‘L’Etat, C’est moi!’
“L’Etat, C’est moi!”
Roughly translated, the phrase means “The State; It’s me.”
Purportedly spoken to the French Parliament in April 1655 by seventeen-year-old Louis the 14th, the phrase reeks of self-importance, supreme confidence, and the determination to wield unfettered political power with no distinction between the man Louis was and the political position he held.
It wasn’t until some 60 years after Louis’ death in 1715 that uppity, English-speaking North American colonists rebelled against their own divinely anointed monarch, the English King George. It took eight years of war, and a little help from Louis’s great-great-great grandson Louis 16th, before the colonists forged a representative republic modeled on England’s constitutional monarchy.
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