Known as the “Sun King,” Louis XIV centralized power in the monarchy and reigned over a period of unprecedented prosperity in which France became the dominant power in Europe and a leader in the arts and sciences.

According to the tradition of the French kings, Louis XIV liked to act as a generous patron and supporter of artists – with the ulterior motive of immortalizing himself in paintings and compositions. After all, the color “royal blue” was introduced in art on his behalf.

King Louis XIV supported the arts by sponsoring musical entertainment and plays. A new form of dance, ballet, became popular in the French court. Painting, music, decorative arts, and architecture in the French styles soon became the model of all of Europe.

Louis XIV installed his royal court at Versailles. He required all the great nobility of France, to come live at Versailles for at least part of the year. This has the effect of reducing one major threat to his power – Nobility. It weakened the nobles by accustoming them to opulance and decadent activity.

Louis XIV chose the sun as his emblem. The sun was associated with Apollo, god of peace and arts, and was also the heavenly body which gave life to all things, regulating everything as it rose and set. Like Apollo, the warrior-king Louis XIV brought peace, was a patron of the arts, and dispensed his bounty.

How did Louis’s actions weaken the french government? He spent too much money and he revoked the edict of Nantes causing the hardworking and prosperous Huguenots to flee France.

Huguenots. The Huguenots were a groups of French Protestants that lived from about 1560 to 1629. Protestantism was introduced into France between 1520 and 1523, and the principles were accepted by many members of the nobility, the intellectual classes, and the middle class.

Huguenots were French Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who followed the teachings of theologian John Calvin. Persecuted by the French Catholic government during a violent period, Huguenots fled the country in the 17th century, creating Huguenot settlements all over Europe, in the United States and Africa.

The Edict of Nantes (1598) freed them from persecution in France, but when that was revoked in the late 1700s, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots fled to other countries, including America. A ruler who suppresses his or her religious designs for his or her kingdom in favor of political expediency.

Decree issued by the French crown granting limited toleration to French Protestants. The duo saw their enemies as the Huguenots and also wanted to diminish the power of the Hapsburg family who were Catholic so France took the Protestant side to overthrow them.

The wars of religion threatened the authority of the monarchy, already fragile under the rule of Catherine’s three sons and the last Valois kings: Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III. This changed under the reign of their Bourbon successor Henry IV.

The Protestant Reformation that Martin Luther sparked continued into the next century. The Catholic Church eliminated the sale of indulgences and other abuses that Luther had attacked. Catholics also formed their own Counter-Reformation that used both persuasion and violence to turn back the tide of Protestantism.

The Reformation became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the three major branches of Christianity. The Reformation led to the reformulation of certain basic tenets of Christian belief and resulted in the division of Western Christendom between Roman Catholicism and the new Protestant traditions.

The literature on the consequences of the Reformation shows a variety of short- and long-run effects, including Protestant-Catholic differences in human capital, economic development, competition in media markets, political economy, and anti-Semitism, among others.