Louis XIII, The Just

Fülszöveg

LOUIS XIII
THE JUST A. Lloyd Moote
"A powerfully convincing portrait of one of the most inarticulate kin^s in European history."
Orest Ranum
One of the most peculiar and interesting figures of seventeenth-century Europe, Louis XIII has long been overshadowed by his brilliant minister. Cardinal Richelieu, and has suffered from literary portraits as a hapless king, as in Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. A. Lloyd Moote now presents us with a biography that looks at a man whose personal passions might embarrass us and whose public acts we would now consider sadistic, but whose strong sense of right and wrong led his contemporaries to call him Louis the Just.
Exploring every clue to the king's personality— from his cryptic correspondence with his ministers to his endless quest for a love that was beyond his nature, whether with his wife, his female platonic friends, dr his male crushes— Moote gives this most reticent subject flesh and blood. He shows us a willful child... Tovább

Fülszöveg

LOUIS XIII
THE JUST A. Lloyd Moote
"A powerfully convincing portrait of one of the most inarticulate kin^s in European history."
Orest Ranum
One of the most peculiar and interesting figures of seventeenth-century Europe, Louis XIII has long been overshadowed by his brilliant minister. Cardinal Richelieu, and has suffered from literary portraits as a hapless king, as in Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. A. Lloyd Moote now presents us with a biography that looks at a man whose personal passions might embarrass us and whose public acts we would now consider sadistic, but whose strong sense of right and wrong led his contemporaries to call him Louis the Just.
Exploring every clue to the king's personality— from his cryptic correspondence with his ministers to his endless quest for a love that was beyond his nature, whether with his wife, his female platonic friends, dr his male crushes— Moote gives this most reticent subject flesh and blood. He shows us a willful child fashioned by family, court, and media conceptions of royal virtues into a complicated king with strong ideas about what he and his subjects should and should not do. We see Louis settle into a highly effective "mode of governance" that combined his morally tinged political instincts with his minister's sophisticated understanding of them and their author. And we note the irony of this royal-ministerial collaboration that made the king look weak, even as the sacrifice of his own health and his subjects' lives on the altar of state necessity brought him to an early grave. ^ _ _
tiveness of charismatic leaders with vision. As a biography, it points the way toward a new integration of social, political, cultural, and élite histories in order to better understand an "ordinary" ruler who powerfully shaped his people's destiny.
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A. Lloyd Moote, Professor of History at the University of Southern California, is the author of The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643-1652; The Seventeenth Century: Europe in Ferment; and The World of Europe: The Seventeenth Century. Vissza