Louis XV

gigatos | June 4, 2022

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Summary

Louis XV, known as “le Bien-Aimé”, born on February 15, 1710 in Versailles where he died on May 10, 1774, was a king of France and Navarre. Member of the House of Bourbon, he reigned over the kingdom of France from September 1, 1715 until his death. He was the only king of France to be born and die in the Palace of Versailles. If he was nicknamed the “Beloved” at the beginning of his reign, the people”s appreciation changed and at his death he was rather the “Unloved”.

Orphaned at the age of two, Duke of Anjou then Dauphin of France from March 8, 1712 to September 1, 1715, he succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV at the age of five. His power was then delegated to his cousin, nephew of the deceased king, the Duke of Orleans, who was proclaimed “Regent of the Kingdom” on September 2, 1715, until February 15, 1723, the date when the young king came of age, which was fixed for kings at that time at 13 years. He officially took over the government. It should be noted that the Duke of Orleans could not be regent until the parliament had overturned the will of Louis XIV. In return, he had to give back to the Parliament his right of remonstrance, which will cause a lot of trouble to Louis XV afterwards.

The first years of his reign were relatively calm, under the careful guidance of several tutors, who imparted a broad culture. When he came of age, he successively entrusted the government to close relatives, the Duke of Orleans, ex-regent, then the Duke of Bourbon, and then to one of his former preceptors, the Cardinal de Fleury. If with this minister, France prospered and was enlarged by Lorraine and the county of Bar, his will to make the Unigenitus bull a state law provoked the rise of the opposition of the parliaments very impregnated with Jansenism.

After Fleury”s death in 1743, Louis XV began to govern alone, relying on a few secretaries of state and ministers, a few councils and a small number of senior officials. Intelligent but timid and lacking in self-confidence, governing was not an easy task for him, especially since he began this exercise while the Enlightenment movement was asserting itself, as was physiocracy. The parliaments asserted, following Le Paige, that their body had seniority and, consequently, an authority equal or even superior to that of the king and entered into opposition. They were the ones who provoked the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1763. Finally, in Europe, the Prussia of Frederick II and Russia asserted themselves as European powers, while Austria had to fight to keep its place. On the oceans, England deploys a fleet without equal and pursues a vigorous policy of overseas expansion based on its control of the oceans.

The only survivor of the royal family stricto sensu (he was the great-grandson of Louis XIV), he enjoyed great popular support at the beginning of his reign. However, over the years his lack of firmness, the opposition of the parliamentarians and part of the court nobility, his relationship with Madame de Pompadour, his difficulty in asserting himself at a time when public opinion (essentially Parisian at the time) was becoming important, led to the disappearance of his popularity. So much so that his death – from smallpox – provoked festivities in Paris, as had been the case at the death of Louis XIV. His relations with his mistresses, for which he felt a certain guilt, because he was not philosophically libertine, led him to stop taking communion and practicing the thaumaturgical rituals of the kings of France, which led to a desacralization of the royal function.

During his reign, the arts flourished, especially painting, sculpture, music and furniture. As in philosophy and politics, artistic styles underwent profound changes around 1750. France had some military successes on the European continent, acquiring the Duchy of Lorraine, the Duchy of Bar, and Corsica. On the other hand, France loses control of a large part of its colonial empire, to the benefit of British colonial domination: especially New France in America, as well as its preponderance in India.

During the reign of Louis XV, French architecture reached one of its peaks, while the decorative arts (furniture, sculptures, ceramics, tapestry, etc.), appreciated not only in France, but also in the European courts, experienced a strong expansion.

Birth and Baptism

Louis de France (future Louis XV) was born on February 15, 1710 at the Palace of Versailles. Great-grandson of Louis XIV, he was the third son of Louis of France, Duke of Burgundy, nicknamed the Little Dauphin as opposed to his father Louis of France (1661-1711), known as the Great Dauphin, and of Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy and, as such, the fourth prince in line of succession. Of his two older brothers, also named Louis, the first (titled Duke of Brittany) died in 1705 at the age of one, the second Louis of France (1707-1712) (taking the title of Duke of Brittany), was born in 1707 and died in 1712.

Immediately after his birth, the future Louis XV was anointed in the room of the Duchess of Burgundy by Cardinal Toussaint de Forbin-Janson, Bishop of Beauvais, Grand Chaplain of France, in the presence of Claude Huchon, priest of the church of Notre-Dame de Versailles.

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Education and training

The little prince was immediately entrusted to his governess, the duchess of Ventadour, assisted by Madame de La Lande, under governess. He was not destined to reign, being placed fourth in the order of dynastic succession. Before him, his grandfather, son of Louis XIV, the Grand Dauphin, then his father the Duke of Burgundy, soon to be called the Little Dauphin, grandson of Louis XIV, and finally his elder brother, the Duke of Brittany, should logically reign. But between 1710 and 1715, death struck the royal family several times and suddenly put the young prince of 2 years in the first place in the succession of Louis XIV: the Grand Dauphin died of smallpox on 14 April 1711. The Duke of Burgundy became dauphin. The following year, a “malignant measles” took his wife on February 12, 1712, and then the Little Dauphin on February 18.

Heir to the throne of France

The two eldest sons of Louis of France (1682-1712), Duke of Burgundy, the Dukes of Brittany and Anjou, also contracted the disease. The elder one, duke of Brittany, died on March 8, 1712. The young duke of Anjou, then barely two years old, became the heir to the throne of France with the title of dauphin de Viennois, shortened to dauphin. While he was ill, his health was carefully scrutinized by Louis XIV, an aging king who was sufficiently affected by recent family losses to weep before his ministers. For a long time, the young prince”s health was feared, but little by little he recovered, cared for by his governess and protected by her from the abuse of bloodletting that had probably caused his brother”s death.

The future Louis XV was baptized on March 8, 1712 in the apartment of the Children of France in the castle of Versailles by Henri-Charles du Cambout, duke of Coislin, bishop of Metz, first chaplain of the king, in the presence of Claude Huchon, parish priest of the church of Notre-Dame de Versailles: his godfather was Louis Marie de Prie, marquis de Planes, and his godmother was Marie Isabelle Gabrielle Angélique de La Mothe-Houdancourt. Baptized at the same time as his brother the Duke of Brittany, and both children being in danger of death, the king had ordered that those who were then in the room be taken as godparents.

In 1714, Louis was entrusted to a tutor, Father Perot. He taught him to read and write, gave him the rudiments of history and geography, and gave him the religious education necessary for the future very Christian king. In 1715, the young dauphin also received a dancing master, then a writing master.

Beginning of his public life

The future Louis XV begins his public life shortly before the death of his great grandfather Louis XIV. On February 19, 1715, Louis XIV received with great pomp in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles the ambassador of Persia. He associated his successor, who had just turned five, to the ceremony, placing him at his right hand. In April 1715, the child participated with the old king in the ceremony of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday and took part in the washing of the feet. He was always accompanied by his governess, Madame de Ventadour. During the last years of Louis XIV”s life, the future king participated in several military parades and ceremonies in order to acquire the habit of public life.

On August 26, feeling death coming, Louis XIV brings the young Louis into his room, embraces him and talks to him with gravity about his future task as king, in words that later passed to posterity, which saw in them a kind of political testament of the great king and remorse about his own action:

“Mignon, you are going to be a great king, but all your happiness will depend on being submissive to God and on the care you will take to relieve your people. For this you must avoid making war as much as you can: it is the ruin of the people. Do not follow the bad example I have given you on this matter; I have often undertaken war too lightly and supported it out of vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and let your main application be to relieve your subjects.”

Louis XIV died six days later, on September 1, 1715.

On September 3 and 4, 1715, Louis XV, aged 5 and a half, performed his first acts as king, first by attending the requiem mass celebrated for his predecessor in the chapel of Versailles, then by receiving the assembly of the clergy who had come to celebrate his own accession. On September 12, he attended a bed of justice, one of the most solemn ceremonies of the monarchy, on September 14, the harangues of the Grand Council, the University of Paris and the French Academy, and the following days the receptions of ambassadors who came to present their condolences. In spite of his young age, he had to comply with the mechanics of the government and the court and play his role of representation.

Training

On her seventh birthday, February 15, 1717, having reached the age of reason, her education “passes to men”: she is now entrusted to a governor, Duke François de Villeroy (a childhood friend of Louis XIV and son of Nicolas V de Villeroy, governor of Louis XIV) who imposes on her all the rituals of the court of Versailles set up by Louis XIV. He also had a tutor, André Hercule de Fleury, bishop of Fréjus. He was taught Latin, mathematics, history and geography, cartography, drawing and the rudiments of astronomy, but also hunting. Manual education was not neglected either: in 1717, he learned a little typography, and in 1721, he learned to turn wood. From 1719 on, he was taught music by Claude Ballon, and showed an aptitude for dance from the age of eight. In December 1720, he participated in a show called Les Folies de Cardenio in which he was accompanied by sixty-eight dancers, both professionals and courtiers, and in December 1721 in the opera-ballet Les Éléments.

Unlike Louis XIV, he had little affinity for music, but was attracted to architecture.

During this period, if the king reigns, he cannot govern directly (period of the regency), the interlude of the duke of Bourbon ends in a certain way when his former preceptor becomes cardinal of Fleury and has the sufficient institutional weight to occupy an eminent role. During the following period, he left a great deal of freedom to the cardinal in whom he had complete confidence. The latter de facto ruled the kingdom until his death. When we say that the king reigns, it means that he is the one who holds “the fullness of power” and that this power can only belong to him, even if he delegates some of it to the ministers. It is the presence of his person, even if he is a minor, that is required during essential political acts (the bed of justice, the reception of constituted bodies, etc.).

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The regency of the Duke of Orleans (1715-1723)

Louis XIV, by an edict of July 28, 1714, included in the list of his possible successors the children he had had with Madame de Montespan: the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, which strongly displeased the great nobility. On July 31, he decreed that the future regent would only be president of a regency council, whose composition he determined. He also decided that the custody and education of the young king would be entrusted to the Duke of Maine. On May 23, he conferred on the two sons of Madame de Montespan the quality of prince of the blood. The Duke of Orleans decided to join forces with the other great men, in particular with the former supporters of Louis XIV”s ex-granddaughter, Louis de France, and of Fénelon, who had been his tutor, who had drawn up plans for an aristocratic government. On the other hand, the Duke of Orleans had the Parliament annul Louis XIV”s will and, in return, gave him back the right of remonstrance that Louis XIV had deprived him of in 1673. On September 2, 1715, the Parliament declared him regent with full “administration of the affairs of the kingdom during the minority”. By breaking with Louis XIV”s control over the rights of the parliaments, the Regent opened the door to an era of contestation, which Louis XV would later find difficult to counter.

As a first step, the regent brought Louis XV and the court back to Paris. If it is to go against the will of Louis XIV, it is also to get closer to the people. The memory of the Fronde is still vivid, and the regent wishes to establish a strong link between the people of Paris and the young king, in order to avoid any trouble. After passing through Vincennes from September to December 1715, Louis XV moved to the Tuileries Palace, while the regent ruled the kingdom from the Palais-Royal. The Parisian people became fond of the young king, while the nobility, now dispersed in the hotels of the capital, enjoyed their freedom without restraint or measure.

Louis XIV never ruled alone. He relied on the King”s Council, whose most important decisions were dealt with in the Conseil d”en Haut, so called because it was held on the second floor in Versailles. The members of the royal family, the princes of the blood and the chancellor were excluded since the death of Mazarin in 1661. During the Regency, the Conseil d”en Haut was replaced by the Conseil de régence. This council was presided over by the Duke of Orleans and was composed of the Duke of Bourbon, the Duke of Maine, the Count of Toulouse, the Chancellor Voysin, the Marshals of Villeroy, Harcourt and Tallard as well as Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. To these men appointed by Louis XIV, the Regent added Saint-Simon, Bouthillier de Chavigny and the Marshal of Bezons. Jérôme de Pontchartrain and Louis Phélypeaux, Marquis de la Vrillière, who wrote the minutes, were also invited.

This council, as in Spain and Austria, was assisted by specialized councils. There were seven councils whose task was to simplify the work of the Council of Regency:

The members of the Council of State, the masters of the requests and the intendants of justice, of police of finance as well as the magistrates of the chancellery prepared the work. The polysynod was inspired by the plans of an aristocratic government elaborated by Fénelon, the archbishop of Cambrai.

