Mr. Mansel, building on his formidable reputation as the most stylish of historians of modern Europe, is as good at explaining and illustrating Louis’s decline as his ascendancy ... Copiously, beautifully and intelligently illustrated, complemented by excellent maps and diagrams (notably a ground-plan of Versailles), King of the World is one of the most stimulating and enjoyable works on European history to have been published for many a long year.
Almost everything about Louis XIV — the size of his palaces, the length of his reign, the height of his heels — was on a gargantuan scale ... Such splendour is there not just to dazzle, but also to deceive, and excavating the “real” Louis beneath the mountains of eulogy poses a major challenge for any would-be biographer. Philip Mansel’s impressive new survey — the best single-volume account of the reign in any language — moves deftly between these fictive and objective worlds. He revels in the fêtes and fireworks, the frescoes and tapestries, that glorified Louis’s rule. But he is never blind to Louis’s failings and absurdities, and clearly delineates how the 'absolute monarch' was never as absolute as he wished the world to think.
The self-control of Louis — and his pathological secretiveness — has made him difficult quarry for historians. Thus far, no other English-language biography has so successfully given us a portrait of him as man and monarch. Mansel is strong at recreating the king’s inner life ... Mansel renders Louis’ satellites in fascinating detail ... Mansel, whose previous books include The Eagle in Splendour: Inside the Court of Napoleon, treads the line between the academic and the accessible effectively, explaining the context of the French monarchy, diplomacy, medicine, Catholicism, queenship, fashion and art. He devotes three chapters to the construction of Versailles, which was far more than simply a mausoleum for Louis’ ego; it was a place of such splendour and renown that it enhanced French international prestige. As the author reminds us, Louis’ subjects sometimes referred to him as 'Louis le Grand', but that sobriquet has not endured ... the Sun King emerges as a fascinating failure.
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas Books’, and there was a comment of Jonathan Sumption’s that ‘as a general rule, biography is a poor way to learn history’. It is primarily a matter of approach rather than simply subject of course, but if one was drawing up a shortlist of men who might qualify as exceptions to the rule, then Philip Mansel’s King of the World, Louis XIV, would surely be very near the top ... On a scale suitable to its subject, King of the World is in one way an extended moral fable, the story of how this ‘kind and modest boy’, intelligent, hard-working, courageous but naturally cautious, became the self-destructive monarch who savagely persecuted his Huguenot subjects, ravaged whole swathes of Europe, and taxed France into starvation, misery and revolt.
Philip Mansel writes shrewdly about the self-styled Sun King’s doomed endeavours to enlarge his dominion ... Excellent though Mansel is on the larger picture — you will find no more comprehensive biography of this extraordinary monarch who reigned from 1643–1715 — his genius in King of the World lies in unpacking the complexities of Louis’ royal court. The contrast is chillingly made between a starving country and the deplorable but engrossing ostentation of Louis’ most enduring creation: the Palace of Versailles ... Mansel is an acknowledged expert on Versailles and he combines exceptional detail with an enjoyably cool detachment.
Philip Mansel’s King of the World chronicles Louis’s seventy-two-year reign ... Comprehensive and eminently readable, the book is enlivened by surprising facts about Louis, including how his voracious appetite in infancy (he is reported to have thoroughly exhausted eight wet nurses) foreshadowed his cult of self-glorification. And it lays the cause of the French Revolution to his having left behind a faulty financial system that prioritized palace building and continual warfare over the needs of French citizens ... Enhanced by lavish, full-color illustrations and meticulous notes and references regarding France’s turbulent history and the lifestyle of its royal court, Mansel’s book reveals both the glory and depravity of Louis XIV’s reign.
The King of the World [...] tends to take place on a far wider international scale than any previous English-language biography of Louis XIV. The King’s colorful and convoluted Court life usually tends to preoccupy his biographers, and Mansel seeks to counterbalance that with more detailed accounts of French colonial exploits far from Versailles. Mansel has mastered a bewildering array of primary and secondary sources dealing with his man and his time period, and he’s invested his entire narrative with a kind of tightly compressed narrative energy that has the most unlikely effect imaginable: it turns a 600-page biography of King Louis XIV into a genuine page-turner of a reading experience ... King of the World is a fine combination of intriguing and paradigm-shifting, one of the year’s grandest biographies ... there’s something oddly fitting about a Louis XIV biography being such an ostentatiously ornate thing; it’s a perfect finishing stroke for a genuinely impressive work.
A wonderfully meticulous look at Louis XIV (1638-1715) from a leading historian of France ... Throughout, the narrative is dense but readable, and the 110-page notes and bibliography section attests to Mansel’s prodigious research. An impressive, comprehensive biography of the Sun King—a must-add to any Francophile’s library.
