... was surrounded by equally motivated individuals who shared his notions of 'absolutism'. This paper seeks to understand these motivations and in so doing, understand the consonance and dissonance between Louis the 'absolute monarch' and Louis the man. The quest for legitimacy, not just as France's monarch but as a universal monarch, is the principle incentive for Louis' 'packaging'. His absolutist pretensions are 1) a decisive reaction to past and future uprisings3 and 2) the attempted fulfillment of the age-old paradigm of the 'Divine Right of Kings'.4 The efforts to represent Louis as an absolute monarch can be seen as a response to "a series of crises"5 and as such the 'absolutist' principle was for Louis and 'his men' a political imperative. The king's court had to occupy the center of all governing spheres in the state. The revolutionary actions of the Fronde catalyzed the 'absolutists', creating a heavy response of propaganda ...

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