This form of government had a bad press for a long time. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, basing himself on the writings of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, was not kind to polysynodalism, which he described as ridiculous while considerably reducing its scope. This hasty judgement contributed to the bad reputation with which polysynodality was afflicted, including by historians of institutions such as Michel Antoine or even Jean-Christian Petitfils, who considered that only the councils of finance and of the navy functioned “more or less correctly.

Thanks to more in-depth work, the current historiography is more nuanced. Thus, the specialist of polysynodality, Alexandre Dupilet, invites not to overestimate the responsibility of the councils in the great political decisions taken by the Regent. He argues that a number of financial and administrative reforms were made in a spirit of rigor. One can cite in particular the fiscal reforms of the proportional size and the royal tithe.

The renewal of the Jansenist crisis, linked in particular to the way of applying the Unigenitus bull, as well as the change of alliance, provoked upheavals among the aristocracy and the Parliament which pushed the Regent to adopt a more authoritarian line. On September 24, 1718, he abolished “the Councils of Conscience, Foreign Affairs, Interior, and War” and restored the Secretariats of State. On this occasion, Abbé Dubois became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Claude Le Blanc for War. Both men also entered the Council of Regency.

The king of Spain Philippe V is all the more upset by the treaties of Utrecht which made him lose the kingdom of Naples that his second wife the ambitious Elisabeth Farnèse is Italian. So he undertook the reconquest of this kingdom. Pushed by the abbot Dubois, the Regent considers that it is not in the interest of France to follow him in this adventure. He therefore chose to renew his ties with Great Britain and the Netherlands, both of which were Protestant. This reversal of alliances offended what Petitfils called “the party of the old Court that remained pro-Spanish out of loyalty to the grandson of Louis XIV” and in particular “the Marquis d”Huxelles, president of the Council of Foreign Affairs. In the summer of 1717, Spain continued its military offensive in Italy, while the Triple Alliance of The Hague was formalized, linking France, the Netherlands and England. This reversal of alliances of the Regent is even completed, in 1718, by an innovative alliance with Austria of Habsburg (quadruple alliance). The victory of the European powers forced Spain to get closer to France. Dubois convinced the King of Spain to betroth his daughter Marie-Anne-Victoire of Spain, aged three, to Louis XV, who was twelve, and the eldest son of the King of Spain, the Prince of Asturias (aged 14), to the daughter of the Duke of Orleans, aged 12. The exchange of the two princesses took place on January 9, 1722, on the Ile des Faisans.

After the death of Louis XIV, France was both heavily indebted (especially in the short term) and suffered from a lack of money. John Law wanted to tackle this double problem. To this end, he obtained from the Regent the creation of the General Bank which issued banknotes convertible at first in gold and silver.

In 1717, he obtained from the Regent the revival of the Compagnie d”Occident which was authorized to trade freely between France and North America. For him, it was essentially a matter of developing Louisiana. This company was financed by the sale of shares of 500 livres that could be paid in government bills (short-term debt). This was a way to pay off part of the public debt. At the beginning and until May 1719, the value of the shares rarely exceeds 500 livres. To give the company a boost, he merged it with the East India Company and the China Company and named it the Mississippi Company. At the end of 1719 he issued two new shares payable in installments. At the same time he sent settlers to Louisiana to exploit the agricultural and mining wealth. In total he managed to buy 100 million pounds worth of government bills and thus reduce the kingdom”s short-term debt.

At the end of 1719, the General Bank, which had increased the supply of money and lowered interest rates, became the Royal Bank, which also had the power to issue bills, but this time they were not convertible into gold or silver. On February 22, 1720, the decision was made to merge the Royal Bank and the company. This is to limit the creation of money that the support of the stock price has caused. But the Regent and his entourage, embarrassed by the fall in prices, put pressure to resume money creation, which very quickly caused the system to fail.

If the end of the system impoverished many shareholders, the money that the Duke of Bourbon earned on this occasion allowed him to build the castle and stables of Chantilly. France returned to its old system with the “return of the financiers” who regained control of tax revenues. This was accompanied by a great distrust of banks and joint-stock companies, which marked the country for a long time. Cécile Vidal argues that Law”s system contributed to transplanting the plantation economy of the Caribbean islands to the Mississippi Valley and turning it into a society based on slavery.

Tired of the criticism of the parliamentarians who began to agitate the Parisians and of the hostility of the crowd who threw insults and projectiles at his carriage, the Regent, without officially announcing it, decided to make the Court return to the Palace of Versailles. On June 15, 1722, Versailles became a royal residence again and symbolized the return to the Louis-Quatorzian policy.

The young Louis XV was crowned in Reims on October 25, 1722. He reached his majority (14 years old) the following year and was declared of age during the court session of February 22, 1723. On this occasion, Louis XV announced that the Duke of Orleans would lead the councils for him and confirmed Cardinal Dubois as Prime Minister. The Council of Regency was renamed Conseil d”en Haut, while the Council of the Navy, the last remaining element of the polysynod, was abolished.

Cardinal Dubois and the Duke of Orleans died within a few months of each other, in August and December 1723, bringing the Regency to an end. It left to the young king Louis XV, who had just come of age but was still an adolescent, a kingdom at peace with the other European powers (because of the Quadruple Alliance) and in an economic situation in the process of being reorganized, a kingdom that was both heir to the absolutist monarchy of Louis XIV and to the sometimes “weakening” overtures of the Regent. There remained two threatening and partly related internal problems: 1. the Gallican-Jansenist opposition, 2. the resurgent opposition of the Parliaments (the Regent having restored to them the right of remonstrance). The reign of Louis XV will be considerably affected.

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The government of Louis de Bourbon (late 1723 – mid 1726)

As soon as Philippe d”Orléans died on December 2, 1723, the Duke of Bourbon presented himself to the king to ask for the position of Prime Minister. The king having consulted his tutor Fleury accepted. Fleury accepted because he was not a cardinal at that time and he thought that he would not be accepted by the aristocracy. Moreover, as the Duke of Bourbon was not very “esprite”, to use an expression of the time, he could think of governing in the shadows. The duke has nevertheless a certain sense of maneuvering since in 1717, he obtained that the two legitimate sons of Louis XIV are reduced to the rank of simple peers of the kingdom. Moreover, his mistress, the Marquise de Prie, was ambitious, hard-working and a skilled maneuverer, as Fleury would realize. The young Voltaire, wanting to return to grace, dedicated his comedy L”indiscret to her.

In 1724, the King issued a revision of the Black Code for Louisiana, which was a tightening of the previous version enacted by his great-grandfather. Although marriages between blacks and whites were forbidden, the text nevertheless provided for what could happen to children born of interracial relationships.

The infanta Marie-Anne-Victoire of Spain was engaged since 1721 to Louis XV and had been living in France since 1722. But the Duke of Bourbon, fearing that the young king, in poor health, would die without a male child if he had to wait for the marriage to be consummated, broke off the engagement in 1725 after the king had been seriously bedridden for several days. This rupture is badly taken in Spain which expels the French diplomats, breaks the diplomatic relations with France and signs a treaty of friendship with Charles VI, emperor of the Holy Empire. If this rupture could take place, it is because in France one distrusts the Spanish crown. Indeed, the king Philippe V abdicated in favour of his son, the prince of Asturias, died shortly after. Some in Madrid wanted the other son Ferdinand to be married to a daughter of the emperor Charles VI, a project that the French ambassador in Madrid dreaded, because he feared that the influence of the great and the imperial party would be very harmful to France.

The search for another bride among the princesses of Europe is dictated by the fragile health of the king, which requires a quick offspring. After drawing up a list of one hundred princesses of Europe to be married, the choice fell on Marie Leszczyńska, a Catholic princess and daughter of the dethroned king of Poland Stanislas Leszczynski. The marriage is initially not very well seen in France, as the young queen is perceived as too weak extraction for a French king. In addition, it should be noted that Catherine I of Russia proposed her daughter and an alliance with France. This option was discarded, because the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Fleuriau de Morville had little regard for Russia and the Marquise de Prie, the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon, wanted someone malleable. The two future spouses like each other (despite the seven years that separate them, Marie Leszczyńska being 22 years old and Louis XV only 15) and the queen is quickly appreciated by the people for her charity. After a proxy wedding on August 15 in the cathedral of Strasbourg in order to enhance the value of the recently annexed province of Alsace, a passage to Metz to avoid the Duchy of Lorraine, whose sovereigns hoped that their eldest daughter would become queen of France, the wedding ceremony was celebrated in Fontainebleau on September 5, 1725.

In 1725, following tornadoes, grain began to run out and the price of bread increased. At the same time, the state coffers were empty following the collapse of Law”s system and the “deflationary financial policy” led by the Controller General Dodun and the Pâris brothers. So it was decided to promulgate a new tax, the cinquantième, which was to be applied to all. The nobility immediately protested and the general assembly of the clergy opposed it, while the Orleans faction demanded a reduction in expenses. Finally, the parliament refused to register the edict. A court decision on June 8, 1725 forced them to register the edict, but public opinion turned against it, especially since the Duke was clumsy with the Protestants by reactivating the ban on religious meetings. Concerning Jansenism, he wanted on the contrary to appease and would like the pope to make some concessions. Despite the insistence of the Queen who considered him as her mentor, Louis XV dismissed the Duke of Bourbon from power on June 11, 1726 and exiled him to his lands in Chantilly. With this exile, Louis XV also decided to abolish the office of Prime Minister. He called Cardinal de Fleury, his former tutor, to his side. The latter then began a long career at the head of the kingdom, from 1726 to 1743.

Louis XV, the cardinal and the court

Louis XV began his reign on June 16, 1726 by setting the framework of his government, announcing to his Council from above, in addition to the end of the office of Prime Minister, his loyalty to the policies of Louis XIV, his great-grandfather:

“My intention is that all that concerns the functions of the offices near my person are on the same footing as they were under the late King my great-grandfather. Finally, I want to follow the example of the late King my great-grandfather in everything. “I will fix hours for them for a particular work, to which the former bishop of Frejus will always attend.”

In reality, if the position of Prime Minister was nominally abolished, de facto, Fleury was to exercise it. In fact, for Petitfils, having “a patent authorizing him to have ministers and secretaries of state work under his authority, and even to make decisions in the absence of the king,” he had the prerogatives of a lieutenant general of the kingdom that exceeded those of a prime minister. Moreover, the obtaining on September 11 of the cardinal”s purple reinforces his position in the Council of above. Throughout the period, he favored working one-on-one with the king. When Fleury, at the end of his life, had to stop working, the king replaced him to the satisfaction of all, but the old cardinal insisted on remaining in his post until his death. For Michel Antoine, Louis XV, extremely shy, “remained practically in guardianship until the age of thirty-two years”.

If the cardinal de Fleury was an old man in 1726 – he was seventy-three years old -, the rest of the ministers and very close advisers of the king were renewed and were composed of younger men than before. The changes were numerous, but the period of the Fleury ministry was marked by great stability. Fleury brought back the chancellor d”Aguesseau, who had been dismissed in 1722. However, he did not regain all his prerogatives, since the seals and foreign affairs were entrusted to Germain-Louis Chauvelin, president à mortier of the Parliament of Paris. The Count of Maurepas became Secretary of State for the Navy at the age of 25. Although Fleury was very determined, he was timid and did not always speak with the necessary firmness. He considered it necessary to rely on two men of strong character: Orry, who from 1730 was in charge of finance, and Germain-Louis Chauvelin, who became Keeper of the Seals from 1727.

The Court is at the same time the great services which manage the public life and a place of sociability of the aristocracy, it is also a field where clashes of coteries, of family and personal ambitions take place. It is also a place where the question of rank is very important and determines political choices. In these conditions, the person who takes the place of Prime Minister must not only direct the state apparatus, but also take into account the different clans that structure aristocratic sociability. In the early 1740s, Cardinal de Fleury found it increasingly difficult to control the factions structured around the Noailles and Belle Isle clans.

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A prosperous economy and healthy finances

With the help of the comptrollers general of finance Michel Robert Le Peletier des Forts (1726-1730) and especially Philibert Orry (1730-1745), “Monsieur le Cardinal” managed to stabilize the French currency (1726), cleaning up Law”s financial system, and finally balanced the kingdom”s budget in 1738. From 1726, the general farm became almost a parastatal organization with a staff endowed with precise rules of payment and promotion as well as a right to retirement.

