Politics & Power Quote by Lytton Strachey

France "burst into splendid flower" is Strachey doing what he does best: flattering the reader with a gorgeous sentence while quietly tightening the noose around its subject. On the surface, the line is a coronation hymn. Louis XIV takes "the reins" and the nation blooms, suddenly, "wonderfully", as if history were waiting for a single hand to turn the key. The wording is aggressively aesthetic: maturity arrives like a staged springtime, a Versailles mural come to life.

But Strachey, the great modern biographer-critic, rarely hands out uncut praise. His real subject is the seductive myth of the Great Man. "Assumed the reins" reduces a complex state to a horse that finally found its rider; "whole nation" collapses messy social forces into a single, obedient body. That compression is the tell. It mimics the ideological move absolutism itself makes: the king as the nation, the nation's complexity rewritten as royal coherence.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, post-Victorian and post-World War I, Strachey had seen how national grandeur gets narrated into inevitability. So he builds the propaganda into the prose: the suddenness, the wonder, the botanical inevitability. The sentence performs the spell it describes. It also hints at the cost: flowers are cultivated. They require pruning, control, and a gardener who decides what counts as "splendid". In a single image, Strachey captures how monarchy’s cultural radiance can feel like maturity while functioning as management.