character, and a profound knowledge of mankind, as well as cheerfulness and caustic wit. Though he had not a spark of the romantic valour of his great adversary, Charles the Bold, he was brave, calm, and self-possessed in danger. He thoroughly understood the true interests of France, and zealously promoted them as long as they did not clash with his own designs. But his character was purely and intensely selfish, and he was ready to sacrifice every thing for his own interest. He was a profound dissembler, utterly regardless of truth or honour, oaths or promises; jealous, suspicious, crafty, vindictive, and cruel; fond of low company, low pleasures, and obscure debauchery; and was the victim of the most puerile superstition. Sir Walter Scott says that from his thorough and intense selfishness, combined with his acute, sneering, and depreciating spirit of caustic wit, his heartlessness, and utter want of principle, Louis almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself. He was the first French monarch who assumed the title of "Most Christian King."—J. T.
Louis XII., called the Father of the People, was the son of Charles, duke of Orleans, and Mary of Cleves, and was born at Blois in 1462, and died 1st January, 1515. Charles VIII. dying without issue, Louis came to the throne as nearest of kin, and succeeded in 1498, at the age of thirty-six, taking the titles of king of France, Jerusalem, and the Two Sicilies, and duke of Milan. Although married to Jeanne, daughter of Louis XI., he procured a divorce in order to marry Anne, the widow of his predecessor, so as to prevent her dukedom of Bretagne from being severed from the crown. He then engaged in Italian wars, and subdued Milan, but was stopped in his attempts on Naples by Gonsalvo of Cordova. Genoa at the time was in possession of the French, but the people rose and drove them out. Louis vowed vengeance, entered the city sword in hand, and hanged the doge and seventy-nine of the principal citizens, taxing the remainder to a ruinous extent. Louis hated the Italian republics, and concluded the league of Cambray, 1508, which was aimed against their independence. The French marched to Venice, and treated the inhabitants with incredible cruelty. The battle of Ravenna, however, was the last of the French successes. The pope, the emperor, Henry VIII. of England, and Ferdinand the Catholic formed a coalition; and the battle of Novara in the south, and the battle of the Spurs in the north, effectually humbled the Italian ambition of France. To insure peace Louis married Mary, sister of Henry VIII., but died shortly after. Louis left one good, saying—"I prefer to see my courtiers laugh at my economy, rather than see my people weep at my extravagance."—P. E. D.
Louis XIII., son of Henry IV. and Marie de Medicis, was born at Fontainebleau in 1601, and died at St. Germain-en-Laye on the 14th May, 1643. He was nine years of age at the death of his father, and the regency was carried on by the queen-mother, who, while he was yet a boy, married him to Anne of Austria, and reversed the policy of Henry IV. In youth he gave his time to childish amusements, and when he arrived at manhood, found himself almost without the semblance of authority. A favourite, Luynes, proposed to emancipate him from the thraldom of the Marechal d'Ancre, and the latter was assassinated. "Now," said Louis, "I am king." Marie attempted to regain her authority, but without success; and the appearance of the remarkable statesman, Richelieu, put an end to her schemes. The history of the reign is the history of Richelieu, much more than of the king. The three great enterprises of the reign were the humiliation of the house of Austria, the suppression of protestantism, and the destruction of the aristocracy. Louis was morose in disposition, and spent his time in the chase and in listening to devotional books.—P. E. D.