Economic expansion was at the heart of the government”s concerns. The communication routes were improved with the completion in 1738 of the Saint-Quentin canal, linking the Oise to the Somme, later extended to the Scheldt and the Netherlands. The extension and the maintenance of a road network on the whole national territory is done mainly by means of the corvée whose instigator, Philibert Orry, specifies “I prefer to ask them for arms that they have than for money that they do not have” before adding “I would be the first to find more urgent destinations for this money”. The corvée provided the necessary manpower and allowed the corps of engineers of bridges and roads trained at the school of Ponts-et-Chaussées created in 1747 to plan the works.

At the military level, Louis XV decided to implement the idea of his great-grandfather Louis XIV to stop depending on imports to equip the French armies with swords and bayonets. He asked his Secretary of State for War, Bauyn d”Angervilliers, to set up a factory for the production of edged weapons, which was established in Klingenthal in Alsace in 1730.

Trade was also stimulated by the Conseil du Commerce and especially by the Bureau du Commerce headed by Louis Fagon who promulgated regulations to improve the quality of the kingdom”s productions. France”s foreign maritime trade increased from 80 to 308 million pounds between 1716 and 1748.

The Unigenitus Bull and the rebellion of the Parliament

If Cardinal Fleury wanted to marginalize the Jansenist current, he was not a supporter of the devout party close to the Jesuits. According to Jean-Christian Petitfils, he wanted to “maintain the religious unity of the Catholic monarchy”. As such, he was careful to remove priests, monks and nuns who were considered close to these currents. However, his desire to remove a Jansenist prelate, Jean Soanen, was to set the world on fire. The latter, during an ecclesiastical tribunal held in Embrun, was suspended from his office on September 21, 1727 and sent by letter of seal to the abbey of La Chaise-Dieu. On October 30, 57 of the 550 Parisian lawyers challenged the validity of this judgment, followed shortly after by twelve bishops who were warned by the king. On this occasion, two Jansenist currents acted in concert: ecclesiastical Jansenism, which was very marked by richerism and which wanted the Church to be a sort of democracy, and juridical Jansenism, which was very Gallican. On May 28, 1728, the Cardinal Minister had a declaration adopted condemning the lawyers and the richerist trend.

This policy bore fruit when on March 24, 1730 Fleury wanted to strike a decisive blow against Jansenism by making the Unigenitus bull a law of the state. The king had to impose this decision by holding a court session on April 3, 1730. Immediately lawyers entered the battle. In a public consultation signed by 40 lawyers, François de Maraimberg argues that the king is the head of the nation and not the chosen one of God. It is worth noting that during this period Fenelon”s ideas were revived with the publication by Henri de Boulainvilliers of a three-volume work entitled Histoire de l”ancien gouvernement de la France, avec XIV lettres historiques sur les parlements ou états généraux. A book which is “an attack in rule against the absolutism Louis the fourteenth, against the divine right, the ministers, the intendants and other agents of despotism”. It is also the time when the influence of the British parliamentary system begins to be felt. Thus, in 1734, Voltaire wrote his Lettres philosophiques in which he praised English morals. At the same time, the tendency in France was to confuse the British parliament, an elected legislative assembly, with the French parliaments, a purely legal body. Nevertheless, the King”s Council condemned the lawyers” text on October 30, 1730, and the Cardinal de Fleury tried to find a common ground. However, the rebellion of the parliament continued until 139 Parisian magistrates were exiled to the provinces during the night of November 6 to 7, 1732. Finally, a reconciliation took place and the parliament resumed its activity on December 1.

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Acquisition of Lorraine and Barrois

In 1733, King Augustus II of Poland died. Stanislas Leszczynski, the father-in-law of Louis XV, whom he was hosting at Chambord, immediately applied for the position. If for the second time the Polish Diet recognized Stanislaus as king, Russia refused to validate this choice and sent troops so that he was obliged to take refuge in Danzig. As he could do nothing against the Russians, who were out of reach of the French troops, he decided to attack Emperor Charles VI. This is the War of Polish Succession.

France took the opportunity to occupy the Lorraine of the young duke François III, taking advantage of the fact that the son of duke Léopold I of Lorraine and Élisabeth-Charlotte d”Orléans lived in Vienna where he was called by his close relative, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Charles VI, who appointed him viceroy of Hungary in 1731, the beginning of a more promising career, since he urged him to marry his eldest daughter and heiress Marie-Thérèse. Such a union would have considerably strengthened the Austrian power, which already possessed the Belgian provinces and Luxembourg on the borders of France. The empire would have protected the Rhine route and would have come dangerously close to Paris. When Charles VI appealed to England, it shied away. Also in November 1738, an agreement was reached by the Treaty of Vienna. Louis XV”s father-in-law obtained the duchies of Lorraine and Bar as compensation for the second loss of his Polish throne (with the objective that the duchy would be integrated into the kingdom of France at his death through his daughter), while Duke Francis III became heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany before marrying the young Maria Theresa and being able to claim the imperial crown. By the secret convention of Meudon, Stanislas gave up the reality of the power to a steward appointed by France who prepared the reunion of the duchies to the kingdom. The annexation of Lorraine and Barrois, effective in 1766 at the death of Stanislas Leszczynski, constitutes the last territorial expansion of the kingdom of France on the continent before the Revolution.

Shortly after this result, French mediation in the conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire led to the Treaty of Belgrade (September 1739), which put an end to the war with an advantage for the Ottomans, traditional allies of the French against the Habsburgs since the beginning of the sixteenth century. As a result, the Ottoman Empire renewed the French capitulations on which the commercial supremacy of the kingdom in the Middle East was based.

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War of the Austrian Succession: the beginnings

The death of Emperor Charles VI in 1740 saw the accession of his daughter Maria Theresa to the throne of Bohemia and Hungary, but the question of her accession to the empire remained unresolved. The king and the cardinal were in favor of the Pragmatic Sanction that wanted her to succeed her father the emperor. They were ready to help her in return for compensation, but they came up against the court and Parisian opinion, which remained marked by France”s anti-Austrian policy. They struggled to understand that the world had changed and that France now had to fear Frederic II of Prussia who wanted to extend his kingdom and England where Carteret had succeeded Walpole with the support of a powerful colonial “lobby” who wanted to fight France on the oceans.

The king and the cardinal sent to Germany the marshal of Belle-Isle, one of the leaders of the anti-Austrian party, with precise instructions: to avoid that the crown falls in the hands of the grand duke of Tuscany who could claim Lorraine and get the crown to Charles-Albert of Bavaria. Once there, he showed himself hostile to Maria Theresa and allied himself with Frederick II. The king was then obliged to send two armies to Germany: one to Westphalia to put pressure on the Elector of Hanover who was also King of England and one to Bohemia. If Charles VII was elected emperor, Maria Theresa immediately counterattacked and forced the French armies to withdraw. She remained master of her states except for Silesia, which Frederick II had taken from her.

During the period that covers the years 1740-1750, the landscape in which the royalty moves deeply changes: the “Enlightenment” in both philosophy and economics asserts itself. In the short term, however, it was the opposition of the parliaments that predominated and undermined the royal authority.

Style of government

With the death of Cardinal de Fleury in 1743, the personal government of Louis XV began. The king, then 33 years old, was called “Louis the Beloved”. If Louis XV wanted to follow the example of his great-grandfather Louis XIV, his character was very different. While the Sun King loved the spectacular and theatrical and wanted to be constantly on the front of the stage, Louis XV distinguishes very strictly public and private life and likes to take refuge in his small apartments. Finally, the king, although intelligent, doubted his abilities and listened, sometimes too much, to his entourage. His shyness made him prefer the written word to the spoken word and disgrace could fall suddenly in writing without any oral or gestural signs having announced it. François Bluche reproached him for having favored the nobility of the sword or of the robe too much in his promotions and for having rejected too easily elements of value. He believes that Louis XV, unlike Louis XIV, really seized power too late, which prevented him from really investing himself in his role as monarch, hence a certain indolence in his functions, and a lack of global vision of things. According to Bluche, his reign resulted in a “sort of bureaucratic oligarchy.

Michel Antoine maintains that if the king “seems to want to work with his five ministers in particular”, he relies on a “governmental machine” which forces him to work a lot. Thus, he had to preside over the Conseil d”en-haut on Sundays and Wednesdays, the Conseil des dépêches on Saturdays and sometimes on Fridays, and the Conseil royal des finances on Tuesdays. In addition, he often receives his most important ministers face to face, sometimes several times a week. In addition, the king, who liked to be well informed, consulted for this purpose the black cabinet, the secret diplomacy and the Lieutenant General of the Police of Paris. If his ministers can belong to the court nobility, they are most often part of the nobility of dress. In his working circle, the councils are populated with State Councillors and other civil servants, which makes Michel Antoine say that if his reign is “poor in great politicians”, it is “rich in great administrators” such as Gaumont, Trudaine, d”Ormesson, Machault, Bertin.

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The Metz episode

Louis XV, who had left to lead his armies engaged on the Eastern front in the war of the Austrian succession, fell seriously ill on August 4, 1744, in Metz. As his condition worsened, the question of communion and extreme unction arose. François de Fitz-James, the king”s first chaplain, refused to give him communion until his mistress, Madame de Châteauroux, had left. Then, he forced the king to ask for forgiveness for the scandal and the bad example he was setting. On August 14, 1744, day, he agrees to give him the extreme unction only if his mistress loses the title of superintendent of the house of the Dauphine. Madame de Châteauroux left Metz while the queen arrived in a hurry. The king vowed to build a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, in case he would recover.

The king escaped death and, following a thanksgiving mass celebrated in the church of Notre-Dame de Metz in the presence of the royal family, the whole country took up the celebrant”s words and called Louis the Beloved. Louis XV gave his instructions to build the church he had promised in case of recovery; it would become the Pantheon.

However, Louis XV, as king, felt painfully the humiliation inflicted on him by the devout party. Back in Versailles, he dismissed Fitz-James from his duties as chaplain, exiled him to his diocese and recalled Madame de Châteauroux. But she died before his official return to grace. The king, although his sex life is not good enough to make him suffer from a deep sense of guilt, does not renew his relationship with the queen.

The “king”s secret

Secret diplomacy has always existed more or less under the Ancien Régime. But what makes the king”s secret under Louis XV so special is that it conducts an underground foreign policy that sometimes contradicts the official policy. The secret of the king was founded by the Prince of Conti when around 1745 Jan Klemens Branicki and some Polish aristocrats had the idea to offer him the crown of Poland. This prince, who had been close to his cousin Louis XV for about ten years, managed this service for as long as he thought he could become King of Poland. The secrecy was also intended to prevent Russia from meddling in European affairs, to ally with the Nordic countries, to maintain ties with Turkey and to keep an eye on Austria.

Successively directed by the Prince de Conti, Jean-Pierre Tercier and the Count de Broglie, this service was financed from the king”s personal coffers. It included a black cabinet in charge of monitoring correspondence, headed by Robert Jannel. Among the agents of this service, one can note the names of the count of Vergennes, the baron of Breteuil, the knight of Eon, Tercier and Durand).

With the death of Louis XV and the accession of his grandson, Louis XVI, the Secret was dissolved. However, its agents, still active, especially the Count de Broglie, tried to play an important role in the American War of Independence. Thus, Beaumarchais provided arms to the “Insurgents”.

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The end of the War of the Austrian Succession

On January 20, 1745, Charles VII, the emperor that the French diplomacy made emperor dies. The husband of Marie-Thérèse of Austria, François de Lorraine, was then a candidate. Once again, despite the reluctance of the king, the Marquis d”Argenson tried to thwart this project. But the heir of Charles VII refuses to lend himself to this game and the elector of Saxony August III rallies to François de Lorraine who commits himself to help him against Frederic II. The Landgrave of Hesse as well as the Elector Palatine opted for neutrality. Also on October 4, 1745, François I became emperor, the power being occupied de facto by his wife Marie-Thérése of Austria. This outcome suits the French marshals who can concentrate their efforts on Belgium and the Netherlands where they will have to face the English troops of the Duke of Cumberland, the English being henceforth the only ones to want to continue the war.

The last part of the war was marked by a series of French victories in the Netherlands: Battle of Fontenoy (1745), Battle of Rocourt (1746), Battle of Lauffeld (1747). The battle of Fontenoy, won by the Marshal of Saxony and the king himself, is considered one of the most brilliant French victories against the British. As a result of these victories, France occupied the entire territory of present-day Belgium and was in a position to invade Holland with the fall of the fortress of Berg-op-Zoom. However, in the southeast, the battle of Piacenza, lost in 1746 by the Marquis de Maillebois, forced the French to cross the Alps again, but without any major political consequences, since the main front was in the Netherlands.

