La Couronne du Sacre de Louis XV

The Bourbon Kings of France

Desmond Seward

Copyright © 2013, Desmond Seward

This edition first published in 2013 by:

Thistle Publishing

36 Great Smith Street

London

SW1P 3BU

CONTENTS

Copyright

Foreword: ‘That Ancient Loyalty’

Prologue: Princes of the Blood (1276–1589)

1   ‘That Man from Béarn’: Henri IV (1589–1610)

2   ‘That Idiot’: Louis XIII (1610–1643)

3   ‘The Love of Glory’: Louis XIV (1643–1715)

4   ‘The Well-Beloved’: Louis XV (1715–1774)

5   ‘The Suicide of France’: Louis XVI (1774–1793)

6   ‘The Child in the Temple’: Louis XVII (1793–1795)

7   ‘Tartuffe’: Louis XVIII (1795–1824)

8   ‘A Submissive Bigot’: Charles X (1824–1830)

9   The Third Restoration: Henri V (1830–1883)

Select Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

La Couronne du Sacre de Louis XV (1722)

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Henri IV in 1605

(Mansell Collection)

Louis XIII by Philippe de Champaigne

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Louis XIV and his heirs, attributed to Largillière

(Wallace Collection)

Louis XIV, wax bust by Benoist

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Louis XV by Quentin La Tour

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Jean Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, by Boucher, 1759

(Victoria and Albert Museum)

Louis XVI, by Duplessis

(Collection du Musée, Giraudon)

Marie Antoinette and her children, by Mme Vigée-Lebrun

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Louis XVII, by Kucharski

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Louis XVIII, by Gerard

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Charles X in robes of state, by Gerard

(Musées Nationaux, Paris)

Henri V, Comte de Chambord

(photograph, property of the author)

Comtesse de Chambord

(photograph, property of the author)

A genealogical tree appears at the beginning of each relevant chapter

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Hon John Jolliffe and Mrs Prudence Fay for their advice and helpful criticism. In addition, I am grateful to Mr Reresby Sitwell, the Hon Julian Guest, Mr Michael Thomas, Mr Hubert Witheford and Mr and Mrs Michael Dormer, who also gave me advice and encouragement, and above all to Mr Christopher Manning who read the typescript and the proofs. I have to acknowledge a special debt to Elisabeth, Viscountess Pollington for telling me of a seventeenth century English life of Louis XIII.

Once again, I must thank Mr Richard Bancroft of the British Museum Reading Room and the members of his staff for their courteous and patient assistance.

For

EILEEN SEWARD

‘Licentious or bigoted, noble or ignoble, there has seldom been a dull Bourbon. They were nearly all odd, original men of strong passions, unaccountable in their behaviour.’

Nancy Mitford

Foreword

‘THAT ANCIENT LOYALTY’

This is a study of the Kings who reigned over France from 1589 until 1830. Eight monarchs are involved: Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Louis XVII, Louis XVIII and Charles X; and also a pretender, Henri V.

Surprisingly, until now there has never been a straightforward narrative account of them written for the general reader, although there are many such studies of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Yet the Bourbons have been royal since 1548, when Antoine de Bourbon married the future Queen of Navarre. They have occupied the thrones of France and Navarre, of Spain, of the two Sicilies, of Parma and Piacenza, and of Lucca. Today there is again a Bourbon King in Spain, while a Bourbon Grand Duke reigns in Luxembourg. They are best known, however, as the mighty dynasty which once ruled France.

The Bourbons ruled their homeland for over two centuries, making it the greatest power in Europe, and taming and uniting a people who are arguably the most individualist and ungovernable in the world. The France of Louis XIV overawed even her most jealous neighbours, while the France of his successors, her predominance gone, charmed and inspired them by her civilization. The Bourbon Kings were the personification of both this grandeur and this seduction.

As Nancy Mitford said, there has seldom been a dull Bourbon. They emerge from a shadowy line of medieval princes of the blood—sons of St Louis but very far from the throne—with Henri IV. The founder of the dynasty, with his infectious gaiety and his sixty-four mistresses, is still a folk hero to the French, a mighty fighter and drinker. His enigmatic son Louis XIII was in complete contrast—lonely, morose and neurotic yet brilliantly successful in his partnership with Cardinal Richelieu. Louis XIV, the Grand Monarque with his ‘red heels and his golden snuff-box and his towering periwig’, was worshipped at Versailles almost as a living idol and was one of the strangest and most remarkable kings who ever lived. Louis XV remains the most baffling of all French monarchs, intensely secretive and solitary; to at least one historian he is the most evil man ever to sit on a throne, directly responsible for the French Revolution; to another a seriously underestimated ruler who, had he lived longer, might have saved the monarchy.

Louis XVI came nearest to being a dull Bourbon, though with a consort, Marie Antoinette, who more than compensated for any dullness. But during the Revolution even Louis XVI became a figure of compelling interest, with his refusal to save himself by shedding his people’s blood and then the martyrdom in which he was soon joined by his beautiful Queen. They were followed by their son, the pitiful Louis XVII who died in prison as a lonely, diseased little boy.

The Bourbons did not come to an end with the Revolution, but the Kings of the French Restoration are practically unknown to the general reader. Yet Louis XVIII, who gave France her first workable Parliamentary regime, is probably the most unappreciated of all French rulers. His brother, the charming but inept Charles X, who finally lost the throne, was also the King who commissioned six operas from Rossini, including William Tell, and refused to ban Victor Hugo’s Hernani. Nor is it generally realized that a hundred years ago it seemed not merely possible but inevitable that the French would restore the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Charles X’s grandson, Henri V; in the early 1870s both the President of France and the majority in the National Assembly were united in wishing to summon home the last member of the dynasty to be their King.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the French under the Ancien Régime: ‘Their feeling for the King was unlike that of any modern nation for its monarch, even the most absolute; indeed that ancient loyalty which was so thoroughly eradicated by the Revolution has become almost incomprehensible to the modern mind. The King’s subjects felt towards him both the natural love of children for their father and the awe properly due to God alone.’ The winning of that loyalty, the loss of it and the failure to regain it, are the theme of this book.

Prologue

PRINCES OF THE BLOOD (1276–1589)

In 1276 Robert, Count of Clermont, married Béatrix of Burgundy. Béatrix was a very great heiress indeed, her mother being the daughter of Archembault VIII, Lord of Bourbon and last of his line, who had died on Crusade in 1249. Although her mother was still alive and had married again, King Philippe III ordained that the lordship must pass to Béatrix. Bourbon I’Archembault (near Moulins in the modern département of Allier) took its name from some hot springs which the ancient Gauls had dedicated to the god Borvo. Since the ninth century its château had been the centre of a great seigneurie holding sway over a vast area of central France—the Bourbonnais. The descendants of Robert and Béatrix were to become the royal house of Bourbon.

Count Robert came of an even greater line than his wife. He was a Capetian, being the sixth son of King Louis IX, whose ancestor, Hugues Capet, Count of Paris, had seized the crown in 987 from the last Carolingians. Hugues took his name of Capet through being lay Abbot of Saint-Martin at Tours, where the cloak of the patron saint of France was venerated. As King, he was little more than feudal lord of about sixty dukes and counts, his effective realm reaching from just north of Paris to just south of Orleans. But with Philippe Auguste, who ascended the throne in 1180, the Capetian kings began to make real their authority. Louis IX (1226–70), who was Count Robert’s father, inherited a realm which stretched from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. This crowned monk, who washed the feet of the poor and kissed lepers, was a strong, practical ruler. Unfortunately he was so much a product of his age as to lead two disastrous Crusades, to Syria and to North Africa, dying on the second; he was canonized in 1297. St Louis, who made the monarchy almost sacred, was always present for his successors in the Sainte-Chapelle—which he built to house the Crown of Thorns—and in a charming life written by his friend, the Sieur of Joinville. (Of his reign, Joinville wrote, ‘The throne shone like the sun which sheds its rays far and wide’.) Until the end, Fils de Saint Louis remained one of the proudest titles of a king of France.

Louis arranged rich marriages for all his sons. However when Robert of Clermont entered into the Bourbon inheritance in 1283, he was unable to take much pleasure in it. Five years before, during a tournament, Robert had received a blow on the head which rendered him permanently insane. He lived in quiet retirement until his death in 1318 at the age of sixty-two. He was succeeded by his son, and in 1327 King Charles IV made the Seigneurie of Bourbon into a Duchy.

When Charles died in 1328 the main line of the Capetians came to an end. However, it was (and is) almost impossible for the Capetian dynasty to fail, because of a provision in the Salic Law of the ancient Franks which forbids inheritance in the female line. Philippe of Valois, Charles IV’s cousin, ascended the throne as Philippe VI. In 1346 he led his chivalry to disaster at Crécy, His one achievement was to purchase Vienne: the Counts of Vienne had styled themselves Dauphin (from the dolphin in their coat of arms), and from 1349 until 1830 the eldest son of the King of France was known as the Dauphin. Splendid and unlucky, Philippe personified the house which was to rule France for the next two centuries.

The Counts of Vendôme, who descended from a younger grandson of Robert de Clermont, were only distant cousins of the Valois, yet they were destined to inherit the throne as well as the Duchy of Bourbon. Charles, Comte de Vendôme, born in 1489, became one of the greatest lords in the kingdom, being made a Duke and Peer in his own right and Grand Huntsman of France. He played an important part in public life throughout the reign of François (1515–47): he performed the duties of the Count of Flanders at the King’s Coronation, and in 1517 was one of three Princes who held the crown over the Queen’s head at her coronation. The chroniclers give glimpses of the new Duke, gorgeously appareled, jousting at the Field of Cloth of Gold. In 1521 he commanded the rearguard of the royal army during the King’s campaign in Flanders; the year after, as the King’s Lieutenant in Picardy, he conducted his own energetic campaign against the Imperial troops. However, in 1523 after the conspiracy of his cousin, the Constable de Bourbon, he was relieved of his command. Vendôme vindicated himself when King François was a prisoner in Spain, serving faithfully as President of the Council; he dismissed some Councillors of the Paris Parlement who had urged him to seize power, with the words ‘Obey the King!’ After the Constable’s death, François rewarded Vendôme by recognizing him as first Prince of the Blood and head of the House of Bourbon. In his latter years the Duke seems to have spent most of his time away from court, devoting himself to his thirteen children. He had married Françoise d’Alençon, sister of the King’s brother-in-law.

Vendôme died in 1547, aged forty-seven, and was succeeded by his son, Antoine de Bourbon. The Abbé de Brantôme remembered him: ‘He was high-born, brave and valiant—men of the Bourbon race are never otherwise—and of a most handsome appearance (well-built, and much taller than my lords his brothers) and altogether regal in manner, very fine and eloquent in his speech’. But for all his courage and charm, Antoine was wildly unstable, to the point of insanity.

In 1548, when he was thirty, Antoine married Jeanne d’Albret, daughter of King Henri d’Albret of Navarre and Marguerite d’Angoulême, sister of François I. Her father died in 1555 and, as Jeanne III, she inherited Navarre. This ancient Kingdom had been reduced to a little strip of territory north of the Pyrenees—since 1512 most of the realm, on the far side of the mountains, had been occupied by the Spaniards. King Consort of this minute state, Antoine ranked as a European sovereign; the title, King of Navarre, was to be born by the Bourbons until 1830. As Jeanne’s husband, Antoine was also lord of the d’Albret lands, a vast area of south-western France which included Béarn, Foix and Armagnac. He was the greatest magnate in France. But he was not satisfied, and dreamt feverishly of recovering his wife’s lost domains.

After Henri II’s death in a tournament in 1559, the French magnates saw the regency of his widow, Catherine de Medici, as an opportunity for a feudal revival. In his capacity of Governor of Guyenne, Antoine at once tried to recover southern Navarre, in a notably foolhardy and unsuccessful expedition. But there were prizes to be won at home. Calvinism, with its aggressive ideology and para-military organization—each church had a captain as well as a minister—was sweeping France. Great nobles exploited the Reformation in the way they had the Hundred Years War. At the end of 1559 King Antoine adopted the Calvinist faith, Queen Jeanne already being an enthusiastic convert who corresponded with Calvin himself. However, Antoine’s notorious fondness for loose women soon earned him a rebuke from the great Reformer. His marriage had begun as a love match; later Jeanne referred sadly to his many infidelities as ‘a sharp thorn, not in my foot but in my heart’. In 1561 Antoine returned to the Roman Church: as Lieutenant-General he held the greatest office in the realm and was subordinate only to the Regent, Catherine de Medici.

The first War of Religion had now broken out. In October 1562, Antoine directed the siege of Rouen which was held by the Huguenots. He behaved with crazy bravado, dining in the trenches. Eventually he was shot while relieving himself in full view of the enemy. Mortally wounded, King Antoine expired a month later, in the arms of his latest mistress, having become a convert to Lutheranism on his deathbed. This futile weathercock can never have suspected that his only son was to become King of France and found a new dynasty.

‘That Man from Béarn’

HENRI IV (1589–1610)

_____________

‘I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist’

Henri IV is certainly the most colourful of French Kings. The Vert Galant killed mountain bears with a knife, fought on foot with a pike at the head of his men, ate and drank enough for ten, had sixty-four mistresses, and wished every peasant to have a chicken in the pot on Sundays. At first sight this laughing, swaggering little hero seems quite different from the Bourbons who followed him. In fact he bequeathed a surprising number of his qualities to his descendants.

Henri of Navarre was born at Pau in Béarn, on 13 December 1553. At his christening the Navarrese King, Henri d’Albret, rubbed his grandson’s lips with garlic and made him sip some wine. He enjoyed it and the old King, laughing, said, ‘You’re going to be a real Béarnais!’ Philip II always referred to Henri as ‘That Man from Béarn’. The baby was taken to a remote castle in the Pyrenees where he grew up with the local peasant children on a diet of bread, cheese and garlic, running barefoot in the mountains. He kept his southern accent—and his common touch—throughout his life. Of all the Kings of France he was the only Southerner.

His mother brought him up in the faith of Geneva. When, in 1561, Henri was taken to Paris on his father’s orders and given a Catholic tutor, he refused to go to Mass. After his father’s death, Jeanne reinstated the Protestant tutor; by the time he was ten Henri had changed his religion twice. He remained in Paris, attending classes at the Collège de Navarre. Eventually he was able to speak as well as write Latin and Greek with some fluency; he also acquired a knowledge of Spanish and Italian. In addition he learnt to write very beautiful French (Proust credits the Duchesse de Guermantes with writing ‘le français exquis de Henri IV’.) In 1567 he rejoined his mother and his sister Catherine at Pau. His education continued, including no doubt instruction in fencing and the military arts. Relaxations were tennis—there was a magnificent court at Pau—swimming, hawking and, above all, hunting, which was one of the great passions of his life. He also learnt to dance, though, so his earliest biographer informs us, ‘with more spirit than grace’.

The First War of Religion had come to an end in 1563 but the Second broke out in 1567, to be followed by the Third in 1568. There were between half a million and a million Huguenots in France, including a large number of experienced soldiers. But the vast majority of Frenchmen were Papists and when the Counter-Reformation began, a new, fanatical Catholicism came into fashion. Apart from a few rare eccentrics who were known as the Politiques, most people thought that the only solution was conversion or extermination.

The situation was made worse by the lack of any proper royal authority. From 1559 until 1589 France had inadequate Kings—François II (the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots), Charles IX and Henri III. These three decadent sons of Henri II left the government of the realm to their mother, Catherine de Medici, whose intrigues earned her a sinister name. Years later, when she and her brood were dead, Henri had some kind words: ‘I ask you, what could she have done, poor woman, left at her husband’s death with five small children and two families in France—ours and the Guises—who hoped to get the Crown for themselves? Wasn’t it necessary for her to play some strange games, to deceive everybody, in order to protect her sons who reigned only because of her cunning? You may say she did harm to France—the marvel is she didn’t do worse!’

When the Third War of Religion broke out, King Charles threatened to invade Béarn, and Queen Jeanne and her two children had to take refuge at La Rochelle. Jeanne’s brother-in-law, Louis, Prince de Condé, commanded the Huguenot army; in March 1569 he was taken prisoner at Jarnac and shot. Although Condé’s real successor was the Admiral de Coligny, the Huguenots hailed Henri as their champion; the fifteen-year-old boy and his mother were presented to the Protestant host who cheered them heartily. However, in 1570, when both sides had fought each other to a standstill, the Huguenots’ right of public worship was restored, in a settlement guaranteed by four places de sûreté—towns with Huguenot garrisons.

Later, as a further guarantee, a marriage was arranged between Henri and the King’s sister, Marguerite de Valois. Queen Jeanne died in June 1572, before it could take place (probably of tuberculosis, though it was rumoured that she had been poisoned by Catherine de Medici’s perfumer, with gloves whose scent entered the brain).

Everyone believed that the marriage would bring peace and the great nobles of the realm, Protestant and Catholic, assembled in the capital. Henri’s bride, Marguerite de Valois, was nineteen. Brantôme wrote, ‘If in all the world there has ever been anyone perfect in beauty, it is the Queen of Navarre … and I think that all women who were, who are and who shall be are ugly next to her.’ Portraits are less flattering. None the less, ‘Margot’ danced exquisitely, spoke Greek with astonishing fluency and was an excellent theologian. She was also a byword for promiscuity. The couple did not take to each other. On 18 August they were married at Nôtre-Dame, Marguerite wearing a royal crown and an ermine cape, with a long train of royal blue borne by three princesses. The marriage was the prelude to one of the most ghastly crimes in European history.

During the wedding, Catherine de Medici was deeply distracted by matters of state. Admiral de Coligny had persuaded Charles IX to attack Spain, a war which could only be disastrous. Catherine was in despair; Catholic nobles urged the Queen to agree to Coligny’s assassination; reluctantly she yielded. The Guises, who had a father’s murder to avenge, arranged the details. On 22 August one of their henchmen shot at the Admiral from a window, but only wounded him. The Huguenots were enraged. Catherine, terrified, accepted that a general massacre was the only solution. After much browbeating, King Charles, unbalanced at the best of times, agreed, screaming, ‘Kill them all’. It was the eve of the feast of St Bartholomew.

Before dawn on Sunday 24 August 1572, the Duc de Guise’s swordsmen broke into Coligny’s bedroom. He was skewered with a pike, then his corpse was thrown out of the window to be hanged by its heels from the public gibbet. The tocsin sounded and the Paris mob was unleashed. Neither children nor pregnant women were spared—whole families had their throats cut. The Louvre was turned into a slaughterhouse, its floors and staircases strewn with dead or dying Protestants. Henri and his cousin Condé were spared only because of their royal blood; they passed a terrifying night listening to the screams of their friends. The butchery continued for several days, at least 4,000 dying in Paris. Similar massacres took place in the provinces, 10,000 more Huguenots being killed by the end of September. But their strongholds held out and the Catholic ‘final solution’ merely precipitated the Fourth War of Religion.

Henri was forced to change his faith for a third time. He remained a prisoner at court for nearly four years. During this time he played the part of a simple, self-indulgent squire, hunting and whoring. Among those of other mistresses, he enjoyed the favours of Charlotte de Sauve, a beautiful blonde whom the Queen Mother had ordered to spy on him.

In 1575 a Venetian diplomat wrote a detailed description of the young King of Navarre. Henri was ‘of medium height but very well built, with no beard as yet, brown skinned, and zestful and lively as his mother was; he is pleasant, affable and friendly in manner, and generous too, so people say. He is obsessed by hunting in which he spends all his time.’

In May 1574 Charles IX died in agony, of pulmonary tuberculosis—blood vessels burst all over his body. He was succeeded by his brother, Henri III, who for a few months had been a reluctant King of Poland. The last Valois monarch was an extraordinary figure; intelligent, cultivated and brave, he was also a homosexual and a religious maniac—transvestist orgies alternated with flagellant processions. This epicene psychopath surrounded himself with catamite ‘mignons’ whose shrill quarrels often ended in lethal duels. On the whole he left government to his adored mother.

Two attempts at escape by the King of Navarre failed. A third scheme, in February 1576, was more carefully planned, but at the end of a day’s hunting near Saint-Germain, news came to Henri that he had again been betrayed. Changing his plans, he galloped into the forest with only a few friends, though it was a freezing winter’s night. They hardly drew rein for three weeks, until they reached Protestant Saumur and safety.

In May 1576 Henri III made peace with the Huguenots of the ‘Calvinist Union’. They were given freedom of worship everywhere save Paris. A popular reaction saw the foundation of the ‘Catholic League’; La Ligue mobilized the Faithful by parishes just as the Huguenots were by presbyteries. Between these two armed camps France sank into bloody anarchy.

Henri of Navarre, now the acknowledged leader of the Huguenots, ruled almost all south-western France. However, he seldom ruled it in peace, for there were five more ‘wars of religion’. His armies were the Protestant lords and squirearchy on horseback. Until the fall of La Rochelle in 1628 these ‘razats’ rode out to do battle for the soul of France, their cropped heads and Biblical speech (the ‘patois of Canaan’) anticipating the Roundheads of the English Civil War.

Henri held his court mainly at Nérac in Armagnac—the setting of Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘a park with a palace in it’. According to that dour Puritan, Agrippa d’Aubigné, the entire Huguenot court gave itself up to the pleasures of love. Henri could hardly be expected to remain content with one mistress. Mlle d’Ayelle, a Cypriot refugee, was succeeded by Mlle de Rebours and then by Xainte, one of Margot’s women of the bedchamber. There were also tales of a girl who starved herself and her baby to death because of Henri’s desertion, of another unreasonable lady who threw herself out of a window, and of a baker’s daughter who drowned herself. In addition there was a charcoal burner’s wife, and his groom’s doxy whom he surprised in the stable (and who gave him a mild dose of gonorrhoea). Undoubtedly there was a pathological element in his insatiable sexuality. His chief passion at Nérac, Françoise de Montmorency-Fosseuse, was only fourteen when she became his mistress in 1579, and the honour went to her head when she found herself with child. But her baby died. In 1583 Marguerite left Henri for good.

By now Henri was fully mature, a stocky, jaunty little man with a fan-shaped black beard, upturned moustaches, hair en brosse and a tanned face with a great hooked nose and an invariable grin. His clothes were stained and shabby, he spoke broad Gascon and swore horribly, and he looked altogether more like a common soldier than a King. Ebullient, mercurial, laughing or weeping as the mood took him, he joked unceasingly, relying on charm rather than majesty. During the unending cavalry raids and sieges which occupied this period of his life, he developed remarkable powers of leadership. Yet in some ways he had inherited the lack of balance of his father, King Antoine. His moods of melancholy were so extreme as to be pathological; he may well have been a manic depressive.

In January 1583 Henri at last met a woman worthy of him—Diane de Gramont, Comtesse de Guiche, known to history as ‘la grande Corisande’. A widow, she was twenty-six years old, a brunette with black eyes and a high forehead. Her friend, Montaigne, said there were few ladies in France who were a better judge of poetry. Corisande gave Henri intellectual as well as physical companionship. To her he wrote his most delightful letters, written as André Maurois says ‘with a mixture of country warmth and Gascon poetry’. Sometimes he describes the landscape and the birds, sometimes he descends to the price of fish. He sent her passionate messages, ‘loving nothing in the world so much as you … my soul, I kiss a million times those beautiful eyes which all my life I shall hold dearer than anything else in the world … I will live as your faithful slave. Good-night my soul.’ He also wrote revealingly of his savage melancholia: ‘all the Gehennas where a spirit can go are busy with mine’, or ‘until the tomb which is nearer than perhaps I realize’. He was incapable of being faithful, despite assurances that ‘believe me, my fidelity is pure and stainless—there was never its like’. Corisande can hardly have relished his sorrow at losing little Gédéon, his son by Esther Imbert (daughter of a Protestant pastor)—‘Think what it would have been like had he been legitimate.’ With his letters he sent gifts—bird’s feathers, fawns and wild boar piglets. The sheer number of his letters to Corisande shows how often he was away on campaign.

On 27 October 1587, at Coutras, Henri was forced to give battle to a greatly superior Catholic army. Henri III’s favourite, Anne, Duc de Joyeuse, had 2,500 horse and 5,000 foot—the Huguenots numbered 2,000 horse and 4,000 foot. Navarre with a river at his back could not retreat. The two armies made a strange contrast; the Catholics in gilded armour and nodding plumes; the crop-headed Huguenots in leather jerkins and plain steel. Joyeuse launched a headlong frontal attack, his glittering cavalry only two deep. Henri had mixed musketeers with his cavalry and sited his three cannon where they could do most damage. The enemy were mown down, then three Huguenot squadrons, each six deep, rolled them back. Henri, with his white plume and white scarf, led one squadron—his sword was red with blood. His followers were not so merciful; 5,000 Catholics were slain, including Joyeuse himself. The victory cost Henri only forty casualties.

He at once galloped off to present Corisande with the captured standards, disappearing for three weeks. He then informed his horrified followers that he had promised to marry her. Fortunately his gentleman-in-waiting, Agrippa d’Aubigné, made him realize that such a match would destroy any chance of inheriting the throne. Henri agreed not to see Corisande for two years. In the event he never saw her again. It was one of the very few occasions when Henri brought himself to resist a mistress.

After losing his army at Coutras, Henri III was at the mercy of the Catholic League. The Seize, a junta of fanatic Catholic bourgeois, controlled Paris. Against the King’s express orders, Henri, Duc de Guise, made a triumphant entry into Paris in May 1588. The Duke was the hero of the Catholic mob—among the League it was openly argued that he would make a better King than the Valois, that he had a better right to the throne by virtue of his descent from Charlemagne. Henri III fled to Blois. He saw only one solution: at dawn on 23 December 1583, Henri de Guise was stabbed to death in the royal bedchamber, by the King’s personal bodyguard, the Forty-five; the following day his brother, the Cardinal de Guise, was hacked to death by halberdiers. The League reacted with fury, mobs howling for revenge. King Henri discovered that he had alienated the greater part of his subjects and now ruled only a few towns in the Loire valley.

Inevitably he turned to his cousin of Navarre. They joined forces, after a public reconciliation and soon controlled the entire area between the Loire and the Seine. On 30 July they besieged Paris, with an army of 40,000 men. But on 1 August a Dominican friar, Jacques Clément, obtained an audience of the King and then stabbed him in the stomach, with a knife which he had concealed in his sleeve. The wound did not at first seem mortal. However, the King died during the night, after ordering his followers to take an oath of allegiance to Henri of Navarre.

Henri was King of France, but only in name. Most of the country was ruled by warlords, and everywhere the nobles robbed the bourgeois and harried the peasants, while the countryside swarmed with bandits. The League proclaimed as king Henri’s uncle, the aged Cardinal de Bourbon, and struck coins in the name of ‘Charles X’; but their real champion was the Duc de Mayenne (Guise’s brother) who secretly hoped for the throne. A mere sixth of France supported Henri. His army dwindled every day—not many Catholics would fight for a heretic King who had been excommunicated. His only chance was to be a Politique, to appeal to those who preferred peace to religious war. Some years before, he had written to a friend, ‘those who follow their conscience belong to my religion—my religion is that of everyone who is brave and true.’ But while the Baron de Givry might fling himself at Henri’s feet, crying, ‘You are the King for real men—only cowards will desert you’, there were not many men like Givry.

Meanwhile, Henri withdrew to Normandy with 7,000 troops, from where he could control the districts on which Paris depended for food, setting up his headquarters at Dieppe. Here he could obtain supplies and munitions from England. Mayenne pursued him, with 33,000 men. The odds were nearly five to one, and Henri’s staff advised him to sail for England. Instead the King prepared an impregnable position. The road from Paris approached Dieppe through a marshy gap between two hills—on one side was the castle of Arques, on the other earthworks and trenches. Henri placed his arquebusiers and Swiss pikemen in the trenches and drew up his cavalry behind them; heavy cuirassiers armed with pistols but accustomed to charging home with the sword.

The Catholic cavalry were old-fashioned lancers who charged in widely spaced lines. Their commander, the Duc de Mayenne, was a strange figure, enormously fat, too fond of food and wine, gouty and tortured by venereal disease, who passed his days in a sluggish torpor, frequently retiring to bed. His staff were as idle and unbusinesslike as their commander. None the less, he lacked neither ambition nor courage.

The morning of 21 September 1589 was misty. When Mayenne attacked the trenches in the Arques defile, the mist prevented the castle’s guns from firing. The Catholic pikemen overran Henri’s first line of trenches and the Catholic cavalry attacked on both flanks. When his front was on the point of disintegrating, Henri galloped up, shouting ‘Are there not fifty noblemen of France who will come and die with their King?’ His cavalry held the enemy—the Royalist foot rallied. Then the mist lifted and the castle batteries opened fire. The Leaguers withdrew hastily and Henri retook all the lost ground. Mayenne realized that he was facing a most formidable general. Some days later, news came that reinforcements were on their way to Henri—more Huguenot troops and an English expeditionary force. After another halfhearted engagement, the Duke withdrew.

Having taken the measure of his opponent, Henri was anxious to bring him to battle again. As bait he laid siege to Dreux. Mayenne advanced to its relief with 15,000 foot and 4,000 horse, and on 14 March 1590 engaged the King at Ivry. Henri had 8,000 infantry and 3,000 cuirassiers. A white plume in his helmet and a white scarf round his armour, he prayed before his troops—then he told them that, whatever happened, they must follow his white scarf. In the centre, he led his cuirassiers to crash into Mayenne’s lancers, through whom they hacked and pistolled their way. All along the line the Royalists hurled back the enemy cavalry until they disintegrated, fleeing, abandoning their infantry to be shot down by Henri’s arquebusiers. In his flight, Mayenne ordered the bridge at Ivry to be broken down behind him, cutting off many of his men from any hope of escape. The King ordered his exultant followers to spare Frenchmen but to give foreigners no quarter. Three thousand Leaguer foot and 800 cavalry died—nearly a hundred standards were taken.

In May he besieged Paris with 15,000 men, but the capital remained fanatically Catholic—even monks and friars took up arms. Rather than shed Parisian blood, Henri decided to starve the city into submission. (He is said to have passed his time debauching two young nuns, whom he afterwards made abbesses.) By July Paris was starving, horribly. There were cases of cannibalism—children were chased through the streets. People ate dead dogs, even the skins of dogs, together with rats and garbage. Some made flour from bones; those who ate it died. Thirteen thousand perished of hunger. At midnight on 27 July the King launched a general assault on the suburbs, but it was beaten back; despite its sufferings, Leaguer Paris was not prepared to surrender to a heretic King. Early in September it was relieved by the Duke of Parma, who ferried food across the Seine to the stricken city. Disconsolately the King withdrew, to winter in northern France. Many Royalist squires rode home.

It was in these gloomy days that Henri met Gabrielle d’Estrées. She was seventeen (Henri was thirty-seven), the daughter of a Picard nobleman, a plump, round-faced pink and white blonde who liked to dress in green. Gabrielle already had a lover, the sallow-faced Duc de Bellegarde (known as feuille morte—dead leaf). Rivalry drove the King into a frenzy. He showered letters on his ‘belle ange’—‘My beautiful love, you are indeed to be admired, yet why should I praise you? Triumph at knowing how much I love you makes you unfaithful. Those fine words—spoken so sweetly by the side of your bed, on Tuesday when night was falling—have shattered all my illusions! Yet sorrow at leaving you so tore my heart that all night long I thought I would die—I am still in pain.’ He wrote a poem, Charmante Gabrielle, and had it set to music. Eventually the affair went more smoothly. In the autumn of 1593 Gabrielle found herself enceinte with the King’s child, the future Duc de Vendôme.

Meanwhile, after the setback at Paris, Henri’s star had begun to rise again. In the summer of 1591 he was reinforced by English troops. For a time these were commanded by Queen Elizabeth’s young favourite, the Earl of Essex, to whom Henri showed himself especially amiable. Sometimes relations were strained: Sir Roger Williams, being rebuked for his men’s slow marching pace, snapped back that their ancestors had conquered France at that same pace. Even so, many Englishmen took a strong liking to Henri IV. In 1591 Sir Henry Unton, the English ambassador, wrote of him: ‘He is a most noble, brave King, of great patience and magnanimity; not ceremonious, affable, familiar, and only followed for his true valour.’

Sully tells us that Henri’s life on campaign was so exhausting that sometimes the King slept in his boots. Unton grumbled, ‘we never rest, but are on horseback almost night and day.’ None the less, Henri continued to hunt whenever possible.

The League was splitting into many factions. The Cardinal King, ‘Charles X’ had died in 1590, since when they had been unable to agree upon even a nominal candidate for the throne. The most formidable Catholic contender was the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain—Guise, son of the murdered Duke, was to be her consort.

In November 1591 the Royalists beseiged Rouen. Henri, hearing that Parma was on his way to its rescue, galloped off with 7,000 cavalry to stop him. On 3 February 1592, at Aumâle, he unexpectedly made contact with the Spaniards and had to beat a hasty retreat after being wounded by a bullet in the loins; he was carried in a litter for several days. Unton commented gloomily, ‘We all wish he were less valiant.’ Parma relieved Rouen in April. However, he and Mayenne were trapped by Henri at Yvetot. When all seemed lost for them, Parma—who had been wounded—rose from his bed and evacuated his troops over the Seine by night. This great general then returned to the Low Countries where he died at the end of the year, his wound proving mortal.

One must admit that Henri IV lacked calibre as a soldier, compared with Parma. Though capable of fighting a defensive battle, as at Arques, the King was primarily a cavalry man—all his victories were won by the charge. His instincts as a captain of horse always came before his duty as a commander.

During 1592 Henri, the League and Philip II accepted a stalemate. The Tiers Parti, a combination of Politiques and moderate Leaguers, now asserted itself. Their solution was that Henri should turn Catholic. More and more Huguenots were willing to settle for a Politique monarchy—many urged the King to let himself be converted. After carefully counting his followers’ reactions, Henri, in white satin from head to foot, was received into the Roman fold at Saint-Denis, on 23 July 1593. This conversion has too often been seen as an act of cynical statesmanship, summed up in the phrase ‘Paris vaut bien une messe’ (there is no proof that he ever said it). In fact Henri wept over the gravity of the step. Since childhood his personal beliefs had been fought over by the kingdom’s most persuasive theologians, and he must have become hopelessly confused. Within a fortnight, towns all over France were declaring for Henri, and on 25 February 1594 he was crowned King in Chartres Cathedral. The impact upon France was extraordinary—Henri’s putting on the Crown was accepted as both sacramental confirmation and seal of legality.

On 18 March Henri entered Paris, sold to him by its governor, the Comte de Cossé-Brissac. The same afternoon the Spanish troops marched out of Paris. Henri watched them, saying, ‘My compliments to your King—go away and don’t come back.’

The warlords still controlled most of France—Mayenne Burgundy, Joyeuse the upper Languedoc, Nemours the Lyonnais, Epernon Provence, and Mercoeur Brittany. But the bourgeoisie rallied to Henri. Town after town rebelled against the magnates; at Dijon, led by their mayor, armed citizens overcame Mayenne’s troops and handed the town over to the Royalists.

Paris was still dangerous. Early in 1595, a young scholar, Jean Chastel, attacked Henri with a knife. Always agile, Henri recoiled so quickly that he escaped with only a cleft lip and a broken tooth.

At the beginning of 1595 Henri formally declared war on Spain. He had not done so before, to avoid the onslaught of Philip II’s full military might, which was still directed against the Dutch. Soon the Spaniards were invading France on five fronts. In June Henri, operating in Burgundy, nearly lost his life in a cavalry skirmish at Fontenay-le-Français. With a small force of cavalry he found himself surrounded by the entire Spanish army. An enemy trooper slashed at him and was shot down only just in time by one of Henri’s gentlemen. Luckily, reinforcements came up and the Spaniards withdrew. Henri wrote to his sister Catherine, ‘You were very near becoming my heiress.’

In September 1595 Clement VIII at last agreed to give Henri absolution (officially he was still excommunicated). Six days later Mayenne negotiated a truce with Henri; in return for his submission he received three million livres and the governship of the Ile de France. Soon, of the warlords, the Duc de Mercoeur in Brittany alone remained. Elsewhere every important French city had recognized Henry IV by the summer of 1596.

But Philip II continued the war implacably. Henri was desperate for money: in April 1596 he wrote to Rosny (the future Duc de Sully) that he had not a horse on which to fight nor a suit of armour. ‘My shirts are all torn, my doublets out at elbow, my saucepan often empty. For two days I have been eating where I can—my quartermasters say they have nothing to serve at my table.’ The King summoned the old feudal Assemblée de Notables to meet at Rouen in October 1596—nineteen from the nobility, nine from the clergy and fifty-two from the bourgeoisie. He invited them to share the task of saving France, in a tactful and flattering speech, and the necessary supplies were voted. Even so the war was far from won. In 1597 Amiens, capital of Picardy, was captured by the Spaniards. It was a severe loss, as not only was the town the centre of Franco-Flemish trade, but also a supply depot filled with munitions. Henri in person led an army to recapture it. ‘I will have that town back or die,’ he promised. ‘I have been King of France long enough—I must become King of Navarre again.’

During his siege of Amiens, Henri reorganized the army. He placed the three veteran corps of Picardy, Champagne and Navarre (also known as Gascony) on a permanent basis, together with that of Piedmont and new regiments from the northern provinces, each of 1,200 picked musketeers and pikemen. There were also the Royal Guards and the various regiments of mercenaries, Swiss and German. His 4,000 Gendarmes d’Ordonnance provided the heavy cavalry.

Amiens surrendered on 25 September. Elsewhere the Spaniards were failing. The Dutch, still fighting the Spanish, were increasingly successful. Another Spanish Armada, destined for Ireland, was destroyed by storms. In March even Mercoeur surrendered. King Philip, in failing health, despaired and, on 2 May 1598 a treaty was signed at Vervins, by which France retained the frontiers of 1559 and regained any towns occupied by the Spaniards. (Queen Elizabeth of England was so furious that she called Henri the Anti-Christ of ingratitude.)

Henri had also taken steps to ensure peace at home. The Edict of Nantes, promulgated in April 1598, gave the Huguenots liberty of conscience and guaranteed their safety with 200 fortified towns maintained at the Crown’s expense, though defended by their own Protestant garrisons. The Edict was not quite the triumph of common sense over bigotry that it seems to modern eyes. In reality it was little more than an armed truce. Protestant France could muster 25,000 troops led by 3,500 noblemen who constituted an experienced and highly professional officer corps. An English observer, Sir Robert Dallington, noted: ‘But as for warring any longer for religion, the Frenchman utterly disclaims it; he is at last grown wise—marry, he hath bought it somewhat dear!’ France could simply not afford another civil war. Even so Henri had to bully the Parlements into registering the Edict.

Henri IV was now undisputed King of a France which was at peace for the first time for nearly half a century. At last he was able to enjoy Paris. He acquired new friends, like the fabulously rich tax farmer, Sebastien Zamet, an Italian from Lucca, who had begun his career as Catherine de Medici’s shoemaker and then made his fortune as court money-lender. The King often dined and gambled or gave little supper parties for his mistresses in Zamet’s hôtel in the Marais. Gabrielle became a familiar figure in the capital. She accompanied the King everywhere; they rode together hand in hand, she riding astride like a man, resplendent in her favourite green, her golden hair studded with diamonds; she presided over the court like a Queen. As tactful and kindly in manners as she was warm-hearted and generous by nature, Gabrielle had the miraculous gift of making no enemies. She had born Henri several children, notably César whom the King made Duc de Vendôme. Gabrielle was given increasingly greater rank, eventually becoming a Peeress of France. Henri’s love deepened every day. Eventually he decided to marry her. In token of betrothal he gave her his coronation ring, a great square-cut diamond.

Henri left her briefly in April 1598, when she was again big with child. Her labour began on Maundy Thursday, accompanied by convulsions. On Good Friday, her stillborn child was cut out of her; she suffered such agony that her face turned black. She died the following day, of puerperal fever. Henri buried her with the obsequies of a Queen of France—for a week he wore black, and then the violet of half-mourning. He wrote to his sister, ‘The roots of love are dead within me and will never revive.’

Perhaps fortunately for his sanity, he was soon busy with Savoy. Its Duke, Charles Emmanuel, who dreamt of restoring the ancient Kingdom of Arles, delayed the surrender of Saluzzo and intrigued with Henri’s courtiers; there was even a plot to poison the King. In late 1600 Henri invaded the Duchy. Snow made it a difficult campaign and Henri complained of the hardship—‘France owes a lot to me, for what I suffer on her behalf.’ By the peace of Lyons, signed in January 1601, Henri gained Savoyard territories on the Rhône which all but blocked communications between the Spanish Netherlands and Spain’s possessions in northern Italy. It was the end of Henri’s career as a soldier. Few monarchs have handled a pike or pistolled their way through a cavalry mêlée with such gusto.

He now had the task of rebuilding his ruined kingdom, a land of deserted villages and overgrown fields, of roads infested by highwaymen. Henri has been criticized for not giving France a new system of government and for restoring the traditional structure, the Ancien Régime which went down in 1789. But this is to ask that he should have been a man before his time. His education and outlook were those of the later Renaissance, not of the Enlightenment, and the Renaissance always looked to the past.

His chief minister was Maximilien de Béthune, Baron de Rosny, whom he made Duc de Sully and a Peer of France. Born in 1560, Sully belonged to the lesser nobility of Picardy and was a Huguenot. Bald, with a long beard like a patriarch, eccentric, avaricious and ill-mannered, he was also tireless in his master’s service. He and he alone was able to work the archaic taxation system.

Henri’s first concern was to tame the nobility, and he waged merciless war on the robber barons who plagued France. It took a full scale cavalry battle to defeat ‘Captain Guillery’s’ band of outlaw noblemen in 1604. In 1607 the King lent cannon to a gentleman whose daughter had been abducted by a neighbour, so that he could batter down the walls of her kidnapper’s château. He forbade nobles to ride over ripening crops. Formerly, provincial governorships had been tantamount to semi-independent fiefs, but Henri insisted on appointing every town governor and garrison commander. To the Duc d’Epernon who objected he wrote, ‘Your letter is that of an angry man—I am not so yet and I pray you don’t make me.’ Fear of the over-mighty subject also dictated his harsh treatment of his sister, Catherine, now an eccentric old maid who had clung stubbornly to her Protestant faith, and still hoped to marry her cousin, the Comte de Soissons. Henri forced her to marry the Duke of Lorraine, who refused to allow her to practise her religion. Poor Catherine died three years later, ‘of sadness and melancholy’.

In 1599, he met the last of his three great concubines, Henriette d’Entragues, daughter of the Governor of Orléans. A slim brunette, with a disturbing bosom and flashing black eyes, she at once infatuated Henri with her provoking airs and savage wit. She was a girl who knew just how to exploit the King’s wild jealousies. He had been ready to marry Gabrielle d’Estrées, so she saw no reason why he should not make her his Queen instead. She blew hot and cold until at last Henri, frantic with lust, literally bought her from her father with the title of Marshal (although the man had never seen a battle), a large down payment in cash and a written promise that, should Henriette have a son by him, he would marry her as soon as he was divorced. A furious Sully sent the money in silver—it took many cartloads to deliver it.

However, Henri was just as capable of playing a double game in love as in war. When Rome obligingly annulled his marriage to Marguerite, he sought the hand of Marie de Medici, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of the late Grand Duke Francesco I of Tuscany. In June 1600, Henriette, far gone with child, was resting in her bedchamber at Fontainebleau when the room was struck by lightning which actually passed under her bed. Terror made her miscarry. The King now regarded his promise as invalid, even if Mme de Verneuil (he had made Henriette a Marquise) did not. In October 1600 he married Marie by proxy.

From a political point of view Marie de Medici was thoroughly desirable—her uncle Grand Duke Ferdinand, was anti-Spanish and fabulously rich. Personally she was less desirable, a large, fat, stupid blonde with a vile temper. However, during the consummation of the marriage at Lyons she performed so well that afterwards the King boasted of her prowess. After a month’s marital bliss he lovingly rejoined Henriette in Paris. When his wife arrived at the capital, the King insisted on presenting Henriette to her, saying, ‘She has been my mistress—now she is going to be your most biddable and obedient servant.’ Henriette refused to curtsey and the King had to push her on to her knees before the infuriated Queen. He continued to sleep with both. On 27 September 1601 the Queen gave birth to a Dauphin.

Meanwhile Sully laboured tirelessly. When he became Superintendent of Finances he found the Crown in debt to the sum of £3 million. By 1608 he had paid off nearly half the debt, by redeeming mortgaged Crown revenues and increasing the yield from taxation. The principal direct tax was the taille, an arbitrarily assessed percentage of farm income or a specified percentage of a man’s actual property. The chief indirect tax was the gabelle, an exorbitant duty on salt which caused much resentment. There were also duties on wine, besides customs levied at internal as well as external frontiers. Much of Sully’s success was due to his reduction of profiteering by the tax farmers and of corruption in general.

As the nobility and clergy were exempt from taxation and many bourgeois purchased exemption, the taxes fell mainly on the peasantry, causing much hardship. Yet Henri cared for his peasants. In 1600 he told the Duke of Savoy, ‘Should God let me live longer I will see that no peasant in my realm is without the means to have a chicken in his pot.’ This wish for a chicken in every pot every Sunday is one of the most enduring of the legends about him. In the eighteenth century Henri IV was described as the only French King whose memory was kept green by the poor.

Another source of revenue was the paulette (named after a lawyer called Paulet). This was the sale of offices and titles in return for an annual payment of one-sixtieth of the purchase price. An office conferred nobility, including tax exemption, and in consequence a new aristocracy was created to balance the old feudal nobility. Before the Revolution almost every rich self-made man bought a title.

Henri knew that if France was to prosper, something more was needed than efficient methods of taxation. The country’s chief source of wealth was crops and livestock, so he encouraged new methods of agriculture. Companies were founded to improve arable land, and Dutch experts were brought in to drain fen land. But peaceful conditions were quite sufficient for the French peasant and by 1608 France was exporting grain. Waterways and canals were dug and roads repaired. In 1601 a Chamber of Commerce was founded, which investigated and encouraged horse breeding, linen manufacture, ship building, glass blowing and many other industries. The silk industry was revived, mulberry trees and skilled weavers being imported from Italy. Other luxury industries were founded, notably the Gobelin tapestry looms, and the Savonnerie carpet factory. Mineral resources were scientifically investigated, Henri creating the office of Grand Master of the Mines. Abroad, a spectacularly profitable treaty with Turkey obtained valuable facilities in the Levant for French merchants, while there were commercial treaties with England and the German Hansa. In Canada Samuel de Champlain established a tiny but enduring settlement of fur traders at Quebec. New edicts directed at increasing the country’s prosperity were promulgated every month, edicts which the King not only read but helped to draft. Despite his hunting and whoring, Henri IV was his own first minister.

Sully, who combined the functions of Minister of Finance, Minister of the Interior, Minister of Transport and Minister of Works, was responsible for implementing all these reforms. But one must not underestimate Henri’s contribution. He did far more than merely encourage his Minister, who lacked his enthusiastic response to new ideas. It was Henri who preached agricultural revolution, whose interest was largely responsible for the re-establishment of the silk industry, who supported the Canadian enterprise.

Henri’s employment of Sully enabled him to avoid much of the odium incurred by unpopular policies. Sully’s committees of privilege examined the nobles’ rights to pensions and exemptions, to Crown lands and revenues, demanding full restitution where these had been usurped. These, together with his harshness and gauche arrogance, made him the most hated man in France. Soissons tried to dispose of him by a duel but backed down when Henri announced that he would act as Sully’s second.

By 1602 the French nobility was thoroughly disenchanted. The hub of the opposition was the Maréchal de Biron, an old comrade-in-arms of Henri. During the Savoy campaign he intrigued with the enemy, plotting the King’s murder. An atheist and a student of witchcraft, there was something Satanic about Biron. He plotted a general uprising; Spain and Savoy were to invade while the Marshal and his friends would raise disaffected areas of the kingdom. Henri discovered the plot, but was reluctant to destroy such an old friend; three times he offered Biron a pardon if he would confess his treason, but was rebuffed. During his trial Biron raved and ranted, shrieking that Henri owed his throne to him. At his execution he had to be dragged to the block. The King commented, ‘I would have given 200,000 crowns for him to have made it possible to pardon him; he did me good service though I saved his life three times.’

Then there was the conspiracy between Biron’s friend, the Comte d’Auvergne, and Henriette’s family, the d’Entragues, in 1604. Henriette had resolved to avenge herself when in the summer of 1604 her father had been ordered to surrender the Promise of Marriage (which he had concealed in a bottle). Henriette and her children were to flee to Spain, whereupon Philip III would recognize her son as King of France as soon as Henri had been assassinated. Two attempts were made on Henri’s life but failed, then her sister informed the authorities. Henriette was confined to a convent. However, the King soon forgave her, though she never quite recovered her former influence.

Potentially the most dangerous conspirator of all was the Protestant Duc de Bouillon, who tried to stir up the Huguenots. However, Henri outmanœuvred him, sending Sully to the General Assembly of the Reformed Church in 1605, where he persuaded them to accept the status quo. The King then marched into Bouillon’s lands in the Limousin, blowing up his château. In 1606 he arrived before the Duke’s stronghold of Sedan with an army and cannon, and forced him to submit.

The court of Henri IV has been described as a cross between a barracks and a bawdy house. It was certainly informal. When the court wine taster drained Henri’s glass to the last drop, instead of merely sipping it, the King complained, ‘You might have left some for me.’ He was on good terms with the Parisians, roaming the streets of his capital with little or no escort. He preferred to dress plainly, in grey satin without lace or embroidery, and was careless about washing: Henriette once told him, ‘You smell like carrion.’ (However, the legend of Henri’s chewing garlic like fruit, so that his breath felled an ox at twenty paces, is apocryphal.) His teeth were bad, stopped with lead and gold, and in later years he had to wear spectacles. He was so small that he always used a mounting block. Yet, for all these inelegancies, the English ambassador noted that the great lords of France trembled in King Henri’s presence. He could be stately enough, receiving embassies seated on his throne, surrounded by Princes of the Blood; on such occasions he dressed magnificently, wearing diamonds in his hat. Indeed, during his reign the Louvre and the Tuileries lacked neither grace nor splendour.

Henri was a great builder, notably at Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau and Monceaux. His most notable enterprise was the gallery connecting the Louvre with the Tuileries, which an English visitor described as ‘unspeakably fair’. At the Tuileries he created, in the opinion of the same visitor, ‘the fairest garden for length of delectable walks that ever I saw’. At Saint-Germain-en-Laye he built a series of terraces which overlooked the Seine. (Here he installed hidden water jets which drenched the unwary courtiers who trod on them, to the King’s joy.) There was a project to build an enormous new palace at Blois, but this came to nothing. Henri was also interested in public building. Work on the Pont Neuf commenced in 1604, and the next year the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges) was begun, with its pavillons and arcades. There was also the Place Dauphine and the uncompleted ‘Porte et Place de France’ which was intended to rehouse the Parisian poor.

Henri has never received his due as a patron of the arts. He was responsible for the second ‘School of Fontainebleau’. (The first school, a product of the inspired patronage of François I, had lost its momentum under the last Valois.) At Henri’s request, Toussaint Dubreuil executed a large number of frescoes at Fontainebleau and at the King’s new château of Saint-Germain. Dubreuil also worked on the petite galerie of the Louvre, together with Jacob Bunel. Amboise Dubois probably painted the portraits in the great gallery, which so impressed an English tourist; Thomas Coryate refers to ‘many goodly pictures of some of the Kings and Queens of France, made most exactly in wainscot, and drawn out very lively in oil works upon the same’. Dubois also painted a portrait of Marie de Medici as Minerva. Both Henri and Marie were painted by Frans Pourbus in 1608; Henri, in formal black and wearing the Saint Esprit, looks every inch the soldier King, grizzled but still vigorous. Another artist who worked for him at Fontainebleau was Martin Fréminet, who decorated the Chapelle Royale.

One can hardly claim that Henri IV was an intellectual. The news that James I of England had written a book horrified him. (It was he who called James ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.) None the less, Henri was well aware that writers could play a useful political role in the presentation of the restored monarchy. The historian Jacques Auguste de Thou, who wrote a Latin History of My Own Time, was made Grand Master of the King’s library, while a Historiographer Royal was appointed, Pierre Matthieu. There was an acknowledged Poet Laureate, François de Malherbe, who was made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Even a Huguenot scholar, the great Isaac Casaubon, received a court appointment.

The King sought to weaken the Huguenots, not by persecution but by encouraging a Catholic revival. The Jesuits were allowed to set up schools. He encouraged public disputations between theologians of the two persuasions. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Saint François de Sales to leave Savoy and accept a French diocese; he commented, ‘A saint. And furthermore a gentleman too.’ Throughout his reign, Catholic reform gathered momentum.

Despite these edifying preoccupations, the King continued to keep his ménage à trois. Henriette insisted she ought to be Queen and that the Dauphin Louis was a bastard, referring to Marie as ‘your fat Florentine banker’. At the same time the Queen nagged Henri so viciously that often he had to flee from the marital bed, where he ‘found thorns’. (Yet Sully tells engagingly how, when he brought the King and Queen presents at daybreak on New Year’s Day 1606, the King told Marie, ‘Awake, you dormouse, give me a kiss, and groan no more, for I have forgotten all our little quarrels; I am anxious to keep your mind easy, lest your health should suffer during your pregnancy.’) To make life even more difficult, Marie acquired two deplorable favourites, Concino and Leonora Concini. The latter, half maid, half lady-in-waiting, was the Queen’s foster sister, who had married a foppish Florentine homosexual. Sully wrote that they deliberately worked on the Queen to make her dissatisfied with the King.

Henri had his bastards brought up at Saint-Germain-en-Laye with his children by Marie. The Queen had two more sons, a Duc d’Orléans who died in infancy, and Gaston, Duc d’Anjou; and two daughters—Elisabeth who married Philip IV of Spain, and Henriette Marie who married Charles I of England. Henriette’s children were Gaston Henri, who was made Bishop of Metz and Abbot of Saint Germain when he was seven, and Gabrielle—both legitimized. Henri was devoted to them all. The Spanish ambassador entered an official audience to find him crawling on all fours round the throne room with children on his back.

The King’s diversions continued to be hunting and gambling. At the latter he was a bad loser, paying his card debts grudgingly. His cronies now included François de Bassompierre, a high-spirited young soldier, while a somewhat surprising new friend was his confessor, a suave, saintly Jesuit. Henri liked Père Cotton so much that courtiers joked that the King had ‘cotton in his ears’.

In 1605 Queen Marguerite—Henri had allowed her to retain the title—returned to Paris. She was enormously fat and wore a golden wig, employing blond English footmen for their hair. With her vast skirts she could block an entire doorway. She built an hôtel near the Louvre, filling it with gigolos and savants for she retained her conflicting tastes for vice and piety. (St Vincent de Paul was one of her chaplains.) She made fast friends with Henri’s children whom she loaded with presents—they called her Aunt.

In 1609 Sir George Carew reported of Henri: ‘His health and strength he hath in a great proportion, his body being not only able for all exercises, but even for excesses and distempers, both in intemperance and incontinency. And though he be sometimes bitten by the gout yet ever he findeth means suddenly to shake it off. And in the four years, that I served in that court, I found him little decayed in his countenance, or other disposition of his body, but he rather grew to look younger every day than other.’ Henri’s good health may have owed something to good wine. Although he is celebrated for drinking enough for four, in fact he seems to have indulged in quality rather than quantity. A rousing traditional song is attributed to him in praise of ‘my old Arbois’, that rare and almost legendary wine from the Jura. Above all he enjoyed the still grey wine of Champagne, sometimes boasting that he was ‘King of Ay’, a noted Champenois vineyard.

Yet Henri was increasingly plagued by melancholy. Sometimes he blurted it out—‘I wish I were dead’—at others he was known to dance and whistle by himself. He regretted his vices but had a pathological need of sex. To some extent his melancholy was soothed by religion. His skilled confessor, Père Cotton, realized that he was not altogether responsible for his sins.

As late as the end of 1609, true to the tradition of British diplomacy, Carew believed that Henri was anxious to avoid war. In fact Henri had been preparing for it for many years. When Sir George wrote, Henri had an army of 37,000 men under arms, all (save 1,000 mounted noblemen) being regular troops receiving pay. The arsenal in Paris was well stocked, and money had been set aside for a war chest. The artillery had been reorganized by Sully, as Grand Master of the Ordnance, and a corps of engineers had been formed. Although the army continued to be officered by noblemen, they now served on a professional instead of a feudal basis. Two military academies were instituted as well as a hospital for veterans. If necessary the King could muster 100,000 troops.

Henri was determined to break the encirclement of the Habsburgs, who among them ruled most of Europe. In Spain he intrigued with the persecuted Muslims and Philip III was so alarmed that in 1609 he ordered the expulsion of two million Moriscos. But it was in Germany that Henri saw most opportunity: he intended to enlist the Protestant Princes against the Emperor. His opportunity came with the death of the Duke of Cleves-Julich-Berg in March 1609; the succession was disputed and the Emperor occupied the duchies, to the alarm of the Princes. By August Henri was preparing for war.

