Louis XIV became king of France at four years old and nearly lost his throne during the Fronde rebellions before he turned thirteen. That childhood terror — mobs storming the palace, fleeing Paris in the night — shaped everything that followed. He built Versailles to trap the aristocracy in a gilded cage, centralized power more completely than any European monarch before him, and ruled for seventy-two years, the longest reign in European history.

This episode traces Louis from the childhood trauma of the Fronde through the construction of Versailles, the cultural golden age, the wars that bankrupted France, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes that drove hundreds of thousands of Protestants into exile.

• The childhood Fronde rebellions and the terror that convinced Louis to never trust the nobility
• The construction of Versailles as a tool of political control disguised as architectural grandeur
• The cultural golden age — Moliere, Racine, Lully — and Louis’s role as patron and performer
• The wars of expansion, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the debts he left his successors