Louis XIV., surnamed the Great, was born on the 16th September, 1638, and succeeded to the throne of France in 1643, when he was only five years old. His mother, Anne of Austria, was appointed regent during his minority, and Cardinal Mazarin, a pupil of Richelieu, was her favourite minister. The events which took place at this period of the reign of the young monarch have been already narrated under Condè (see also Mazarin and Turenne). Suffice it to say here, that the Thirty Years' war was terminated by the treaty of Munich, which added to the French dominions Alsace, the Suntgau, Metz, Toul, and Verdun. No sooner, however, was the war in Germany brought to a close than the civil contest of the Fronde broke out, and agitated the country for several years. In January, 1649, the young king and his mother, with her favourite minister, were compelled to leave the capital and wander from province to province in search of a place of refuge. It is affirmed that this event made a deep and permanent impression on the mind of Louis, and that his love of arbitrary power and his dislike to Paris and to the parliament may be dated from this period. The war of the Fronde was brought to a close in 1653, and in the following year Louis made his first campaign in Flanders against the Spaniards. The prince of Condè now fought on their side against his own country, but the honour of France was successfully upheld by Turenne; and Mazarin having concluded a treaty of alliance with Cromwell against Spain in 1655, the war terminated in the complete humiliation of that power. In 1657 the Emperor Ferdinand died, and Mazarin put forth his utmost efforts, and lavished vast sums of money, to obtain the imperial dignity for his master; but the vacant crown was conferred upon Leopold of Austria, and the mortification of the French monarch at this defeat was the cause of that bitter animosity which he cherished against his successful rival, and of three long and sanguinary wars. Hostilities with Spain were brought to a close in November, 1659, by the treaty of the Pyrenees, in which it was stipulated that Louis should marry the Infanta Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV.; that Spain should cede Artois and Rousillon to France, and Juliers to the elector palatine; and that Condè should be reinstated in all his honours and estates. The marriage of Louis was celebrated with great magnificence in the following year. The young queen, who brought with her a dowry of half a million of crowns, was amiable in her disposition, but weak in intellect and childish in her habits, and never had any hold on the affection of her husband, though he treated her with respect. The death of Mazarin took place in February, 1661, and from this period Louis took the reins of government entirely into his own hands. When his courtiers asked him, "To whom shall we address ourselves on affairs of state?" to their great surprise he answered, "To me;" and this resolution he maintained to the end of his life, though he intrusted the details of government and the administration of particular departments to Colbert, Louvois, and other able ministers. The ruling passion of Louis was the love of absolute power; he regarded all public authority as vested in himself: "L' état c'est moi!" was his well-known favourite expression. He carried out this maxim till the end of his reign. He claimed, he said, "the full and entire disposal of all property, whether in the possession of the clergy or of laymen." The lives of his subjects, too, he regarded as his own property, and he devoted them unsparingly to promote his own greatness. The transformation of France from a feudal to an absolute monarchy, begun by Richelieu, was completed by Louis. He reduced the parliament to a nullity—ordering it in most insolent and peremptory language to cease discussing his edicts, and to confine itself to registering them—broke down the independent spirit of the nobles, rendered the clergy docile and subservient to his will, and trampled on the common people, whom he regarded and treated as mere beasts of burden. To him France is indebted for the destruction of all local government and municipal rights, and the establishment of that system of centralization in the administration of public affairs which has contributed so much to the ruin of national liberty, and has made the country so completely subservient to the ambitious designs of its despotic rulers.
Vain, selfish, arrogant, faithless, and blind to every patriotic duty, the overweening ambition of Louis embroiled him with all his neighbours, and even with the Roman pontiff, whom he repeatedly insulted and treated with great harshness and injustice. On the same principle his dislike to the protestants, whom he hated not so much because they were heretics, as because he regarded them as rebels who refused to obey his will, led to a long series of harassing and cruel persecutions, and ultimately to that most unjust and impolitic measure, the revocation of the edict of Nantes in the year 1685, which deprived France of many thousands of its best citizens, and inflicted a severe blow on its manufactures and commerce. His foreign, like his domestic policy, was characterized by ambition, selfishness, and a total disregard of the most solemn obligations. On the death of his father-in-law Philip IV. in 1665, who was succeeded by an infant son, Louis determined to take advantage of the weakness of Spain; and on the paltry pretext that, as his wife's dowry had not been paid her renunciation of all claim to her father's dominions was null and void, he suddenly invaded the Low Countries in 1667, at the head of fifty thousand men. The
