Louis XV of France: Fifty-Nine Years of Slow Erosion
On 3 March 1766 the King of France walked into the Parlement of Paris to remind the magistrates who was in charge. "It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides," he told them. "To me alone belongs the legislative power." The speech was nicknamed the flagellation, and it circulated afterwards as his political testament. It was also a confession. A monarch whose authority is intact does not need to announce it.
The Accidental Survivor
Louis reached the most powerful throne in Europe at the age of five, and he got there by outliving almost everyone else. Born at Versailles on 15 February 1710, great-grandson of Louis XIV and son of the Duke of Burgundy and Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, he watched smallpox and measles carry off the Grand Dauphin in 1711 and then his parents and elder brother in 1712. When the Sun King died on 1 September 1715, a child inherited a throne built for a colossus.
Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, governed as regent — a man Louis XIV had distrusted enough to call him "Fanfaron des crimes" — and his opening move was to have the Parlement of Paris annul the dead king's restrictions on regental power. That bargain set the pattern of the reign: the crown bought the magistrates' cooperation and then spent sixty years paying for it. Louis was crowned at Reims on 25 October 1722, by which point John Law's Mississippi scheme had already torn a hole in French credit.
The Fleury Peace
The best years of the reign came when Louis did least. From 1726 to 1743 Cardinal de Fleury governed with the king's assent, and the period was the most peaceful and prosperous of the fifty-nine. Controllers-general such as Philibert Orry steadied the accounts, the Saint-Quentin canal opened in 1738, and French maritime trade climbed from 80 million livres in 1716 to 308 million by 1748. Fleury even brokered the Treaty of Belgrade with the Ottomans in 1739. Louis, meanwhile, had married Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of a deposed Polish king, on 4 September 1725; he was fifteen, she twenty-two. Between 1727 and 1737 she bore ten children, of whom only the Dauphin Louis reached adulthood — and he died before his father, in 1765.
Wars Won, Peace Squandered
France under Louis XV did not lack soldiers. It lacked anyone able to convert a victory into terms. The War of the Polish Succession (1733–35) ended with his father-in-law compensated with Lorraine, which passed to France on Stanislaus's death in 1766 — a quiet, permanent gain. In the War of the Austrian Succession, Louis stood on the field at Fontenoy on 11 May 1745 with his son beside him while Maurice de Saxe won again at Rocoux and Lauffeld. Then, at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, he handed the conquered Netherlands back to Austria and took nothing for it. Paris coined a phrase: *bête comme la paix* — stupid as the peace.
Worse followed. On 1 May 1756 Louis signed the first Treaty of Versailles with Maria Theresa, reversing two centuries of Habsburg enmity, and declared war on Britain that June. Minorca fell to French arms; then Frederick the Great broke the French at Rossbach on 5 November 1757 and at Krefeld the following June, and British sea power did the rest. Martinique, Quebec and Montreal were gone by 1760. The Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1763 stripped France of New France, leaving it Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the north Atlantic; Louis chose to recover the sugar islands instead. Corsica, ceded by Genoa on 19 May 1768 and subdued at Ponte Novu the following year, was the last acquisition of the reign.
The Kingdom Turns
On 5 January 1757 a man named Robert-François Damiens stabbed the king in the side at the Grand Trianon. Winter clothing stopped the blade; the assassin was torn apart at the Place de Grève that March. Louis's body recovered quickly. His standing did not. The epithet *le Bien-Aimé*, earned when the nation prayed over his illness in 1744, did not survive the peace of 1748 and his visible indifference to what anyone thought of him.
The Parlements pressed the advantage. They rejected the *vingtième* tax in 1749 by 106 votes to 49; in a quarrel over the Hôpital Général they simply refused to sit, in what amounted to the first open disobedience of the legislature against the king. On religion Louis let Fleury make the bull *Unigenitus* French law in 1730, then in the 1760s let the magistrates drive the Jesuits out of France — afterwards saying he had acted against his own feelings, which is another way of admitting he had been governed. Only at the very end did he fight back. On 24 December 1770 he dismissed the Duke de Choiseul; on 21 January 1771 the triumvirate of Maupeou, Terray and d'Aiguillon dismissed the magistrates outright, exiled them to the provinces, replaced the regional Parlements with six high councils and made civil justice free of charge. It worked, and it died with him.
The Curious King
The private Louis is more attractive than the public one. He brought the court back to Versailles in 1722, carved out a suite of private rooms to escape it, and built the Petit Trianon from 1763. The Château de Versailles describes him as a generous patron of scientists and engineers who collected precision instruments and clocks, applied Linnaeus's classification to the royal gardens, and watched a Leyden jar experiment in 1746. He founded a chair of physics at the Collège de France in 1769 and one of mechanics in 1773, and paid for the Cassini survey, the first complete and accurate map of France. His own physician, François Quesnay, invented physiocracy under his roof; Quesnay's disciple Vincent de Gournay gave the world *laissez faire, laissez passer*, and in 1763 the crown freed the grain trade. Then the harvests of 1766–68 failed, prices rose, and France decided the government was starving it deliberately.
Alongside all this sat Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, his mistress from July 1745 and for twenty years his confidante and adviser — she pushed Choiseul up and Machault d'Arnouville out, and championed Boucher and Pigalle. She stopped sleeping with him around 1750 and remained titular mistress until her death in April 1764, after which he shut himself away for weeks.
Why Louis Is Called a Genius
He is not, in any ordinary sense, and the honest case has to start there. Louis XV inherited absolute power at five and was never required to earn anything. What the record does show is a genuinely curious and technically literate mind attached to unlimited means: a king who understood the instruments in his cabinets, who could follow Quesnay's argument about the circulation of wealth before economics existed as a discipline, who financed the mapping of his own kingdom to a standard no European state had reached, and who thought physics and mechanics worth endowing as subjects. That is real, and it is more than most eighteenth-century monarchs managed.
It is also the cheapest achievement a king can buy. Against it stands a reign historians generally judge harshly: the charge is that his incompetence and extravagance weakened France, drained the treasury, discredited absolute monarchy and lowered the country's standing abroad. A minority argue that he was popular in his lifetime and blackened afterwards by revolutionary propaganda. The Château de Versailles, hardly hostile to his memory, concludes that he left his grandson a kingdom weakened and divided, fertile ground for the seeds of Revolution. Whatever faculty Louis possessed was for appreciation rather than decision — and a king is paid for decisions.
Legacy
He died of smallpox at Versailles on 10 May 1774, aged sixty-four, and was buried at Saint-Denis two days later after a reign of nearly fifty-nine years, the second longest in French history. Maupeou's reforms were reversed within months of his death. Fifteen years after that, the kingdom he had failed to reform came apart, and the country he had ruled longer than almost anyone decided it could manage without kings altogether.
Achievements
- King of France and Navarre (1715–1774)
- Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece — 1739
- Order of St. Andrew