The King seems to have referred to his ultimate objectives as ‘a Grand Design’, and in the past many historians credited him with an inspired plan for European peace. The earliest account occurs in Sully’s memoirs, the alleged project taking a more definite shape in the revised eighteenth-century version of Sully’s memoirs. The supposed scheme aimed at guaranteeing nations and creeds by the collective agreement of a great European League led by France. Modern historians agree that the Grand Design was in large part invented by Sully, though possibly a few ideas may be ascribed to Henri. D’Aubigné limited it to confining Spain between the Pyrenees and the sea. Henri’s real foreign policy was identical with that of Cardinal Richelieu—to make France the greatest power in Europe by breaking the Habsburg hegemony.

There now occurred Henri’s last love affair, with the fifteen-year-old Charlotte de Montmorency. He first saw her at a ballet rehearsal at the Louvre, dressed as a nymph. She raised her spear as if to stab him, whereupon the King, in his own words, ‘almost swooned away’. The King made himself a laughing-stock, dressed in scented ruffs and sleeves of Chinese satin. Sighing, he told Bassompierre, to whom she was engaged, ‘I want to talk to you as a friend. I have just fallen in love, I am bewitched and worse by Mlle de Montmorency. If you marry her and she loves you I will hate you; if she loves me, you will hate me.’ He explained that he was going to marry her to his nephew Condé, ‘as a comfort for my old age’. When the worldly-wise Bassompierre said he would break off his engagement because it gave him an opportunity of showing how fond he was of the King, Henri burst into tears and said he would make his fortune as though he were one of his own bastards.

Condé, first Prince of the Blood, was a reserved, awkward youth of twenty, dissolute and reputed to have caught the pox. His favourite pastime was drinking in low taverns. He and Charlotte were married in May 1609. By now Henri had sunk to spying on Mme la Princesse, wearing a false beard and even hiding behind a tapestry to watch her through a hole. He persuaded her parents to petition for the annulment of her marriage. Unexpectedly Condé refused to bring his wife to court; at the end of 1609 the young couple fled to Brussels, where there was a last abortive attempt to procure Charlotte by kidnapping her and lowering her from a window by a rope.

But by then the King had greater matters to engage him. For in August 1609 France began to arm. By the spring of 1610 40,000 men were massed in Champagne, Cleves-Julich-Berg was to be invaded in May. Instead of fighting for his own throne, Henri would take the field as ruler of a great European power.

Yet he was in a strange mood, haunted by the fear of death. ‘By God! I’m going to die in this city, I’ll never get out of it,’ he told Sully. He expected to be murdered at Marie’s belated coronation which took place on 13 May, upsetting his intimates by constant gloomy outbursts. His fears were grounded on more than melancholy. Catholic fanatics were outraged that he should seek alliances with Protestant Germany—Leaguer France was far from dead. Undoubtedly there were many plots on his life in 1610.

A demented out-of-work schoolmaster, François Ravaillac, who had no connection with any of these plots, dreamt that he had been summoned by God to kill Henri. The day after the coronation, gloomier than ever, the King decided to visit Sully at the Arsenal. After saying farewell three times to the Queen, he set off in his carriage. As it slowed down at the corner of the rue de la Ferronnerie, Ravaillac jumped up from the road, leant through the window and stabbed him with a broken table-knife. The King gasped, ‘I’m wounded’, whereupon Ravaillac stabbed him again. Henri fell back, dead.

France was overwhelmed with grief. Sully feared a rebellion but his fears were groundless. Ravaillac was executed with fiendishly ingenious tortures in the Place de Grèves, amid the applause of a revengeful mob.

Perhaps it was as well that Henri died when he did. Despite his preparations, France was not ready for a war against the combined might of Spain and the Empire; while the squalid affair with Mme la Princesse, and the paranoiac terrors which he experienced in Paris, indicate a mind on the edge of a severe breakdown. None the less, Henri Quatre was a great King; even today ‘le Vert Galant’ is still one of France’s heroes. As Mme de Staël wrote, ‘He was the most French of all French Kings.’

‘That Idiot’

LOUIS XIII (1610–1643)

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‘God knows I never liked life’

Louis XIII was born at Fontainebleau on 27 September 1602. It was a difficult birth, which may have been the original cause of his mother’s dislike. Through Marie, he was a quarter Italian and a quarter Habsburg. Certainly no son was ever more different from his father.

Louis had a miserable childhood. He was a timid, unattractive little boy, and Henri tried to beat his timidity out of him. (He none the less adored his father; years later his greatest compliment about anyone was the odd remark, ‘I’m near my father—I can smell his armpit.’) Queen Marie, who seems to have lacked any maternal feeling, had him whipped every morning. He grew up neurotic and distrustful, one of the strangest and most enigmatic of all French Kings.

The news of Henri IV’s assassination so shocked France that even the great princes rallied to the throne. The Parlement of Paris was summoned, in its capacity as first court of the realm, and the eight-year-old King presided over a lit de justice, a special Royal session of Parlement. The Duc d’Epernon, who commanded the infantry in Paris, entered the great hall of the Palais Royal where the Parlement sat. He was wearing his sword. ‘My sword is still in its scabbard,’ he shouted, ‘but if the Queen is not made Regent at once I shall draw it.’ The Parlement hastily declared that Marie’s regency was according to the wishes of both the late and the present King. Louis was crowned at Rheims on 17 October 1610. The ceremony must have been a frightening experience for a boy of eight. Four day later, at Saint-Marcoul, he touched no less than 900 persons for the Evil.

Marie de Medici, who was as stupid as she was heartless, was quite confident that she could govern France. Her favourites, the Concini, became all-powerful. Leonora slept next to the Queen’s bedchamber, being consulted on all matters of state; her advice was partly dictated by astrologers, but mainly by her husband’s insatiable thirst for money and titles. For the time being Marie and this ignoble pair had the sense to retain Henri’s old ministers, although Sully soon resigned (he lived on in obscurity until 1641). Abroad, Henri’s foreign policy was reversed—French troops were withdrawn from Cleves-Julich and an alliance was sought with Spain. At home, Concini had a programme of sorts; to keep the nobles in their place and to make Lorraine part of France. In the meantime he acquired a huge fortune by peddling favours—Leonora’s speciality was selling pardons. He bought the marquisate of Ancres and then, although he had never seen a battle, took the title of Marshal.

Rebellion was inevitable. First Bouillon tried to raise the Huguenots: Marie bought him off with an enormous bribe. But the Huguenots were not the only threat. ‘Les Grands’—the Great Ones—considered that with Henri’s IV’s death, ‘the day of Kings has passed and the day of great lords and princes has come.’ They remained almost as formidable as they had been during the Wars of Religion. Each had a large ‘household’—a retinue of armed noblemen amounting to a private army. Some had provincial governorships which provided them with fortresses—Epernon, Governor of Metz, seized its citadel as soon as Henri died, referring to his province as ‘my kingdom of Austrasia’. Condé, First Prince of the Blood, had secret hopes of the throne itself. Early in 1614 he left court, raised an army and seized the fortress of Mézières. He publicly accused the government of squandering the realm’s wealth, and inflicting hardship on the entire country. His manifesto concluded with an ultimatum that the States General (the representative body of the French nation) be summoned. He was joined by the Dukes of Mayenne, Longueville, Nevers and Vendôme, but as neither the bourgeois nor the Huguenots would support them, they allowed themselves to be bought off with the last of Sully’s treasure.

The States General—140 clergy, 132 nobles and 192 bourgeois—met in the old Hôtel de Bourbon (opposite the Louvre) in October 1614. It was to be their last formal meeting until the fateful year of 1789. King Louis, who was now twelve, presided, a sulky, pale-faced little figure in white satin. The three estates squabbled furiously. The clergy imperiously demanded the implementation of the Council of Trent. The bourgeois countered—by urging that the French Church be reformed; they also asked for an end to pensions paid to great lords, the suppression of high military offices and the prohibition of duelling. As for the nobles, they did not want ‘the children of cordwainers and soap-boilers to call them brother’, demanding that anyone who called a bourgeois ‘Monsieur’ should be fined. The assembly, having achieved nothing, dispersed in March 1615 when royal officials summarily closed the hall where it met. However preposterous Marie’s regime may have been, seventeenth-century France had no practicable alternative to absolute monarchy.

During the assembly, the loyal address by the spokesman of the clergy had been a brilliant analysis of the problems confronting the state, couched in graceful terms which complimented the Regent. The spokesman was the twenty-eight-year-old Bishop of Luçon, Armand du Plessis de Richelieu. Marie, delighted by such flattery, marked out the fascinating young prelate for preferment.

In autumn 1615, just as the Regent and her son were setting out for Bordeaux, Condé rose again. The Duc de Rohan formed an alliance with him, leading the Huguenots into revolt. It was a return to the bad days of the Valois; even worse, for now Catholics and Protestants were banding together against the Crown. Fortunately Condé lost his nerve, allowing himself to be bought off once more, in May 1616. He received a million and a half livres—he had already had four and a half million—while a further six million was divided among his followers.

In October 1615 Louis was married at Bordeaux to Anne of Austria, an ash-blonde, pink-faced Infanta of Spain. The new Spanish alliance was doubly cemented by the marriage of Madame Elisabeth, Enfant de France, to the Infante Don Philip (the future Philip IV). The new Queen of France was only thirteen. However, in November Louis consummated the marriage—probably his mother told him that it was his duty. The experience proved disastrous and gave the King a lifelong aversion to physical love.

Marie intended to remain Regent for as long as possible. When Louis was fifteen she slapped his face in front of the entire court; he tried to attend a meeting of the Royal Council, whereupon she took him by the shoulders and threw him out of the chamber. Saint-Simon says that according to his father, a friend of Louis, ‘The Regent wanted a son who was only King in name and who would not interfere with her favourites. He was therefore brought up in a way as harmful as possible for his character. He was left completely idle, receiving no education whatsoever. He frequently complained about it to my father, and in later years often referred to the fact that he had not even been taught to read.’ (Louis may have been indulging in a certain amount of self-pity; not only could he write elegant and economical French, but he spoke excellent Italian and Spanish.)

By now Louis was a very strange boy indeed, nervous and awkward, a King who stammered when he spoke, who was frequently tongue-tied. Yet he was not without kindly impulses. From an early age he disliked any derogatory remarks about his Huguenot subjects. As a boy of eleven he intervened passionately in a case where a girl was unjustly accused of murdering her baby.

His chief delight was falconry. His other favourite diversion was hunting—mainly stag, fox and wolf. He killed his first stag when he was only twelve. If possible he hawked or hunted every day and he is said to have ridden horses to death. He certainly achieved the notable feat of killing six wolves in one day. When it was too wet to go out, he flew hawks at tame finches which he kept in his room, chasing them all over the Louvre. Sometimes the solitary boy made teams of dogs run through the palace dragging cannon. At other times he cooked omelettes and made sweets in the palace kitchens. He had his own smithy. Another amusement was a little carriage—a kind of dog-cart—which he drove himself. He did not have a single friend, until the emergence of Charles d’Albert de Luynes, a rather dim falconer.

Voltaire says that Luynes ingratiated himself by teaching grey shrikes to fly at sparrows. In fact Luynes’s job was to fly falcons at red kites, the most prized of all quarry. He was a big tall man, goodlooking rather than handsome, with curly hair and a pleasant expression. In his late thirties, he was the son of a Provençal hedge squire who farmed with his own hands the family’s manor near Marseilles. A gentle, unselfconfident soul, he was far from aggressive—once when challenged to a duel he sent his brother.

While hunting he frequently found himself alone in the forest with the King. The lonely, stuttering boy began to confide in this big man with the reassuring manner. Luynes was a very limited personality but he had the gift of sympathy. For the first time in his life the young King had met a human being whom he trusted: he became so dependent on his falconer that in his sleep he was heard to mutter ‘Luynes! Luynes!’ Marie, informed, thought of dismissing the man; she decided on bribery instead, making him Captain of the Tuileries and then Governor of Amboise with its great château.

Ancres, who had dismissed all Henri IV’s old ministers, was only too aware of the hatred which his ignoble government inspired. Condé was cheered in the Paris taverns and in his cups spoke of seizing the throne. Everywhere obscene songs about the Regent were sung with enthusiasm. So frightened was Ancres that he and Leonora considered flying to Italy in disguise. But he would not leave his treasure. In September 1616 he managed to arrest Condé, besides sending troops into the provinces to cow les Grands. His regime acquired a most useful new servant when the Bishop of Luçon was given a post equivalent to Foreign Minister. The Marshal did not suspect that his greatest danger was the King whom he treated with the utmost contempt; he remained seated in his presence without doffing his hat; sometimes he even ignored him. The tongue-tied boy felt an overpowering sense of injustice—about this time he suffered a nervous fit of such violence that doctors suspected epilepsy.

It was Luynes of all people who organized the plot which brought Ancres down. When one of the conspirators asked the young King what they should do if the Marshal resisted arrest, Louis remained silent. Someone said, ‘The King wishes that he should be killed’—Louis still kept silence.

On the morning of 24 April 1617 the Marshal d’Ancres strutted across the drawbridge of the Louvre. He stopped in the courtyard to read a petition. Suddenly the captain of the royal guard, the Marquis de Vitry, accompanied by twenty-five guardsmen, pushed through the crowd and, seizing him by the arm, shouted ‘In the King’s name!’ Ancres shrieked in Italian ‘A me!’ and tried to draw his sword. Vitry’s men drew pistols from beneath their cloaks—the Marshal fell to the ground, shot three times in the face. Kicking the body, Vitry cried, ‘Vive le Roi!’

Louis was waiting for the news with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other. Climbing on to a billiard table he cried, ‘Merci! Grand merci à vous! A cette heure je suis roi!’

His mother was given the news by a lady-in-waiting. ‘All I can hope for is a crown in heaven,’ screamed the Regent, who ran up and down her chamber, wringing her hands. When asked who would tell Mme la Maréchale that her husband had been killed, Marie shrieked, ‘I have myself to think about, leave me alone! if you don’t want to tell her, sing it to her! Don’t speak to me about them—I warned them long ago that they ought to escape to Italy.’ Ignoring frantic appeals to see him, Louis sent word to his mother to stay in her chamber and not to meddle with affairs of state.

Ancres’s body was secretly buried in the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, but the mob dug it up, hung it on the Pont Neuf and then tore it to shreds. Royal guards burst into Leonora’s room. Pulling her out of bed they found that she had already hidden some of her treasures beneath her mattress—it was rumoured that Crown jewels were among them. She was imprisoned in the Bastille, accused of plotting against the state and of black magic. Torture did not break her spirit. Asked at her trial what spells she had used to bewitch the Queen, she replied, ‘Only the power of a strong mind over a weak one.’ She was burnt at the stake in the Place de Grève.

The new ruler of France was Luynes, however much Louis might proclaim himself King. His government was scarcely more effective than Ancres’s. The petty noble set about transforming himself into a great lord; he became the Duc de Luynes, Constable of France and Governor of Picardy. He also acquired a Rohan heiress for his bride. His two brothers, equally amiable and undistinguished, became Duc de Chaulnes and Duc de Piney-Luxemburg; they too were provided with heiresses.

What might be called the opposition was based on Blois, where the indignant Marie de Medici had been confined. In February 1619, aided by the Duc d’Epernon, she escaped from Blois after being lowered from the château by ropes. Dissatisfied nobles gathered round her at Angers and it looked as though the entire south would rise. Louis wanted to attack at once, but Luynes preferred to negotiate. In May 1619 Marie was given the government of Anjou, with three strongholds garrisoned by her supporters. There was a public reconciliation between mother and son—both wept, while continuing to loathe each other. But in the summer of 1620 rebel armies again began to gather, one at Rouen, the other at Poitiers. When the Royal Council met, Luynes had no idea how to deal with the crisis.

Louis intervened angrily. He had never spoken in public before. ‘With so many dangers to face, we march against the most serious and the nearest, which is Normandy. We march now.’ In a wet and windy July he led his little army to Rouen. The rebels were prepared to face Luynes but not the King—they fled. Louis’s advisers were nervous about marching on to Caen, also held by rebels, whereupon the eighteen-year-old monarch, newly courageous, cried, ‘Péril de ça, péril de là! Péril sur terre, péril sur mer. Allons droit à Caen!’ Caen surrendered. Louis then marched south to Anjou with 12,000 men. Marie’s 4,000 followers met him at Ponts-de-Cé, two bridges over the Loire near Angers. Louis behaved just as his father would have done, charging with his men. Seeing the enemy weaken, he led a charge which drove them back to the bridge. After losing 700 men, the rebels broke and the bridge was taken, cutting Marie off from any hope of escape. However, there was another reconciliation and the Queen Mother was allowed to keep Anjou. The settlement was ably negotiated by her adviser, Richelieu.

In 1617 an edict had re-established the Church’s right to its former lands in Protestant Béarn, but commissioners who attempted to enforce the edict were roughly handled. After his triumph at Ponts-de-Cé, Louis and his army paid a swift visit to Béarn and implemented the edict at gun-point before returning to Paris. As a result the Huguenot Assembly met at La Rochelle and swore to support their persecuted co-religionists. They began to raise troops and gather munitions. Condé, now a loyal subject, convinced Luynes that war was inevitable.

The royal army marched south again, occupying Saumur where Louis was cheered so enthusiastically that he shouted back, ‘Vive le peuple’, and waved his hat to the crowd. (Later he showed his less warm side. Seeing among the throng a certain M d’Arsilemont, who was a famous highwayman, the King cried, ‘Ah! Vous voilà!’ and had him arrested—within three days the man had been tried and broken on the wheel.) Montauban, an important Huguenot stronghold, was besieged in August 1621. A friar prophesied its speedy fall, but Montauban held out. Luynes showed himself to be hopelessly incompetent—in November the approach of a Protestant army under the Duc de Rohan forced him to raise the siege. Louis, by now completely disillusioned with his favourite, returned to Paris. Luynes continued the campaign despite terrible weather. He became depressed, then took to his bed. On 15 December 1621 he died of scarlet fever, abandoned even by his servants.

Louis had no intention of persecuting his Protestant subjects for their religion, but he was not going to tolerate separatism. For by now the Huguenots had set up something very like a republic on the Dutch model and a new state was emerging, which included most of the western seaboard together with a large area of southern France. In the Duc de Rohan and his brother, the Comte de Soubise, it had formidable leaders. The Royal Council tried to dissuade Louis from continuing the campaign but he knew how great was the danger.

He went to war again in April 1622, besieging the Ile de Riez, Soubise’s marshy stronghold on the west coast, which could only be reached at low tide. On 16 April the King rose from his straw pallet and led a midnight attack, riding through the water at the head of his men. Soubise was completely taken by surprise and routed, losing 4,000 troops. Louis spent the following months storming Huguenot towns and blowing up their fortifications; Nègrepelisse was burnt to the ground for having murdered 400 royal soldiers. In October Rohan sued for peace—Protestant France had become a land of famine and corpses, of abandoned villages and ruined châteaux. At the peace of Montpelier the Huguenots gave up all their strongholds save La Rochelle and Montauban.

It had been a gruelling campaign in an exceptionally hot summer. The King had many times spent whole days in the saddle, sleeping in his clothes and dining on bread and cheese. In June, at Toulouse he was struck down by a mysterious fever which attacked him several times, forcing him to travel in a litter. Eventually he recovered and enjoyed himself at Marseilles, attending bull fights and fishing for tuna fish. The fever had been tuberculosis which would eventually kill him. In addition he suffered from a chronic gastric disorder which never left him, and he was further weakened by the ministrations of his doctors (in one year alone he was bled forty-seven times, purged 212 times and endured 215 enemas).

None the less, Louis usually had sufficient energy to hunt, dance and campaign. At twenty, he was a thin young man of medium height, elegant and athletic in build, who sat a horse particularly well. He wore a moustache, but as yet his long, tanned face was beardless. He had mastered his earlier awkwardness, save for stammering when angry, and had acquired a most dignified presence—what Saint-Simon calls ‘l’allure royale’. He had an intense dislike of luxury. Although on state occasions he wore a white satin suit and a black hat and cloak, he liked best to dress as a soldier and was fond of wearing armour. Indeed, he thoroughly enjoyed military life and spent much time on parades and drilling his troops.

Hunting remained his great passion. He talked of little else and even took his hounds to bed with him. Of all the Bourbons, every one of whom was remarkable for an almost fanatical devotion to the chase, Louis XIII was the greatest huntsman.

In character he was upright to the point of harshness. He had an exalted concept of kingship—Joinville’s life of St Louis was a favourite book—and could be merciless to himself, always ready to sacrifice his own happiness. He once said, ‘I should not be King if I had the feelings of an ordinary man.’ His devotion to business was remarkable, considering that he detested reading and preferred carpentry and gardening (his peas were sold in the Paris market), let alone hunting, to administration. Yet he never missed a Council meeting and impressed ambassadors by his grasp of affairs. Extremely pious, he enjoyed the ceremonies of the Church and was scrupulous in confession. His religion verged on the puritanical; a characteristic remark was ‘Please God, adultery shall never enter into my house’.

In Paris Louis lived at the Louvre and the Tuileries, though he much preferred Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Summer and winter he rose at six am. His rising was divided into the Petit Lever and the Grand Lever, the latter being shortened, as Louis liked to take long baths. (Unlike most of his contemporaries he was extremely clean in his person; later he cropped his head and wore a long brown wig for the sake of cleanliness.) The day began with a Council meeting, after which the King went to Mass. There followed private and public audiences. Then he paid a formal visit to the Queen, before dining publicly. The afternoon was spent hunting or in military exercises. After supper there was sometimes a concert or a ballet. Louis composed some of these ballets himself and occasionally danced in them.

By 1619 Louis was deeply in love with Anne of Austria, but not physically. Both his confessor, Père Cotton, and Luynes tried to make him sleep with her; the Papal Nuncio urged that Heaven needed an heir to the throne of France; the Spanish ambassador considered the King’s failure to beget a child an insult to Spanish honour. Eventually Luynes forced him to lie with Anne—he was in tears when he went to her bed, but from then on he slept with her regularly for some years.

To govern France a stronger hand was needed than that of a nervous and unsure young man, and Louis knew it. In 1622, much against his will, his mother persuaded him to obtain a Cardinal’s hat for Richelieu. Marie, who had been reconciled yet again with her son after Luynes’s death, owed her return to Paris to Richelieu’s shrewd counsel. Unwillingly Louis recognized that here was a man who could save France, and in January 1624 he was admitted to the Council. La Vieuville, the aged mediocrity who was its President, tried to discredit him but was dismissed and arrested for his pains. On 13 August 1624 Cardinal Richelieu became head of the Council with the title ‘Secretary of State for Commerce and the Marine’. In 1629 the King named him ‘Principal Minister of State’.

Armand du Plessis had been born in 1585, the third son of a family of poor Poitevin nobles. Originally he had intended to become a soldier but his elder brother, for whom the Bishopric of Luçon had been reserved—the appointment was in the gift of the family—died, and Armand entered the Church. In 1608, only twenty-one, he was consecrated Bishop of Luçon where he proved himself an exemplary pastor. He was burningly ambitious but his first step towards power, when Ancres gave him a post, turned out to be a serious setback when the Marshal fell—the King shouted at him, ‘I have escaped your tyranny, Luçon!’ It took him years to vindicate himself, through the unlikely path of acting as adviser to Marie de Medici. His chief ally was the mysterious Capuchin friar, Père Joseph (better known as ‘the Grey Eminence’).

Richelieu’s masterful, fastidious face with its high nose and prominent cheekbones, was the mask of a man who lived on the verge of total nervous breakdown, racked by headaches and indigestion, weakened by bad circulation. The Cardinal was agonizingly prone to depression and discouragement, terrified by bad news and by threats of violence, even by loud noises; he was frequently in tears—on occasion he even hid under his bed from whence he had to be coaxed by his valet. Greedy, avaricious, he was also coldly arrogant and lacked charm. Women in particular disliked him. Yet he was undoubtedly one of the greatest of all Frenchmen; of seventeenth-century Englishmen, only Oliver Cromwell was of the same stature.

Of his aims he later wrote, ‘I promised Your Majesty to use all my industry and all the authority which it pleased you to give me to ruin the Huguenot party, to bring down the pride of the great lords, to bring back all your subjects to their duty, and to restore your name to its rightful place among foreign nations.’ Richelieu’s determination to make his country the leading power of Europe at the expense of the Catholic Habsburgs conflicted in no way with his Catholicism; he believed that a strong France was essential for the health of the Church; that Rome could not be allowed to remain a mere tool of Spain. He quickly made Protestant alliances, with England and the Dutch.

The English alliance was soon jeopardized by the Duke of Buckingham. This magnificent creature visited France in May 1625 to assist at the marriage (by proxy) of Mme Henriette Marie to King Charles at Nôtre-Dame. For a week’s visit he brought twenty-seven suits—one, of white velvet embroidered with diamonds and shedding loosely-sewn pearls as he walked, was valued at £24,000. His beauty and elegance took Paris by storm.

He was soon embroiled in a plot to seduce the Queen of France, by the Duchesse de Chevreuse, Luynes’s widow, who was the evil genius of Louis XIII’s marriage. In 1618 she had become Mistress of the Queen’s Household. Richelieu wrote of her, ‘She was the ruin of the Queen, whose wholesome outlook was corrupted by her example; she swayed the Queen’s heart, ruined her, set her against the King and her duties.’ It was her horseplay in the spring of 1622, when she persuaded the pregnant Queen to run down a gallery, which made Anne lose a Dauphin. Born in 1600, a tiny blonde with a delicate face and unforgettable eyes, Marie de Chevreuse was a woman of innumerable conquests. An enemy described her as the matchmaker behind every court love affair. Startlingly unconventional (in London she swam the Thames, to the horror of the English), she and her antics were a perennial scandal. Next to love affairs she enjoyed political intrigue, and nursed a real hatred of Louis, whom she referred to as ‘that idiot’.

‘La Chevrette’s’ latest lover was Lord Holland, one of Buckingham’s suite. She swiftly enchanted the Duke with the prospect of cuckolding a King. At Amiens, where the court took official leave of the English embassy, Buckingham climbed into a private garden where the Queen was taking an evening walk; he may even have tried to rape her. Anne’s shrieks summoned her attendants. Later, during less private interviews, he wept and spoke with such passion that he terrified her. Louis was so affronted that henceforward he refused to think seriously of an English alliance.

Despite his dealings with Protestant powers abroad, nothing could deflect Richelieu from his determination to break Messieurs les prétendus réformés. He wrote, ‘So long as the Protestants in France are a state within a state, the King cannot be master of his realm or achieve great things abroad.’ The capital of French Protestantism was still La Rochelle. In July 1627 an English fleet commanded by Buckingham put in at the Isle of Ré opposite the port. Immediately the Rochellois rose, while throughout the south Rohan raised the Huguenot squirearchy. Luckily the royal garrison on Ré prevented Buckingham from consolidating his position and when they were relieved by Louis in November, the English hastily evacuated the island. La Rochelle was besieged. However, it was still possible for the English to relieve it as the French King did not possess a navy.

Richelieu, who never left the siege and wore a gilded cuirass over his purple soutane, had a solution. A breakwater was built across the mouth of the port, consisting of sunken ships on top of which a stone dyke was constructed; there were forts at each end and floating batteries were moored along it. Frantically, soldiers and peasants worked waist deep in the water. Louis and the Cardinal never left the dyke—the King had to be prevented from taking up a pick himself. On the landward side, the city was isolated by three lines of royal fortifications including thirteen forts. But the Rochellois, commanded by the fiery Duchesse de Rohan and by its mayor, the brave Jean Guiton, supported by eight fanatic pastors, resisted heroically. It was a dreadful winter and the besiegers suffered accordingly. Louis grew bored and went off to hunt. The Cardinal had a nervous collapse, though in March he none the less led an abortive night attack through a sewer.

By the spring the Rochellois were starving. When the English fleet returned, it found the dyke impregnable and sailed home. A second English expedition in September 1628 also turned back. Mme de Rohan boiled her leather armchair to make soup—others ate their shoes. On a single day 400 Rochellois died of hunger. Those who tried to escape were hanged by the besiegers. (However, Louis spared a young lady who had written to an officer saying she would marry him and turn Catholic if he would save her—the royal army celebrated their wedding in splendid style.) On 28 October 1628 La Rochelle surrendered. The King, wearing an armour damascened with golden fleurs-de-lis, rode into the city on All Saints’ Day. He wept when he saw the misery caused by the siege—the unburied corpses and the scarcely less ghastly survivors. (Wagon-loads of food were brought in, whereupon a hundred Rochellois died of over-eating.) A triumphant Richelieu said Mass in the city’s principal church, giving Communion to Louis and his captains. La Rochelle’s fortifications were razed to the ground and every church had to be returned to the Catholics. The Rochellois kept only the right to worship as Protestants.

The Duc de Rohan still held out in Languedoc, so in the spring of 1629 Louis launched a final campaign. Whole towns were demolished—in some places the King’s officers hanged all males or sent them to the galleys. Eventually Rohan surrendered and was banished. The Huguenots were ordered to summon their Assembly for Louis to dictate his terms. Peace was signed at Alais in June 1629; the Protestants lost their places de sûretés but the Edict of Nantes was confirmed. Even though a Huguenot rising took place as late as 1752, Alais was the end of the Wars of Religion.

There was another focus of rebellion, in the person of the heir to the throne, ‘Monsieur’. Born in 1608, Gaston, Duc d’Anjou, was not quite so useless as he has been painted; his fat face and bulging eyes give a misleading impression. He was both kind-natured and intelligent, a patron of the arts who collected paintings and gem stones. But he was also weak, and easily influenced. When in 1626 Richelieu wanted him to marry a Bourbon cousin, Mlle de Montpensier who was the richest heiress in France, Mme de Chevreuse put it into Monsieur’s head that he did not want the marriage. A confused plot emerged in which the chief schemers were Gaston’s bastard half-brothers, the Duc de Vendôme and the Grand Prior, his tutor the Marshal d’Ornano, and of course Mme de Chevreuse and her latest lover, the Comte de Chalais. Undoubtedly there was talk of murdering Richelieu and possibly Louis too—Gaston was to be made King and married to Anne of Austria. (Louis always thought that Anne had been in the conspiracy and never quite forgave her, saying on his deathbed, ‘In my condition I have to forgive her but I don’t have to believe her.’) The plot came to light when Chalais lost his nerve and made a partial confession to Richelieu. The Vendôme brothers were sent to prison where the Grand Prior died. Chalais paid with his life; his execution was so bungled that it took thirty-four blows to sever his head. Mme de Chevreuse was banished to Poitou but escaped to Lorraine. Gaston confessed everything with gusto, implicating everybody, and then tamely married Mlle de Montpensier—the ceremony was performed by Richelieu. As a reward Gaston was made Duke of Orleans.

Henri IV in 1605

Louis XIII by Philippe de Champaigne

The Cardinal was determined to show the nobility that they were not above the law. A royal edict was therefore issued which forbade duelling under pain of death. In 1627 the Comte des Chapelles and the Comte de Bouteville fought a duel in the Place Royale, ignoring the edict. Bouteville had taken part in no less than twenty-two affairs of honour. Within a month they had been arrested, tried, condemned and beheaded in the Place de Grève. It was well known that the Cardinal persuaded Louis that the executions were necessary. Richelieu attacked the nobility in other ways too. In 1628 he was responsible for an edict ordering the demolition of fortified châteaux, and for another which abolished the offices of Constable and Grand Admiral. By 1634 a tribunal in Poitiers was condemning over 200 noblemen for robbery and other crimes. In 1635 he instituted the office of Intendant—a royal representative in each province who kept an eye on the governor and on any other source of opposition. Such measures earned the Cardinal much hatred. One can only wonder at his courage; Gaston remained heir to the throne until 1638, and in the event of Louis’s death Richelieu would probably have lost not only his place but his life as well.

Sometimes even Louis found Richelieu irritating. There is a story that on one occasion the King growled at him, ‘You go first, since you are the real King.’ Richelieu replied smoothly, ‘Only to light the way,’ and, picking up a torch, preceded Louis like a lackey. In reality the King seems to have been fond of the Cardinal rather than otherwise. His letters to him were often almost excessively affectionate; he could write, ‘Be assured that I shall love you until my last breath’, signing himself ‘Louis de très bon coeur’. Richelieu took care to let the King know exactly what he was doing. Besides a daily correspondence, the two men spent long hours together, discussing plans and projects. Louis once said of Richelieu, ‘He is the greatest servant that France has ever had.’ The Cardinal wrote gratefully, ‘The capacity to permit his ministers to serve him is not the least of qualities in a great King.’

In the autumn of 1630 Louis fell so ill that he was not expected to live; he received the Last Sacraments, asking pardon for any wrong he might have done. The doctors thought he was suffering from dysentery but in fact he had an internal abscess: fortunately it burst, and he made a slow recovery, during which he was nursed by his wife and by his mother. The latter had now turned against the Cardinal. When Louis was at his weakest they insisted that he must dismiss Richelieu. Rumours of the Cardinal’s imminent disgrace circulated, and appeared to be confirmed by Louis’s curious coldness when Richelieu visited him. On his return to Paris, the King stayed with his mother at her new palace of the Luxembourg. On 10 November Marie took Louis into her chamber and again demanded that he dismiss the Cardinal. As she was speaking, Richelieu, who had been warned, burst into her room through a back door, to be met with a torrent of abuse from the Queen Mother. He knelt before the King begging for mercy, at which Marie screamed at Louis, ‘Do you prefer a lackey to your own mother?’ The King, who must have found the scene intolerable, told Richelieu to rise, bowed to his mother and left for his hunting-lodge at Versailles. Marie thought she had won: courtiers flocked to her, including the Marshal de Marillac and his brother, the Garde des Sceaux, as well as Bassompierre.

Richelieu made preparations for flight. Suddenly one of the King’s young cronies, Claude de Saint-Simon, appeared with a message from Louis summoning him to Versailles. There he again knelt before the King, and in an emotional scene Louis told him, ‘I have in you the most faithful, the most affectionate servant in the world. I have seen the respect and the attention which you have always paid the Queen my mother. If you had failed in your duty to her I would have cast you off. But she has no cause whatever to complain of you. She has let herself be prejudiced by a cabal whom I know very well how to destroy. Serve me as you have so far served me and I will defend you against every enemy.’ The Marshal de Marillac was arrested at the head of his troops, accused of embezzlement and beheaded; his brother, the Garde des Sceaux, died in prison; Bassompierre was sent to the Bastille, where he spent twelve years. Louis, not the Cardinal, was responsible for these measures. The Queen Mother was confined at Compiègne, from where in 1631 she fled to the Spanish Netherlands, dying in exile a decade later. Her attempt to overthrow Richelieu is known as ‘The Day of Dupes’.

Gaston too left France. From Lorraine he appealed to all Frenchmen to revolt against the Cardinal. He won a valuable recruit in the rich and popular Duc de Montmorency, who was angry at not being given the great office of Constable which his father and grandfather had held. In autumn 1632 Gaston invaded France and was joined by Montmorency, but their little army was easily defeated at Castelnaudry. Monsieur fled at the first charge. Poor Montmorency, a paragon of knightly virtue, was beheaded at Toulouse. Gaston swore to relinquish evil companions and be ‘especially fond of his cousin the Cardinal de Richelieu’. He soon fled again, to join his mother.

Louis was busy abroad, with the war of the Mantuan Succession, which broke out in 1629. (Mantua was important because it controlled one of the roads between Spanish Italy and the Empire.) The Duke of Mantua, a Gonzaga but also a Frenchman, defended his Ducal throne to the point of selling his Titians and Mantegnas. In the campaign’s early stages Richelieu took the King’s place, clad as a cavalier in clothes of ‘feuille morte’ edged with gold, wearing a cuirass of polished steel, white jackboots, a plumed hat and a rapier. In March 1630 Louis stormed the Savoyard fortress of Pignerolo, having first forced the pass of Susa where he smashed his way through three lines of fortifications. The old Duke of Savoy knelt in the snow to kiss Louis’s boots in token of submission, the war ending in April 1631 with the peace of Cherasco. Savoy ceded Pignerolo to France—with it went control of a pass over the Alps which guaranteed France access to Italy.

An incident during the campaign shows Louis’s fatalism. The mistress of the house where he lodged fell ill with the plague. His staff were terrified but Louis, dismissing them, said simply, ‘Withdraw and pray God that your own hostesses are not stricken, but first draw my bed curtains. I shall try to get some sleep and then we will leave to-morrow morning, early and without panic.’

During Gaston’s revolt, the Parlement of Paris had refused to ratify a royal edict condemning the rebellion. Louis soon forced them into a humiliating ratification. For the Parlement were not exempt from the revolution in government, their functions and privileges being constantly under attack. In 1641 Louis savagely told the senior President of the Paris Parlement, ‘You have been created only to judge between Maître Pierre and Maître Jean and if you continue your plots I will clip your claws so close that your flesh will suffer.’

Culturally, the later years of Louis XIII’s reign were a period of some distinction. In 1636 Corneille’s Le Cid was triumphantly performed for the first time. Next year Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode was published. The Academie Française was set up, charged with producing a dictionary which would preserve the purity of the French language. A natural history museum, the Jardin des Plantes, was founded for the instruction of medical students. In the chambre bleue of her hôtel near the Louvre, Mme de Rambouillet created the salon, holding receptions at which great lords and bourgeois intellectuals could meet on equal terms. Life was becoming altogether more graceful; the forerunners of the boulevardiers learnt to stroll through the elegant arcades of the Place Royale as well as to strut and bow at court. There were many new buildings in which they were able to parade, notably Louis’s extension of the west wing of the Louvre and Richelieu’s Palais Cardinal. Most of the hôtels of the Marais date from this period. At Fontainebleau and at Saint-Germain the King employed Simon Vouet, one of the best painters of the day; he also commissioned Philippe de Champaigne to paint an allegory of the royal triumph over heresy at La Rochelle. However, though Louis enjoyed plays, he had no deep interest in the arts and cancelled all literary pensions when Richelieu died.

A field in which Louis and Richelieu were less than successful was finance. Their government lived from hand to mouth, selling offices or confiscating the property of rebellious noblemen. The Cardinal increased taxes, but unlike Sully, relied on tax farmers. There were riots in Paris, peasant risings in Guyenne and Normandy—tax collectors were murdered and châteaux sacked until troops had to be sent in to restore order. One concrete achievement was a standard gold coinage, the famous Louis d’or, which made its appearance in 1640, bearing a most impressive portrait of the King.

In 1631 Théophraste Renaudot, a Paris doctor, published his Gazette, and was immediately given a royal pension. His journal, the first modern newspaper, was made to print royal edicts. It also published news bulletins which gave details of military campaigns—when they were successful—and of attempts to lighten taxes. Some of these bulletins were written by Louis himself, who had at once grasped their importance as a means of shaping public opinion.

Fully mature and bearded, the King had lost none of his neuroses. Scrupulously correct and owing something to fashionable Stoicism (he had probably read Epictetus), he still gave way to moods of hysterical depression during which he was quite unapproachable. Though an introvert, he was fond of such extrovert amusements as cards and parade grounds. His tastes were eccentric in their simplicity. When the axle of his carriage broke, the King, taking an axe, walked into the forest and returned with a sapling which he had trimmed. On campaign he could be found in a kitchen morosely cooking his supper. Like most Bourbons he had little time for intellectuals; Mme de Rambouillet’s précieuses were not much in evidence at the court of Louis XIII.

In any case he detested court life. Probably Louis’s ideal of paradise was the seventeenth century equivalent of a good London club. He tried to create his own world at Versailles—it is ironical that that monstrous edifice should have begun as a sanctuary of the simple life. The place was a small, lonely village outside Paris in a flat landscape of sandy soil and marshes. Its dreariness explained its isolation, an isolation which in turn explains its attraction for Louis. He had first visited Versailles-au-Val-de-Galie when he was a boy of six, on a hawking expedition in 1607. He began to hawk and hunt there again regularly in 1621. The long ride back to Paris irked him, so in 1624 he bought a little estate of hardly more than a hundred acres, and built a hunting-lodge. This first château of Versailles consisted of twenty-six rooms in a centre block with two wings, constructed in red brick and white stone, and roofed with blue slate. The bright colours are the reason for Saint-Simon’s description, ‘a card castle’. By 1636 it had been enlarged by the architect Philibert le Roy and consisted of three blocks around a courtyard, the fourth side being closed by an arcade; there was a small pavilion at each angle. The park and hunting grounds were also extended. None the less a contemporary described it as ‘a house fit for a gentleman with an income of only ten to twelve thousand livres’; Bassompierre even called it ‘the miserable little house of Versailles’.

Versailles was meant for relaxation. The food, like the furniture, was plain and uncomplicated. Besides hunting the King played cards, billiards, backgammon, chess and spillikins with his boon companions (and also such long forgotten games as renarde, moine, oie, tourniquet and trou-madame). He liked to drill a small company of musketeers in the courtyard. Sometimes in his little carriage he inspected young trees he had planted; at others he lounged in his bedroom in a green velvet dressing-gown lined with squirrel fur. Very occasionally the Queen or the Queen Mother visited Versailles with their ladies, but they never stayed the night. ‘Ce Prince si farouche pour les dames’, as Mme de Motteville terms him, gave it as his opinion that too many women would spoil everything. Versailles was essentially a bachelor paradise.

The King yearned for friendship. He sought ceaselessly a kindred spirit to whom he could unburden himself, someone who could dispel his overwhelming sense of isolation and desperate loneliness. The poor man was too suspicious and too inarticulate to have much chance of success. Mme de Motteville says of Louis, ‘Among so many sombre mists and weird fancies the tender passion could find no place in his heart. He did not love as other men do, to take pleasure in it. His spirit had grown accustomed to bitterness and he loved only to be hurt.’ Another person who knew the court of Louis XIII, M de Montglat, explains that, ‘The King’s love was not like that of other men, because he loved a girl without any thought of enjoying her favours, behaving to her as he would to a friend; even though it is perfectly possible for a man to have a mistress and a friend in one and the same person, that was not what he wanted, because his mistress was no more than his friend, a confidante to whom he could reveal the secrets of his heart.’

Louis had several mistresses, but as M de Montglat says, the relationship was invariably platonic. When Mlle de Hautefort coyly dropped a letter into her bosom, the King retrieved it with a pair of tongs. She lasted longest of all his loves, holding sway for nearly a decade. He first met her in 1631 when she was a seventeen-year-old Maid of Honour to the Queen. Nicknamed ‘Aurora’ by the court, Marie de Hautefort was a big, bouncing, Gascon blonde with an aquiline nose. High-spirited, imperious and a little hard, she inflicted upon Louis all the miseries which he expected; their affair was a business of jealous quarrels and grudging reconciliations. He suspected her of making fun of him to the Queen, but loved her in spite of himself. One day he confided his love to Saint-Simon, whereupon that earthy young man suggested that he act as Louis’s ambassador to Marie, hinting that if he did, the King would very soon find himself in bed with her. Louis was horrified. ‘It is quite true that I’m in love with her,’ he admitted, ‘that I look for her everywhere, that I enjoy talking about her and that I dream about her even more. But it is also true that this happens in spite of myself, as I’m a man and weak in that way. Being King makes it no easier for me than for anyone else to indulge my feelings, because I have to be always on my guard against sin and giving scandal.’ The astonished Saint-Simon concluded that Louis’s passion was real enough, but kept in check by religious scruples. Mlle de Hautefort’s influence was not altogether beneficial; as a loyal friend of Anne of Austria she disliked Richelieu and was pro-Spanish. On the other hand, she did her best to bring together the King and Queen, between whom there was now little love. Also, according to la Grande Mademoiselle (Gaston’s daughter), she made the court more agreeable. As a précieuse with literary tastes, Marie complained that the King only talked to her about hounds and hunting (though she occasionally hunted herself). No doubt she preferred the music parties which took place three times a week.

Louis’s other mistress, Mlle de La Fayette—who interrupted the Hautefort’s tyranny—also tried to reconcile the royal couple. The King first met this timid little Maid of Honour with brown ringlets and blue eyes in the autumn of 1635, when she was only sixteen. A deeply pious girl, she refused and made the Sign of the Cross when Louis paid her the unheard-of compliment of asking her to come and live with him at Versailles. She too hunted with the King and, entirely disinterested, seems to have genuinely loved him for himself. But she also detested Richelieu and his ‘wicked policies’. Ruthlessly, the Cardinal ordered her confessor to encourage her leaning towards the religious life, and in May 1637 Louise de La Fayette entered a Carmelite convent in Paris, in the rue Saint-Antoine. The King was in tears. So was Louise. ‘I shall never see him again,’ she wept. Her confessor told the King that her decision could be postponed, but Louis replied that if he kept her from her vocation he would regret it all his life. For a few months he visited her at her convent, though he was only able to speak to her through a grille (her somewhat worldly abbess said that the King ought to exercise his royal prerogative and come inside, but he was shocked by this suggestion). Marie de Hautefort soon returned, to make his life a torment again.

During her brief reign, Louise had formed a friendship with Louis’s confessor, a Jesuit called Nicolas Caussin. Potentially it was the most serious opposition which Richelieu ever encountered. Caussin held strict views on the nature of true repentance; he believed that absolution should only be given if the penitent felt real contrition, which included a strict resolve never to commit the sin again. (This was in contrast to the more normal view that attrition, a resolve to try not to sin again, was sufficient.) In addition Caussin believed that any alliance with a Protestant Prince was sacrilegious and a sin. He remonstrated in the confessional with Louis who, always scrupulous and fearful of damnation, began to have grim doubts about his eternal salvation. Finally Caussin actually dared to hector the King outside the confessional, vilifying Richelieu; he also made the terrible mistake of giving his penitent a letter from Marie de Medici. The Cardinal then managed to have Caussin dismissed and banished. He made sure that royal confessors were more tractable in future.

It is often said that Louis’s favourite companions were grooms. But these grooms were noblemen, even if not of very high rank. Admittedly, Baradas, his favourite of the mid-1620s, was an uncouth brute who grew insufferably arrogant and joined his betters in conspiring against the Cardinal. However, Claude de Rouvroy, Seigneur de Saint-Simon, was a very different type. Richelieu introduced him into the royal household as a page in 1626, when he was only nineteen. Saint-Simon speedily recommended himself by holding a second horse during the hunt in such a way that Louis was able to change mounts without touching the ground. Small, ugly, unlettered, Saint-Simon, apart from an ancient lineage, was not exactly distinguished; he had a wretched, mean appearance; Bassompierre called him ‘the little insect’. He was none the less shrewd and honourable and, during the ten years in which he was the King’s inseparable companion, had the sense to be grateful to Richelieu. So close were Louis and Saint-Simon that they could communicate without speaking—a mere glance between them was sufficient—while they had a secret language which only they could understand. The King appointed his friend Captain of Versailles, First Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Master of the Wolfhounds; in 1630 he made him Governor of Meulan and of Blaye, in 1635 a Duke and Peer of France. But in the end even Saint-Simon grew spoilt; by 1635 Louis was writing to Richelieu to complain of the new Duke’s ‘mauvaises humeurs’ and of how he always seems irritated with the King. Ironically, it was the loyalty and generosity which Louis so valued in him that brought about his downfall in 1636. The King decided to arrest and charge with treason an old friend of Saint-Simon, and Saint-Simon at once warned him. Louis would not tolerate such a betrayal of his confidence and, regardless of his own anguished feelings, banished Saint-Simon to Blaye.

Probably the Cardinal was Louis’s truest friend. The King’s letters to him are full of curiously intimate little details; how many times he has taken medicine, how many animals his hounds have killed, how cruel his favourites have been. He is also human enough to tell Richelieu not to be depressed because he knows how bad it is for his health.

The Cardinal did not waver in his determination to bring down the Habsburgs. Nevertheless, during the first decade of the Thirty Years War which convulsed Germany, it seemed that the Emperor Ferdinand II might impose his rule not only on Bohemia but upon all Germany. France was too weak to challenge him openly. The Imperial troops were formidable, while the allied army of Spain was considered to be the best in Europe. As yet French troops were neither sufficiently numerous nor sufficiently disciplined to take on such opponents. Richelieu therefore waged a kind of Cold War, subsidizing the Emperor’s Protestant enemies with French money. This policy proved almost too effective when King Gustav Adolf of Sweden all but destroyed the Imperial army; the ‘Lion of the North’ was a fanatic Lutheran, who aimed at establishing a great Protestant empire in place of that of the Habsburgs. Fortunately King Gustav was slain at Lutzen in 1632.

Throughout, Louis accepted the dangerous gamble of Richelieu’s brinkmanship. He took a keen interest in expanding his army and in improving its equipment. By the end of his reign Louis possessed a standing army of nearly 200,000 men, compared with 100,000 in 1622. Among new types of cavalry which he introduced were mounted infantry (the Black Musketeers and the Grey Musketeers, destined to be among the Ancien Régime’s most famous regiments). The principal corps remained those of Henri IV—the Guards, with the Regiments of Picardy, Navarre, Champagne and Piedmont. There were also regiments of Swiss, German and Italian mercenaries together with about a hundred small regiments raised by their colonels. The élite troops were excellent, but the rest were still too much of a feudal rabble.

A navy was also built up. Coastal rights were resumed by the Crown and a Conseil de la Marine was established. Bases were set up at Atlantic ports, and there was a regular programme of shipbuilding (the largest vessel, La Couronne, was 2,000 tons, 500 more than Charles I’s famous Royal Sovereign, and mounting 72 guns). By 1636 there was an Atlantic Fleet and a Mediterranean Fleet. The Archbishop of Bordeaux, Mgr Henri de Sourdis, proved a most capable Admiral of the Atlantic Fleet, who recruited officers from French Knights of Malta and from among merchant captains and privateers.

In 1635 Richelieu and Louis decided to bring the war into the open. A French herald, wearing his tabard and accompanied by a trumpeter, rode into Brussels to read out a formal declaration of war in the Grande Place. French troops were then sent to aid the Dutch and to invade Milan, but bad organization brought these operations to a halt. An attempt to overrun Franche Comté also failed. The French army seemed hardly adequate for a full-scale war on three fronts.

The Habsburgs retaliated swiftly. In the summer of 1636, Imperial troops invaded Burgundy while a Spanish army commanded by the Cardinal Infante, Philip IV’s viceroy in the Low Countries, invaded Picardy. He advanced across the Somme, to find only 10,000 French troops between him and Paris. The capital’s walls had been dismantled and there were no troops for its defence; thousands of Parisians had fled. Richelieu, whose bodyguard was being hissed in the street and who was suffering from migraine, lost his nerve badly. At a meeting of the Council he advised the King to abandon Paris. Everyone present agreed with the Cardinal, with the exception of Louis, who for once overruled his great servant. To leave Paris, said the King, would demoralize the entire country. After promulgating a series of edicts tantamount to a general mobilization, Louis rode out to Senlis to join what troops were available. As he rode out, he was cheered. Somehow reinforcements, untrained but sufficient, were brought up. Meanwhile the Cardinal Infante took Corbie, the last fortress before Paris, which was now only eighty miles away; his forward troops reached Pontoise. But the Parisians rose to the occasion in the same way that they did at the battle of the Marne in 1914. Soon Louis had an army of 40,000 men and the Cardinal Infante withdrew, the French regaining Corbie on 14 November. For long afterwards 1636 was known as the Year of Corbie.

In 1637 France began to win victories, capturing towns on the Flemish frontier. The new navy won a significant triumph in an action with the Spaniards off Lerins; the following year it won its first major battle, off Fuentarrabia, sinking twenty Spanish ships. Also in 1638, France’s Protestant ally, Duke Bernhardt of Saxe-Weimar, smashed the Imperial army at Rheinfelden and conquered most of Alsace; he died unexpectedly in 1639, whereupon the French took over his conquests. Ill-health prevented Louis from playing as active a part as he would have wished in military operations. In any case he had problems at home.

In 1636 Gaston d’Orléans was involved in yet another plot against Richelieu, who only just escaped assassination. The Comte de Soissons, a Prince of the Blood, who had been connected with the plot, hatched a further conspiracy in which Gaston also joined. Both plots were discovered, but no really harsh measures could be taken against members of the Blood Royal. Gaston was bought off with a large sum of money (part of which paid for the Mansard wing at Blois) and Soissons fled to Sedan.

Louis’s support for the Cardinal in the face of opposition from the entire nobility shows real moral courage. None the less Richelieu was always fearful of losing his favour—he considered the four square feet of the King’s cabinet ‘more difficult to conquer than all the battlefields of Europe’. During Louis’s reign, twenty-six persons were beheaded for plotting against the Cardinal, and more died in prison (they included four Dukes and a Marshal of France). The King gave his support at terrible personal cost. Estrangements with his mother and his brother were inevitable, but surely not with his Queen. When war was declared on Spain, Mme de Chevreuse persuaded Anne to send details of any French military operations which she could discover to her brother, the Cardinal Infante. For four years the Queen of France was a spy for Spain. Eventually in August 1637 one of her messengers, M de La Porte, was intercepted. Marie de Hautefort saved Anne by boldly entering the Bastille, disguised as a man, and smuggling a letter to La Porte so that he was able to make his story tally with that of the Queen. As for Mme de Chevreuse, still youthful and slightly-built, she disguised herself as a page and galloped down lanes and byways until she reached Spain. It is likely that Anne had convinced herself that she was aiding the enemies of the Cardinal and not those of France.

One day in December 1637 Louis left Versailles to stay with Condé at Saint Maur. Passing through Paris, he decided to visit Soeur Angélique (the former Louise de La Fayette) at her convent in the rue Saint-Antoine. Their conversation continued until nightfall, by which time heavy rain was falling; the wind was so violent that it blew out the candles in the lanterns of the royal escort. Their captain, M de Guitaut, who was on familiar terms with the King and who was also devoted to the Queen, said that it would be impossible to reach Saint Maur in such a violent storm; he advised the King to stay at the Louvre. Louis replied that his apartments were not ready, whereupon Guitaut suggested that he stay with the Queen. The night grew blacker than ever, the rain falling in torrents. Reluctantly, the King agreed. He had supper with the Queen and then spent the night in her bed. A little before midday on Sunday 5 September 1638, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Anne of Austria gave birth to a son, Louis Dieudonné—the God-given. Mlle de Hautefort persuaded Louis to go to the Queen’s bedside and kiss her. Te Deums were sung throughout France.

The news was not welcomed by everyone; Gaston was no longer heir to the throne—Richelieu was safe. The Cardinal’s enemies suggested that the King was not the father; indeed it was somewhat surprising that Anne should bear her first child in the twenty-third year of their marriage. But there was no doubt about the birth, which took place in poor Gaston’s presence; to console him the King gave him a large sum of money.

The King continued to sleep with Anne. In his grim way he considered it his duty, though he now neither liked nor trusted her. Flirtatious, still goodlooking if a little plump, with her fair hair in ringlets, Anne was very conscious of her looks. (Mme de Motteville says that her only imperfections were too big a nose and wearing too much rouge.) Her voice was not attractive, a shrill falsetto—she yapped like a terrier. In character she was scatter-brained, lazy, a glutton, everything that Louis was not. He knew very well that she corresponded with Mme de Chevreuse, who was now in England.

Marie de Hautefort—‘the creature’ as Louis calls her in his letters to Richelieu—was not much solace. She had a stinging wit and bullied him unmercifully, demanding places at court for her family. In 1638 he wrote pathetically to the Cardinal, ‘la créature est toujours en mauvaise humeur contre moi.’ He was driven to distraction by her love for a Captain in the Royal Guard, the Marquis de Gesvres, even writing to the young man’s father to tell him how angry he was with his son. In the end she made herself so disagreeable that the King was thoroughly disenchanted with all women. Mlle de Hautefort could not believe it when she was finally asked to leave the court in November 1639.

Richelieu was uneasy. He knew that in his loneliness, Louis might find some new favourite who might oppose the Cardinal. To protect himself, he had introduced the son of an old friend into the royal household—Henri d’ Effiat, Marquis de Cinq Mars, who was appointed Master of the King’s Wardrobe on 27 March 1638. It was the eighteenth birthday of this strikingly handsome young nobleman. The first thing he did was to add to his own wardrobe (which eventually included fifty-two suits). Louis soon took a passionate liking to him. Here was another long-sought friend. In the summer of 1639 he made him Grand Master of the Horse, and henceforward Cinq Mars was known as Monsieur le Grand. The King fawned on his new favourite, loading him with presents.

