King of the World by Philip Mansel

King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV
By Philip Mansel
University of Chicago Press, 2020

As historian Philip Mansel points out in his new biography of the Sun King, when Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643, he was the latest in a line of French monarchs stretching back a thousand years, a heritage of such storied enormity that it’s little wonder so many of its inhabitants shared a tendency to behave like bloody-minded space aliens. 

With Louis XIV, this tendency is enhanced almost to science fiction levels, not only in terms of his personality and ambitions and appetites but also just in raw statistical terms: he ruled for 72 years at a time when most people only lived for 50. Virtually everything about Louis XIV was larger-than-life (except the man himself, who would have been no great shakes when viewed in the bathtub, had he ever visited that specific location in any of his many palaces), and throughout his book, Mansel concentrates on the broad sweep of the King’s ambition. “Louis XIV was both King of France and a global ruler with global ambitions,” Mansel writes. “He founded colonies in America, Africa and India, tried to seize Siam (as Thailand was then known), sent missionaries and mathematicians to the Emperor of China and launched the struggle for France’s global markets which continues to this day.” 

He was, Mansel goes on, a king devoted to “dynastic aggrandizement” but, as Mansel intriguingly adds, “He is also an argument.” 

The resulting book, The King of the World, therefore tends to take place on a far wider international scale than any previous English-language biography of Louis XIV. The King’s colorful and convoluted Court life usually tends to preoccupy his biographers, and Mansel seeks to counterbalance that with more detailed accounts of French colonial exploits far from Versailles. Mansel has mastered a bewildering array of primary and secondary sources dealing with his man and his time period, and he’s invested his entire narrative with a kind of tightly compressed narrative energy that has the most unlikely effect imaginable: it turns a 600-page biography of King Louis XIV into a genuine page-turner of a reading experience. 

Despite Mansel’s best intentions, of course, that reading experience naturally ends up spending quite a bit of time at home with the King and his Court. Yes, readers learn a great deal about the far-flung envoys and governors who hacked about the corners of the world in an attempt to annex as much of it as possible for Louis, and Mansel makes all of that fascinating reading, but like every other Sun King biographer before him, he’s also led inevitably to passages of interesting but purely domestic intentions:

Marly was a country house, not a palace. The King’s bed had no balustrade, as it did at Versailles or the Louvre, to keep courtiers at bay. In the main salon of the Pavillon royal guests stretched out on chairs in the presence of members of the royal family, talking and playing cards with them almost as equals. They could address the King when they wished. Women wore robes de chambre rather than, as at Versailles, grands habits. Guests were fed and heated at the King’s expense, which was not the case at Versailles. Meals were eaten together at round tables. The fashionable new drinks of tea and coffee were served, which they were not at the King’s meals at Versailles. In 1705 Madame complained that men wore hats when walking with the King in the garden, and even the cleaners had started playing cards in the corridors: ‘it no longer resembles a court at all.’

King of the World is a fine combination of intriguing and paradigm-shifting, one of the year’s grandest biographies, and as an added bonus, the folks at the University of Chicago Press made the inspired decision to match the book’s lavish subject with a lavish physical edition. The printed version of this book is an unrepentantly gorgeous thing: the Sun King’s sharp, florid face in extreme close-up on the end papers, an elegantly embossed cover, beautiful maps, dozens of pages of color illustrations, and plump solidity of paper and binding that’s pleasingly substantial in the hand. There’s something oddly fitting about a Louis XIV biography being such an ostentatiously ornate thing; it’s a perfect finishing stroke for a genuinely impressive work.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.