At sea, the royal navy, which was fighting one to two against the Royal Navy, did better than defend itself since it succeeded, between 1744 and 1746, in keeping open the lines of communication to the colonies and in protecting the commercial convoys. The battle of Cap Sicié allowed the blockade of Toulon to be lifted. Two attempts to land in England failed in 1744 and 1746, as well as an English attack with a landing against Lorient in 1746. In North America, England seized Louisbourg in 1745, which defended the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, but was unable to invade French Canada. In India, the French held the English fleet in check and in 1746 took Madras, the main English post in the region. They then repelled an English fleet that came to reconquer the place and attack Pondicherry. The English navy changed its strategy in 1746 by imposing a blockade near the coast. In 1747, the French navy suffered two heavy defeats in the Atlantic (at Cape Ortegal in May and at Cape Finisterre in October), but without any consequences on the colonial prosperity of France, because peace was signed shortly after.

At the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, France and England returned their respective conquests (Louisbourg against Madras) which created, for a few years, a naval balance between the two countries.

However, the king returned all the conquests made to Austria, including Belgium, against all expectations. Louis XV preferred to support or spare the Catholic powers to counteract the new emerging Protestant powers (England, Prussia). The only notable changes in Europe were the annexation by Prussia of Silesia, a rich mining region, and the return of the tiny Duchy of Parma to the last of the Farneses, the Dowager Queen of Spain; the Duchy was then given to her youngest son, Infant Philip, son-in-law since 1739 of Louis XV.

Louis declared that he had concluded the peace “as a king and not as a merchant”, a posture that discredited him in his country, because the French, following Voltaire, believed they had fought “for the King of Prussia” who had kept the rich province of Silesia. This misunderstanding is aggravated according to Michel Antoine by the fact that the king refrained from explaining to his subjects the reasons for a policy inspired by Fénelon.

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The Marquise de Pompadour: an influential mistress

Jeanne Le Normant d”Étiolles, born Poisson, sought to be noticed by the king in 1743 by attending hunting parties in the forest of Sénart. In her undertaking, she could count on her mother who had connections in the close circle of the king. She knew not only the first valet of the dauphin, but also the king”s valet and the Pâris brothers, famous financiers. Her first meeting with the king remains poorly documented. It seems to have taken place during a masked ball, either during the wedding of the dauphin Louis, or during a ball at Versailles. The king, in order to allow her to be presented to the court and to become lady-in-waiting of the queen, gave her a land in Limousin that had fallen into disuse: the “Marquisate of Pompadour”. Madame de Pompadour, the adulterous daughter of a financier, was beautiful, cultured, intelligent and very ambitious. Her rise to fame was frowned upon by the devout, especially the Dauphin, and by the aristocracy in general. Indeed, until then, the official mistresses of Louis XIV, except Madame de Maintenon, and Louis XV are chosen in the high aristocracy. If the king”s sons and daughters do not like her and call her “mother whore”, she knows how to make herself appreciated by the queen by showing deference to her.

The Marquise de Pompadour was officially housed on the third floor of the Palace of Versailles, above the king”s apartments. There she organized intimate dinners with selected guests, where the king forgot the obligations of the court which bored him. The marquise, who was in poor health and supposedly frigid, was no longer the king”s lover, but remained his mistress and confidante and kept her privileged relationship with the king by discreetly “providing” him with young girls, among them Lucie Madeleine d”Estaing, the illegitimate half-sister of the admiral d”Estaing. This function of matchmaker inflames “the imagination of the echotiers”.

According to Michel Antoine, Madame de Pompadour interfered in the policy conducted by the king by favoring the careers of her relatives, who were sometimes given “responsibilities too heavy for their abilities”, and by defeating the careers of men of value that she did not appreciate. If her lifestyle and her constructions were reproached to the king, the studies of the royal accounts show that he was not very generous with her. But in politics the appearance can be seen as a reality especially if a king, in this case Frederick II of Prussia, maintains by his propaganda this opinion. Finally, according to Michel Antoine, she understands the king badly, she tries to stun him when it would be necessary to help him “to overcome his distrust of oneself”, so that it is during this relation that “the conduct of the policy appeared the most uncertain”.

Changing intellectual landscape

The men of French enlightenment known as philosophers were very active during this part of Louis XV”s reign. In 1746, Diderot published the Pensées philosophiques, followed in 1749 by the Lettres sur les aveugles and the first volume of the Encyclopédie. In 1748 Voltaire published Le Siècle de Louis XIV and in 1756 the Essai sur les mœurs et l”esprit des nations. In 1750 Rousseau became famous by publishing the Discourse on Sciences and Arts, followed in 1755 by the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. In 1751, Montesquieu published De l”esprit des lois.

In the 1740s, Voltaire was welcomed at court as a playwright and poet. But very soon his low extraction added to the Jansenism of his father displeased the queen and the king, and he had to leave Versailles. Voltaire approves the king when he abolishes the parliaments and does not oblige the plaintiffs to pay the judges anymore. Nevertheless, after the death of the king, he deplores the few reforms realized in 58 years of his reign.

In 1756, Rousseau was invited to Versailles by the king following the success of his opera, Le Devin du village. He declines this invitation. In 1762, he wrote the Social Contract, a call for a new political system based on equality. His ideas, published under the reign of Louis XV, were more or less adopted by the revolutionaries who overthrew Louis XVI in 1789.

The thought of François Quesnay (and of the physiocrats), in addition to an economic component, which will be discussed later, also has a political component. Quesnay argued that while the republic was a suitable regime for merchant states like Holland, an agricultural nation was more suited to royalty. Nevertheless, this very speculative doctor was opposed to the social hierarchy of the Ancien Régime, which he tended to replace with a society composed of three classes of citizens defined according to their place in the economic order: the landowners, the productive class (the farmers) and the sterile class}. He did not accept the analyses developed by Fénelon, Saint-Simon, Montesquieu and one of his disciples, the Marquis de Mirabeau, whom he did not stop trying to convert to his views. Indeed, he does not believe, contrary to them, that the aristocracy is a weapon against absolutism.

Physiocracy is also opposed to Rousseau”s ideas. The book of the physiocrat Mercier de la Rivière, The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies, based on the idea of legal despotism inspired by natural laws, is opposed to Rousseau”s ideas, especially on the question of the general will. Indeed, for the physiocrats, the idea of alienation or fusion of the individual in the general will constitutes an ethics of sacrifice to which they substitute an ethics of interest. For them, it is the balance of interests of several political bodies guided by science that leads to a common will that unites the nation. The thought of the physiocrats was especially influential during the French Revolution. If Tocqueville gives the physiocrats a strong influence on the institutions resulting from the French Revolution, it is because he understood, according to Longhitano, that it takes from the physiocrats the idea of legal despotism applicable to both a republic and a monarchy. It also borrows from them their opposition to Montesquieu”s mixed government and to Rousseau”s egalitarianism.

Economic problems

At the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, it seemed necessary to the king and his council to reform the tax system. By an edict of Marly in 1749, he decided to create a General Fund of Amortizations intended for the repayment of the debt. In order to finance this Fund, the tax of the tenth was abolished and replaced by the twentieth, which was levied on all the subjects of the king. The edict was presented to the Parliament of Paris, which postponed the registration of the edict and made some admonitions, but the King obliged him to register it.

This tax challenged the privileged status of the clergy and nobility, who were traditionally exempt from paying taxes. The former fulfilled their obligation by making a “free gift” to the treasury and by caring for the poor and for education, while the latter paid the “blood tax” on the battlefields. However, it was the clergy who were most opposed to this measure. To put the opinion with him, the minister Jean-Baptiste de Machault d”Arnouville makes write by a Jansenist and anticlerical lawyer a text entitled Ne répugnante bono vestro aiming at refuting the arguments of the clergy. If this text rallies Voltaire to the cause of the twentieth, it does not change the opinion of the clergy gathered in assembly.

Finally, the latter agrees to make a free gift of 1 500 000 livres, but refuses the principle of the tax. The devout party, well established in the royal family, especially with the wife of Louis XV and his sons and daughter, put pressure on Louis XV. Moreover, in the matter of the General Hospital, which managed eight establishments (notably, the Pitié, Bicêtre and the Salpétrière), the king had to oppose the Jansenists who de facto ran this establishment where zeal and devotion were combined with prevarication and a certain freedom of morals. Also, at the end of 1752, it was decided to let the diocesan offices take care of the management of the clergy”s free donations. This measure, badly perceived, favors the rallying of the petty bourgeoisie to the theses of the philosophers.

In 1747 and 1748, the harvests were not good, which sometimes led to supply problems. As a consequence, many beggars and hungry people flocked to Paris. A royal decree of November 12, 1749, re-enforced the arrest of these people and their confinement in “houses of force”. These measures, applied very severely by Nicolas-René Berryer, led to a certain number of excesses, notably the arrest of children without any history. Immediately rumors were born: the arrested people would be sent to populate Mississippi; their blood would be used to cure a leprous prince, or it was seen as a replica of the massacre of the Innocents under Herod I the Great. It is not necessary to be mistaken for the Parisians very influenced by the Parisian clergy then very Jansenist, in the last two cases, it is in fact Louis XV who is aimed, compared either to Herod or to a leprous prince. Let us recall here that, in the thought of the time, sin is seen as the leprosy of the soul.

From his first economic writings – the articles published around 1755 in the Encyclopedia of d”Alembert and Diderot: “Farmers”, “Grains”, “Taxes” and “Men” – François Quesnay, the king”s physician introduced to Versailles by Madame de Pompadour and founder of physiocracy, exposes what he believes to be the reasons for the kingdom”s economic difficulties. For him, Colbert, dazzled by the wealth of Holland, made the mistake of wanting to make France a trading nation. According to him, France was a great agricultural kingdom and it was by relying on agriculture, as the English had done by building their wealth on the wool of their vast flocks of sheep, that it could find its salvation. The problem is that the Colbertist system discouraged agriculture by wanting to keep agricultural prices low in order to promote the development of an industry based on imported raw materials. The result was that the ban on exporting agricultural products discouraged large-scale farming. Indeed, because of the ban on foreign sales, any increase in production leads to a fall in prices, which ruins the most enterprising farmers. According to him, the suppression of export restrictions and other regulations would allow farmers to obtain good prices (the notion of good price is a key element of physiocracy) which would promote agricultural production and enrich the kingdom.

Another economic current was born in the early 1750s, a little before physiocracy, around the Marquis Vincent de Gournay, André Morellet, de Forbonnais and Montaudoin de la Touche, to name but a few. These men introduced into France the writings of foreign economists, among whom we can mention Josiah Child, Gregory King, Hume, Jerónimo de Uztáriz, and others. They are also very marked by the idea of sweet trade developed by Jean-François Melon. These men were also convinced, like Colbert, of the importance of industry, except that they thought it was time to dismantle the laws and the corporate system that surrounded it. On the other hand, like the mercantilists, they gave a great importance to the external balance of the country. If they agree to liberalize the trade of grain, they do not want its price to go up because it would go, according to them, against the interest of the French manufactures. Quesnay accuses them of not really wanting to free the agricultural potential of the country. For a while Turgot tried to reconcile the two points of view, but in 1766 Montaudoin de la Touche started an argument with the physiocrats based on the defense of the interests of merchants and industrialists, which broke any idea of agreement between them. In the course of these exchanges Forbonnais accuses the physiocrats of not understanding what the introduction of money had caused as a change in the natural order. If the physiocrats had some influence on the liberalization of the grain trade introduced in 1764 by François de L”Averdy, after the arrival of Joseph Marie Terray at the general control of finances in 1770, they lost all economic influence.

