Abstract
On 1 September 1686, Louis XIV welcomed the ambassadors of Phra Narai, King of Siam, in a great public audience at Versailles. Held in the sumptuous Hall of Mirrors, it was the most spectacular reception the Sun King ever granted to an embassy during his long reign. What made it unique was the way in which the French court copied as nearly as possible the outward forms of Siamese royal ceremonial, as recounted by various French visitors to the Asian kingdom and the chevalier de Chaumont, who had served as Louis’s ambassador to Phra Narai the previous year. For the object of the reception was to present the French monarch as an omnipotent Asian despot, equal to the Siamese monarch in every way, to give the envoys an exalted idea of Louis’s greatness, power, and magnificence according to eastern expectations. At the same time, the French king also impressed his own courtiers with a theatrical display of royal absolutism that went far beyond European precepts. What this event reveals in particular, therefore, is how the Sun King manipulated royal French protocol and Siamese rituals of majesty to assert his absolutist claims in a visual way, by magnifying his image and gloire both personally and symbolically as French monarch and the living embodiment of the state.
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