The big three quotes

Louis XIV

• Three quotes to know:
• “I am the state”
• “I have gone to war too lightly and pursued it for vanity’s sake.”
• “What rapture! The Pyrenees no longer exist.”
• “I am the state.”
• Is this alleged absolutist quote from Louis XIV a good thing or a bad thing?
• Does all of the king’s power come from the people agreeing with him and giving the king his power?
• It doesn’t seem like the peasants liked him very much-- in the 1690s there were a series of peasant revolts

• In true, absolutist style, Louis wanted everything throughout France to be the same to unite the country
• He revoked the Edict of Nantes (which granted the French Huguenots the ability to practice their faith).
• “I have gone to war too lightly and pursued it for vanity’s sake.”
• there was a lot of economic instability in France during this time, but King Louis XIV kept picking fights
• There were also a couple of bad seasons, and grain harvests suffered
• The real economic problem was the inefficient system of taxation and government spending
• The taxation methods did not supply enough revenue for the French to pay for their military escapades or their extravagant Versailles lifestyle as well as paying off their debt.
• “What rapture! The Pyrenees no longer exist.”

Pyrenees= the mountains between Spain and France (for all of us who aren't the Naps :) )

• Charles II said that when he died he would split Spain between the French and the Holy Roman Empire
• when he died, however, he left the Spanish crown to Philip of Anjou, Louis XIV’s grandson
• For France, this was good because it bound the two countries together and gave them more power.
• Everyone else (the English, Dutch, Austrians, and the Prussians) felt threatened by the French
• “The union of the French and Spanish crowns would have totally upset the European balance of power”
• balance of power:

• if one country gains too much power, the others think they will abuse that power. The other countries then gang up on the one country to diffuse the power so that no one country remains the dominant power.
• The four other countries used the Treaty of Utrecht to put the principle of balance-of-power into action to limit France’s ability to become more powerful

Hope eveyone had a god Halloween weekend!!

-Cory