Louis XIV

Synopsis of Louis XIV

This book is more than a classic biography. It embraces the entire reign within a general vision of the society of the Grand Siècle, renewing the subject and challenging many clichés thanks to considerable documentation, including recent and little-accessible foreign studies. Through a remarkable, original, and fair analysis of power, its servants, its means of action and propaganda, its greatness, but also its limits and contradictions, Jean-Christian Petitfils has written a rich and great Louis XIV, which the French Academy crowned with its Grand Prix for Biography (History).