<P> Henry IV's son Louis XIII and his minister (1624--1642) Cardinal Richelieu, elaborated a policy against Spain and the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War (1618--48) which had broken out in Germany . After the death of both king and cardinal, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) secured universal acceptance of Germany's political and religious fragmentation, but the Regency of Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin experienced a civil uprising known as the Fronde (1648--1653) which expanded into a Franco - Spanish War (1653--59). The Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) formalised France's seizure (1642) of the Spanish territory of Roussillon after the crushing of the ephemeral Catalan Republic and ushered a short period of peace . </P> <P> The Ancien Régime, a French term rendered in English as "Old Rule", or simply "Former Regime", refers primarily to the aristocratic, social and political system of early modern France under the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties . The administrative and social structures of the Ancien Régime were the result of years of state - building, legislative acts (like the Ordinance of Villers - Cotterêts), internal conflicts and civil wars, but they remained a confusing patchwork of local privilege and historic differences until the French Revolution brought about a radical suppression of administrative incoherence . </P> <P> For most of the reign of Louis XIV (1643--1715), ("The Sun King"), France was the dominant power in Europe, aided by the diplomacy of Cardinal Richelieu's successor as the King's chief minister, (1642--61) Cardinal Jules Mazarin, (1602--61). Cardinal Mazarin oversaw the creation of a French Royal Navy that rivalled England's, expanding it from 25 ships to almost 200 . The size of the Army was also considerably increased . Renewed wars (the War of Devolution, 1667--68 and the Franco - Dutch War, 1672--78) brought further territorial gains (Artois and western Flanders and the free county of Burgundy, previously left to the Empire in 1482), but at the cost of the increasingly concerted opposition of rival royal powers, and a legacy of an increasingly enormous national debt . An adherent of the theory of the "Divine Right of Kings", which advocates the divine origin of temporal power and any lack of earthly restraint of monarchical rule, Louis XIV continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralized state governed from the capital of Paris . He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism still persisting in parts of France and, by compelling the noble elite to regularly inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, built on the outskirts of Paris, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the earlier "Fronde" rebellion during Louis' minority youth . By these means he consolidated a system of absolute monarchy in France that endured 150 years until the French Revolution . McCabe says critics used fiction to portray the degraded Turkish Court, using "the harem, the Sultan court, oriental despotism, luxury, gems and spices, carpets, and silk cushions" as an unfavorable analogy to the corruption of the French royal court . </P> <P> The king sought to impose total religious uniformity on the country, repealing the "Edict of Nantes" in 1685 . The infamous practice of "dragonnades" was adopted, whereby rough soldiers were quartered in the homes of Protestant families and allowed to have their way with them--stealing, raping, torturing and killing adults and infants in their hovels . Scores of Protestants then fled France, (following "Huguenots" beginning a hundred and fifty years earlier until the end of the 18th Century) costing the country a great many intellectuals, artisans, and other valuable people . Persecution extended to unorthodox Roman Catholics like the Jansenists, a group that denied free will and had already been condemned by the popes . Louis was no theologian and understood little of the complex doctrines of Jansenism, satisfying himself with the fact that they threatened the unity of the state . In this, he garnered the friendship of the papacy, which had previously been hostile to France because of its policy of putting all church property in the country under the jurisdiction of the state rather than that of Rome . </P>

What city was the seat of the french monarchy