Volume 15, Number 2 · July 23, 1970
Looking for Louis
By C.B.A. Behrens
Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen
by Pierre Goubert, translated by Anne Carter
Pantheon, 350 pp., $7.95
The Age of Louis XIV
by Pierre Gaxotte, translated by Michael Shaw
Macmillan, 346 pp., $7.95
The Affair of the Poisons
by Frances Mossiker
Knopf, 336 pp., $7.95
No authoritative account of Louis XIV's reign has been written since Lavisse produced his magisterial work in 1906. This work established a great body of facts, social, economic, and political. From the point of view of the layman, however, for whom all the three books now under review are designed, or even of the educated layman, with whom Professor Goubert specifically professes to be concerned, it is virtually unreadable. It is too long and detailed; in so far as it is inspired by any philosophy, this is the philosophy of a now discarded liberalism; modern scholarship has made it necessary to revise a number of the judgments, and modern preoccupations require that the scope of the inquiry should be broadened in some respects and narrowed in others.
Review, 2944 words
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