The Duc Quacks

Duc de Saint-Simon's Louis XIV Tell All

 According to Duc Louis de Rouvroy, King Louis XIV was ignored in his childhood because he was unattractive and had no talent, which caused him to develop an inferiority-superiority complex as an adult to make up for it. This caused the French Revolution because no one could stand him, yet he had the longest reign of any European monarch and it slowly drove the French mad.

Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Versailles' elite. XOXO, the Duc.

Not that he did not have any good sides. Louis XIV worked hard to make up for his faults and is said to have had the smarts and heart of a potentially good king, it's just that his massive inferiority-superiority complex got in the way. His childhood was so bad that as a king he only favored sycophants who complimented everything he did no matter how wasteful or stupid and due to the spoils system that the French government was operating on at the time; this led to an entire Court and Church full of under-qualified suck-ups. 

Further, because he was still really paranoid that deep down no one loved him, he pulled a Richard Nixon and spied on those he did not like to varying degrees of secrecy. Unlike Nixon, no one could do anything about this, and it probably caused a lot of bad blood among the nobility over the years. 

Another quirk of Louis XIV according to Duc was his love of spending inordinate sums of cash and enjoyment of spending time with friends who spend just as much as he. As everyone was a suck up in his court, this caused all the nobles to spend beyond their means to gain his favor, which then made it a general social custom of France to show off your wealth using luxury. Oddly, this proved somewhat of a wise political move as it made most of the nobles even more dependent on him due to his control over their debts.

However, this all feels a lot like a member of an opponent party slinging mud at their rival parties candidate. Given the nasty murder habit of the unhappy French peasant and Louis XIV's incredibly long reign, the Duc's entertaining biography on the man should be taken with a grain of salt.