Louis XV of France



King of France and Navarre (1715-1774)

byname The Well-Beloved

Born: February 15, 1710, Versailles, France Died: May 10, 1774, Versailles, France

The Great-grandson of King Louis XIV of France, Louis succeeded to the throne at the age of five. Until he attained his legal majority in February 1723, France was governed by a regent, Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, his grand-uncle. After the death of Orléans in December 1723, Louis XV appointed Louis-Henri, duc’d Bourbon, his cousin, as his first minister. Bishop (later cardinal) André-Hercule de Fleury, his tutor later replaced Bourbon as chief minister in 1726. Louis XV’s personal rule in France began at the death of his old tutor Fleury in 1743. The king’s policies were increasingly influenced by his mistresses. His ineffectual rule contributed to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.

Early Life and Family
Louis was born in the Palace of Versailles during the reign of his great-grandfather Louis XIV. His father, Louis duc de Bourgogne became the Dauphin at the death of his grandfather Louis, le Grand Dauphin in 1711. Louis' mother, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy was the eldest daughter of Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy and Anne-Marie d'Orléans. She is also the granddaughter of Philippe I, duc d'Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV, and was the second cousin of her husband.

Louis’ mother died of smallpox on February 12, 1712 when he is just almost two years old. His father died before the end of the week of the same disease. His elder brother, Louis duc de Bretagne, the new dauphin, died on March 8, 1712 making Louis the new heir to the throne. On September 1, 1715, Louis XIV died of gangrene, and Louis XV became king at the age of five

Reign
Unexpectedly surviving the death of most of the royal family between from 1711 to 1715, which saw the deaths of Louis XIV and the four following members of the line of succession, Louis XV enjoyed a favorable reputation at the beginning of his reign and earned the epithet "le Bien-Aimé" ("the Well-Beloved").

Regency of Orléans
Until Louis XV attained his legal majority in February 1723, France was governed by a regent, Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, son of Louis XIV’s younger brother. In search of support, Orléans favoured the aristocrats who had loss power during the reign of Louis XIV. In September 15, 1715, he established the polysynody, structure of councils that gave the aristocracy rights on participating in the government. In 1721, Orléans betrothed Louis XV to the infanta Mariana, daughter of King Philip V of Spain. The king left the duc d’ Orléans in charge of state affairs until his death in December 1723.

Ministry of duc de Bourbon
Following the advice of his tutor, André-Hercule de Fleury, Louis XV appointed his cousin, Louis Henri, duc de Bourbon, to replace Orléans. The king took no part in the decisions of the government under the duc de Bourbon. Bourbon cancelled the Spanish betrothal and married the king to Marie Leszczynska, daughter of the toppled king Stanislaw I of Poland. The ministry of the duc de Bourbon marked the creation of new taxes and high price of grain, which created troubles and economic depression. In 1726, King Louis XVI dismissed the unpopular duc de Bourbon and replaced him with his tutor, Cardinal de Fleury.

Ministry of Cardinal de Fleury
The Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury ruled France with the king’s proposal. He stabilized the French currency and managed to balance the budget in 1738. Fleury attempted to maintain the alliance with England and reestablished relations with Spain. In September 1729, Queen Marie Leszczynska finally gave birth to a son, the dauphin Louis-Ferdinand. The birth of a male heir dispelled the risks of a succession crisis and likely war with Spain that would have resulted.’

French troops overran Lorraine, and peace was restored in as early as 1735. By the Treaty of Vienna in November 1738, Louis’ father-in-law, Stanislaw was paid off for the loss of his Polish throne with the duchy of Lorraine, which would later pass to him. The elderly Cardinal de Fleury persuaded the king to enter the War of the Austrian Succession in 1741 on the side of Prussia. The war would last seven years. Fleury did not live to see the end of the war. After his death in January 1743, King Louis XV ruled without a first minister from then on.

Personal Reign
Louis isolated himself at court and occupied himself with a succession of mistresses, several of whom exercised considerable political influence. In September 1745 the king made Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour as his official mistress (maîtresse en titre), whose political influence lasted until her death in 1764. Despite the critics, the Marquise de Pompadour had an undeniable influence on the flourishing of French arts during the reign of Louis XV. She was also a prominent patron of architecture, being responsible for the building of the Place Louis XV (now called Place de la Concorde) and the École Militaire in Paris, both built by her protégé Ange-Jacques Gabriel.

Louis was not, however, a totally passive monarch. His desire to determine the course of international affairs through intrigue caused him to set up, about 1748, an elaborate system of secret diplomacy known as le Secret du roi ("the secret of the king").

Most government work was conducted in committees of ministers which met without the king. The king reviewed policy only in the High Council (Conseil d'en haut), which was composed of the king, the dauphin, the chancellor, the controller general of finances, and the secretary of state in charge of foreign affairs. Created by Louis XIV, the council was in charge of state policy regarding religion, diplomacy, and war.

During the reign of Louis’ great-grandfather, the privileged status of the aristocracy and the clergy had been suspended. But during the later years of his reign, an attempt was made to strengthen the declining authority of the nobility by withdrawing from the Parlements, the privilege of obstructing royal legislation. The judicial magistrates had later consolidated their position as opponents of the aristocracy by claiming to be defenders of the fundamental laws of the kingdom and by uniting the provincial Parlements in a close union with the Parlement of Paris.

The French people had forgiven Louis XV for his high taxes, his mistresses, and his lavish consumptions, as long as he was successful in wars. However, at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, Louis shocked his people and the rest of Europe by agreeing to restore all the territories conquered to Austria. Since that year, the king’s popularity  steadily declined. In 1756, the king entered another war, the Seven Year’s War, against France’s arch-enemy, Great Britain. It caused France to a devastating loss of nearly all of its colonial empire. Later in Louis’s reign, Corsica and Lorraine became territories of France but they were to be the last territorial expansions of France on Europe before the French Revolution.

Later Life
On January 5, 1737, an assassination attempt was done on King Louis XV by Robert Damiens. The assassin entered the Palace of Versailles, as did thousands of people every day to petition the king. When the king is about to return to the Trianon where he was staying, Damiens suddenly emerged from the dark, passed through the guards, and stabbed the king with a penknife. The king, who was bleeding, remained calm and was probably saved by the thick layers he wore on that cold day. The king, who had displayed calm and royal dignity on the day of the assassination attempt, sank into fundamental depression in the following weeks. He became convinced that he was on the wrong track. All his attempts at reforms were abandoned.

Death
Apart from this reform, Louis XV’s long reign had been marked by a decline in the crown’s moral and political authority. Louis XV died of smallpox at the Palace of Versailles. Louis' death saw the French monarchy at its lowest point, in political, financial and moral terms. Since Louis XV’s son, Louis-Ferdinand, had died nine years earlier, the throne passed to his grandson, Louis XVI destined to confront the French Revolution.