Louis XIVdied at Versailles on September 1, 1715, four days before his 77th birthday. He had been king for 72 years, longer than any other major European monarch before or since. Gangrene in his left leg, which set in after a hunting fall in the summer, was the immediate cause.
The length of the reign is one thing. What he did with it is another. Louis took personal control of the government in 1661 after the death of his chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, and he never handed it back. He did not appoint another chief minister, and he worked through councils and small teams of ministers he could dismiss at will. This is the system historians call absolute monarchy, and France remained outside the constitutional settlement that England had reached a generation earlier.
Versailles was the instrument. Louis turned his father's hunting lodge outside Paris into a vast palace and, from 1682, made it the seat of government. He required the high nobility to live there for parts of the year. A courtier who wanted a pension, an office or a military command had to be present, to be seen, and to compete for the king's attention over the details of etiquette. The great nobles were not abolished. They were turned into an audience.
The cost was enormous, and it fell unevenly. Louis fought four major wars, including the Nine Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession, and revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which drove perhaps 200,000 Huguenots out of the country. The state he left behind was heavily in debt and short of tax reforms, a problem his successors never solved.
His heir was his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV. Almost every male descendant in the direct line between them had died of smallpox or measles in the preceding four years.