Louis XI of France - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Louis XI is a central character in Sir Walter Scott's 1823 novel Quentin Durward, where he is presented as an utter villain, who fatally undermined "the knightly code of chivalry", "ridiculed and abandoned the self-denying principles in which the young knight was instructed" and "did his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour at the very source".
• In the opinion of Scott, inspired by the 19th-century Romanticism, Louis XI's being "purely selfish" and concerned solely with "his ambition, covetousness and desire of selfish enjoyment" merited his being considered "almost an incarnation of the devil himself", comparable to Goethe's Mephistopheles.
• Conversely, Balzac gives a plausible and somewhat favourable picture of the king in his story "Master Cornelius".
• Louis XI appears as a character in several film versions of the stage melodrama If I Were King, a fictitious play about real-life poet François Villon.
• He is also an important character in Victor Hugo's classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame as well as its film adaptations.
• He also appears in the operetta The Vagabond King, which is based on If I Were King.
• Among the actors who have played him onscreen are Robert Morley, Basil Rathbone, Conrad Veidt, Harry Davenport, Walter Hampden, and O. P. Heggie.
• In addition, Louis XI is also a minor character in Henry VI, Part III by William Shakespeare, where he is stylised as Lewis; he is depicted as, after choosing to support the Yorkist faction, switching allegiance to the Lancastrians, led by Margaret, following Edward IV's refusal to marry a French noblewoman.
• A character called the Spider King in Christopher Stasheff's 1994 novel The Witch Doctor goes by different names in different worlds, one of which being Louis XI.