A thoroughly shallow creature, Cinq Mars, although intoxicated by his good fortune, was entirely without gratitude. He was bored by Louis, who spent more and more time hunting; digging out foxes and flying sparrowhawks at blackbirds were small consolation to a young man who loved Paris and had a beautiful mistress. He turned sulky and was continually slipping away. There were constant scenes in which Richelieu acted as peacemaker. Sometimes Monsieur le Grand’s hauteurs were so insufferable that the King was unable to sleep from rage. It is often said that the relationship was homosexual, and Louis’s behaviour was certainly abnormal. But there is no evidence whatsoever of homosexual behaviour on his part, even if he undoubtedly admired beauty in both sexes. The only hint of perversion is Tallemant des Réaux’s squalid gossip, which includes a story of the King, wearing a bride’s nightdress, sharing a bed with his favourite and kissing his hands. Tallemant is not noted for reliability. In fact, throughout the association with Cinq Mars, Louis continued to sleep with the Queen—in the late summer of 1640 she gave birth to another son, Philippe (the future ‘Monsieur’). Anne did not show the slightest jealousy of Cinq Mars, though she had resented Mlle de Hautefort. Nor was the King any less assiduous at his devotions. He would hardly have written his pitiful complaints to Richelieu about the favourite’s cruelty if he had thought the relationship a sin. What is particularly significant are the childish certificates which the pair signed after quarrels and sent to the Cardinal, stating that they were on good terms again. Basically the association was an adolescent friendship, even if Louis was twenty years older than Cinq Mars; the King was not perverted but retarded—he had the emotional age of a boy of fifteen.

While these puerile quarrels were taking place, France was winning victory after victory. In 1640 the French conquered Artois, while across the Alps the Comte d’Harcourt routed the Habsburg armies three times and captured Turin. The Duke of Savoy hastily negotiated for peace with France.

Yet the French nobility were determined to overthrow Richelieu. The Comte de Soissons gathered a Spanish army at Sedan and began to invade France; luckily he was killed by a stray pistol bullet during the first skirmish. Next year the Duc de Bouillon revived the plan; he intended to invade France with a French army from Italy and raise the Huguenots of the Cévennes, while Gaston was to attack from the north. They were joined by no less a personage than Cinq Mars who signed their treaty with Spain; he hoped that if the plot were successful he might marry Marie de Gonzaga and obtain her fabulous wealth. In his conceit he had come to resent the Cardinal’s admonitions; by now Louis was so irritated by his favourite that on one occasion he shouted ‘Je le vomis!’ But Richelieu’s spies soon discovered the plot.

In June 1642, at Narbonne, an agent of the Cardinal showed the King documents which gave irrefutable proof of Cinq Mars’s treachery. Louis at once gave orders for his arrest and, after a brief attempt to hide in the back streets of Narbonne, the former favourite was incarcerated in the fortress of Montpelier. In September he was tried at Lyons, hopelessly compromised by the confessions of Gaston and Bouillon. The wretched young man broke down and admitted his guilt; he also incriminated his best friend, François-Auguste de Thou. Arrogant to the last, he protested at sharing a scaffold with de Thou because the latter was a commoner. On the day of Cinq Mars’s execution, the King, who was playing chess, looked up at the clock and said, ‘Aha, this morning at this very moment our dear friend is having a bad time [un mauvais moment].’

Ill-health—gout, rheumatism and fever striking at a constitution which was now dangerously undermined by pneumo-intestinal tuberculosis—together with the miseries of his private life had brought Louis to the verge of collapse. Unable to hunt, he turned to music, being particularly soothed by the airs de cour composed and sung to the lute by Pierre de Nyert, whom he rewarded by appointing him Premier Valet de la Garde Robe. (He left him a considerable sum of money in his will.)

Spain was falling apart. In 1641 Portugal, which had been under Spanish rule since 1580, declared itself independent. Catalonia also rebelled, proclaiming Louis as sovereign Count of Barcelona. In 1642 the King added Roussillon and Cerdagne to France, whose frontier now extended along the entire length of the Pyrenees. Although Louis had personally directed the siege of Perpignan, his growing weakness had made it impossible to take much part in the campaign.

Meanwhile Richelieu lay dying. A skeleton, eaten by ulcers which paralysed him, he had to be carried in a litter; he was rowed up the Rhône in a gilded barge, his cabin hung with gold and crimson velvet. Although in agony as he lay on his bed of violet taffetas, the Cardinal’s mind retained its icy clarity. But by the end of 1642 he was spitting blood, and his physicians diagnosed pleurisy—he offered his resignation. However, Louis answered that Richelieu must die as he had lived, First Minister of France, and came to his bedside to feed him spoonfuls of egg yolk with his own hand. The ‘torment and ornament of his age’ died on 4 December 1642. He had made France the greatest country in Europe; his achievements are the measure of Louis XIII’s judgement. On his advice Louis appointed Mazarin to be his successor, with instructions to continue all the Cardinal’s policies.

Louis himself was dying. At the end of March 1643 he told his doctor, Bouvard, ‘I see from your silence that I am going to die.’ He added, ‘God knows I never liked life and that I shall be overjoyed to go to Him.’ They brought the Dauphin to see him. When the King asked him his name the little boy replied, ‘Louis XIV, mon Papa.’ His father smiled and answered, ‘Not yet, my son.’ After receiving the Last Sacraments at the end of April, Louis diverted himself by ordering his gentlemen to sing psalms and hymns in which he sometimes joined. He died on 14 May 1643. His last word was ‘Jesus’. He was only forty-one.

Acting on his instructions, an attendant removed the crucifix, which Louis wore on a cord round his neck, and took it to Soeur Angélique (Mlle de La Fayette) at her convent.

The day before he died the King had said to the old foe of his childhood, Condé, ‘Monsieur, I know that the enemy is advancing towards our frontiers with a great and powerful army.’ No one in Paris had heard of any enemy invasion. Louis added faintly, ‘Your son will rout it and win a great victory.’ They thought the dying man’s mind was wandering. A week later, a strong Spanish force laid siege to Rocroi, a French fortress in the Ardennes. Condé’s son, the Duc d’Enghien who was only twenty-two, led an army of 20,000 men to its relief. A brilliant, unorthodox commander, he marched straight at the Spaniards, positioning his troops too quickly for the enemy to manœuvre. Next day the Duke routed them with successive charges until only the famous Spanish infantry remained, commanded from a litter by the aged Count Fuentes. Enghien charged them three times until Fuentes was killed. Another final charge destroyed them; 8,000 Spaniards were killed and 7,000 taken prisoner, the cream of their army. It was the end of a military domination of Europe which had lasted since their victory at Pavia in 1525.

To his contemporaries, Louis XIII seemed a most effective monarch. James Howell,[*] writing in 1646, regarded him as an inspiration to English royalists: ‘A successful and triumphant King both at home and abroad throughout the whole course of his reign,’ wrote Howell, ‘and that in so constant degree as if Fortune herself had been his companion and Victory his handmaid.’

Saint-Simon outlived his friend and master by fifty years, dying in 1693. He had known Louis XIII better than anyone. It is worth remembering that he and his son—the diarist—never ceased to venerate Louis’s memory. To the end of his life the diarist wore on his finger a miniature of the King set in diamonds, while a lamp burnt perpetually before a bust of Louis in the family chapel. Father and son faithfully attended Mass at Saint-Denis on every anniversary of his death. Few Kings have inspired such gratitude and affection in their favourites.

‘The Love of Glory’

LOUIS XIV (1643–1715)

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‘The love of glory has all the same subtle shades and, may I say, all the same questionings as the tender passions’

So much has been written about Louis XIV that it is impossible to think of him without prejudice. Many have admired him extravagantly, and as many have detested him no less fervently. It is not easy to distinguish the man from the King. He lived so completely in public that he almost ceased to exist as a private individual.

Louis ascended the throne in 1643, at the age of four and a half. He was already conscious of his superiority to other mortals; when Cinq Mars had presumptuously picked him up in his nursery, Louis had kicked and screamed till he was set down again. Even as a child he possessed a marked sense of theatre and must have relished his presentation to the Parlement in their red robes and bonnets. Their President, M Omar Talon, went on his knees before the boy to tell him that, to the lawyers, his chair of state represented ‘the throne of the Living God’, and that ‘the realm’s estates pay you honour and duty as they would to a God who can be seen’.

Anne of Austria swiftly persuaded the Parlement to set aside the late King’s will, which had left her only the title of Regent while giving the substance of power to a council of advisers. Like Marie de Medici, she meant to be all-powerful, and like Marie de Medici, real power lay with an Italian favourite. But there was little resemblance between the Concini and Giulio Mazzarini, better known as Cardinal Mazarin. This low-born adventurer, who was reputed to be the grandson of a Sicilian fisherman, had combined the careers of soldier, diplomat and cleric, first in the Papal service and then in the French, winning the approval of Louis XIII and Richelieu who obtained the Red Hat for him (though he only took minor orders and was never a priest). Where Richelieu had been nervous and harsh, Mazarin was suave and charming. His character was subtler, more accommodating. Never discouraged or depressed, his motto was ‘Time is on my side’. Tall, fair-haired and handsome—Richelieu said he looked like Buckingham—he knew how to please women. Anne of Austria was completely captivated: as Voltaire put it, ‘He had such dominion over her as a clever man may well have over a woman born with sufficient weakness to be ruled and sufficient obstinacy to persist in her choice.’ Even so, the court was taken by surprise when the Regent confirmed him in his post of First Minister.

No one expected Mazarin to continue in office for very long. The opposition which had plagued Richelieu descended on the court; they had suffered either on behalf of, or with, the Queen and they expected to be rewarded. This Cabale des Importants included the Duc de Vendôme, Henri IV’s son, and Vendôme’s own son, the gallant Duc de Beaufort; the Bishop of Beauvais (whom a fellow prelate described as a ‘mitred beast’); Marie de Hautefort, and, of course, Mme de Chevreuse. The latter shrilly insisted that Anne must return everything which Louis XIII had stolen from the great lords. After four months the Regent grew tired of her former friends, the last straw being a plot to murder Mazarin, and banished them.

Anne was a strong, vigorous woman, still goodlooking if somewhat full-blown. She ate enormously at all meals, and when angry screamed at those who displeased her. She was unconventional; during the torrid summer of 1646 she and her ladies, accompanied by little Louis, disported themselves in the Seine, clad in grey nightdresses. While the Regent may well have been in love with her First Minister, it is certain that she never lived with him; Anne was a devout Spanish Catholic and it would have been impossible for her to sleep with the Cardinal without her ladies knowing of such a spectacular liaison, as they themselves slept at the foot of her bed every night. None the less, she trusted Mazarin almost as a second husband.

In the long run it was fortunate for France that she did. Mazarin continued all Richelieu’s policies and abroad the benefits were quickly evident. The Thirty Years War came to an end in 1648 when Sweden, France and the Empire made a peace by which France gained Alsace (even if it was still nominally subject to the Emperor). The negotiations were conducted in French, the beginning of its long sway as the language of diplomacy. France remained at war with Spain, but the latter was now too weak to be of much danger.

Louis was an attractive little boy, bright, high-spirited and unusually goodlooking, though he lost some of his looks after catching smallpox in 1647. His education was designed to give him an ineradicable sense of the dignity of kingship; he had to copy out texts such as ‘Homage is owed to Kings; they do what they wish’. He was told to model himself on Saint Louis and on his grandfather. Henri IV was now referred to as ‘Henri le Grand’ in official documents, while one of Louis’s tutors, Bishop Péréfixe, compiled a eulogistic life for the young monarch’s edification. Anne is said to have told the boy not to copy his father because ‘People wept at the death of Henri IV, but laughed at that of Louis XIII’. However, Louis always remembered his father with affection.

Each night the Queen’s valet read him extracts from Eudes de Mezeray’s History of France, though Louis himself much preferred fairy-tales. He was taught riding, fencing and deportment, how to carry himself as a King; he also learnt the lute and the guitar, and how to sing and dance. He could speak good Italian and passable Spanish. Apart from basic arithmetic, he was given little instruction in mathematics and remained more or less ignorant of geography, economics and modern history.

His tutors were so obsequious that he christened one—Marshal de Villeroy—‘Maréchal Oui-Sire’, but it cannot be said that Louis was spoilt. Although fond of him, his mother regretted not having a daughter and preferred his delicate brother, Philippe, whom she called her little girl. If the King had his own household from the age of seven, his stockings were often in holes, while he never had enough sheets (for the rest of his life he slept with the bed clothes wrapped round his waist, and nothing over his chest and shoulders save a nightshirt). He was so much left to his own devices that once when he fell into the big fountain in the Palais Royal garden, he was not rescued until evening. On state occasions, however, he was paraded in a coat of cloth of gold and a plumed cavalier hat with a diamond buckle. He had toy soldiers of silver and toy cannon of gold, but his favourite possession was a miniature arquebus made by his father. Years later the King told Mme de Maintenon how he and his brother had roamed happily through the Louvre, teasing the maids and stealing omelettes from the kitchens. They used to play with a servant’s little girl—she pretended to be Queen and they acted as her footmen. But in 1648 life assumed an air so menacing that even children could not fail to notice it.

The Fronde was an expression of general discontent. Years of frustration and irritation had at last reached boiling point. But it was not an attempt at revolution in the contemporary English manner. There was an odd note of frivolity in its name, which meant catapulting—or even pea-shooting. A popular song ran:

Un vent de Fronde

S’est levé ce matin

Je crois qu’il gronde

Contre le Mazarin.

The attitude of the Frondeurs may have been negative and unconstructive, but they included the majority of articulate Frenchmen. There were to be two Frondes—the Fronde of the Parlement, and the Fronde of the Princes.

In five years, Mazarin had made himself even more hated than Richelieu. His financial methods—such as manipulating the Rentes (or government annuities) by withholding interest and then buying them cheap when the price fell—caused widespread bankruptcies among the bourgeois. Taxes were collected with such savagery that in 1646 over 20,000 Frenchmen were in prison for fiscal offences. At the same time the Cardinal displayed both avarice and ostentatious luxury—he was famous for his Titians and Correggios, his collection of gems and his exquisite library, notorious for hoarding bullion. Surrounded by a bevy of black-eyed nieces, always fondling some scented marmoset or lap-dog, speaking with a strong Italian accent, and embarrassingly obsequious, Mazarin aroused instinctive dislike in the Frenchmen of his time.

The office-holding noblesse de la robe was both alarmed and angered by the increasing power of the Intendants throughout the realm, which detracted from their prestige and diminished their influence. The Paris Parlement was finally infuriated beyond endurance by an edict of 1646 which made them pay duty on fruit and vegetables sent up from their country houses. They began to refuse any edicts which increased taxation, winning considerable popularity. In May 1648 they announced their intention of serving the public and rooting out abuses of state. They even developed a presumptuous theory that the will of the King was not law—events across the Channel had not gone unnoticed. Mazarin smelt danger and in July agreed to reforms suggested by the Parlement. Then news came of another triumphant victory by Condé (Enghien, who had now succeeded his father) at Lens, and the Cardinal felt strong enough to arrest the three noisiest lawyers. An attempt to rescue one of them, the demagogue Broussel, turned into a riot and then into a revolt; 200 barricades blocked the narrow streets. A deputation went to the Queen to demand Broussel’s release, and when it returned empty-handed it was nearly murdered by an armed mob. Despite the Queen’s tearful opposition—she threatened to strangle Broussel with her own hands—Mazarin released the lawyers. Shortly after, the Regent signed a Declaration of Reform.

In January 1649 Condé and a royalist army surrounded Paris, whereupon Anne and the King fled to Saint-Germain. The siege continued for three months. During this time Louis and his mother slept on truckle beds at a Saint-Germain denuded of furniture. Ladies had to make do with straw palliasses, while gentlemen lay on the floor. There were ballets and banquets, but the royal coffers were soon empty—Louis dismissed his pages because he could not feed them. The royal party can hardly have been cheered by the news from England; Charles I had been beheaded. Anne groaned, ‘This is a blow to make Kings tremble!’ However, the first Fronde came to an end when the Regent grudgingly confirmed her Declaration. The court returned to Paris in August 1649.

Mazarin and the Regent were now threatened by ‘Le Grand Condé’. The young warlord was an insufferably haughty little man with an overbred face like a bird of prey, who could never forget that he was First Prince of the Blood and possessed six dukedoms. He thought himself all-powerful, insulting both Anne and the Cardinal—on one occasion he pulled the latter’s beard. To his own astonishment Condé was arrested and imprisoned at Vincennes in January 1650. His friends soon raised the standard of revolt, beginning the Fronde of the Princes. All over France nobles rose, but at first the royal troops were successful (during one of these engagements, Louis was shot at). Meanwhile, behind Mazarin’s back, a debauched little abbé, Paul de Gondi (the future Cardinal de Retz), who was the co-adjutor to the Archbishop of Paris, was plotting to unite the two Frondes; he was able to do so because his office gave him a seat in the Parlement, where he ostentatiously wore a dagger known as the breviary of M de Retz. He intrigued to such effect that the lawyers allied with the Princes, and Parlement asked the Regent to release Condé and dismiss Mazarin.

Mazarin fled to Cologne, disguised as a musketeer, with Anne’s diamonds in his pocket. Gaston d’Orléans was proclaimed Lieutenant-General of France. Suspecting that the Queen was about to flee from Paris to join Mazarin, a Frondeur mob broke into the Louvre and demanded to see the King. Anne, who was on the point of leaving, hastily changed into a nightdress, while Louis leapt into bed—still wearing his boots—and pretended to be asleep. In single file the rabble of Paris shuffled past his bed, some daring to peer behind the curtains to see if he really were inside. Condé was released from Vincennes.

Gaston d’Orléans said that during these years the political scene changed so often and so swiftly that he was in a state of almost perpetual bewilderment. In September 1651 Louis was crowned at Rheims (during the celebrations he danced in a court ballet, wearing the costume of a ‘Sun King’). The ‘Eighth Sacrament’ confirmed him in his extraordinary and precocious self-confidence. Furthermore, he had achieved his legal majority and Mazarin, feeling secure again, returned. It was too soon. Condé, during his absence, had quarrelled with the Parlement and had left Paris, but he now advanced on the capital with an army—he may even have hoped to seize the throne. In the battles which followed Condé very nearly captured Louis. Anne was only persuaded to stay in Paris by her confidence in that great soldier, Turennes, the son of Henri IV’s old enemy, who had rallied to the Royalist party—she told him gratefully, ‘Without you every town in France would have shut its gates on the King.’ But Condé continued to advance. In July 1652 he fought a battle in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, during which La Grande Mademoiselle (Gaston’s daughter) trained the guns of the Bastille on Turennes’s troops and opened the gates to Condé. The royal forces withdrew, leaving Condé in occupation of the capital, and a massacre of Mazarin’s supporters ensued; law and order broke down, to such an extent that the Parisians began to starve. Shrewdly Mazarin left France for a second time. Finally Condé lost his nerve and retreated to Flanders.

The Fronde collapsed. Peasants and bourgeois alike were desperate for peace; mercenary armies were devastating France and famine was widespread—there were cases of cannibalism. Both the nobles and the lawyers were disillusioned; their challenge to Absolutism had failed utterly. In October 1652 Louis XIV entered Paris to the cheers of its fickle inhabitants. The exiled Charles II of England rode beside him. In December the fourteen-year-old monarch showed both courage and dissimulation in effecting the arrest of Cardinal de Retz (Gondi). The latter was still dangerous in his residence at Nôtre-Dame, guarded by a mob who idolized him. When he visited the young King at the Louvre, he was greeted effusively by Louis, who spoke enthusiastically of a play which he had just seen, his last words as he left the room being, ‘and above all when no one is on the stage’. The words were the signal for his Guards to arrest de Retz, who speedily found himself in Vincennes. Condé, who had fled to Spain, was condemned to death. The Parlement was humiliated by an edict that it must henceforward register all decrees of the royal council. In February 1653 Mazarin returned—he had triumphed, though his hair had turned white. The Fronde was over.

Mazarin was now undisputed master of France. He took pains to train the young King in statecraft; in 1654 he started to hold special sessions of the Council at which business was simplified so that the boy could follow; soon Louis was attending daily. Of this time he wrote in his memoirs how he never ceased to test himself in secret—‘I was delighted and encouraged when I sometimes learnt that my youthful ideas had been adopted by able experienced men.’ His already phenomenal self-confidence was growing. One day in March 1655, while hunting, he learnt that the Parlement had met without authorization to reconsider recent edicts; booted and spurred, Louis strode into the Parlement and told the Président, ‘I forbid you to allow these meetings and any one of you to ask for them.’ He began to impress ambassadors with his knowledge of foreign policy. By 1657 he was visiting Mazarin every morning to discuss matters of state.

The one matter in which the Cardinal did not indulge the King was finance, which he never discussed. While he himself was amassing a vast fortune, Mazarin kept Louis short of ready cash. Voltaire says that he administered the royal finances like the steward of some bankrupt nobleman—the King often had to borrow money. Yet when Mazarin shrewdly presented Louis with all his own enormous wealth, in a specially drawn-up deed, Louis promptly returned it. Until the end he deferred to the Cardinal.

Mazarin’s foreign policy was imaginative. Spain, for whom Condé was now fighting, had recaptured all the French gains, so the Cardinal made an alliance with Cromwell, after which the Spaniards were defeated on both sea and land. In 1658 Turennes won a great victory, the Battle of the Dunes, capturing Dunkirk, the key to Flanders. Louis made a grand entrance into the port, though by the terms of the treaty it soon had to be surrendered to the English. When the Protector died, the French court went into mourning. It was in 1658, too, that Spain made peace, France retaining Artois, Cerdagne and Roussillon and remaining in occupation of the Duchy of Lorraine; Condé received a full pardon. The peace was sealed by Louis’s betrothal to a Spanish princess.

The King was no stranger to the pleasures of the bed. He was said to have been initiated, on his mother’s instructions, by Mme de Beauvais, who was the chief lady-in-waiting and known as ‘One-eyed Cateau’; she lay in wait for him as he returned from his bath. From her he went on to various chambermaids and laundresses, contracting gonorrhea to his shame and self-disgust.

In 1657 he had fallen head over heels in love with Mazarin’s niece, Marie Mancini, who was only seventeen. Mme de Motteville describes her as sallow and scraggy, but in fact she was pretty enough, and interesting too—an intense blue-stocking with huge brown eyes. She refused to become his mistress, the affair being highly intellectual; they exchanged verses and read favourite books to each other. Louis gave her his little dog, Friponne, and bought her Henrietta Maria’s pearls (poverty had forced the English Queen to sell them). By 1658 the King wanted to marry Marie and was encouraged by the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden. Mazarin was horrified when Louis asked him for his niece in marriage; he told the King that he would stab Marie rather than allow her to disgrace the throne. The lovers parted tearfully in the courtyard of the Louvre, Marie crying, ‘You are King and you are weeping and yet I have to leave!’ A long, sad farewell lasted until the autumn of 1659 when Marie begged Louis to stop writing to her. (She became the wife of the Roman Prince Colonna, in whose father’s household Mazarin’s father had been a servant; it turned out an unhappy marriage.)

In June 1660 like his father before him, Louis married an Infanta of Spain. At the nuptial blessing in the church at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, near the Spanish border, Maria Theresa wore a dress of silver brocade with a forty-foot train of blue velvet; she was small and stout, almost a dwarf, with a long, fat face partly redeemed by wonderfully curly hair of brilliant gold, and bright blue eyes. Her husband, whom she was meeting for the first time—they had been married by proxy—was in gold brocade; she was alarmed by his insistence on consummating their marriage the same night. The following year Maria Theresa presented him with a Dauphin (Louis—known to history as le Grand Dauphin, to his contemporaries as Monseigneur), but the six other children who followed all died in infancy. Amiable, good-natured, but unintelligent, always chattering in bad French, she bored Louis. The poor young woman solaced herself with prayer and by indulging her passion for rich food, especially chocolate, and garlic sauces.

At twenty-two Louis XIV was a handsome, well-built little man of five feet four inches, dark-skinned, with long brown hair. His face was round, with a firm yet sensual mouth, and was dominated by a great Bourbon nose; at this time he wore a pencil-thin moustache. His eyes are sometimes described as grey, sometimes as hazel, being of that changeable hue which the French call chatoyant. Despite his small size—he wore six-inch heels to offset it—he had broad shoulders and was unusually muscular. He possessed an unmistakably regal presence and what contemporaries describe as an almost god-like way of carrying himself. He was already a man of overwhelmingly strong personality, with a rather grave charm, which was enhanced by beautiful manners; he seldom joked for fear of hurting people’s feelings.

Louis was highly intelligent, with a marked sense of justice and fair play. (Lord Acton considered him ‘by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne’.) Although sensitive and emotional, he displayed almost complete self-control from a very early age—he never showed signs of pain, never gave way to weariness before his courtiers; in some ways he resembled an actor perpetually on stage. Like his grandfather he had voracious appetites, being a gargantuan eater and an insatiable womanizer, and like all Bourbons he loved hunting. A need for constant exercise was evident in long walks, in tennis and pall-mall, and in his enjoyment of dancing in court ballets.

So far the reign of Louis XIV had been very like that of Louis XIII. There had been a long minority under a tactless Queen Regent, who governed through an Italian favourite. The turbulence of the great nobles and the lawyers had plunged France into civil wars of just the same sort as those of the early years of the preceding reign. Finally, order had been established by a strong and ruthless First Minister.

From 1660, however, the Cardinal was ailing—he had cancer. Early on the morning of 9 March 1661 Pierrette, Louis’s old nurse who still slept in his bedchamber, woke the King to tell him that Mazarin was dead. Louis rose, dressed, and locked himself in the Cardinal’s room, weeping. When he emerged he ordered the court to go into mourning as if for a member of the royal family—he had been fond of the old man, almost as a second father (in his memoirs he wrote that he had loved him).

Next day Louis summoned the Council to meet at the Louvre, at seven o’clock in the morning. Each of its members hoped to be the new First Minister and all were astonished when the King told them, ‘It is time for me to govern. You will help me with advice when I ask for it … Secretaries of State, I order you to sign nothing without my command, not even a passport or a safe conduct.’ From his memoirs it is evident that Louis was amused by the Council’s astonishment—he saw that they expected him to grow bored. He wrote, ‘A man reigns by work and it is ungrateful and presumptuous to God, unjust and tyrannical to men, to wish to reign without working.’ He himself often worked a full eight-hour day, reading every document which bore his name.

Even at this early age he had evolved the principles which governed his reign. Mazarin had assured him that he could be the greatest King the world had ever known. He wrote proudly, ‘A ruling and over-riding passion for greatness and glory obliterates all others’; and that for a King ‘the love of glory has all the same subtle shades and, may I say, all the same questionings as the tender passions.’ Louis considered himself not only master of his subjects but also owner of their goods; this belief was not his own invention, but was derived from the place of the Emperor in Roman Law. Nor was it a concept without dignity, for Louis also believed that it was his duty to consider the welfare of his subjects rather than his own. ‘If God gives me grace to do all I hope to, I will bring happiness during my reign, to such an extent that … nobody, however poor he may be, shall be uncertain of his daily bread, either from his own labour or from public assistance by the state.’

Louis XIV set out to be a great King at a moment when France had decided that she wanted to be a great nation. He threatened Spain, and even the Papacy, with war merely because of trivial insults to his ambassadors. The French applauded, and welcomed his early campaigns. Their attitude was a little like that of the Germans in 1933—they wanted a ruler who would give them self-respect. After the remote Louis XIII, the country was delighted to find itself with a charming and accessible young King. Their adulation affected even les Grands, in the same way that Hitler’s popularity cowed the German ruling classes. The upper ranks of the French nobility had been badly shaken by the débâcle of the Fronde. If Richelieu could bring them to heel, an able King who governed for himself, and was a popular idol, could easily exploit their lack of self-confidence.

Louis had the hypnotic charisma later possessed by Napoleon and by Hitler. Saint-Simon writes of his ‘terrifying majesty’. His all-seeing glance could make the haughtiest duke tremble—he could make even Condé shake with fear. Fascist writers of the 1920s and 1930s saw him as a precursor of the Dictators—a ruler who embodied the National Will, the Warrior King of Action Française. But, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, and indeed unlike Napoleon, Louis put his office before himself; he was the anointed King of France rather than Louis XIV. Voltaire has a revealing story, that when a sycophant proposed that the Académie should debate which was the King’s greatest virtue, Louis actually blushed.

The Dauphin was born in June 1662. The King held a fête in celebration, in an enclosure between the Louvre and the Tuileries (which is still known as the Place de Carrousel—or ‘Tournament Place’). Three Queens were watching from a dais—Anne of Austria, Maria Theresa and Henrietta Maria of England. The court celebrated just as the Valois would have done, with jousts and a trot-past to music of five companies of horsemen in fantastic costumes—Romans, Persians, Turks, Indians and Americans. Louis was at their head in the role of King of the Romans, clad in flame-colour.

It was about this time that he adopted the sun in splendour as his emblem (Louis XIII had chosen the device of a sun appearing from behind a cloud to symbolize his son’s birth). Many other French Kings had used emblems—Louis XII the porcupine, François I the salamander—but none to such effect. For Louis XIV, the sun in splendour was a personal declaration of policy; he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I chose the sun because of the unique quality of its radiance … the good it does everywhere, endlessly creating joy and activity on all sides … Certainly the brightest, most beautiful image of a great King.’

His determination to be master was quickly shown. The Surintendant des Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, had plundered the royal treasury, exaggerating statements of government expenditure, and was parading his insolent and ostentatious luxury. He had prepared a refuge against disgrace by fortifying the island of Belle-Ile with cannon and armed retainers. He possessed a stranglehold over the treasury and the King feared him as a dangerous obstacle to financial reform. In August 1661 the unsuspecting Fouquet invited Louis to his magnificent château at Vaux-le-Vicomte (which was reputed to have cost eighteen million livres, about £ 750,000 in English money of the period); where he was giving a splendid housewarming party with a firework display and a play by Molière. Amid the bursting rockets, Louis grew angrier and angrier; he was particularly incensed by Fouquet’s arms, a climbing squirrel, and his motto, ‘What heights shall I not reach’, which were depicted everywhere. On the way home the King said to his mother, ‘Madame, he is going to disgorge our money!’ Within three weeks, Fouquet was in the Bastille (having been arrested by M d’Artagnan) and Louis made sure that he stayed in prison until his death nearly twenty years later.

Louis XIV and his heirs, attributed to Largillière

Louis XIV, wax bust by Benoist

To take Fouquet’s place, the King appointed Colbert Controller-General. Mazarin had once said to Louis, ‘I owe you everything, but I think I’ve repaid some of the debt by giving you Colbert.’ Jean Baptiste Colbert was the son of a draper of Rheims, who had studied the law and then spent some time in banking before entering Mazarin’s service. His worth was speedily recognized by the King, who preferred ministers of humble origin (no Prince of the Blood held ministerial office under Louis XIV, and only one Duke). Colbert did the work of many ministers—of finance, public works, trade and industry, agriculture, the colonies, the navy and even the arts. Although bemused by mercantilist economics—he believed that the more gold and silver a country possessed the more powerful it would be—this frowning, beetle-browed ‘man of marble’ was the most businesslike of all the ministers of the Ancien Régime. In 1661 the treasury received thirty-one million livres in revenue, while the tax farmers took more than double that amount. Colbert retrieved a good deal of it, introducing some measure of honesty into the public accounts. He then reduced direct taxation—the taille—by nearly a half; he did so by raising indirect taxation, with a luxury tax on coffee, tobacco and certain wines. However, he reduced the salt duty because salt was essential, and he exempted large families from the taille. A sense of social justice was also evident in the revocation of patents of nobility granted in the last thirty years; thousands of rich men were forced to bear a fair share of taxation. By 1667 he had more than doubled the royal revenues.

Tirelessly the Controller-General encouraged the establishment of new industries and the expansion of existing ones. He bought technical secrets from abroad, imported skilled labour, and employed inspectors to enforce uniform standards of quality. State factories were set up. Steel, tin-plate, glass, pottery, mirrors, furniture, clocks, velvet, silk, lace and linen, all began to be manufactured in France on a large scale. It was now that the Gobelin tapestry looms came to Paris, that the carpets of Savonnerie became famous. Colbert was determined that nothing should be imported. He raised external customs duties, forbidding the export of corn to ensure a cheap supply. To aid the home market, he tried to abolish internal customs duties and began a nation-wide programme of canal-digging and road-building.

Colbert admired the Dutch for making their little country a European power solely through trade. He therefore set up five great trading companies, sent new colonists to Canada, now known officially as New France, established trading posts at Pondicherry and other ports in India and even Madagascar, and bought a dozen islands in the Caribbean. A navy was needed, not only for war, but to protect French merchantmen. As Minister of Marine, he increased the French navy from twenty ships to over 250, based on depots at Brest and Toulon, and manned by over 60,000 sailors; and founded a school for naval officers.

For all his good intentions, Colbert lacked human feeling. It was brutally evident in his otherwise admirable plans for New France. Sending out a cargo of ‘150 girls together with stallions, mares and ewes’, he ordered the garrison to marry the girls on their arrival, and get them with child by the end of the year.

Modern research has shown that ‘Colbertism’ had many shortcomings. Though he attempted to moderate the ferocious exactions of the tax farmers, they were never properly restrained during bad harvests; it was this, not Louis’s wars, which reduced French peasants to the misery later depicted by Bruyère. Nor was there any machinery to regulate the grain, trade and wheat prices, despite Colbert’s belief in controls; so that both peasants and urban poor suffered unnecessarily. Colbert also failed to attract sufficient capital to his new trading companies. Undoubtedly his administration benefited the economy, and the royal finances in particular, but he was not quite the genius of popular legend.

Louis worked beside Colbert for several hours each day, examining every project and helping to draft the edicts. In the early years of the reign, when the treasury was almost bankrupt, he made many self-sacrificing economies, and gave his Controller-General enthusiastic support.

Louis’s reform of the law has been described as the greatest legal work between Justinian and Napoleon. In 1667 the Code Louis was promulgated, simplifying and unifying all French legal procedure. Five more codes followed; a new code of criminal law, which limited the use of torture; a commercial code; a marine code; a code for woods and waters; and even a code for negro slaves in the colonies. The King worked with his ministers—notably the Chancellor Seguier—on these revisions, acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the realm’s two great legal traditions; the Loi Coutumier or Common Law of northern France, and the Loi Ecrit or Roman Law of France south of the Loire. From the former he derived his deep respect for his subjects’ privileges, from the latter reasoned justification for his Absolutism. Few attempts to understand Louis’s concept of kingship have paid attention to the impression which must have been made upon him by familiarity with the Roman Law and with the God-like rôle which it accords to the Emperor.

The King was much concerned with the enforcement of his new laws. In 1667 he appointed a special magistrate to administer the Paris police. M de la Reynie, who was his Lieutenant of Police for thirty years, trebled the force and introduced night patrols. In addition, street lighting was introduced; every street in Paris was provided with a lamp at each end and in the middle. Generally admired for his honesty and humanity, La Reynie was none the less responsible for what was later called the cabinet noir—censorship of the post and supplying the government with a weekly report on public opinion—and for operating a widespread network of police spies. He also enforced the lettres de cachet or ‘sealed letters’; these were special warrants for arbitrary arrest without trial, which usually meant confinement in the Bastille, though surprisingly few were issued.

During Maria Theresa’s first pregnancy, Louis’s fancy was taken by a seventeen-year-old lady-in-waiting, Louise de la Baume le Blanc, Demoiselle de la Vallière. She was a country girl from Touraine, daughter of an impoverished captain of horse, who had taught her to shoot with a pistol and to use a boar spear. Her skill as a horsewoman and her fondness for hunting attracted Louis. She was an ash-blonde, thin and flat-chested, with a slight limp, rather shy and awkward but noted for her sweet nature. The early days together were spent in hunting expeditions during which the King conducted an idyllic courtship. Louise became his mistress in June 1661, at Fontainebleau, but her ascendancy was not finally established until the affair of Madame, Monsieur’s English wife in the following summer.

The second man in the kingdom, and the one closest to Louis, was his brother, Philippe, whom he made Duc d’Orléans after the unmourned Gaston’s death in 1660. Small, goodlooking, ‘Monsieur’ had features which recalled those of Louis XIII. From his father he inherited a curious sexual makeup, which in his own case became homosexual. Early leanings in this direction were unwittingly indulged by Anne of Austria, who—with Gaston’s unfortunate example in mind—kept the boy in petticoats for far longer than was customary, in the hope of making him more tractable (though tales of perverted practices being deliberately encouraged are nonsense). Like Louis XIII, Monsieur was a natural soldier who showed bravery on several occasions; unlike his father he was cheerful and garrulous—he was said to talk more than several women together. Although Louis loathed sodomites, the two brothers were devoted to each other. Unfortunately, while Louis was able to tolerate Philippe’s eccentricities—ribbons, jewelled bracelets, drenching himself in feminine scents, painting his face, dancing at balls in female costume—he could not approve of a circle of vicious favourites which included the beautiful and malicious Chevalier de Lorraine and the no less evil Comte de Guiche.

To detach Monsieur from these unsavoury catamites, he was married in 1660 to Henrietta of England, Charles II’s favourite sister. Monsieur was not entirely satisfactory as a husband and ‘Madame’, a lively, flirtatious brunette, was unhappy. The King seems to have thought of consoling her himself. So did the insolent and bisexual M de Guiche, who tried unsuccessfully to seduce her in the summer of 1662. Madame remained entirely innocent, but the affair annoyed Louis.

Mlle Louise knew something about the affair—she was a friend of one of Madame’s messengers—but, always loyal, refused to tell the King. He became so angry that she fled to the convent at Chaillot; it was rumoured that she had taken the veil. Louis, horrified, rode hastily to Chaillot where he found her in tears lying on the guest-room floor. She was taken home by a repentant King after an ecstatic reconciliation, and retained possession of his heart for the next five years, presenting him with three children. However, La Vallière was not recognized as mâitresse en titre until his mother’s death in 1666, for fear of shocking Anne of Austria. The King was also considerate enough to spend part of every night in Maria Theresa’s bed. The person who suffered most was Louise, whom Mme de Sevigné called ‘the little violet hiding beneath the grass, ashamed to be a mistress, a mother’.

Louis joined with enthusiasm in Colbert’s encouragement of the arts. His patronage was on a massive scale and was not limited to a mere distribution of pensions. The Academie Française made good its position as supreme arbiter of the language and of letters. Other academies were established—Inscriptions and Belles Lettres in 1663, Science in 1666, Architecture in 1671. The Academy of Painting and Sculpture was reconstituted, to make a much-needed distinction between artists and house-painters, between sculptors and masons. Mazarin’s great library was opened to the public, the Jardin des Plantes extended.

The King’s feeling for style is evident in the polished prose of his memoirs—even Voltaire admired his gift for graceful expression, and considered that his taste had been formed by reading Corneille. Certainly Louis loved the theatre and had the plays of Molière and Racine produced at court. It was the King who decided that the former’s true bent was comedy and not tragedy; Louis was personally responsible for the production of Les Précieuses Ridicules (a play which made startlingly unconventional fun of the period’s fashionable intellectuals); he also helped with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, arranging for Molière’s introduction to his First Musician, Lully. He had a genuine passion for the French language and undoubtedly enjoyed writers’ company. He was on close terms with Molière, whom he even asked to sit down, an honour rarely accorded to Princes of the Blood, and he was godfather to Molière’s first child. (When Molière died without the Sacraments, Louis saw that he was given Christian burial despite the opposition of the Archbishop of Paris.) He was often read to by Racine and Boileau—the Dr Johnson of the age—whom he made his historiographers. Hearing Boileau in an argument shout, ‘I know more about poetry than the King,’ he commented, ‘Boileau is right—he does know more.’

Louis was fond of all the arts. His agents bought so many statues in Rome that the Pope forbade any further export of works of art. From Lully the King commissioned marches and ballet music, operas and motets, tolerating his dirtiness and his drinking. On Lully’s death he appointed François Couperin as his new First Musician (the music of this virtuoso of the clavichord can still convey much of the atmosphere of Louis’s court). An Academy of Music was founded in 1666. The following year a school of painting for Frenchmen was established in Rome. Although the country’s greatest painter, Poussin, refused all invitations to come home, his most important follower, Charles Le Brun, became the King’s First Painter, in which capacity he advised him on almost every aspect of decoration. Besides employing portrait painters like Pierre Mignard and Hyacinthe Rigau, Louis was directly responsible for the rise of a new school of engraving; he ordered that France’s great buildings and treasures should be perpetuated in the Cabinet des Médailles, a national collection of engravings, while he himself posed for such engravers as Nanteuil. He also sat to sculptors, notably Antoine Coysevax.

It was Voltaire who first observed that while the earlier part of Louis XIV’s reign abounded with men of literary genius, the end was a cultural desert, a verdict which has since been repeated ad nauseam. But the decline was hardly the King’s fault; if he could encourage great artists he could hardly be expected to create them. Although Voltaire was not aware of it, one of the greatest of all French writers was secretly at work throughout the later years of the reign; the Duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs rank with the novels of Proust and Balzac, a masterpiece encapsulating an entire world. And Montesquieu, Buffon and Voltaire himself emerged only just after the reign was over.

Versailles was the supreme expression of Louis’s love of beauty. This palace is often seen as a monument to megalomania, something ‘un-French’. If it is a monument, it was meant as one to the Bourbon dynasty as a whole, intended to outshine the beautiful châteaux of the Valois; even the bluff Henri IV had had plans drawn up for a palace almost as large to be built at Blois. Nor was the choice of Versailles a ‘rejection of Paris’. The Valois had always lived away from the capital, in the Loire valley, and the move was quite in keeping with French tradition. Throughout his reign, Louis continued to beautify Paris; he built the Champs-Elysées, the first boulevards, the Observatory, the Place des Victoires, the Pont Royal, the Louvre Colonnade, the Invalides, the Place Vendôme, and the chapel of the Salpêtrière. He laid out the new street plan for the Faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré and extended the Tuileries. Even after he had moved out to Versailles, the King visited his capital regularly.

Louis’s predilection for Versailles owed something to his father’s memory, and something to his visits there with La Vallière. He began to enlarge it in 1661, though until 1668 the little palace was merely extended. In 1664 he gave an open-air fête at Versailles for Louise, which lasted for seven days and far outshone the Carrousel; its theme was Les Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchanté (a tale taken from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso). Amid the pageants and the tableaux, supper was served by 200 nymphs and shepherds at tables lit by 4,000 flaring torches. Another part of the entertainment was the first production of Molière’s greatest play, Tartuffe.

Versailles in these early days was not yet sufficiently theatrical for the King’s taste. Bernini visited him in 1665 and while his bust of Louis conveys both his good looks and his majesty, the face is as much that of a great actor as of a great King. Louis XIV needed a stage.

The second phase of rebuilding began in 1669. Louis had a complete new palace in mind, but would not allow his architects to demolish Louis XIII’s ‘house of cards’; he told them, ‘If you pull it down I will have it rebuilt brick by brick.’ It had to be included in the new building, enclosed on three sides by an ‘envelope’ of red brick and white stone designed by Le Vau. He soon decided that this second palace was not big enough for anything other than a holiday residence, and a third rebuilding began. Thousands of workmen toiled for years, and so many millions were spent that the sum was made a state secret, but the palace was not fully complete until 1710. It was basically a three-sided building, so big that the garden front had 375 windows. Louis himself, advised by Le Brun, approved every detail of its design and decoration—the gilding and the tiles, the chimneys and the terraces, the marble and the mirrors, the silver furniture and silken tapestries, the urns and sconces.

Although Le Vau designed the original plan, the architect who built Versailles was Jules Hardouin-Mansart—‘a tall, well-built, handsome man of very humble origin but possessing a great deal of natural intelligence’, says Saint-Simon. Louis was not concerned with ‘the vulgarity of his origin’ and became very fond of Mansart, whom he ennobled. On one occasion the King told his courtiers, in the architect’s presence, ‘I can make a score of dukes and peers in a quarter of an hour, but it would take centuries to make a Mansart.’

Of all the mistresses of the French Kings, Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan was the most formidable. Born in 1640, a daughter of the Duc de Mortemart—his family, the Rochechouart, was one of the oldest and grandest in Poitou—she had married an impoverished rake, the Marquis de Montespan. Like her mother in the previous reign, she became a lady-in-waiting, pleasing the Queen by her apparent piety. She soon endeared herself to Louise de la Vallière as a reassuring confidante. However, as early as 1666 she was having diabolical prayers said by witches to help her seduce the King. At first Louis did not seem interested—perhaps he realized that she was dangerous. While Athénais was very beautiful, dark and sensuous, with violet eyes, scarlet lips and an adorable figure (despite a tendency to plumpness), she was also both wild and arrogant, a compulsive gambler who was heavily in debt; and she combined a savage wit with a vile temper. In any case, she had two children and her proud and fiery husband would not be a willing cuckold. Athénais hid her ambition, biding her time, confident not only of her prayers but also of her charms. For Athénais was not only beautiful, she was interesting. Sophisticated, with a discerning taste in luxury, she dressed delightfully; even more important, she was extremely well-read and spoke exquisite French with a turn of phrase which was admired by Saint-Simon.

In the summer of 1667, during the invasion of Flanders, the King finally became her lover. La Vallière, who had recently been made a Duchess, and who was always trustful, suspected nothing. M de Montespan was furious and beat his wife; dressed in mourning, he drove to court with two great cuckold’s horns waving from the roof of his carriage. The King banished him. Louise was deserted, but to preserve the proprieties was forced to stay at court and retain the title of maitresse en titre—she still travelled in Louis’s carriage with the Queen and Athénais. (These could be dreadful journeys for the ladies-in-waiting, as the King would not let them stop the carriage when they wished to relieve themselves.) Louise was allowed to depart in 1674, whereupon she entered a notoriously strict Carmelite convent where she remained—as Soeur Marie de la Miséricorde—until her death in 1710. When told that her son, the Duc de Vermandois, had died, she commented, ‘I mourn his birth even more than his death.’

Athénais held the King for twelve years. She worked hard to do so, dyeing her hair blonde because he liked it better than brown; dieting (Mme de Sévigné once noted that she came back after an absence from court half her size) and having herself rubbed down with scent; patriotically, she dressed in French silks and velvets. To begin with, her life with Louis was an exuberant idyll. Voracious in bed, she satisfied his once insatiable sexual appetite. She accompanied him when he inspected the frontiers in 1678, even though she was pregnant. He adored children, so she presented him with seven (who were put in the care of her dear friend, Mme Scarron). He rewarded her richly, making her father Governor of Paris, paying her gambling debts and buying her wonderful jewels. He built her a fabulous château, Clagny (specially designed by Mansart) where to please him she made a garden filled with jonquils and jasmine, his favourite flowers. (The King was so fond of jasmine that sometimes the entire floor of his bedroom was covered with it.) Everybody else loathed her. Success made her intolerably haughty and unbridled her vicious tongue. Not even the King was spared, and he almost abandoned her in 1672 and again in 1674. To keep him, so it was later alleged, she commissioned blasphemous spells and gave him toad excrement as an aphrodisiac; she was even accused of having a Black Mass, during which a baby was sacrificed, said over her naked body. By the mid-1670s the King was tiring of her. Totally unsubmissive, she reacted violently to his many infidelities. He ceased to sleep with her in 1678, though the final breach did not come till later.

Military glory remained for Louis infinitely desirable. In the brutal Marquis de Louvois, the King had a wonderful Minister of War, whose reforms served France until the Revolution. Louvois introduced regimental uniforms, badges of rank, portable pontoon bridges and standardized artillery. For the first time the ordinary French soldier was regularly paid, well fed from field kitchens and had a chance of rising from the ranks. Louvois was responsible for the foundation of the Hôtel des Invalides—in its day the best old soldiers’ home in the world—and of three schools of artillery, together with cadet companies for training young officers. He introduced grenadiers and hussars, replaced the pike by the musket and plug bayonet, and made the troops march in step to airs on the fife and drums specially composed by Lully. Hitherto the French had considered cavalry as the only soldiering fit for gentlemen; now Louis forbade anyone to join the cavalry without having first served in the infantry. A Corps of Engineers was set up to assist the great Vauban, who in 1663 had deeply impressed the King by his fortifications at Dunkirk, Vauban’s principle being that the lower defences were, the less likely they were to be hit by enemy artillery.

The King restrained himself until this army had begun to take shape—and until Colbert had amassed sufficient funds. By 1667 he was ready. Philip IV of Spain had died in 1665, succeeded by the child Charles II. In May Louis suddenly overran southern Flanders, claiming that the province belonged to his wife as the child of Philip IV’s first marriage, Charles being only the child of the second (the pretext gave the campaign its name, the ‘War of Devolution’). In February 1668 Louis also invaded Franche Comté. England, Sweden and the United Provinces, who had been watching with considerable apprehension, quickly formed a Triple Alliance. In May he was forced to withdraw from Franche Comté, though he kept the towns he had won in Flanders.

The Triple Alliance infuriated Louis. The Dutch, who were its real architects, had already affronted him by responding to Colbert’s tariffs with surcharges on all French wines, spirits and manufactured goods, while the activities of the Bank of Amsterdam were seriously depleting French currency. By the spring of 1672 he had isolated them from their allies, paying Sweden a large annual subsidy and sending Charles II of England a secret pension; in the latter case Louis’s agent was Madame, who, just before her death in 1670, persuaded her brother to ally with France.

The French army was now stronger than it had ever been, with nearly 120,000 highly trained soldiers. Voltaire describes Louis’s newly formed household troops: ‘There were four companies of life-guards, each comprising three hundred gentlemen, among whom were many young cadets, unpaid, but subject like everyone else to the strict rules of the service; there were also two hundred guardsmen, two hundred light horse, five hundred musketeers, all of gentle birth, young and of good appearance; twelve companies of men-at-arms, afterwards increased to sixteen; the hundred Swiss guards accompanied the King, and his regiments of French and Swiss guards mounted guard in front of his house and tent.’ These troops, the Maison du Roi, whose uniforms were covered with gold and silver, became the crack troops of the Ancien Régime.

Besides Condé, the King had the services of another great captain, Turennes. Although the Dutch possessed the most formidable navy in the world, they had pitifully few troops. France declared war in April 1672, and in June the French cavalry swam the Rhine, Louis and the infantry following over their new pontoon bridge. The King, in jack-boots, a leather coat and a red-plumed hat, shared his men’s rations but insisted on full ceremonial and used his tent as an audience chamber. By the end of the month Turennes had turned the Dutch line of defence, and Amsterdam was only twenty miles away. The Dutch fell back on their last resource, breaking down the dykes and flooding all the country around Amsterdam. Then they begged for peace.

Louis’s terms were too much—a crushing indemnity and a large slice of territory. On hearing them, the Dutch overthrew the government of de Witt—he and his brother were torn to pieces by a mob—and replaced them with the young Prince of Orange who was appointed Stadtholder. By now all Europe went in fear of Louis, and the Dutch found new allies—Brandenburg and the Empire at the end of 1672, Spain and Lorraine in 1673, Denmark and the Rhine Palatinate in 1674.

Withdrawing from Holland, Louis struck swiftly at the Spanish and conquered Franche Comté in six weeks, this time for good. Turennes laid waste to the Palatinate, burning two towns and twenty villages, and destroying vineyards, crops and livestock so that the enemy would be without supplies. When the Germans invaded Alsace at the end of 1674, Turennes drove them back in a terrible winter campaign, inflicting 40,000 casualties; while Condé repelled a Dutch and Spanish invasion. Next year the French were not so successful. A stray cannonball killed Turennes (Louis buried him in the royal sepulchre at Saint-Denis). Condé drove the Germans out of Alsace for a second time, but France was growing tired. Despite Colbert’s striving, taxes had risen to enormous heights—the war was costing France something like £ 30 million a year—and there were sporadic risings among the Breton peasants.

The war dragged on for three more weary years, during which the French won some slight victories—Monsieur, painted and powdered as always, defeated the Prince of Orange at Mont Cassel by a courageous gamble, much to the King’s jealousy. Meanwhile Louis was waging a most skilful diplomatic campaign; setting the Dutch against the Spanish and attacking the latter in Italy; stirring up rebellion in Hungary; he even managed to foment quarrels between the Dutch republicans and the Stadtholder’s supporters. Louis’s enemies grew even wearier of the war than the French. A peace conference met at Nijmegen in the summer of 1678 and was brilliantly handled by Louis’s diplomats. A treaty signed in August gave him Franche Comté and twelve towns in Flanders—the latter constituting a valuable reinforcement to France’s weak northern frontier—and Nancy. A separate treaty with Holland reduced the French tariffs, though it did not abolish them entirely. Nijmegen was an undoubted triumph for Louis and his policy of aggression.

The years which followed Nijmegen were the zenith of Louis’s glory. In 1680 the Parlement of Paris bestowed upon him the title of ‘The Great’. When the poor Queen died in 1683 Bossuet, in his funeral oration, spoke not only of her ‘piété incomparable’ but also of ‘les imortelles actions de Louis le Grand’. Versailles was a fitting shrine. The King moved in permanently in May 1682. The following year Mme de Sévigné, visiting it for the first time, wrote ecstatically, ‘Tout est grand, tout est magnifique.’ The King’s chief joy was the vast garden created by André le Nôtre. Louis loved to stroll through geometrically-arranged terraces, down countless avenues, over the lawns (or ‘green carpets’) shaded by carefully planted groves, along great canals and lakes. There were a thousand fountains and innumerable statues. He enjoyed chatting with the charming Le Nôtre or with M de la Quintinie, the amiable kitchen gardener, or visiting the orangery to see his beloved orange trees (he was so fond of these trees that he even had them in his rooms, in silver tubs). The King wrote a little guide to the gardens, so that sightseers would know the correct sequence in which to visit them. Louis spent nearly as much time in his gardens as he did hunting.

His Versailles was a return to the Dijon of the medieval Dukes of Burgundy, to the Fontainebleau of François I. Far from being a Spanish importation, its ceremony was essentially French, with rules laid down by Henri III in 1585. Louis merely brought them up to date. There had to be more functionaries because the court now numbered thousands instead of hundreds. The ritual quality of life at Versailles was due not so much to the ceremonies as to Louis’s own awe-inspiring personality.

To his subjects no King could have seemed less remote. Every day thousands of Parisians rode out in special public conveyances to see him eating or walking at his new palace. (It was rather as though Queen Elizabeth II lunched daily in public at Hampton Court.) Anyone dressed like a gentleman and wearing a sword was admitted to the gardens—swords could be hired at the gates for a small fee—while the royal apartments were frequently open to the public. Louis greeted everyone politely. This gift of living gracefully in public was largely responsible for the extraordinary popularity which he enjoyed during the greater part of his reign.

He was awakened at about eight in the morning. Having greeted the few courtiers privileged to have the grande entrée, he said the Office of the Holy Spirit. He then dressed, each garment being handed to him with ceremony after which he wiped his face and hands on a napkin soaked in spirits of wine; on alternate mornings he was shaved. (He seldom took baths but changed his clothes, including his linen, three times a day.) His breakfast consisted of white bread, and hot wine and water or sage tea. He then said more prayers and completed his dressing. The Lever was now over. After giving orders for the day, he heard Mass. There followed a meeting of the Council or audiences. The King dined at one o’clock, alone and in public at a square table. He ate a comparatively light meal with plenty of fruit and vegetables, which he washed down with the still, grey champagne of Bouzy. (The fizzy variety was not yet known at court, though Dom Perignon had just invented it.) In the afternoon Louis either slept with his current mistress or took some other exercise. Often he hunted or went shooting on foot, being an excellent shot. After breaking his arm in 1683, he took to following hounds in a fast wagonette which he drove himself, or spent more time walking in his beloved gardens. When he returned, he recommenced work in his study. Supper was often served as late as eleven-thirty pm. It was Louis’s main meal, and he ate enormously; in the old-fashioned way he never used a fork, eating with his fingers. Finally there was an entertainment—music, dancing, cards or billiards or some other gambling game. He usually went to bed at about one in the morning, with no less ceremony than at his rising.

Versailles was the instrument by which Louis tamed the upper nobility. He drew them to court with an unending series of entertainments and also by the lure of titles and pensions; these were of vital importance to an aristocracy which was to a large extent impoverished. Versailles was the only road to preferment and promotion; there were posts to be had in the royal household and in the Dauphin’s household, commissions in the army, bishoprics, abbeys, canonries. Once at court, noblemen grew still poorer, from gambling or from having to buy splendid clothes. If they would not come, Louis ordered the Intendant in their province to make life difficult for them. Within a few years the dangerous war-lords, who only recently had terrorized France, were transformed into foppish courtiers, grateful for gifts to relieve their debt-ridden lives. There was only one plot against his government during the entire reign.

Louis has frequently been accused of destroying the French ruling class, but it will have been seen in the preceding chapters that he had good reason for doing so. Nor did he only make fops of his nobles: the courtiers of Versailles were moulded into an officer corps—each one could be called to the colours at a moment’s notice. In addition they frequently acted as commission agents, who for a given fee would procure an audience of the King to interest him in some commercial or scientific project, rather like modern public relations men.

