Louis XI, King of France

Louis XI, king of France from 1461 to 1483, is the sovereign who most strongly marked the late Middle Ages. On the one hand, his reign corresponds to a turning point in the history of state building. The last convulsions of the Hundred Years War had not yet died out; the last feudal and princely rebellions were still shaking and testing the royal authority. And yet the authority of this king, who came to the throne at the mature age of thirty-eight, emerged strengthened from these trials, and the power of the monarchy was reinforced. On the other hand, in an unstable Europe in which threatening forces often formed powerful coalitions against the king (England, Castile, Aragon, Empire, Italian city-states, the papacy), Louis XI showed remarkable political intelligence by approaching such resistance with the aim of circumventing it. The originality and modernity of his methods correspond with an important moment in the development of Italian diplomatic methods, which he was able to adapt with discernment. Both flexible and intransigent on his function, he embraced pragmatism as a doctrine. With the possible exception of his reign’s last years, he retained this flexibility in all areas of exercise of his power. A final point concerns the historical assessment of Louis XI. Few kings have been tagged with such worn stereotypes, notably the simple and sinister image of the “universal spider” that has clung to him over the centuries, especially during the Romantic era. But for the past fifty years, the approach to the reign of Louis XI has been more scientific and transversal: historians have relied on remarkable documentation based not only on archival sources but, more surprisingly, on the voluminous correspondence (nearly 1,300 letters) that this sovereign carried on with other European political actors. Armed with this documentation, historians have taken a fresh look at the fields of political, economic, diplomatic, military, and religious history. One area has seen a complete overhaul of analytical methods thanks to the publication of previously unpublished documents: law and justice, especially ordinary and extraordinary criminal proceedings, which evidenced a remarkable intensity under the reign of Louis XI. All these scientific and critical approaches reveal the unique and exceptional character of this monarch’s private and political conduct.