The book which the reader has before him makes no pretense to be a life of Louis XIV. It is of a quite different sort from biography. It is a study of certain matters whereon those who have written about this great formative period in European history have widely differed; and that study is now directed to exploring the old and half forgotten, the now rapidly reviving, principle of monarchy. Belloc wrote it in order to discuss and illustrate both the strength and the weakness of that institution as it appears in the capital example of Louis XIV's very great reign. Contents: monarchy; formation; founding of all within and without; maturity and the wars without and the wars within; the defensive;