A Lust for Virtue: Louis XIV's Attack on Sin in Seventeenth-Century France

by Philip F. Riley

Midway through his reign, in the critical decade of the 1680s, the lusty image of Louis XIV paled and was replaced by that of a straitlaced monarch committed to locking up blasphemers, debtors, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that dispensed ample doses of Catholic-Reformation virtue. The author demonstrates how this attack on sin expressed the punitive social policy of the French Catholic Reformation and how Louis's...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0313317089
• ISBN13: 9780313317088
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.5" x 9.7"