Louis XVI

I

Introduction

Louis XVI (1754-1793), King of France (1774-1792), who lost his throne in the French Revolution and was later beheaded by the Revolutionary regime.

II

Early Life of Louis XVI

He was born Louis-Auguste at the Palace of Versailles, near Paris, on August 23, 1754, the son of the dauphin (heir to the throne), Louis, and Marie-Josèphe of Saxony. The deaths of his two elder brothers and of his father, the only son of Louis XV to survive to adulthood, made the young prince the dauphin in 1765. Two years later Louis’s mother died and he was raised by his grandmother, Queen Maria Leszczyńska, wife of Louis XV, but she died the following year. Thereafter, he was cared for by his four spinster aunts, who were collectively known as Mesdames Tantes (“My Lady Aunts”). As a child he was timid and considered simple (possibly due to an undiagnosed myopia), and his education by the Duke of Vauguyon, his governor, and by Monsignor Jean-Gilles du Coëtlosquet, his tutor, in an atmosphere of piety and aristocratic conservatism, made him uncomfortable in a court dominated by the Marquise de Pompadour, the influential mistress of Louis XV.

In 1770 he married Marie Antoinette, youngest daughter of Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria. The consummation of the marriage was delayed by seven years, most likely by a sexual dysfunction suffered by Louis, which may have been dealt with by circumcision in 1777. Four children were then produced by the marriage: Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte (1778-1851); Louis-Joseph Xavier François (1781-1789), the first dauphin; Louis-Charles (1785-1795), the future titular Louis XVII; and Sophie Hélène Béatrix (1786-1787).

III

Louis XVI’s Early Reign

On May 10, 1774, the 20-year-old Louis XVI became king upon the death of his grandfather. In contrast to the weakness and indulgence of Louis XV, the new king appeared virtuous and gauche, and benefited from a wave of sympathy and affection not normal during the first years of a reign. However, on Louis's accession, France was impoverished and burdened with debts, and heavy taxation had resulted in widespread misery among the French people. Determined to make a break with the past, Louis, under the influence of the Mesdames Tantes, recalled as ministerial adviser the experienced Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Comte de Maurepas, who had been disgraced and exiled in 1749 for an epigram against the Marquise de Pompadour, but who would remain at Louis’s side until his death in 1781. He dismissed both the chancellor, René de Maupeou, whose attempts at fiscal reform under Louis XV had signalled the failure of “enlightened despotism” in France, and Joseph Marie Terray, the comptroller-general of finance (finance minister). Both had been the principal movers of the idea of modernization. In their place he appointed Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne, as finance minister, Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes as interior minister, and Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, as foreign minister.

Aided by such capable statesmen, Louis remitted some of the most oppressive taxes and instituted financial and judicial reforms. Greater reforms, including the taxation of the nobility, the abolition of feudal labour laws, and the suppression of commercial monopolies, were proposed by Turgot in his famous Six Edicts to the Royal Council. However, these changes were prevented by the opposition of the court and the nobility (represented by the various French parlements, or sovereign courts), and so strong was this opposition that in 1776 Turgot was forced to resign. Louis replaced him with the financier, Jacques Necker.

Necker opposed the free trade policies instituted by Turgot, and introduced a number of financial reforms, including a more equitable system of taxation, a plan for the funding of the national debt, and the abolition of the multiple obstacles to agriculture and trade. In 1781 he completed the Compte rendu au Roi (Report to the King), a comprehensive analysis of the national finances. However, Necker’s description of the exact state of the nation’s parlous finances, and his proposals for drastic taxes on the nobility to rectify this, led Louis, who disapproved of his Protestantism and his suggestion that Marie Antoinette limit court extravagance, to dismiss Necker later that year.

IV

Louis XVI’s Foreign Policy

In contrast to his continuing failure to address France’s domestic problems, in foreign affairs Louis found a prestige for France that had been absent under the previous reign when the nation had suffered several military reverses to Great Britain in India and North America, ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The rebellion of Great Britain’s 13 American colonies against its rule was passionately embraced by young French aristocrats such as Marquis de Lafayette and the Comte de Rochambeau, and received the official support of France by a treaty of friendship and alliance signed on February 6, 1778, between Louis and Benjamin Franklin (see American War of Independence). France offered practical military help on both land and sea to the American cause and played an important part in its victory. In the Indian Ocean, the French navy, under Admiral Pierre André de Suffren, performed encouragingly against the British Navy in its ongoing struggle for control over India, while in Europe the foreign policy of Vergennes was one of friendly relations with Austria while limiting the ambitions of Joseph II, as well as protecting the Ottoman Empire, maintaining the neutrality of the northern European states, and opposing Great Britain.