If Louis was often responsible for financially ruining his nobles, he could show great kindness in individual cases. Mme de Sévigné tells us that when Marshal de Bellefonds came to the King in 1672 to resign his post at court, Louis took him aside and asked, ‘Monsieur le Maréchal, why do you want to leave me? Has it to do with religion? Or do you simply want to retire? Is it your heavy debts? If it is the latter, I will settle them and must know more about your affairs.’ The Marshal replied, ‘Sire, it is my debts. I am ruined. I cannot let my friends, who have helped me, suffer because I’m unable to pay them.’ ‘In that case,’ said the King, ‘their debts must be made good. I’m going to give you 100,000 francs for your house at Versailles and a guarantee of 400,000 francs which will serve as a surety should you die. You can pay off what you owe with the 100,000 francs—and then you can stay in my service.’

To read the memoirs of Saint-Simon—who hated him—is to experience something of Louis XIV’s strange fascination. ‘Never did a man use his words, his smiles, even his mere glances, with more grace,’ wrote the Duke grudgingly; ‘no man was ever more polite by instinct or more correct, or knew better how to honour age, merit or rank … his smallest gesture, his walk, his bearing, were all most fitting and becoming, being noble, grand and majestic, and yet perfectly natural.’ Louis knew not only how to overawe, but also how to charm. When an old courtier asked him for permission to leave Versailles, the King answered, ‘We have known each other for too long to say good-bye at our age, when we cannot hope to find new friends—don’t desert me!’ The compliment he paid to the aged Condé, who was having difficulty in climbing the stairs at Versailles, is legendary: ‘One who carries such a weight of laurels can only move slowly.’ These compliments were paid in a voice which was at once dignified and charming. He was elegant even in his rages; having been grossly insulted by a certain nobleman, the King threw his cane out of the window, saying, ‘I should be sorry to strike a man of quality.’ Above all, says Saint-Simon, ‘he had no equal with women’. He had an ineffable way of half-raising himself at supper for each lady who arrived at table. He never passed the humblest petticoat without raising his hat, not even chambermaids. (The honnête homme, or French gentleman, of the period could be surprisingly polite to servants—the Duc de Beauvilliers apologized to his coachman if he kept him waiting.)

Louis’s chief fault was his ferocious amour propre. The ambassador of the Elector of Brandenburg, Ezekiel Spannheim, noted in 1690 that the King was ‘jealous to the smallest detail of his authority, excessively touchy about everything which concerns it or could harm it’. All the same, says Herr Spannheim, ‘he is easily influenced by advisers and adopts their policies.’ Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim (which he never made) ‘l’état, c’est moi’. The ‘state’ of Louis XIV was the bureaucracy which he created—his Council of a few all-powerful ministers, and the Intendants, each of whom was supreme in his province, overriding the Governor, the Parlement and the municipalities. These chosen servants often acted without their master realizing fully what they were about. As the years went by, however, Louis paid more and more attention to business, working as much as ten hours a day.

By the 1680s Louis was middle-aged and running to fat. His face was lined and sagging; because of the removal of several teeth from his upper jaw—the doctors broke it, smashing his palate—his mouth was shrunken, with pursed lips. He had shaved off his moustache and in place of his own long hair wore a full-bottomed periwig. Sometimes his eyes looked tired, even in official portraits. In 1686 his health was cruelly tested by a terrible operation for an anal fistula; on two occasions, fully conscious, he bore being cut many times, without a sound. Also he probably weakened himself by excessive purges (usually camomile or rhubarb). Yet he kept his huge appetite for food and women, and his love of exercise. At this period he dressed plainly, in a neat brown coat, with a waistcoat of red, green or blue, and the Cordon Bleu of the Saint-Esprit. Maturity made him more imposing than ever.

He was not only adored by his subjects, but was the most admired man in Christendom; as Voltaire says, ‘Louis was looked on as the only King in Europe.’ Every European sovereign built his own Versailles, copied its etiquette and furniture and learnt to speak French. Schönbrunn in Austria, Het Loo in Holland, the garden façade of Hampton Court, still bear witness to their admiration. Foreigners flocked in crowds to see King Louis.

There were now new personalities at court. ‘Monseigneur’, as the Dauphin was known, was very tall, fat and yellow-haired. Dull, lazy, but unusually good-natured, he bore little resemblance to his father, who overawed him. Having been beaten and crammed by his tutors, Monseigneur detested books, although he collected pictures and furniture in his exquisite flat at Versailles and enjoyed good music. He lacked any aptitude for soldiering, but loved wolf-hunting above all else, exterminating wolves in the Ile de France. A shy man, he preferred to live quietly at Meudon with his ugly Bavarian wife, to whom he was devoted, until she succumbed to melancholia. They had three sons—the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou and Berry. When his wife died in 1690, he married a certain Mlle de Choin, whose greatest charm, in the Dauphin’s eyes, was her enormous bosom. If he had little influence, Monseigneur was none the less often to be seen at court, for his father was fond of him.

Louis liked all his children, including his bastards whom he legitimized, though they did not rank as Princes of the Blood. Of these the most important was his eldest son by Athénais—Louis-Auguste, whom the King made Duc du Maine. Sickly, limping and ineffectual, he failed miserably in his ambition to be a great soldier; he turned out both cowardly and boastful. (Even so, Saint-Simon’s portrait of him is a spiteful caricature.) Louis married him to one of Condé’s granddaughters. His brother, the Comte de Toulouse, was also a dull creature, but proved reasonably successful as a naval officer. He too was found a wealthy wife, one of the Noailles.

There was a nasty little scandal in 1682, when a homosexual clique was discovered at Versailles. It included Louis’s son by La Vallière, the fifteen-year-old Duc de Vermandois, who had been corrupted by the Chevalier de Lorraine. Vermandois was treated with such contempt by the King that he left court of his own accord and joined the army. A sickly boy, he died the following year.

The most colourful arrival at court was Monsieur’s second wife (Madame had died in 1670), Liselotte von der Pfalz—the Princess-Palatine. This ugly German blonde with the figure of a Swiss Guard, was a convert from Protestantism, fat and red-faced, fond of dogs, beer and sausages, and much disliked by the court—a dislike which she heartily reciprocated. If unintel-lectual, Liselotte was brutally shrewd and observant, and her letters give a vivid picture of life at Versailles. Neither she nor Monsieur, now grown pot-bellied and stilted, but still festooned with diamonds and obsessed with his complexion, were exactly in love but they did their duty; after many failures Philippe managed to beget a son by—so he believed, according to his wife—rubbing his manhood with a holy medal.

The most formidable member of the King’s new circle was his own second wife. Queen Maria Theresa died in 1683, her health undermined by pregnancies, killed by the excessive bleeding ordered by the doctors. (Colbert died the same year, sad and disillusioned.) Louis, to the court’s astonishment, wept bitterly. He had been faithful to her for the last two years, even after being badly shaken by the death of a young mistress, Marie Angélique de Fontanges, in 1681. Among the friends of Mme de Montespan was a dark, statuesque widow in her forties, Mme Françoise Scarron. She was the granddaughter of Agrippa d’Aubigné, Henri IV’s old henchman. Her father was a ne’er-do-well who had murdered his first wife, and Françoise had been born in prison, her mother being the governor’s daughter. Since then her life had been as unusual as it was poverty-stricken. As a young girl, having been abandoned by her parents after a sojourn in Martinique where her father died, she was converted to Catholicism. At sixteen she married a crippled and disreputable poet, Paul Scarron, partly from pity, partly from poverty. Although the marriage could not be consummated, she was happy enough, gathering a little salon around her in their house in the Marais. However, Scarron died when she was twenty-four, leaving her almost penniless. Luckily, the Queen Mother, who had been one of Scarron’s patrons, took pity on the pretty young widow and gave her a pension. Pious, yet none the less fond of the beau monde, Mme Scarron took up residence in a fashionable convent where she filled her time with good works and embroidery. She knew many people at court and was recommended to Athénais as a suitable person to bring up her children. One of nature’s governesses, she did this so efficiently and showed such discretion that the King rewarded her with a marquisate and the little estate of Maintenon.

Louis first began to know her well during their mutual concern over the health of the little Duc de Maine. He had started by disliking her, but eventually he came to admire her strong mysterious character and Junoesque figure. With her fine eyes and sober, enigmatic charm, dressed in elegant black with a becoming widow’s cap, she was far from unattractive. Eventually he fell in love with her, but to his amazement the former widow Scarron refused to sleep with him; it was she who persuaded him to return to the Queen’s bed. When Maria Theresa died, the King married Mme de Maintenon in secret—the date has never been discovered, but it was probably some time in 1684. He needed her: ‘When a man leaves his youth behind him, he nearly always requires the companionship of a woman of even temper’, is Voltaire’s comment. Françoise did not find her exalted position one of unalloyed enjoyment—Louis, still voracious, must have been an exhausting husband for a middle-aged woman who was probably still a virgin. It is the measure of her remarkable personality that this new, morganatic wife was accepted without demur by the royal family and by the court.

For over thirty years the King showed an unwavering taste for domesticity. Although Mme de Maintenon complained of his unflagging virility, he was never once unfaithful. She rarely ventured out of her apartments, so her bedroom became his office; their two chairs were on each side of the fireplace, separated by Louis’s table where he worked at his state papers. She set up a little theatre next door to her flat; here courtiers performed carefully chosen plays. Under her sober influence Louis grew pious. Operas were forbidden during Lent, and everyone had to communicate at Easter—people were rebuked for talking during Mass. Saint-Simon says that the court, in its efforts to please, ‘sweated hypocrisy’. There was something a little sanctimonious about Mme de Maintenon. She favoured people one moment, only to cast them off the next. None the less she kept her place by her piety and won her ‘battle for the King’s soul’.

Although Mme de Montespan had finally lost the King, she lingered on at court for several years, growing enormously fat (an Italian observer says that her thigh became as thick as a man’s waist). She had finally been discredited in Louis’s eyes by the great Poisoning Scandal, of which details first began to emerge in 1679, when the arrest of the mass murderess, Mme de Brinvilliers, led to the discovery of a vast network of professional poisoners and witches. During the panic which followed, the King established the Chambre Ardente (or ‘Council for Burning’) which accused some of the highest personages in France of murder and black magic, among them Marshal Luxembourg. Over 400 suspects were arrested and more than 200 were found guilty, thirty-six being executed (some were actually burnt). The court was abruptly dissolved in 1682 when Louis realized that Athénais might be involved—there were rumours of love philtres to secure his affections, of poisoned phials to remove rivals. Louis had the evidence destroyed. Eventually ‘dreadful and ignominious Maintenon’ harried ‘thundering and incomparable Montespan’ into leaving court. Like La Vallière, Athénais ended in a convent, where she died with decorous piety.

Mme de Maintenon has been blamed for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but the King would have revoked the edict in any case. At the beginning of the reign, despite the loss of its military privileges, French Protestantism still remained something of a state within a state. Meanwhile the Gallican Church, laity as well as clergy, was increasingly critical—the Huguenots’ privileged position made a striking contrast with the hysterical persecution of Catholics in the three kingdoms across the Channel. As early as 1669 measures were taken to make life difficult for French Protestants. In 1681 they were forbidden to enter government service. In 1682 when risings began in areas where the Reformed Faith was strong, dragoons were billeted in their houses with orders to behave as badly as possible (behaviour which included rape and torture). In 1685 the King at last revoked the Edict, orders being given for the destruction of all Protestant ‘Temples’ and for all ministers to leave France within a fortnight, or be sent to the galleys.

Out of two million Huguenots, probably 300,000 left France. Many were skilled artisans so it is often said that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes postponed the French Industrial Revolution by a century. In addition, more than 600 officers left the army for foreign service. In fact the exodus had surprisingly little effect on the French economy (except in a few specialized crafts such as watchmaking, though even here for hardly more than a decade). The loss of army officers was soon made good by Irish Catholics fleeing from the persecution of the Williamite government. From his own special point of view, Louis was amply repaid by the thunderous applause of the greater part of his subjects.

Paradoxically, he himself was inclined to be tolerant. At one moment he had even hoped that Rome would make doctrinal concessions to the Protestant Churches. The real motive for his persecution of the Huguenots was an anxiety to demonstrate that he was the true leader of the Catholic world; here a certain jealousy may be discerned, of the Emperor and the Polish King who were winning spectacular victories over the Turks. His natural tolerance was shown in 1670 when he took the Jews of Metz under his personal protection, and when he ordered that any criminal charges against Jews must be brought before the Royal Council. In 1687 he told a Siamese embassy that God had given men religions of slightly different hue—‘as the green leaves of a tree subtly vary in colour’.

To the King, the Jansenists, with their fierce criticism of fellow Catholics, seemed just as troublesome as the Huguenots. This austere and noble sect took its name from Bishop Cornelius Jansen, a theologian who had died in 1640 and whose writings were taken up by French admirers; the basis of his teaching was that most men were damned and that only those few whom God had predestined would be saved. In practice Jansenism, with its terrifying consciousness of sin and the fruitlessness of human effort, led its followers to practise a harsh and uncompromising personal religion. The movement centred round a small community of devout gentlemen who settled near the Jansenist convent of Port Royal outside Paris. It soon attracted a distinguished following, including Pascal and later Racine. When in 1653 the Pope condemned five propositions which had been attributed to Jansen, the Jansenists said that they were not to be found in his book. Then the Jansenists attacked the Jesuits for their emphasis on Free Will. Louis, no theologian, could not grasp the finer points of the interminable quarrel. However, many prominent Jansenists had been enthusiastic Frondeurs and he discerned the same rebellious note in their attitude towards the Papacy. As an inveterate optimist himself, he must have found their extreme pessimism distasteful. In 1679 he forbade Port Royal to take novices, and at the end of his reign had the remaining nuns evicted and the convent demolished. In 1713, at the King’s request, Rome categorically condemned Jansenist beliefs.

Once Louis decided that any institution or belief was divisive, he was merciless. A new form of Quietism—the ancient doctrine that all that is necessary for salvation is a passive love of God—was propagated by a certain Mme Guyon, an unbalanced mystic who went in for ecstasies. When Mme Guyon’s lectures to the girls of the school at Saint-Cyr, founded by Mme de Maintenon, resulted in outbreaks of mass hysteria, the King quickly came to the conclusion that her beliefs were a threat to public morality. However, she had a powerful ally in the elegant and saintly Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, who published a partial defence of her views, his Maximes des Saints. The book was attacked by Bossuet and ultimately condemned by the Pope. Fénelon was banished to his diocese, while Mme Guyon was shut up in a convent.

Fénelon had been tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, the Dauphin’s eldest son. Born in 1682, Louis de Bourgogne had grown up learned and hard-working; he stooped from too much study and was thin from fasting. Devout and a would-be philosopher, he was genuinely charitable, and on one occasion sold his mother’s jewels to provide assistance for impoverished army officers. The Brandenburger Spannheim thought ‘there was never a Prince of such promise’. What particularly struck him was the contrast between the Duke’s cheerful, vivacious nature and the fact that he spoke little. The King found Bourgogne far more congenial than the Dauphin, despite the Duke’s admiration for Fénelon.

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), Bishop of Meaux, was in many ways the reign’s most representative churchman. In his writings, this pillar of Gallican orthodoxy expressed the religious attitude of most Frenchmen of his time. The ‘Eagle of Meaux’ was loud in his praise when Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, but from a dislike of extremism and dissension rather than from intolerance. His own religion was a balanced and generous French Catholicism which was all but anti-Roman; he drew up the ‘Four Articles’ which re-affirmed the independence of the Church of France from that of Rome; the ‘Pope of Gallicanism’ even showed a certain interest in the Church of England. Tall, white-haired, majestic, he was a familiar figure at Versailles. He moved courtiers to tears with his beautiful sermons, making an art form of the funeral oration (his oraisons funèbres, particularly those on the deaths of Queen Henrietta Maria and Madame, have something of the sad and stately measures of Purcell’s ‘Music for the Death of Queen Mary’).

It says a good deal for the French Church of Louis XIV that it could produce men of the calibre of Bossuet and Fénelon. There were many other great churchmen—notably Dom Rancé, the ‘Thundering Abbot’ of the Trappists.

Bossuet was the classical exponent of French Absolutism. He claimed to discern a ‘loi fondamental’ by which the King and his subjects accepted each other’s rights and privileges as immutable and unchallengeable (this acceptance was the ultimate basis of the Ancien Régime). The King was indeed God’s image on earth, the only source of law, yet if he acted immorally or ignored his subjects’ rights he ceased to be an absolute monarch and became a mere despot. The distinction was one which Louis XIV undoubtedly recognized.

In his foreign policy, however, Louis showed less respect for other peoples’ rights. Between 1679 and 1686, he bloodlessly acquired the remainder of Alsace, the Saar and much of Lorraine by means of the Chambres de Réunion—special legal tribunals who disinterred ancient treaties to justify French occupation. His new towns were made into strongholds by Vauban; Strasbourg (which had been entered by a combination of bribery and intimidation) becoming the strongest fortress in Europe. The King also laid claim to towns in the United Provinces and in the Spanish Netherlands. This aggressive foreign policy, together with an ostentatious build-up of the French army and navy, alarmed all Europe. In the summer of 1686, the League of Augsburg was formed against France—eventually it included the Emperor, most of the German Princes, Spain, Sweden, the Dutch and England. The Nine Years War opened early in 1689. Louis’s greatest enemy was the new Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange, whom the Glorious Revolution had just made King of England. Louis’s main objective was to break the Dutch and turn William III out of England, even if it meant fighting on five fronts.

Poor James II had been driven out of his kingdom but was not without supporters among his former subjects. Although he used James as a political tool and was well aware of his faults, Louis had a genuine affection for a brother monarch whom he had known since he was a small boy. A magnificent welcome awaited the exiled court at Saint-Germain, which was put at James’s disposal. Mary of Modena was waited on as if she were Queen of France and given presents of gold and silver plate, jewellery, silks and velvets; a purse of 10,000 golden louis was on her dressing-table. King James received a pension large enough for him to keep his entire household. The French navy soon drove the English off the sea, routing their main fleet at Beachy Head. A French Armada took James and a Jacobite army to Ireland, which had remained loyal. As anticipated, this second front caused William III the utmost alarm. Unfortunately King James had lost his nerve; without enough experienced troops, he was easily defeated at the Boyne and fled to France once more. The Irish fought on bravely for two more years but the Jacobite cause was doomed.

In Germany the French at first conquered all before them. In February 1689, determined to knock the Elector Palatine out of the war, Louis issued an order to his troops to reduce the Palatinate to ashes. The real author of the order was Louvois, who, as Voltaire said, ‘had become less humane through that hardening of sensibilities which a lengthy ministry produces.’ The beautiful Rhineland went up in flames and Mannheim and Heidelberg were gutted; any Germans remaining in their ruined houses were butchered; 100,000 refugees fled north and east. German hatred of the French is often said to date from this campaign. In Italy, after several bloody reverses, the French conquered all Savoy save Turin.

Louis had excellent commanders in Marshals Catinat and Luxembourg. It was Catinat who conquered Savoy, while Luxembourg became known as the ‘tapissier de Nôtre-Dame’, so many were the enemy flags and standards which he brought home in triumph. In 1690 near Fleurus in Flanders he killed 6,000 of the enemy, taking 8,000 prisoners; in 1691 he took Mons; in 1692 Namur, the strongest fortress in the Low Countries, the King being present. At Steinkirk and Neerwinden (1692 and 1693), two more glorious victories were won, though the casualties were so frightful that people said De Profundis ought to be sung, rather than Te Deum. Unfortunately Luxembourg died in 1695, just when the Dutch were beginning to recover. The French also did well in Spain where the Duc de Vendôme captured Barcelona. The French navy ruled the waves after a brief reverse and French privateers harried English ships and raided Jamaica and Newfoundland. Newfoundland was almost conquered by the Comte de Frontenac and his Canadiens (though at that date the entire population of New France was only 11,000 souls). But for all the bloody battles, all the marching and counter-marching, neither France nor her enemies could win.

Louis was anxious to break up the League of Augsburg before the question of the Spanish Succession would have to be settled. He therefore bought off the Duke of Savoy by returning his Duchy. The League dissolved. At the Treaty of Ryswick, signed at the end of 1697, France gave up Lorraine and most of her conquests in Germany and the Low Countries, besides recognizing William III as King of England. Colbert’s tariffs were abolished. But she retained Strasbourg and other strong-points on the Rhine frontier, and in America gained the Hudson Bay and most of Newfoundland.

Louis took advantage of the peace to redecorate Marly. For Louis XIV, this château—twelve little pavilions flanking a tiny palace—was what the original Versailles had been for his father. Here he relaxed among the people he liked best, etiquette being much less formal than elsewhere, and picnicked with parties of ladies in the woods. At Marly he indulged his passion for tulips; four million a year were imported from Holland. The château’s new decorations, by Pierre Lepautre, are an early example of rococo.

The treaty with Savoy brought to France the last of Louis’s great loves. This was Marie Adelaide, ‘The Rose of Savoy’, not yet twelve years old, who arrived in 1696 to marry the King’s grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. The King went to meet her. He wrote enthusiastically to Mme de Maintenon, ‘She is very graceful and has the most perfect figure I have ever seen, dressed as if ready to sit for her portrait, with bright, beautiful eyes, admirable black eyelashes, as clear a pink and white complexion as could be desired, and the loveliest flaxen hair and plenty of it …’ Louis continued, ‘I find her exactly what I would wish and should be sorry if she were more beautiful.’ Until her marriage was consummated in 1699, Marie Adelaide lived with the King and Mme de Maintenon as a daughter, attending the school at Saint-Cyr. According to Saint-Simon, Mme de Maintenon, whom she called ‘Aunt’, treated her as a little doll. Louis adored the child; he took her for walks every day and let her sit on his lap and rumple his wig. She remained his favourite when she grew up plain but still vivacious. Marie Adelaide was the idol of the court—even Saint-Simon admired her. Giddy and flighty, hopelessly lacking in decorum, she had many flirtations though they were innocent enough, and was fond of rather coarse practical jokes. The King never scolded her and allowed her to run into his office at any moment of the day and rummage through his papers—she was the one person who was never frightened of him. At first her husband bored her, but then she fell in love and became a devoted wife. They had three children; a short-lived Duc de Bretagne, another Bretagne and the Duc d’Anjou (the future Louis XV).

As early as 1680 Colbert had warned the King of terrible poverty in the provinces. War was exhausting the country, and when the Controller-General died a broken man in 1683, the budget was in deficit to the tune of sixteen million livres (over £ 1,500,000 in contemporary English money). By 1689 Louis was in even worse difficulties and had to sell the silver furniture at Versailles. By the end of the Nine Years War the deficit was 138 million livres. Yet direct taxation and internal customs had already been increased, while a new tax, the capitation (a graduated poll tax) had been introduced in 1695; it was the first French taxation to be based on personal wealth. Titles and offices were being sold at an unheard-of extent; 500 bourgeois bought titles in 1696 alone (the price was 2,000 crowns). Apart from further loans from abroad at crippling interest, more cash could only be found by issuing paper money and then devaluing it, by a carefully contrived state bankruptcy, by forced loans and by lotteries. The need for money to pay for the war had coincided with a depression; corn prices were low, wine producers were cut off from their foreign markets and the shortage of raw materials from abroad caused unemployment. In 1694 Fénelon, addressing the King, wrote, ‘Your people are dying of hunger … France is nothing but a vast hospital.’

La Bruyère’s famous description of French peasants at this time still appalls. ‘Sullen beasts, male and female, who, black with dirt and white with hunger, live on black bread, grapes and water in lairs.’ But modern research shows that their misery was due to a phenomenal succession of bad harvests rather than to conscription or to money squandered on the King’s wars. The savagely inequitable tax system harried them in bad years as in good, so that even prosperous roturiers dressed in rags to conceal any appearance of wealth.

Louis no longer possessed ministers of the same calibre as Colbert and Louvois. Instead he had men like Chamillart (a protégé of Mme de Maintenon), who was excellent at billiards, but no good as an administrator, and who allowed himself to be bribed by contractors and even sold military decorations. Saint-Simon believed that Chamillart only kept his post because the King felt sorry for him and enjoyed correcting his mistakes.

However, Louis was still his own First Minister. Contrary to what has been alleged, he showed both realism and flexibility during the latter part of his reign. Recent research has considerably altered the old picture of his last years as a period of stagnation and decline. At home Louis was so active in encouraging French commerce that the period after 1697 has even been described as a second era of economic reform comparable with that under Colbert. In fact he was far more imaginative than Colbert had ever been. Monopolies were attacked, with other obstacles to trade; there was an attempt to simplify internal customs barriers; a scheme for a uniform system of weights and measures. The King tried to raise the social status of French merchants, encouraging noblemen to take part not only in overseas but also—and vainly—in domestic trade. No one, not even nobles, was exempt from the capitation; later the nobility also had to pay another tax, the dixième. Not until 1789 would there be such an onslaught on privilege. Louis’s innovations were blocked by vested interests at almost every level. None the less, he deserves full credit for his imagination. He saw the Canadians as more than mere producers of fur—there was a glut of beaver pelts—and encouraged new settlements, notably Louisiana in 1699; he had a vision of a New France which would stretch up the valley of the St Lawrence and down the Mississippi, from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico; he even created American titles of nobility. Further afield, he set up a new company to trade with China, in 1698, very much in Colbert’s manner.

Louis was equally realistic in his foreign policy. He knew that war was inevitable over the Spanish Succession. France had to fight. It was a unique opportunity of ending the Habsburg encirclement. In addition, as he pointed out after the conflict had begun, ‘The present war is a struggle for the commerce of the Spanish Indies and the wealth which they produce.’ Crippled and half insane, so afflicted that his subjects called him ‘The Bewitched’, the childless Charles II of Spain was near death for several years. Who would inherit his vast domains—his Austrian cousins or the Bourbons? In 1700, after earlier negotiations, France unwillingly agreed to a treaty which would give Spain and Milan to the Archduke Charles (the Emperor’s younger son) and Naples, Sicily, Tuscany and Guipuzcoa to the Dauphin. Then Louis was unexpectedly helped by Charles II who, angry that his Empire’s fate had been decided without consulting him, suddenly made a will leaving everything to the Dauphin’s second son, Philippe, Duc d’Anjou. Four weeks later Charles died. Louis hesitated before accepting the inheritance for his grandson. He told some great ladies, ‘Whichever side I take I am well aware that I shall be blamed for it.’ On 6 November he presented the Duc d’Anjou to the court, saying, ‘Messieurs, the King of Spain!’ As Saint-Simon comments, ‘The eighteenth century opened for the House of France with a blaze of glory.’

When poor old James II died at Saint-Germain in September 1701, Louis recognized the Prince of Wales as King James III of England, Scotland and Ireland. It seemed an act of remarkable generosity, in the face of apocalyptic warnings from his ministers; in fact Louis knew that William III had already decided on war—the Grand Alliance against France by the Empire, the Dutch and the English had been signed at The Hague a week previously. France’s one ally was Bavaria. Spain was merely a corpse to be fought over. The enemy had two commanders of genius, Prince Eugène of Savoy and John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. The first had a fanatical hatred of Louis (who had once refused him a commission in the French army). Churchill, although a greedy and ambitious time-server, was in war a master of organization and surprise. To oppose them the King had Catinat, Boufflers, Tallard, Vendôme and Villars. The last two were quite as colourful, if not so gifted, as Eugène and Churchill. The Duc de Vendôme was the grandson of Henri IV, whom he much resembled, being wildly brave, a great trencherman and adored by his men. Unfortunately he never rose before four in the afternoon—but once out of bed, he could be an extremely formidable commander. Despite his notorious homosexuality, his slovenliness, his drinking and his syphilis—which cost him his nose—he was a favourite with the King. (Once when Vendôme was leaving court for a cure, the King asked him to return ‘in a state in which one might kiss him with safety’. When the Duke came back without his nose, Louis told the court to pretend not to notice.) The Duc de Villars was described by Saint-Simon as ‘the most fortunate man in the world’; a plump, amiable, unpolished Gascon, he owed his career to Louis, who had noticed his bravery during one of the Dutch campaigns. Although undoubtedly the best general that Louis now possessed, Villars had his own faults—boastful optimism and an odd manner, half blunt, half theatrical.

An unattractive side of Louis was his treatment of any promising Prince of the Blood. He refused military employment to Condé’s young nephew, the Prince de Conti, who was a gifted soldier, and ruined his career.

Monsieur’s brilliant son, the Duc de Chartres, was put off with equal shabbiness. ‘Treading the galleries of Versailles,’ as Saint-Simon described it, was not good for a young man with such a father and whose tutor had been the unsavoury Abbé Dubois. Philippe de Chartres had many gifts—he painted, sang, composed music (his opera Panthée was performed before the King) and was sufficiently interested in science and mechanics to have his own laboratory. He was above the other Princes of the Blood by his rank as a ‘Grandson of France’—being a grandson of Louis XIII. He had married a daughter of Mme de Montespan, Mlle de Blois, Monsieur’s agreement to such a mésalliance having been bought by the bestowal of the Cordon Bleu of the Saint-Esprit on his beloved Chevalier de Lorraine. (Saint-Simon says that M de Chartres’s mother, Madame, looked ‘like Ceres after the rape of her daughter Proserpine’, so horrified was she by the disgrace.) M de Chartres took solace in the bottle and in women; he was reputed to have naked harlots served up on silver dishes at his dinner parties. A notorious free thinker, he held orgies on Good Friday, read Rabelais bound like a missal during Mass, and tried to raise the Devil. Though these vices were not yet in full bloom in 1700, his life was already scandalous enough.

Since childhood, Monsieur had been accustomed to defer to the King. However, Louis’s steady refusal to give a command to his son angered him beyond endurance. In June 1701 when Louis complained of M de Chartres’s debauched life, Monsieur, flushed, his eyes red with rage, reminded the King of his own mistresses—soon both brothers were shouting at each other at the top of their voices. Monsieur, gluttonous, purple-faced and short of breath, had already been warned of apoplexy by a plain-spoken confessor. That night he had a fit during dinner, and he died the following day. Louis wept a good deal. Despite his absurdity, everyone had liked Monsieur; Saint-Simon admits, ‘It was he who set all pleasure a-going and when he left us, life and merriment seemed to have departed.’ A certain sense of guilt was evident in the King’s sudden generosity to M de Chartres, who was given all his father’s pensions and honours together with the Duchy of Orleans.

The war opened at the end of 1701, on three fronts. At first things did not go badly for the French. For two years Vendôme waged a surprisingly successful campaign against Eugène and the Imperial armies. In Germany, Villars won a glorious victory in the Black Forest near Friedlingen, and was rewarded with a Marshal’s baton. Next year he won more victories, while Tallard defeated the Imperialists near Spiers. Unfortunately the Bavarians refused to join in an advance on Vienna and Villars resigned in disgust. France had lost her one chance of winning the war.

At home the Huguenot mountaineers of the Cévennes rose in revolt. They were known as Camisards, from the white shirts they wore over their clothes to distinguish each other in the dark. The government used the most savage measures, perpetrating a kind of French Massacre of Glencoe when they burnt out mountain villages in mid-winter. Villars brought the rising to an end in 1704 by the imaginative expedient of offering its leader, Jean Cavalier, a colonelcy and persuading him to form his followers into a regiment which would fight for France. Cavalier also insisted on being taken to Versailles to see the King, but the young peasant was so humiliated when Louis passed him without saying a word that he took service with the English. It is said that nearly 100,000 men, women and children died during this rising, either Camisards or victims of their reprisals.

Abroad, a series of disasters began in 1704. At Blenheim, Marlborough killed 12,000 Frenchmen and captured even more, including the shortsighted Marshal Tallard, together with their entire artillery. The French were driven out of Germany, Bavaria was invaded and the Elector fled. In Spain, the English took Gibraltar while the Archduke Charles captured Barcelona—soon poor Philip V thought of taking refuge in America. In 1706 the elegant Villeroy, who was the son of Louis’s old tutor, was routed by Marlborough at Ramillies (near Waterloo); when he returned to Versailles, the King greeted him with the words, ‘M le Maréchal, at our age one can no longer expect to be lucky.’ The defeat cost France the Low Countries. Vendôme was recalled to hold off Marlborough, whereupon Prince Eugène drove the French out of Italy, killing the French commander in the process; next year Eugène invaded Provence, besieging Toulon, though he was driven out with heavy casualties. In 1708 even Vendôme was defeated, at Oudenarde by Marlborough, and the French army was almost destroyed in the ensuing retreat. Luckily the allies baulked at a full-scale invasion, though a small Dutch force actually penetrated as far as Versailles and captured one of the King’s equerries.

It was the nadir of Louis’s fortunes. The winter of 1708–9 was a terrible one. The cold was such that at Versailles wine froze in the glasses and ink on the pens. An iron-hard frost lasted until the end of March; animals froze to death in their barns, game birds in the trees, rabbits in their burrows; the spring wheat and barley perished, whole vineyards died and in the south the entire olive crop was destroyed. Famine set in everywhere. Even at Versailles, royal servants were seen begging at the gates and Mme de Maintenon ate oatmeal bread ostentatiously; in Burgundy bracken was used to make flour, and throughout the countryside the peasants were reduced to nettles and boiled grass. Louis did what he could, imposing a special tax to feed the hungry, from which not even he himself was exempted; he forbade the baking of white bread, abolished transport dues and tariffs; he had his gold plate melted down, eating off silver gilt instead. All this did little to abate the famine. Even the troops starved, selling their muskets to buy bread.

France, bankrupt, starving, her industries and trade in ruins, her armies beaten and demoralized, and faced by triumphant and revengeful enemies, was now in a position very like that of Germany at the beginning of 1945. At a council meeting, the Duc de Beauvilliers drew such a miserable picture of France’s condition that the Duc de Bourgogne burst into tears, followed by the entire council. This ruinous situation is often depicted by historians as the just reward of Louis’s folly. Whatever the cause, it showed him at his greatest. He was not a Hitler who would sacrifice his country; humbling himself, he sued abjectly for peace, sending the Marquis de Torcy to obtain it on any terms. But the allies insisted that Louis must himself drive his grandson, Philip V, out of Spain. The King would accept anything but this. ‘If I have to make war,’ he said, ‘I prefer to fight my enemies rather than my children.’

It was Louis’s finest moment. He sent a circular letter to every provincial governor, to every bishop and to every municipality, explaining why France had to fight on; he admitted that all sources of revenue were virtually exhausted, and asked for advice and for help. Recruits flocked to the colours, while the rich handed in their plate and valuables; in 1710 the French even accepted the dixième, a ten per cent tax on all incomes. The tide began to turn. Marlborough defeated Villars at Malplaquet in late 1709, but only just; the French losing 8,000 men compared to the allies’ 21,000. Next year Vendôme, ‘happiest and haughtiest of men’, utterly destroyed the Austrian army of Spain, hitherto victorious, at Villaviciosa. The allies were astonished by the French will to resist. In England the Tories gained power and removed Marlborough from his command. But the situation still seemed desperate for France.

Meanwhile in April 1711, the first of a series of terrible personal blows struck Louis. The Dauphin, ‘drowned in fat and sloth’ though he was, had always seemed healthy enough. Suddenly he fell ill and died of smallpox, within little more than a week. The Duc de Bourgogne was now Dauphin, and impressed everyone by his sense of responsibility, attending all Council meetings and listening carefully to what ministers and generals had to say. Even Marie Adelaide became more serious. Then early in February 1712, when she was pregnant, she developed a fever; a rash appeared and she was dead within a few days. Louis wrote to Philip of Spain, ‘There will never be a moment in my life when I shall not regret her.’ Less than a week after his wife’s death, the Duc de Bourgogne developed the mysterious rash. ‘He was extraordinarily fond of his wife, and sorrow for her death gave him his fever.’ He died three days later, perhaps the worst blow of all to Louis.

His mind formed by Fénelon, Bourgogne, had he lived, might have saved the Ancien Régime. He recognized and lamented the gulf between monarch and subject. He intended to introduce changes in taxation—which would have ended the privileged position of the nobility—and generally to broaden the entire basis of government. Few men have been mourned so deeply.

Early in March the Bourgognes’ two surviving children sickened, and the elder, the five-year-old Duc de Bretagne, soon died. The younger, the Duc d’Anjou, was saved by his governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour, who said that he was too small to be bled, and had him breast-fed in her own room until the rash went. So mysterious were these deaths—probably a rare form of measles—that it was rumoured that the Duc de Bourgogne and his family had been poisoned by the Duc d’Orléans whose interest in chemistry was well known; the Duke was hissed in the streets. The Duc du Maine seems to have been largely responsible for spreading the slander. But the King had too much sense to believe such rumours. He showed incredible fortitude; Saint-Simon said that he truly merited the title of ‘the Great’ by his behaviour.

It was at this time that France was in most danger. Prince Eugène prepared to invade France from Flanders with 130,000 men. In April Louis entrusted Villars with his last army. In tears, his voice shaking, he told Villars, ‘You see the condition I am in, M le Maréchal. Few people have known, as I have, what it is to lose a grandson, a grand-daughter and their son, all of great promise and deeply loved, within a few weeks. God is punishing me and I deserve it: I shall suffer less in the world to come.’ The King went on to discuss what he should do if Villars failed. ‘Most of my courtiers want me to go to Blois without waiting for the enemy to advance on Paris, as they may well do if our army is defeated.’ But Louis thought that even if the worst happened, sufficient French troops would hold out on the north bank of the Somme. ‘I shall go to Péronne or Saint-Quentin, collect all the troops I can muster and make a last stand with you, in which we will either die together or save the kingdom.’

But in July Villars captured the fortified town of Denain and cut the allied army in half. Eugène was forced to retreat, the French advancing steadily and capturing town after town. Within less than two months, Prince Eugène had lost over fifty battalions; fifty-three enemy standards were sent to Versailles. At the Treaty of Utrecht in April 1713, Philip V renounced his claim to the French throne and was recognized as King of Spain by most of the allies. France kept Alsace and Strasbourg. In return Louis ceded Hudson Bay and Gibraltar to England and agreed to disown poor James III.

Although he had brought his kingdom close to ruin, he had won a brilliant triumph, demonstrating the strength of the state which he had created: France would not be invaded again till the Revolution. With his usual realism, Louis now began negotiations for an alliance with Vienna. The Habsburg encirclement had been broken for ever. Sainte-Beuve says patronizingly, ‘Louis had nothing more than good sense, but he had plenty of it.’ One may think that the old King had more than good sense—he anticipated a realignment in European diplomacy by thirty years.

In May 1714 Louis suffered yet another tragedy, when his third and last grandson, the Duc de Berry, died after a fall from his horse. Berry’s children had all died in infancy so (apart from Philip of Spain, who was not eligible) the King’s only heir was his great-grandson, the frail, four-year-old Duc d’Anjou. The heir presumptive was Monsieur’s son, the disreputable Philippe d’Orléans. In August 1714 Louis went directly against the loi fondamental by forcing the Parlement to recognize the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse as Princes of the Blood, with the right of succession to the throne in the event of M d’Anjou’s death. The education of the latter was to be entrusted to the Duc du Maine, who in these last days was the old King’s favourite companion.

Louis was now nearer eighty than seventy. Yet his appetite for food continued to astonish observers—some believed that he had a gigantic tapeworm. It was still the appetite of which his sister-in-law had written, ‘I have often seen the King drink four bowls of different sorts of soup and then eat an entire pheasant, a partridge, a large plate of salad, mutton with gravy or garlic, a dish of patisserie and after that fruit and hard-boiled eggs.’ Large quantities of bread and cold meat with two bottles of wine were placed in his room every night in case he should feel hungry. Plenty of fruit and green vegetables seem to have saved him from any ill consequences. At this period he drank watered burgundy instead of champagne, usually Romanée St Vivant, which had originally been prescribed for him after his fistula operation by the surgeon, Fagon, who told him, ‘Tonic and generous, it suits, Sire, a robust temperament such as yours.’ He needed exercise as much as ever, walking in all weathers, and following the hunt in his little cart. He worked his customary hours. He still exhausted Mme de Maintenon with his demands and then ‘slept like a child’. He kept his liking for Molière’s comedies—especially Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Georges Dandin and Le Coccu Imaginaire—which were often performed at Versailles. In June 1715 he remarked, ‘If I continue to eat with such a good appetite, I am going to ruin all those Englishmen who have wagered large sums that I will die by September.’ But the English would win their bet.

Perhaps sensing that his end was not far off, he had grown steadily more devout in recent years. He listened dutifully to his new confessor, the sinister and fanatical Jesuit, Le Tellier. An old peasant who looked like a bird of prey, arrogant and illiterate and with burning eyes, Le Tellier has even been compared to Rasputin, such was his influence over Louis. The King was sincerely pious but he had a curiously underdeveloped religious sense. On his deathbed he told Cardinal Rohan that in matters of religion he had only done what his bishops had advised him. ‘It is you who will have to answer to God for everything that has been done … I have a clear conscience.’

The King enjoyed himself at Marly in the first few days of August 1715 and had a good stag hunt. Suddenly, on 10 August, he felt ill and returned to Versailles. Two days later sores broke out on his left leg. Although in pain, he worked as usual with his ministers, and interviewing ambassadors, and tried to soothe himself with frequent concerts. His leg began to smell foully and then turned black—it was gangrene. By 24 August, he knew he was dying. Next day he added a codicil to his will, nominating Philippe d’Orléans as chief of the Council of Regency.

He was already talking of ‘the time when I was King’. He took a dignified farewell of his courtiers, thanking them for their service and asking their pardon for the bad example he had set them. At the end both he and they began to cry. ‘I perceive that I am allowing my feelings to overcome me,’ said Louis, ‘and am making you do likewise. I beg your forgiveness for it. Farewell, gentlemen—I hope you will sometimes remember me.’ Later, however, he rebuked two servants for weeping: ‘Why do you shed tears? Did you think me immortal?’

He summoned his five-year-old great-grandson, who was placed on his bed. He told him, ‘My child, you are about to become the greatest King in the world. Never forget your duty to God. Do not copy me in my taste for war. And try to relieve your people as much as you can, which I unhappily have not done because of the needs of the state …’ He then kissed the Dauphin, blessed him and burst into tears.

It was a long and agonizing death, which he suffered with dignity. He received the sacraments many times and prayed fervently. He told his wife, ‘I thought it would be harder to die—I assure you it is not very terrible and does not seem difficult to me.’ His last words were, ‘Oh my God, come to my aid, make haste to succour me!’ He died at a quarter to eight on the morning of Sunday 1 September 1715.

The whole country rejoiced. His coffin was hooted at on the way to Saint-Denis by a drunken mob, and Voltaire saw small booths set up along the route where people drank and sang. Saint-Simon says that the provinces leapt for joy. Both the nobles and the lawyers felt that their deliverance had come. But the diarist also noted that no foreign court rejoiced—‘all plumed themselves on praising and honouring his memory’.

Historians vary considerably in their judgement of Louis and, indeed, the motives for many of his actions remain as much a mystery now as they were to his contemporaries. On the whole, however, he is generally seen as a selfish megalomaniac, whose lust for glory ruined his people; whose demoralization of the French nobility made the Revolution inevitable; whose ruthlessness in personal relationships ruined the lives of his intimates. This picture owes a good deal to the almost hypnotic fascination of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, and much to the impression made by the soulless bulk of Versailles. Yet Saint-Simon was biased to the point of derangement, while without its glittering courtiers, Versailles, essentially theatrical in conception, could never be more than a vast and deserted playhouse. The métier of absolute monarch was a demanding one which few human beings could perform without losing some of their humanity. None the less, Louis was a good father, a good son, a good brother and, for most of his married life, a good husband. If he made France suffer, he made her great. Napoleon, whose judgements it is always dangerous to ignore, once said, ‘Louis XIV was a great King. He made France first among the nations. What French King since Charlemagne can be compared with him?’

‘The Well-Beloved’

LOUIS XV (1715–1774)

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‘If I were Lieutenant of Police, I would prohibit those Paris cabriolets’

Louis XV is the Hamlet of the Bourbons. Few Kings have baffled historians as he has done; to most he is a classic example of the man who is not up to his job, though a surprising number think he may have been seriously under-estimated. He was no less of a mystery to his contemporaries. The shyest and most reserved of all his dynasty, his interest lies in his strange yet curiously attractive character and in its tragic inadequacy. For Louis XV, the eighteenth century was always the age of the Rococo, not of the Enlightenment.

He was born on 15 February 1710, the third and youngest son of the Duc de Bourgogne and Marie Adelaide of Savoy, and was soon after created Duc d’Anjou. One brother had already predeceased him; his remaining brother died in the same epidemic which carried off their parents. It has already been related how he was saved by the good sense of his governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour. She continued to be his governess for the first two years of his reign, taking the place of his mother; on his deathbed Louis XIV told the little boy to obey her, and he remained devoted to her for the rest of his life, calling her Maman.

The young King, a frail but beautiful child, was the idol of his people. Michelet recaptures their veneration: ‘He, the only remains of so great a family, saved like the infant Joash, is preserved apparently that he himself may save others.’ At his accession the crowd joined with wild and tearful emotion in crying ‘Vive le Roi!’ Once again France was afflicted with a minority, but unlike his predecessors Louis XV had no mother to act as Regent. Nor did the nobility make any attempt at rebellion; it has been said that while during Louis XIII’s minority they waged civil war and during Louis XIV’s joined in the Fronde, in the minority of Louis XV they were only capable of writing memoirs.

The new ruler of France was the King’s ‘wicked uncle’, his cousin Philippe d’Orléans, a plump, short-sighted little man with a cynical grin. He quickly set aside Louis XIV’s will—which had given considerable powers to the Duc du Maine—telling the Parlement firmly, ‘I have been proclaimed Regent and during the minority I must have a King’s authority.’ Indeed, Orléans became King in everything but name, as heir presumptive to a sickly boy, whom everyone expected would soon make way for ‘Philippe VII’; the eight years of his regency amounted to a reign on which he stamped his own scandalous, pleasure-loving character. Amiable, humane, tolerant, sceptical but open-minded, the Regent seems surprisingly modern. Yet he looked backward rather than forward, consciously modelling himself on his great-grandfather, Henri IV, whom he really believed he resembled. Alas, he took after him only in being amusing, loose-living and wearing spectacles. He was an insatiable womanizer, with more than a hundred mistresses (famous for their ugliness), and a drunkard with a weak head, who consumed bottle upon bottle of the new sparkling champagne.

Despite his hopes of the throne, the Regent was obviously very fond of his little cousin. He treated him exactly as he had treated Louis XIV—with deep respect. There is a charming portrait of them together; the Regent is seated at his work table, gesturing amiably and deferentially towards the little King who stands in the foreground, dressed in the height of grown-up fashion, wearing the star and sash of the Saint-Esprit. He adored the Regent, insisting that he sat down to dinner with him, contrary to all etiquette. At the end of 1715 Louis and his governess were sent to the old château of Vincennes, where long country walks improved his health. After a year the Regent had him brought to Paris to take up residence in the refurbished Tuileries. Soon he began to attend Council meetings, holding his favourite cat, but remaining tongue-tied; the ministers called the King’s cat his ‘cher collègue’.

In 1717 Peter the Great of Russia visited Paris. Observers were fascinated to see the gigantic Tsar—six foot eight inches tall—take the tiny King under both arms, hoist him up and kiss him again and again; Louis showed no fear, while Peter was charmed with him; Saint-Simon says that the Tsar’s gentleness was very moving. Despite his barbaric manners Peter was fêted enthusiastically by the French; the Regent took him to the opera (which he does not seem to have enjoyed, leaving early). He even visited the Sorbonne where he saw a statue of Richelieu; seizing it with both hands the Tsar cried, ‘Great man, I would give half my kingdom to learn from you how to govern the rest!’ None the less, during his stay Peter also foretold that the French lords would ruin themselves by their luxury.

Louis’s childhood was not always happy. The same year that he met Peter, he had to part tearfully from his governess and was handed over to a Governor, Marshal de Villeroy, an old soldier courtier in his seventies; the King, who was only seven, refused to eat or even speak for several days. Villeroy was not altogether satisfactory. He told Louis that in dealing with ministers he must ‘hold a chamber pot over their heads when they’re in office, and pour it over them when they are out. He made him attend endless parades and receptions, which caused him to dislike appearing in public for the rest of his life; having to dance in ballets—‘a pleasure for which he was far too young’—increased this dislike. When the King was eleven, a Turkish envoy reported that during an audience the senile Marshal had made Louis walk up and down: ‘Come, walk about a little and show us how you move—walk a little faster to show the ambassador how light you are on your feet.’ As a result he became abnormally reserved. The Regent’s mother thought the King an ill-natured child: ‘He loves no one but his old Governess, dislikes people for no reason at all and enjoys making cutting remarks.’ Certainly he showed a cruel streak; when his cat Charlotte had kittens, he teased three of them to death, although devoted to cats (throughout his life, Versailles was full of them); he also shot a pet white deer.

Even so, Louis was deeply attached to his tutor, kindly old Bishop Fleury of Fréjus, who did more than merely see that the child received a good education. He encouraged him to make use of a toy printing press and played cards with him when he was bored. Fleury’s shrewd understanding of small boys is vividly preserved in the beautiful model warships (now in the Musée Marine) which he had made for the young King; Louis always retained a keen interest in the French navy.

To begin with the Regent seemed breathtakingly liberal. Prison doors opened, galley slaves were unmanacled, Huguenots and Jansenists were set free. He even thought of re-enacting the Edict of Nantes. He had Fénēlon’s Télémaque—an allegory criticizing Absolutism—reprinted. For a short time he replaced Louis XIV’s bourgeois bureaucracy with a system of councils staffed by noblemen. He gave back to the Parlement of Paris its ancient right of refusing to register any royal edict of which they disapproved. (Louis behaved with precocious dignity during the wearisome lit de justice which followed his accession.) Orléans delighted the Parisians by bringing the court back to Paris, he himself governing from his town house, the Palais Royal. He allied with England, a country which he much admired; the alliance was joined by the Habsburgs and all three fought together against Spain in the war of 1719; the French army marched on its King’s uncle, Philip V, storming Fuentarrabia. Yet if the Regent’s policies were a complete reversal of those of Louis XIV, he was still not prepared to summon the States General and use it as an English Parliament, as his friend Saint-Simon suggested.

It was a time of great elegance. The Regent—whose paintings included works by Raphael, Titian, del Sarto, Veronese and Poussin—made Watteau painter to the King, an ethereal genius whose idealized, fantastic scenes of court life imply that there was more than debauchery to the Regency. Even the furniture—for example, that by Charles Cressent—seemed gayer and freer than that of the old King’s reign.

In 1716, always open to new ideas, the Regent introduced a system of national credit finance invented by a Scots gambler, John Law; it was based on the principle that the country’s economy would benefit if more money were in circulation, and that this could be achieved by issuing paper currency guaranteed by a state bank. Law, who was made Controller-General, also formed the Compagnie du Mississippi which quickly took over all the other state trading companies. There was a wave of frenzied speculation, during which great fortunes were made. Then dissatisfied investors began to sell shares; to save the company Law incorporated it into the bank which was flourishing, but there were not sufficient assets. The public lost confidence in the new bank notes. In the summer of 1720 both bank and company collapsed, ruining large numbers of investors; many committed suicide. The Regent incurred considerable unpopularity for his part in this French South Sea Bubble; which unpopularity, most unfairly, was increased by a dreadful plague at Marseilles.

He was now on bad terms with the Parlement which had begun to compare itself with the British Parliament, in what Saint-Simon calls ‘a mad career of infinite presumption, pride and arrogance’. Seeking better relations with Rome, the Regent forced the Parlement to register the Papal Bull against the Jansenists; the latter’s supporters retaliated with a flood of scurrilous pamphlets accusing him of tyranny and even alleging that he was trying to murder the King. When the boy fell ill, the fishwives of Paris gathered under the Tuileries’ windows, screaming ‘to hell with the Regent’. In 1722 Louis was taken back to Versailles and moved into his great-grandfather’s old rooms.

Orléans’s approaches to Rome were partly dictated by a wish to secure a Red Hat for the Abbé Dubois, his old tutor who was now his secretary and éminence grise. Popular rumour credited this unsavoury cleric with being responsible for the Regent’s debauched tastes. Saint-Simon described him as ‘a little, wizened, herring-gutted man in a flaxen wig, with a weasel’s face brightened by some small intellect. Within, every vice fought for precedence. Avarice, debauchery, ambition were his gods; perfidy, flattery and bootlicking his methods.’ He had some strange hold over his former pupil, who on occasion addressed him as ‘you shark’. Unwillingly, Philippe gave way to the man’s shameless pleading and made him Archbishop of Cambrai. According to Saint-Simon, ‘an appalling scandal’ resulted which embarrassed even M le Duc d’Orléans. In fact, although indisputably vicious and greedy, Dubois was not without ability; he was the architect of the English alliance, receiving a fat English pension, and also worked for a rapprochement with Spain. In 1722 the Regent made him First Minister.

However, Dubois died in August 1723. The King had come of age the previous February (thirteen was still the legal age of royal majority), so to retain his power Orléans—who had ceased automatically to be regent—had himself appointed First Minister in Dubois’s place.

The King had been crowned at Rheims on 25 October 1722. A painting by Jean Baptiste Martin shows an awkward, boyish figure, crowned and holding the sceptre and main de justice. M d’Argenson wrote in his journal, ‘How like Cupid he seemed in his long robes … our eyes filled with tears at the sight of this poor young prince.’ The sacrament made a profound impression upon Louis; throughout his life he never doubted the divine origin of his authority. Oddly enough, however, it seems to have done little to increase his self-confidence.

For all that Fleury could do, Louis was growing up to be shy and unsure of himself. His chief indulgence was over-eating—especially game and cakes. Ironically in view of his later life, at this age he was frightened of women and rather prudish; he actually ordered a loose lady to leave Versailles. Reassuringly, he had the family passion for hunting and enjoyed shooting: his other amusements were cards and gambling, which helped to distract him from his chronic boredom and melancholia. There were surprising affinities between the young Louis XV and his great-great-grandfather, Louis XIII.

He was even involved in a mild homosexual scandal in 1722 when a group of young courtiers near him, including Villeroy’s grandson were found indulging in sodomy. They were hastily banished; the King was told that they were being punished ‘for pulling up the pallisades in the gardens’. Shortly afterwards the aged Marshal followed, protesting shrilly. Louis wept from fear rather than regret; the old man, anxious to keep his place, had told the poor child that he would undoubtedly be murdered if Villeroy left court. The King’s too-enthusiastic friendship for the young Duc de La Trémouille, the first nobleman of the bedchamber, who was famed for his embroidery, also gave cause for alarm. Such fears were natural in the case of so beautiful a boy as Louis, but proved groundless.

In 1721 the Regent announced the King’s engagement to his first cousin, the Infanta Maria of Spain. On learning of his betrothal Louis burst into tears. Recovering, he told an unmarried courtier, ‘I am more experienced than you—I have a wife and child.’ For the Infanta was only four years old, and arrived in Paris sitting on Mme de Ventadour’s lap and playing with her doll. The monarch (who had just passed his twelfth birthday) greeted her gravely, ‘I am very glad, Madame, that you have reached France in such excellent health.’ Overcome with embarrassment, he then refused to address another word to her, although she persisted in following him everywhere. Sighing, the little girl told Mme de Ventadour, ‘He will never love me.’ There is a most attractive painting of the engaged couple in the Pitti in Florence.

The scandal of Orléans’s seraglio and of the ‘daily filthiness and impiety’ of the wild supper parties in the Palais Royal was noised abroad everywhere. It was even rumoured that the Duke slept with his favourite daughter, the widowed Duchesse de Berry, an utterly depraved creature who drank so much that she vomited over the company and rolled on the carpet. Her death at only twenty-four—worn out by a combination of drink and giving birth to an illegitimate child—was a severe blow to Orléans. He was also saddened by the death in 1722 of his grim old mother, Liselotte, to whom, more edifyingly, he had been devoted—he wept bitterly. He himself was growing iller every day, ‘a man with a hanging head, a purple complexion and a heavy stupid look’, although he was not yet fifty. He and everyone else knew that he was a dead man if he continued his debauchery, but he had lost all control. On 22 December 1723, discussing the ludicrous concept of final damnation with a mistress, Mme de Falaris, he suddenly fell against her, unconscious; it was an apoplexy. When a lackey tried to bleed him, another lady screamed, ‘No! You’ll kill him—he has just lain with a whore.’ He was dead within two hours.

Philippe d’Orléans is generally regarded as a failure. None the less, Voltaire could write that the Regent’s only faults were too much love of pleasure and too much love of novelty, and that of all the descendants of Henri IV, he most resembled him ‘in his courage, kindliness, frankness, gaiety, lack of pomposity and deep culture’. Even that ferocious republican, Michelet, calls him ‘the good’ Duc d’Orléans, and claims that he used to say, ‘If I were a subject I would certainly revolt.’ Louis mourned him deeply, and spoke of him affectionately as long as he lived.

The Duc de Bourbon, who was the grandson of the great Condé and a senior Prince of the Blood, demanded and obtained the post of First Minister. Monsieur le Duc, as he was known at court, was scarcely less debauched than Orléans, and far less able. In his early thirties, ‘tall, bowed, thin as a rake, legs like a stork and a body like a spider, with two eyes so red that the bad one is difficult to distinguish from the good’ (old Liselotte’s description), Bourbon was hardly a charmer. He was already heartily disliked for having made a fortune out of Law’s Système. Soon he had made his administration thoroughly unpopular by harrying the Jansenists. His most maladroit piece of work was the King’s marriage.

