Louis XIV Trivia
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80 free Louis XIV trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Louis XIV trivia quiz covers the whole reign of the Sun King: the miracle baby born after two decades of childless marriage, the boy king stared at in bed by a Paris mob, the young man who took the reins of government himself, the builder of Versailles, the patron of Molière and Racine, the persecutor of the Huguenots, the warlord who fought the Dutch, the League and the Grand Alliance, and the old man who told his heir not to copy him. The easy questions cover the outline: his nickname, how long he reigned, his palace, the war-torn end of the reign and who succeeded him. The harder half is for people who have read Saint-Simon or watched Versailles twice: the unpaid Spanish dowry, the château that doomed a finance minister, the island he fortified, the names of his taxes, the city bombarded to save Namur, the disastrous raid on a Channel Island, the god he danced beside Apollo, the dance master who codified the five positions, his 1686 operation, and the Victorian dean who ate a piece of his heart. Every answer was checked against Louis XIV's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our French history, Versailles and Marie Antoinette quizzes next.
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Q 01By what nickname is Louis XIV best known?
The Sun King
The Sun King. He took the sun as his emblem and, at 14, danced the part of the sun god Apollo in a court ballet, casting himself as the star his whole kingdom revolved around.
Q 02Which British monarch's 70-year reign is second only to Louis XIV's 72 among sovereign monarchs?
Elizabeth II
Elizabeth II. Her 70 years and 214 days fell short of Louis XIV's 72 years and 110, a total he could reach only because he inherited the throne as a small child.
Q 03In which royal château west of Paris was Louis XIV born?
Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He held court at the château for years before settling at Versailles, then lent it to England's deposed king, whose exiled court stayed on for decades.
Q 04Which real-life musketeer, later immortalised by Alexandre Dumas, arrested Louis XIV's disgraced finance minister in 1661?
D'Artagnan
D'Artagnan. The real Charles de Batz de Castelmore, an officer of the king's musketeers, made the arrest on Louis's orders and then spent years as his prisoner's jailer.
Q 05Who was Louis XIV's mother, who ruled France as sole regent during his minority?
Anne of Austria
Anne of Austria. Despite the name she was a Spanish princess, born in Valladolid to King Philip III; 'Austria' was the name of her Habsburg dynasty, not her homeland.
Q 06How old was Louis XIV when he became King of France?
Four
Four. His dying father, distrusting the queen, tried to tie her to a regency council, but within days she had the will overturned and governed alone in her son's name.
Q 07Which cardinal, Richelieu's successor, governed France as chief minister throughout Louis XIV's youth?
Mazarin
Mazarin. Born Giulio Mazzarino in Italy, he was also the boy king's godfather and personally schooled him in diplomacy and statecraft until his own death in 1661.
Q 08The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, negotiated during Louis XIV's minority, ended which war?
The Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War. France, though Catholic, had joined it against the Catholic Habsburgs, and the peace rewarded the boy king's government with lands in Alsace.
Q 09Which 1648–53 civil wars forced the young Louis XIV and his court to flee Paris?
The Fronde
The Fronde. Named after the slings of a Paris street game played in defiance of the authorities, the revolts failed, and their collapse cleared the way for Louis's absolute rule.
Q 10What did the twelve-year-old Louis XIV do when a Paris mob entered his bedchamber in 1651?
Pretended to be asleep
Pretended to be asleep. The crowd gazed at the boy, was satisfied and left quietly, but Louis never forgot the humiliation and held it against Paris for the rest of his life.
Q 11Which famous blue gem in the Smithsonian is thought to have been recut from a diamond Louis XIV bought in 1668?
The Hope Diamond
The Hope Diamond. Louis's stone, known as the French Blue, vanished when thieves looted the crown jewels in 1792, and the smaller gem that later surfaced in London is believed to be what was left of it.
Q 12Whom did Louis XIV marry in 1660 to seal France's peace with a long-standing enemy?
Maria Theresa of Spain
Maria Theresa of Spain. His cousin on both sides, she bore his affairs in silence, and when she died in 1683 he is reported to have said it was the only trouble she had ever caused him.
Q 13At Versailles, courtiers competed for the honour of watching Louis XIV do what each morning?
Q 21Louis XIV's Code Noir of 1685 regulated what in the French colonies?
Slavery
Slavery. As much about religion as labour, the code ordered every enslaved person to be baptised a Catholic and expelled all Jews from France's colonies.
Q 22The 1667 War of Devolution was Louis XIV's attempt to seize territory in which region?
