I.

Introduction

Louis XV (1710-1774), King of France (1715-1774), whose failure to provide strong leadership and badly needed reforms to modernize the country contributed to the crisis of absolutism that brought about the French Revolution.

II.

Early Life and Regency of Louis XV

Louis was born at the Palace of Versailles, near Paris, on February 15, 1710. He was the second son of the Duke of Burgundy and Marie-Adelaide of Savoy, and the great-grandson of Louis XIV. After a calamitous series of sudden deaths struck the royal family—his grandfather, the dauphin (heir), in 1711, followed by his parents and elder brother in 1712, of possibly smallpox or measles, and then his uncle, the Grand Dauphin, in 1714—Louis found himself the heir to the throne. With the death of Louis XIV, the young royal acceded to the throne on September 1, 1715, aged five, and was immediately placed by the Parlement (sovereign court of nobles) of Paris under the regency of Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, the nephew of Louis XIV. He was raised first by his governess, Madame de Ventadour, and after 1717 by his ageing governor, Marshal François de Neufville, Duc de Villeroi. In 1715 André Hercule de Fleury, whom Louis would continue to hold in confidence and affection, was appointed his tutor.

III.

Early Reign of Louis XV

When Louis reached his legal majority in 1723 Philippe was made his first minister. However, later that year Philippe died and Louis, on the advice of his former tutor Fleury, appointed Louis-Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, to replace him. In 1725 the king married the poor and virtuous Maria Leszczyńska, daughter of Stanislas I Leszczyński, the former king of Poland. The queen bore ten children, of whom six daughters and a son survived into adulthood.

At this time, Louis appeared an elegant and educated king, with an interest in new ideas. However, he felt deep insecurities, and having been orphaned as an infant he yearned for a reassuring figure and a more private life, away from ceremonial responsibilities of court. In 1726, aged 16 and determined to show authority, he dismissed Condé, who was extremely unpopular and was preparing a war against Spain and Austria, and replaced him as his first minister with Fleury, whom he also made a cardinal.

Fleury served as first minister from 1726 until his death in 1743 and succeeded in giving France a stable administration. It was the most prosperous time of Louis’ reign, and for France, the most populated country in Europe after Russia, the centralized state that had begun to be adopted by his predecessor began to show positive results with a growing global empire, improved public health, a modern transport network, greater agricultural production, new and growing industries, and a stable currency. It was a period of intellectual curiosity, growth, and optimism.

IV.

Louis XV’s Foreign Policy and Domestic Affairs

France was involved in three major wars during Louis's reign. In the first, the War of the Polish Succession, which began in 1733, Louis supported the claims of his father-in-law, Stanislas I Leszczyñski, to recover the throne of Poland. The influence of Louis among the Polish nobles enabled Stanislas to obtain re-election to the Polish throne when the Polish king, Augustus II, died in 1733. However, Russia and Austria intervened against Stanislas, and despite French aid he was again expelled from Poland in 1735. Although the war was a failure for France, the Treaty of Vienna in 1738 recognized French sovereignty over the province of Lorraine, which became a duchy for Stanislas for the rest of his life.

The second war of Louis’s reign, the War of the Austrian Succession, which marked the beginning of a colonial struggle with Great Britain, was indecisive. When it began in 1740, Louis’s policy was the long-standing aim of establishing French patronage over the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. France was allied to Prussia, Bavaria, Spain, and Saxony against Great Britain and Austria, and won several great victories, including at Fontenoy (1745), Rocourt (1746), and Lauffeld (1747), and occupied the Netherlands, consolidating Louis’s popularity at home. There were also successes against Great Britain in North America and India. However, the parlous state of the French economy—primarily the result of a bad harvest in 1747, but also due to the effects of the British naval blockade—decided Louis to settle for a peace based, as far as Great Britain and France were concerned, on the status quo. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed by Great Britain and France on October 18, 1748, restored to each other their overseas conquests, leaving frontiers in North America as ill defined as before, and marking a return to the status quo of 1740. The Netherlands were also returned to Austria.

The death of Cardinal Fleury in 1743 marked the turning-point of Louis’s reign. Thereafter, he ruled for several years without a first minister. Although he was in nominal control, Louis took only a sporadic interest in government and never followed any consistent policy at home or abroad. He also became frequently influenced by his mistresses, the first of whom, Madame de Mailly, followed by her sister, Madame de Châteauroux, he had taken in 1734, when he had become bored with his wife. They were the prelude to many extra-marital affairs that thrived in the frivolous and dissipated atmosphere of the court at Versailles.

In 1744, in Metz, Louis fell ill and believed himself close to death. While prayers were held across France for his recovery, the king’s chaplain persuaded him to renounce his adulterous ways. To the embarrassment of the king, who soon recovered, his “confession” was made public, greatly damaging him and associating him in the public mind with immorality. Soon afterwards he began his affair with the Marquise de Pompadour, a woman of non-aristocratic origins, who was to have a profound influence on his future decision-making and prove to be the most powerful of all his mistresses. The idea of a lowborn individual being involved in government was particularly abhorrent to the masses, and this liaison tarnished his public image more than any other. From 1750 the king was regularly lampooned in the Paris press, and from being popularly known as le bien-aimé (“the well-beloved”) Louis became known as “the well-hated” as the stories of his private life knocked popular faith in the monarchy.

V.

Parliamentary Crisis

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.

VI.

Louis XV’s Decline and Death

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.