Which French king was called the Sun King?

Louis XIV, who reigned for 72 years - the longest of any European monarch - and chose the sun as his emblem because everything revolves around it. He danced the role of Apollo in a court ballet at fifteen, and the imagery was maintained deliberately for the rest of his life.

Versailles was a machine for controlling the nobility. He moved the court there and required the great families to attend, where they competed for meaningless honours - the right to hand him his shirt at the morning ceremony was a serious prize - while ruinously expensive attendance kept them from their estates and from building regional power bases. Politics was replaced by etiquette on purpose.

The reign is also a warning about how the two halves of a record can be separated. He built the army, the navy, the academies, and a cultural dominance that made French the language of European diplomacy for two centuries. He also revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, ending toleration of Protestants and driving several hundred thousand Huguenots - disproportionately skilled artisans and merchants - out to Britain, the Netherlands and Prussia, enriching his rivals. He spent his last decades in near-continuous war and left the treasury wrecked, which his great-grandson inherited along with the throne.