The orphan king
Louis was born at Versailles on 15 February 1710, a great-grandson of Louis XIV, and was given the title Duke of Anjou. Nobody expected him to reign. Then, in 1712, an epidemic of measles swept through the royal family: his mother, Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, died on 12 February, his father, the Dauphin, on 18 February, and his elder brother on 8 March. The two-year-old survived, looked after by his governess, the Duchess of Ventadour, and became heir to the throne.
When Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, after a reign of seventy-two years, the new king was five. Power passed to a regent, the old king's nephew Philippe, Duke of Orléans. The Regency moved the court from Versailles back to Paris and tried a bold cure for the crown's war debts, John Law's paper-money bank, which collapsed in 1720. Louis was crowned at Reims in 1722 and declared of age in February 1723. In 1725 he married Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of the deposed king of Poland, Stanisław Leszczyński, because the kingdom needed an heir sooner than his young Spanish fiancée could give one.
The Well-Beloved
From 1726 France was governed by the king's old tutor, Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury, cautious and thrifty. His seventeen years in power were mostly peaceful and brought sound finances and one lasting gain: after the short War of the Polish Succession, Lorraine went to the queen's father for life and passed to France on his death in 1766. When Fleury died in January 1743, at eighty-nine, Louis announced that he would govern without a chief minister, like Louis XIV.
France was already at war again. In the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) the king went on campaign himself. In August 1744 he fell dangerously ill at Metz; his recovery was celebrated across the country and earned him the name le Bien-Aimé, the Well-Beloved. In May 1745 he watched Marshal Maurice de Saxe defeat the British and their allies at Fontenoy. But at the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 he handed back all his conquests in the Austrian Netherlands, and many in France saw the peace as victories thrown away.
In the year of Fontenoy, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, soon Marquise de Pompadour, became the king's official mistress. Clever, cultivated and of middle-class birth, she kept her place and her influence for nearly twenty years, until her death in 1764, patronising artists and writers and helping ministers rise and fall. Her successor from 1769, Madame du Barry, a woman of humble birth, was a gift to the pamphleteers, and the king's private life became a matter of gossip and scandal.
An empire lost
The Seven Years' War, 1756–1763
In 1756 Louis reversed two centuries of French policy and allied with Austria, the old Habsburg enemy, against Prussia and Britain. The Seven Years' War that followed was a disaster. In Europe, Frederick the Great routed a French and imperial army at Rossbach in November 1757. Overseas, the British navy cut France off from its colonies: Quebec fell in 1759, Montreal in 1760, Pondicherry in 1761.
By the Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1763 France gave up Canada and its lands east of the Mississippi to Britain, having already ceded Louisiana to Spain; in India it kept only a handful of unfortified trading posts. It saved its rich sugar islands, Guadeloupe and Martinique, and its fishing rights off Newfoundland. The war left a mountain of debt and a wish for revenge, which Choiseul, the leading minister of the 1760s, prepared by rebuilding the navy; he also acquired Corsica from Genoa in 1768. The Austrian alliance held: in 1770 it was sealed by the marriage of the king's grandson and heir, the future Louis XVI, to the archduchess Marie Antoinette.
The king against the parlements
The parlements were France's high law courts, led by the Parlement of Paris. A royal law took effect only once they had registered it, and first they could protest. Under Louis XV they used this right more and more: in the religious quarrel with the Jansenists in the 1750s, against new taxes to pay for the wars, and against the Jesuits, whom they drove out of France in the 1760s. They began to speak as if they stood for the nation.
In the middle of this quarrel, on 5 January 1757, a servant named Robert-François Damiens stabbed the king with a penknife at Versailles. The wound was slight. Damiens, who said he had meant to recall the king to his duty, not to kill him, was tortured and publicly torn apart by horses in Paris on 28 March 1757, the last man in France to be executed that way.
In March 1766 Louis came in person to the Parlement of Paris and set out plainly his idea of the monarchy.
“It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides… To me alone belongs the legislative power, without dependence and without division.”
In January 1771 his chancellor, René-Nicolas de Maupeou, went further. The magistrates of the Parlement of Paris who refused to resume their duties were exiled to the provinces, their offices were confiscated, and new courts with salaried judges took their place. Critics called it despotism; its defenders saw at last a chance to reform justice and the taxes the courts had blocked.
What his grandson inherited
At the end of April 1774 the king fell ill at the Trianon and was carried back to Versailles. It was smallpox. As death approached he sent Madame du Barry away so that he could confess and receive the last rites, and he died on 10 May 1774, aged sixty-four, after a reign of fifty-eight years. His body, still contagious, was taken to Saint-Denis by night with little ceremony.
His only surviving son, the Dauphin Louis, had died in 1765, so the crown passed to his nineteen-year-old grandson, Louis XVI. With it came everything the long reign had built up: the debts of three wars, the humiliation of 1763, a court whose private life had become a public scandal, and the unfinished fight with the parlements. Within months the new king dismissed Maupeou and recalled the old courts — and it was those courts that would block the reforms of the 1780s and declare, in 1787, that only the Estates-General could consent to new taxes.
