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).