French nobility in the context of "Louis XIV of France"

Louis XIV (Louis-Dieudonné; 5 September 1638 – 1 September 1715), also known as Louis the Great (Louis le Grand [lwi lə ɡʁɑ̃]) or the Sun King (le Roi Soleil [lə ʁwa sɔlɛj]), was King of France from 1643 until his death in 1715. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest of any monarch in history. An emblem of the age of absolutism in Europe, Louis XIV's legacy includes French colonial expansion, the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War involving the Habsburgs, and a controlling influence on the style of fine arts and architecture in France, including the transformation of the Palace of Versailles into a center of royal power and politics. Louis XIV's pageantry and opulence helped define the French Baroque style of art and architecture and promoted his image as supreme leader of France in the early modern period.

Louis XIV began his personal rule of France in 1661 after the death of his chief minister Cardinal Mazarin. A believer in the divine right of kings, Louis XIV continued Louis XIII's work of creating a centralized state governed from a capital. Louis XIV sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France by compelling many members of the nobility to reside at his lavish Palace of Versailles. In doing so, he succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many of whom had participated in the Fronde rebellions during his minority. He consolidated a system of absolute monarchy in France that endured until the French Revolution. Louis XIV enforced uniformity of religion under the Catholic Church. His revocation of the Edict of Nantes abolished the rights of the Huguenot Protestant minority and subjected them to a wave of dragonnades, effectively forcing Huguenots to emigrate or convert, virtually destroying the French Protestant community.

The ancien régime (/ˌɒ̃sjæ̃ reɪˈʒiːm/; French: [ɑ̃sjɛ̃ ʁeʒim] ; lit. 'old rule') was the political and social system of the Kingdom of France that the French Revolution overturned through its abolition in 1790 of the feudal system of the French nobility and in 1792 through its execution of King Louis XVI and declaration of a republic. "Ancien régime" is now a common metaphor for "a system or mode no longer prevailing".

The administrative and social structures of the ancien régime in France evolved across years of state-building, legislative acts (like the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts), and internal conflicts. The attempts of the House of Valois to reform and re-establish control over the scattered political centres of the country were hindered by the Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598. During the House of Bourbon, much of the reigns of Henry IV (r. 1589–1610) and Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643) and the early years of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) focused on administrative centralization. Despite the notion of "absolute monarchy" (typified by the king's right to issue orders through lettres de cachet) and efforts to create a centralized state, ancien régime France remained a country of systemic irregularities: administrative, legal, judicial, and ecclesiastic divisions and prerogatives frequently overlapped, the French nobility struggled to maintain their influence in local judiciary and state branches while the Fronde and other major internal conflicts violently contested additional centralization.

The Fronde (French pronunciation: [fʁɔ̃d] ) was a series of civil wars in the Kingdom of France between 1648 and 1653, occurring in the midst of the Franco-Spanish War, which had begun in 1635. The government of the young King Louis XIV confronted the combined opposition of the princes, the nobility, the noble regional court assemblies (parlements), as well as much of the French population, and managed to subdue them all. The dispute started when the government of France issued seven fiscal edicts, six of which were to increase taxation. The parlements resisted, questioned the constitutionality of the king's actions, and sought to check his powers.

The Fronde was divided into two campaigns, the Parlementary Fronde and the Fronde of the Princes. The timing of the outbreak of the Parlementary Fronde, directly after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that ended the Thirty Years' War, was significant. The nuclei of the armed bands that terrorized parts of France under aristocratic leaders during that period had been hardened in a generation of war in Germany, where troops still tended to operate autonomously. Louis XIV, impressed as a young ruler with the experience of the Fronde, came to reorganize French fighting forces under a stricter hierarchy, whose leaders ultimately could be made or unmade by the king. Cardinal Mazarin blundered into the crisis but came out well ahead at the end. The Fronde represented the final attempt of the French nobility to confront the king, and ended in its humiliation. In the long run, the Fronde served to strengthen royal authority, but weakened the national economy. The Fronde facilitated the emergence of absolute monarchy.

Louis XVI (Louis-Auguste; French: [lwi sɛːz]; 23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. The son of Louis, Dauphin of France (son and heir-apparent of King Louis XV), and Maria Josepha of Saxony, Louis became the new Dauphin when his father died in 1765. In 1770, he married Marie Antoinette. He became King of France and Navarre on his grandfather's death on 10 May 1774, and reigned until the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792. From 1791 onwards, he used the style of king of the French.

The first part of Louis XVI's reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolishing the death penalty for deserters. The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation. Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it led to food scarcity which, during a particularly bad harvest in 1775, prompted the masses to revolt. From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the Treaty of Paris (1783). The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the ancien régime.

Charles V (21 January 1338 – 16 September 1380), called the Wise (French: le Sage; Latin: Sapiens), was King of France from 1364 to his death in 1380. His reign marked an early high point for France during the Hundred Years' War as his armies recovered much of the territory held by the English and successfully reversed the military losses of his predecessors.

Charles became regent of France when his father John II was captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. To pay for the defense of the kingdom, Charles raised taxes. As a result, he faced hostility from the nobility, led by Charles the Bad, King of Navarre; the opposition of the French bourgeoisie, which was channeled through the Estates-General led by Étienne Marcel; and with a peasant revolt known as the Jacquerie. Charles overcame all of these rebellions, but in order to liberate his father, he had to conclude the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, in which he abandoned large portions of south-western France to Edward III of England and agreed to pay a huge ransom.

Gentleman (Old French: gentilz hom, "gentle man"; colloquial: gent) is a term for a chivalrous, courteous, or honorable man. Originally, gentleman was the lowest rank of the landed gentry of England, ranking below an esquire and above a yeoman; by definition, the rank of gentleman comprised the younger sons of the younger sons of peers, and the younger sons of a baronet, a knight, and an esquire, in perpetual succession. As such, the connotation of the term gentleman captures the common denominator of gentility (and often a coat of arms); a right shared by the peerage and the gentry, the constituent classes of the British nobility.

Thus, the English social category of gentleman corresponds to the French gentilhomme (nobleman), which in Great Britain meant a member of the peerage of England. English historian Maurice Keen further clarifies this point, stating that, in this context, the social category of gentleman is "the nearest contemporary English equivalent of the noblesse of France." In the 14th century, the term gentlemen comprised the hereditary ruling class, which is whom the rebels of the Peasants' Revolt (1381) meant when they repeated: