The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  No doubt France was in decline, but the decline was not apparent to contemporaries. She was still the richest, most populous country in Europe. French had consolidated its position as the universal language; in the Holy Roman Empire rulers and nobility alike spoke it in preference to their native German. Copies of Versailles continued to be built by kings and princes throughout the Western world. And, to give some substance to the illusion, France went on making remarkable economic and industrial progress until the late 1770s.

  Louis was sixty-four in 1774, still the handsomest man at court. Michelet paints a compelling picture of these last years. ‘The god of flesh abdicated every vestige of mind. Avoiding Paris, shunning his people, ever shut up at Versailles, he finds even there too many people, too much daylight. He wants a shadowy retreat, the wood, the chase, the secret lodge of the Trianon.’ By now he was thoroughly unpopular, ‘Louis the well-hated’ as the Parisians sang. Yet Mme du Barry was making him surprisingly happy. It was a very intimate relationship. Despite a brilliant superficial polish, the Countess retained some of the inelegant ways of her youth. Once, when Louis was preparing breakfast at the Trianon, she told him, ‘France, you’re making a muck of the coffee.’

  However, during Lent they were badly frightened by a sermon which closed with the words, ‘Forty days more and Nineveh will be destroyed.’ At the end of April, after spending the night with Mme du Barry at the Petit Trianon, the King woke up feeling feverish, but hunted as usual. The next night he felt ill again and was taken back to Versailles. Then he developed a rash. Mirrors were kept from him but he was suspicious, complaining to the doctors, ‘You tell me I’m not ill and will soon be well again, but you don’t believe a word of it—you should tell me the truth.’ In fact the doctors thought he had already had smallpox and was immune; they were mistaken. Meanwhile his daughters and Mme du Barry nursed him devotedly—the former by day, the latter by night. At last he saw the spots on his hands and asked for a mirror. ‘This is smallpox,’ he gasped; ‘at my age one doesn’t recover!’ Next day he sent Mme du Barry away—‘Had I known earlier, you would not have entered the room. Now I must arrange matters with God.’ He wept when he learnt she had gone—‘so soon?’ On 7 May he confessed, received Communion, and then asked the Grand Almoner to tell his gentlemen that he begged their forgiveness, and that of his people, for any scandal he might have given. His face was black and swollen, his body suppurating with sores and stinking; he told Adelaide that he felt neither happier nor calmer. The Prince de Croÿ writes, ‘During his illness Louis XV has shown a courage both heroic and simple, gentle and unassuming.’ Croÿ was a truthful man, yet the ‘Enlightened’ Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt tells us that the King lay dying ‘in inconceivable fear and pusillanimity’. Louis died painfully at three o’clock on the afternoon of 10 May 1774.

  Suddenly ‘a terrible noise, just like thunder’ was heard in the ante-chamber where the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette were praying. It was the court running to acclaim their new sovereign. Meanwhile the late King’s body was in such a state of putrescence that his doctors dared not embalm him. He was therefore sealed in a lead coffin filled with quicklime and camphorated spirit, and taken by night to Saint-Denis. (So horrible were the rotting remains that one of the workmen paid to place them in their box is said to have died from uncontrollable vomiting.) As the cortège passed by, lit by flaring torches, the crowd jeered and cried, ‘Tally-ho!’ in mockery of Louis’s well-known holloa; others shouted, ‘There goes the ladies’ pleasure.’ In the words of Michelet, ‘That dead man was Old France, and that bier the coffin of the Old Monarchy.’

  With his secrecy, his Shakespearean gloom and indecision, and his passion for elegant pleasures, Louis is very hard to assess—both as a man and a ruler. Carlyle’s sneers and the late C P Gooch’s subtler condemnation are fairly wide of the mark, but so too are the attempts at rehabilitation by right-wing French writers like Pierre Gaxotte. Louis was undoubtedly weak and apathetic; he was also shrewd and determined in the successful defence of his authority. On her deathbed Mme de Pompadour admitted that she found his personality indéchiffrable (indecipherable), and she had known and loved him for twenty years. In the end, Louis XV remains an enigma.

  ‘The Suicide of France’

  LOUIS XVI (1774–1793)

  _____________

  ‘I should like to be known as “Louis the Serious” ’

  No king has been more unfortunate than Louis XVI. Yet had he reigned happily and prosperously, he would probably have been regarded as the dullest and most commonplace monarch in all French history. As it was, his tragic destiny showed him to be in some ways one of the noblest, if not one of the wisest, men who has ever tried to rule France.

  Louis’s personality is inextricably involved with the French Revolution. As it approaches, there is a steadily increasing note of drama in his story; at the end, the constantly changing attitude of his subjects towards him is terrifying. Unfortunately, in a book of this size one can only offer a brief and superficial account of the Revolution. Perhaps this is not altogether a handicap, for Louis as a human being is so often lost sight of amid the cataclysm; most studies concentrate on the perplexed, doomed ruler of 1789–93 and tend to neglect the odd young King of the 1770s and 1780s.

  Louis XVI was born at Versailles on 27 August 1754, the third son of the Dauphin Louis and Marie Joséphine of Saxony, christened Louis-Auguste and created Duc de Berry. His childhood was no less overshadowed by death than that of Louis XV. His eldest brother, the Duc d’Aquitaine, died long before Louis-Auguste was born and the second, the Duc de Bourgogne, died in 1761; his father died in 1765 and his mother in 1768; by the time he was fourteen he was an orphan. Unfortunately, unlike his grandfather, there was no Mme de Ventadour to take the place of his mother, while the old King although fond of him—Louis-Auguste called him ‘Papa Roi’—seems to have kept his distance.

  His earliest memories were of his precociously brilliant elder brother boasting how he would conquer England, and then dying painfully at ten of lymphatic glanditis—scrofula, the King’s Evil itself. Louis-Auguste himself fell ill with the same tuberculosis at the age of seven, and, like Henri IV, was sent to the country where he acquired his iron health. His governor was M de Vauguyon, a pedantic Breton Duke whose piety had impressed his father; Louis-Auguste was rather frightened of him. The boy was oddly inarticulate and unselfconfident. His younger brothers, the sly and clever Provence and the handsome, lively Artois, made him feel inferior; he once said ‘I love no one because no one loves me’. His usual companions were grooms and stable-boys. His aunts felt sorry for the lonely, gloomy child, particularly Adelaide who used to say, ‘My poor Berry, you must make yourself at home with me—make a noise, shout, break things—but do something!’

  Vauguyon instilled an almost excessive piety into him. Louis-Auguste was good at his Latin, learnt to speak German, and memorized much history even if he had small power of analysing it. Geography was the chief joy of his studies—he drew maps to perfection. He also read English with surprising ease, especially English history. With his tutor’s help he translated Walpole’s essay on Richard III. The Civil War fascinated him—he said that had he been Charles I he would never have made war on his people. When he was ten Louis-Auguste wrote a book of reflections on his conversations with his tutor. There is a pathetic and revealing entry; ‘My greatest fault is my sluggishness of mind which makes all mental effort tiresome and painful for me; I am determined to overcome this fault …’ He was terrified when his father died; not only was he deeply upset but he dreaded his future responsibilities. In the two years left to her, his mother did her best to give him some confidence. A lady asked the earnest boy by what name he would like to go down to history: ‘I should like to be known as “Louis the Serious”,’ was the touching reply.

  The new Dauphin had his own printing press and produced a small book of Fénélon’s political and moral maxims, much to Louis XV’s irritation—he found the selection dan
gerously liberal and ordered his grandson to stop printing. However, Louis-Auguste had other pleasures—he was good with all tools and particularly interested in locks and machinery. Predictably, he loved hunting and was a crack shot, shooting until his face was black with powder.

  When he married Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin was a fat, clumsy youth—he had a pot belly by the time he was twenty—whose countenance, according to the Austrian ambassador, gave promise of ‘only a very limited intelligence, little comeliness and no sensitivity’. The Neapolitan Ambassador thought he ‘looked as if he had been brought up in the woods’. He could not dance, in an age when social accomplishments were everything. But Louis-Auguste’s appearance was deceptive. When, during his wedding celebrations, a stampede caused by exploding fireworks killed hundreds in the Place Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde) he sent his entire monthly allowance to the Lieutenant of Police, writing to the Lieutenant: ‘I have learnt of the misfortune which happened in Paris because of me and am deeply distressed. I have just received the sum which the King gives me each month for personal expenses; I have nothing else but send it to you. Help those most in need. I have, Monsieur, much esteem for you.’

