The Court of France

For many of our contemporaries, the Court is only a place of entertainment and pleasures, the courtiers, the idle and useless people. The flying squadron of Catherine de Medici, the scandal of the Poisons, the Necklace affair would summarize its history.
In reality, far from being an archaism, the Court of France has since Francis I, a creation of the modern state. noble instrument of pacification, it allowed the monarchy to strengthen. Home of culture and civilization, it was a model imitated by the whole of Europe.
Three centuries, the Valois and the Bourbons and forged a subtle mechanics, brought to its peak by Louis XIV, radiant but already distorted by his successors.
Refuting the legends and cliches, Jean-François Solnon shows in this book (the first dedicated to the Court of France) the strengths and weaknesses of the brightest institution of modern times. So true is it that no monarch Court is a great uprooted tree that the slightest gust of wind overturned.