Increased opposition from parliaments

According to Michel Antoine, “From the 1950s onwards, the judiciary sank into a more or less constant state of effervescence and rebellion, giving rise to incidents and conflicts at every opportunity. The reasons for this state of affairs are numerous. First of all, the prices of the offices have been constantly falling since 1682 and sometimes no one wants to buy them, which led Chancellor d”Aguesseau to merge the courts and reduce the number of offices. Moreover, very often the staff is too much for the number of cases to be treated. This situation was linked to the rise of the civil service, spearheaded by the intendants and engineers. Let us recall that it was around 1740 that the École de la Marine, the École des Ponts-et-chaussées and the École du génie de Mézières were created. All of this led the magistrates not to be satisfied with merely wanting to judge, but to extend their field of action and to want, as they proclaimed in 1757, “to judge the equity and usefulness of new laws, the cause of the State and the public…”. If, according to Michel Antoine, the book L”Esprit des lois goes beyond what the average magistrate can understand, they have nevertheless retained that the accusation of despotism also targets the French monarchy. The book that will really mark the magistrates is written by a lawyer Louis Adrien Le Paige under the title Lettres historiques sur les fonctions essentielles du parlement, sur le droit des pairs et sur les lois fondamentales du royaume. In this book, he defends the idea that there is a primitive constitution on which the monarchy has rested since Clovis, which has been altered over time in a direction favorable to despotism. This book argues that parliaments born before the monarchy, have at least an equal footing with the king. A theme taken up again since 1755 by the parliament of Paris. If these claims are refuted in the book of an anonymous entitled Reflections of a lawyer on the remonstrances of the parliament of November 27, 1755 which shows that the existence of the parliament goes up at most to Philippe le Bel, the parliament of Paris does not care about it and orders on August 27, 1756 that this writing is “torn and burned in the court of the palace”.

At the same time, the parliaments, which at the time of the recording of the laws can emit remonstrances intended for the kings, deeply modify their nature by drafting them “more and more with the intention of the public”.

In 1746, Christophe de Beaumont, appointed archbishop of Paris to restore order in a diocese largely won over to the opponents of the Unigenitus bull, imposed on his priests to refuse the last rites to those who did not present a confession bill. In 1749 and 1750, the parliament confined itself to remonstrances when such cases were reported to it, and its first president, René-Charles de Maupeou, preached moderation. From 1752 onwards, vexed at not having been appointed chancellor, he decided to let the parliamentarians do their work. So when an old oratorian was refused the sacraments by the priest of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, he was fined and ordered to give the sacrament. Immediately the king overturned this decision. The parliament maintains its judgment and wants to make it carry out, but the priest fled. The parliament remonstrated with the king about the danger of “schism” and considered that “any refusal of the sacrament was a defamation, subject to the secular courts”.

In an effort to appease him and because he considered the denial of the sacrament to be abusive, the king announced the creation of a joint commission of state councilors and bishops to decide the question. He asked that until the submission of the conclusions, there be silence on these cases. He did not obtain silence and the parliament continued to pursue the priests who refused the sacraments. The mixed commission came to nothing and on May 9, 1753, the king exiled the magistrates of the inquiries and the requests. The situation was then blocked and the higher justice was paralyzed, because a temporary chamber of vacation instituted was not able to function. The king, possibly on the advice of Madame de Pompadour, summoned de Maupéou to Versailles in July 1754 and showed clemency to the magistrates. Christophe de Beaumont, who continued to approve the refusal of the sacrament, was exiled.

The beginnings of the Seven Years” War

In 1754, elections to the House of Commons brought to power a government that wanted to expand the English colonial empire. From October 1754, the troops stationed in America were reinforced either by sending English regiments or by local recruitment. The building of ships and the recruitment of sailors were accelerated while the English general Edward Braddock was ordered to occupy the French forts in the Ohio Valley and on Lake Erie. Finally, on April 16, 1755, Admiral Edward Boscawen was ordered to intercept the French ships at the entrance to the St. Lawrence.

On the European side, in order to cover Hanover, where its king came from, England sought an agreement with a reluctant Austria. Despite everything, it managed to reach an agreement with Russia, to which it provided subsidies to maintain an army of 55,000 men in Livonia. This agreement worried Frederick II of Prussia who feared being caught in a pincer movement. Also, he signed on January 1, 1756 (even though his alliance with France did not end until June 5, 1756), the Treaty of Westminster with the English, which removed the Russian threat in exchange for a commitment on his part to defend the borders of Hanover against France.

In the autumn of 1755, the Empress of Austria sent a letter to the king through Madame de Pompadour, telling him that she wanted to start secret negotiations with France. These were entrusted to the abbot of Bernis and remained secret until Frederick II decided to negotiate with England. After this date, they were made known to all the ministers of state. These negotiations led to the Treaty of Versailles in 1756, in which the Empress of Austria promised to remain neutral in the Franco-British conflict in America, while the King of France promised not to attack the Netherlands and other possessions of the Empress. Finally, the two countries agreed to guarantee their European possessions against other countries. In the official text, this guarantee is not valid against England whereas in a secret document, this guarantee is valid against those operating as auxiliaries of the English.

Constituting a break with the policy followed since the cardinal of Richelieu, this alliance with the empress of Austria is badly seen in France, even if the time having changed, this reversal of alliance is according to Michel Antoine the most reasonable solution.

On February 1, 1757, the king dismissed two of his most important ministers, Jean-Baptiste de Machault d”Arnouville and the Count d”Argenson, two men involved in the affair of the twentieth. The first one because it is his project and the second one because, friend of the Jesuits, he is closer to the positions of the clergy in this matter. If the letter of dismissal of the first is rather affectionate, that towards the second is much more dry. Besides the fact that the latter was not on the best terms with Madame de Pompadour, the king also seems to reproach him for his management of the Parisian affairs which will be entrusted to the Marquis de La Vrillière. The Marquis de Paulmy replaces his uncle the Count d”Argenson at the Secretary of State for War, Peyrenc de Moras is entrusted with the Navy, which he must combine with Finance, while the King reserves the Seals. The Marquis de Paulmy resigned from the Secretary of State for War on March 3, 1758 and was replaced by Marshal de Belle-Isle. Peyrenc de Moras ceded the navy to the Marquis de Massiac who kept it only during the summer of 1758 before it was ceded to Berryer. Berryer, a close friend of Madame de Pompadour, was also appointed to the Conseil d”En-Haut in 1758, as were the Maréchal d”Estrées and the Marquis de Puisieulx. After Machault”s resignation, the Contrôle général des finances was very unstable, since from 1754 to 1759, five people succeeded each other in this position before it was entrusted to Bertin, who held it from 1759 to 1763. Choiseul, ambassador in Vienna, became at the end of 1758 secretary of state for foreign affairs in place of the abbot of Bernis who became cardinal in August 1758. Choiseul will be appointed in 1761 at the death of Belle-Isle, Secretary of State for War, a position he will hold until his disgrace in 1770. Throughout this period the Choiseuls (the Duke and his cousin the Marquis) were at the head of foreign affairs, the navy and war.

The Abbé de Bernis, on the verge of becoming a cardinal, suggested to the king that he should change the way the government worked. As he knew that the king, like his ancestor Louis XIV, did not want to have a Prime Minister, a natural person, he suggested that an assembly, the King”s Council, should take its place. His plan, partially implemented, also provides for an examination of government spending that will reveal major dysfunctions in the Secretary of State for the Navy leading to the departure of Massiac. But this plan did not please Madame de Pompadour who would lose her influence in government affairs. Finally, it would place de facto Bernis in the foreground, which the king did not want. Also Bernis, hardly made cardinal on November 30, 1758, is disgraced on December 13, 1758. Choiseul then became the preponderant minister until his own disgrace in 1770.

Seven Years War (1756-1763)

Frederick II won a victory over the Austrians at Prague on May 6, 1757, before being defeated by them on June 18 at Kolín. Louis XV”s army led by Marshal de Soubise, together with the Austrian army of Saxe-Hildburghausen, were defeated at the battle of Rossbach on November 5, 1757. Immediately, the public opinion is against Soubise, a close friend of the Marquise de Pompadour.

In Canada, during the siege of Louisbourg, the English navy used all the means at its disposal (14,000 men and 23 ships) to ensure victory in 1758. Fort Frontenac was also taken, but Fort Carillon held out thanks in part to the supplies provided by three convoys that left from Bordeaux.

In Africa the fort of Saint-Louis fell as well as the island of Gorée. In India Chandernagor and Madras were also taken.

At the end of 1758, the King and Choiseul wanted to continue the war in order to achieve a more balanced peace than the present balance of forces allowed. To do so, they developed a project to land in the east of Scotland, supported by the Swedes. To this end, a project to build barges was launched. The departure base initially planned in the Pas de Calais was transferred to the Gulf of Morbihan under the direction of the Duke of Aiguillon. But five English ships of the line bombarded Le Havre, the place where the barges were built, while a Mediterranean squadron sent to support the ocean squadron was destroyed by the English fleet off the coast of Portugal at the battle of Lagos in 1759. Finally, this project was definitively abandoned after the battle of the Cardinals.

In April 1759, Marshal de Broglie defeated Ferdinand of Brunswick, while on August 12, the Russian general Piotr Saltykov at the head of the coalition troops of which France was a member inflicted a major defeat on the Prussians at Kunersdorf.

The death of Elizabeth I of Russia on January 5, 1762 and her replacement by Peter III and then by Catherine II of Russia, led to a change in Russian policy towards Prussia which weakened the Franco-Austrian alliance.

The king was aware of the imbalance of forces in North America. He knew that on this continent the English population was 1.2 million, while the French population was only 100,000. Militarily, he knew that the French side would never be able to field more than 13,000 men against 48,700 on the English side. Moreover, economically, these colonies weighed little compared to Martinique, which had 80,000 inhabitants at the time, Guadeloupe 60,000 and Saint-Domingue 180,000 inhabitants, mainly slaves. Also, he was not surprised when, in October 1759, Quebec surrendered, especially since, since 1755, he had understood that, after the Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle, France had not made a sufficient effort for its navy, which, at the beginning of 1756, consisted of 45 ships of the line, compared to 88 for England. Moreover, the gap was bound to widen, because at that date France had nine ships under construction while the English had 22.

In the West Indies, Guadeloupe was taken by the English in April 1759, as were Désirade, Marie-Galante and the Saintes shortly after.

The Brest fleet was defeated on November 20, 1759 by Admiral Edward Hawke and his 45 ships at the Battle of the Cardinals.

In April 1761, the English seized Belle-Île, which the Duke of Aiguillon could not rescue because of the lack of French warships. In June 1761, Dominica fell.

In an attempt to counter England, Louis XV and Charles III of Spain decided to sign a third family pact on August 15, 1761, in which they promised each other the assistance of at least twelve ships of the line and six frigates as well as 18,000 infantrymen and 6,000 cavalrymen. At that time the number of ships of France and Spain combined was less than the one hundred and six ships of the English navy. The situation was even worse if one takes into account the obsolescence of the Spanish ships. On January 2, 1762, Spain declared war on England and the defeats followed one another for the Franco-Spaniards. Martinique fell into the hands of the English in February 1762, followed by Grenada, Saint Vincent, etc. Finally, Havana was occupied by the English as well as Florida and the city of Mobile.

France tried to negotiate with Great Britain at the end of 1760, but came up against the intransigence of William Pitt the Elder. It is necessary to wait for his political withdrawal as well as the death of King George II in 1760 so that the businessmen in Great Britain agree to negotiate. They were prompted to do so both by Frederick II”s rather casual attitude towards them and by their concern about the cost of the war.

The Treaty of Paris was signed on February 10, 1763. In continental Europe, we return to the situation of departure. On the other hand, overseas, France recovered Belle-Île, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie-Galante, Désirade, Gorée and the five trading posts in India. All other possessions remained in British hands. France acquired Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, but gave Louisiana to Spain by secret treaty. Spain lost Florida but recovered Havana.

It should be noted that in economic terms, Guadeloupe and Martinique plus the part of Santo Domingo that remained in French hands thanks to French colonists and sailors brought in more than all of Canada.

Frederick II maintains that in this war France acted against its interest by intervening in Germany. He notes: “The kind of war that they made with the English was maritime; they took the change and neglected this principal object, to run after a foreign object which properly did not look at them. It should be noted that for Bluche this war allowed Prussia to enter the restricted circle of the great European powers.

The king facing the opposition of the parliaments (continued)

The Grand Council received from Charles VII and Louis XII a status that made it “a court of conflicts, an administrative court and a court of exception”. The head of the Council was the chancellor and the first presidency was entrusted to a State Councillor. Although socially the Parliament and the Grand Council were almost identical in their recruitment, the Parliament had always hated this body, which was derived from the King”s Council. The affair arose in June 1755 when two individuals filed a complaint about a fight. One filed a complaint with a court under the Parliament and the other with the Grand Council of which he was an honorary member. The Grand Council decided to handle the case and asked the other jurisdiction to relinquish jurisdiction, which it did only partially, so that, one thing leading to another, the Parliament and the Grand Council came face to face. In the meantime, for some undefined reason, the king, through the Conseil des Dépêches, issued two rulings in favor of the Grand Conseil, rulings that set off the fire. The matter became more political when the Parliament invited the princes and peers of the kingdom to come and deliberate. The king forbade them to go, but six princes (Orléans, the Condés, the Contis) and twenty-nine dukes and peers rebelled against this ban. This rebellion caused a rapprochement between the nobility of dress and that of sword.

