Myth- and Monarch-Making: Claire de Duras’s Pensées de Louis XIV (1827)
Louis XIV is one of the most captivating figures in French history despite his myth sitting uneasily alongside a modern Republican France. Louis XIV’s rarely read memoirs provide unique insight into the monarch’s role, demonstrating the tension between God-given right and the day-to-day duties of being a king. Novelist Claire de Duras used the memoirs to compile Pensées de Louis XIV (1827), a collection of seventy selected quotations. This article shows how Duras attempts to reconcile past and present, maintaining the mythical aura of the monarch while also portraying Louis XIV as a figure that might appeal to a post-Revolutionary, post-Imperial society.
Keyword(s):
1966 ◽
Vol 24
◽
pp. 322-330
1983 ◽
Vol 41
◽
pp. 194-195
Keyword(s):
1988 ◽
Vol 46
◽
pp. 26-27
Keyword(s):
1972 ◽
Vol 30
◽
pp. 680-681
1972 ◽
Vol 30
◽
pp. 482-483
1991 ◽
Vol 49
◽
pp. 742-743
Keyword(s):