The Spanish Netherlands
The Spanish Netherlands. Louis invoked a local custom there that let a daughter of a first marriage inherit ahead of sons of a second, and claimed the lands had 'devolved' to his wife.
Q 23With which English king did Louis XIV sign the Secret Treaty of Dover in 1670, an alliance against the Dutch?
Charles II
Get out of bed
Get out of bed. At the ceremony called the lever he was woken at 8.30, then washed, shaved and dressed before onlookers admitted in order of rank, so a place in the room showed how high a courtier stood.
Q 14On taking personal power in 1661, Louis XIV astonished his court by announcing he would do what?
Rule without a chief minister
Rule without a chief minister. It broke with tradition, since French kings had long left daily government to a favourite, but Louis chaired his own councils for the next 54 years.
Q 15Which Superintendent of Finances did Louis XIV have arrested in 1661 and imprisoned for life?
Nicolas Fouquet
Nicolas Fouquet. His judges voted only to banish him, but Louis overruled them and 'commuted' the sentence upward, to life in the Alpine fortress of Pignerol, where he died in 1680.
Q 16At which château did Louis XIV's finance minister throw the king a lavish fête weeks before his arrest?
Vaux-le-Vicomte
Vaux-le-Vicomte. Louis went on to hire the very team that had created it, its architect, its painter and its garden designer, to build his own far larger palace at Versailles.
Q 17Which finance minister of Louis XIV, a champion of French industry, sharply cut the royal deficit in the 1660s?
Jean-Baptiste Colbert
Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Convinced that France grew rich by selling more than it bought, he lured skilled foreign craftsmen such as Venetian glassmakers to the kingdom and taxed imports heavily.
Q 18What was the gabelle, one of the main taxes of Louis XIV's France?
A salt tax
A salt tax. Across much of France everyone over the age of eight had to buy a set amount of salt at the crown's price, and because that price varied hugely between provinces, salt smuggling became a thriving trade.
Q 19Louis XIV's ministers Michel le Tellier and his son, the Marquis de Louvois, reorganised which institution?
The army
The army. Their inspector of infantry, Jean Martinet, drilled the regiments so relentlessly that his surname passed into English as the word for a rigid disciplinarian.
Q 20Which military engineer ringed Louis XIV's France with fortresses and directed many of the king's sieges?
Vauban
Vauban. Late in life the great fortress builder turned reformer, proposing that most taxes give way to a flat tenth paid by every class, nobles included, and the government suppressed his book.
Charles II. In return for French money that freed him from Parliament, he secretly promised to declare himself a Catholic one day, a clause known to only two of his own councillors.
Q 24How did the Dutch stop Louis XIV's invading troops from reaching Amsterdam in 1672?
Flooding their own land
Flooding their own land. They opened the dikes to drown a belt of countryside, the Water Line, kept too deep to march through and too shallow for boats, and the French advance stopped dead.
Q 25Which landscape gardener designed the gardens of Versailles for Louis XIV?
André Le Nôtre
André Le Nôtre. Born into a family of royal gardeners, he studied perspective and optics in a painter's studio and used them to lay out vistas that seem to run on as far as the eye can see.
Q 26Which Free Imperial City on the Rhine did Louis XIV annex in 1681?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg. Louis simply seized the largely Protestant city in peacetime, with no war declared, and the rest of Europe accepted it as French only in the peace treaty of 1697.
Q 27Which French explorer claimed the whole Mississippi basin in 1682 and named it Louisiana after Louis XIV?
La Salle
La Salle. Two years later he sailed back to plant a colony at the river's mouth, missed it, landed in what is now Texas and was murdered there by his own men in 1687.
Q 28Embassies from which Asian kingdom did Louis XIV receive at Versailles in 1684 and 1686?
Siam
Siam. King Narai wanted a French alliance to offset Dutch power, and Louis received his envoys in state, but it all ended in 1688, when Narai fell ill and a court faction overthrew and executed his Greek favourite, Constantine Phaulkon.
Q 29Which Catholic order supplied the 'mathematicians' Louis XIV sent to the Chinese emperor's court in 1685?
The Jesuits
The Jesuits. The five priests reached Beijing in 1688, and two of them stayed at court for years teaching the Kangxi Emperor mathematics and astronomy.
Q 30Which kingdom's ruler sent Louis XIV an elephant from the Congo for his menagerie at Versailles?
Portugal
Portugal. The elephant lived in the menagerie for thirteen years, and when it died in 1681 its dissection revealed that the animal long taken for a male was in fact a female.