Robert-François Damiens – a servant of several councillors of the Parliament – tried to kill the king at Versailles on January 5, 1757, after renting a sword and hat from a store in the Place d”Armes in front of the castle. He entered the Palace of Versailles, among the thousands of people trying to obtain royal audiences, and struck the king with an 8.1 cm blade at about 6:00 p.m., as the king had just visited his ailing daughter and was about to enter his carriage to return to Trianon. Louis XV was wearing thick winter clothes and the blade only penetrated one centimeter, between the 4th and 5th ribs. If the wound is not very serious, the attack causes a great stir. Above all, the question that arises very quickly is to know if it is a plot and possibly by whom. Two tracks are advanced: the English, or the Jesuits and the clergy. Very quickly it was realized that there was no conspiracy, but that, as Damiens himself declared, “if I had never entered the palace and had only served swordsmen, I would not be here”, in short, it was partly the hatred of the parliamentarians for the king that had armed his arm.The question that arose was who was to judge Damiens, a commission composed of State Councillors and maîtres des requêtes or the Parliament of Paris? The Abbé de Bernis tipped the balance in favor of the Parliament, because he thought it best to have the case dealt with publicly. During the trial, the Prince of Conti made great efforts to conceal as much as possible the role played by the seditious statements of the parliamentarians. Finally Damiens was condemned and executed on March 28, 1757 on the Place de Grève.

On September 3, 1758, King Joseph I of Portugal was the victim of an assassination attempt presumed to have been committed or inspired by the Jesuits. The Jesuits were outlawed in Portugal shortly thereafter. The Jansenist press seized the subject and pamphlets hostile to this religious order spread: however the hostility to the Jesuits was not specific to the Jansenists and the Gallican tradition in France was opposed to an order which was then perceived as subservient to the pope. In a four-volume work, Histoire générale de la naissance et des progrès de la Compagnie de Jésus et analyse de ses Constitutions, Louis Adrien Le Paige drew up a document that served as a basis for the fight against the order and put forward the grievance that most frightened people: despotism.

The occasion for a full-scale attack on the Society of Jesus was provided by the commercial bankruptcy of the establishment run by Father Antoine Lavalette in Martinique. One of his debtors, the house of Lionci et Gouffre of Marseilles, turned to the Society and claimed 1,552,276 livres. At that time, the religious orders were entitled to ask that their case be dealt with by the Grand Council, but the Jesuits opted for the Parliament of Paris, which condemned them to pay the sum claimed. Things could have remained there. But on April 17, 1762, the Abbé de Chauvelin asked the Assembly of the Chambers to examine the Constitutions. The Parliament immediately asked the Company for its Constitutions, which it received. The Advocate General Joly de Fleury, who presented the report of the Public Prosecutor”s Office after examining the documents, asked that the five Jesuit provinces of France be given a large measure of autonomy (this would allow them to escape the despotism of the Superior General of the Order) and that they be taught a doctrine “in conformity with the Gallican maxims”. Louis XV then tried to obtain from the Pope a reform of the Constitution of the Order, but was refused. From then on, the affair was sealed. According to Michel Antoine, the king and especially Choiseul cooperated with the Parliament, because they thought it would make them more flexible in fiscal matters. In reality, as the president of Miromesnil noted at the time, they “increased the confidence of the parliaments” and he added, now “there is nothing of which the heated people do not flatter themselves to come to an end.

When the affair of the Parliament of Navarre occurred, the king, at the instigation of Choiseul and Madame de Pompadour, asked the chancellor of Lamoignon for his resignation. The latter, one of the great losers in the Jesuits affair, reproached the king for his capitulations to the Parliament. The chancellor refused and the king decided to exile him on October 3, 1763. But, as one cannot remove a chancellor, a post of vice-chancellor is created and attributed to Maupéou father. This situation further strengthened the position of the Choiseul clan, usually close to the parliamentarians, who had just seen one of them, François de L”Averdy, a militant Jansenist who had made his mark during the trial of the Jesuits, arrive at the Contrôle général des finances.

In 1764, the parliament of Navarre rebelled against a law registered 17 years earlier. In 1765 two commissioners of the king were sent, they succeeded in restarting the justice system in spite of the resistance of many members of parliament who made life difficult for those who had resumed their work. It was then that the La Chalotais affair began, named after the Attorney General of the Parliament of Brittany who was also a physiocrat. The latter, emboldened by the example of François de L”Averdy, wanted to make a career for himself. Like L”Averdy, La Chalotais made a name for himself during the expulsion of the Jesuits by writing a Compte-rendu des constitutions des jésuites (1761) and a Second compte-rendu sur l”appel d”abus (1762). He is also known for his Essay on National Education (1763). His great rival in Rennes was the Duke of Aiguillon who also dreamed of a national destiny. The affair at the parliament of Brittany started with a refusal to register an edict that maintained the twentieth while mitigating other points. Things quickly escalated and, as a final provocation, the commander of the royal militia, the intendant”s delegate, was accused of improperly managing a nightly disturbance. This led to the arrest of La Chalotais, his son and three advisors. During the investigation of the case, Jean Charles Pierre Lenoir and Charles-Alexandre de Calonne discover a correspondence between the ex-prosecutor and a certain Deraine. On their way to his house, they see envelopes marked correspondence which they want to seize. Deraine objected, telling them that these documents could only be seen by His Majesty or the Prince of Soubise. So they had this mail brought to Louis XV who discovered letters he had sent to one of his former mistresses, Mlle de Romans. This episode, together with the hostility of the majority of the ministers to La Chalotais, led to the so-called flogging episode.

The king goes to the parliament of Paris on March 3, 1766, in the presence of all the princes of the blood and in a long speech intended to reaffirm his authority he says in particular:

“it is in my person alone that sovereign power resides… It is from me alone that my courts hold their existence and authority.”

Shortly afterwards, La Chalotais and his son, after having been imprisoned, were relegated to Saintes under close surveillance, while Deraine was forbidden to return to the Court but continued to receive his wages as a washerman. Nevertheless, La Chalotais continued his complaints to the parliament of Brittany and this affair poisoned the relations of the king with the parliaments, until 1771 at least.

The flogging especially impressed the crowd of subjects. On the other hand, it did not bring the magistrates back to resignation for long. They continued to agitate from 1766 to 1770. Generally speaking, if the parliaments remained loyal to the monarchy, they were perfectly aware of the king”s weaknesses. For example Durey de Meinières, a former president of the parliament, estimated that “the king only occupied with his pleasures becomes more and more incapable of serious business. He can”t hear about it. He sends everything back to his ministers”.

Choiseul”s policy on foreign affairs (1756-1770)

In foreign policy, two sectors fell to Choiseul: England, the Navy and the Overseas Territories; Eastern and Northern Europe, i.e. the relations with Austria. In order to face England on the oceans, France, which needed an alliance with Spain, was bound to her by the third family pact. Choiseul and the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Grimaldi, had a friendly relationship as did their respective kings Louis XV and Charles III. As for relations with Austria, Maria Theresa and Louis XV had a mutual respect for each other and a common distrust of Frederick II of Prussia. On the other hand, the relationship between their ministers Kaunitz and Choiseul was courteous, but defiant and based mostly on words of friendship.

In the military field, Choiseul had the artillery modernized by Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, who equipped it with cannons that were used during the French Revolution and the First Empire. He also reformed the army by standardizing the uniforms and reinforcing the rules and discipline. He modified the recruitment of the regiments by drawing lots for militiamen who were to serve as reserves. In addition, a pension system was introduced for soldiers who retired. The navy was considerably strengthened and in 1772 it had 66 ships of the line, 35 frigates and 21 corvettes. Overseas, the Compagnie des Indes was abolished and its former territories came under the authority of the King. In the West Indies, Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint Lucia were each provided with an intendant.

The conquest of Corsica is one of the only successes in foreign policy of the Duke of Choiseul. In 1756, Louis XV was granted by the Republic of Genoa the right to install garrisons in Calvi, Saint-Florent and Ajaccio. The agreement with Genoa was the following: France was to pacify Corsica on behalf of the Genoese and would only keep it if the Republic of Genoa could not pay the expenses it would incur in Corsica. Also, the sale is not formally stipulated in the treaty of May 15, 1768, of which the English worried about the interference of the French in the Corsican affairs could not know the exact content. The English then let it be understood that they could intervene, which did not frighten Choiseul.militarily, the campaign was marked by two major combats. First, at the battle of Borgo, in 1768, Pascal Paoli defeated the French, killing 600 and capturing 600 others, including Colonel de Ludre, Choiseul”s own nephew. Following this failure, an expeditionary force of nearly 20,000 men landed at Saint-Florent commanded by one of the greatest military men of the monarchy, the Count of Vaux. The nationals were finally defeated at the battle of Ponte-Novo, on May 8, 1769. Shortly after, Pascal Paoli, general in chief of the Corsican nation, leaves in exile in England and Corsica submits to the king.

In 1768, the chancellor of Lamoignon resigned. He was replaced by René-Charles de Maupeou on September 18. In 1769, the new chancellor opposed the financial operations proposed by the general controller Mayon d”Invault and provoked the resignation of this close friend of Choiseul. After discouraging Choiseul”s candidate, the appointment of Abbé Terray on December 22, 1769 strengthened Maupeou”s position in the government. In December 1770, Choiseul wrote to his Spanish counterpart Grimaldi that war with England seemed inevitable. Louis XV, informed, forbade the sending of this letter and asked the duke to write another one in which he recommended to the king of Spain to make the greatest efforts to make peace. At the same time, Louis XV wrote to Charles III. If he asks him to make efforts for peace, he also announces to him that even if he considers changing minister, he will continue the same policy towards Spain. On December 24, Choiseul was disgraced. This disgrace made a great noise. His supporters and members of parliament attributed it to the Countess du Barry. According to Michel Antoine, Choiseul”s main mistake was to have prepared a war of revenge without having prepared the country to support it. Later, in 1772, Louis XV said to the Count de Broglie “Choiseul”s principles are too much against religion, and consequently against the royal authority”.

This was the real turning point of the reign, the moment when, according to François Bluche, “belatedly lucid…and…finally somewhat voluntary”, he appointed three not particularly flexible ministers who would form what is sometimes called the triumvirate. Its leader was the chancellor of Maupeou, president of the Parliament of Paris from 1763 to 1768, assisted by the abbot Terray at Finance and by the duke of Aiguillon at Foreign Affairs and War.

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Abolition of parliaments

Maupeou”s first priority was to bring the parliament under control and to continue the program of modernization of the state. On January 21, 1771, royal agents and musketeers arrived at the homes of parliamentarians, informed them that their offices were being abolished, and ordered them to leave Paris and take up residence in the provinces. In February an even more radical measure was taken: the regional parliaments were replaced by high courts of civil justice and by six new high regional councils. From then on, justice was rendered free of charge. Only the powers of the parliament of Paris remained largely unchanged. The abolition of the provincial parliaments allowed the government to enact new laws and levy new taxes without opposition. However, after the death of the king, the nobility demanded and obtained the restoration of the regional parliaments.when, on April 13, 1771, Louis XV held a bed of justice to force the parliament to record its decisions, he let the chancellor Maupeou speak, contenting himself with speaking at the end of the ceremony to declare: “I will never change.

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Finance

Abbé Terray is only nominally a priest, his governmental career is entirely secular and his private life not free of reproach. Nevertheless, he is an efficient tax collector. He opened a school to train tax inspectors and worked hard to ensure that taxes were levied and collected in the same way in all regions. When he was appointed, the state had a deficit of 60 million pounds and a long-term debt of 100 million pounds. By 1774, tax revenues had increased by 60 million pounds and the debt had been reduced to 20 million pounds. He returned to the liberalization of the grain market in 1763 and 1764. The controls would be a source of unrest in the following years, and this, until the French Revolution.

