French Politics

Louis was dignified and imposing with charming manners, but he was also hard working, patient and self-disciplined with an iron physical constitution. He maintained a strict routine of official business, every day. Short of height, he was of modest intelligence (not much helped by his upbringing undertaken largely by his servants) and lacking of a sense of humor. Possessed of a colossal pride, he loved grandeur, glory, military reviews and petty details (uniforms, equipment, drill).

Louis was the epitome of the absolute monarch and embodied the idea of divine right monarchy. As God's representative on earth, he felt that he was due respect and that his word was law; he was responsible to God alone. As an absolute monarch, Louis XIV wielded unlimited authority with all decisions made by him; however, it was not despotism nor arbitrary power, as kings still had to justify their actions to churchmen, entrepreneurs and nobles.

Having taken the reigns of government, Louis now had to contend with the nobility, church, bureaucracy and the rest of Europe to achieve his idea of France.

The chief opposition to the central monarchy was the French, feudal nobility. The king continued the process of destroying the nobility as a class by increasing the use of commoners to run the state and by establishing Versailles as a seventeenth-century "Disneyland" to keep the nobility occupied with non-political amusements after the court moved there in 6 May 1682.

To solidify