Heir from the cradle
Louis was born at Versailles on 4 September 1729, the first son of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska after three daughters. His only brother died at two, so he was the heir from the day he was born and stayed the heir for thirty-six years. He was brought up in strict piety, and it held: he grew into a serious, devout and studious man, uneasy in the pleasures of his father's court.
At fifteen he rode with his father at the Battle of Fontenoy, in May 1745, one of the great French victories of the War of the Austrian Succession. It was as close to glory as he came. Louis XV let his son sit in the royal councils, and from 1757 in the Council of State itself, but gave him little real say, and the Dauphin watched from the side as the king's mistresses, Madame de Pompadour above all, and the ideas of the philosophes, gained ground. The court's devout party, the dévots, looked to him as their future king, and he defended the Jesuits until the parlements drove them out of France in the 1760s.
Two marriages
A Spanish infanta, then a Saxon princess
In February 1745 he married the Infanta Maria Teresa Rafaela, a daughter of Philip V of Spain. He was fifteen, she eighteen, and he mourned her deeply when she died in July 1746, days after giving birth to a daughter.
France needed heirs, and less than seven months later he married again. His second wife, fifteen-year-old Maria Josepha of Saxony, was a daughter of Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony — the dynasty that had driven the queen's own father, Stanisław Leszczyński, from the Polish throne. The marriage turned into a close one. They had eight children. The eldest son, Louis-Joseph, Duke of Burgundy, the family's favourite, died in 1761 at the age of nine, and the next surviving son, Louis-Auguste, took his place in the line of succession.
A death before the king's
In 1765 the Dauphin fell ill with tuberculosis. He was with the court at Fontainebleau in the autumn and died there on 20 December 1765, aged thirty-six. At his own wish he was buried not at Saint-Denis, with the kings of France, but in the cathedral of Sens. Maria Josepha, who had nursed him through his illness, died of the same disease in March 1767 and was laid beside him.
His death made his eleven-year-old son Louis-Auguste the new Dauphin. When Louis XV died in May 1774, the crown passed straight to his grandson, who became Louis XVI at nineteen. The father who never reigned was followed on the throne by three of his sons: Louis XVI, guillotined in 1793, and, after the Revolution and Napoleon, Louis XVIII and Charles X, whose overthrow in 1830 ended the rule of the senior line of the BourbonsHouse: House of Bourbon. The family that ruled France for two centuries, lost the throne and won it back.