The English were nervous at the prospect of a French rapprochement with Spain. Bourbon’s mistress, the beautiful, nymph-like Mme de Prie—whom an exiled Jacobite called ‘the most corrupt and ambitious jade alive’—was in receipt of an English pension and came out strongly against the Spanish match. Then in 1725 Louis fell dangerously ill, after which Bourbon lived in constant dread of the throne being inherited by the heir presumptive, the new Duc d’Orléans. ‘What will become of me?’ muttered Bourbon. He wanted a tractable, biddable Queen who would bear a Dauphin as soon as possible. The little Infanta was therefore sent back to Madrid. The Spanish ambassador cried out, ‘All the blood of Spain would not suffice to wipe away the shame which France has caused my master!’ (However, the Infanta was obviously delighted to go home—she said that she was very glad that she was not going to be married after all. In the end she married King Joao of Portugal.)

Europe was still more amazed by Bourbon’s choice of a Queen, Marie Leszczynska. She was the daughter of King Stanislas Leszczynski, a once dashing and glamorous figure now living in seedy retirement in Alsace as a pensioner of France; he had even been forced to pawn his wife’s jewels. Count of Lesno, he had been elected to the throne of the Polish Republic in 1704 when only in his twenties, and since losing it in 1709 had led a strange, adventurous life, pursued by assassins and living on charity; by now he had lost all hope of recouping his fortunes. When he heard the news of the French marriage, he shouted to his wife and daughter, ‘Down on our knees to give thanks to God!’ Unfortunately Marie was singularly lacking in Polish allure, though not the web-footed monster of French popular gossip; she was nearly seven years older than her future husband and, while pleasant-looking, had hardly the beauty which one may expect of a Cinderella; she was good, pious, unaffected, sweet-natured and boring, her favourite occupation being the embroidering of altar cloths. Lack of any other suitable bride was the real reason for Bourbon’s choice of ‘the Princess of Poland’, whom he no doubt hoped would be suitably grateful.

A marriage by proxy took place at Strasbourg Cathedral in August 1725, the Duc d’Orléans representing Louis; the bride wore a dress of silver brocade ornamented with roses and trimmed with silver lace. The King, for once amiable and at ease, married her for a second time in the chapel at Fontainebleau, after which there was a magnificent wedding banquet, presentations, a play, and supper amid dazzling fireworks. That first night Louis made love to his wife no less than seven times.

The King was fifteen when he consummated his marriage and was the father of five children by the time he was twenty. He was to have ten in all; in 1727 Marie presented him with twin daughters, Mmes Elisabeth and Henriette (known as Mme Première and Mme Seconde); another daughter in 1728 who died very young; the Dauphin Louis in 1729; the Duc d’Anjou in 1730 who died three years later; Mme Adelaide in 1732; Mme Victoire in 1733; Mme Sophie in 1734; Mme Félicité in 1736; and Mme Louise in 1737 (popularly known as Mme Dernière). It is said that all were begotten on the poor Queen without a single word from her husband.

To begin with, the marriage seemed happy enough, although Marie is credited with complaining that her life was nothing but, ‘toujours coucher, toujours grossesse, toujours accoucher’. At first she was overcome by the unaccustomed luxury and plenty; shortly after her wedding she fell so ill that she was given the last sacraments; according to her father, Marie’s illness was due to eating nine dozen oysters, washed down with four flagons of beer, at a single sitting. Although many Frenchmen blamed Bourbon for such a mésalliance, her friendliness and lack of conceit won most hearts.

Ironically, Marie ruined her benefactors, Bourbon and Mme de Prie. At their bidding she tried to persuade the King to dismiss Fleury, who had been telling him of the appalling state of the country, that inflation and famine were widespread; that there were food riots in the provinces and even in Paris starving men were breaking into bakeries. The Duke persuaded Marie to invite Louis to her apartments where he might see him alone, without fear of interruption. He presented the King with a letter from Cardinal de Polignac which contained a savage attack on Fleury. ‘What do you think of this letter?’ asked Bourbon. ‘Nothing,’ replied Louis. ‘Your Majesty wishes to give a command?’ ‘Things will remain just as they are.’ ‘I have displeased Your Majesty?’ asked Bourbon nervously. ‘Yes.’ Cunningly, Fleury had already left Versailles, leaving an affectionate letter of farewell. At the news Louis burst into tears and ordered Bourbon to bring him back. Shortly afterwards the Duke was banished to his estates. Mme de Prie was also banished; within a year, driven crazy by boredom, she had poisoned herself. Fleury took control of the government in June 1726 and was created a Cardinal before the year was out.

If Cardinal Fleury was hardly another Richelieu, he could at least claim to be a French Walpole. His programme was a simple one—peace and prosperity. War must be avoided at all costs and the economy came before everything else. In 1728 he and an excellent Controller-General, Philibert d’Orry—a true heir of Colbert—having fixed the ratio of gold to silver and of bank notes to coin, established the livre at twenty-four to the gold louis d’or (or six livres to the silver crown), a rate which remained until the Revolution. Stricter controls were imposed on tax farmers and government expenditure was cut; some taxes were even reduced. An excellent system of state roads was begun and bureaux de commerce were founded to encourage trade. Abroad, Orry reorganized the Compagnie des Indes—the French East India Company—and encouraged trade with the Spanish and Portuguese Americas. In 1739 Fleury’s administration succeeded in balancing the budget for the first time since 1672 (and also for the last until the budget of the restored Bourbon government in 1815).

The King was perfectly happy to leave all power in the hands of an aged cleric. Pink-faced, beaming like an old cherub, the Cardinal was so powerful that all France was ready to attend the little ceremony when he went to bed. M d’Argenson writes scornfully how ridiculous it was to see the old man folding his breeches, putting on a threadbare nightshirt and combing his four white hairs. But elsewhere the diarist also writes how Fleury ‘loves the King and the realm and is honest and sincere’.

The Cardinal’s greatest cross were the Jansenists. He tried to enforce the Papal condemnation, imprisoning a number of priests and even a bishop and dismissing Jansenist professors from the Sorbonne (including the great historian Rollin). By now the sect had almost hysterical popular support in Paris; miracles were reported to have taken place at Jansenist graves, notably at the church of Saint-Médard. Predictably the Parlements took up so popular a cause, refusing to register a royal decree against Jansenists in March 1730. Louis summoned the lawyers to Versailles, where they were told that the law and its interpretation came from the King, not from Parlement; ‘Do not force me to show you that I am your master,’ he threatened, clutching his whip. At one point during the struggle over a hundred magistrates were exiled. In the end Fleury gave way and recalled them. The alliance of Parlementaires and Jansenists would cause trouble later in the reign.

Even the Queen was anxious to keep on good terms with Fleury. He made Louis send her a letter which said, ‘I beg you, Madame, and if need be, order you to do everything that the Bishop of Fréjus asks you, just as though it came from me.’ Marie addressed the Cardinal almost obsequiously, while he treated her with cold respect.

However, even Fleury could not resist public pressure to go to war on behalf of Marie’s father in 1733. Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, died in February. Stanislas Leszczynski hurried home to be elected King by his enthusiastic countrymen. Unfortunately Augustus III of Saxony was supported by the Habsburgs and by the Russians. The latter, a new factor in European politics, sent an army into Poland; Augustus was crowned at Cracow while Stanislas took refuge in Danzig, besieged by the Russians. Despite his frantic appeals, the French only sent 1,500 men under the Breton Comte de Plélo. Plélo made a heroic sortie but he was mortally wounded and his little force was wiped out. Just before Danzig fell, King Stanislas managed to escape, disguised as a sailor.

French prestige had to be redeemed, though Fleury grumbled that he did not want to ruin the King for the sake of his father-in-law. One French army attacked Augustus’s Austrian allies in the Rhineland, while another attacked them in Italy. In Germany, after advancing triumphantly, the Marshal Duke of Berwick (James II’s son by Arabella Churchill) had his head taken off by a cannonball; in Italy, after capturing Milan, gallant old Marshal Villars died, aged eighty-one. Having restored her reputation, France made peace in 1735. She recognized Augustus III as King of Poland, but in return Duke Charles of Lorraine—who had married the Emperor’s heiress, Maria Theresa—gave up his duchy to Stanislas with remainder to France. The old adventurer reigned happily at Luneville as ‘King of Lorraine’ for the rest of his life, holding elegant court and patronizing Montesquieu and Voltaire; the latter wrote that it was impossible to be a better King or a better man. By 1740, due to Fleury’s excellent diplomacy, France dominated Europe.

In 1740, when the Cardinal was ill, M d’Argenson confided to his diary that Louis was ‘a King of thirty, very well informed’, and had shown that he knew how to rule for himself. Later, d’Argenson—when his ambitions had been frustrated—claimed to despise Louis, but at this time even he succumbed to his charm. The young King was tall and magnificently built, and wonderfully handsome—huge, sad eyes, and a delicate Roman nose over a generous mouth redeemed from any femininity by a strong blue chin. Extremely shy, his reserve added to his fascination; he spoke little, but always in a pleasing, oddly husky voice. His haughty manner, which came from lack of self-confidence, intrigued rather than repelled. In addition, Nancy Mitford discerns ‘a sexy moodiness of manner irresistible to women’.

So limited a personality as Queen Marie could not hope to hold him. She refused to let him into her bed on certain saints’ days, and when she did she smothered him with blankets. Even her own father described Marie and her mother as ‘the two most boring queens I ever met’. Marie once gave it as her opinion that the best way of dispelling ennui was eating—she herself sometimes ate a twenty-nine course dinner. In any case she had lost her figure and was ageing fast. Louis was a man of violent appetites, a mighty trencherman and gros buveur, and by the late 1730s discreet valets were regularly procuring whores for him. Every ambitious young woman at court watched the King with greedy, fascinated eyes.

At Easter 1739, Louis refused to take Communion. During one of his little dinner parties at La Muette he had already toasted ‘that unknown she’. The previous autumn d’Argenson had noted that the King had taken one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting for his mistress, the Comtesse de Mailly; the diarist describes her as ‘well built but ugly, a big mouth with good teeth which gives her rather a stupid look. She is of small intelligence and has no ideas about anything’; later he says that ‘her ugliness scandalizes foreigners who expect a King’s mistress to at least have a pretty face’. (Perhaps surprisingly, Mme de Mailly once boasted that sixteen artists had painted her portrait!) None the less, as an experienced married woman of twenty-seven—she was nicknamed ‘the widow’—Louise-Julie de Mailly knew just how to put the shy King at his ease, flattering him with little attentions, such as making him a dressing-gown with her own hands and leaving it on his dressing-table. She was invited to the supper parties at La Muette and installed in a flat at Versailles. The Queen accepted the situation with surprising common sense and even humour—she may have been glad of the rest. When Mme de Mailly asked for leave to go to Compiègne where Louis was, the Queen replied, ‘Do what you like—you’re the mistress.’ La Mailly did not have a particularly enjoyable reign—the King was constantly betraying her with other ladies. However, she no doubt felt safe in introducing him to her sister, Félicité de Vintimille (whom an enemy described as having ‘the face of a grenadier, the neck of a stork and the smell of a monkey’.) As early as June 1739 the sisters were dining together with the King; he took them hunting and boating.

By 1740 Mme de Vintimille had supplanted her sister—the King even offered her Fleury’s flat. Félicité was a big, bold woman with a rough tongue which somehow amused Louis. But even he was irritated by her outbursts of bad temper; on one occasion he told her, ‘I know just how to cure you of your ill nature, Mme la Comtesse—to cut off your head; it wouldn’t altogether be a bad idea as you have such a long neck.’ In the autumn of 1740 she gave birth to a son (the Comte du Luc—who grew up so like the King that he was called the Demi-Louis all his life). But La Vintimille developed puerperal fever and died of it. Louis was so miserable that he took to his bed, had a death mask made of her face, and then retired to Rambouillet almost by himself. When he returned to the court, it was to the forgiving arms of Mme de Mailly.

Unfortunately she was so unwise as to introduce him to her fat and even uglier sister, Adelaide, who took her turn as mistress, although she did not last very long. It is even possible that he slept with a fourth sister, Hortense. By this time lewd songs were being sung in Paris about the King’s weakness for the family.

Mme de Mailly never learnt. In 1742 she presented her youngest sister, Marie-Anne de la Tournelle, who was beautiful, intelligent and thoroughly nasty. At her insistence Mme de Mailly was banished four leagues from court, ‘with a harshness inexplicable in a Most Christian King’, as d’Argenson comments. ‘You bore me,’ Louis told the poor woman. He created Marie-Anne Duchesse de Châteauroux, gave her the official title of maîtresse en titre, a flat at Versailles over his own, a house in Paris and a country estate; he also agreed to legitimize any children born to her. Success went to Marie-Anne’s head and she was viciously rude to the poor Queen.

More responsible courtiers were alarmed by the King’s immaturity and irresponsibility. D’Argenson observes that the monarch, ‘rises at eleven and leads a useless life. He allows only one hour for work amid all his frivolous amusements; his Councils can scarcely be called work, as he lets his ministers do everything, merely listening or repeating what they say parrot fashion. He is still a child.’ The new Duchesse de Châteauroux tried to make Louis devote more time to affairs of state and advised him to join his army, but he only moaned, ‘Madame, you will kill me.’

France had been at war since 1741. It was a war which Louis had wanted to leave to other countries, but Marshal de Belle-Isle convinced him that he would be unworthy of his war-like forebears if he did not seize this chance of overawing Europe. He had allied with Prussia to deprive Maria Theresa of her succession to the Habsburg domains, but Frederick the Great had quickly made peace after conquering Silesia. Fleury’s foreign policy was in ruins; not only was France at war, but England emerged from the diplomatic isolation which the Cardinal had so carefully encouraged over the last decade, and joined in on the side of the Austrians. A French army had to surrender in Bohemia. Yet old Fleury—he had been born in 1653—clung to office though he was quite past it; news of reverses in Italy ‘made him dizzy’.

In 1740 d’Argenson had seen the Cardinal coming out of the King’s room; ‘More like a ghost than a man, the merest shadow of a dried up old monkey. He grows thinner before your very eyes, his legs and feet drag, he is only half alive and fast failing … indeed at this afternoon’s session the King’s Council needed Extreme Unction rather than refreshments.’ During the same year a bad harvest and rising prices had caused hunger riots all over the country, even in Paris; old hags seized the bridle of Fleury’s coach and screamed through the windows, ‘We’re dying of hunger!’

None the less, totally deaf and growing blind, the Cardinal toiled on, working at his papers from six in the morning until six at night. He rouged his cheeks and joked that old age was a disability which he did not want to cure just yet. When at last he died, at the end of January 1743, his pupil wrote to his uncle, Philip V of Spain, ‘I owe everything to him and always felt that he took the place of my parents.’

Louis presided over the first Council after the Cardinal’s death. ‘Messieurs, me voilà Premier Ministre!’ There is something faintly frivolous about the announcement; within two months d’Argenson was commenting bitterly that the King was simply not interested in how the realm was governed. It was now however that Mme de Châteauroux persuaded her royal lover to join his troops.

France’s military situation had seriously deteriorated. Marshal de Noailles had received a bloody repulse at Dettingen in 1743, the French army falling back down the Rhine. The troops’ morale had to be restored; it was felt that the appearance of the King at their head would have the desired effect. Louis marched into the Low Countries in April 1744 with a large force which included Mme de Châteauroux and one of her sisters (not Mme de Mailly). He was present when Ypres and several other towns were taken. Then news came that an Austrian army was advancing on Alsace and, together with Noailles and 50,000 men, Louis went to meet it.

On the way he fell ill at Metz. It was a fever which failed to respond to the normal purges and bleedings. Within a few days everyone, including the King himself, believed he was dying. The news alarmed the entire country. Michelet quotes a contemporary account: ‘The people leapt from their beds, rushed out in a tumult without knowing whither. The churches were thrown open in the middle of the night. Men assembled in the cross-roads, accosted, and asked questions without knowing each other. In several churches the priest who announced the prayer for the recovery of the King interrupted the chanting with his sobs, and the people responded by their cries and tears.’

The Bishop of Soissons, the Royal Almoner, refused to give Louis the last sacraments unless Mme de Châteauroux was sent away. Terrified, the King dismissed his mistress, made a tearful confession and summoned the Queen. Marie came at once—he embraced her and begged forgiveness. ‘Only God has been offended,’ replied his pious consort. The Bishop also made him make a full public confession, to be read in every parish church; the citizens of Metz were privileged to hear Louis read the confession in person. (M de Soissons would never again receive preferment.) Prayers were said throughout the kingdom, even in the humblest village church.

Then a Dr du Moulin prescribed a powerful emetic. Suddenly the King began to recover. He was quickly on his feet again and the cure was termed a miracle. What was truly miraculous, however, was the extraordinary outburst of popular rejoicing; all over France the people danced and sang and lit bonfires in the streets; Voltaire wrote some sycophantic verses which compared Louis to the ever-glorious Henri IV, and which were enthusiastically applauded. It was now that the King received the name ‘Le Bien-Aimé’. He rejoined the army, then went home to Versailles. Mme de Châteauroux, who had been hooted in the streets and was ill, waited for her recall; the longed-for message came and she rose from her bed, to be suddenly stricken down with peritonitis; she was dead in two days, only twenty-seven years old. Louis, from being euphoric after a triumphant welcome into his capital, was prostrate; very unfairly he expressed his grief by ignoring the Queen.

However, he preserved sufficient decorum to attend the festivities which celebrated the marriage of the Dauphin to yet another Spanish Infanta, in February 1745. The culmination was a masked ball in the Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles—the famous Hall of the Clipped Yews—which was open to anyone who could afford a ticket. Here, disguised as a yew tree, he danced in the crowd with a delicious brunette who was dressed as Diana; when she removed her mask he recognized Mme Le Normant d’Etioles, whom he had noticed driving in a pink phaeton in the forest of Sénart where he sometimes hunted. A few days later there was another masked ball, at the Hôtel de Ville. Louis looked in briefly at yet another ball at the Opéra and then took a public cabriolet to the Hôtel de Ville where he had supper with Mme d’Etioles; they left discreetly, taking a cab to her house where they spent the night together. The court was quickly aware that there was a new maîtresse en titre. Soon Mme d’Etioles moved into Mme de Mailly’s old flat at Versailles. She was a most beautiful young lady, tall, chestnut-haired, with exquisite eyes and teeth, a perfect complexion, and a lively, vivacious manner—she had a particularly delightful laugh.

As Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, she had been born in 1721. Her father, who began life as a ship’s steward, had made money as an army contractor but was then charged with embezzlement and fled abroad, whereupon her mother went to live with her rich friend, the tax farmer M Le Normant. The girl received the best education that money could buy, no less a person than Boucher being her art master. (Sainte-Beuve says ‘she had been instructed in everything save morals which might have embarrassed her.’) At nineteen she married the nephew of her mother’s protector. Young Mme d’Etioles (the name of an estate purchased by her husband’s family) belonged unmistakably to the new arriviste nobility, but though she could hardly expect to be invited to the best houses, she was generally recognized as one of the prettiest girls in Paris and considered to have surprisingly good manners. She had all the boundless social ambition of her class, reinforced by a fortune-teller’s prophecy (when she was only nine) that she would grow up ‘a dish for a King’, since when her mother had called her ‘Reinette’—little Queen. Like most people, Reinette was the oddest mixture of good and bad qualities; she never saw her heartbroken husband again, yet she showed herself a loyal and loving daughter to her disreputable old father. Intelligent, tactful, sensitive to his slightest change of mood, she would love Louis very genuinely and give him that soothing feminine companionship which held him far more closely than any physical ties.

Meanwhile the war dragged on, France being forced to continue fighting merely to obtain a reasonable peace settlement. Louis was persuaded to take the field again and to accompany Marshal Saxe. The King enjoyed the campaign thoroughly, sleeping in barns on straw, telling dirty stories (received with acclaim), and singing marching songs in a high, cracked voice. Tournai had been besieged by the French, and an Anglo-Hanoverian and Austrian army of some 46,000 men, commanded by the twenty-two-year-old Duke of Cumberland, marched to relieve it. Saxe intercepted them at Fontenoy with 52,000 troops. He took up a strong defensive position; a triangle based on the village of Fontenoy where his centre was, his right at another village, and his left protected by a wood, the entire position being criss-crossed with redoubts; his troops included Parisian skirmishers imaginatively equipped with crossbows (who later routed General Lord Ingoldsby). The Marshal was incapacitated by dropsy and had to be driven round the field in a light wickerwork carriage.

Cumberland’s cavalry attacked the French from 6.00 am onwards, but was driven back again and again. Finally, the Duke changed his tactics, massed his infantry into a single column, and then battered his way straight up hill into the French centre. Louis, wearing a gold-laced coat and the Cordon Bleu, watched through a telescope. It was now that, after declining the Comte d’Auteroches’s invitation to fire first, the English mowed down 400 men of the Regiment du Roi with a single volley. The entire front line of the French centre disintegrated. It was midday. Cumberland’s massive column prepared to bludgeon the second line out of existence. The only four French cannon available blazed away at the English, who stood firm and then beat off charge after charge by the Maison du Roi, the King’s household cavalry. Louis put on his cuirass, hoping to charge with them; he and the Dauphin were watching from a hillock. Noailles, who thought the battle lost, now advised the King to leave the field.

Suddenly Saxe drove up. When informed of the advice, he bellowed, ‘What poltroon told you that?’ He felt completely in control of the situation, explaining, ‘Our Irish troops remain.’ Shortly after, at about 2.00 am, the Irish Brigade—Clare’s Dragoons, Dillon’s, Lally’s and all the other Wild Geese-charged up hill into the British, roaring in Gaelic, ‘Remember Saxon treachery!’ The enemy, which included the Grenadier and Coldstream Guards, had already suffered many casualties. Their mighty column faltered, then broke; the total allied losses were over 10,000 men, the Coldstream losing a colour.

Louis embraced Saxe on the field of victory and even wrote to the Queen. Tournai fell the following month and Te Deums were sung all over France. The King and his Marshal were the heroes of the nation; everywhere he was acclaimed with shouts of Vive le Roi. Yet Louis never went to war again; he had ridden over the battlefield of Fontenoy after it was all over, and had been horrified by the corpses and the bleeding, groaning wounded.

Had Louis XV been killed at Fontenoy he would have gone down to history as one of France’s better Kings, and certainly as one of the most popular. His subjects all but worshipped him. His charm and good looks were the admiration of all (even the humblest peasant was familiar with the Adonis-like profile on the coinage). For nearly twenty years Fleury had given the country unusual prosperity, while a French army had now won a glorious victory.

Yet despite the victory, France’s fight for an honourable peace dragged on for three more weary years. In Scotland, the rising of Prince Charles Edward, at first brilliantly successful, was crushed in 1746. In Italy, the French were defeated in the Milanese and in Piedmont. However, an Austrian invasion of Provence was swiftly repulsed by Marshal Belle-Isle, while in the north Marshal Saxe won two more great victories at Raucaux and Laffeldt, occupied almost the entire Austrian Low Countries and went on to invade Holland. But in 1747 Russia joined the enemies of France, who now stood alone. Across the Atlantic in New France, Louisburg fell to the English and also Cap Breton Island, which commanded the mouth of the St Lawrence, despite the gallant coureurs des bois and their Iroquois blood-brothers. France was exceedingly lucky to obtain such a favourable treaty as that signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in April 1748; it was a mutual agreement that each government should restore its territorial gains.

During the Fontenoy campaign, Louis had written every day to Mme d’Etioles; one letter contained the patent creating her Marquise de Pompadour. Meanwhile the Abbé de Bernis, a man of fashion, was instructing her in the mysteries of court etiquette. (Though many years later, Talleyrand heard that she never quite lost her ‘vulgar accent and gauche manner’.) Upon the King’s triumphant return to Versailles in September 1745 she was presented to the Queen by the Princesse de Conti (in return for the payment of her gambling debts), in Louis’s presence—he was red with embarrassment. The Queen greeted the new favourite with unexpected kindness. Mme de Pompadour was so agitated that, when taking her glove off, she broke her bracelet. Overcome, she told her lover’s wife with deep emotion that she would do her best to please her.

The favourite certainly succeeded in pleasing Louis. Besides organizing every sort of party and diversion, she kept him amused with such toys as private theatricals. A minute playhouse, with room for only fourteen spectators, was erected at Versailles, the first performance taking place in 1747; the play was Molière’s Tartuffe, which Louis thoroughly enjoyed. Later, the theatre was enlarged to hold over forty. More than sixty plays and operas were presented by the Théatre des Petits Cabinets before its creator brought it to an end in 1752, including works by such fashionable writers as Voltaire and Crébillon. The favourite chose the plays with great care, the King having a peculiar dislike of tragedies, preferring comedies with happy endings. The operas were those of Lully, Rameau and de Campra. There were also performances of sacred works—motets by Lalet and Mondonville. On one occasion Louis was so pleased by the little orchestra that he gave the musicians gold snuff boxes bearing his portrait. In the plays, however, the actors were all amateurs, consisting of Mme de Pompadour and her friends. Only very favoured members of the court were invited to the theatre.

Later, long after Mme de Pompadour’s death, Louis commissioned his favourite architect, Jacques Ange Gabriel, to build a full-sized theatre at Versailles; it was known as Gabriel’s Opéra. Less well known, perhaps, is another of the King’s commissions, the cathedral at Versailles which was begun by Mansard de Sagonne in 1743. In addition Louis slowly converted Versailles to suit his passionate desire for privacy, constructing the famous petits appartements on the upper floors of the right wing, overlooking the Marble Courtyard, and reached by secret staircases; the palace became a ‘rat’s nest’ of little flats. But at the same time he also redecorated the salons and great state rooms in the new Rococo style, supervising the redecoration, with almost unbelievably graceful results. His alterations at Fontainebleau were even more drastic. The Ecole Militaire and the Place de la Concorde (both by J A Gabriel) are also his creations—originally the latter was the Place Louis XV.

His mistress shared the King’s mania for building, landscape gardening and the decorative arts. She has been described as ‘undoubtedly the key to an understanding of French taste in the first half of the eighteenth century. She gave it just that exquisitely graceful and feminine touch which still fascinates us today.’ Her houses were fabled for their elegance and beauty—notably the châteaux of La Celle, and of Bellevue, and the Hôtel d’Evreux (now the Elysée and the home of the Presidents of France); she also built ‘hermitages’ at Versailles and Fontainebleau. The prosperity of the state porcelain factory at Sèvres owed a good deal to her influence. Nancy Mitford wrote of her, ‘Few human beings since the world began can have owned so many beautiful things.’ Perhaps the most fitting monument to the friendship—one might almost say partnership—between Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour is the delicious little palace which he built for her in the gardens of Versailles, but which she did not live to see completed—the Petit Trianon.

Mme de Pompadour made the King aware of a new world of intellectuals, bringing him into contact with men like her doctor, François Quesnay, who was a pioneer economist and founder of the Physiocrats. She admired the period’s leading thinkers, the Philosophes, who returned her admiration; when she died, d’Alembert said, ‘She was one of us,’ and Voltaire went into mourning. But she failed to make a Philosophe of Louis XV, who although not without intellectual tastes—he amassed a fine library of scientific books, collected rare manuscripts, and spent much time in his laboratory—did not care for the new ideas. None the less, he cannot have objected to her patronage of men like Rameau.

One must not overlook the King’s own patronage. He jealously protected his Academie des Beaux Arts, giving the best pupils bursaries to study in Rome at the French Academy in the Palazzo Mancini. He also attended the annual exhibitions in the Salon Carée of the Louvre. As a leading authority on eighteenth-century French art (Alvar Gonsalez Palacios in Il Luigi XV, Milan 1966) tells us, ‘Louis XV himself could always recognize what was best in the art of his time. He could see talent even when it was accompanied by impertinence, as in the case of the painter Quentin La Tour’ [who was rude and half-crazy]. The King also took special pains to help Boucher whose paintings still convey so much of the reign’s atmosphere. Louis commissioned furniture from such masters as Oeben and Riesener, taking a keen interest in its manufacture, which sometimes took years. In addition he watched with pleasure the progress of the new state porcelain factory which had been founded in 1738 (at Vincennes—later it moved to Sèvres) as a rival to Meissen.

Mme de Pompadour was not strong, and after some years began to find Louis’s physical demands exhausting. She tried such aphrodisiacs as hot rooms, chocolate and truffles, and even celery soup, but to no avail; her lover said unkindly that she was ‘as cold as a coot’. In 1752 she therefore took the dangerous step of ceasing to sleep with him, relying on the indispensability of her companionship. She knew that so long as the King had his ‘Deer Park’ he would bed with illiterate girls who only interested him with their bodies, and ought therefore to be immune from the charms of any lady of the court. She had nothing to do with the Park, but prudently did nothing to discourage Louis in his use of it. Most unjustly it earned her the epitaph,

Ci-git qui fut vingt ans pucelle,

Quinze ans catin, sept ans maquerelle.

(Here lies a maid for twenty years, a whore for fifteen and a procuress for seven.)

The Parc aux Cerfs has given rise to pleasurable legends of naked young women being hunted through the woods by the King and his hounds. Carlyle writes zestfully of, ‘a fabulous Griffin, devouring the works of men, daily dragging virgins into thy cave’, Michelet of ‘an infamous seraglio of children whom he bought’. In reality, the Park was a modest house in the town of Versailles which discreetly procured healthy young women of the people for His Most Christian Majesty’s pleasure; many wealthy men of the period kept similar private brothels. The girls were engaged by Louis’s valet, Lebel, and brought to a little flat in the palace known as the ‘Bird Trap’; if they gave satisfaction they were then boarded—seldom more than one at a time—at the Park under the supervision of the house-keeper, Mme Bertrand. They were nearly always professional prostitutes with only their youth and beauty (and health) to recommend them. The most famous was Louise O’Murphy, whose posterior was immortalized by Boucher; she stayed at the Park for four years until she was dismissed for making an impertinent remark about Mme de Pompadour; the King arranged a good marriage for her. Before going to bed, Louis would sometimes make his little whores kneel down with him and they would say their prayers. Rumours about the establishment spread all over Paris and it was said that just as every man descends from Adam, so every Frenchman would descend from King Louis XV. Probably Louis sired no more than twenty bastards at most.

Otherwise, the King’s private amusements were far from sordid. It was the world of fêtes champêtres and commedia dell’ arte revels of the sort painted by Boucher and Fragonard, of picnics in Elysian parks, of Venetian carnivals, of parties on the water in gondolas, of balls in lamplit woodland glades where the court wore masks and dominoes and dressed as Pan and Flora, as Pierrot and Columbine. Louis loved music and adored dancing—pleasure has never been more elegant than it was in his reign. One bitter winter Mme de Pompadour had her flowerbeds filled with porcelain flowers while the air was sprayed with summer scents.

None the less, life at court was still stately and much of court etiquette remained unchanged until the Revolution. Even so, Louis XV’s timetable was very different from that of Louis XIV. Although he slept in his great-grandfather’s bed, instead of rising at the same hour every day he often slept long, telling his valet when to wake him; alternately he rose very early, before the servants, and lit his own fire. Having washed, shaved and dressed—he was scrupulously clean—he breakfasted on fruit and black coffee. He no longer used a chaise percée in public but had a modern, private cabinet with one of the new English water-closets. Council meetings, audiences and Mass occupied the morning, until he dined in public, by himself at a square table; unlike Louis XIV he ate with a knife and fork. He drank copiously but not heavily; his wines were usually burgundy or champagne (as Governor of Guyenne, the Duc de Richelieu once brought him the finest bordeaux obtainable, but the King merely sipped it, muttering ‘drinkable’, and never touched it again).

In the afternoon Louis hunted or shot; out of season he walked or went for a hard gallop. He killed on average over 200 stags a year, besides many wolves and wild boar, frequently exhausting his huntsmen and grooms. Violent physical exercise was essential to his wellbeing, though another reason why he, and indeed all Bourbons, were so passionately addicted to hunting may have been that it offered a chance of being by oneself and behaving naturally. There was a softer side to hunting which is often overlooked—ladies following the hounds down woodland rides in fast little phaetons, and the delightful hunt breakfasts painted by van Loo. Perhaps the greatest of all French sporting artists was discovered by Louis—Jean Baptiste Oudry, from whom the King commissioned a dazzling series of tapestries, ‘The Royal Hunts of Louis XV’.

Like most Bourbons, Louis liked working with his hands. Sometimes he would spend a whole day toiling with his gardeners. He was an expert silversmith and at Marly in 1738 made a pair of candlesticks. He also turned ivory.

In the evening the King joined the Queen and the Royal family at supper, after which—having a true Bourbon appetite—he would often slip away and eat a second supper with his mistress. Then he might drive to Paris to go to the opera, to dance masked at one of the public balls, or to visit a brothel. Sometimes he stayed at home, giving little supper parties, playing cards and making coffee into the small hours of the morning; frequently his pages fell asleep on his bed waiting for the Coucher. As soon as they had left him, Louis, who did not even bother to undress, would jump out of the state bed and join his mistress by a secret staircase.

Louis XV by Quentin La Tour

Jean Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, by Boucher, 1759

Frequently the King was away from Versailles. He spent much time at Compiègne, Marly, Rambouillet, La Muette, Fontainebleau, moving about to escape from his awful boredom. When he went to inspect the fleet at Le Havre in 1749, he travelled all night and hunted all day, exhausting his entourage. He was always escorted by his hunt staff and by a special bodyguard of the Black and the Grey Musketeers; at Rambouillet 500 persons had to be housed on each visit. Louis understood little about money; once, hearing that the poor were starving, he sacked eighty gardeners, but took them back when it was explained to him that as a result they too would starve.

Although the King far preferred women’s company, he had his male cronies, some being lifelong friends. Among them were the Duc d’Ayen (a Noailles and a soldier) and the Comte de Coigny, who was killed in a duel over a card dispute in 1749. From his youth these two accompanied Louis everywhere, were invariably invited to his little supper parties, and escorted him on the nocturnal expeditions. Other men friends were the Duc de Vallière (one of the better French soldiers of the reign and a gunnery expert), and the rather silly Duc de Penthièvre, a bastard Bourbon who was Grand Huntsman of France, and whose lovely château of Saint Leger was frequently borrowed by the King. Ayen, Vallière and Penthièvre all had the misfortune of outliving their master and of surviving until the Revolution.

An outsize member of his little circle was that illiterate condottiere, Maurice de Saxe. One of the 365 children of Augustus II—‘The Strong’—of Saxony-Poland (Stanislas Leszczynski’s supplanter), Marshal Saxe had been a soldier since the age of twelve, entering the French service in 1720. Louis rewarded his many victories by creating him Marshal General of France and giving him the château of Chambord. Saxe had strange and colourful ambitions; after losing his delightful little Grand Duchy of Courland on the Baltic, he dreamt of making himself King of Madagascar. A huge, corpulent man, dropsical and stone-deaf, the Marshal was a glutton and a womanizer but his eccentricities were gladly suffered. He had an embarrassingly coarse wit; once, seeing Louis and Mme de Pompadour out walking together, he bellowed, ‘There go the King’s sword and the King’s scabbard.’ Saxe died in 1750, of over-exerting himself with a lady of pleasure.

The one member of the circle who dared to be openly hostile to Mme de Pompadour was the infamous Richelieu. Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu and a great-nephew of the Cardinal, had been born in 1696 and was First Gentleman of the Bedchamber (and therefore in charge of all court entertainments) for more than half a century. A brave and skilful soldier—he captured Minorca from the English in 1757—he was also almost unbelievably venal and unscrupulous; once he offered to sell the frontier town of Bayonne to the Spaniards, while during the Seven Years War his soldiers nicknamed him Papa la Maraude (Daddy Plunder). A creature of exquisite elegance and breathtaking extravagance who gave wonderful parties, the Duke also had intellectual pretensions; he was elected to the Academie Française, was the friend and patron of Voltaire, and was a notorious free-thinker. However, Richelieu’s chief claim to fame was as a Don Juan; he was a sexual athlete whose uncanny gift of attracting women was attributed to supernatural powers; when he died at ninety-four, letters were found in his pocket from four ladies, who each begged for an hour in his bed. Countless scandals enveloped this insatiable debauchee and intriguer—he had been in the Bastille three times. Richelieu was really rather a horrible man, but the King, like most people, never tired of his disreputable, amusing company. Mme de Pompadour had the good taste to dislike him.

It is curious, even taking into account that war was the only occupation fit for a nobleman, that almost all Louis’s closest friends were distinguished generals. Ironically, in view of his distaste for bloodshed, the King was surrounded by soldiers. The guardsmen of the Maison du Roi numbered no less than 10,000, including such specialized troops as the 150 Horse Grenadiers (reputedly the finest-looking men in France). Even when he went to Mass he arrived to martial music from a fife and drum band.

The portraits of Louis XV by Nattier, van Loo and Quentin La Tour give some idea of his good looks. Those who knew the King were even more struck by his charm and beautiful manners; by now a unique and fascinating compound of majesty and simplicity, he could be delightfully gay and talkative, though only in private. Manners had relaxed generally, the honnête homme giving place to the bon compagnon as the pattern for gentlemanly behaviour, and sometimes Louis was the best of companions. The Prince de Croy tells us of little dinner parties (so informal that sometimes the gentlemen dined in their shirtsleeves); there were no servants in the small room under the eaves, everyone helping himself and the King making the coffee. The Prince says, ‘Often I felt more at ease with him than with almost anyone else—his kindness is engraved on my heart.’ In public he was a very different person, shy and stiff. ‘One could see that he wanted desperately to say something but the words died in his mouth’, observes a courtier. The King could be rude too, sulky and scowling, especially when his dreadful melancholy was upon him, though according to Croy ‘he never grumbled or shouted’. Savage things are said of Louis XV by other contemporaries who also knew him well, but these were invariably frustrated men whom he had dismissed from their posts.

His was a strange temperament. In his melancholy moods the King often showed a morbid obsession with death, which may have been due to his parents’ untimely fate; like the Prince of Denmark he sought for his noble father in the dust; on occasion he was very like Hamlet in the churchyard—once, passing a cemetery, he sent a groom to find out if there were any newly-dug graves. At court he frequently inquired about dangerous operations and serious illnesses, asking people where they would like to be buried and even foretelling their demise. For although Louis literally lived for pleasure, he knew little happiness. His entire character and intellect were vitiated by pessimism. Even if the hostile d’Argenson could admit that the King ‘gave orders like a master and discussed business like a minister’, at Council meetings his suggestions were too easily over-ruled by his ministers, while he would agree to policies which his innate shrewdness told him were misguided. His hopeless lack of purpose is illustrated by the immortal remark (made famous by Carlyle), ‘If I were Lieutenant of Police, I would prohibit those Paris cabriolets.’

Yet with all his frivolity and dissipation, Louis—like all Bourbons—was a deeply religious man. He never missed Mass, walked tirelessly in processions, had an expert knowledge of the liturgy, and prayed with real devotion; he once said naively, ‘I do not regret my rheumatism—it is in expiation of my sins.’ He was also like all his family in being in no way an intellectual. He found the ideas of the Philosophes—ces gens là as he scornfully termed them—quite incomprehensible; their excessive rationality did not appeal to a doubting mind which knew very well that men are fools by nature. The King was old-fashioned too in his complete conviction that he had received absolute authority from God—he believed it no less firmly than had Louis XIV. For all his Rococo tastes, Louis XV was more a man of the seventeenth than of the eighteenth century.

Unlike Louis XIV, the King did not enjoy the company of men of letters. None the less his reign was the silver age of French classical literature. It saw the publication of Candide, Manon Lescaut, Gil Blas, Emile and the Nouvelle Héloïse, of Buffon’s natural history and Vauvenargues’s maxims, to name only masterpieces.

Unfortunately for Louis XV, his prime coincided with the age of the ‘Enlightenment’. This was a climate of ideas, almost amounting to a new religious and political philosophy, which was largely derived from the thoughts of Newton and Spinoza, partly from the example of English freedom, and partly from the dissatisfaction of under-privileged bourgeois intellectuals. It was disseminated by Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and a host of others, broadcast everywhere in France by means of a new encyclopaedia of knowledge which claimed to deal with every aspect of human activity. Later the Enlightenment was reinforced by Rousseau, though his pernicious ideas about equality and a return to nature were hardly compatible with reason. By the end of the reign, most literate Frenchmen had consulted the Encyclopédie, which could be obtained through the new Masonic lodges or at the public reading rooms despite every attempt at censorship. However, the Philosophes really wanted reform, not revolution. Their aim was to eradicate Diderot’s ‘artificial man’, the man of tradition, which meant putting an end to religious and intellectual intolerance (of which the Jesuits were a symbol, ‘fanaticism’s grenadiers’ as d’Alembert called them); humanizing the country’s barbarous mediaeval code; and setting the state on a sound economic basis. They were quite content with the Ancien Régime, so long as it could be brought up to date and made to function efficiently. They did not wish to destroy privilege, but merely to rationalize it, as—so they thought—had been done in England.

Louis disliked most new ideas, but eventually allowed the Encyclopédie to be published when ‘sincère et tendre Pompadour’ (Voltaire’s name for her) intervened in its favour. She tried to turn him into a ‘Benevolent Despot’ of the sort to be seen at Vienna or Berlin, but—predictably—was unsuccessful. None the less, he was not averse to his ministers holding fashionable views and actually made Voltaire his Historiographer Royal and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber.

Poor Queen Marie, prematurely aged, had become duller and dowdier than ever. Her dreadful red velvet bonnets were a constant cause for merriment. She painted execrable little pictures, performed dismally on the guitar, harpsichord and hurdy-gurdy, and worked day in, day out at her tapestry; her sole indulgences were gluttony and some mild gambling on a peculiarly dreary card game. Her religious duties were scrupulously observed—she frequently overspent her allowance on charities. The Queen was a frump, but a most dignified one—her stateliness put some in mind of the old court of Louis XIV—and everyone, including the King, respected her deeply. She had a cosy little circle of dull friends, most of whom joined with her in abominating all Philosophes and free-thinkers, in abhorring Jansenists and in cherishing Jesuits.

The Dauphin Louis, small-eyed and black-haired, resembled the King hardly at all. He was another Duc de Bourgogne, of whom some contemporaries had excessive hopes. Like his sainted grandfather, he had been an evil-tempered child who frequently struck his servants, but whose personality had completely changed when he was about fourteen; like his grandfather he became lethargic and taciturn, perhaps as a consequence of having grown unnaturally fat; he may well have suffered from a glandular affliction. Henceforward he was disturbingly pious; his intimate friends were fanatic priests and, to the alarm of all Enlightened courtiers, he would throw himself flat on his face at the Elevation of the Host. His preferred occupation was ‘vegetating’—his own name for it. His habitual rudeness, even boorishness, did not arouse affection. D’Argenson writes, ‘If there really is some spark in him, it is a dying one, extinguished by fat and bigotry.’ None the less, at sixteen he showed at Fontenoy that for all his lethargy he had plenty of courage, begging to lead a charge.

In 1745 the Dauphin married yet another Spanish Infanta, the red-haired Marie Theresa (sister of his father’s former betrothed) with whom he quickly fell in love, but the poor girl soon died. The young husband was prostrate. In 1748 he was forced to take a second bride, the fifteen-year-old Marie Joséphine, straw-haired and sapphire-eyed, who was shy and plain (although the sour d’Argenson thought her ‘a pretty child’). Despite bad teeth and a flat nose, she grew up high-spirited and surprisingly attractive, and the Dauphin fell in love again, becoming an uxurious husband; the pair shared a mutual love of religion and music, withdrawing into a secret world of their own. Five sons were born to them; the short-lived Ducs d’Aquitaine and de Bourgogne, and the Duc de Berry and the Comtes de Provence and d’Artois—the last three becoming Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. There were also two daughters, Mesdames Clothilde and Elisabeth.

Louis had mixed feelings about the Dauphin. ‘My son is lazy, quick-tempered and moody. He is not interested in hunting, women or pleasure. But he really does love goodness, he is genuinely virtuous, and he is not without intelligence’; this seems to have been the King’s considered verdict. He cannot have been too pleased with the Dauphin’s calculated rudeness to poor Mme de Pompadour, to whom he could not even bring himself to speak; he referred to her father as ‘that gallows Bird’. Nor was Louis above sneering at him, especially at his plumpness—he once asked, ‘Do I not have a well-fed son?’ None the less, when the Dauphin was dangerously ill with smallpox in 1752, the King spent whole days and nights in his room.

Portraits of the Dauphin Louis show a not ill-looking face, a curious compound of sharpness and femininity. He undoubtedly had a stronger character than his father, and during a brief regency when the King was ill in 1757, showed himself both firm and able. It was not easy to overrule him—later he defended the Jesuits to the bitter end—and he had no illusions about the growing weakness of the monarchy; he wrote that the realm’s financial disorders must be attended to before anything else, that ‘the monarch is nothing but the steward of the state revenues’. In his personal life he was civilized enough, collecting books and pictures, and playing the organ, the harpsichord and the violin; surprisingly, he was an admirer of Rousseau’s Contrat Social. However, the Dauphin was no lover of the Philosophes, who—probably with reason—dreaded his accession and feared that the reign of ‘Louis the Fat’ would be a reign of bigotry and intellectual intolerance.

Another source of opposition to the Enlightenment were the King’s daughters. He had six who grew to womanhood, and although they were not particularly beautiful he adored them all (to the extent of holding their hands when their teeth were drawn). The two he loved best predeceased him; these were the twins, Mme Henriette who died very young; and Mme Elisabeth, Infanta of Spain and later Duchess of Parma, who despite her marriage had frequently returned to Versailles. Croy says that Mme Henriette’s death literally paralysed Louis, who was ‘in a frightful state’. The twins’ place in his affections was taken by the boyish, hot-tempered Mme Adelaide, who as a very pretty little girl had refused to leave him and be educated in a convent; she and the rather colourless Mmes Victoire—amiable and pretty—and Sophie—ugly and sly—never married, Adelaide and Victoire surviving the Revolution and dying only in 1800. The most unusual of the six was the youngest, the tiny, hump-backed Mme Louise. Brought up by the nuns of Fontevrault, from her girlhood Louise wished to take the veil. When she was over thirty her wish was granted and she entered the enclosed convent of the Carmelites at Saint-Denis, where she was blissfully happy praying for her sinful father. Until his death the King came to see her at least once a month, when she would bitterly attack the debauchery of the court and new ideas (later she was a critic of poor, giddy Marie Antoinette). ‘Soeur Sainte-Thérèse de Saint-Augustin’ was lucky enough to die just before the Revolution, in 1787. All Louis’s daughters were loyal supporters of the Jesuits.

By 1750 Louis was at last growing unpopular. Ridiculously, he was suspected of speculating in the grain trade and forcing up the price of bread. When a new road was being built from Versailles to Compiègne, he had it re-routed to by-pass Paris, explaining, ‘I do not see why I should go where people call me Herod.’ (This was a reference to a popular scare that the government were abducting children to send to the colonies; according to Michelet there were even rumours that Louis bathed daily in children’s blood ‘to renew his exhausted frame’.) The fact that taxation had not been decreased after the end of the war in 1748 did not endear him to his subjects. However, the principal reason for the King’s unpopularity was his association with Mme de Pompadour who had incurred the traditional hatred for all royal mistresses. Her bourgeois origins irritated the court—she was the first commoner to be maîtresse en titre—while everyone disliked her connection with a tax-farmer’s family. Increases in taxation were invariably blamed on her extravagance (and admittedly she spent over a million and a half of the King’s money, reckoned in English pounds of the period, in the course of her career). Savage pamphlets, the Poissonades, circulated, lampooning the poor woman without mercy. It was common knowledge that she ruled Louis. After meeting her, the Prince de Ligne described Mme de Pompadour as ‘a second Queen’, and M d’Argenson says in 1756, ‘She is more the First Minister than ever.’

Oddly enough, France was more prosperous than ever before. As Pierre Gaxotte says, the reign of Louis XV was truly ‘an era of agriculturists, bankers, ironmasters, shipwrights and planners’. For, after Orry’s stabilization of the currency in 1726, a period of really remarkable economic expansion had set in and lasted for the rest of the reign. Admittedly the peasantry in many areas were often near starvation when there was a bad harvest, but on the whole agriculture flourished, though there were very few ‘improving’ landlords. There was also an industrial revolution, with an impressive increase in the number of mines and foundries. In addition, there was a marked growth in trade with the colonies. Sugar, rum, tobacco and coffee flowed into the great French seaports, much of it to be re-exported, bringing economic wealth and capturing a considerable part of the European market from the English.

Machault—Orry’s successor as Controller-General—tried to introduce a new and equitable tax system, the vingtième, in 1749–51. This was to be a five per cent wealth tax on real property and capital, which would replace the old system with its inefficiency and injustices; under the new scheme everyone—noble and priest, bourgeois and peasant farmer—would pay, except tenant farmers or wage earners who were to be exempt. The scheme was quickly killed by the privileged classes—notably the clergy in general assembly and the Parlements.

The Parlements were challenging the monarchy once more. These powerful legal corporations, exclusive, rich and noble, had become bastions of reaction and privilege. The noblesse de l’épée were incapable of mounting another Fronde, and the mantle of rebellion had fallen on the Parlementaires who, once bourgeois and loyal, had with increasing exclusiveness grown feudal and fractious. By ‘liberty’ this judicial aristocracy meant a kind of legal neo-feudalism; in 1734 they burnt Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques, and they resisted any attempt to reform their archaic and often cruel statutes. They claimed to be the custodians of the law with supreme jurisdiction, and as such to constitute a ‘Senate of the Nation’ which spoke for France. Although entirely selfish and reactionary, they none the less managed to attract popular support in their self-styled rôle of ‘Fathers of the People’. Louis was not far wrong in describing the Parlement of Paris as ‘an assembly of republicans’. They were also the greatest single obstacle to reforming the Ancien Régime.

In the 1750s the Parlementaires derived considerable strength from their support of the Jansenists. Although by then this sect had its mindless fanatics, it did not derive its support from mere popular superstition alone, as is too often suggested; whole monasteries adopted the theology of Port Royal—in the middle of the eighteenth century an entire Carthusian community fled from Paris to join the Jansenists in Utrecht. Jansenists were popular because of their defiance of the Pope, they enlisted qualified support from the Philosophes in their feud with the Jesuits, and they inspired respect by their piety. (In the next century even Stendhal admired their survivors, in Le Rouge et Le Noir.) By their reliance on the lower clergy in their battle with the bishops, the Jansenists undermined authority and helped spread republican ideas.

In 1752, the Archbishop of Paris forbade his clergy to give the last rites to dying men who could not produce a certificate proving that they had been shriven by a non-Jansenist priest. The Parlement thereupon ordered his pastoral letters to be burnt by the public hangman. The Crown intervened and a furious quarrel ensued, a number of magistrates being banished. Although the Jansenist conflict died down briefly in 1757—thanks to intervention by Rome—the Parlement of Paris then tried to unite with the provincial Parlements to form a single body which would work towards obtaining the powers of the English Parliament. Louis angrily ordered them to confine themselves to their normal business.

The King was keenly aware that the monarchy was in danger. ‘At least it will last my time,’ he muttered grimly to a friend. For his authority was under ceaseless attack from the privileged classes. In this context one should no longer distinguish between nobility of the sword and nobility of the robe; by the late 1750s some of the Dukes and Peers—‘obscure men of illustrious origin’ as Michelet calls them—were beginning to side with the Parlementaires. An aristocratic counter-revolution was taking place; as Tocqueville first recognized, the nobles were becoming a closed caste. Louis XIV had carefully excluded the nobility from the councils of state, but by the mid-eighteenth century they occupied almost all government posts, even those of the Intendants; the higher clergy were exclusively noble; the Parlements refused to admit lawyers who could not show four quarterings; and the army was becoming steadily more patrician.

Louis XV understood very well that the state’s financial machinery was inadequate and that corruption was spreading. Unfortunately his pessimism made him reluctant to act—as C P Gooch says, ‘for him all evils were incurable.’ Furthermore, the growth of literacy and the new critical climate introduced by the Enlightenment made it difficult for an eighteenth-century King of France to act in the way that Louis XIV had done—this was the age of Voltaire, no longer of Bossuet.

Louis XV’s unpopularity was made known to him in a peculiarly unpleasant fashion in January 1757. Ironically, he had already predicted that he would die like Henri IV. One snowy afternoon, as he was descending the Dogs’ Staircase at Versailles, an out-of-work serving man called Damiens stabbed him with a little pen-knife. At first Louis thought he had merely been hit. But touching his ribs he found them covered in blood, and cried, ‘Arrest that man, but don’t hurt him!’ Then he muttered, ‘Why do they want to kill me? I’ve harmed no one.’ He walked upstairs without assistance, but then fainted—from shock rather than loss of blood. Reviving, he demanded a doctor and confessor—above all he feared to die unshriven. Summoning his family, he informed the Queen, ‘I have been assassinated’, and told the Daulphin, ‘Govern better than I have done’, after which he asked their pardon for his scandalous life. When the priest came, after an hour and a half’s confession, he begged for the last rites.

Yet the assassin’s ‘weapon’ had had to penetrate a fur overcoat, a velvet jacket and two shirts. The wound was hardly more than a scratch, but Louis insisted, ‘I shall not recover.’ Eventually his huntsman, deeply trusted, managed to convince him that the wound was not mortal. Even so, the King refused to emerge from behind his curtains for over a week. He would not see Mme de Pompadour who feared that her reign was over; for some it was a day of Dupes; M d’Argenson refused to censor the royal post for her and was dismissed as soon as Louis was in circulation again.

At Fontenoy, in killing many dangerous stags with the sword, and in nursing the Dauphin’s smallpox, Louis XV had shown that he was no coward. To say that his behaviour on this occasion was due to his obsessive fear of damnation—he was not frightened of death—is only part of the explanation. His terror has an uncanny resemblance to the mood of Henri IV on the eve of his own assassination. In fact Louis showed many symptoms of a manic-depressive state. Revealingly, he told his doctor, ‘My body is all right, but this is bad and won’t heal’, pointing to his forehead. It is only fair to add that Damiens’s peculiarly horrible torture and execution—he suffered all the barbarous penalties for regicide—were imposed by the Parlement and not by the King.

The Seven Years War had begun in the previous year, 1756. Already the English, jealous of French colonial prosperity, had ordered its navy to board French merchantmen and even men-of-war. Meanwhile, France had realized that her traditional foe, Austria, was no longer her real enemy. At the same time the English, determined that the war should be fought on land as well as at sea, subsidized Frederick of Prussia, who was alarmed by the new Franco-Austrian alliance. He swiftly invaded and conquered Saxony, an ally of Austria, and won a series of victories in Bohemia.

The French army was in a parlous condition. Undeterred by terrible punishments, thousands deserted the colours every year, while since Saxe’s death there were no great commanders; the rank of Marshal of France had become a mere court perquisite instead of a victor’s accolade. Louis XV’s one positive contribution was the foundation of the Ecole Militaire in 1752, an officer-cadet school for the sons of country gentlemen. French troops have seldom been so badly led as they were during the Seven Years War.

To begin with, the French offensive went well enough. Marshal d’Estrées defeated the English and occupied Hanover; however Richelieu threw away the victory by allowing the Duke of Cumberland to escape. In 1757 there took place one of the most terrible disasters ever suffered by a French army. It was commanded by a brave and elegant friend of Mme de Pompadour, Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, who marched into Saxony with 50,000 men, to attack Frederick who had only 20,000. But Richelieu and the allied generals had, with criminal incompetence, omitted to provide food for the French troops; they had not eaten for three days and were scarcely able to walk when they arrived at the little village of Rosbach where Frederick was waiting for them. None the less, the French marched doggedly towards the enemy. Suddenly they were mown down by hidden artillery, and then their unprotected right flank was overwhelmed by General von Seydlitz’s cavalry. The Prussians lost 165 men; 3,000 Frenchmen were killed, 7,000 taken prisoner. Soubise, the descendant of so many Huguenot paladins, wrote to the King, ‘I write to Your Majesty in an agony of despair. Your army has been totally routed; I cannot tell you how many of your officers were killed or captured or are missing.’ France was so horrified that the Dauphin begged to be sent to the front, without success. Next year, at Krefeld, Frederick again defeated the French.

Meanwhile the French navy was being annihilated. Thirty-seven ships of the line and fifty-six frigates were sunk by the English, the remnant of the fleets being finally destroyed by Admiral Hawke at Quiberon Bay in 1759. The enemy blockaded every French port, raiding Normandy and Brittany, and put the entire French coast in a stage of siege—any sorties were blown out of the water. It was impossible to send aid to the colonies. There were only 5,000 troops in Canada, badly short of ammunition and provisions; in 1759 Quebec fell to an English army of 40,000. Most of the French possessions in the Caribbean were overrun, in India Pondicherry fell and even in Africa Senegal was occupied. It was the most disastrous war which France had known for a hundred and fifty years.

