Free Republic

From the moment the Sun King arose from his sumptuous gold bed, aligned with the rising sun at the centerpiece of his beloved Versailles, the château was alive with activity. The life of every courtier, minister, lovely lady, doctor, and cook was finely tuned to the rituals of the King, his dressing, shaving, dining, meetings, and evening comedie, dancing or appartement when the halls were flooded with light and the courtiers played billiards, gambled, and ate sweets. Living under a pretense of usefulness to Louis XIV and the government of France, the courtiers were largely a source of amusement...

As was revealed in a breathtaking New York Times opinion piece today, many of Barack Obama's top advisers feel alienated from him. There is a sense within the White House that President Obama's theory of government is that "he is the government". Apparently, President Obama has personalized the presidency to such an extent that it is now seen as more about the man than about the position. Certainly that is not how the American Founding Fathers viewed the presidency. The author of this article, David Rothkopf, characterizes the president as a poor manager who is also aloof and a poor...

MADRID, Spain (3 Apr 2007) -- In February 1694, British admiral Francis Wheeler set sail from the Bay of Gibraltar with an important mission. He was to bring a large sum of money to the Duke of Savoy in order to buy his loyalty and to ensure victory in Britain's ongoing war against France's Sun King Louis XIV. But when the HMS Sussex arrived in the Strait of Gibraltar, it was hit by a violent storm, and Wheeler struggled in vain to save it. The 50-metre warship went down with more than 500 men, 80 cannons and an estimated 10...

New evidence unearthed in France's National Museum of Natural History shows beyond reasonable doubt that the Hope Diamond is the same steely-blue stone once sported by the Sun King, they said. Mineralogist Francois Farges, heading an investigation published in a peer-reviewed French journal, told AFP he was now "99 percent sure" that the Hope and the mythical Blue Diamond of the Crown were one and the same. "The evidence corroborates a scenario under which the diamond, after being stolen in Paris in 1792, was swiftly smuggled to London, where it was recut," he said. The Blue Diamond came from a...

“Kings,” Louis XIV once observed, “should enjoy giving pleasure” and when it came to the fairer sex, he obeyed this precept zealously and often. “They’re all good enough for him, provided they’re women,” his sister-in-law remarked, “peasants, gardeners’ daughters, chambermaids, ladies of quality”; women of every stripe benefited from the Sun King’s sexual largesse. Neither the bonds of matrimony (to the sad, neglected Marie-Thérèse of Spain) nor the intrigues of his “official” mistresses (one of whom, Athénaïs de Montespan, wasn’t above spreading the rumor that a particular rival had scabs all over her body) could deter him from sharing the...