HIST 229: Spectacles of Power in Europe, 1550-1700 - Louis XIV (HC)

Absolutist Attachments uncovers the affective and media connections that shaped Louis XIV's absolutism. Studying literature, painting, engravings, correspondence, and the emerging periodic press, Hogg diagnoses the emotions that created absolutism's feeling subjects and publics. Absolutist Attachments discovers absolutism's alternative political and cultural legacy--not the spectacle of an unbound king but the binding connections of his subjects.

The cultural and increasingly political value of flowers was not lost on royal panegyrists, who seized on the new meanings of flowers in celebrating the glory of Louis XIV. Using previously unexplored archival sources, Hyde recovers the extent of floral plantations in the gardens of Versailles and the sophisticated system of nurseries created to fulfill the demands of the king's gardeners.

An historian's guide to French institutions during the ancien regime.

From 1661 to 1664, France was mesmerized by the arrest and trial of Nicolas Fouquet, the country's superintendent of finance. Prosecuted on trumped-up charges, Fouquet managed to exonerate himself, in the process embarrassing and infuriating Louis XIV. The young king overturned the court's decision and sentenced Fouquet to lifelong imprisonment in a remote fortress.

To establish his personal authority, Louis XIII was forced to resort to conspiracy and murder, and even then his authority was constantly challenged. Yet a little over a century later, as the reign of Louis XIV drew to a close, such disobedience was impossible. Instead, a simple royal command expressing the sovereign's judgment of disgrace was sufficient to compel the most powerful men and women in the kingdom to submit to imprisonment or internal exile.

This book examines the age of the Sun King through the experience of Franche-Comte, a possession of the Spanish empire with a long history of autonomy, conquered by Louis XIV in 1674. The integration of Franche-Comte into France proved to be a protracted process involving confrontation, negotiation, and compromise. The resulting regime was then severely tested by the challenges of Louis XIV's late reign; its survival demonstrated how the king had brought a distinctly early modern state to the height of its development.

Monahan argues that this war between the crown and Protestant artisans and peasants involved a host of often conflicting world views in which the various parties to the conflict often misunderstood or failed to communicate with each other, resulting too often in terrible violence and bloodshed. This tells us much about the nature of the reign of Louis XIV and the popular religion of the time.

From Vaux-le-Vicomte to Versailles, the buildings of Louis Le Vau shaped the image of French court society. None, however, has had as dramatic an effect as Mazarin's Collège (1661-70), the Parisian landmark that now houses the Institut de France.This book explores this masterpiece, a hybrid of baroque and classical styles. Focusing on elements informing Le Vau's personal style and his relationship with Colbert brings into sharper focus the phenomenon of royal patronage .

Louis XIV and his court at Versailles had a profound influence on music in France and Europe. In 1660 Louis visited Aix-en-Provence, a trip that resulted in political and cultural transformations throughout the region. Soon thereafter Aix became an important center of sacred music composition, eventually rivaling Paris. This book documents the young king's visit and examines how he and his court deployed sacred music to enhance the royal image and secure the loyalty of the populace.

What role did sacred music play in mediating Louis XIII's grip on power in the early seventeenth century? How can a study of music as 'sounding liturgy' contribute to the wider discourse on absolutism and 'the arts' in early modern France?

This book presents a history of Oriental studies in 17th century France, mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India. The Orientalist writers studied here produced books that would become sources used throughout the eighteenth century. Here they are placed in their own context as members of the 'republic of letters' in the age of the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment.

In the late 17th century the role of printed propaganda in manipulating public consciousness became increasingly explicit, and governments developed systematic controls over the printed word. This book considers the purposes, mechanisms, content, and audience of royal printed propaganda in early modern France during the reign of Louis XIV. Originally published in 1977.

One voice imagines, the other analyzes in this elegant literary excursion through the history of garden art in France from the medieval era to the present. Alternating discursive accounts, or allees, with fictional vignettes that recreate time and place, the Le Dantecs skillfully integrate the history of French gardens with the modern history of ideas. See the primary text "Oronte’s Parterres" and the accompanying historical analysis, "Allée Five."

Sikes traces the shifting role of performance in the fashioning of subjectivity from the early modern era to the present. See Chapter Two, "Dancing with the Sun King: The Performance of Privilege in the Reign of Louis XIV."

Who preceded whom? Who wore what? One of the most striking aspects of the early modern period is the crucial significance that contemporaries ascribed to such questions. Status symbols operated as a key tool for defining and redefining identities, relations, and power. This book investigates status interaction - in dress as in address, in high ceremony and in everyday life - at one of its most important historical arenas: aristocratic society at the time of Louis XIV.

This book explores the fascinating phenomenon of cross-casting and related gender issues in different theatrical genres and different performance contexts during the heyday of French theatre.

In 1668 Louis XIV decided to enlarge Versailles by preserving his father's building, the Petit Chateau, and by enclosing it in a new structure, the Envelope. This decision, and the history of indecision that went before and after it, are prominent themes in this book. Professor Berger has discovered that published sources of the late 17th century and the 18th century provide rich material that has as yet been underutilized.

Offers a fresh interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King's last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien regime.