Translated from French
The myth of the "Sun King" is a masterpiece of propaganda.
Behind the gilding of Versailles, Louis XIV conceals an absolute war crime: the total destruction of the Palatinate.
In 1688, the King of France makes a decision of unprecedented brutality to protect his borders.
With his Minister of War, Louvois, he orders the region of Germany to be wiped off the map.
The directives sent to the generals in the field are explicit and utterly pitiless: "The King's intention is that the Palatinate be ruined from top to bottom."
The French army does not stop at occupation. It razes everything.
General de Tessé, tasked with carrying out the deed, writes to his superiors himself, terrified by the scale of the disaster he is unleashing: "I do not believe that in eight days my heart will return to its ordinary state."
But the machinery of the state crushes everything. Mannheim, Speyer, Worms, and Heidelberg are methodically plundered and then reduced to ashes.
Castles are dynamited. Churches are desecrated. Vineyards are uprooted, and grain reserves are set ablaze.
The human toll is apocalyptic.
More than 100,000 civilians are deliberately driven from their homes in the dead of a freezing winter.
Those who try to resist are put to the sword.
The others succumb to the cold, typhus, and famine on the roads of exile.
From the gilded corridors of Versailles, Louis XIV's own sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine, watches helplessly as her native people are massacred.
Her private letters bear witness to the nightmare and the indecency of the court: "I spend my nights weeping. Every day they tell me new horrors about the misery to which my poor compatriots have been reduced."
Even in the 17th century—an era when war was notoriously ferocious—this act shocks the world.
All of Europe brands the operation as pure barbarism. A savagery so brazen that it unites every European power against France.
While the court dances and powders its noses, an entire region of Europe is literally erased from the map on the king's orders.
History has remembered the grandiose splendor of Versailles, but its true legacy is shrouded in blood and ashes.
The wise will understand.
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