Louis XIV, James II and Ireland

Type:

Book Chapter

Published:

2016

Publisher:

Routledge

This chapter examines millenarian portrayals of Louis XIV from a Protestant perspective. Looking at the prophecies of German, central and eastern European, English, and French millenarians, it retraces the Sun King's eschatological rise. First praised as a peaceful and protective monarch, Louis embodied for a while the Antichrist in person before falling into prophetic oblivion. It is argued overall that his political ascendency inspired a shifting millenarian paradigm in the post-Westphalian era. Although France had in the meantime entered the war alongside Sweden and Germany, it at first remained absent from contemporary millenarian predictions. Fears of a French claim to Universal Monarchy shed a different light on Louis XIV, and overturned the image of him as a potential saviour. The political reconfiguration between two major European powers at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession inspired a shifting millenarian ethos in contemporary prophecies, that of a more peaceful age paving the way for the New Jerusalem.

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