He sought to control everything, but became dependent on bureaucrats to keep the country running. Louis supported the arts, but exercised strict censorship. Those wars drove up France's national debt and caused taxes to balloon, a bad combination with famine. His military aims were quashed by his strong neighbor, the Netherlands, which eventually united with England under King William of Orange. The soil produced several bad harvests and famines during his fifty-year reign. The book describes how Louis, the supposed "Sun King," continually hit a brick wall when pursuing his goals. But Goubert makes a good point that kings and their people must be understood in relation to each other. Typically, these subjects involved commoners and regular people, so Goubert's choice to write about a famous king is unusual for an Annales man. Pierre Goubert came out of the French Annales School of history, a group of thinkers that wanted to use statistics, economics, and other social sciences to write "total histories" of their subjects.
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