I noticed that my last article on Louis XIV met with rather quite a few interest, in a way entering into a fresh discussion by Janusz Korwin-Mikke with John Kuban on the monarchy. Given that Louis XIV's megalomania and narcissism amuse me very much, I would like to draw a fewer more words about the circumstantial "historical policy" of this monarch.
Unless Louis XIV is in France for writers writing on politics, past is developing as a substitute for the missing reflection on politics, or rather, "historical policy". I realize in this sense not a description of past ("how it was"), but a presentation of a historical imagination with a hidden political message, shaped by a modern payer. While historical policy present constitutes an abuse of past for political purposes and is considered contrary to the goals of past as a discipline, it was different in the 17th century. Readers were not curious in ‘how it was’, but in the influence of past past on the present, where past and present times were 1 whole. Hence, the merits of the ancestors were considered to be the validation of the privileges of modern aristocracy, etc. This is simply a view that we do not realize very much today, but we gotta presume that this was the way past was viewed, and that was the way past was done.
In Louis XIV's historiography, there is simply a circumstantial manner in describing the king's reign in succession as king in specified a way that readers see the continuity of thought and action to unite all the French lands and to build an hereditary and Catholic monarchy of expanding power and causality, the crowning process of which is the reign of Louis XIV. A separate category consists of multivolume biographies, or possibly alternatively political hagiographies of this ruler, written and printed during his lifetime. The best known works of this species are the two-volume work of Michel de Vuoerden Historical Journal (Journal historique, 1684) and the tremendous ten-volume work of Jean Donneau de Viségo Records of Louis’ reignXIV (Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Louis XIV, 1697-1703). In these works, as well as others and little known, it points out that respective accent changes have been made in the past of France. I'll discuss the 2 most interesting.
Until the second half of the 17th century, the legendary French king Faramund of the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries, whose king in 418 (?) was to choose the French knighthood in the year. This election component did not match Louis XIV's prevailing doctrine of absolutism, which is why this character was very effectively marginalized for Chlodwig, an hereditary ruler who accepted Christianity (496). This marginalization was right from the point of view of modern historical sciences, as there has been an intra-French discussion for decades, or did it truly exist? And if so, did not respective characters in 1 name be combined, possibly accidentally with the same name? And if there truly was specified a ruler, how many medieval chronicles are truths about him and how many legends? Equipped with a inferior technological workshop and means of verifying sources, 17th century historians treated this figure as authentic, and marginalized it solely due to the way in which this legendary ruler came to power. Therefore, anyone who present says that the first king of France was Chlodwig is an ignorant pupil of Louis XIV's historical policy.
The character of Charles the large was besides marginalized, who in 800 crowned himself emperor of the empire covering later France, Germany, Beneluks and Italy. This emperor was besides removed into the shadows due to the fact that his imperial crown was taken over by Germany in 962, which Louis XIV himself regarded as a kind of brazen theft and ruthlessly mocked for the imperial title, for which the military force of the fragmented Reich did not follow. Moreover, the French-born Habsburg Austrians derived their power from this tradition, which ordered it to desecrate – both the title and the full tradition associated with it. In order for no 1 to think that Louis XIV – as “only” king – should be subject to the emperor, Charles the large was marginalized. Philip II Augustus was first exposed to this place, as he defeated the German emperor at Bouvines (1214) and in return for his military support, the papal candidate obtained from Innocent III the privilege of failing to submit to the emperor. So he was a prominently French king who did not admit the imperial power of any German!
Unfortunately, the Monarch's grace on the horse's spur rides! Philip II Augustus did not last long as a model figure of French history. In the 1880s, after being married to the profoundly believing and dedicated Catholicism of Madame de Maintenon, which greatly contributed to the cassation of spiritual tolerance for French Calvinists (revocation of the Nantes Edict in 1685), the king began to profoundly care about spiritual and theological matters. Historians rapidly noticed the transformation of the worldview of the ruler. Therefore, from around 683, gradually and King Philip II Augustus began to be marginalized. Louis IX of Saints became the model ruler for the Catholic monarchy. He had all the advantages of historical politics. First, he was a saint of the Catholic Church. First of all, his name was Louis, or “the proper” name, which Louis XIV's subject was to associate well with the reigning ruler, who, by virtue of the same name, was walking “in the shoes” of his predecessor and putting on another's halo of holiness.
Well, all political force writes a communicative under itself. Liberal historians like to compose about the past of freedom; nationalistic about the past of the nation; socialist about the past of poorness and proletariat; judaic about the past of anti-Semitism; homosexual about the past of homophobia, etc. Louis XIV wanted him to compose about Louis.
Adam Wielomski