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Foreign Affairs

After Choiseul”s resignation, the king encouraged his cousin and ally Charles III of Spain to come to an agreement with England to settle the Falkland Islands crisis in order to avoid war. As Choiseul focused on the war with England, he completely ignored Europe and France did not even have an ambassador in Vienna. Russia and Prussia divided Poland, a traditional ally of France, without any protest from France. Sweden, another traditional ally, was threatened to be divided between Russia and Prussia when its king died in 1771. The royal prince Gustav III of Sweden, then in Paris, had a long talk with the king who promised him his help. With French subsidies and the help of the King”s secret, Gustav III could return to Stockholm. On August 19, 1772, on his command, the Swedish royal guard imprisons the Senate and two days later he is proclaimed king by the Diet. Russia and Prussia, occupied in Poland, protested but did not intervene.

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Last years and death of the king (1772-1774)

At the end of the reign of Louis XV, the court at Versailles is a shadow play. Marie Antoinette, the wife of his heir, does not hide her antipathy towards Madame du Barry, the king”s mistress for whom he had built a luxurious complex near his offices. The du Barry also reigns over the Pavillon de Louveciennes as well as the Petit Trianon initially built for Madame de Pompadour. The court is divided between the supporters of du Barry and the old aristocracy like the duke of Choiseul and Marie-Antoinette who hates her. The King continued his construction work. The opera theater of the palace of Versailles was finished for the engagement of the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, as well as the new Louis XV square with an equestrian statue of the king in its center, designed in the manner of the one of Louis XIV, place Louis-le-Grand.

On April 26, 1774, the symptoms of “small pox” appeared while Louis XV was at the Petit Trianon.

The surviving daughters of the king, the count of Lusace, maternal uncle of the dauphin, are present during the agony of the king. The candle lit at night, on the balcony of the room, is extinguished when the sovereign dies, on May 10, 1774, at 3:30 pm, at the Palace of Versailles, of the consequences of the disease (septicemia aggravated by pulmonary complications), in the indifference of the people and the rejoicing of part of the court, at the age of 64 years and at the end of almost 60 years of reign. Variolique, he was not embalmed: he was the only king of France not to have received this post-mortem tribute. He left the throne to his grandson, almost 20 years old, who became King Louis XVI.

The unpopularity of Louis XV was such that his death was welcomed in the streets of Paris by joyful festivities, as had been that of Louis XIV. At the time of the funeral, on May 12, to avoid the insults of the people on its passage, the reduced funeral procession circumvents Paris by night, by the west, before arriving at the basilica Saint-Denis. The decomposition of the body is so fast that the partition of the body (dilaceratio corporis, “division of the body” in heart, entrails and bones) with multiple burials cannot be carried out. If the Parisians showed their indifference or their hostility, many testimonies attest the deep sadness of the French of province, which follow in great number, during the end of spring 1774, the services organized in all the cities and big towns of France and Navarre for the rest of the soul of the king.

Nineteen years later, on October 16, 1793, during the desecration of the tombs of the Saint-Denis basilica, after having opened the coffins of Louis XIII and Louis XIV (relatively well preserved) the revolutionaries opened that of Louis XV and found the corpse swimming in abundant water due to the loss of water from the body which had in fact been coated with sea salt, and had not been embalmed like that of his predecessors. The body quickly fell into putrefaction, the revolutionaries burned gunpowder to purify the air from the foul odor it gave off and threw it, like the other bodies, into a mass grave on top of quicklime.

On January 21, 1817, Louis XVIII had the remains of his ancestors (including Louis XV) recovered from the mass graves and returned to the necropolis of the kings (no body could be identified).

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Portrait of the king

Physically, Louis XV has a curved waist and a majestic bearing. If his face is beautiful, the King has built a mask of impassivity difficult to pierce. D”Argenson remarked on this subject: “Louis XV worked from morning to night to conceal himself”. This desire to conceal his thoughts seems to come from both the obligations of representation that he had to assume from his early youth, and from his great shyness. Let us note here that François Bluche doubts the shyness of the king and insists rather on his malice – like voluntarily stepping on the foot of a man who has the gout to joke – which he sees as an extension of a “royal egocentrism… not very edifying”. Since Louis XV did not leave any memoirs and the extensive correspondence he conducted has largely disappeared, historians are having a hard time really getting to the bottom of it.

The king is prone to bouts of neurasthenia, during which he locks himself up in complete silence. Sometimes also, one feels that he wants to say something obliging, but he does not succeed. The king doubts especially of his capacities to such an extent that, according to the duke of Croÿ:

“Modesty was a quality that was pushed to the vice in him. Seeing more correctly than others, he always thought he was wrong. I often heard him say, ”I would have thought that (and he was right), but I am told otherwise so I was wrong.””

His memory is great, and he remembers with precision a lot of details about the foreign courts that amaze the ambassadors. As he liked to read, the royal residences were equipped with libraries: Versailles but also Choisy-le-Roi, Fontainebleau and Compiègne. He was curious about scientific and technical knowledge. He observed the eclipses of the planets with the most famous astronomers. His knowledge of medicine allowed him to have regular conversations with the great physicians of his time about recent discoveries. Finally, he had a botanical garden created at the Trianon which, with 4,000 species, was the most important in Europe at the time. Passionate about geography, he encouraged the work of geographers and was responsible for the creation of the Cassini map. He also had a great knowledge of the history of the kingdom and astonished his interlocutors with the precision of his liturgical knowledge.

Hunting and “cabinet dinners

The king was a great hunter, even more than Louis XIV and Louis XIII. He practiced this activity four to six times a week. If he likes the barking of the dogs, the sound of the horns and the contact with nature, he is also careful not to damage the crops. He knew all the dogs of his pack perfectly, and he took such good care of them that he had the dog”s cabinet set up in his apartments at the Château de Versailles. To facilitate his errands, he had the forests of Ile-de-France redesigned with the goose feet that still exist today. From the age of thirteen and a half, he enjoyed the post-hunt meals, the “cabinet dinners” surrounded by ten to fifteen friends whom he chose carefully. During these dinners, there was no Gallicism, everything remained in good taste, stripped only of the heavy ceremonial of Versailles.

According to François Bluche, the king generally treated women, apart from his official mistresses, less well than the servants of his House. In this respect, he quotes the Duke of Luynes as saying: “The King loves women and yet has no gallantry in his mind”.

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The king, his wife and children

The queen plays perfectly her role of representation, even if, according to Petitfils, she lacks “the presence and the majesty necessary to her condition”. Louis XV had happy years with the queen who adored him and was completely devoted to him. A child was born almost every year. However, the queen eventually tired of these repeated pregnancies, as much as the king tired of the unconditional love of his wife. She and the king had ten children with a first pregnancy in 1727 with the birth of two twins Marie-Louise Elisabeth and Anne-Henriette. In 1728, she gave birth to Louise Marie, in 1729 to a son, the dauphin Louis Ferdinand. In 1730, she had a second son who, like Louise Marie, died in 1733. Then, in 1734, Sophie Philippine was born, and in 1737, Marie Thérèse who died in 1744. The surviving daughters spent more than ten years at Fontevrault Abbey without their parents coming to see them.

According to François Bluche, the king loved his daughters but did nothing to marry them, it is according to this historian a selfish love. Moreover, he imposed on them the respect of an etiquette bordering on the ridiculous, which he later relaxed. One of his daughters ended up a Carmelite nun. Generally speaking, his daughters belonged to the devout party, as did his son, and wished for his conversion.

The queen was very pious and obtained from Pope Clement XIII, in 1765, the establishment of the feast of the Sacred Heart put forward by John Eudes of the Oratory. She liked to read books on history and metaphysics, especially the books of Father Malebranche.

The king and his mistresses

In 1733, Louis XV had his first out-of-wedlock affair with Louise Julie de Mailly-Nesle, Countess of Mailly (1710-1751), just a few months before the death of his second son. Little by little, the guilt he felt from this affair pushed him to stop taking communion in 1737 and to continue practicing the thaumaturgical ritual of touching scrofula patients. His mistress around 1739 was the sister of Louise Julie de Mailly-Nesle, Pauline Félicité de Mailly-Nesle, Countess of Ventimiglia (1712-1741), followed by Marie-Anne de Mailly-Nesle, Marquise de La Tournelle, Duchess of Châteauroux (1717-1744). Finally come his most famous mistresses: Madame de Pompadour and the Countess du Barry.

Besides these famous mistresses, the king sometimes slept with “little mistresses”. Thus, when he no longer had sexual relations with Madame de Pompadour, she provided him with uneducated young girls whose influence she did not have to fear. From there was born the legend of the Parc-aux-Cerfs which makes this place a harem populated by young kidnapped women devoted to the pleasure of the king. This legend was propagated by pamphlets with torrid illustrations. In reality, it seems that there was never more than one girl at a time at the Parc-aux-Cerfs, a place closed in February 1765 after the death of the Marquise de Pompadour.

Despite these criticisms, the Marquise de Pompadour had an influence on the development of the arts during the reign of Louis XV. A true patron of the arts, the marquise amassed an impressive collection of furniture and art objects in her various properties. Louis XV bought three paintings and five door tops by Jean Siméon Chardin. She favored the development of the Sèvres porcelain factory and her orders ensured the livelihood of many artists and craftsmen. Similarly, one of her protégés, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, was in charge of the architecture of the church of Sainte Geneviève. According to Michel Antoine, historians have tended to exaggerate his role in the artistic field to the detriment of the king who, according to him, has a true artistic sense when the marquise tends to give in the mawkishness.

The end of the reign is marked by the arrival in the life of the king of the Countess du Barry, officially presented to the court in 1769. Before the king”s choice is fixed on her, the devout party supported by the daughters of the king, including his Carmelite daughter, proposes to remarry the sovereign, whose beauty is intact despite his 58 years, with the Archduchess Marie-Elisabeth of Austria, sister of Marie-Antoinette, but she sees her great beauty compromised by an attack of smallpox and the marriage project is long gone. The duke of Choiseul on his side wanted to slip into the royal bed his sister Beatrix. Finally, the Duke of Richelieu, a great libertine lord, and Lebel, the king”s first valet, successfully intercede to give Louis XV a new mistress, Madame du Barry. This choice strongly displeases the Duke of Choiseul who launches “a campaign of defamation against the intruder” through libels such as Le Brevet d”apprentissage d”une jeune fille à la mode, La Bourbonnaise, La Paysanne pervertie.

The choice of Madame du Barry, a woman of modest extraction, is for the king, according to Jean-Christian Petitfils, the opportunity to launch “a challenge to the princes and the high aristocracy who defied him, either by supporting the robin sedition, or by swooning before the new philosophy”. Madame du Barry is a “sweet and mutinous” woman whose only fault seems to be that she likes jewels. She was not very much interested in politics, but the hostility of Choiseul placed her in the center of the political scene and caused the party of the devout who surrounded the Dauphin who had died just a few days before her arrival at the court to rally around her.

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A man marked by grief

In 1752, the king lost his favorite daughter, Henriette. In 1759, his eldest daughter, the Duchess of Parma, died. In 1761, the death of the Duke of Burgundy, ten years old, eldest son of the Dauphin, a precocious and promising child, also affected him deeply. In 1763, the intelligent and romantic granddaughter of the king, Marie-Isabelle de Bourbon-Parme, wife of the Austrian archduke, died in Schönbrunn. In April 1764, his mistress the Marquise de Pompadour died. In 1765, the king lost successively his son, the dauphin, whose irreproachable moral life edified him, and his son-in-law, the duke of Parma. In February 1766, the old king Stanislas died almost nonagenarian in Lunéville. The following year, it was the turn of the Dauphine, a disconsolate widow who contracted her husband”s illness while nursing him. Finally, in June 1768, the queen died.

In France the public opinion begins to impose itself. The king does not perceive its importance. He prefers, when he reads the police reports, to know about the turpitude of the great ones than to be informed about the content of the libels that target him. In fact, on this point, the king is a victim both of the legacy of the end of the reign of Louis XIV and of his character and a policy that leads him to rely solely on the state.

