Who Was Louis XIV? (Part 1): AP Euro Bit by Bit #21

Hi, my name is Paul Sargent and welcome once again to AP Euro Bit by Bit. And today we're going to take a look at the most absolute monarch of the 17th century, and that is Louis XIV. Now, if you watched my video on absolutism, I hinted that Louis XIV was kind of the big guy, but let's take a closer look at how he was able to consolidate power inside the French monarchy, and not only take power away from the nobles, but completely subjugate them and the country to his interests. So let's get started. So there are a few things we can say about Louis XIV in general. First of all, he was a real believer in the divine right of kings, the idea that the king only has to answer to God and to no one else. He's known for the statement, les tas et moi. In other words, I am the state. He didn't have any enemies, the state had enemies. And through it all, he's able to take away power from the nobility by creating this system that turns them into squabbling children, in many ways, who are all jockeying for position within his favor. And he had total control over absolutely everything. Not only does he hold the record for the longest tenure as monarch in European history, 72 years, having taken the throne at the age of five, but he also, during his reign, was able to make France the center of European culture, make French language the language of diplomacy, and to make the tactics of his realm and his rule the blueprint that all absolute monarchs attempted to follow. He was the prototype. Now, as I've said many times before, in order for a monarch to consolidate power, they have to take power away from where it exists. And in this society, power existed in a local nobility. Now, early in his reign, when nobles were really afraid of the power that was being invested in Cardinal Mazarin, this was the person who was regent, who was in charge of ruling the country while Louis XIV was a young child. While the nobles were worried about consolidation of power under him, they tried to take advantage of the situation of a boy king. And so, they engage in what becomes known as the Fronde, a series of uprisings in which nobility tried to gain control over the monarch. And, well, they failed. Mazarin put them down violently, but the major effect was that Louis XIV, for the rest of his reign, knew that there was always the possibility that the nobility would try and get their rights back. And he spent his entire life trying to prevent that from happening. In terms of government administration, he made the central government in Paris, and later in Versailles, the absolute center of power in Paris. He did this in a number of ways. First of all, he recruited his chief ministers from the middle class. He sort of ousted the nobility from being his main advisors, taking away their power to really give him input. Second of all, he contended the intendant or intendant system that had been set up by Cardinal Richelieu, in which bureaucrats hired by the king and loyal to the king were out in the countryside doing the traditional work of nobles in terms of administrating the area, collecting taxes, and so forth. He also decided to check the power of any government institution that would try and take power away from him. The parlement, which is sort of a gathering of nobles in France, was powerless because they feared his reaction to anything that went against him. He never called the estates general. He took total power away from these people, gave it to people who were loyal to him. And then finally, he controlled the peasantry, because the peasantry had to engage in what was known as the corvée. They had to give a certain amount of labor to the state in order to fulfill their responsibilities. Not only this, but financially, peasants really only kept about 20 percent of their total income between the tithes that they had to pay to the church, between rents to the landlord, those sorts of things. They only had a very small amount of money that they could really work with. And if they were idle, they could be thrown in or conscripted into the French army to fight for it. And then of course, being an absolute monarch, if peasants went against anything he said, they could be...