Contemporaries tended to blame poor Mme de Pompadour. Undoubtedly she meddled in politics, making and unmaking ministers—she had had the excellent Orry dismissed in 1745, to please her tax-farmer friends. For her, politics was a matter of personalities—Bernis said she judged affairs of state like a child—and she chose people for amiable qualities rather than abilities. Between 1755 and 1763 no less than twenty-five ministers were appointed and dismissed, ‘falling one after the other like the figures in a magic lantern’, said Voltaire. D’Argenson commented, ‘C’est la vide qui règne.’ Nor was France able to make peace when Frederick openly laughed at ‘Cotillon (Petticoat) II’ and named one of his bitch puppies ‘Pompadour’.

Even if the idea of a woman prime minister does not seem so outrageous nowadays, it is difficult to find an explanation, let alone an excuse, for Louis XV’s trust in his mistress’s political judgement. Yet the twenty-five ministers were only peripheral; the key men were sound enough throughout the war, for the ‘harlotocracy’—Carlyle’s cruel definition—secured the appointment of Bernis and then Choiseul.

The Abbé François Joachim de Bernis had attached himself to Mme de Pompadour even before her meeting with the King, in poverty-stricken days when his highest ambition had been a garret under the eaves of Versailles. He was a light-weight, timid, hypochondriacal, an amateur of flowery verse, essentially a man of pleasure and fashion whose chief talents were those of the drawing-room. But, although he lacked the character to give them force, his political views were shrewd and sensible—he was a pioneer advocate of the Austrian alliance. The court did not take the fat little Abbé very seriously. However, Mme de Pompadour had him appointed Ambassador to Venice, where he did so well that, in 1755, he was made Minister of Foreign Affairs and charged with negotiating the new alliance with Austria. He was wise enough to see that any continuation of the war would benefit only England, a defeatist attitude which was too pessimistic even for Louis. Despairingly, the Abbé wrote, ‘I feel myself to be the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Limbo.’ He resigned in December, consoled with a Red Hat.

Bernis had carefully prepared the way for his friend Choiseul to succeed him. Etienne François, Duc de Choiseul, was a big, pug-faced nobleman with red hair and sharp blue eyes. Not yet forty, the scion of an ancient family from Lorraine, he had begun life as a penniless army officer but had made his fortune by marrying the daughter of a rich army contractor (‘manuring his lands’, as the court termed such an alliance). Choiseul eventually managed to squander all her vast wealth and went bankrupt. Although no less ruttish in his private life than the King, he was intelligent and amusing and succeeded in charming Mme de Pompadour (who came from much the same sort of background as his wife); he knew just how to please her—when he sent her a large opal from Rome, she made Louis give him the Cordon Bleu. It was she who had him appointed Ambassador to the Holy See, where he got on wonderfully well with the amiable Benedict XIV, before going on to Vienna. Energetic and even dynamic, Choiseul was quite sure that he knew what was best for France. To the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs he soon added those of Minister for War and Minister for the Marine and Post-Master General. From 1758 to 1770 he was First Minister in all but name.

As Foreign Minister, Choiseul’s skill inspired Catherine of Russia to call him ‘the coachman of Europe’. He achieved a major triumph with his Family Compact. This famous treaty, which was signed in August 1761, was an alliance between all the Bourbon sovereigns—the Kings of France, Spain and the Two Sicilies, and the Duke of Parma and Piacenza. This immediately procured for France the services of the Spanish navy, which if not particularly effective, did at least divert the attentions of the English. But not even Choiseul, a former Lieutenant-General, could win the war, though at least he ensured that England too fought to a standstill. Everyone wanted peace, and the war came to an end with the Treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg. For France, the price was her colonial empire—the English took Canada and half of Louisiana (the rest being given to Spain). She retained most of her rich West Indian possessions, but her ambitions on the Indian sub-continent were halted for ever.

Few Frenchmen seem to have regretted the loss of Canada, which Voltaire actually dismissed as ‘a mere few acres of snow’. Louis himself was more interested in power in Europe than in power overseas. Like most contemporary monarchs, he operated his own secret service. His main objectives were to save Poland from Russia and to weaken England. In the first he was unsuccessful, Poland being partitioned at the end of his reign, despite tireless work by his agents; the King was one of the few Frenchmen to recognize the full might of the Russian menace. After the Treaty of Paris he concentrated on M de Broglie’s scheme for invading England; later he allowed the plans to be shown to Choiseul who was impressed, and also sent an Irish officer to investigate a possible invasion of Ireland. The Secret du Roi achieved little but Louis regarded it as essentially a safeguard against any weakening of his authority. He once said, ‘At my own court I enjoy less power than some lawyer at the Chatelet, over my armies less power than a Colonel. It is through the Secret that I can recover what I’ve lost.’

Choiseul was the French Pitt. He toiled feverishly to restore his country’s position in the world. He handled the King brilliantly, never boring him with excessive details. Abroad he maintained the alliance with Austria and the Family Compact, besides detaching Portugal and Holland from England. The purchase and conquest of Corsica took place in 1768–9, an accession of territory which was a marvellous tonic for French pride, already soothed by the acquisition of Lorraine on the death of Louis’s father-in-law in 1766. As Minister for the Marine, he reorganized the ports and the navy, building over sixty ships of the line and fifty frigates with the King’s enthusiastic encouragement. At the same time, as Minister for War, he improved the army; the artillery was reorganized, training camps were set up, a serious attempt was made to raise the quality of non-commissioned officers, and colonels were no longer allowed to appoint their own junior officers. His ultimate objective, too, was the invasion of England.

At home Choiseul was less effective. Money was needed to pay for the debts of the Seven Years War and for the new navy, and further taxes could only be obtained with the agreement of the Parlements. Not only did the Duke have little understanding of national finances, but he was not prepared to risk a complete confrontation with the lawyers. Accordingly he tried to buy their support by sacrificing the Jesuits who, as Ultramontanes and the Jansenists’ arch-enemies, were hated by the Parlementaires. As one who sympathized with the Philosophes, Choiseul himself had little love for the Order. In 1761 the Jesuit administrator of the Fathers’ sugar plantations in the West Indies went bankrupt for a large sum (as a result of British privateering); the courts ordered the Order to pay, whereupon it unwisely appealed to the Parlement of Paris, who promptly accused the Fathers of seeking to undermine public morals and the fundamental law. Much against his will, Louis was eventually persuaded by Choiseul to banish the Jesuits from France and to close their schools; the King had done everything possible to save them. Later the Vatican was cajoled into suppressing the entire Order.

Unfortunately, far from being grateful, the Parlementaires remained as intractable as ever. In 1764 Louis summoned the leading members of the Paris Parlement to Versailles and threatened them, without effect. In 1766, in the Palais de Justice, at the famous Seance de la Flagellation—so called on account of the tremendous tongue-lashing which he gave them—the King told the Paris Parlement that ‘the courts depend for their very existence on me alone … to me alone belongs the legislative power’. But the lawyers remained unabashed. In 1768 he again had to force them to register new taxes by a lit de justice. Despite threats and banishment, they continued to obstruct the Government’s financial policy whenever possible. Choiseul was incapable of envisaging any solution.

Paradoxically, the Parlements who challenged absolutism were among the most repressive institutions in what was still an age of brutal intolerance and ferocious punishment. Admittedly, a knock on the door at night and the production of a royal lettre de cachet meant arbitrary incarceration in the Bastille or Vincennes, but Louis XV was comparatively sparing in his use of this weapon. On the other hand the lawyers enforced their statutes with the utmost severity, especially on Protestants. When—ten years after the last Huguenot rising of 1752—some Protestant noblemen attempted to rescue their pastor who was being hanged, they were condemned and beheaded forthwith. The Calas affair (in which the Huguenot father of a young suicide was falsely accused by the Toulouse Parlement of murdering him for turning Catholic, found guilty and then barbarously executed) outraged public opinion; after a brilliant campaign of protest conducted by Voltaire, the King forced the Toulouse Parlement to make what reparation it could to the unfortunate man’s family.

By the 1760s Mme de Pompadour had grown old and plump. Her position was much more secure since being made a lady-in-waiting to the Queen in 1756. None the less, in recent years her sway had been far from unquestioned. Her best friend, Mme d’Estrades, the mistress of M d’Argenson, had plotted to discredit her with the King, while there had been a number of take-over bids by Mme de Choiseul-Romanet and by the bewitchingly pretty Marquise de Coislin (who was known as ‘Proud Vashti’ and who tried to extort vast sums of money). In 1763 the King had an affair with young Mlle de Romans, whose beautiful black hair and satin skin were admired by no less a connoisseur than Casanova. Mlle de Romans, who had ambitions, might have been a really formidable rival; Louis set her up in a house at Passy where she bore him a son and he created her Baronne de Meilly-Coulongé; but her conceit put him off, luckily for Mme de Pompadour.

Since 1756, poor Mme de Pompadour, already weakened by miscarriages, had suffered from tuberculosis, coughing blood with pitiful regularity; she was also afflicted with insomnia, bronchitis and breathlessness, hiding her ravaged face with more and more cosmetics and an unfailing smile. D’Argenson noted sweetly, ‘the bottom of her countenance is yellow and withered; as for her bosom it is kinder not to mention it.’ None the less, she continued to work at her patronage like some hard-pressed man of affairs, writing as many as sixty letters a day. The disasters of the Seven Years War hurt her deeply for she was a true patriot—she commented, ‘If I die it will be from grief.’ Eventually she found her position almost unbearable. According to her maid, she spent any time alone in tears; in 1763 she complained, ‘My life is like that of the early Christians—a perpetual struggle.’ She turned to religion—commissioning a Book of Hours illuminated by Boucher—and even considered returning to her husband. By now she was so short of breath that she had to move into a ground-floor flat. The poor woman was worn out, and when she contracted a bad inflammation of the lungs in February 1764 she sensed that her end was near. Louis went to Choisy to stay with her and then brought her back to Versailles, visiting her every day. Despite his soothing care, she grew steadily worse. The King now spent all his time in her room. Eventually they had to say good-bye, when the moment had come for her to receive the last rites. Mme de Pompadour died on 7 April 1764, with a courage which even the Dauphin admired. Louis could not attend her funeral, but watched from his study as the cortège left Versailles. He muttered, ‘a friend for twenty years’, and two tears fell from his eyes—he said to his servant Champlost, ‘Those are the only tributes I can pay her.’

In the autumn of 1765 Horace Walpole, visiting the French court, noticed that the Dauphin was ailing—‘He is a spectre and cannot live these three months’, he wrote. The poor Dauphin, coughing and spitting blood, had indeed lost all his plumpness and, despite devoted nursing on the part of his wife—every day he told her, ‘How I love you!’—died of tuberculosis on 20 December 1765. He was only thirty-four. The King was inconsolable, writing of ‘a terrible blow for me’, and of how he could have suffered ‘no greater loss’. Louis now displayed the better side of his nature. He had liked the Dauphine, Marie Joséphine from the very first; they frequently wrote affectionate letters to each other. He was ready with the kindest and most understanding sympathy—the young widow wrote that in her misery, his kindness had been her only comfort. But in 1767 Mme la Dauphine died too, of tuberculosis.

On 24 June 1768, Queen Marie Leszczynska died; she had long been suffering from a tumour. While she lay dying the King spent more time with her than he had for many years—perhaps even he felt a little guilty. For several weeks after her death he showed the most edifying signs of grief and remorse, though he also seemed somewhat preoccupied. The princesses, who fancied that he might remarry, suddenly realized with fury that the preoccupation was with a new mistress. At least the Queen was spared the news.

Since Mme de Pompadour’s death Louis had been lonely, and there had been several volunteers for the post of maîtresse en titre. Some time in 1768—it is not known exactly when—he met the Comtesse du Barry; it is even possible that the King’s valet brought her to the ‘Bird Trap’. Jeanne Bécu was born in 1743, the illegitimate daughter of a dressmaker; her father seems to have been a friar, Frère Ange. She first came to Paris at the age of five, when her mother found employment as a cook in the house of a rich contractor. This employer was a kindly man who paid for the pretty little girl to be educated at an excellent convent. Leaving school at fifteen, Jeanne was by turn a hairdresser, a companion to an old lady, and a shop girl in a milliner’s establishment where her lustrous dark eyes, radiant complexion and splendid bosom attracted both lovers and custom. She was taken up by M Jean Baptiste du Barry, a professional gambler and pimp, who peddled her services to various smart rakes. She lived with him for five years, calling herself Mme du Barry (although his wife was still alive) and meeting many noblemen from whom, despite being illiterate, she managed to acquire surprisingly polished manners. If she never actually worked in a brothel, she was none the less no better than a very high-class prostitute, albeit selective and at the top of her profession.

A singularly beautiful woman, far lovelier than Mme de Pompadour, she was nearly twenty-five when she first met the King. Choiseul privately thought that so low born a creature could only be a passing fancy. However, Jeanne had not been a prostitute for nothing; Louis told M d’Ayen that he was experiencing ‘sensual pleasure of an entirely new kind’, and M de Richelieu that ‘she is the only woman in France who can make me forget I am nearly sixty’ (the Duc de Noailles gave it as his opinion that this was because the King had never patronized a really good brothel). To make her respectable, M du Barry—who saw golden possibilities—hastily married her to his bachelor brother, a retired naval officer, who received a large down payment in cash and a magnificent pension before being sent back to the country. By November 1768 she was living at Compiègne next to Mme de Pompadour’s old flat, waited on by footmen in splendid livery; edifyingly, she attended the King’s Mass on Sundays and feast days.

Soon she had her own château at Louveciennes, with marble pillars and lapis lazuli chimney pieces, supervised by her Bengali page, Zamor. (Years later Zamor would testify against her when she was being tried for her life.) In April 1769, Mme du Barry made her official entrance to court where, wearing a dress of virginal white, her hair snowily powdered and blazing with diamonds, she was presented to the indignant princesses and the little Dauphin. Although nervous, she carried off the ordeal with some style. The King, with his arm in a sling—he had broken it in a hunting accident—watched admiringly. He was quite enslaved and soon afterwards closed the Parc aux Cerfs, no doubt for excellent reasons.

In May 1770 the Dauphin—Louis-Auguste, Duc de Berry—was married at Versailles to an Austrian Archduchess. Louis-Auguste was sixteen, a fat lethargic youth who was irritated at having to miss his hunting on a day of such glorious weather. (Even Mme du Barry called him ‘the fat, ill-bred boy’.) The Archduchess Maria Antonia—Marie Antoinette, as the French christened her—was a pink-faced little blonde of fifteen, dressed all in white. Among those who signed the register was the Dauphin’s cousin, the Duc de Chartres, who, as ‘Philippe Egalité’, would vote for Louis-Auguste’s execution nearly a quarter of a century later. A violent thunderstorm marred the evening and spoilt the firework display. At the great supper in the Versailles opera house—specially built for the occasion—the Dauphin, enjoying himself for the first time during that long, boring day, fell on the food with his customary voracious appetite. Poor Marie Antoinette merely picked at hers. The King whispered to his grandson, ‘You mustn’t have too heavy a stomach for tonight.’ ‘Why not?’ answered the Dauphin, ‘I always sleep much better after plenty to eat.’ Sure enough, almost as soon as he was in the nuptial bed, Louis-Auguste fell into a deep sleep.

There then began a fierce feud between the little Dauphine and la du Barry. When Marie Antoinette first inquired just what was that beautiful lady’s function, Mme de Noailles replied cryptically, ‘To make the King enjoy himself.’ On learning the exact nature of Mme du Barry’s employment, the Dauphine was horrified and refused to address a single word to her; soon the ladies of the court were supporting one side or the other, and fighting like cats. King Louis became irritated. News of his displeasure reached Vienna; the Empress Maria Theresa wrote to her daughter that she really must try to be polite to la du Barry, if only to please the King, and must feign ignorance of any squalid relationship. Finally, after nearly two years of ignoring her, the Dauphine at last acknowledged Mme du Barry’s presence at court by saying coldly to her, ‘Il y a beaucoup de monde aujourd’hui à Versailles.’ (There are lots of people at Versailles today.) Louis was delighted and sent beautiful gifts to Marie Antoinette. But the feud went on just the same.

Choiseul was silly enough to resent Mme du Barry, joking about her in public. The new favourite, who was very good-natured, did her best to make friends, but to no avail, and she ended by hating him. She then spared no opportunity of making spiteful remarks to him, especially during the King’s little supper parties. In December 1770 Louis dismissed him. Horace Walpole wrote, ‘Choiseul has lost his power ridiculously, by braving a fille de joie to humour two women—his sister and his wife.’ In his retirement Choiseul wrote vitriolic memoirs, in which his gibes at the King suggest that there was something a little unstable about the Duke.

Indeed, there was much more to Choiseul’s dismissal than the new favourite’s hostility. He had all but plunged France into a new war with England by his excessive support of Spain’s claim to the Falkland Islands. Nor was he the right man to cope with the Parlements. He was replaced by the Triumvirat—the Duc d’Aiguillon, the Chancellor Maupeou and the Controller-General Terray.

Louis’s choice of d’Aiguillon is often dismissed as sheer bad judgement. Admittedly the Duke, another courtier soldier, was mediocre. Yet it is probable that the King chose him for sound reasons. D’Aiguillon was the one public figure who was a declared enemy of the Parlements; as Governor of Brittany he had been harried for years by the Parlement of Rennes, while the Parlement of Paris had only recently failed in an attempt to try him for misgovernment. And unlike Choiseul, he could be relied on not to plunge the country into a war which she could not afford.

By now the Parlementaires had become an obstacle to national government. From obstructing taxes they had gone on to attacking the King’s officials. To make their point they frequently refused to allow any legal business to be transacted, thus bringing the courts to a standstill. Even Voltaire recognized that ‘this astonishing anarchy could not be allowed to continue. The Crown had to regain its authority or else the Parlement would have triumphed.’ After Louis had stopped the proceedings against M d’Aiguillon by a lit de justice, they adopted their usual strike tactics. On the night of 19 January 1771, musketeers ordered them to resume their duties; they refused. Next day all 700 magistrates were exiled, after being informed that their offices had been abolished. The Parlements were dissolved all over France.

The Chancellor Maupeou set up new courts. Though these ‘Maupeou Parlements’ were laughed at, and even though they may have sometimes been corrupt, they were a step in the right direction—a blow against the most formidable obstacles to financial and even political reform.

Now that the Parlements were out of the way it was possible to introduce new taxes. Those envisaged were revolutionary, constituting an attack on wealth and privilege of almost twentieth-century proportions. The bad qualities of the Abbé Joseph Marie Terray—cynicism, avarice and lack of pity—made him an excellent Controller-General. He repudiated many of the government’s more questionable financial obligations, delayed repayment of loans, reduced the income from rentes, converted tontines into life annuities, and abolished a number of court pensions and reduced others. He introduced a swingeing five per cent tax on real property as well as on income, and planned to bring in an entirely new system of taxation. He set up a board to control the grain trade, taxing it but also regulating it to meet supply and demand. To every complaint, Terray—known as the Vulture—answered, ‘The King is master and necessity knows no laws.’ At the same time he did his best to persuade his master to economize on the royal household.

The work of the Triumvirat, who governed France for the rest of the reign, has some pretensions to be considered as a revolution. It has not received proper recognition because it came to an end prematurely; had it lasted, the Crown might well have succeeded in enforcing radical economies and political reforms in the teeth of the nobility’s counter-revolution. The coup d’état of 1770 against the Parlementaires needed real courage, as did Terray’s reforms. It is to Louis’s credit that for the remainder of his life he gave these strong ministers unqualified support.

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)

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‘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 dangerously 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 abandoned 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.

Within a year, largely through sacking useless officials, the Controller-General had reduced government expenditure by 66,200,000 livres (well over two and a half million pounds in contemporary English money). Unfortunately, his abandonment of controls on the grain trade sent wheat prices soaring and there were bread riots, even in Paris, popularly known as ‘The Flour War’. As he had predicted, he outraged the privileged classes, including the clergy, and the party of religion at court soon turned the Queen against him; she did her best to discredit the Controller-General with the King. None the less, Turgot clung grimly to office, and Louis continued to support him, though more and more doubtfully. In 1776 the Controller-General introduced his famous Six Edicts—his programme for reform. The opposition took particular exception to the proposed abolition of the corvée (the peasants’ duty work on the roads) and its replacement by a road tax on local landowners. Louis, rather surprisingly, forced the Parlement to register the edicts with the lit de justice.

But by now Marie Antoinette was really angry. Turgot had insisted on recalling one of her protégés from London—the Duc de Guisnes (of Mozart’s Guisnes Concerto)—where he was ambassador, on the grounds of incompetence. Turgot’s position was weakened still further when Malesherbes resigned. He then terrified the King with a scheme for a national assembly, following it with an extraordinarily tactless letter—‘Never forget Sire, that weakness put Charles I’s head on the block.’ He was dismissed in May 1776, after being Controller-General for only twenty months. Many historians believe that Turgot’s dismissal marked the final doom of the old monarchy.

Louis, in his dealings with Turgot, had eventually shown all his own worst qualities—a fear of unpopularity, and a slowness of thought which invariably grew into irresolution. Added to this was his pathological terror of being dominated by any one minister. Yet the King was thoroughly honest and kind-hearted, and still hoped to make his people love him by good government. In the twentieth century he would have been an excellent constitutional monarch.

None the less, whatever his vices or virtues, Louis XVI was undeniably an oddity. He indulged in orgies of gluttony, frequently preparing the meals himself and then gorging and swilling until he was carried almost insensible to his bed, emitting ‘un bruit très suspect’. Certain disloyal courtiers called him ‘the fat pig’, while the naturalist Buffon, who saw him dining with his accustomed enthusiasm, was put in mind of a big monkey feeding at the zoo. One of the royal breakfasts consisted of four chops, a plump chicken, a thick slice of ham and six baked eggs, washed down by a bottle and a half of champagne; the same day he ate a gargantuan dinner. Indeed, the Austrian ambassador reported that the King’s return from hunting was followed by meals so enormous ‘that they deprive him of reason’. Plump even as a youth, he became inordinately fat (though in part this may have been due to glandular trouble.) Probably because of his hunting, his health did not suffer, apart from the occasional hangover, and he was famous for his strength; he could pick up a page standing on a heavy shovel and carry him round the room. The worst effects of the monarch’s gorging were his primitive humour (consisting of the simplest practical jokes), a tendency to foul language and an almost Bohemian slovenliness; the Swedish King, the elegant Gustav III, was received by Louis with hair uncombed and wearing a dressing-gown and odd shoes. It is only fair to add that he fasted rigorously throughout Lent.

Like so many of his dynasty, Louis XVI was never so happy as when working with tools. He enjoyed making clocks and locks; a smithy with two forges was attached to his library and a locksmith was in permanent attendance; he made a metal table which he gave to Vergennes. Mme de Campans says that the King’s hands were often filthy—on at least one occasion the Queen screamed at him for being so dirty (though he took daily baths). He had a telescope room at Versailles, equipped with the most modern instruments through which he scanned his visitors, together with model warships and even small James Watt steam engines. Masonry was another relaxation and he built several walls with his own hands. Nor did he disdain chopping wood. Sometimes he was almost frivolous, indulging in backgammon or going to the play—Molière was a particular favourite.

However, unlike almost all Bourbons, Louis XVI had small interest in patronizing the arts. Nor was he a builder. He was equally untypical in his intellectual curiosity. His library was filled with works in Latin, German and English (he began a translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was later incorporated by Guizot into his own translation). He read Shakespeare, Fielding and Defoe—notably Robinson Crusoe—and glanced at most of the leading European newspapers and the English Annual Register—he was acquainted with all the more famous debates in the English Parliament. The King also owned many books on travel, science and geography and, in particular, history—especially naval and English. In fact he was very much a man of the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, he far preferred reading in his library to government business.

No wife could have been less suited to him than Queen Marie Antoinette. She had no intellectual interests whatsoever and her taste was inferior even to that of Mme du Barry (who had been sent to a convent for a dreadful, but mercifully brief, period of penance). Apart from ordering some good furniture from Riesener and Jacob, the Queen’s one essay in patronage was to make Paris learn to like the music of her old music-master, Gluck—and his Iphigénie in particular. Her chief joys were having her hair fantastically styled by her beloved coiffeur, Léonard, ordering extravagant if deceptively simple clothes from the great dressmaker Rose Bertin, and playing at being a dairymaid at her ‘hamlet’ next to the Petit Trianon (known as her ‘Little Vienna’), where she kept cows and goats with ribbons round their necks, milking them daily. She was also a compulsive gambler, playing all night and every night. Desperately frustrated, she found a certain relief in emotional friendships with young favourites like the delightful Princesse de Lamballe, a honey-blonde widow of eighteen, whom Mme de Campan described as ‘looking like spring peeping out from beneath sable and ermine’; and the beautiful but greedy Comtesse de Polignac, with whom Marie Antoinette was eternally arm-in-arm, and whose relations all sponged on her. There were undoubtedly sapphic undertones to these friendships. Soon the Queen’s allowance had to be doubled—partly because of vast sums lost at the gaming table or spent on diamonds, partly for pensions for her friends.

Marie Antoinette also flirted much too much, with men like the middle-aged roué, Baron de Besenval, who commanded the Swiss Guards, and the impertinent but amusing Duc de Lauzun, whom eventually she had to snub. Her profligate young brother-in-law, Charles of Artois, presided over her gay supper parties at the Petit Trianon and took her racing; there were rumours that Artois was her lover, and he was undoubtedly too familiar—he was actually seen to pinch her. (Their friendship cooled after her children were born, an indication that it was innocent, if indiscreet.) There were also rumours that she slept with the Duc de Coigny, the Swedish Count Fersen (Colonel of the Royal Swedish Regiment) and the Franco-Irishman, Count Edouard Dillon; these slanders were largely circulated by the Duc de Chartres (later Orléans) who bragged vilely that he had had to rebuff the Queen’s advances. Then there were stories that her bedroom was hung with diamond-studded tapestries, lit by a thousand candles, and had a bed with black satin sheets. Indeed, the poor woman was accused in countless filthy pamphlets of every known vice, including both Lesbian revels and Messalina-like orgies.

Within a few years Marie Antoinette was detested by almost all sections of society, who referred to her as ‘The Austrian’ and expressed deep pity for the King. She had made herself thoroughly unpopular with the nobility by her rudeness, her breezy simplifying of etiquette, and her favouritism and prejudice—throughout the reign she attacked her husband’s ministers for the most frivolous reasons. Nor did her jokes about Louis, whom she spoke of as ‘that poor fellow’, endear her; referring to his blacksmith’s forge, she once wrote that she had no desire ‘to play Venus to his Vulcan’. The alarmed Austrian ambassador reported to Vienna as early as 1776 that, ‘Each day fewer and fewer people come to Versailles and the situation will go from bad to worse if the Queen cannot make up her mind to conduct her court in a more sober and orderly fashion.’ Maria Theresa sent dreadful letters to her daughter. The Empress told ‘Madame my dear daughter’ that she was behaving like a Pompadour or a du Barry rather than a Queen, and that the news of her amusements and ridiculously affected hair-styles—‘like an actress’—made her mother tremble. Marie Antoinette’s lack of respect for the King was shocking. Furthermore, ‘It is rumoured that you do not pay your country’s noblemen the respect due to them and don’t even talk to them, but chatter instead with your young ladies and play all sorts of silly games.’

In 1777 the Queen’s brother, the Emperor Joseph II—a Viennese of the dour sort—visited France incognito to see just how bad things were. His considered view of his brother-in-law after meeting him was that Louis was ‘a little weak but no fool’, though curiously apathetic in mind and body. As for his sister, whom he reduced to tears, Joseph wrote grimly that she thought only of her pleasures and ‘fulfills neither the duties of a wife or a Queen’. It was all to no avail, and Marie Antoinette remained one of the monarchy’s greatest liabilities.

Nor were the rest of the Royal Family exactly an asset. Even ‘Mesdames Tantes’ were unpopular because of their bigotry. Horace Walpole saw them, and was as catty as only his sort of Englishman can be: ‘The Four Mesdames, who are clumsy, plump old wenches with a bad likeness to their father, stand in a bedchamber in a row, with black cloaks and knitting bags, looking good humoured, not knowing what to say, and wriggling as if they wanted to make water.’

Monsieur (Provence) was sensible enough, but he was unattractive in appearance and had an icily cold manner. Artois was worst of all, disastrously fond of wine, women and song, and gambling too—his debts were astronomical, twenty-one million livres by 1781, much to the fury of the taxpayers. Strikingly handsome, charming when he felt like it, he was often drunk and violently rude. One of his boon companions was the awful Chartres.

Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (known as Duc de Chartres until he became Orléans on his father’s death in 1785) was considered a member of the Royal Family, though privately he saw himself as head of a rival dynasty, rather than a junior Prince of the Blood. Like so many of his line, the Duke was a byword for debauchery. Although smaller and older—he had been born in 1747—and beautifully dressed, he resembled King Louis in appearance, but his face was blotched purple from hard drinking and ravaged by the pox. He led a life of the utmost futility, drinking, whoring and gambling, proud of his skill at card tricks and throwing dice—on one occasion he is said to have offered to run stark naked through Paris for a bet. Like some of Balzac’s villains, Orléans combined avarice with debauchery. When his losses at the gaming-table grew out of hand, he more than recouped them by building three arcades of shops round the gardens of the Palais Royal, which he turned into a public pleasure park; the arcades were soon filled with cafés, restaurants, hairdressers and jewellers’ shops, and also casinos and smart brothels. He was already enormously rich, and the venture made him King of Paris, with the Palais Royal for his Versailles. The debauched little Duke hated his cousins, but was too ineffectual to do them much damage.

In 1776 Jacques Necker, a brilliant Swiss banker and writer on economics, was appointed ‘Director of Finances’. (In practice he was Controller-General in everything but name, but it was considered unfitting that so prestigious a title should be given to a foreigner and Protestant.) A self-made man who had bought a French title, Necker was a plump, pot-bellied, yellow-faced bourgeois with awkward, oily manners, but extremely vain and socially ambitious. Through his wife’s somewhat louche salon and his promiscuous blue-stocking daughter (the future Mme de Staël), he had made many useful friends whom he had no wish to upset by introducing new taxes. Although as a Philosophe Necker introduced a number of minor reforms—he abolished 2,000 minor court posts—he was hardly another Turgot. In any case, the country’s finances were soon completely out of control because of French intervention in the American Revolution; as Turgot had predicted, France was ruined from the moment the first shot was fired. Without war, Necker might have preserved some semblance of solvency—as it was, faced by impossible demands for money, all he did was borrow long-term loans at ruinous interest and then produce a reassuring booklet on the national finances, the Compte rendu au Roi; in fact, the Compte rendu was a massive cooking of the books.

From the very beginning, the French had shown remarkable sympathy for the Americans in their Revolution. No doubt some of this enthusiasm was a legacy from the Seven Years War, a determination to be revenged for the humiliations which England had inflicted on France. However, Frenchmen of the period undoubtedly felt genuine admiration for the colonists. Lord Stormont, the English ambassador, reported sardonically of the Parisians that, ‘Our Wits, Philosophers and Coffee House Politicians … are all to a Man warm Americans, affecting to consider them as a brave People struggling for its Natural Rights and endeavouring to rescue those Rights out of the Hands of violent and wanton Oppression.’ Indeed, the Declaration of Independence reflected all the most hallowed ideals of the French Enlightenment, and there was a popular clamour to join in and help these colonial heroes against the traditional enemy.

One person who definitely did not want war was the King. Although he understood little about finance, he must have shuddered at Turgot’s warning. Louis hated bloodshed, and had small inclination to encourage rebellion against a fellow monarch; if he ever read it, he would certainly have agreed with a contemporary English pamphlet which cautioned him that the same spirit which had begun the American Revolution might well be preparing a revolution in France. However, the Americans were brilliantly successful in fanning the enthusiasm which so many Frenchmen felt for their cause; their ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, with his quaint (and carefully contrived) charm and his reputation as a scientist and man of letters, conquered both Versailles and Paris; he was popularly known as l’ambassadeur électrique. Only Louis disliked him. In addition, the Americans had the writer Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais on their side; the future author of Le Mariage de Figaro pestered Vergennes ceaselessly. Eventually that cautious diplomat, too clever by half, was persuaded that an American victory would win back for France and Spain everything which they had lost during the Seven Years War. Maurepas and most of the other ministers agreed with him. Louis, always irresolute, gave way reluctantly; many years afterwards he told M de Molleville, his naval secretary, ‘I never think of the American affair without regret—I was young then and advantage was taken of my youth, but now we have to suffer the consequences.’

Vergennes led the King by easy steps. First he obtained his permission to send a secret agent to Philadelphia, the pleasantly named Chevalier de Bonvouloir, to make contact with the revolutionary government. He then persuaded Louis to supply the rebels secretly with money, arms and uniforms, avoiding open war. The English raged but the French government blandly insisted that if any French supplies were reaching the colonists, it could only be the work of smugglers. The aid amounted to millions of pounds. In February 1778 France recognized the United States, signing a treaty of friendship and commerce, together with a secret treaty of military alliance. England at once declared war on France. Next year Spain joined in, on the side of France.

Many French volunteers had been fighting in America before 8,000 royal troops, including the Marquis de Lafayette, a red-haired, chinless wonder of nineteen, landed in 1780 to save the Revolution. Louis followed their campaigns with the keenest enthusiasm, poring over maps. At sea, Choiseul’s new navy proved its worth under men like Estaing and Rochambeau, destroying the legend that Britannia rules the waves. The Comte de Grasse prevented reinforcements reaching General Cornwallis at Yorktown, forcing him to surrender with 7,000 men, a feat which made ultimate American victory certain, while the fat old Bailli de Suffren (who had learnt his seamanship with the Knights of Malta) terrorized the English navy in the Indian Ocean, winning four shattering victories in 1782 alone. Nearer home, the Duc de Crillon captured Minorca again, though the English just managed to hold Gibraltar against a furiously determined siege by the French and the Spaniards. However, a massive invasion of England had to be called off because the crews were found to be scurvy-ridden.

Throughout the war, Necker, horrified at the expense, had been trying to make peace behind Vergennes’s back, but George III’s government refused to do so until France stopped helping the rebels. Most ungratefully, the Americans cynically concluded a separate peace with the English at the end of 1782, obtaining complete independence. None the less, the Treaty of Versailles which France signed with England on 3 September 1783 was ample revenge for the Seven Years War. In the West Indies she regained St Lucia and Tobago, in India most of her trading posts (including Pondicherry), and in Africa Senegal, besides many valuable trading concessions. England was humiliated, losing colonies of far greater worth than any which had been taken from France after the previous war. It was the last great triumph of the French monarchy.

France’s prestige, at its highest for many years, was reflected in diplomacy during the remainder of the 1780s. Already she had prevented war breaking out between Prussia and Austria over Bavaria (in 1779) by tactful mediation. By subsidizing Gustav III, she was able to use Sweden as an instrument for exercising at least some small restraint on Prussian ambitions. In 1786 France signed a commercial treaty with England which lowered tariff walls, while the following year a treaty with Russia opened up hitherto unknown areas of trade. Culturally, the entire Western world was still in thrall to Francomania.

At home, Ernest Semichon claims that during Louis XVI’s reign ‘nearly every political, religious and judicial problem was investigated and in many cases solved’. If exaggerated, this claim is still not entirely without substance. Even Tocqueville admits that, ‘During his entire reign Louis XVI was always talking about reform, and there were few institutions whose destruction he did not contemplate before the Revolution broke out and made an end of them.’ He tried to improve conditions in prisons and hospitals, and ordered free treatment for sufferers from venereal disease. He abolished the death penalty for desertion. It was the King, not Necker, who was responsible for abolishing the ‘Preparatory Question’ (torture by water or the boot to extract a confession after arrest) in 1780, but the Parlements prevented him from abolishing torture before execution. Louis also put an end to serfdom on Crown lands, though it was retained on the estates of the clergy and nobility. As will be seen, he envisaged legal reforms which would have swept away the Parlements.

New canals were dug between the greatest French rivers, while the naval harbour at Cherbourg was protected by an impressive sea wall. A Royal Society of Medicine was founded, together with a Veterinary College and a School of Mines, and the Academy of Sciences was expanded to include agriculture, biology, mechanical sciences and mineralogy. An institution for deaf mutes was established and also an institution for the blind. The world of European science was dominated by such Frenchmen as Lavoisier—‘the father of modern chemistry’—and the agriculturalist Parmentier, who, with the King’s encouragement, popularized the potato. Most dramatic of all, the brothers Montgolfier were making their first ascents in hot air balloons. It was not only for reasons of sycophancy that statues of Louis were erected all over the country with inscriptions like ‘Servitude abolished’, ‘The Navy restored’, and ‘Commerce protected’. If it had not been for ‘the unfortunate reality of the deficit’, as he described the monetary crisis, Louis XVI might have bumbled happily on for the rest of his natural life.

It was a bad time for anyone to be poor. About 1778 France entered into a long depression, both agricultural and industrial. The rural economy, which was in any case backward enough, was severely damaged by a steep decline in grain prices and an even more catastrophic drop in the price of wine; as a result peasants could not make a living from their produce. The repercussions affected the hitherto advancing economy of the towns, where production fell disastrously in such industries as the cloth trade, and many workers were laid off. There was poverty and unemployment throughout the entire country, in painful contrast to the comparative affluence of Louis XV’s reign. All classes found themselves short of money. Unfortunately, the recession coincided with a crisis in the national finances.

Tocqueville was perfectly correct in claiming that ‘France was ruined before she ceased to be victorious’. It has been calculated that the American War may have cost the French government as much as 2,000,000,000 livres (well over £ 80 million). When Necker was dismissed in 1781, he had only avoided state bankruptcy by massive borrowing, and during his last year of office, the annual deficit—the gap between revenue and expenditure—was at least 50 million livres (more than £ 2 million), quite apart from the hundreds of million livres of national debt. But the wily banker had concealed the full horror of the situation by his Compte rendu.

Necker was dismissed largely because old Maurepas had grown jealous of him, and had made the aristocratic party fearful of the half-hearted reforms which the Director of Finances had been trying to introduce. The opposition was led by the Duc d’Orléans, his son Chartres, Monsieur (the Comte de Provence) and the Comte Artois; characteristically, the latter called Necker ‘a fornicating foreign bastard’. As soon as the Director had gone, a number of reactionary measures were brought in—four proofs of nobility (ie to show that all four grandparents had been noble) now became necessary for any candidate for a commission in the army. None the less, Louis insisted that bourgeois sailors should have the chance of becoming naval officers.

Despite Louis’s good intentions, to survive a minister had to keep both the Queen and all the Princes on his side. Maurepas (who died at the end of 1781) understood this very well and would go to almost any lengths to ensure their support. During Marie Antoinette’s first pregnancy, when she was unable to go to a ball and a torchlight charade was staged by the court to divert her, the venerable and all but octogenarian minister—who had been famed even as a young man for his impotence—appeared in pink silk as Cupid.

For Louis, the 1780s were probably the happiest years of his life. In 1777 he had at last consented to the very minor operation which made it possible for him to have normal relations with his wife. On 30 August of that year, Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother, ‘I am so deeply happy … my marriage was perfectly consummated a week ago.’ (The tone of her letter indicates that much of her objectional behaviour hitherto may well have been due to frustration.) Ingenuously, the King told Mesdames Tantes that the physical pleasure was even greater than he had anticipated. Nevertheless, he still did not sleep with the Queen as much as she would have liked, despite her ‘tormenting him to come more often’, and Maria Theresa remained sceptical about any hopes of a pregnancy. However, in December 1778 Marie Antoinette at last gave birth to a child, the Princess Marie Thérèse—Madame Royale. (This grave little girl was later known as Mousseline la sérieuse, on account of her old-fashioned expression.)

Louis was overjoyed, as indeed was the entire country; when the Queen went to Nôtre Dame for her churching, she was cheered by the crowd. An exception to the general rejoicing was Monsieur who, at the christening, asked sourly who was the father. On 21 October 1781 Marie Antoinette had a second child, the Dauphin Louis-Joseph; the King was so overcome that he wept and stammered. Again gossips, led by Monsieur, said that the real father was Artois. It was a delicate creature, tormented by rickets and bone tuberculosis, whose health gave cause for alarm from the very beginning. But another son was born in 1785, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie—the future Louis XVII. There was also a fourth child, the Princess Sophie Béatrice, who did not reach her second year. Now that she had children the Queen led a much quieter life. Despite occasional squabbles, she and the King had always been good friends, and now fell genuinely in love with each other. She too grew fatter, with a bust measurement of forty-four inches (according to her dressmaker’s order book).

Louis was extremely popular, especially with those who came into contact with him. Artois’s Scots gardener, Thomas Blaikie, obviously liked what he saw; ‘The King was dressed almost like a country farmer, a good rough stout man about twenty-five.’ At thirty he was even fatter, as a consequence of hunting a little less and of reading rather more while continuing to indulge his extraordinary appetite. But the French have never blamed anyone for enjoying their food. When he visited the new naval base at Cherbourg in 1785, although the expense of the trip was sharply criticized in Paris, the King had a personal triumph; peasants lined the roads to cheer him as he passed. Louis was noticeably moved, kissing the girls and shouting back, ‘Vive mon bon peuple!’ when the crowd cried ‘Vive le Roi!’ Indeed most Frenchmen still felt an extraordinary reverence for the King—what the normally unsentimental Tocqueville defines as ‘both the natural love of children for their father and the awe properly due to God alone’. Foreigners were astonished by the passionate interest which the French took in the person of their sovereign. The Scot John Moore, who visited France in 1779, noted that Louis’s slightest illness alarmed the entire country: ‘Did he cough?—Yes, by Gad! And strongly—I am in despair.’ This reverence continued right up to the Revolution. His subjects did not blame the deficit and the hard times on the King—it was all the fault of his advisers and that ‘Austrian bitch’ of a wife.

Many years later, the Comte de Hézecques, a royal page from 1786–92, gave a fascinating portrait of the King he had served. ‘When seated on the throne Louis XVI looked well enough, but it has to be confessed that he walked with an unpleasant waddle … He dressed very plainly in grey or brown coats, with a steel or silver sword, though on Sundays and feast days he wore white velvet.’ Hézecques adds, ‘I spent nearly six years at court and I never once saw the King act rudely, even in the slightest way to any one of all his servants.’ He also emphasizes that Louis had no favourites.

The basic ritual of Louis XIV’s court was still observed, with Lever and Coucher, daily Mass and dining in public. Everything that the King ate, even in private or between meals, was tasted by an ‘Officer of the Goblet’ for fear of poison. Hézecques tells us that though only very ancient noblemen bowed to the State Bed when Louis was not in it, even the youngest and most modern courtiers backed to the wall when he approached, shuffling their feet in the hope of attracting their sovereign’s attention. Even those on intimate terms could only address him in the third person: ‘Has the King had good sport today?’ ‘Has the King caught a cold?’

Yet fewer and fewer people bothered to go to court. This was largely the fault of the Queen, who had no use for anybody outside her own set. The Duc de Lévis remembered that, ‘Except for a few favourites, chosen by caprice or intrigue, everyone was shut out; rank, service, interest, high birth, were no longer sufficient to procure admission to the royal family’s circle.’ In consequence many noblemen began to consider presentation at court a waste of time. The Duke tells us that Versailles became ‘no more than a little provincial town which one visited reluctantly and left as quickly as possible’. Even so, the pomp and ceremony remained as splendid as ever—Châteaubriand says that those who did not know Versailles before 1789 have no conception of true magnificence.

According to the Comte de Ségur, by the 1780s, ‘from one end of the kingdom to the other, opposition had become a point of honour.’ Opposition meant different things to different people, even if the vast majority of educated Frenchmen subscribed to the Enlightenment and considered the Ancien Régime ruinously inadequate. Noblemen envied the power which the English ruling class had gained after their ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and, for all their love of Rousseau, had little taste for equality. Unfortunately for them, égalité was to be one of the French Revolution’s great slogans; by Louis XVI’s reign the sharp difference which once existed between the classes had been eroded; many an haut bourgeois was infinitely richer and more polished than some titled country booby squire, but the law denied him the status, privileges and opportunities which belonged to nobility alone. There was also the psychological factor, that artificial gap between noble and bourgeois, which gave rise to deep resentment. At the same time, because of the aristocratic counter-revolution, social mobility was far less in the later eighteenth century than it had been during its early years.

The dissatisfied bourgeois—businessmen, doctors, architects, lesser lawyers, minor civil servants and all the other professional people—had small concern for the miserable lot of the peasants. Throughout the countryside, hatred of the nobility was growing. Because of the economic depression, landowners were increasingly short of money in the 1780s and resorted to what has been called ‘the seignorial reaction’; not only were long-forgotten feudal dues exacted once again and the corvée extended, but common land was expropriated. Lawyers busily disinterred old title deeds and terrorized peasants with their documents. In consequence there was a vast increase in the already large numbers of indigent rural poor, while bad harvests drove even the most stolid peasant into a fury of resentment at the lord of the manor’s greed.

Yet, despite all Michelet’s horror-stories about the Bastille, the government was far from harsh. Someone asked the nonagenarian Duc de Richelieu—he did not die until 1788—if life had changed. The Duke replied that under Louis XIV people had not dared to even speak, that under Louis XV they had whispered, and that now they spoke out loud. As Tocqueville points out, Beaumarchais’s brief imprisonment shocked Paris far more than the persecution of the Huguenots in the previous century.

When Louis first read Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro in 1781—he read it aloud to Marie Antoinette—he cried out ‘Detestable’, complaining that, ‘That man makes fun of everything which should be respected’, and forbade the play’s performance. For two years Beaumarchais campaigned to save his play, giving readings and enlisting support from very important personages like Artois. The play tells how a grand seigneur, Count Almaviva, plots the seduction of a servant girl and how her fiancé—his valet, Figaro—joins with the Countess in thwarting the Count’s attempt to revive the droit de seigneur. Throughout, the valet’s superiority over the nobleman is emphasized, and the unfairness of the social order—‘You nobles merely take the trouble to be born’, Figaro tells the Count. Eventually the King gave way to the popular clamour, and the play’s first night on 27 April 1783 was a succès de scandale, cheered to the echo by the glittering audience whom the author ridiculed so subtly; some spectators realized its implications, but the fashionable world ignored them. Beaumarchais at once published a mocking pamphlet, whereupon he was arrested and sent to the St Lazare prison; the public outcry was so enormous that he was released after only twenty-four hours.

Talleyrand’s claim that anyone who had not lived under the Ancien Régime did not know how sweet life could be, has often been questioned. Nevertheless he seems to be born out by Tocqueville. ‘France in those days was a nation of pleasure seekers, all for the joy of life … The upper classes were far more interested in living beautifully than in comfort, in making a name for themselves than in making money.’ It was not only the world of Beaumarchais but of Mozart too, of Gluck and Grétry. Of its popular songs, Plaisir d’Amour, with its bittersweet yet simple elegance, conveys perfectly the spirit of the times. Stateliness went hand in hand with simplicity—at court, French country dances alternated with minuets. The fashionable painters, perhaps a little too relaxed, were Mme Vigée Le Brun, Greuze and ‘L’aimable Frago’ (as Fragonard liked to be called), though Neo-classical giants were emerging—the sensation of the Salon of 1785 was Louis David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’. The period’s delightful furniture was also Neo-classical, made by Reisener, Weisweiller, Molitor, Schichtig, and Jacob. Under the influence of Rousseau, clothes were becoming simpler, though no less elegant; men no longer wore wigs but powdered their hair and often wore riding boots and English hunting coats and breeches. Women tried to look like shepherdesses. Furthermore, the eighteenth century had invented the café and the restaurant—by 1785 there were 600 cafés in Paris alone. Even the life of the poorer classes could be surprisingly gay, to judge from the novels of Restif de la Bretonne, who writes not only of the debaucheries of underworld Paris, but also of the joyous life of the well-to-do peasant household.

In 1783 Yolande de Polignac coaxed Marie Antoinette into persuading the King to appoint Charles-Alexandre de Calonne as Controller-General. He was a most agreeable man in his late forties, handsome, always beautifully dressed and invariably charming, with exquisite taste in pictures (he owned ten Titians), furniture and mistresses: the Duc de Lévis said that he was the only member of the noblesse de la robe who knew how to behave like a gentleman. He had had an impressive career in administration, having been an Intendant for nearly twenty years, and he was hailed as a new Colbert. Calonne always lived above his means and on being appointed he joked, ‘The finances of France are in a deplorable state and I would never have accepted responsibility for them if my own were not in an equally shaky condition.’ His policy was original, to say the least. He believed, ‘A man who wants to borrow must appear to be rich; to seem rich one has to impress by lavish expenditure.’ Calonne had no problems with Marie Antoinette, who was enchanted by him (whatever her loyal Mme de Campan may say to the contrary). When the Queen made one of her demands for an enormous sum of ready cash, he replied, ‘If it is possible, Madame, it is already done; if it is impossible it shall be done.’ He levied no new taxes. His method was the same as Necker’s—simply to borrow.

Yet outside matters of finance, Calonne was surprisingly imaginative. He tried to encourage a French industrial revolution on the English model, and—with Louis’s support—suggested to a number of rich noblemen that they invest in mines and factories. But like his master, the Controller-General had no understanding of the way in which Pitt in England was able to dispose of a national debt far larger than the French deficit, by means of a sinking fund.

Two years after Calonne’s appointment, the monarchy was badly shaken by the comic opera affair of the Queen’s necklace. A seedy young adventuress (and occasional prostitute), the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois, had been ‘befriended’ by the Cardinal de Rohan, Prince-Bishop of the fabulously rich see of Strasbourg and Grand Almoner of France. This ornament of the boudoirs was a handsome, womanizing fop in his forties, straight out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose boundless conceit was matched only by his fatuity. His conduct as French ambassador in Vienna had been so scandalous that the Empress Maria Theresa had actually asked for his recall; later, as a friend of Mme du Barry, he had offended the Queen. However, Louis de Rohan had ambitions of becoming a second Richelieu, and was convinced that only Marie Antoinette’s disfavour stood between him and the highest office. Somehow Mme de la Motte persuaded the Cardinal that she had the Queen’s ear; the Countess arranged an ‘interview’, in the park at Versailles on a moonless night, Marie Antoinette being impersonated by a young prostitute from the Palais Royal, dressed in white, who bore a striking resemblance to her and who gave him a rose. Rohan was completely taken in. His pliability was in part due to the influence of the self-styled alchemist, magician and prophet, Count Cagliostro, who had thoroughly bemused this useful patron and had ‘foreseen’ a woman in white transforming the Cardinal’s life.

It was popular gossip that the Queen had been offered a wonderful diamond necklace by her jewellers at an astronomical price. Mme de la Motte informed the Cardinal that the Queen wanted him to buy the necklace for her discreetly—the commission was confirmed by forged letters. With staggering credulity, Rohan fetched the necklace from the jewellers, telling them that they would be paid in due course, and gave it to the Countess to take to Versailles—her husband speedily sold the stones in London. The theft came to light when the jewellers demanded payment from the Queen, and in August 1785 the Cardinal was arrested at Versailles as he was proceeding, vested for Mass, down the Hall of Mirrors to the Chapel Royal.

Next year Mme de la Motte was sentenced to be branded, but Rohan was acquitted by the Parlement of Paris; his acquittal was seen as a slur on the Queen and also as an example of social injustice. Louis, who was furious, banished the Cardinal to the country, thus heaping even more odium on poor Marie Antoinette, who was entirely innocent. (Later Rohan reformed, spending his last years in something very like sanctity.) Popular suspicions about the Queen’s frivolity—and also her spitefulness—deepened. ‘A nice little smear of dirt on both crown and crozier’, commented an ‘Enlightened’ councillor of the Parlement. None the less, the affair helped to forge an alliance between the clergy and the lawyers who had saved the Cardinal. Mme de Campan, a lady-in-waiting whose memoirs are sometimes a little unreliable, spoke the truth when she said that the Affair of the Necklace marked ‘the end of happy times’. Indeed Napoleon actually considered it to be a partial cause of the Revolution.

By 1786 even Calonne had to realize that a policy of pure optimism alone could no longer suffice. There was an annual deficit which he estimated at 112 million livres. He explained to the hapless King, who had no inkling that things were so desperate, that monies borrowed over the last ten years amounted to the then almost incredible sum of 1,250 million livres (well over £ 50 million in English money of the period). But for all his frivolity, the Controller-General could be both clearheaded and courageous. He proposed a programme of radical reform, derived partly from Turgot, which included a land tax from which no one, not even the clergy, would be exempt. Hoping to obtain as much support as possible, he persuaded Louis to call an Assembly of Notables, which met at Versailles in February 1787. It consisted of 144 persons, but had only twenty-seven representatives from the Tiers Etat (or Commons).

Unfortunately, the Notables were already convinced that the deficit was entirely due to the government’s mismanagement and that the solution was to force the King to share his power with the nobility, who would run things properly. Admittedly, of the 400,000 persons of noble birth in France at that time, most were small country gentlemen with minute incomes (in one case as little as £ 26 a year). But they felt as one with Dukes who possessed annual revenues in excess of £ 100,000 in their determination not to pay taxes.

When the Assembly met, the Controller-General addressed it with admirable frankness. Explaining that there was no way of remedying the deficit other than by taxing the privileged orders, he stressed that most of their rights and privileges would be untouched. The Franco-Irish Archbishop Dillon of Narbonne protested, ‘M de Calonne wants to bleed France; and he is asking the Notables’ advice on whether to bleed her in the foot, the arm or the jugular vein.’ The Assembly demanded to see detailed accounts of national expenditure. The debates became bogged down in a welter of recrimination. Calonne, whom overwork had driven to the verge of collapse, forgot his manners for once and told the Notables that the King would introduce the reforms whether they liked them or not. He enraged the Assembly still further by a clumsy attempt to recruit public support, circulating a pamphlet which attacked the privileged orders and their refusal to pay their fair share of taxes; he asked the King to arrest twenty of the more outspoken Notables. Louis thought he had gone mad, lamenting that Vergennes was no longer alive to help him, and he dismissed Calonne at the end of April. Later, when the Notables informed him that the ex-Controller-General had concealed the true magnitude of the deficit, the King smashed a chair in his rage and roared that he should have had him hanged. Nevertheless, when the Parlement attempted to try Calonne, Louis stopped the proceedings. The former minister fled to England, to live in elegant exile.

For a time the King retreated to Versailles. He was so overwhelmed by the problem of the deficit that he spent whole days cursing and weeping. However, the Assembly of Notables was still there, and in a rebellious mood. Eventually Louis chose a new Controller-General. Archbishop Loménie de Brienne was the last ecclesiastical statesman of France. He was a no less colourful figure than Calonne and, like him, had been recommended by the Queen. A true child of the Enlightenment, the Archbishop collected books, works of art and women (he suffered from secondary syphilis). A Deist rather than an atheist, he had no real Christian beliefs and had only entered the Church to restore the fortunes of his ancient but impoverished family.

Although Brienne revised Calonne’s new tax to make it more palatable, his proposals were rejected out of hand by the Notables. He therefore dismissed them and, without much hope, had recourse to the Parlement of Paris, who promptly rejected both a proposed stamp tax and a property tax, and demanded the publication of the national accounts, and—menacingly—the summoning of the States General. In August 1787, perched on the purple velvet cushions of the lit de justice, Louis forced them to register the new taxes, whereupon the Parlementaires declared the taxes illegal; they were banished to Troyes where they continued to demand a States General. The révolte nobilaire dragged on. At one point Philippe d’Orléans told Louis publicly, in his timid, stuttering voice, that he was breaking the law of the land; the Duke was banished to the country, becoming a popular hero. Poor Marie Antoinette, whose extravagances were insignificant compared with those of Orléans, was christened ‘La Reine Déficit’ and hissed at the Opera. In May 1788 Louis XVI copied his grandfather and took away most of the Parlements’ powers, replacing them by forty-seven new courts, together with a plenary court (whose membership was to resemble that of the English House of Lords) for the registration of royal edicts. The King also abolished all remaining use of torture in legal proceedings.

But the deficit remained. Brienne tried desperately to reduce the expenses of the royal household, dismissing half the staff, such as the falconers, selling the wolfhounds and boarhounds, while a number of royal châteaux were sold or demolished to avoid the cost of maintenance, and pensions were slashed. But it was not enough. The Archbishop turned desperately to the Church, as a last resort. In Tocqueville’s view, ‘There has probably never been a clergy more praiseworthy than that of Catholic France just before the Revolution’; but among the few failings which he discerned was ‘an instinctive, sometimes unjustified attachment to the rights of their corporation’. Brienne begged them to pay higher taxes. Their answer was, ‘No, the people of France are not taxable at pleasure.’ The final crisis came in August 1788 when the Archbishop discovered that the treasury was bankrupt. He suspended all payments, raised a little money from floating bonds and appropriated the funds of the Invalides, the Théatre Française and the Opéra. He then resigned, thankfully (for as long as he lived, Brienne could never afterwards speak of his time as Controller-General without shaking).

