Glorifying the sun and air
Nigel Spivey
THE FABRICATION OF LOUIS XIV by Peter Burke Yale University Press, £19.95, pp. 242 Image-junkies' — that is how we have all been characterised by Susan Sontag, on account of our fetish for photographs. But Louis XIV as Apollo, costume design 1654 the characterisation is less memorable if it implies that an addiction to images is unique to the 20th century. The inhabitants of Classical Athens were image-junkies; the citizens of the Roman Empire under Augustus were image-junkies; and it looks as if the 20 million subjects of Louis XIV were image-junkies too. That is, they were given regular fixes: from municipal statues and triumphal arches, to paintings, tapestries, engravings, coins and medals. Peter Burke asserts that these do not amount, in the modern sense, to mass- media: illiterate toilers down in the Dor- dogne went on with their toiling, just as many people in provincial Britain carry on quite happily without ever clapping eyes on the latest Benetton poster. Yet there was an image-machine behind this king: and its efficiency may have had a lot to do with the longevity of his rule.
The machine was cranked into action at a very early stage. A son to Louis XIII was announced by an image of the sun, deliv- ered from a bed of clouds. That was the launch of the Sun-King, who for his infant coronation was dressed in a solar ballet costume. Whether they knew it or not in the Dordogne, the new king had the power to make artichokes grow: he was 'god- given', and the rays of his power ensured prosperity and happiness wherever they shone. Those entrusted with 'packaging' the king formed a sub-group of the French Academy, and with the input of savants such as Corneille and Boileau the image grew predictably more sophisticated, using symbols of power which must certainly have been lost upon many onlookers. But the basic message traded upon a very sim- ple feel-good factor: the sun. Plenty of autocrats prior to Louis XIV had tried this — Alexander the Great, influenced by Egyptian practice, makes an obvious precedent — but in particular Louis bor- rowed from Roman emperors. One of the Perrault brothers (Perrault and Perrault may roughly equate to Saatchi and Saatchi here) explicitly pushed the comparison of 'le siècle de Louis au beau siècle d'Auguste': Louis, like Augustus, relied heavily upon the alter ego of Apollo for his symbolic language, enabling not only many allusions to his 'enlightened' patronage of arts and crafts and sciences, but also reflections Of his passion for hunting.
A thorough study of the power of images in the age of Augustus (by Paul Zanker) has already appeared. Burke spends little time tracing the genealogies of the images churned out by the Sun-King machine: as he says, it needs another book for that.. Instead, he focuses upon the mechanism ol the propaganda, drawing easily upon theo- ries of communication and 'signification and emphasising the theatricality of it all ('Louis was on stage for almost the wholc of his waking life'). He tells us that Louis is the 'protagonist' of the book, then pro- ceeds to demonstrate who the real protago- nists were: the crew marshalled by Colbert during the minority of the king. Very little emerges about Louis himself. Readers who want courtly tittle-tattle will have to go back to Nancy Mitford. Nor is this a guide- book to Versailles, although it would be good to have it at one's elbow when visiting there.
The value of the study to non- specialists is its clinical treatment of the process of glorification. So it is particularlY interesting to see how the machine dealt with military failures, 'pseudo-events', and royal decisions subsequently judged 3,s asinine (Louis' reversal of his grandfather s toleration of Protestants, for example).
And the counter-propaganda is not ignored. Of Alexander it was said that those parts of the world outside his rule remained in darkness. But in the penumbra of the Sun-King resistance to his despotism flickered strongly, stoked up by angry Huguenot exiles. Outsiders played him at his own game: their image-machine discov- ered another alter ego for Louis: not Augustus, but Nero. A colossal statue of Nero as Helios the Sun-god used to stand in Rome (the colossus from which the Colosseum takes its name); and to his enemies Louis was simply Nero Gallicanus.
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