Louis XIV (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In early September 1638, the Court of Saint-Germain was in a state of excited, if anxious, expectancy..." (more)
Key Phrases: petit château, lay peers, ooo livres, Mme de Maintenon, Mme de Montespan, Mme de Motteville (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Winner of the 1999 Enid MacLeod Award, Ian Dunlop's elegant biography of Louis XIV (1638-1715) brilliantly achieves the author's aim "to help my readers see [Louis] as his contemporaries saw him." Extensive quotes from diaries and memoirs (each assessed for their prejudices) bring to life the glittering French court in the heyday of divine-right monarchy. Handsome and athletic, autocratic but kind, devoted to his queen as well as his mistresses yet also a pious pillar of the Catholic Church, Louis seemed to his dazzled subjects to incarnate the power and glory of the French nation. He moved in a world where personal relations dominated political affairs, and royalty's private life was intensely public: "The great families of the French aristocracy were at their most natural when they were showing off," writes Dunlop, with a nice appreciation of this society's paradoxes. Louis's fondness for wars and passion for extravagant building projects like the palace of Versailles strained the French economy and sowed the seeds for the French Revolution. In his time, however, he was adored. Dunlop's engaging depiction of a generous, charismatic man makes it easy to understand why. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

The life, times and character of the Sun King have never lacked for treatment by historians, and Dunlop, a student of architecture and biographer of Marie Antoinette, adds little new to our understanding of the notorious ruler, whom he calls "one of the most elusive" men in French history. But he skillfully deploys a wealth of sourcesAmany of them firsthand observations of the king and his courtAto bring the man and the era to life. He leads us through the Sun King's lifeAfrom his birth to his acquisition of mistresses to the battlefield; from Louis's religious dilemmas to the death of his son, the Grand Dauphin. Nor is the narrative confined to the politics of the day. Louis XIV was a major patron of the arts, and the literature, art and architecture of the period (the king's "passion for building" was "second only to his enthusiasm for warfare") are also presented in an informative and entertaining way; Dunlop is especially to be commended for a brief yet exact explanation of Jansenism. The general reader will find much of value here. The volume might seem daunting for its length and perhaps too great a wealth of detail. Still, this is an impressive addition to the literature on Louis XIV and deserves a wide readership. 12 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (August 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261969
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261962
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #980,548 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Louis XIV, July 21, 2001

By	Mauro Mioni (Beverly Hills, CA USA) - See all my reviews

The book's title appears to me to be misleading, inasmuch as rather than a chronological biography, as the title would seem to entail, it is a somewhat loose assembly of anecdotes relating to the Sun King's lifelong passion for the construction of royal palaces, interspersed with descriptions of his battles. I found that the portrait of the man, both as an individual and as a king, highlighting either his private or public life, or both, and the man's impact on history, with the whole coherently and cogently presented in a clear prose, was sorely missing. In sum, I found the book to be unfocused, uninformative, rambling and at times boring.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Aaarrggg, December 16, 2000

By A Customer

This book is like wading thru glue. It references people and times without explaing why people disliked/like them. It adds confusion by jumping around wihtout transition or explination, and worse, it is awash with phrases and quotations in French with no translation. If I could read French, I would not need a book in English to learn about the "Sun King."

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Specialists beware, others should enjoy, July 9, 2003

By	Andrew O'Connor (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Academic reviewers have been a bit sniffy about this book. It's true that Dunlop scatters quotations throughout the book without a footnote to be seen. He also makes some careless errors of fact. For example on p.432 he claims that Lully was composing music in 1710, when he had been dead for 23 years.

However, readers who are not worried about its lack of scholarly rigour should find this a very enjoyable book. Dunlop has a delightfully easy going style and an eye for the enlivening anecdote. It would be hard to write a dull book about such an extraordinary monarch as Louis XIV and Dunlop's biography is not a bad place to make his acquaintance.

Those who want to meet Louis face to face, as it were, should seek out Lucy Norton's three volume edition of Saint Simon's Versailles memoirs.