  Indeed, in some ways the new monarch was a caricature of those much lamented paragons, his father the Dauphin and his great-grandfather the Duc de Bourgogne; he was certainly like them in being fat, pious and lethargic; and there was even a closer resemblance to that prototype of all fat Bourbons, the Grand Dauphin. Yet underneath the slack podgy face, the bone structure was surprisingly handsome; it appears in the profile on some early portrait medallions and in occasional drawings. The nose was unmistakably the great eagle’s beak of the Bourbons, the short-sighted eyes—he used a lorgnette—large, mournful and kindly. He had an unusually pleasing voice. Eventually, despite obesity and shyness, contemporaries would recognize a most regal dignity in Louis XVI. If he thought slowly and was slow to make up his mind, he was none the less intelligent enough in his own way, but he did not care to talk about his interests. His worst fault was that terrible lack of self-confidence.

  He was unfortunate in not having a wife who understood him, as Marie Joséphine had understood his father. At his wedding his grandfather had commented, characteristically, ‘Marriages are never happy, but occasionally they are pleasant; let us hope that this one will be so.’ Maria Antonia—Marie Antoinette—was one year younger than her husband and they had not a single taste in common. Despite the influence of that wonderful and delightful woman, her mother the Empress Maria Theresa, she had grown up shallow and superficial; a French tutor said that trying to teach her was almost impossible—‘she could only apply herself to what amused her.’ She was essentially Germanic (even though French was her first language and her father had once been Duke of Lorraine) possessing all the German vices and virtues, and being a bouncing, sentimental girl, who rode astride, noisy and aggressive, very like the heroine of a Mozart opera or a Viennese operetta. (As a child she had played harpsichord duets with Mozart.) An ash-blonde, ‘a head taller than all her ladies’, she had a high, slightly bulging forehead, the jutting, unsightly Habsburg lower lip, and big blue eyes. None the less, it was generally conceded that Marie Antoinette, if not exactly pretty, was sublimely attractive. Her complexion was exquisite, her skin translucent. Not only was she elegant in her every movement, but she had a noble, queenly air; a man who knew her said, ‘One would have offered her a throne without thinking, in the way one would offer any other woman a chair.’ At first the French adored her but, quite soon after Louis’s accession, the mood changed and many began to hate her. She was a kindly, warm-hearted person, cheerful and impetuous, but she was also tactless and arrogant. It may well have been her Germanic qualities which awoke aversion among Frenchmen.

  The new Queen’s character must have suffered from her physical relations—or the lack of them—with her husband. It is generally accepted that Louis suffered from phimosis—an irretractable foreskin—which made it impossible for him to accomplish the sexual act. He was so shy that it is likely that his wife attributed his lack of desire to sheer disinclination. To some extent she took refuge in pornography, reading erotic novels.

  Every mistake which the poor girl made was immediately reported to Vienna by the Imperial ambassador, Count Florimond de Mercy. This suave and cynical Lorrainer wrote with gloomy relish, but he was not a liar, as has recently been suggested. Both Maria Theresa and Joseph II were far too discerning to retain a dishonest ambassador for twenty years in the world’s most important capital.

  At first the new King and his Queen were wildly popular. He declared solemnly, ‘I want to be loved.’ He announced that he would forgo his joyeux avènement, a heavy tax which each monarch traditionally levied on his accession; similarly, Marie Antoinette relinquished her Ceinture de Reine—the ‘Queen’s Girdle’ tax which in times past had always accompanied the ‘joyful event’. She wrote to her mother how much she was touched by the demonstrative affection of the people in the streets. Porcelain medallions were made at Sèvres, bearing the optimistic legend Louis le Populaire. In June 1775 Louis was crowned and anointed at Rheims Cathedral by the Archbishop-Duke, who was assisted by nine archbishops and twenty other prelates. The service was so moving that Marie Antoinette was reduced to tears. But when the crown was placed reverently on his head the King complained that it hurt him—not a good omen. Next day he pardoned all the inmates of Rheims prison, after first touching for the Evil. Yet, despite his deep religious faith, Louis lacked the confidence of his grandfather in his authority, in his Divine Right.

