‘Kings, who are the sovereign arbiters of the fortune and the conduct of men, are always themselves the most severely judged and the most curiously observed.’ Louis XIV complained in his memoirs (addressed to his son) about the public gaze in which monarchs lived, and the malicious gossip to which they were always therefore subject:
The slightest suspicion conceived of them passes immediately from one ear to another as a piece of news which it is fun to gabble about: the one who talks always wants to show that he knows more than everyone else, and he therefore exaggerates matters instead of playing them down, while the one who listens, taking a malignant pleasure in seeing a man demeaned whose superior position he resents, does all he can to persuade himself that what he is being told is true.
Louis’s apparent resentment at his lack of privacy is odd in view of the fact that, more than any other king in history, his name is associated with the public exercise of power. The bizarre public ceremonies in the royal bedchamber, the lever and the coucher, are well known; but when we are reminded that the Sun King would also dance ballets for his court, dressed in magnificent and fantastical costumes, and that these performances would cause the enmities of the courtiers to dissipate as their attention was absorbed by the monarch’s graceful leaping, then we realise that visual effects and public spectacles were as much a key to the maintenance of political power in the age of absolutism as television is in the age of mass media.
It was through ostentatious and glorious displays of glory that Louis achieved the unification and pacification of a country previously riven by religious wars.
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