By Philip F. Riley
Midway via his reign, within the serious decade of the 1680s, the lusty photograph of Louis XIV paled and used to be changed by way of that of a straitlaced monarch dedicated to locking up blasphemers, borrowers, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that distributed abundant doses of Catholic-Reformation advantage. the writer demonstrates how this assault on sin expressed the punitive social coverage of the French Catholic Reformation and the way Louis's activities clarified the criminal and ethical differences among crime and sin.
As a hot-blooded younger prince, Louis XIV paid little realization to advantage or to sin and, regardless of his loved name of God's so much Christian King, violations of God's 6th and 9th Commandments by no means bothered him. certainly, for the 1st 20 years of his reign, he paraded a circulation of royal mistresses ahead of all of Europe and fathered 16 illegitimate young children. but, halfway via his reign, within the severe decade of the 1680s, the lusty picture of Louis XIV paled and was once changed by way of that of a straitlaced monarch devoted to locking up blasphemers, borrowers, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that disbursed plentiful doses of Catholic-Reformation virtue.
Using police and felony records, administrative correspondence, memoirs, and letters, Riley describes the formation of Louis's slender moral sense and his efforts to shield his matters' souls through attacking sin and infusing his nation with advantage, in particular in Paris and at Versailles. all through his assault on sin, women--so-called squaddies of Satan--were the specific pursuits of the police. by means of the 17th century, fornication and adultery had turn into solely woman crimes; males responsible of those sins have been infrequently punished as critically. even though unsuccessful, Louis's assault on sin clarified the felony and ethical differences among crime and sin in addition to the futility of implementing a religiously encouraged social coverage on an irreverent, secular-minded France.
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