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78
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Philip Mansel
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Date:
September 1, 2020
Louis XIV was a man in pursuit of glory. Not content to be the ruler of a world power, he wanted the power to rule the world. And, for a time, he came tantalizingly close. This is a global biography of a global king, whose power was extensive but also limited by laws and circumstances, and whose interests and ambitions stretched far beyond his homeland. Through it all, we watch Louis XIV progressively turn from a dazzling, attractive young king to a belligerent reactionary who sets France on the path to 1789.
What The Reviewers Say
Mr. Mansel, building on his formidable reputation as the most stylish of historians of modern Europe, is as good at explaining and illustrating Louis’s decline as his ascendancy.
Almost everything about Louis XIV — the size of his palaces, the length of his reign, the height of his heels — was on a gargantuan scale.
The self-control of Louis — and his pathological secretiveness — has made him difficult quarry for historians. Thus far, no other English-language biography has so successfully given us a portrait of him as man and monarch. Mansel is strong at recreating the king’s inner life.
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas Books’, and there was a comment of Jonathan Sumption’s that ‘as a general rule, biography is a poor way to learn history’. It is primarily a matter of approach rather than simply subject of course, but if one was drawing up a shortlist of men who might qualify as exceptions to the rule, then Philip Mansel’s King of the World, Louis XIV, would surely be very near the top.
