French Baroque Music and Royal Power

French Baroque music wasn't just beautiful sound. It was a weapon of royal power.

When Louis the fourteenth moved his entire court to Versailles in the sixteen eighties, he turned the palace

into a permanent stage, demanding new ballets and operas almost daily to prove France

was the center of civilization. Composers like Lully controlled everything, favored by the king,

given monopolies over opera. Meanwhile the Catholic Church needed grand motets to heal the

wounds left by decades of religious war. The French elite deliberately rejected passionate Italian

styles, insisting on clarity and order instead. But Italian ideas kept sneaking in

anyway. By the seventeen hundreds, Paris salons and public concerts