Meanwhile, the royal authority was breaking down all over France. There had been riots in favour of the Parlements; and very nearly civil war in Grenoble in June, on ‘The Day of the Tiles’, when troops refused to fire on the mob. Louis capitulated. Amid wide rejoicing, he recalled the perennially popular Necker, who swiftly borrowed sufficient funds. The King dissolved the new courts and brought back the Parlements. On 24 September 1788 the Parlement of Paris registered the royal edict that the States General would be summoned in January of the following year.

In every bailiwick and parish solemn little councils met, not only to elect a representative but also to draw up a Cahier des Doléances (List of Grievances). It must be explained that the States General had never been an established legislative assembly; by tradition it was an extraordinary body which the King only summoned in times of crisis or national dissatisfaction. (As recently as the mid-1950s, a large group of French deputies, the Poujadistes, were demanding the calling of a States General.) Its members had always represented the ‘estates’ or classes, rather than the country. Now, however, the Third Estate was determined to speak for the nation as a whole.

The Parlementaires had assumed that the coming assembly would be modelled on that of 1614. But the middle classes insisted furiously that the Tiers Etat must be doubled, to take account of the increased numbers of the bourgeoisie, and that the Three Estates should vote together instead of separately. Their proposals meant that the Tiers Etat would dominate the States General. The Parlementaires rejected these presumptuous demands, and were then amazed to find themselves hooted in the streets—their popularity had vanished overnight. No one had anticipated such a development. Calonne wrote to Louis from London, ‘I was unaware of the degree to which a division had developed between the nobility and the Third Estate in many provinces of the kingdom. I tremble to hear of it.’ Necker supported the Tiers Etat and the King gave way, announcing that their representation would be doubled. Marie Antoinette, who seemed to be learning a little political sense, declared that she was the ‘Queen of the Third Estate’. Alas, Louis’s insistence that the Estates vote separately lost him any support he might have hoped to gain from this concession.

The French Revolution was not a foregone conclusion. It is true, as Tocqueville says, ‘that if it had not taken place the old social structure would still have collapsed everywhere, here sooner, here later, except that it would have continued to crumble piecemeal.’ But by insisting on summoning the States General, the ruling classes had brought about the very thing they had sought to avoid—the loss of their privileges. The Third Estate alone were united, in their determination to secure radical changes; both the clergy and the nobility were divided among themselves; country priests were against the rich prelates, while the little hedge squires from the backwoods resented the great courtier lords and the Parlementaires. The privileged orders had made a revolution of which they were to be the first victims.

The situation was made even more explosive by the economic troubles. For all the new ideas, the country’s economy still depended almost completely on grain production and there was a disastrous harvest in 1788; all the poorer classes, artisans and peasants alike, suffered miserably from a catastrophic rise in the price of bread. The winter of 1788–89 was one of the worst France had ever known. In the countryside brigands roamed unchecked.

Yet in Paris, despite feverish talk of reform and the occasional riot, the atmosphere was one not only of optimism but of gaiety. And the people were as fond of Louis as ever. A German traveller, von Vitzin, who visited France in 1788, wrote that love of monarchy was ingrained in the French—‘the humblest chimney-sweep is enraptured with joy when he sees his sovereign.’ Throughout all the recent storms and troubles Louis had never lost his popularity. In the provinces he was still applauded; at Arras a local notary, M de Robespierre, told people to thank God for their King.

The States General met at Versailles in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs (‘The Hall of Lesser Pleasures’) on the morning of 4 May 1789. In the procession to its opening, the Host was carried before the King, fittingly, for this was to be the last great ceremonial appearance of the most sacred temporal institution in Western Europe. Louis, wearing the purple hat of state, walked under a canopy, followed by the Princes of the Blood. The deputies were led by the 291 members of the First Estate, the clergy, in their robes; after whom walked the 270 deputies of the Second Estate, the nobility, with swords, plumed hats and gold-braided cloaks. The 578 deputies of the Third Estate, the bourgeois, were in ridiculously old-fashioned black suits, a humiliation which made them all the more touchy; at the Mass in the church of Saint-Louis they insisted on occupying the front seats. None the less, a few noblemen had chosen to walk with them, including M d’Orléans and a certain Comte de Mirabeau.

Despite bickering between the three estates, the King was treated with the utmost respect. The hall rang with repeated shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ and clapping, even during his address. Surprisingly, Marie Antoinette was also acclaimed with cries of ‘Vive la Reine!’ which she acknowledged by curtseying to the assembly—redoubled cheers won another, even deeper curtsey.

However, during these crucial days the King and Queen were overwhelmed by a heart-breaking domestic tragedy. The Dauphin Louis-Joseph had been dying since the last months of 1788; his deformed spine protruded, while one lung had been almost destroyed by tuberculosis—Hézecques tells us that by the beginning of 1789 his face had become distorted with pain. A feverishly precocious child, abnormally intelligent for his years, the Dauphin bore his sufferings with touching bravery; he watched the opening procession of the States General from a balcony, lying on a day-bed. When he died in June 1789, Louis collapsed and was in tears for weeks, while Marie Antoinette’s hair went grey. To observe the customary mourning, the court went to Marly. When some representatives of the Third Estate insisted on seeing him and forced their way in, the King muttered, ‘Is there not a father among them?’

Unfortunately, in his broken mood Louis was easily swayed by Artois, who begged him not to abandon the aristocracy. Unlike Louis XIV, nearly everyone whom Louis XVI knew belonged to the nobility or to the higher clergy; even his servants—at any rate, those with whom he came into contact—were gentlemen. The King was not sufficiently ruthless to throw his entire circle of friends and acquaintances to the wolves. Certainly he wanted the nobility to pay taxes, but he had no wish to ruin them. It never entered his head that the monarchy’s only hope was an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

While Louis was away from Versailles the Third Estate seized the initiative. They proclaimed themselves a national Constituent Assembly and persuaded the clergy to join them. When the Salle des Menus Plaisirs was barred to them on 20 June, they met in a tennis court where they took the famous oath not to disperse until France had a new constitution. The King ordered them to end their Assembly and debate separately. They refused. M de Mirabeau, a dissolute idealist who had the makings of a French Charles James Fox, shouted at the youthful official who brought Louis’s order, ‘Monsieur, go and tell your master that we are here by the will of the people and will only leave at the point of the bayonet!’ Some days later the Assembly was joined by a large group of liberal noblemen led by Orléans, who by now had hopes of succeeding his cousin on the throne. Although advised to break it up with troops, the King muttered weakly, ‘Foutre! If they don’t want to go, leave them alone.’ Necker said that he could see nothing against a national Assembly replacing the States General. However, bewildered and undecided, Louis then ordered up 30,000 troops from the provinces to Paris—mainly regiments of foreign mercenaries. On 11 July he dismissed Necker.

Uproar broke out, culminating three days later in the storming of the Bastille, the French Tower of London. (Ironically, Louis had already approved plans for its demolition.) The triumphant mob rampaged through the streets, joined by mutinous troops. The British ambassador, the cricketer Duke of Dorset, reported to his Secretary of State in London, ‘Thus, my Lord, was accomplished the greatest revolution recorded in history, and, relatively speaking, considering the importance of the results, one which has been achieved with very little bloodshed.’ Henceforward, one can only summarize the progress of the French Revolution, concentrating on the unfortunate Louis whenever his head can be seen in the maelstrom.

On 16 July 1789 Artois, the acknowledged leader of the privileged orders, left France, and many great nobles followed him. Necker was hastily recalled from Brussels. Before the month was over the American ambassador, Gouverneur Morris, was reporting to President Washington that the King had lost all authority. A National Guard was formed to protect the Assembly and placed under the command of that popular idol, the Marquis de Lafayette; they adopted a red, white and blue uniform and cockade—red and blue being the colours of Paris, white the colour of the monarchy. Orléans had himself painted in the new tricolour uniform. On 4 August liberal nobles voted enthusiastically for the abolition of their privileges; fuedalism vanished overnight—in theory at any rate. By 26 August the Constituent Assembly had published its Declaration of the Rights of Man (based on the American Declaration), which a historian has called ‘the death certificate of the Ancien Régime’.

Meanwhile there was uproar in the countryside. Unemployment, the soaring price of bread, and general misery had all contributed to ‘The Great Fear of 1789’, triggered off by rumours that the nobility were about to seize Paris and then subdue the rest of the kingdom with an army of mercenaries; the brigands who already roamed France were regarded as their agents. In July and August mobs of panic-stricken peasants took up scythes and muskets to attack manor houses and abbeys; what they were really after were title deeds to their lands, and everywhere archives went up in flames; often the lord of the manor was forced to sign a document renouncing his dues. The Englishman Arthur Young heard in Besançon at the end of July that, ‘Many châteaux have been burnt, others plundered, the seigneurs hunted down like wild beasts, their wives and daughters ravished …’

Many of the Assembly now considered that the revolution had gone quite far enough. A conservative party of monarchiens emerged, who hoped to give back to the King much of his power and to create a limited monarchy with an upper and lower house on the English model. Unfortunately, this only served to bewilder Louis still more. Marie Antoinette persuaded him to summon the reliable Flanders Regiment to Paris, despite Mirabeau’s warnings. The Parisians, already suspicious that a counter-revolutionary plot was brewing, learnt on 2 October that the day before the King’s Bodyguard had given a dinner party for the officers of the Flanders Regiment, drinking loyal toast after loyal toast and singing emotionally Grétry’s poignant aria, O Richard, O mon Roy, l’univers t’abandonne; the King and Queen had paid a brief visit to the party, where they had been cheered wildly. This news was embellished by tales that the health of the French nobility had been drunk and the tricolour cockade trampled underfoot.

Clamour overwhelmed the capital, fanned by a mad and evil journalist, Marat. It was rumoured that the King was about to seize Paris by force, that he was going to dismiss the Assembly; but it was the news of the banquet itself which enraged the women, for there had been a bread famine for months. On 5 October an armed rabble 5,000 strong—mainly women, and some of them well-to-do bourgeoises—set out from Paris to march the ten miles to Versailles; as they marched through the pouring rain they shouted, ‘Bread! Bread!’ or screamed what they would do to Marie Antoinette—‘We’ll cut off her head … rip her heart out … fry her liver … make her guts into ribbons.’ The popular story that Marie Antoinette, when told of the bread famine, had cruelly said, ‘Let them eat cake!’ shows how deeply she was hated by the people.

At Versailles a delegation was allowed in to see the King. Its spokesman, a seventeen-year-old female art student, Louison Chabry, said simply, ‘Bread, Sire’ and then fainted. When she revived Louis kissed her on both cheeks and promised to do something about the famine. But the mob outside remained, throughout the wet night, despite the fact that the palace was patrolled by Lafayette and his National Guard. Early next morning, in Lafayette’s absence, the crowd managed to break in through an unlocked door, killing and then decapitating two of the Bodyguard. Marie Antoinette barely had time to reach the King’s apartments. Luckily Lafayette arrived and calmed the crowd by promising that Louis would speak to them. The King appeared on the balcony, but was too overwrought to say anything. With remarkable bravery the Queen took his place. The crowd, waving their axes and the heads of guardsmen on pikes, howled in derision, but when Lafayette kissed her hand they began to shout, ‘Vive la Reine!’

They also yelled, ‘To Paris! To Paris!’ The minister for the royal household, M de Saint Priest, advised the King to flee to Rouen and raise an army to restore law and order, but Necker told him that such a step would be tantamount to abdication. Accordingly, Louis appeared on the balcony again and said, ‘Mes enfants, you want me to come with you to Paris. I consent, but only on condition that I shall never be parted from my wife and children.’ He also demanded safe conduct for his Bodyguard. Shortly after midday an extraordinary procession set out for the capital, headed by a gloating, uproarious mob, and including the miserable men of the Flanders Regiment and of the Bodyguard who had all been disarmed and now wore the Revolutionary cockade in their hats. The same day the royal family was installed in the Tuileries, which they found dirty and dilapidated, and with only a few sticks of old-fashioned furniture; the Dauphin was frightened by its gloom.

The Assembly was unwise enough to follow the King to Paris, where it found itself at the mercy of the mob. It decided to change Louis’s title—from being ‘by the grace of God King of France and Navarre’, he became ‘by the grace of God and the constitutional law of the state, King of the French’. Daily, crowds flocked to the Tuileries to see their Parisian King and Queen.

Mirabeau, leader of what were now the moderates in the Assembly, submitted a secret memorandum to Louis urging him to flee to Normandy and from there offer the country a workable democratic constitution. (Louis had made his only clever move during the entire Revolution, by offering to pay Mirabeau’s debts in return for his advice.) But Marie Antoinette did not trust Mirabeau, whose pock-marked face—like a diseased lion—and reputation for vice and atheism obscured his very real patriotism and political genius. In any case, the King was determined not to start a civil war. He had read Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and it had impressed him deeply—he was convinced that so long as he did not oppose the revolution by force of arms in the way Charles I had done, everything would turn out right. Ironically, he gave it as his opinion that, ‘The Frenchman is incapable of regicide.’ Such beliefs suited his lethargic nature—he had always hated having to make decisions. And to anyone so politically naive as Louis XVI the situation seemed far from hopeless; he remained extremely popular, and medals and statues of him were still being inscribed ‘Restorer of Liberty’. In February 1790, addressing the Assembly, he declared himself to be King of the Revolution.

Indeed, life at the Tuileries, which had been refurnished, was not so very different from what it had been at Versailles. Count Fersen, visiting Marie Antoinette in February 1792, was staggered by the splendour of her apartments. Though Louis was no longer able to hunt, he went riding in the Bois, unescorted and plainly dressed as befitted a citizen King, where he was sometimes cheered by workmen. His new position as a constitutional monarch was curiously modern. Men like the Comte de Narbonne and the Vicomte de Noailles really believed that the new constitution would work—even Louis himself thought so at times.

The King co-operated with the Assembly throughout 1790. On 14 July, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, there was a great ceremony in the Champs de Mars, which some saw as a revolutionary coronation, a ‘dispelling of Gothick mists’. Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, said Mass (for the last time). Louis made a most successful speech to the huge crowd and then took the Civic Oath: ‘I, the King of the French, do swear and declare that I will use all the powers delegated to me by the constitutional law of the state, to maintain the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.’ Marie Antoinette, watching from a balcony of the Ecole Militaire, lifted up the six-year-old Dauphin to present him to the crowd, who cheered them emotionally. Most people thought that the revolution was over.

Unfortunately, the government, having abolished the traditional taxes, had to look for money elsewhere. On Talleyrand’s advice it seized all church property; henceforward the state would pay the clergy’s stipends. The government insisted that bishops and parish priests must be appointed by the state through the local authorities, and they were now required to swear an oath of obedience to the nation; the vast majority of French churchmen refused to take such an oath, which implicitly denied Papal supremacy, so ‘Down went the old Church of France with all its pomp and wealth’. As a man of rigid religious principles, the King was horrified by the government’s action. He still possessed the veto and refused to accept edicts against non-juring clergy. It was the veto which eventually destroyed him.

The break with Rome did not come until the Pope denounced the oath in April 1791. By then France was hopelessly divided. The lesser nobility, many of whom had been mildly liberal, turned against the Revolution when titles and the traditional law of inheritance were abolished in June 1790. They followed the grands seigneurs into exile, and among them were a large number of army officers and naval men. Many of these émigrés waited in the Rhineland towns just over the frontier, hoping for civil war or armed intervention by the great powers. Marie Antoinette was no longer ‘Madame Déficit’ but ‘Madame Veto’. Frantically she begged her brothers (the Emperors Joseph II, Leopold II and Francis II, who succeeded each other in turn) to invade France and save her. To Artois she wrote despairingly that Louis could not see his danger. At home, the constitutionalists were steadily losing ground to the extremist republicans of the political clubs. In September 1790 even Necker had resigned and fled to Switzerland. The streets rang with that gayest, catchiest and most sinister of all revolutionary songs, Ça Ira. Curiously, it had been composed by Couperin.

Hitherto the King had roundly cursed anyone who spoke to him of flight or of conspiring against the Revolution. But by the autumn of 1790 he had had to realize that in Paris he was a mere prisoner and, after being threatened on a number of occasions, almost at the mercy of the mob. In November he therefore commissioned M de Breteuil to negotiate secretly with foreign courts for help ‘to re-establish my lawful authority and my people’s happiness’. Shortly afterwards, the Assembly bullied him into signing an edict dismissing priests who would not take the oath. Mesdames Tantes, the Princesses Adelaide and Victoire, were sent to take refuge with old Cardinal de Bernis at the French embassy in Rome. Mirabeau, Louis’s one really able adviser, died in March 1791, lamenting that he had unwittingly helped to pull down the monarchy. Paris became more and more suspicious of the King, especially after the flight of his aunts. Jacobin extremists attacked him in the Assembly and in the gutter press. They were not without provocation. Nearly 400 pugnacious noblemen haunted the Tuileries, swaggering and boastful and known as the Chevaliers du Poignard—Knights of the Dagger. Their loose talk gave rise to rumours of conspiracy. One day, when they met at the Palace, they were arrested by a detachment of the National Guard—though only after a pitched battle—and dragged off to prison. Louis was so upset that he took to his bed. His Revolutionary subjects’ worst suspicions were confirmed. At Easter 1791, when the royal family tried to visit Saint-Cloud, they were prevented by a howling mob who seized their horses’ bridles. Louis commented, ‘They want to murder me like Henri IV.’ He realized that he had to get out of Paris at all costs.

The flight to Varennes was one of the worst-organized escape attempts in history. On the night of 20 June 1791 the King disguised in a brown wig, Marie Antoinette swathed in a voluminous black cloak, and the Dauphin dressed as a girl, together with Madame Royale and Louis’s sister Mme Elisabeth, climbed into a small carriage driven by Count Fersen. As soon as they were outside Paris they exchanged it for an enormous green and yellow coach which made disguise superfluous—it even had the royal arms on the door. Most unfortunately, one of the detachments of loyal Hussars who were supposed to meet them en route, failed to make contact. At Varennes the Dragoons were waiting for them on the wrong side of the river. When they arrived there at midnight, the royal family were met by some Hussars, but too few of them. Suddenly the entire party was surrounded by a large and excited detachment of National Guardsmen. Louis, with his almost superstitious dread of shedding French blood, ordered the Hussars not to resist.

The coach and its dejected occupants were driven back to the capital, a melancholy and terrifying journey which took nearly four days, during which they were frequently stoned. When they reached Paris they drove to the Tuileries through silent crowds—placards warned, ‘Whoever cheers the King will be flogged: Whoever boos him will be hanged.’ Soldiers reversed arms as though at a funeral parade. The National Assembly suspended Louis until a committee of investigation reported diplomatically that he had been kidnapped and was therefore innocent. But as Gouverneur Morris, a good friend to the monarchy, reported to President Washington, ‘It would not be surprising if such a dolt as this were to lose his throne.’ Even though the Assembly resisted an outcry for his deposition from Jacobins like Danton and Robespierre, the King was doomed. He had lost his last asset, his popularity.

Even now, however, his situation seemed far from desperate. In July a great anti-monarchist demonstration in the Champs de Mars was broken up by the National Guard, who opened fire and killed over sixty demonstrators; many Jacobin extremists went into hiding, Danton actually fleeing across the Channel. On 3 September 1791 the Constituent Assembly completed its work and introduced a definitive Constitution. The King retained his functions, but had to swear yet another oath, pledging his loyalty to all the provisions of the new Constitution. He did so publicly before the Assembly, with considerable aplomb; while he was taking the oath the Deputies rudely sat down, whereupon Louis sat down himself and continued. In private he was miserably dejected and wept, groaning, ‘It’s all over.’ Marie Antoinette was furious with him. Reading his speech, which had been carefully prepared for him by the Assembly, she cried angrily, ‘That’s hardly the speech of a King deeply resentful of his ill treatment!’ Louis simply shrugged his shoulders. But Paris was en fête—for a second time people thought that the Revolution was over. Poor simple Marie de Lamballe came home to her beloved Queen.

The Constituent Assembly had naively forbidden the reelection of any of its members. As a result, the new Legislative Assembly was far more to the left, though a minority were still convinced supporters of Louis XVI. At once egalitarian debates began as to whether he should still be addressed as Sire and Majesty. Emperor Leopold II and King Frederick William of Prussia had issued a declaration, in August, that it was in the interests of every European sovereign that the King of France should recover all his powers. In November 1791, at the Assembly’s prompting, Louis issued a declaration to the effect that France was ready to fight in defence of its new constitution and laws; he also asked his fellow sovereigns to withdraw their troops from the French borders. In addition, he issued an open letter to his brother Artois, who was busy organizing an émigré army, inviting him to come home. On 20 April 1792 the King went to the Legislative Assembly and asked it to declare war on the new Emperor, Francis II.

Quite rightly, many people suspected Louis of playing a double game. Both he and the Queen believed that a war would be their salvation—6,000 out of 9,000 army officers had left the country and it was reasonable to assume that an undisciplined rabble would be speedily defeated. In fact, his open letter to his brother was a calculated lie—for many months he had been sending money to the émigrés, and to Artois in particular. He had already vetoed laws against them (to confiscate their property and make them liable to the death penalty if ever they returned to France), despite the Assembly’s remonstrances. Ironically, he was now behaving exactly like his bête noire, Charles I, negotiating with both sides.

To begin with, the war went badly for France. A French attack in the Low Countries failed disastrously, largely because the men did not trust their officers. At home the new paper currency of assignats collapsed, resulting in savage inflation and food riots. In the panic, the Assembly began to lose control—on 20 June it was invaded by a savage mob who ordered the deputies to force Louis to sign an edict deporting priests who would not take the oath, and which he had been resisting for over a month.

At the same time, an enraged rabble stormed its way into the Tuileries to force the King to sign the edict. They made him don the red cap of Liberty—they tried to put one on Marie Antoinette but she promptly placed it on the Dauphin. Threatened with a bayonet, the King invited a soldier to feel his heart ‘to see if I’m afraid’. He cheerfully drank from a bottle offered to him, and then appeared on the balcony, wearing his cap; but he none the less remained firm in his refusal to sign the edict. A young gunner officer who was watching outside asked a friend, ‘Why on earth did they let in that scum? If a few hundred had been mown down by cannon, the others would still be running.’ The officer’s name was Captain Bonaparte. Nevertheless, the King’s coolness and amiability impressed the mob, who withdrew, and aroused a certain admiration in most spectators. Moderate men were indignant and Lafayette prepared a counter-attack on the political clubs who had arranged the demonstration, but his plans were deliberately betrayed to the Mayor of Paris on the orders of Marie Antoinette, whose personal dislikes always overruled her judgement. By now the royal palace of the Tuileries had an atmosphere ‘like that of a wrecked ship in a storm’.

On 26 July the Duke of Brunswick, the general commanding the Prussian army, issued a proclamation which threatened that, if the Royal Family were harmed, Paris would be sacked and its inhabitants placed before firing squads; the Duke also announced that he was going to restore Louis XVI to his rightful powers. The French went almost mad with rage. Even moderates began to accuse the King of conspiring with the enemy—with justification Marie Antoinette was suspected of being an Austrian spy who was sending information to her brother the Emperor. The Assembly was inundated with letters and petitions demanding Louis’s deposition.

The Paris Commune, which was now controlled by extremists, carefully organized a final assault on the Tuileries, arming the mob from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and reinforcing it with like-minded National Guardsmen. In the early hours of 10 August they took up their position on the Place du Carrousel, in front of the palace, to the sound of ceaseless drum rolls and accompanied by twelve cannon. The Tuileries were defended by 900 red-coated Swiss Guards, 2,500 National Guardsmen, and 200 noblemen (including gallant old Malesherbes, well over seventy, who had brought his court sword). Unfortunately there was no one to lead them, as the National Guard officer commanding the palace had been lured away and murdered. Louis, as heedless of reality as ever, took a morning stroll in the garden, driving the mob outside the railings into a frenzy. The gates collapsed and the rabble swept in. But the King had already left, just in time, although the Queen wanted him to stay and die—he hoped to defuse the situation by taking refuge at the Manège (the royal riding school) where the Assembly were sitting. Unfortunately he forgot to tell the Swiss to withdraw. They and the armed gentlemen fired steadily into the mob until the courtyard was heaped with dead and dying sans-culottes. The mob had been all but beaten off when a message arrived from Louis ordering the Swiss to lay down their arms; they obeyed, whereupon they were hacked and clubbed to death, their severed heads being thrown into the air to be caught on pike points—over 800 died. Years afterwards Napoleon, who was not exactly a stranger to bloodshed, said that he had never seen such carnage. A few Swiss got away through the gardens, while many of the nobles—including Malesherbes—escaped through secret passages.

After a miserably uncomfortable confinement in the minute writers’ gallery at the Manège, the royal family were temporarily imprisoned in the former monastery of the Feuillants nearby. Louis had been quickly suspended from his functions by the Assembly, whose members were terrified by the mob outside howling ‘Down with the tyrant!’ Finally, the royal family were sent to the grim Tower of the Temple, a thirteenth-century building which until recently had been the headquarters of the Knights of Malta (it had been built by the Knights Templar). The prisoners’ quarters were on two floors, dungeonlike rooms which they found in a filthy, verminous condition and almost without furniture. Louis’s only comment was to remove a pornographic picture hanging on the wall, muttering, ‘I can’t allow such things to be seen by my daughter.’ Soon, however, the rooms were swept out and furnished, humbly but adequately. A single servant, Cléry, the King’s valet, waited on them. The Queen, Mme Elisabeth, the Dauphin and Madame Royale slept on the lower floor, Louis on the floor above. They met at breakfast, in the King’s room which served as a sitting-room, and spent the day together. In the morning Louis, Marie Antoinette and Mme Elisabeth gave lessons to the children—Latin, history, geography and arithmetic—and at one o’clock went for a walk in the grounds before lunching at two. The King slept afterwards and then there was reading aloud. Mme Elisabeth mended their clothes. The food and wine seem to have been excellent and the archivist’s fine library was available—after saying goodnight to his family at nine, Louis always read till midnight. The most unpleasant feature were the guards, two of whom were always in the sitting-room in case of any attempt at escape or to communicate with the outside world.

Outside, the terrified Assembly had dissolved itself and had been succeeded by the Convention, who proclaimed a republic and set about concocting yet another constitution. The Revolution was fighting for its life. Brunswick, having taken Longwy and Verdun, marched on Paris. On 20 November he was halted at Valmy by devastating fire from the French artillery (which was commanded by pre-1789 officers); to the amazement of all Europe, Brunswick withdrew and then began a general retreat. Goethe, who was a spectator at the ‘Cannonade of Valmy’, prophesied that a new era of history had begun. Meanwhile, in Paris the extremists, determined to cow any opposition, had instigated the dreadful ‘September Massacres’, butchering more than 1,200 prisoners in the Paris jails. Although the royal family had no means of knowing what was happening, they were sometimes stoned and screamed at during their walks. One day a mob paraded outside, waving a pike bearing a beautiful blonde head which the Queen suddenly realized was that of her faithful friend, Marie de Lamballe; the sans-culottes tried to storm the Temple but were stopped by an official; a deputation was allowed in, one of them holding a piece of bleeding flesh which he claimed was the heart of Mme de Lamballe—Marie Antoinette fainted. The guards were increasingly insolent, addressing Louis as ‘Capet’. One took particular pleasure in blowing tobacco smoke into the King’s face. Some drew cartoons on the walls, of their prisoners hanging from gibbets—inscribed ‘Louis taking an air bath’ or ‘Marie Antoinette dances’. But others were impressed by the King’s dignity and simplicity—one remarked, ‘A man who loves his children like that cannot have done all the evil that they say.’

The extremists demanded that ‘Citizen Capet’ be tried. Probably a majority of the Convention was against it. But on 20 November François Gamain, the locksmith who had once been a pampered favourite of the King’s, showed the authorities a secret iron safe which he had built for him at the Tuileries; it was opened and found to contain hundreds of documents which revealed that Louis had been subsidizing émigrés and begging foreign powers to invade France and save him. On 11 December he was summoned before the Convention to be accused of treason. His appearance was not helped by his being unshaven (his razors had been confiscated), yet although stripped of the trappings of royalty, his dignity was overwhelming—even Marat observed, ‘If he were not a King I would have said that he was a great man.’ Everyone present was haunted by the recollection of Charles I’s trial. Louis denied all charges and was allowed to choose counsel to defend him. The seventy-two-year-old Malesherbes came to the Temple and requested the honour. The King, in tears, embraced him but warned him that he was risking his neck. ‘Yours is a far greater sacrifice, because you are putting your own life in danger when you cannot even save mine.’ Louis had no doubt as to the verdict and made his will. During his trial he was not allowed to see his family—for Louis an almost unbearable hardship.

The Jacobins, whipped up by Marat, bullied the Convention into deciding both guilt and sentence by a public vote. The Girondins, republicans but not murderers, tried to save the King by vainly demanding a referendum—it was refused, as the extremists knew that the country would acquit him. Tom Paine, the English revolutionary, proposed that the King be exiled to America. But fanatics howled for Louis’s head, referring to him as ‘that fat pig who cost us so much’ or ‘the snoring rhinoceros’. Yet even the most savage Jacobin was shocked by the behaviour of Orléans—now known as Citizen Philippe Egalité—who voted for his cousin’s death (probably, like many others, he did so to save his own life). However, although a large majority found Louis guilty of conspiring against the state, a much smaller majority voted for execution—a single vote less, and he would have been saved. Malesherbes brought the verdict to Louis, falling at his feet. After comforting Malesherbes, the King told his valet to fetch a volume of history containing an account of the execution of Charles I. What hurt the simple creature most was that Orléans had voted for his death. The order for Capet’s execution was issued on 19 January. Even the ferocious Carnot, the architect of the republic’s victories, wept when he signed the death-warrant.

On Sunday 20 January 1793 a deputation called at the Temple to inform the King that he was to be executed within twenty-four hours. They refused his request for the sentence to be deferred for three days so that he could prepare his soul, but agreed to send him a non-juring priest. After a last evening with his family, he said goodbye. Marie Antoinette wanted to spend the night with him but he refused, promising to see everyone in the morning. They all insisted, ‘You promise!’ ‘Yes, I promise.’ The priest, the Franco-Irish Abbé Edgeworth, had supper with Louis who ate an excellent meal and then slept soundly.

Drums and trumpets sounded continuously throughout Paris from five am. The King’s first words on waking were to ask Cléry to draw the curtains. ‘I need daylight—yesterday’s business tired me.’ After having his hair dressed so that his neck would be ready for the guillotine, Louis heard Mass and communicated. Making what possessions remained to him into small parcels, and asking Cléry to give his wedding-ring to Marie Antoinette, he told the valet, ‘Tell the Queen, and my dear sister and my beloved children that I beg their pardon for not having allowed them to come upstairs—I wanted to spare them the pain of a cruel parting.’ At eight-thirty am Louis, wearing a black cocked hat and a brown overcoat, and the Abbé Edgeworth were driven in the Mayor of Paris’s carriage to the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde). The square was packed with 20,000 troops, though the streets were deserted. On the way, the King read the Psalms from Edgeworth’s breviary. When they arrived drums rolled, and as he climbed the steps of the scaffold the King shouted to the drummers, ‘Keep quiet!’—they ceased. He loosened his shirt, taking off his cravat with an almost unnatural calm. He demurred a little when the executioners wanted to tie his hands, but then agreed. As he was about to lie on the board beneath the knife he cried, ‘Frenchmen, I die innocent!’ The drums began to roll. His last words were, ‘May my blood strengthen the happiness of the Fr …’ As the knife fell, the Abbé Edgeworth prayed aloud, ‘Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.’

However weak and indecisive Louis XVI may have been, no more honourable or decent man ever sat upon a throne. He could have escaped his fate many times over, if he had not been so determined to avoid shedding his people’s blood. Ernest Renan saw his killing as self-murder, ‘the suicide of France’.

‘The Child in the Temple’

LOUIS XVII (1793–1795)

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‘Always alone—my mother stays in the other tower’

There is no episode in French history more painful than the ‘reign’ of Louis XVII. These two years, the last of his short life, were years of utter misery; the boy who had been born to the highest position in the world was systematically brutalized and degraded, and then deliberately neglected until he died. None the less, for a moment at least he knew that he was King of France when, after his father’s execution, his mother knelt before him in homage.

Louis XVII—Louis-Charles—was born at Versailles on Holy Saturday 1785, and at once created Duc de Normandie. Marie Antoinette first learnt his sex when the child was shown to her wearing the cordon bleu of the Saint-Esprit—the traditional way of informing a Queen that she had given birth to a Son of France. In contrast to his brother, the Dauphin Louis-Joseph, he began life as a healthy, lively boy, soon very talkative, with striking, somewhat girlish good looks, set off by his long fair hair, but marred (according to contemporaries) by excessively thick lips—though these are not apparent in the many beautiful portraits of him. Hézecques tells us that he was a noticeably sweet-natured child. He was only four when he succeeded his brother as Dauphin, too young to realize his new importance. In a letter, written in that sad summer of 1789, Marie Antoinette says that though healthy he is much too nervous—‘the slightest unusual noise has an extraordinary effect on him.’ He had to have as much fresh air as possible; fortunately he loved flowers and gardening. The Queen herself read him Perrault’s fairy tales and La Fontaine’s fables. She noticed with concern that her son was bad at his lessons, owing to lack of application rather than stupidity. However, she was satisfied that he had the best governess possible in Yolande de Polignac.

Louis-Charles could remember little of the early days of the Revolution. He was obviously upset by the dreadful leave-taking of Versailles in October 1789; when the harridans screamed threats at the Queen on the way to Paris, he put his head out of the coach window and begged ‘Forgive Mummy’ (Grace pour Maman). Although his first sight of the Tuileries, dusty and unfurnished, frightened him, he became happy enough there, and enjoyed playing in the palace gardens wearing the red, white and blue uniform of the National Guard. In July 1790 1,500 Bretons marched up to Paris to swear loyalty to the King. After Louis XVI had embraced their leader, the entire contingent was taken to see the Dauphin who was picking flowers on the terrace of the Tuileries. ‘The pretty boy gave a flower as long as they lasted to every Breton’, says an English eye-witness, ‘and then gathered lilac leaves, and for fear they should not last, tore them in two, and gave half a leaf apiece to the rest.’

Probably his first lasting moment of fear was the flight to Varennes; having fallen asleep after leaving the Tuileries, he said later that he woke up on the way out of Paris, terrified and convinced that ‘someone was coming to murder him’. Such a timid, sensitive child was horribly scared by the hostile demonstrations—the shouting and the stoning—and by his parents’ dejection on the miserable drive back.

Louis-Charles’s last year at the Tuileries must have been a time of constant terror, not only when the mob stormed into the palace on 20 June 1791, and made him wear the red cap of Liberty, but each day and every day. Though his mother and father did their best to conceal their own fear from him, he must have sensed the savage hostility of the mob outside the railings. According to Mme de Tourzel, one of his governesses, the Prince Royal (as he was called by the new Constitution) was obviously aware of his parents’ alarm, however much they tried to hide it. After the mob’s invasion of the Tuileries in June 1792, the royal family dared not set foot outside the palace, and Louis-Charles was even banished from his beloved gardens; when his mother attempted to take him for a walk there, there was nearly a riot by the red-capped sans-culottes, who screamed threats and insults at them through the railings and howled Ça Ira. During the flight from the palace to the Manège his parents kept the full horror of their situation from him, and mercifully he dozed throughout much of the ordeal in the minute writers’ box.

The months in the Temple with his father and mother were probably happy enough for Louis-Charles. Admittedly, the contrast between palatial luxury and the Tower’s rough furniture—some of which can still be seen at the Musée Carnavalet—must have come as a shock, but at least his parents were able to spend more time with him. They were invariably soothing and reassuring, despite the guards’ provocation. The King and Queen did not even show emotion when the commissioners came to tell them that the monarchy had been abolished, though the boy realized that secretly they were very distressed, and he learnt to fear the constant visits by committees from the Convention. Cléry, that heroic valet, was deeply impressed by the child’s sweet nature and attempts to comfort his parents. Naturally quick and intelligent, he learnt to live with the insolent guards, to recognize which of them was biddable or at any rate not a nuisance; on one occasion he reported to his father, as a good sign, that a guard was reading Tacitus.

When Louis XVI knew that he had been condemned to death, he told the Dauphin never to forget his Catholic faith and never to take vengeance upon regicides, raising the boy’s hand into the air to give more solemnity to the oath. Louis-Charles tried, unsuccessfully, to run out of the Temple, with a touching little plan of begging the soldiers to save his father. While the cannon roared to celebrate the execution and the royal prisoners were all in tears, Marie Antoinette (it is said) knelt solemnly before her son and acknowledged him as King. Almost certainly the majority of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen joined with her in spirit. Only extremists wanted the First Republic—everyone else was heartily sick of the bloodshed and anarchy, the soaring inflation, the revolutionary wars at home and abroad.

The prisoners were guarded with the utmost vigilance. One plan to escape—in which Louis was to have been hidden in a laundry-basket—was betrayed; another was foiled by sheer accident. For a time General Dumouriez who commanded the republican armies in the Low Countries, intended to march on Paris and enthrone Louis XVII, but he was defeated by the Austrians at Neerwinden in the spring, and deserted. In March 1793 the royalists rose in the Vendée where, led by the Marquis de Rochejacquelein, the pious peasants—the dreaded Chouans, so called from their hooting like owls when signalling—waged a bestial little war on the Godless government. Other risings were to follow—at Caen, Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles. The French would soon be at each other’s throats, White (royalist) against Blue (democrat). The newly-formed Committee of Public Safety (the ten extremists who terrorized the Convention and formed the country’s real government) regarded Louis as the greatest internal danger—he was the focal point of every counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Even the crazy Hébert, whose extremism had degenerated into mania, had to admit that, ‘For royalists and moderates the King never dies—he is in the Temple.’ It was also obvious that his mother and aunt had every intention of escaping and of taking him with them. The last straw came in June 1793 when it was discovered, just in time, that the Franco-Irish General Dillon had been plotting a coup d’état to dismiss the Convention at the point of the bayonet and proclaim Louis XVII.

Accordingly on the night of 3 July 1793 six commissioners—mostly Paris tradesmen—suddenly arrived at the Temple and burst in on the Queen who was quietly sewing by the side of her sleeping son. They announced brusquely that ‘Capet’s son is to be separated from his mother and family’. For an hour Marie Antoinette clutched Louis, who was weeping hysterically, imploring and beseeching the men to have mercy, but her prayers were in vain. At last she dressed the sobbing child, telling him to go with the men but never to forget how much she loved him. As they dragged him away, the King of France and Navarre screamed piteously.

In place of his mother Louis XVII now had a ‘tutor’, a Member of the Paris Commune, Antoine Simon. This successor to the grand seigneur Governors of the Bourbon child monarchs was a failed cobbler of nearly sixty, from the Paris back streets, who was living off the savings of his charwoman wife. Illiterate—he could neither read nor write—dirty, foul-mouthed and evil-tempered, Simon had been chosen deliberately as being best qualified ‘to turn an aristocrat into a democrat’. Though it has sometimes been questioned, there is no reason to doubt the traditional assessment of Simon. The child cried for two days and two nights, refusing to eat and begging to be taken back to his mother; eventually he grew too frightened to weep. The old cobbler quickly taught the boy, who was only eight and naturally trusting, to sing popular revolutionary songs like the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole, and to swear, and made him wear the red bonnet of a sans-culotte. Meanwhile his distraught mother, who could hear him crying in the room below, stayed at her window for hours on end in the hope of catching a glimpse of him when he went to play in the garden. Later, she said, ‘Nothing can hurt me any more.’

Simon was frequently drunk, and made Louis drink till he was tipsy too, although wine nauseated the boy. From her own room his horrified sister heard her brother’s shrill treble echoing the old man’s hoarse voice in bawdy catches. The cobbler made the King of France fetch and carry for him, cursing and shouting at him, and beating him especially when drunk. Hébert seems to have instructed Simon to degrade the boy physically—the old man taught him to masturbate, damaging one of his testicles in the process. Probably he was also instructed to bring prostitutes into his room, who, it was hoped—although he was too small to have intercourse with them—might infect him with the pox (this instruction does not seem to have been carried out). Every effort was made to terrify Louis, Simon bellowing that he would send him to the guillotine. Such treatment soon had an appalling effect on the sensitive little boy. Only a few weeks after being dragged from his mother, referring to his relatives in the room above him, he was heard to yell, ‘Foutre, haven’t those damned whores been guillotined yet?’

By the summer of 1793 the Austrians and Prussians were beginning to capture French frontier towns, while the English occupied Toulon and the Spaniards invaded Roussillon. Within France, royalist risings were going from strength to strength—even the Protestant mountaineers of the Cévennes rose for the lily banner of the Kings who had treated them so ill. Only the most savage measures sustained the tottering Republic, the guillotine crashing down monotonously. Robespierre and Carnot saved their Revolution in an orgy of French blood. Scapegoats were needed, the most sensational possible, and the Austrian bitch was the obvious candidate. The Committee of Public Safety wished to humiliate her as well as to destroy her.

On 6 October Hébert and a commission visited the Temple to obtain ‘evidence’ from ‘Capet’. Louis signed statements, obviously drafted by Hébert, accusing his mother of counter-revolutionary activities, and of deliberately teaching him to masturbate for her amusement. Madame Royale was brought down to confirm the statements, which her brother repeated—he even accused her of not telling the truth. Weeping with indignation, the girl was removed to make way for Mme Elisabeth, to whom poor Louis again repeated his ‘statements’. Her comment was ‘Oh! he monstre!’ But one of those present said that she was prompted by astonishment rather than revulsion, and that it was quite obvious that her nephew was repeating word for word a lesson which he did not understand.

His poor, proud, silly mother, prematurely aged—white-haired and half-blind—died magnificently on 16 October 1793. At her trial—she was indicted as ‘the scourge and bloodsucker of France’—Hébert’s disgusting allegations prompted the fine reply, ‘I appeal to all mothers here today.’ Shouts of feminine support from the gallery so alarmed Robespierre that he muttered, ‘The fool. He will save the woman yet!’ Unlike her husband, the ‘Widow Capet’ was taken to the guillotine in an open tumbril like a dung-cart. On the scaffold her courage was sublime; although nearly fainting, she showed not the slightest trace of fear—she even apologized to the headsman for treading on his foot. Napoleon described Marie Antoinette’s killing as ‘something even worse than regicide’, and the splendour of her bearing throughout her trial and execution, and the countless humiliations which accompanied them, disenchanted many of her former enemies with their new masters. For reasons of policy or from sheer indifference—one cannot believe from humanity—her death was kept a secret from her son, who for the rest of his short life always believed that she was somewhere in the Temple.

Thousands perished in the Terror, royalists like gallant old Malesherbes and his daughter and his grandchildren, together with republicans like André Chénier and Mme Roland—who had once proclaimed, ‘We can only be reborn through blood’—and even the maniac Hébert. Some of the worst excesses took place in the provinces—at Nantes 2,000 enemies of the state were systematically drowned. Other casualties were the regicide Philippe Egalité—characteristically, his speech from the scaffold was ‘one short, obscene word’—and Mme du Barry. On her way to the guillotine, jolting over the cobbles in her tumbril, la du Barry howled and shrieked, imploring a horrified crowd for mercy; observers thought that if the French aristocracy had behaved like her—instead of maintaining a silent, icy, dignity—the Terror could never have taken place. As it was, in May 1794 Louis’s aunt, Mme Elisabeth, was accused of ‘planning to massacre the people, to make away with freedom and restore tyranny’; after the execution her headless body was thrown naked into a common grave. Now only Louis’s sister remained in the Temple, though he never saw her again.

Everything associated with the monarchy had been demolished. Street names had been changed, statues pulled down. Saint-Denis, the most sacred shrine of French royalty, had been sacked in August 1793; the tombs of the Kings were broken open and their remains dragged out and thrown into a limepit—their embalmed hearts were sold as curiosities (years later the painter Saint-Martin returned those of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, practically undamaged, to Louis XVIII). The phial containing the coronation chrism was smashed—nobody noticed a monk in plain clothes stealing away with several drops on a shard of the shattered sainte ampoule. But for all the tearing down, the Convention could never forget that there was still a King of France in the Temple.

For the last months of 1793 Louis remained with the Simons, who seem to have grown quite fond of him; the old man had a pigeon loft built for him and even had a toy singing canary, which he had found, repaired and installed in the boy’s room. Some of the better-natured guards used to play draughts and bowls with him. When they were drunk, it was a different story; on one occasion they were found throwing ‘Capet’ round the room, and blowing smoke into his face, while Simon kept on pulling his long hair and threatening to kill him because he refused to sing yet another filthy song. Later, old Mme Simon too admitted that she had hit the child on a number of occasions. But in January 1794 the Simons decided that the job entailed too much responsibility and resigned their post.

In the months to come, Louis may even have missed the dirty old cobbler’s company. For the Committee of Public Safety decided that more extreme measures were necessary to guard against ‘Charles Capet’s’ escape—people among the Paris mob could be heard referring to ‘The King’ or to ‘Louis XVII’. Accordingly, a guard of four commissioners was appointed, to be relieved daily. There is no detailed account of what took place during the following months, but it seems that orders were given for the boy to be literally walled up on 19 January; apparently his door was nailed to the frame and further secured by great iron plates; his food was pushed in to him on a turn-box inserted in the door, while a small grating at the top of the door enabled the guards to peer in to see if he was still alive. No lamps or candles were allowed, a particularly cruel order as the one window was nailed and shuttered and the child was terrified of the dark—partly because of the rats which constantly scurried across the floor, and under, and sometimes over, his bed. Nobody entered that dark, airless room for six months, an eternity for an eight-year-old, and nobody spoke to him—except occasionally to shout at him through the grating.

In May 1794 Robespierre came to inspect Madame Royale, and it is more than likely that he peered through the grating at the dim form of his rightful King. The Princess, a spirited fifteen-year-old, had obviously learnt something of her brother’s condition from the guards, and remembered that when she had last seen him the previous October he had seemed unhealthily fat; the man who passed him his food through the turn-box said that he had to shout through the grill to make the boy realize that it was there. She handed a note to ‘the Sea-Green Incorruptible’, demanding that a doctor should see her brother. Naturally, the enemy of tyrants ignored her request.

On 27 July 1794 Robespierre was deposed, to be beheaded shortly afterwards in circumstances of great agony and humiliation. (He fell because practically the entire Convention went in fear of their lives.) Next day the ci-devant Vicomte de Barras, who had organized the coup, visited Louis at the Temple. We know what he found from a report by later visitors. The room was almost unimaginably filthy and foul-smelling; the King of France had had no means of washing and lay in his excrement on a urine-soaked invalid’s cradle, covered with bugs and lice, surrounded by the rotting remains of uneaten food which the rats gnawed at will. At first Barras thought that the nightmare apparition with matted hair and huge finger-nails was asleep, but then he saw that it had woken and was watching him. Attempts to make Louis get up from his bed of filth failed—if picked up he collapsed as soon as he was released. In response to questions, he said he had no complaints about his guards. The guards told Barras that the child ate nothing and did not even seem to sleep much.

Barras, horrified, gave orders that Louis should receive medical attention at once and that the revolting room should be washed down immediately. He also recommended that he should be allowed to play in the garden with his sister, and that two women should be appointed to look after him. The Convention ignored his recommendations. Admittedly a new guardian, a young Creole ‘democrat’ from Martinique called Christophe Laurent, was appointed. But for a further two months, during the heat of summer, the child remained immured with his filth and his misery.

At last, on 1 September 1794, Laurent and two assistants unbarred the door. Asked why he had not eaten—there was an untouched meal on the table—Louis replied simply that he wanted to die. He was carried out and brought into another room, where he was bathed and deloused, and then a doctor saw him. He realized at once that the child was seriously ill, covered in sores and tumours—a skin condition made it torment for him to remove his breeches.

Louis’s room was cleaned out and he was given toys, cards and writing materials, and taken each day to the top of the Tower for a breath of fresh air. One day he picked some flowers growing on the battlements and dropped them outside a door on the way down; it was the door of his mother’s old room and he may have remembered how he had once brought her flowers from his own garden at the Tuileries—obviously he thought she was still there.

But the improvement was very slight. He was still not allowed to play in the garden, not to see his sister and not to have a light at night (although the guards managed to kill the rats in his bedroom, with arsenic). However, in November Laurent acquired a more agreeable, if somewhat ineffectual assistant, one Gomin, who was timid but imaginative. He brought Louis flowers and even a lamp, and took him into another room. It was some weeks before the child trusted him sufficiently to speak. Suddenly Louis said, ‘You’re the man who gave me the flowers—I haven’t forgotten.’

Just before Christmas 1794 commissioners again came to inspect the prisoner, whom certain members of the Convention had recently been referring to as ‘a rallying point for aristocrats’—and also as ‘the Capet foetus’. The commissioners’ leader, Harmand, described the visit twenty years later (some months before he himself died of want and starvation). They found the King in a bare, scantily-furnished, but clean, set of rooms, playing with a pack of cards. Louis, dressed in a neat, slate-coloured sailor suit, looked extraordinary, with thin elongated limbs, a disproportionately small torso and chest, and curiously rounded shoulders, though ‘the head was very handsome, with long fine hair which was well kept and light brown in colour’. Harmand found livid swellings on his arms and legs, which he attributed to rickets. What struck him most, however, was the child’s refusal to speak or to answer questions, almost as though deaf and dumb; he did not even respond to offers of toys and sweets. Harmand was also shocked by the royal diet—a coarse bowl of blackish soup, some equally black beef, a platter of lentils, half a dozen burnt chestnuts, and no wine. He ordered grapes for the prisoner, who ate them without saying a word.

In January 1795 ‘Capet’ had the honour of being the subject of a debate by the Convention, who discussed whether he and his sister should be exiled or remain in prison. A lawyer called Cambacères argued that ‘the exile of a tyrant has always been the first step in his return to power’, and cited the case of Tarquin and the Romans. The Convention voted to keep the children in prison. The only power which tried to save them was Spain; to his eternal honour, Charles IV—otherwise a pitiful degenerate, and immortalized as such by Goya—insisted on the release of his young cousins as a pre-requisite condition for any peace between the two countries.

Gomin knew something of what the ‘tyrant’ suffered. When the guard told yet another commissioner that Louis was ill, the man replied, ‘There are many children worth just as much as he, who are far iller—and many of the ones who die are worth a good deal more.’ Gomin remembered that the prisoner repeated the words to himself. Another commissioner told Gomin in front of Louis, ‘In six weeks time that child will either be an idiot or dead.’

His health worsened—tumours appeared on his knees and elbows which made any movement an agony. Ironically he was suffering from the King’s Evil, a tuberculosis which sometimes attacks the bones as well as the lymph glands. Gomin did his best, bringing the child toys, playing draughts with him and fetching books from the Temple library for him to read. One evening he looked beseechingly at Gomin, whom he obviously thought understood him, and then looked at the door. ‘Let me see her once before I die,’ he begged. Gomin had not the heart to tell him that his mother was dead; he said awkwardly that it was impossible, whereupon the prisoner cried piteously.

Indeed by now there was no hope for King Louis XVII. On 16 March 1795 a royalist agent, M de Frotté, wrote to an adventurous Irishwoman, Lady Atkyns (who had wild dreams of rescuing ‘the King’) to tell her what he had heard from a member of the Convention: ‘Under Robespierre they so debased the unfortunate child, physically and morally, that he cannot live … you have no idea of the degeneration and brutishness of the little creature.’ If Louis was far from brutish, it was none the less true that his health was broken—he was increasingly attacked by fevers.

Laurent left the Temple that March, to be replaced by Etienne Lasne, a house-painter who had once been a soldier and had seen Louis at the Tuileries. A tough but kind-hearted character, the old soldier tried to make the boy as comfortable as possible, cleaning out his room meticulously. Accompanied by Gomin on the violin, he sang to him—sometimes marching songs of the royal guard, which they hoped the boy might remember—played cards with him and read to him. When Louis grew too weak to climb the stairs, Lasne would carry him to the top of the Tower where he could breathe fresher air.

At the beginning of May 1795, a tradesman managed to catch a glimpse of Louis XVII at the Temple, his face covered with ulcers and pimples, his body weirdly deformed—‘the most pitiable creature that ever was seen’—and barely able to sit up. It was plain that he was seriously ill and from 6 May doctors, supervised by commissioners, made regular visits, prescribing medicine and diet. Once, when the doctor was about to leave, Louis clung to him and—referring to the commissioners—begged, ‘Don’t leave me alone with those wicked men!’

He was growing weaker every day. Moved to a room which overlooked the Temple garden, he was barely able to look out of the window at the summer. Lasne and Gomin, who were really a very decent pair, did their best to cheer him, and Gomin brought him flowers assiduously. Then, on 6 June, Louis fainted and his guards suspected that he was failing. On the evening of 7 June, Gomin found him crying; asked if he was in pain, the prisoner sobbed, ‘Toujours seul—ma mère est restée dans l’autre tour.’ He died during the night of 7–8 June 1795, with his arms round Lasne’s neck. He was ten years old. He was buried secretly, by night, in a common grave at the cemetery of the church of Sainte-Marguerite; it is probable that the sexton later re-buried his remains nearer the church wall.

Many attempts were made to show that Louis XVII did not die in the Temple, and more than thirty claimants have tried to prove that they were Louis, or one of his descendants. Admittedly, the silent, rickety little wreck of 1795 bore small resemblance to the talkative, charming, intelligent child of 1793; and there may well have been a plot to rescue him, to substitute a deaf and dumb inmate of the Invalides hospital in his place. But all the evidence supports the traditional—and generally accepted—belief that the boy who died in the Temple was indeed Louis XVII.

Few will disagree with the Comte d’Hézecques’s opinion that the little King had been given ‘a course of poison more horrible and protracted than any dose of laudanum’. The Count adds, ‘The saddest thing for France is that every member of the Convention was responsible for the infamy of his long martyrdom.’

‘Tartuffe’

LOUIS XVIII (1795–1824)

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‘Unite—and forget’

The Bourbons did not die with the Ancien Régime. One of the least known of French Kings, Louis XVIII was also one of the ablest. Had he succeeded to the throne before his elder brother, Louis XVI, this unpleasant but interesting man might well have saved the monarchy.

Louis-Stanislas was born at Versailles on 17 November 1755, the fourth son of the Dauphin Louis, and given the ancient title of Comte de Provence. Like his brothers, his education was entrusted to the pious Duc de Vauguyon, whose repressive regime may have been responsible for his lukewarm attitude towards religion. From a very early age he showed unusual intelligence, aided by a phenomenal memory. Delicate, with deformed hips which made it difficult for him to ride a horse, he was studious and developed a taste for history and literature which lasted throughout his life. He particularly enjoyed Voltaire, and the writings of the Encyclopédistes. Naturally malicious, he was apt to sneer at his clumsy brother, Berry (the future Louis XVI), who was only a year older, mocking his bad grammar—‘A Prince should at least know his own language.’

Berry gave him a revealing nickname—Tartuffe. This is the title-role of one of Molière’s greatest plays, a study of a sanctimonious hypocrite who covets both his benefactor’s wife and his benefactor’s goods. As a Voltairean, Louis-Stanislas was not exactly sanctimonious, while he was to be a very restrained adulterer (at any rate by the standards of his brother Artois, or of his grandfather). But in secret he always coveted his brother’s crown, and undoubtedly he resembled Tartuffe in his cynicism and cunning, in his cruel wit and in his icy selfishness. Probably the quality which most of all prompted his unenviable nickname was his false bonhommie.

When Berry ascended the throne in 1774, Louis-Stanislas was given the traditional style of Monsieur Frère du Roi. He was Heir Presumptive until the birth of the Dauphin Louis-Joseph in 1781, and no one was ever more conscious of the majesty of the French monarchy than Monsieur. Although only eighteen, he remonstrated angrily with his brother when he brought back the Parlements in 1774; ‘France will soon have republican senators like those in Genoa, Venice or Berne and the King will be nothing more than a Doge.’ But his brother told him that they were both too young to rely on their own judgement. Indeed, as a young man Monsieur was a thorough-going reactionary in every way. He voted against Turgot’s Six Edicts and, while delighting in them himself, urged the King to suppress any works of the Encyclopédistes which might encourage sedition. He regarded the American Revolution as ‘a punishable rebellion’.

Monsieur enjoyed pomp and circumstance. Despite his inability to ride, he kept one of the largest stables in France and his regiment of Carabineers was superbly mounted. As Grand Master of the Knights of St Lazarus, he restricted membership of that ancient hospitaller order to great noblemen. Everything about him was designed to enhance his pride and ostentation. Short, fat and swarthy, he overdressed in diamond-studded suits, and adopted a repellently haughty manner. Yet a gouache of Monsieur in his early twenties, by Moitte, shows a surprisingly attractive face, with the Bourbon nose but an amused grin.

