Section 1: Louis XIV’s (14th) Childhood

Louis XIV (14th) was born into a family described by one historian as “a nest of vipers.” His father, Louis XIII (13th), had to combat plots to overthrow him from his brother (Gaston, the Duke of Orleans, who was involved in at least 6 separate conspiracies against the king), his wife, and even his mother. 

Louis XIV’s childhood was scarred by a civil war known as the Fronde. His father had begun to weaken the power of France’s top nobles and soon clashed with a legal body known as the Parlements. The Parlements were a dozen high courts that occasionally reviewed the government’s decisions and had the power to temporarily block them until the king himself arrived personally to explain it to them. This is known as “remonstrating” with the king. Each major region had its own Parlement, with its own set of laws dating back to medieval or even Roman times, making France a confusing legal mess. 

The makeup of the Parlements is key, since it was a hereditary body filled with the sons of France’s most powerful noble families. Louis XIII died in 1643, upon which Louis XIV became king. Being only 5 years old, the king’s powers were temporarily given to his mother, Anne of Austria, and her chief advisor (and not so secret lover), Cardinal Mazarin, who was from Italy. With two foreigners in charge and a child on the throne, France’s high nobles saw their opportunity to seize power. Their first move was to demand the right for the Parlement of Paris to control government spending and to permanently block the king’s decisions. Desperate for revenue to fight a war against Spain, Anne and Mazarin at first gave into these demands, but later changed their minds and arrested some of the Parlement’s leaders. This led to the first phase of the civil war, which the Queen and Mazarin lost after rebels surrounded Paris. They released the rebellious leaders from prison and gave Parlement the powers it had demanded. 

The second phase of the Fronde began shortly afterwards, when a “prince of the blood”, the Prince Conde, tried to seize the throne. Collaborating with Spain in its war against France, Conde took control of several provinces before his revolt was crushed in 1650. Conde was arrested, but then released as alliances shifted. He then led yet another revolt and attacked Paris, causing Queen Anne and Cardinal Mazarin to flee the city. 

The Fronde didn’t end until 1653, when Conde’s forces were finally defeated. The conflict caused enormous suffering among the common people. “Peasants in search of protection from the rebel armies that ravaged the countryside besieged the court [of Louis] wherever it went. Unable to put their cattle out to pasture [due to the fighting], they brought the animals with them, only to see them die of hunger. When the cattle died, the people died too, for they had nothing to live on except the meager charity the court could afford to offer.” One witness reported, “When the mothers were dead… the children died after; and I saw on the bridge of Melun… three children lying on their dead mother, one of them still suckling her.” 

Despite his brazen treason, as a member of the royal family with backing from powerful nobles, Conde was pardoned and allowed to live in freedom until his death, over 20 years after he failed to seize the throne. Much of that time was spent in Louis’s company, including in Versailles. The taming of this supremely ambitious and dangerous man was one of Louis’s most impressive accomplishments.

The chaos and violence of the Fronde helped shape Louis XIV’s belief in the need for a strong centralized government and it fed his justifiable distrust of the high nobles, who saw themselves as his equals, not his subjects. He was likely traumatized by having to evacuate Paris three times during the Fronde and he famously had to fake being asleep when Queen Anne was forced to allow a rowdy mob to enter his bedroom to prove that the king hadn’t been secretly taken out of Paris. Louis and his family were effectively “imprisoned inside his own palace” during the worst days of the Fronde, an experience that impelled him later in life to look beyond Paris for a residence where he could finally be safe.