The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (French: La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV), also called The Rise of Louis XIV, is a 1966 French television film by Italian film director Roberto Rossellini. Audio in French with English subtitles.
The film was presented at the Venice Film Festival and also distributed in cinemas. This is the most accurate historical reconstruction of the rise to power of the Sun King.
The film revolves around the French king Louis XIV's rise to power after the death of his powerful advisor, Cardinal Mazarin. After the death of Cardinal Mazarin, young king Louis XIV decides to assert his power to control the aristocracy. To achieve this political autonomy, Louis deals with his mother and the court nobles, all of whom make the assumption that Mazarin's death will give them more power.
France. On the death of his minister Giulio Mazarino (1602-61), the young king Louis XIV (1638-1715), who had always devoted himself only to his own leisure, decided to exercise power directly, no longer relying on superintendents. Finance superintendent Nicolas Fouquet expects the king's interest in politics to be short-lived and believes he can soon become prime minister, but makes the mistake of attempting to bribe the king's mistress to make her his ally. This is the pretext for Louis XIV, already advised in this sense by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Fouquet's rival, to remove him from office and have him arrested on charges of having abused his office to carry out embezzlement to the detriment of the state. While Colbert undertakes administrative and financial reforms, Louis XIV dedicates all his efforts to building a residence worthy of his person, the Palace of Versailles, in which he forces the court to reside, removing the nobility from the government of the provinces and reducing it to a life of rituals all centered around him, the Sun King.
Jean-Marie Patte, who plays Louis XIV, an office clerk moonlighting as an amateur actor, had terrible difficulty memorizing his lines, and had to read from cue cards in most of his scenes. Roberto Rossellini believed that Patte's awkward, unrehearsed nervousness mirrored that of Louis as he takes on the responsibilities of kingship. The fact that he is never looking at his interlocutor because he is reading his lines from prompts is used by Rossellini to demonstrate Louis’ complete triumph of will over circumstance. It is this that makes all the more poignant the final scene of the film, when Louis, in a rare moment of solitude, strips himself of his finery and reads out La Rochefoucauld’s maxim “Neither the sun nor death can be gazed upon fixedly.” By turning himself into the Sun King, Louis has effectively aligned himself with death—he can no longer participate in the life of the court he has created.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/974-the-taking-of-power-by-louis-xiv-long-live-the-cinema
Cast & Characters:
Jean-Marie Patte: King Louis XIV
Raymond Jourdan: Jean Baptiste Colbert
Cesare Silvagni: Cardinal Mazzarino
Katharina Renn: Anna d'Austria
Dominique Vincent: Madame Du Plessis
Pierre Barrat: Nicolas Fouquet
Fernand Fabre: Michel Le Tellier
Françoise Ponty: Louise de la Vallière
Joëlle Laugeois: Marie-Thérèse of Spain
Maurice Barrier: D'Artagnan
Pierre Pernet: Philippe I, Duke of Orléans
Jean Obé: Louis Le Vau
Georges Spanelly: Pierre Séguier
