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The Presses Universitaires de France and Frémeaux & Associés offer this biography of Louis XIV, analyzed and explained by Stéphane Guerre, associate professor of history and doctor of modern history, specializing in the reign of Louis XIV. Introducing Louis XIV to an audience who already thinks they know the Sun King from school textbooks, that is the challenge and the richness of this biography. Far from the image of the monarch deciding everything, all alone, the historian depicts a man surrounded throughout his life by important statesmen, like Mazarin educating the child-king, and recalls that the exercise of power, even absolute, is also a collective work. By drawing the portrait of the monarch, it is also that of the French society of the 17th century that Stéphane Guerre sketches.