Steve R's Reviews > The Age of Louis XIV

A truly exceptional work of scholarship and lucid story telling, weaving as it does the dynastic experience of a king who reigned for all but five of the seventy-seven years of his life and brought his nation of France to both its height of civilized splendor and the depths of economic and military ruin together with military, economic, intellectual and philosophical developments throughout the European continent in the last parts of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries.

Louis XIV is, however, but the figurehead around whom the other brilliant lights of the late seventeeth century must be appreciated. The Subtitle of the work indicates this: 'A History of European Civilization in the Period of Pascal,Moliere, Cromwell, Milton, Peter the Great, Newton and Spinoza: 1648-1715. To think that this subtitle fails to allude to Locke, Swift, Defoe, Berkeley, Leibniz, Hooke, Halley, Hobbes or Descartes indicates the amazing plethora of intellectual development which changed the world of men's thought at this time.

Europe and with it, civilization, changed more in this half century than in any of the untold millennia preceding this age. Emblematic of this fundamental paradigm shift, the Dutchman Christian Huygens commented that 'The world is my country, and to promote science is my religion'. As an erstwhile atheist, it was only with this volume that I felt the spirit of humankind emerging from the primordial swamp of religious idolatry and ignorance into the true light of reason and scientific exactitude. In mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, zoology, biology and many other academic disciplines - sadly, not in medicine- intellectual thought was finally taken away from the scholastic barriers of the church and given to the independent practitioners of logic and reason. It is not a mere coincidence that the last witches were burned in France in 1718 and in Scotland in 1722. The shackles of ignorant prejudice were slowly being discarded. The Royal Society was founded in 1660 in England and quickly became a focal point for scientific and intellectual changes. Such a development does not seem to have been feasible in the Europe of just a hundred years earlier, wracked as it was by the conflicts of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. Men were, I believe, finally beginning to understand that there is no God and that to worry about spiritual matters is a simple waste of time and effort.

The period was, especially in the person of Louis XIV, the age of absolute monarchy - though he never supposedly said, 'L'etat c'est moi', the country certainly functioned as if this was the case. The sycophancy of the upper nobility and clergy, whose toadyism created the illustrious court of Versailles, eventually led, when coupled with Louis' headstrong willingness to engage in vainglorious wars, to the destitution and even starvation of the French peasantry, particularly during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713). Taxation was so heavy, and so well avoided by the privileged orders, that people literally starved to death so as to finance the disastrous wars of Louis' later years. The days of mercenaries fighting small scale battles was over, as armies of over a hundred thousand men faced off against one another. Few young men were left to actually till the field and grow the food for the people to eat.

The symbol of this height of personal and aristocratic splendor was Versailles -a massive palace capable of maintaining 10000 souls, including over 700 rooms and costing 200,000,000 francs to build - where Louis' court presided. He was actually afraid, after the rebellions referred to as the Fronde, to visit Paris. The wrongheadedness of such noblesse oblige is typified by the lack of adequate restroom facilities being included in the original designs for Versailles, necessitating the unsanitary use of hallways and staircases.

Louis' absolutism was not peculiar to France. The decadence of the Restoration of Charles II in England was short lived, and overcome by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William and Mary simply took over after having been invited by Parliament. Peter the Great tried industriously to drag Russia into the modern world, but understandably resisted attempt to bring European scholars into his nation due to the backward, ignorant and - need we say? - religious prejudices of the majority of his populace.

But it is in the quasi-international, non-religious, realistic visions of Daniel Defoe's novels, Moliere's plays, Swift's satires and Milton's epic verse that the voice of modern man is, I believe, first resolutely heard. The printing press, around for over two hundred years now, was finally allowing the wider dissemination of knowledge through the written word. Corelli's concertos and Gluck's opera were written in the age during which both Handel and Bach were born.

Ignorance was not abandoned. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis led to the expulsion of the Huguenots from France, which caused both social and even more so, economic dislocations which added to that nation's troubles at the turn of the century. Jews were relentlessly persecuted - from 1648 to 1679 anti Jewish atrocities outdid those of both the Crusades and the Black Death.

Against such stupid ignorance one must place the Treatise on Government, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Essays on Toleration of John Locke - works which the Durants justly analyze as having paved the way to Rousseau and the French Revolution's overturning of the era of absolutism.

The age was certainly complex and operated far too often at destructive cross purposes. Nevertheless, through the famines, wars, oppression and untold difficulties of the poorer classes, the light of reason, science, toleration and progress had been lit. That the Durants have made this story such a gripping one is a testament to their skills both as historians and as writers. Very, very well done.