Louis XV

In 1745, in an effort to reform the country's inequitable and inefficient system of taxation, Machault d’Arnouville, comptroller-general of finances (finance minister), proposed, with the support of the Marquise de Pompadour, the first-ever tax on the revenues of the normally exempt nobility and clergy. The tax reform proposals were fiercely opposed, and from 1750 onward the French parlements initiated a policy of systematic obstruction against all royal measures. Louis, weakened by financial difficulties, did not have the energy to carry out the reforms that were essential, and by 1751 had given in and exempted both the nobility and clergy. In 1754 he dismissed d’Arnouville as comptroller-general of finances. Public discontent continued to grow at the seeming incompetence of Louis and the lavishness of his court and in January 1757 there was an assassination attempt on the king at Versailles. The grisly execution in March, at the insistence of the Parlement of Paris, of the would-be assassin Robert Damiens, depressed Louis, who then abandoned attempts at tax reform, believing it the wrong policy.

France’s disastrous involvement in the last war of Louis’s reign, the Seven Years’ War, began in 1756, largely as a result of rivalry with Great Britain over their North American colonies. French prosecution of the war was crippled by corruption and mismanagement, and foreign policy throughout this period was made chaotic by Louis’s “secret diplomacy”, as his agents in other countries sometimes pursued aims that were in conflict with those of his own ministers. Defeats to Great Britain at Quebec (1759) and Montreal (1760), as well as further defeats in India, Senegal, and the West Indies, led to the almost total loss of France’s overseas possessions to Great Britain, a reality confirmed at the Treaty of Paris in 1763. It was a huge blow to the prestige of both France and Louis.

It was during the Seven Years’ War, in 1758, that Étienne François, Duc de Choiseul, a favourite of the Marquise de Pompadour, was appointed to control France’s affairs. Choiseul was able to restore some order to the government and tried to repair the damage done by the war by concluding an alliance with Spain in 1761 and by negotiating at the 1763 peace talks. He also initiated reforms in the army, began to expand the navy, and in 1768 acquired Corsica. In 1770 he strengthened ties with Austria by arranging the marriage of the dauphin, Louis, the king’s grandson, to Marie Antoinette, daughter of Empress Maria Theresa. After 1768, however, Choiseul’s position was weakened by the enmity of the Comtesse du Barry, the new official mistress of the king, and when his policies threatened to provoke another war with Great Britain, over possession of the Falkland Islands, Louis dismissed him in 1770. In the following year, the much-needed tax reforms that Louis had abandoned in 1757 were revived when he appointed René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou as chancellor and Joseph Marie Terray as comptroller-general of finances. Louis cooperated with both men, and the parlements, whose objections had caused the original abandonment of tax reform, were reorganized and stripped of their power to obstruct royal decrees. Measures were then implemented to tax the previously exempt nobility and clergy.

However, the attempts at reform came to nothing. On May 10, 1774, Louis XV died at Versailles of smallpox, and was immediately and privately buried late at night at the cemetery at Saint-Denis. Soon afterwards the taxes on the nobility and clergy were cancelled. These final attempts at fiscal reform had signalled the failure of “enlightened despotism” in France, and Louis XV's alleged prophecy (although some have attributed it to the Marquise de Pompadour, and some believe it apocryphal), “After me, the deluge”, was realized in the overthrow of the French monarchy less than two decades later.