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Heir to a monarchy that has renounced communication

The monarchy since at least Charles IX and Henri III saw rumors and pamphlets being unleashed against it, so Louis XIII, Richelieu and even at the beginning Louis XIV took care “to exalt their action, as to respond to the malicious ones”. But Louis XIV from his relation with Madam de Maintenon changed optics of the whole and gave up to be asserted, what makes that he bequeathed to his successor “neither the men, nor the apparatus able to work out and to spread justifications and explanations of his policy, either to ruin or to counterbalance the opposite arguments”. A king “congenitally timid, anxious and secretive” did not know how to remedy it, even though the Unigenitus bull was going to exacerbate passions in Paris where a people generally won over to Jansenism was going to receive as “the word of the gospel” what the Ecclesiastical News wrote. This lack of communication, of willingness to act on public opinion, was particularly embarrassing when the king himself assumed full power at the end of the 1740s.

The opposition to the king and to Christianity publishes a lot after 1750 while the royal camp is almost silent except for L”Année littéraire of Fréron or the comedy of Palissot entitled Les Philosophes (nevertheless, the people and a great part of the lower clergy remain faithful. The king is liberal towards the literary salons such as those of Madame de Lambert or Mademoiselle Lespinasse and accepts all the elections to the academies with the exception of Diderot.

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A king with little communication

The fact that the king was very reserved in public amplified his difficulties in governing and reinforced the misunderstandings between the king and the parliaments. Indeed, to parliamentarians who liked discussions, he answered very laconically: “I want to be obeyed”, “I will think about your proposals”. The last answer often indignant the magistrates who think that in fact he will ask his ministers to examine the situation. All this creates in the parliamentarians and beyond the idea that the king does not deal with the serious affairs of the country.

In general, the king does not know how to show off his successes, he is too reserved in public, so that the public will soon know about him only what is said in libels that spread “slanderous gossip, salacious tales” by presenting them “as reliable news or as the authentic memoirs of important people”. These writings are all the more influential because no one denies them. Indeed, since the expulsion of the Jesuits, the devout do not support him any more and thus do not seek to contradict these writings.

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From “beloved” king to “unloved

During much of his reign, Louis XV was considered a national hero. According to Kenneth N. Jassie and Jeffrey Merrick, at that time in songs and poems the king was described as the master, the Christian. His mistakes were attributed to his youth and his advisors. Edmé Bouchardon”s equestrian statue was originally designed to celebrate the monarch”s role in the victorious War of the Austrian Succession. It depicted the king as a peacemaker. It was not unveiled until 1763 after his defeat in the Seven Years War. Bouchardon”s work, completed by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, was used by the crown to restore confidence in the monarchy. Its pedestal is supported by the statues of the four Virtues. Shortly after the inauguration, the pedestal was emblazoned with a distich, written by an unknown hand, which testified to the unpopularity of the king: “Grotesque monument

It is that at that time Louis XV became the “unloved” especially because of his choices in his private life (his many mistresses). For Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, of the École des Annales, if the king was handsome, intelligent and athletic, his refusal to go to mass and to fulfill his religious obligations contributed to the desacralization of the monarchy. According to Jassie and Merrick, confidence in the king gradually eroded, and the people blamed and ridiculed his debauchery. He was perceived as the one who ignored famines and crises, and left his successor with a background of popular discontent.

According to Michel Antoine, the reign of Louis XV was one of the apogees of French architecture and “the golden age of the decorative arts”. Through his own commissions and those of nobles and financiers, he helped to support the activity of cabinetmakers, painters, sculptors, ceramists and other specialists in decoration and the arts. The development of these sectors of activity was also stimulated by his gifts to foreign monarchs, which contributed greatly to the French artistic influence.

A king who loves the arts

Although the king loved decorative painting, it was above all architecture that fascinated him. He particularly enjoyed working with the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel. According to Michel Antoine, talking about architecture was “a clever way of courting him”. The king is endowed with a sure taste and has the “concern of the correctness of the colors, the harmony of the tones and the forms, the refinement”. He loved the beautiful and the elegant, which the artists and craftsmen who worked for him knew.

His taste for harmony found in the classicism of the reign of Louis XIV, whose heir he felt, as well as his desire to follow the influence of the artistic fashion of his time led him to follow the magnificence of Baroque art, which was dominant at the time, while refusing its excesses and overloads to which he preferred harmony and measure.

Fountains and squares

In the last years of his reign, Louis XV had new squares built in the center of some cities, such as the Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde) in Paris, with its harmonious row of new buildings designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel or squares in the centers of Rennes and Bordeaux. He also built a monumental fountain in Paris, the Fountain of the Four Seasons with a statuary by Edmé Bouchardon.

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Louis XV and architecture

The main architects of the king were Jacques Gabriel from 1734 to 1742, then his son Ange-Jacques Gabriel with whom Louis XV, an architecture enthusiast, liked to discuss. Among his most important works are the École Militaire, the buildings surrounding the Place Louis XV (1761-1770), and the Petit Trianon in Versailles (1764). During the reign of Louis XV, if the interiors are sumptuously decorated, the facades become less busy, more classical.

At the end of the reign, the architecture of this period tends towards a neoclassical style as evidenced by the church of Sainte-Geneviève (the present Pantheon), built between 1758 and 1790 by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, and the church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule (1765-1777) by Jean Chalgrin.

Interior design

The interior decoration at the beginning of the reign was in the Rocaille or Regency style, characterized by sinuous curves and counter curves with floral motifs. It takes the form of walls decorated with such motifs with medallions in their centers and large mirrors surrounded by palm leaves. Unlike the Rococo style, the ornaments are symmetrical and show a certain restraint. According to Michel Antoine, the king “has always sought the magnitude of forms, nobility and measure. The motifs are often of Chinese inspiration and represent animals, especially monkeys (singerie) and arabesques. Among the artists of the period we can mention Jean Bérain le Jeune (en), Watteau and Jean Audran.

After 1750, in reaction to the previous period, the interior walls are painted in white or in pale colors with more geometric motifs inspired by Greek and Roman antiquity. The Salon de compagnie of the Petit Trianon announces the Louis XVI style.

Furnishings

Compared to Louis XIV chairs, Louis XV chairs are lighter, more comfortable and have more harmonious lines.

The consoles are tables to put against the walls, they are used to support works of art. The commode is a type of furniture that appeared during the reign of Louis XV. They are decorated with bronze and covered with exotic wood plates. Some of them, called “façon de Chine”, are made of black lacquered wood with bronze ornaments. The reign saw the emergence of a large number of cabinetmakers from all over Europe. The best known are Jean-François Oeben, Roger Vandercruse Lacroix, Gilles Joubert, Antoine Gaudreau, and Martin Carlin.

Other types of furniture are born such as the chiffonier and the dressing table.

Around 1755-1760, tastes in furniture change, forms become more discreet and influences from Antiquity and Neo-Classicism are felt. The chests of drawers became more geometrical and a new type of furniture, the cartonnier, made its appearance around 1760-1765.

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Louis XV and painting

At the beginning of the reign of Louis XV the dominant theme is the same as at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, namely mythology and history. Later in the new apartments of Versailles and Fontainebleau, pastoral scenes and portraits appear.

The king”s favorite artist was François Boucher who, in addition to pastoral and exotic religious paintings, also painted hunting scenes for the king”s new apartments. Other notable painters include Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Maurice Quentin de la Tour and Jean-Marc Nattier, who painted many portraits of the royal family and aristocrats.

Sculpture

The sculptural style remained “grand siècle” for most of the reign. Among the notable sculptors were Guillaume Coustou, his son Guillaume Coustou (son) (notably on Place Louis XV), Robert Le Lorrain, and Edmé Bouchardon who created the equestrian statue (finished by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle) which was enthroned on Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde), based on the model of François Girardon”s equestrian statue of Louis XIV on Place Louis-le-Grand (Place Vendôme from the 19th century on).

At the end of the reign of Louis XV, the sculptors give more importance to the faces. The main followers of this new style were Jean-Antoine Houdon and Augustin Pajou who sculpted busts of Buffon and Madame du Barry. At that time, sculpture reached a large audience thanks to reproductions in terracotta or porcelain. Madame de Pompadour, who loved sculpture, encouraged this art by placing numerous orders.

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Louis XV and music

The king, the queen and her daughters are the main patrons of the musicians. The queen and her daughters play the harpsichord under the direction of François Couperin. The young Mozart comes to Paris and writes two sonatas for harpsichord and violin dedicated to Madame Victoire, the king”s daughter. The king himself, like his grandfather, learned to dance but performed in public only once in 1725. The most important musician of the period was Jean Philippe Rameau, court composer during the 1740”s and 1750”s. He wrote more than 30 operas for the king and the court.

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From the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century

During this period, the alteration of the royal image, which had begun in the middle of his reign, continued in literature, historiography and school textbooks, whose judgments were obscured by their secular moralism and their hatred of the monarchy. Sainte-Beuve judged Louis XV: “the most null, the most vile, the most cowardly heart of a king who, during his long and enervated reign, accumulated as if for pleasure, to bequeath them to his race, all the misfortunes”. According to the little Lavisse manual of 1900: “He was the worst king in our history. It is not enough to hate his memory, we must hate him. From the second half of the twentieth century, he is gradually rehabilitated and better appreciated even if the critical view remains.

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Some revaluation as of 1933

After Pierre Gaxotte”s book Le Siècle de Louis XV things changed and the authors distanced themselves from the pamphlets and libels published during his reign and relied more on official documents. However, they were still bothered by the absence of sources from the monarch and in particular by the disappearance of his personal archives which Louis XVI had inherited. In spite of everything, the look remains very critical.

For Norman Davies, the reign of Louis XV was characterized by “debilitating stagnation”, lost wars, endless conflicts with parliaments and religious quarrels. Jerome Blum describes him as “a perpetual adolescent called to do a man”s job.

Many historians believe that Louis XV did not meet the high hopes of his subjects. Robert Harris wrote in 1987 “Historians have depicted this ruler as one of the weakest of the Bourbons, a do-nothing king who left affairs of the state to ministers while indulging in his hobbies of hunting and womanizing. Harris adds that ministers were appointed and dismissed according to the mood of his mistresses, seriously undermining the prestige of the monarchy. For Jeffrey Merrick, weak government accelerated the general decline of the country that led to the French Revolution of 1789. Ernst Gombrich estimated in 2005 that “Louis XV and Louis XVI, the successors of the Sun King were incompetent, they were content to imitate their great predecessor by showing only the appearance of power. Only pomp and magnificence remained.”

But the king also has defenders. Some historians argue that the bad reputation of Louis XV is linked to propaganda aimed at justifying the French Revolution. In his biography published in 1984, Olivier Bernier argues that Louis XV was both popular and reforming. During his 59-year reign, France never feared invasion despite the loss of many colonies. He was known as Le Bien-aimé for part of his reign and many subjects prayed for his recovery in Metz in 1744. According to this author, the dismissal of Choiseul as well as the dissolution of the parliament of Paris in 1771 was only to eliminate from the government those he considered corrupt. Louis XV changed the tax law and tried to balance the budget. Decisions that could have prevented the French Revolution if they had not been repealed by his successor Louis XVI.

Legitimate children

Marie Leszczyńska gave Louis XV ten children, three of whom died in infancy:

Illegitimate children

Louis XV, like Louis XIV, had a number of adulterous children by his numerous mistresses, starting in 1733. Following a new miscarriage of the queen in 1738, the latter, tired of repeated maternity, closed the door of his room, which facilitated the formalization of the first royal favorite, the Countess of Mailly. All his adulterous children, other than Charles de Vintimille, were born to unmarried girls, called the “little mistresses”. Haunted by the bad memories of his great-grandfather”s bastards, Louis XV still refuses to legitimize them. He provided for their education and managed to give them an honorable place in society, but never met them at court. Only Charles de Vintimille du Luc and the Abbé de Bourbon were legitimated.

With Madame de Vintimille :

Perhaps with Irène du Buisson de Longpré:

With Jeanne Perray :

With Marie-Louise O”Murphy:

With the Duchess of Narbonne-Lara:

With Marguerite-Catherine Haynault :

With Lucie Madeleine d”Estaing :

With Marie-Madelaine de Lionvaux :

With the Baroness of Meilly-Coulonge :

With Louise-Jeanne Tiercelin de La Colleterie :

With Catherine Éléonore Bénard :

With Marie Thérèse Françoise Boisselet :

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Favorites and mistresses

His mistresses and favorites were:

Among the matchmakers who provided Louis XV with women was his first valet de chambre, Dominique Guillaume Lebel, grandson of Michel Lebel, himself already in the service of Louis XIV. In order to check the health of the young girls, Lebel “tried” them out to make sure that they were not carriers of one of the venereal diseases that the king feared.

King Louis XV is present in several cinematographic or television works.

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External links

Sources