Explore the meaning of absolute monarchy by examining how Louis XIV of France became one of Europe's most famous and successful rulers as Louis XIV and Absolutism examines the theoretical and practical nature of absolutism and its implications for the development of European states and society.
WILLIAM BEIK is professor of history at Emory University. An authority on the social and institutional history of seventeenth-century France, he is the author of Abolutism and Society: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (1985), which won the 1986 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, and of Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: the Culture of Retribution (1987). He has written numerous articles and is coeditor of the New Approaches to European History series at Cambridge University Press.