La fabrique d’un roi: les représentations de Louis XIV pendant son enfance et sa première jeunesse (1638-1661) dans la fiction littéraire en France de la Révolution à Alexandre Dumas

Abstract

This doctoral thesis proposes a study of fictional representations of the young dauphin and monarch Louis XIV in literary fiction in France from the Revolution to Alexandre Dumas. It specifically examines the portrayal of the future Sun King from his birth in 1638 to the commencement of his personal rule over France, following the death of Cardinal Mazarin on 9th March 1661. The main aim of this work is to understand how, in the French collective imagination, the figure of the dauphin and the young king evolved and was shaped by writers from the Revolution to 1854. This work identifies the various historical sources used by eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists and playwrights and discusses the networks of influence that can be found within their works of fiction. Furthermore, by comparing successive fictional portraits of Louis as a child, teenager and young man with the historical facts, as established by the most renowned and authoritative seventeenth-century specialists, it sheds light on the aesthetic, political and ideological choices made by authors in the first half of the long nineteenth century.