Relations between the Catholic majority (nine tenths of the French people) and the Protestant minority remained antagonistic after the Edict of Nantes in 1598. In the 1660s, there were around 1.75 million Huguenots in France (out of a total population of approximately 18 million), but their numbers were dropping. As a matter of piety and patriotism, the French Catholic church has long backed their persecution.

Following the Treaty of Nijmwegen, Louis initiated a deliberate war against the Huguenots in an effort to spiritually unite France. His mistress, who became his second wife, Madame de Maintenon (1635–1719), a highly pious Catholic who pushed Louis into a far more fervent religious observance, also affected him in this strategy. Louis forbade Huguenots from participating in public life.

He utilized financial incentives to persuade people to become Catholics. He oppressed them by quartering soldiers in their towns in 1681. Finally, in October 1685, Louis abolished the Edict of Nantes, resulting in widespread religious intolerance. Protestant churches and schools were shuttered, Protestant preachers were deported, nonconverts were sentenced to galley slavery, and Protestant children were christened by Catholic priests.

The revocation was a huge mistake. From then on, Protestants throughout Europe saw Louis as a maniac who must be opposed at all means. More than a quarter million people fled France, many of them were highly trained. They established new settlements overseas and joined the anti-Louis struggle in England, Germany, Holland, and the New World.

On May 31, 1653, Pope Innocent X ruled five Jansenist theological statements on grace and redemption to be heretical. The pope prohibited Jansen's Augustinus in 1656. Louis allowed the papal bull against Jansenism to be implemented in France in 1660. He subsequently shut down the Port-Royal community as well. Following that, Jansenists either recanted or went underground. In l713, Pope Clement XI published the bull Unigenitus, which strongly attacked Jansenist teaching once more. Despite internal ecclesiastical opposition, Louis XIV, now in his eighties, ordered the French church to accept the bull.

Jansenism's theological difficulties were complicated. By pursuing the Jansenists, however, Louis XIV abandoned the French Church's long heritage of preserving Gallican liberties and developed inside the French Church a core of anti-Catholicism.

Spain and her great commercial empire with the Americas looked to have succumbed to France. In September 1701, England, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire formed the Grand Alliance to maintain the balance of power by securing Flanders as a neutral barrier between Holland and France once and for all and by gaining the emperor, who was also a Habsburg, his fair share of the Spanish inheritance. By accepting the Stuart claim to the English throne, Louis quickly raised the political stakes.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) began in 1701 and quickly engulfed Western Europe. For the first time during Louis' reign, France went to war with insufficient funds, a poorly prepared army, and subpar generals.

The duke of Orléans was a gambler, and he delegated financial control of the realm for a while to John Law (1671–1729), a Scottish mathematician and fellow gambler. Law felt that increasing the amount of paper money would help France's economy recover. He created a bank in Paris that printed paper money with the regent's consent. Law then established the Mississippi Company, a monopoly on commercial privileges with the French province of Louisiana in North America.

In addition, the Mississippi Company took over administration of the French national debt. In return for government bonds that had plummeted in value, the business issued shares of its own stock. Law promoted speculating in the Mississippi Company in order to repay significant amounts of bonds.

The duke of Orléans made a second choice that reduced the monarchy's influence as well. He wanted to reintroduce the French nobility into government decision-making procedures. He established a system of councils on which nobility and officials would serve. The years of lazy noble domestication at Versailles, on the other hand, had worked too well, and the nobility appeared to be lacking in both aptitude and ambition to lead.

The experiment was a failure. Despite this defeat, the great French nobility maintained their historic goal to exercise their rights, privileges, and local control over the king. The struggle of the nobility to restrict the nobility's influence was a defining aspect of eighteenth-century French political life.

The governmental authority in this region, which was mostly east of the Elbe River, were weak in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The very frequent conflict of the seventeenth century had resulted in a practice of changing political loyalties among princes and aristocracies of tiny kingdoms who refused to submit to central monarchical authority.

However, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, three powerful dynasties developed in central and eastern Europe, whose rulers aspired to the absolutism that was then being built in France. Following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the Austrian Habsburgs understood the fundamental weakness of the Holy Roman Emperor's position and began to establish their control outside of Germany. Simultaneously, Prussia under the Hohenzollern dynasty.