  Louis XVI, by Duplessis

  Marie Antoinette and her children, by Mme Vigée-Lebrun

  Louis’s next step was even more popular than his relinquishment of the joyeux avènement. He recalled the aged Maurepas and sacked the Triumvirat. Maurepas was on the list of reliable men bequeathed to him by his father the Dauphin, and was furthermore recommended by Mme Adelaide as not being a Jansenist (like the far more capable Machault); the young King felt safe with old men. Maurepas, seventy-three years old but still vain and foppish, was intoxicated by the prospect of returning to Versailles and power, and his sole aim was to win applause. Accordingly, he supported Maupeou’s replacement as Chancellor by Miromesnil, who ended the Maupeou courts and brought back the Parlements.

  The King was none the less determined to be a reformer. He never forgot the advice given to him by his father on his deathbed. The Dauphin had told the clumsy, terrified boy that two strong reigns in succession were necessary, ‘one to root out the evils and the next to prevent their recurrence’. In fact, this fat, slow, gentle creature, infinitely well-intentioned, never had the slightest chance of success. Looking back, Barnave (a prominent figure during the Revolution) said that even in 1774 the Crown’s only hope of survival had been to become either a constitutional monarchy or else a military dictatorship. Louis possessed neither the imagination nor the character to bring about the former, while he was hardly equipped to be a French Frederick the Great.

  None the less, Louis did his best. To the delight of the intellectuals, he appointed as Controller-General the Baron Turgot de l’Aulne, a brilliant but charmless Philosophe in his forties, whose views were well known from his writings. He was a former Intendant of Limoges where his land register and new system of tax assessment—and tax collection—had made him thoroughly unpopular. The King nursed great hopes of this paragon. Maurepas had slyly filled Louis with horror at Terray’s exactions, implying that M Turgot would dispell the people’s discontent. Turgot himself possessed no such illusions; he wrote to the King, whom he naively cast in the rôle of Enlightened Despot, ‘I shall be feared and hated by most of the court and by everyone who sells or seeks for pensions.’ The new Controller-General was a difficult man, ill equipped to please. He announced that he intended to economize on expenditure, to do without borrowing more money. A French precursor of Adam Smith and Free Trade, who believed in a ‘natural wage scale’ and laisser faire, Turgot at once aba
ndoned Terray’s policy of attempting to regulate the grain and wine trades, abolishing many internal customs dues. He began to cut the tax-farmers’ profits and investigated ways of making the fiscal system reasonably efficient. He even managed to persuade Louis to slash pensions. All these new measures were explained to the people during Mass on Sundays in every parish church in France. Unfortunately most courtiers were not interested in reform—they depended on pensions for their own expensive existence.

  A much more popular new minister was Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, whom Louis put in charge of foreign affairs. In his mid-fifties, Vergennes was an experienced diplomat, a former ambassador to Sweden and Turkey, and very unlike Turgot—beautifully dressed, impassive-faced and with all the amiable and excessively reassuring manners of his kind. Like Choiseul before him, he hated England, but unlike Choiseul he also had little love for Austria. However, like the King, Vergennes loathed the idea of war and always hoped for peace, though his judgement was erratic. The future President of the United States of America, Mr Thomas Jefferson, when US ambassador to France, considered M de Vergennes a stimulating person ‘to do business with’, but incapable of understanding American institutions. ‘It is impossible to have a clearer, better organized head, but age has chilled his heart.’

  Perhaps the most interesting appointment was Malesherbes, also in his fifties, who was made minister in charge of the royal household, much to the Queen’s irritation. This amiable and distinguished Parlementaire was a former President of the Cour des Aides who had defended the Parlement against Louis XV; he was also a celebrated liberal and friend to the Philosophes, the man whose tolerance as official censor had made possible the publication of the Encyclopédie. He was a character of Johnsonian proportions; a jolly, untidy figure in an old, snuff-stained brown suit, his wig askew, perpetually sucking a pipe and gesturing with a thick stick, whose hobbies were literature and botany. A keen reformer, Malesherbes would have liked France to have been given a constitution on the English model, although—as he would one day prove with his life—he was a most faithful servant of the Crown. His popularity made him a valuable ally for Turgot.