The birth of Louis XVI’s first child in 1778, Madame Royale, was a bitter blow to Monsieur. At the christening, when Cardinal Rohan asked what names would be given to the child, he was heard to mutter, ‘But the first thing is to know who are the father and mother’; later, he seems to have tried to imply that the father was Artois. The birth of a Dauphin in 1781 must have been even more galling.

Monsieur had himself married in 1772, when he was only fifteen, but, despite boasting how he would outdo his brother, failed to beget children; it was rumoured that his impotency drove his wife to drink, though in fact he only became impotent much later in life. ‘Madame’ was Maria Giuseppina of Savoy, daughter of the King of Sardinia. She was small, dark, ugly, insignificant, and bad-tempered, coarse-natured, and dirty in her person—Louis XV begged her parents to persuade her to wash her neck and clean her teeth. Mme de Campan says that the only thing worth mentioning about her was a ‘pair of tolerably fine eyes’. Madame’s favourite occupation was catching thrushes in nets and having them made into soup. (Monsieur was fond of food too, but with more elegance—he created a dish which consisted of a partridge stuffed with an ortolan, which in turn was stuffed with foie gras.) Their flat was in the left wing at Versailles on the side near the Orangery, Monsieur and Madame occupying separate floors.

Monsieur became a patron of literature, supporting a whole host of writers at his palace of the Luxembourg. He earned himself a name for wit and bon mots—it was he who coined the aphorism ‘Punctuality is the politeness of Princes’. He wrote elegant light verse, ferocious political satire and libretti for two operas—La Caravane du Caire and Panurge dans l’Ile des Lanternes. Some of his verse he sent under assumed names to the Mercure and other newspapers. He read voraciously, his letters being filled with quotations ranging from Virgil to Voltaire.

When Emperor Joseph II paid his famous visit to Paris in 1778, he reported to his mother that Monsieur was ‘an inscrutable creature, better-looking than the King, but mortally cold’. None the less, Louis-Stanislas got on well enough with Marie Antoinette—his sly jokes made her laugh; Mme de Campan says that the fête which he gave for the Queen at his château of Brunoy was the most magnificent ever given to her, a combination of masque and tournament.

Monsieur constantly intrigued against the government, writing numerous and often savage pamphlets. One described Turgot as ‘a despot’ and Louis XVI as ‘the leading dummy in the kingdom’. He printed and circulated Necker’s secret memorandum, a ruse which led to the minister’s downfall (Necker had incurred his enmity by refusing to pay him a million livres which Louis-Stanislas claimed had been left to him by his parents). During the Assembly of Notables he presided over one of its committees and opposed most of Calonne’s reforms.

Somewhat surprisingly in view of his ugliness, timidity and ill-defined sexuality, Louis-Stanislas acquired a glittering young mistress, the high-spirited Mme de Balbi, who was one of Madame’s ladies. Anne-Jacobé Caumont La Force had been born in 1759, the daughter of a distinguished member of Monsieur’s household. Admired by all for her elegance and dashing appearance, she married the Comte de Balbi, grandson of a Genoese Doge, but he turned out to be insane; in 1780 violent behaviour culminated in his beating his wife with his cane after finding her en galanterie, and he was confined in a madhouse (some said with Monsieur’s connivance). What appealed to Louis-Stanislas about la Balbi was not so much her physical charms, and certainly not her promiscuity, as her literary tastes and mordant wit; though it is likely that they slept together, for at this date he was not yet impotent. He installed her in a flat above his own at Versailles, Madame continuing to live below. In Paris Anne-Jacobé held court at the Petit Luxembourg, where she entertained the literary men whose company her lover enjoyed so much. Her extravagance on clothes, jewellery and gambling reached such heights that Monsieur soon found himself in serious financial difficulty.

Hézecques, who obviously disliked him intensely, gives an unflattering portrait of Monsieur in the late 1780s and early 1790s. ‘Monsieur was very fat, but it was not the fatness which goes with strength and vigour, like Louis XVI. He had an unhealthy constitution and even as a boy took medicine to help his circulation and cure fits of giddiness, and this unhealthiness was made worse by lack of exercise…. No Prince was ever more ungainly than Monsieur; he had the waddle of the Bourbons in its most extreme form and all his fine clothes could not conceal his bad figure.’

Louis-Stanislas’s real calibre first appeared after the decision to summon the States General. He encouraged the King to agree to double the Third Estate; in his brother’s place he would have extracted the maximum popularity from such a concession. He saw no purpose in leaving Paris in 1789 and persuaded Louis XVI not to abandon his capital; only with hindsight does this advice appear disastrous; at the time, it seemed sound sense. Nor was he shaken by the storming of Versailles or by being dragged to the Tuileries in the King’s wake in October 1789.

By 1790, however, Louis-Stanislas was having second thoughts. The Marquis de Favras, a professional adventurer and mercenary soldier, proposed rescuing the King and taking him to Péronne on the frontier; it seems, though there is no proof, that Monsieur borrowed two million livres to finance the operation. But Favras was denounced by a fellow plotter; it was rumoured that he had meant to raise 30,000 men and assassinate Lafayette. He was hanged but luckily incriminated none of the Royal Family.

Monsieur far preferred the idea of being a constitutional monarch to having no throne at all. He would have had no qualms about taking Louis XVI’s place on the throne. However, after Favras, he was too cautious to intrigue during such dangerous times, but he hung on at the Luxembourg till the last possible moment, playing endless whist at the Tuileries with his dear brother (while grumbling about him behind his back; he told Mirabeau that the King’s weakness and indecision were beyond belief, comparing his character to ‘oiled ivory balls which one tries in vain to hold together’). Mirabeau contemplated forming a cabinet in which Monsieur would have been First Minister, but seems to have decided he was too nervous; probably Louis-Stanislas was hedging his bets.

With his usual astuteness he realized when the situation was finally out of control. During the Royal family’s flight to Varennes, while Louis XVI trundled towards disaster, Monsieur, Madame and Mme de Balbi, equipped with false passports, left Paris by the Pont Neuf and drove to Le Bourget, driving from thence to Soissons, Laon and La Capelle, and crossing the Belgian frontier without incident.

Monsieur now set up a government in exile at Coblenz, where Artois and the Prince de Condé had each gathered an army of émigrés. He assumed the title of Regent on the grounds that the King had lost his freedom of action. He kept impressive state, entertaining regally, sent ambassadors to the European sovereigns in the hope of persuading them to invade France, and issued threatening proclamations which gravely embarrassed his brother in Paris. Calonne came over from England to be his Prime Minister.

Mme de Balbi’s sway over Monsieur reached its zenith at Coblenz, where she was known as the ‘Queen of the Emigration’ and aspired to a political rôle. Her promiscuity made Louis-Stanislas a laughing-stock. When he moved to Hamm, she went to Brussels instead, though with every intention of rejoining him later. However, Monsieur then learnt that it was common gossip that she had had twins by a youthful lover, and was so furious that he never saw her again.

After la Balbi’s fall, the focus of Monsieur’s affections was the Captain of his Bodyguard. Antoine-Louis-François de Bestiade, Comte d’Avaray, was thirty-four and a career soldier whose skilful organization of his master’s escape to Coblenz had won him his master’s confidence; later the infatuated Louis-Stanislas gave him the right to bear the royal arms of France on his own with the motto Vicit iter durum pietas (loyalty finds a way over even the stoniest road). Henceforward, until his death, he only left Monsieur when sent on special missions. The two men had no secrets from each other, Avaray’s one fault in Monsieur’s eyes being that he had no Latin. Indeed it is probable, though there is no actual proof, that Monsieur was a repressed homosexual. Significantly, Hézecques compares his character with those of Henri III and Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV (though admittedly he does not speak of common sexual tastes). Undoubtedly, Louis-Stanislas found full emotional satisfaction in male friendships, even if these were platonic because of his low sexual drive. Like Louis XIII, he sought the perfect friend.

During the campaign before Valmy, Monsieur was irritated by the bragging of the Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick. ‘Be careful, Duke,’ he warned him, ‘I know that the French will defend their country—they are not always beaten.’ As a result of the ensuing débâcle, by the end of 1792 Monsieur was living in a small wooden house at Hamm in Westphalia, short of food and heating. The exploits of the Chouans raised his hopes, but by the end of 1793, even they had been crushed, only M de La Rochejacquelin holding out in his Breton woods. Monsieur moved to Verona. Here, as King Louis XVIII—he assumed the title on his nephew’s death—he issued what some émigrés termed the ‘criminal’ Proclamation of Verona; this promised that Absolutism would be restored and savage penalties inflicted when the King came home; it even listed those who would be quartered, those who would be broken on the wheel (Talleyrand was among these), those who would be hanged, and those who would be sent to the galleys.

In December 1795 his niece, Madame Royale, was rescued from the Temple. The Austrians exchanged a number of important French prisoners for her and sent her to Vienna, from whence she was brought to the King. She received the warmest welcome of which his cold nature was capable and betrothed to her cousin, Louis d’Angoulême, Artois’s son. Sadly, her experiences had ruined her nature and, ‘The orphan of the Temple’ was a sour bitter woman for the remainder of her long life (she did not die until 1851). Even so, a strong, sentimental attachment sprang up between her and the King; she was undoubtedly his favourite member of the royal family.

It must be remembered that a Bourbon restoration seemed almost inevitable until Napoleon was firmly established. The French people had more than a suspicion that égalité was killing liberté and fraternité, and the newspapers were full of royalist propaganda. Most Frenchmen longed for a return to the rule of law. Unfortunately, Louis, encouraged by reports from his agents in Paris, failed to realize that what France wanted was not the monarchy of 1789 but the constitutional monarchy of 1791. The bourgeoisie had no wish for the return of privilege; the peasants feared the re-introduction of feudal dues; and everyone who had bought émigré land dreaded confiscation. Nevertheless, by 1797 Royalist deputies had almost obtained control of the central government and Louis thought his restoration was imminent. But the army was still republican. On 4 September 1797—18 Fructidor, Year V, in the Revolutionary calendar—General Augereau staged a coup d’état and fifty-three Royalist deputies were condemned to deportation to Cayenne.

Meanwhile, the King was leading an odd, wandering life. He had left Verona for a brief spell with Condé’s army at Blanckenberg in Brunswick, before settling at Mittau in the Baltic Duchy of Courland—now part of Soviet Latvia, a coastal land famed for its beauty. From here he watched General Bonaparte’s rise to power with a mixture of hope and apprehension—was he Cromwell or was he General Monk? Before 18 Fructidor he offered him the Vice-royalty of Corsica and the title of Marshal of France if he would restore him. In 1800, when Bonaparte was First Consul, the King wrote to him: ‘You are taking a long time to give me back my throne; there is a danger that you may miss the opportunity. Without me you cannot make France happy, while without you I can do nothing for France. So be quick and let me know what positions and dignities will satisfy you and your friends.’ Bonaparte replied, ‘I have received Your Royal Highness’s letter. I have always taken a keen interest in your misfortunes and in those of your family. But you must not think of returning to France—you cannot do so without marching over a hundred thousand dead bodies.’ In 1803 Bonaparte sent an envoy to Mittau to propose that Louis and his family should surrender all claims to the French throne in return for independent principalities in Italy. The King wrote in reply, ‘I do not confuse M Bonaparte with those who preceded him. I respect his bravery and military genius…. But he is mistaken if he supposes my rights can be made the subject of bargain or compromise.’

However, Bonaparte gave the French everything which they had thought could only be supplied by a Bourbon restoration. Not only did he bring back the Church and build wonderful roads and schools, but he restored the rule of law (besides introducing the Code Napoléon, one of the world’s outstanding legal codes and one which could be understood by everybody, he even revived some of the courts of the old Parlement of Paris). When Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor in 1804, the King travelled to Sweden to join Artois—whom he had not seen for a decade—and issued a formal protest. But the Empire had a disquietingly permanent appearance.

Louis was forced to leave Mittau by the Tsar in 1807, whereupon he followed Artois’s example and settled in England. Although the British government gave him £ 7,000 a year, they would not let him stay in London, so he established his shabby court at Gosfield Hall in Essex, moving in 1809 to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. The diarist Charles Greville, accompanied by his father, visited Louis at Hartwell the following year. Greville says that there were so many people in the house—nearly 150—that the place resembled ‘a small rising colony’ and that he had never seen so many Dukes in his life. The King received them in his private closet, so small that it seemed like a ship’s cabin; the elder Greville said the way Louis heaved his huge bulk backwards and forwards made him feel seasick. He gave them a very modest dinner, carving himself; the only wines served were port and sherry. They spent the evening playing whist at threepence a point. The atmosphere was a compound of privation, hopelessness and ridiculously pompous etiquette. The diarist noted with amusement that the local yokels referred disrespectfully to their august neighbour as ‘old bungy Louis’.

Louis XVII, by Kucharski

Louis XVIII, by Gerard

The King was in constant touch with the professional adventurers and spies who were the only people in France still to take an active interest in the Bourbon cause. Most were of dubious reliability—one double agent even tried to persuade Louis to make a secret trip to Paris. Savary, Napoleon’s Minister of Police, paid the Duc d’Aumont £ 1,000 a year to send him two letters a month reporting what went on at Hartwell. (At the Restoration the King told Savary with relish, ‘You see, Monsieur, how little one can trust people. He [Aumont] always told me he was only paid £ 500—no doubt he didn’t want to pay me my royalties, as I drafted the letters myself!) However, there was a genuine traitor at Hartwell who has never been identified, probably an émigré courtier; he or she was responsible for the capture and death of many royal agents.

For all his undoubted probity, Avaray, the King’s favourite companion, inspired jealousy and even hatred. He particularly irritated conservative émigrés by speaking English and dressing like an Englishman. In 1808 a Vendéen veteran, General de Puisaye, accused Avaray of trying to have him assassinated. The scandal reached such proportions that Louis issued a public defence of ‘the most feeling of friends’ and appointed a committee of twenty-four noblemen who quickly declared Avaray innocent. The favourite at once challenged Puisaye to a duel, but the King had him arrested by the English authorities to prevent him fighting. As a mark of his esteem he then made Avaray a Duke. However, the favourite’s health was collapsing—he seems to have been tubercular—and he had to leave England for a warmer climate at the end of 1810.

Louis’s Queen, Maria Giuseppina, who despite their incompatibility had stayed with him, died the same year. The British government gave her a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, after which her body was sent home to Turin. The King was by now in his late fifties, gout-ridden, cripplingly overweight and with a digestion which must have suffered dreadfully from his love of good food. He was prostrate when news came in 1811 that Avaray had died in Madeira.

Luckily, Louis quickly found a new dear friend, one who had been recommended by Avaray himself. Pierre-Louis-Jean-Casimir de Blacas, Comte d’Aulps, had been born in 1771 of an ancient family of Provence. Like his predecessor, he was a career soldier, a former dragoon captain. He had joined Louis’s household at Verona and had stayed with him ever since. A quixotic figure who modelled himself on the heroes of French chivalry, he insisted on regarding his gouty master as the reincarnation of Saint Louis and Henri IV. He knew Latin, and soon Louis was devoted to him. As Blacas said later, ‘You don’t know the King—he must have a favourite and he might as well have me as anyone else.’

After the débâcle of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, Louis was optimistic enough to send an envoy to Charles XIV of Sweden (the former Marshal Bernadotte) and the Tsar, but the envoy found little encouragement, the Tsar being positively hostile. Then in October 1813 Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig. The King refused to attend a triumphal banquet in London, commenting, ‘I don’t know if the disasters overtaking the French army are a means by which providence intends to restore legitimate authority, but neither I nor the Princes of my family can rejoice at events which are such a sorrow to our country.’ None the less, Leipzig had transformed his situation. On 13 March 1814 Bordeaux hoisted the white flag of the Bourbons. To his amusement, Louis was invited by the Prince Regent to attend a ball at Carlton House for the first time; the walls were hung with draperies covered in fleurs-de-lis and the rooms filled with émigrés in hired court dress.

Yet the allies were still thinking of a settlement with Napoleon and even after the Marshals deserted him in April discussed such alternatives as Bernadotte and the Duc d’Orléans. Finally a demonstration in the Paris streets in favour of King Louis—carefully organized by Talleyrand and M de Vitrolles, Artois’s agent—decided them in favour of the Bourbons.

Napoleon abdicated on 6 April 1814 and departed to Elba. Under the skilful management of Talleyrand (whom Louis had once promised to break on the wheel), the Imperial Senate deposed the two-year-old Napoleon II and proclaimed Louis XVIII. Artois, who had been on the frontier of northern France since February, entered Paris on 12 April 1814 in his capacity as Lieutenant-General (Regent). He delighted the French by quickly negotiating what France wanted most of all—the evacuation of the occupying allied armies in return for withdrawing the French troops who were cut off in Italy and Germany. France kept the frontiers of 1792, including that of the Rhine.

At Hartwell, King Louis’s carriage began its triumphal progress on 20 April, drawn by Englishmen instead of horses. The Prince Regent had come to fetch him, and in London the King was cheered by what seemed to be the entire capital and serenaded by brass bands outside his hotel in Albemarle Street. He dined at Carlton House with the Regent and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Louis bestowed the Cordon Bleu on his host, who reciprocated with the Garter (later the Regent said that buckling it on had been like putting a girdle round the waist of a stoutish woman). The King set sail for France on 24 April, on board the Royal Sovereign.

His Most Christian Majesty drove into ‘his good city of Paris’ through the Porte Saint-Denis on 3 May 1814—it was almost twenty-two years since he had seen his capital and he was in tears. With him in his carriage was the Duchesse d’Angoulême, whose last roof in Paris had been the Temple prison, and the aged Prince de Condé, the once redoubtable White general who was now blind and wandering in his wits. The ‘royal invalid’, as Chateaubriand lovingly called Louis XVIII, was received with all the martial splendour of the Grande Armée; Chateaubriand (in his somewhat unreliable, but always elegant, memoirs) noted that the Old Guard were shaking with rage when they presented arms. On the whole, however, most Frenchmen agreed with Talleyrand that without the ancient dynasty’s prestige, France would have been ‘either enslaved or partitioned’.

The King was certainly very different from the Emperor. His legs were swollen by gout and the great family nose now presided over a cascade of chins. He wore his hair in the fashion of 1789—powdered white, combed into ‘pigeons’ wings’ and a pigtail tied with a bow. His snuff-stained clothes were even more antiquated; he wore knee-breeches and red velvet gaiters and carried a three-cornered hat. Yet this fat, antediluvian little creature, with its preposterous dress, high shrill voice and pedantic jokes, somehow possessed a most regal dignity. Chateaubriand tells us that Louis XVIII never forgot for one moment that he was the King, and that Napoleon’s Marshals ‘were more intimidated when in the presence of this impotent old man than they had ever been in that of the terrible master who commanded them in a hundred battles.’

Even before entering Paris, Louis had granted a constitution, by the Declaration of Saint-Ouen on 2 May 1814. He had thus avoided having to accept that prepared by Talleyrand and the Imperial Senate and, by granting rather than accepting, safeguarded the monarchic principle. The Charter, as the constitution was known, consisted of a hereditary monarchy and two chambers on the model of the English Parliament—an upper house of Peers and a lower of Deputies who were elected by less than a hundred thousand voters. The King also promised freedom of worship and of the press, guaranteed property rights for those who had purchased émigré land, and undertook to maintain Napoleonic titles and the Légion d’Honneur.

The two Chambers constituted a system no less representative than the contemporary English Parliament. During his time at Hartwell Louis may well have taken an interest in English politics, but unfortunately he had no first-hand knowledge of how the system worked. His dear friend Blacas, who looked back to 1689 rather than to 1789 and who as Minister for the Household was the nearest thing to a Prime Minister, was disastrously ineffectual; as in 1790–92 ministers worked directly to the King without any proper co-ordination or cabinet.

The one area in which the regime of 1814–15 took positive action, the military, was especially unfortunate. Old émigré officers from the armies of Coblenz and the Vendée were given half pay and then promoted, while most of the Imperial Army was summarily retired; 14,000 veteran officers, many of them young men, were condemned to rot; Lady Morgan mentions a Captain reduced to working as a waggoner. At court, Marshals were snubbed and reminded of their humble origins. What angered the army above all was the revival of the Maison du Roi, 6,000 strong, complete with Bodyguards, Horse Grenadiers, Musketeers and even the Hundred Swiss, which only noblemen could join. (Among them were two young poets—Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Vigny.) Soldiers began to refer to the King as ‘The Pig’.

When Napoleon landed near Fréjus on 1 March 1815 it was therefore hardly surprising that the army rallied to him. Some Marshals were canny enough to remain loyal to Louis XVIII, but most officers behaved like Ney, ‘Bravest of the Brave’, who first swore undying fidelity to the King, promising to bring the usurper back in a cage, and who then turned his coat.

The news reached the Tuileries on Sunday 5 March. Louis, his hands crippled by gout, had difficulty opening the envelope which contained the telegram. After reading it, he put his head in his hands and then said, ‘It is the Revolution all over again.’ Blacas protested that Napoleon was mad and that there was little danger. The King interrupted him impatiently: ‘Blacas, mon ami, you are a very pleasant fellow but that’s not quite enough. You have been wrong many times before and I am afraid that you are deluding yourself again.’ None the less Louis started to wear the Légion d’Honneur and solemnly asked the Chamber of Deputies, ‘How can I, at the age of sixty end my life better than by dying in defence of my country?’ But the army was going over to the Corsican en masse. On 19 March Louis XVIII left Paris—at midnight, in his carpet slippers. Napoleon re-entered the Tuileries the very next day.

Ghent was the new Coblenz, Louis installing his court at a house lent by the King of the Netherlands. Here Guizot first saw Louis XVIII who ‘gave me the impression of a rational, liberal-minded man, elegantly superficial, courteous to everyone, careful about appearances, not particularly interested in probing to the bottom of things, and as incapable of making the sort of mistakes which ruin a dynasty as he was of ensuring a dynasty’s survival.’ Fortunately, the allies, who had not demobilized their armies, at once announced their intention of crushing the Emperor. Significantly, Talleyrand remained loyal to the Bourbons, though he wrote from Vienna that the Congress blamed the King in large part for Bonaparte’s return. Meanwhile, the people of Ghent were astounded by the immense number of dishes and bottles consumed by their venerable guest, though he also impressed them by his calm during the panic caused by conflicting reports of the outcome of Waterloo.

Louis XVIII returned to the Tuileries on 8 July 1815, in a closed carriage. Parisians scowled at the fat old man forced on them by the enemy troops who swaggered through their city. The Emperors of Austria and Russia and the King of Prussia held parades on the Champs de Mars, treating the King of France with open contempt. The peace terms were an indemnity of £ 28 million; occupation for five years by an allied army of 150,000 troops; the surrender of French Savoy to Sardinia; and handing over the Saar to Prussia (which meant the final abandonment of the Rhine frontier). French pride was shattered. People muttered, ‘The allies gave us the Bourbons but it was Frenchmen who gave us the Bonapartes.’

In fact it was a Frenchman, Talleyrand, who had given France the Bourbons. He was made Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister by the King, who sent Blacas off to Naples as ambassador. Louis XVIII knew very well that Talleyrand had twice set the crown of France on his head and keenly resented the fact that all Europe knew it too. Although personally he despised the man, in 1814 he had greeted him with the most honeyed flattery. ‘Our families date from the same epoch. But my ancestors were cleverer; if yours had been, it is you who would be inviting me to sit down now.’ (In fact the King insisted in private that the Talleyrands only dated from the twelfth century.) For a period after the Hundred Days Louis could not do without him. Nor could he do without Fouché, the regicide Minister of the Interior. Having seen the pair go in together to kiss hands, Chateaubriand wrote, ‘All at once the door opened and there entered, in total silence, Vice supported by Crime—that is to say M de Talleyrand on the arm of M Fouché.’ Fouché was soon thrown to the wolves, but the King needed Talleyrand’s genius to obtain a favourable peace settlement. However, Tsar Alexander then told Louis that Talleyrand was unacceptable; if the King would replace him by the Duc de Richelieu, whom the Russians knew and respected, the Tsar would see that France received good terms. Greatly to Louis’s relief, Talleyrand resigned at the end of September 1815.

The King has often been criticized for not making more use of Talleyrand, but he was totally unacceptable, not only to Ultras but to many moderates. Furthermore, he had betrayed Napoleon and might well betray the Bourbons. Louis would not willingly employ such a dangerous man, but he tried to mollify him with a shower of honours—Grand Chamberlain in 1815, a Duchy in 1817, the cordon bleu in 1820—and ignored his frequent attacks on royal ministers. Talleyrand once paid a grudging compliment—‘All Bourbons are idiots except Louis XVIII.’

Meanwhile, a White Terror raged throughout France, in which nearly 300 people died. Everyone dreaded the royalist bands, the Miquelets and the Verdets, who settled old scores and plundered and looted, murder gangs equipped with pocket pistols, knives and sword-sticks, often working in collusion with the local police. At Nîmes Protestants, including women, were publicly humiliated and beaten solely on account of their religion. Marshal Brune was lynched at Avignon, General Ramel assassinated at Toulouse, General Lagarde murdered at Nîmes. Nor was the government less restrained; Marshal Ney was shot for desertion, as were young General de la Bedoyère, and four other generals. The King dared not intervene, while the rest of the royal family cheered on the Whites; Artois’s son, M de Berry, joked, ‘We are going Marshal hunting.’ Great ladies, the tricoteuses des salons, raged against Imperialists and Liberals, as did many of the clergy. Special Provosts’ Courts sat for three years, executions continuing well into 1816. Both police and terrorists were deliberately encouraged by the new Chamber of Deputies elected in August 1815, so fiercely royalist that Louis called it the Chambre Introuvable—the ‘Nonesuch Chamber’. Its slogan was ‘Time for an end to clemency’; when the King resisted its more savage decrees, it openly called him a Revolutionary, a ‘crowned Jacobin’. Louis groaned, ‘They are relentless’, adding that if the Deputies could have their way ‘they would purge me too’. It was later popularly said, ‘If you have not lived through 1815, you do not know what hatred is.’

If 1815 was one of the most terrible years in French history, 1816 was scarcely better. Amid continuing anarchy, heavy rain caused a bad harvest and a cattle plague broke out; there was widespread famine. Already France was exhausted by years of warfare, years in which she had lost a million men, had been crushed by backbreaking taxes, and had had her trade crippled by the British blockade. Yet she had to find the money to pay for the indemnity and the army of occupation.

Furthermore, France was woefully disunited. Of 402 Deputies, the majority were Ultras who organized themselves into something like a political party; the Faubourg Saint-Germain formed its hard core, but its ranks were made up of small country squires and even of bourgeois and new men with landed interests. It included the Purs, the party’s extremists who were often Vendéens or returned émigrés, ghosts of the Ancien Régime, crying for vengeance on its murderers. On the left sat a motley collection of Liberals who, to begin with, were only united in their loathing of the new regime; most came from the haute bourgeoisie and the parvenu Napoleonic nobility, both deeply resentful of the old aristocracy. Among this opposition were indestructibles like the novelist Benjamin Constant and Lafayette—‘less a politician than a flag’.

However, when discussing Restoration parliaments, one should speak of groups of partisans rather than political parties. The groups which the King preferred were those of the Centre, sometimes known as Constitutionalists. They included Liberals who believed that France’s best hope lay in observing the Charter, and also a tiny band of intellectuals called the Doctrinaires—Royer-Collard, the historian Guizot, and a French Whig, the Duc de Broglie—whose basic principle was that the rights of crown and country were indistinguishable. But most Constitutionalists were simply moderate Royalists. Louis XVIII believed that the Restoration’s one chance of survival was to let such people govern France. Through them he intended to find a middle ground, adopting policies which would upset neither the old aristocracy nor the new rich of the Empire; ultimately he hoped to forge an alliance between both classes. As Balzac puts it, ‘After every revolution genius in government consists of effecting a fusion, which is what Napoleon and Louis XVIII did, both being men of true genius.’ The King’s motto, which he repeated over and over again, was ‘Unite—and forget’.

The fact that Artois was the Ultras’ acknowledged leader did not help Louis. The King was fond of his brother, or at least felt as sentimental about him as his cold nature allowed. Artois genuinely loved Louis but felt that his policies were misguided; he, Monsieur, knew what was best for France, and the Pavillon de Marsan (his wing of the Tuileries and one of the few parts which survived the fire of 1871) was the Ultras’ chief meeting-place.

Indeed, apart from the King, the entire royal family were Ultras. Artois’s eldest son, the ferret-eyed, long-nosed Louis, Duc d’Angoulême, was a gauche nonentity, as ill mannered as he was timid, without brains or character; he was said to be impotent. The childless Mme d’Angoulême, stiff, sour and red-faced, was the ‘Orphan of the Temple’ whose horrible experiences had so embittered her that she was dreaded by the entire court; she often reduced ladies-in-waiting to tears (though Fanny Burney found her charming). Artois’s younger son, Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de Berry, had an ungovernable temper—sometimes he struck officers on the parade ground—which was almost as embarrassing as his attempts to ape Napoleon. In Le Rouge et Le Noir Stendhal gives what may well be a portrait of the Duke—‘He was short and thick-set, with a florid complexion and gleaming eyes without any expression save the vicious ferocity of a wild boar.’ Yet Berry was not entirely unattractive. He could be extraordinarily generous, frequently giving money to tramps, and was democratic enough to treat the merchant banker Greffulhe as a personal friend. He played the flute, was a discerning collector of pictures, and genuinely loved the opera and the theatre—he was a keen admirer of Talma. In 1816 the Duke married a beautiful madcap Bourbon cousin from Naples to whom, though he loved her, he was frequently unfaithful. They lived in Mme de Pompadour’s old residence, the Elysée. Caroline de Berry was a small, lively blonde, with large blue eyes, and just a little too high-spirited. She joined her dour sister-in-law in constantly criticizing the weakness and foolishness of the King’s policies.

There was a Duc d’Orléans in the Palais Royal once more, although the King would not allow him to style himself ‘Royal Highness’. Louis Philippe was the son of the regicide Egalité. Before emigrating he had fought with the army of the Revolution at Valmy in 1792, and he was regarded with some suspicion by the court. A sly, watchful man, Orléans was avaricious to the point of rapacity, working ceaselessly to regain all his father’s vast estates.

The only other Prince of the Blood was the Prince de Condé, last of his line. His gallant old father had died in 1818 and the new master of Chantilly was a very different personality. He doted almost pathologically on his English mistress, Sophy Dawes, a fisherman’s daughter from the Isle of Wight and a former maid-servant, whom he had married to the Baron de Feuchères; the Baron, at first under the impression that Miss Dawes was the Prince’s illegitimate daughter, was enraged when he discovered the truth. Sophy returned to Condé and not only persuaded him to give her enormous presents but to bequeath Chantilly to the Orléans family, who had ingratiated themselves with her. The Prince does not seem to have derived much pleasure from his generosity—he hanged himself in 1830.

As Guizot puts it, ‘King Louis XVIII had a cold heart and a liberal mind. His family’s anger and irritation had little effect, once he decided not to let it bother him. It was his pride and joy to think himself clearer headed and shrewder, and to act according to his own judgement.’ Chateaubriand is even more plainly-spoken: ‘An egoist without principle, Louis XVIII wanted peace at any price. He supported his ministers for just as long as they could command a majority.’

As has been said, the Duc de Richelieu replaced Talleyrand as both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister at the end of 1815. This grand seigneur—‘the very personification of nobility’, Lady Morgan calls him—had made a career for himself in Russia during the emigration, becoming a Lieutenant-General and founding the town of Odessa. Hence Talleyrand’s gibe when he was appointed his successor—‘What a perfect choice, he knows the Crimea better than any man in France.’ But for all Talleyrand’s sneers, the Duke persuaded his friend the Tsar to reduce the indemnity and the allies to end their occupation in 1818, two years earlier than stipulated (some Ultras were horrified, and begged Wellington to stay). In addition, Richelieu rebuilt the country’s finances. Two former Napoleonic ministers worked a miracle for him—one an unfrocked priest, Baron Louis, and the other a Genoese, Count Corvetto. Their basic principle was that if a government wants credit, it must pay for it; accordingly they guaranteed all financial liabilities incurred by the Emperor. Stringent economies were made in the public service, civil servants being persuaded to draw only half their salaries for a six-year period. In 1817 a carefully calculated loan was negotiated from the English bankers, Messrs Baring. As a result of such measures, including an insistence that every minister must present annual accounts, the budget was balanced for the first time since 1739, while the indemnity was paid off by 1818. When Richelieu resigned that year, the Chambers voted him a pension of 50,000 francs in token of the country’s gratitude.

One reason for the survival of Richelieu’s ministry was the fact that its Minister of the Interior was M Elie Decazes. This dark-haired, fine-featured Gascon lawyer in his early thirties, the son of a little notary in the Gironde, had replaced Blacas as the King’s dear friend. Of his appearance Talleyrand said—knowing that his words would be reported to Louis—‘He resembles a moderately good-looking hairdresser’s assistant.’ Minister of Police during the First Restoration, Decazes had won his master’s confidence by following him to Ghent, and then endeared himself by retailing malicious gossip about the country’s leading figures, which he gleaned from police files. He never bored the King with tiresome detail but took care that he was informed of anything of genuine importance. In addition he was of a literary turn of mind, and an excellent listener who enjoyed Louis’s stories. Soon the King was infatuated, addressing him as ‘mon fils’ and writing to him three times a day—‘Come to receive the tenderest embraces of thy friend, thy father, thy Louis.’ He even gave his adorable minister English lessons, and was amazed by his progress; in fact Decazes was discreetly visiting the best tutor in Paris after each lesson. The King said of ‘his darling child’ that, ‘I will raise him so high that the greatest lords will envy him.’ Again, one’s mind goes back to Louis XIII.

The new favourite described his policy as ‘to nationalize royalism and to royalize nationalism’. It was Decazes who persuaded the King to dissolve the Chambre Introuvable in autumn 1816, obtaining a much more workable majority, and who was responsible for relaxing the press laws in 1817. The same year Louis approved a revision of the electoral laws, which gave the government more control of the Chambre des Députés. They were able to bring in the famous ‘law’ of Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr, which decided the structure of the French army until the Third Republic. Gouvion believed that while the monarchy could not trust the old Imperial army, it must none the less have reliable troops if France was to be a great power again. Henceforward the French army was recruited by a limited method of conscription which was infinitely less onerous than the universal conscription of Napoleon. Not only were many Imperial officers reinstated, but a third of all commissions were reserved for promotions from the ranks.

For all his moderate policies, there was almost excessive pomp and ceremony at the court of Louis XVIII. Balzac jokes that the King’s drawing-rooms were so full of powdered heads ‘that seen from above they gave the impression of a carpet of snow’. So conscious was Louis of protocol that when one day he fell over and lay helpless on the floor of the Tuileries and a junior officer named Nogent tried to help him to his feet, the King cried out, ‘Non, O non, M de Nogent!’ and insisted on remaining on the ground till the Captain of the Guard arrived. Duchesses still sat on tabourets (stools) while lesser ladies stood. There were still royal cup-bearers and the Hundred Swiss still mounted guard. Louis observed a monotonous routine, rising at seven o’clock, when he was wakened by the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. The King’s daily council lasted from nine until he breakfasted at ten with his household—he retained the English hours of eating which he had known at Hartwell. From eleven till midday he gave audiences; the usual place for these in the Tuileries was a small study with an arched window, which had been Napoleon’s favourite room; here Louis worked at an English walnut table from Hartwell. At midday the old Voltairean attended Mass, despite certain suspicions as to his sincerity—Guizot speaks of ‘the freethinker’s imagination which his grandfather had bequeathed him’—after which he received his ministers or held a weekly Conseil du Roi. He was too unfit to hunt, so instead he was taken for carriage exercise every afternoon, always at full gallop as he loved speed; sometimes 300 horses were used in relays.

Another relaxation was conversation; Louis XVIII was a most amusing raconteur with a choice collection of anecdotes and dirty jokes; even Talleyrand admitted that, ‘His conversation never flags and is always interesting.’ The King sometimes gave delightful little dinner parties where he was the most convivial of hosts. He could disarm critics with his wit and seeming friendliness; one gambit, when communicating something known to the entire court, was to begin, ‘Let me tell you in the strictest confidence …’

Usually, however, Louis dined at six with the royal family, a meal which was probably the chief pleasure of his life, for he remained a gourmet until the very end (Lady Morgan was told that he ate enough for four, though, added her devoutly royalist informant, ‘C’est un appétit charmant, charmant’). Finally, he received a few privileged friends before retiring to bed shortly after nine o’clock.

One long-forgotten pleasure was the French theatre. At the end of 1814 the King attended Racine’s Britannicus at the Comédie Française, and the great Talma’s performance reduced him to tears, bringing him to his feet in homage. He told the actor, ‘I have a right to consider myself a critic, M Talma, as I saw Lekain’ (the French Garrick, who had died in 1778). Soon Louis was going to the play once a week, either to the Comédie, or to his own theatre in the Tuileries. Although Talma was a protégé of Napoleon—royalists joked that the tyrant had taken lessons in deportment from the tragedian—and always remained a declared Bonapartist, the King none the less confirmed his pension. Nor did he blame him for performing before the Emperor during the Hundred Days, and later awarded him an additional pension of 30,000 francs (£ 1,200) from his own privy purse. He never lost his love of Talma’s acting, for all its innovations, and particularly enjoyed his interpretation of Corneille’s Cid. Talma was not the only actor whom Louis helped. He gave the equally great Mme Mars an annual pension of 20,000 francs, and when a priest refused to bury Mme Raucourt, an earlier ornament of the Comédie Française, sent one of his own chaplains to conduct the service.

Louis eventually acquired a certain popularity. His oddities amused the French. The arrival of his wheel-chair at the theatre caused a hilarity which verged on affection. Wits called him ‘Louis deux fois neuf’, referring to his two restorations, and joked that ‘The King is one part old woman, one part capon, one part Son of France and one part bookworm.’

Indeed, superficially Louis XVIII may seem a rather endearing figure. In reality he was the least likeable of his dynasty, cold, calculating and selfish, with little kindness or sympathy. Chateaubriand thought that, ‘Without being cruel, the King was hardly human, so insensitive was he to other people’s misfortunes.’ Talleyrand (of all people) once observed, ‘Egotistical, insensitive, epicurean and ungrateful, that is what I have always found Louis XVIII.’

Louis’s curious character intrigued contemporary novelists. Dumas has a peculiarly convincing portrait of him in The Count of Monte Cristo, hearing the news of Napoleon’s return ‘while making a note in a volume of Horace, Gryphius’s edition, which was much indebted to the sagacious philosophical observations of His Majesty.’ Balzac’s picture of Louis in Le Bal de Sceaux carries no less conviction. The ‘auguste littérateur’ relishes a polished turn of phrase or a bon mot; his own conversation—he has ‘a sharp, thin little voice’—is full of puns, epigrams and allusions to the classics, and he is invariably mocking and malicious. That vulgar but perceptive woman, Lady Morgan, wrote in her travel diary in 1816, ‘The King’s character and constitution, his tastes and his habits, all tend to repose. He is false, not ferocious, and having permitted Ultra vengeance to glut itself during the first period of his Restoration, he now resumes habitudes nourished in his long exile. A fine gentleman, an elegant scholar; graceful (if not grateful), as the Bourbons always are; gracious, as the French princes always have been, even when their courtesies meant nothing—he owes much to the privacy and privation of Hartwell…. Sensual and sentimental, he applies the bonhommie of the old court to the courtiers of the present. He has his petit mot galant for the ladies.’ However, the lady novelist is a little confused by his attitude towards Decazes. ‘He affiches his innocent passion for the sister of the Duc de Decazes, and his friendship for her brother (his Prime Minister), by throwing his arms around his neck en bon Papa.’ None the less, Lady Morgan knew enough to recognize Louis’s ‘inherent falseness’.

The Restoration is not a popular period with French historians. It seems tame compared to the Revolution and the Empire; even at the time Chateaubriand grumbled, ‘I have seen Louis XVI and Bonaparte die; after that it is a bad joke to live longer.’ Furthermore, feelings of social inferiority and resentment engendered during that Indian summer of the French aristocracy may well have bequeathed an atavistic distaste for the Restoration. Yet it was in many ways a French equivalent of the English Regency, with a noticeably full-blooded style. It was very much a young man’s world, the world of Balzac’s heroes, Eugène de Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré, and of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, trying to make their fortunes in a Paris which, although still without boulevards, had many of its modern landmarks, like the Bourse and the Madeleine, the Place Vendôme and the rue de Rivoli. It was gas-lit and by the end of the period it even had omnibuses. Nor was it merely the world of the rich dandies and adventurers who thronged the Opéra and the casinos, Tortoni’s restaurant, the hôtels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the bankers’ palaces in the Chaussée d’Antin. This was the time when Paris first became Bohemian and when the Latin Quarter became famous; the Left Bank was full of young writers, painters and law students of the sort depicted in Murger’s Scenes de la Vie de Bohème, with their weird clothes and hand-to-mouth existence.

Culturally, it was a wonderful time. Freed from the censorship of the Napoleonic police state, Paris became the literary, artistic and musical centre of the world, full of enthusiasm and new ideas. In 1819 Lamartine published his Méditations, and Vigny brought out his first poems in 1822. Prosper Merimée, Dumas, Balzac, Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve and Alfred de Musset all published their first works during the Restoration. Few regimes have enjoyed such gratifying support from contemporary writers. Victor Hugo produced his own first book of verse in 1822, and its inspiration was so profoundly royalist that Louis XVIII awarded him a pension of 1,000 francs. And if the classical tradition of French painting was majestically continued by Ingres, such Romantic giants emerged as Delacroix and Géricault. As for music, Berlioz performed his first Mass in 1825 and composed his Romeo et Juliette three years later; while everyone enjoyed Ahber’s cheerful operas. Even if French Romanticism did not reach its full bloom until the 1830s, its beginnings must unquestionably be sought under the Restoration.

The government took a laudably constructive part in the nation’s intellectual life. The Academie Française was given back the predominance of which it had been deprived by Napoleon. The Ecole des Chartes was founded in 1821, the Ecole des Arts et Manufactures in 1828 and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1830.

The Restoration tried hard to fill the vacuum left by the departure of Emperor-worship, with a cult of Henri IV, who was officially elevated to ‘best and favourite King’ (Nancy Mitford’s words). His statue was re-erected on the Pont Neuf—Victor Hugo wrote an ecstatic ode to celebrate the event—and other statues were set up all over France, while his bust or his portrait presided in every town hall. The Vert Galant’s head also replaced that of Napoleon on the cross of the Légion d’Honneur. Instead of the Imperialist Chant du Départ, the national anthem became Vive Henri Quatre; its cheerful tune was supported by other royalist airs associated with Henri, notably Charmante Gabrielle. There were even free performances for the poor of Collé’s La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV, a play which glorified the monarch. The official court painter, Baron Gérard, constantly produced ‘scenes’ from the great King’s life. Rather touchingly, Louis wore a little white heron’s feather in his hat in imitation of his ancestor’s famous white plume. Nothing could have shown more plainly how effete and worn out was the dynasty than these reminders of Henri IV.

A cult of the martyred Louis XVI and his Queen and of Louis XVII was also encouraged. Their remains were discovered and identified—Chateaubriand could still recognize Marie Antoinette’s features—and then reburied at Saint-Denis. All the other bones thrown out of the abbey in 1793 were dug up and re-interred in two vaults. One vault bore the inscription, ‘Here lie the mortal remains of eighteen Kings, from Dagobert to Henri III; ten Queens, from Nantilde, wife of Dagobert, to Marguerite de Valois, first wife of Henri IV; twenty-four Dauphins, Princes and Princesses, Children and Grandchildren of France.’ The inscription on the other vault read, ‘Here lie the mortal remains of seven Kings, from Charles V to Louis XV; seven Queens, from Jeanne de Bourbon, wife of Charles V, to Marie Leszczynska, wife of Louis XV; Dauphins and Dauphinesses, Princes and Princesses, Children and Grandchildren of France, to the number of forty-seven, from the second son of Henri IV to the Dauphin, eldest son of Louis XVI’. But the magic had gone for ever. As the twentieth-century Royalist Bernanos made his curé say, despairingly, ‘What force could have been capable of re-imposing the yoke?’

Despite a furious outcry from Artois and the Ultras, when Richelieu resigned in December 1818 after quarrelling with Decazes, Louis appointed a still more moderate Prime Minister, General Augustin Dessoles, though the new government’s real leader was Decazes. The King cried all day at not being able to keep Richelieu; even if he was not particularly attached to him as a man, he recognized his worth. Decazes introduced new and surprisingly tolerant press laws, which were blocked by the upper Chamber, so Louis created nearly seventy new Peers, enabling the government virtually to abolish censorship. Even Liberals began to applaud the King. The Charter had become a kind of Edict of Nantes, which both protected liberties and strengthened the monarchy. The bourgeoisie and the peasants began to accept the regime, soothed by its conciliatory attitude and by the return of peace and prosperity.

Unfortunately, in the elections of 1819 the Constitutionalists were beaten by both the Liberals and the Ultras, the Centre commanding only a handful of votes in the lower Chamber. Among 90 Liberals out of 430 Deputies was the Abbé Grégoire, a former member of the Convention who had actually voted for the abolition of the monarchy in 1792; he had once observed publicly that ‘Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical’; special legislation was brought in to annul his election. But the Charter stipulated that one-fifth of the Chamber of Deputies had to be re-elected every year, and Dessoles and Decazes were increasingly worried by the signs of growing Liberal strength and the consequent drift of moderate Royalists into the Ultra camp. In November 1819, Dessoles resigned and Louis appointed his beloved Elie Prime Minister. Decazes offered concessions to the Ultras, a stick-and-carrot policy which had some chance of success.

But on the night of 13 February 1820, the Duc de Berry, leaving the Opera with his wife by a side door, was stabbed by a Bonapartist fanatic, a saddler from the royal stables called Louvel, who had tracked him for four years—‘a little weasel-faced mongrel, a snarling lone wolf’. The Duke did not die until six the next morning, but he did so with unexpected dignity, asking mercy for the assassin (who in the event was guillotined) and apologizing to the King for waking him. ‘Don’t worry,’ replied the cold old man, ‘I haven’t lost any sleep.’ The nobility of Berry’s end was somewhat marred by his insistence on seeing his two children by his English mistress, Amy Brown. None the less, the Vicomte Hugo’s inevitable ode hymned the Duke’s ‘Mort sublime’.

Berry had left the Duchess pregnant, and to the joy of the Ultras, who feared the eventual accession of M d’Orléans (on whose face Chateaubriand saw barely-concealed triumph as he left the deathbed), she gave birth to a boy on 29 September 1820. This was the Duc de Bordeaux, the future Henri V. The news was announced that evening, and quickly spread throughout Paris; in the theatres audiences rose to their feet and sang emotionally Vive Henri Quatre. Crowds flocked to the Tuileries and danced farandoles in the streets; there was a lavish distribution of free wine in the Champs-Elysées—a hundred barrels at the King’s expense. Victor Hugo was again inspired, writing not only an ode on the Duke’s birth but another on the baptism of ‘l’enfant sublime’. A public subscription was organized, and, partly by strong-arm methods, raised so much money that the château of Chambord was purchased and presented to the ‘Enfant de Miracle’. Louis carefully copied King Henri d’Albret’s behaviour at the birth of Henri IV, rubbing the baby’s lips with garlic and giving him a sip of Jurançon wine. He was so overjoyed that he gave Talleyrand the Cordon Bleu. M d’Orléans was so infuriated that when he visited Mme de Berry his remarks about the baby’s ugliness reduced the lady-in-waiting holding him to tears.

Berry’s assassination brought down Decazes. At the Duke’s deathbed his widow pointed at the Minister and screamed, ‘There is the man who is the real murderer,’ implying that his attacks on the Ultras had stirred up the Jacobins. Chateaubriand wrote, with a lack of taste unusual in him, ‘His feet have slipped in blood and he has fallen.’ In the Chamber of Deputies a motion was proposed which actually accused the Minister of being an accomplice. At first the King stood firm—‘The wolves ask nothing of the shepherd but to get rid of the dog,’ he sneered. The entire royal family begged Louis to dismiss him. When Mme d’Angoulême warned the King that Decazes’s weak government would endanger his life, Louis replied sarcastically, ‘I will risk the knives and daggers.’ He added, ‘I have never known a heart more open nor one endowed with more sensibility than that of Count Decazes.’ But eventually he yielded, and after giving Decazes a Dukedom sent him to London as ambassador, where Greville heard that he was being literally bombarded by the King with ‘verses and literary scraps’. It is difficult to imagine a more dismal and frustrating sexual condition than that of the impotent homosexual; the loss of yet another ‘dear friend’ was a dreadful prospect for poor Louis.

Richelieu returned as Prime Minister but had little hope of implementing moderate policies. In the summer of 1820 new electoral laws, to give the government more control over the voters, plunged the country into a really dangerous crisis. For a moment the Liberals seem to have thought that their only hope lay in a coup d’état. Riots broke out in Paris; there were cavalry charges by cuirassiers and gendarmes, the students fighting back with sticks and stones. The police discovered an army plot to restore Napoleon (who did not die until the following year). But the rioters were ridden down and the plotters were shot. So great was the alarm that the Ultras increased their majority—at the end of 1820 there were only fifteen Liberal Deputies.

As Blacas had said, Louis XVIII had to have a favourite. This time he chose, rather surprisingly, a woman. Zoe Talon, Comtesse du Cayla, was the daughter of an old Parlementaire family, now in her mid-thirties and an exceptionally beautiful and amusing lady. She produced a letter from her dead mother-in-law imploring the King to protect Mme du Cayla from her cruel husband who wanted to take her children away. Louis was so overcome that, referring to Decazes, he cried, ‘I too, Madame—they want to take away my child.’ The King had never known such a wonderful listener. In fact she had been put deliberately in Louis’s way by the royal family, as she had Ultra sympathies and would make him forget ‘darling Elie’. Soon the King was writing to her three times a day, and although there could be nothing sexual, they played chess together every Wednesday behind locked doors. Mme du Cayla became literally the last of the maîtresses en titre. He heaped gifts on ‘his dear daughter’, including substantial sums of money. He had built a magnificent château at Saint-Ouen (to commemorate his granting of the Charter) and gave it to her, being obsessed with the morbid fancy that from its windows she would one day look out and see Saint-Denis where he would lie buried. Paris was full of coarse jokes about la Cayla.

The liberal Duchesse de Broglie—Mme de Staël’s daughter—saw Louis at the Tuileries in September 1821. ‘The King was wheeled in, in his armchair. He is most unusual looking. In spite of his obesity he has considerable dignity and, for all his fat red face, a truly regal air. There is a perpetual smile on his lips, but his eyes are hard and unsmiling.’

Richelieu finally fell in December 1821, brought down by both Ultras and Liberals. Reluctantly the King sent for the Minister of Finance, M de Villèle, the leader of the Ultras. It was the end of Louis’s gallant attempt to govern with a moderate administration and to unite France. As he himself had said in 1818 (long before Disraeli borrowed the phrase for English consumption) he did not want to be ‘the King of two nations’, but in the face of a seemingly invincible Ultra majority in the Chambers, and exposed to the blandishments of Mme du Cayla and unceasing pressure from his family, he gave up. Confined to his wheel-chair, he was growing older and iller every day. He stopped fighting his brother—‘the two brothers have embraced,’ wrote Comte Molé, ‘and Louis XVIII has made way for Charles X.’

Joseph de Villèle was a crop-headed country gentleman from Languedoc, nearly fifty, who had had an unusually varied career. He had been a midshipman in Louis XVI’s navy, but after nearly losing his life in the Terror, had left France for the West Indies, where he had made his fortune; there were rumours that he had dabbled in the slave trade. He belonged not to the Faubourg Saint-Germain but to the provincial nobility—his town house was in Toulouse. Although a shy man, reserved to the point of dullness, he was a fine public speaker and the Ultras’s most formidable spokesman. He was also a natural administrator who soon succeeded in putting his country’s finances on so sound a footing that they remained stable for the rest of the century.

As an Ultra, Villèle was determined to improve the position of the Church, which had already made a remarkable recovery. Ultras and clergy joined in recognizing the ideas of the Enlightenment as a root cause of the Revolution, and the Church began a campaign to control education which culminated in 1824 with the appointment of Mgr de Frayssinous as Minister of Education. There were sinister rumours of the Congrégation (immortalized in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir), in reality no more than a zealous missionary organization; the actual substance behind these rumours were the Chevaliers de la Foi, a secret society of Royalist fanatics dedicated to restoring the Church to its old dominance, whose existence remained unknown until 1949. Understandably anti-clericalism grew apace. The Church was suspected of hoping to regain the estates it had lost during the Revolution, while Liberals regarded its bid to take over education as a real threat to human progress; Stendhal told his readers, ‘Ever since the days of Voltaire the Church in France seems to have realized that its chief enemies are books.’

Villèle’s foreign policy was one of caution. But he was saddled with no less incongruous a Foreign Minister than the Vicomte René de Chateaubriand, who decided that France must intervene in Spain and save Ferdinand VII from his new Liberal masters; many Ultras saw the situation in Madrid as a Spanish 1789 which might well turn into a Spanish 1793. In 1823 100,000 French troops, nominally commanded by M d’Angoulême, marched into Spain under the White Flag. As they crossed the River Bidassoa, a band of French Liberals met them, waving the Tricolore—the troops fired on them without hesitation. Angoulême’s advisers, who had learnt from Napoleon’s mistakes, forbade looting and bribed the Spanish peasants handsomely, and the French army occupied Madrid almost without resistance. Only at the siege of the Trocadero fortress outside Cadiz, where the Liberal government had taken refuge, did the Spaniards show just enough fight for the French to claim a glorious victory. The monarchy’s prestige was enormously enhanced, both at home and abroad, though King Ferdinand refused to pay any of the alarmingly expensive costs of the expedition.

Villèle dismissed his Foreign Minister thankfully, on a pretext of not co-operating on financial matters. ‘Sacked like a servant’, wrote the outraged Chateaubriand. It was a sad mistake to make an enemy of the last of the Frondeurs. For the remainder of the Restoration Chateaubriand led the Ultra opposition to the government in the Chamber of Peers, delivering beautiful and wounding speeches.

On 12 October 1823 Te Deum was sung at Nôtre-Dame for the victory in Spain. During the service the King dropped his prayerbook repeatedly and looked round him with the air of not knowing where he was. His gout, his varicose veins and all his other maladies had gradually pulled him down. Now he grew dropsical; it was rumoured that poor Louis was in such a state of decay that when his valets removed his socks one day, they found a loose toe. The obese old man became a frightful skeleton. None the less, he tried bravely to live up to his maxim that ‘a King may die but he may never be ill’. Artois soon took over his duties of state; when consulted on ministerial appointments Louis would say, ‘I’m old and wouldn’t like to decide without knowing Monsieur’s views—show him the list.’

In August 1824 the King collapsed during dinner and was carried to his bed. Soon he was unable to sit up and could not even raise his head, though he remained perfectly alert; on 12 September he told his confessor that he was well enough not to need a priest. Mme du Cayla made what was to be her final visit; she coaxed Louis into signing an order buying her the Hôtel de Montmorency. But by the night of 15 September it was obvious that the King was dying. He revived a little and Artois stayed by his bed, kneeling in prayer. Typically, Louis had time for a last joke, a pun, ‘Allez-vous en, charlatans’—dismissal for the doctors whom he despised and a summons for Charles d’Artois to draw near. He died at four am on the morning of 16 September 1824.

It was no small feat to be the only sovereign to die in possession of the throne during the last century of monarchical government in France. Louis XVIII gave the French their first workable parliamentary system and was justified in seeing it as a truly great achievement. A character no less subtle than Talleyrand, he remained a pragmatist and an opportunist during an age of extremists. Quite unembittered by the Revolution, always able to judge what was possible and what was not, in his case it is palpably untrue to say that the Bourbons ‘learnt nothing and forgot nothing’. He was beyond question the shrewdest royal statesman of his day. Indeed, Gambetta considered Louis XVIII ‘the greatest King of France after Henri IV’.

‘A Submissive Bigot’

CHARLES X (1824–1830)

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‘I would rather earn my bread than reign like the King of England’

Until recently history books have dismissed Charles X—‘an impossible monarch for the nineteenth century … a typical Bourbon, unable either to learn or to forget’. In reality Charles was much more a creature of the nineteenth century than Louis XVIII, while in many ways he was not the least attractive member of his dynasty. The tragedy of this honourable, kindly and friendly man lies in the contrast between his personality and his political ineptitude—in public life he nearly always acted with almost childlike naïveté.

He was born on 9 October 1757 at Versailles, christened Charles-Philippe and given the title of Comte d’Artois, which had once belonged to Saint Louis’s brother. Artois’s father, the Dauphin Louis, died when he was eight and his mother shortly after, so there was little discipline in his childhood; the Duc de Vauguyon, who made Louis XVI’s early years such misery, could do little with his youngest brother, a naturally cheerful and unruly little boy and the one genuinely normal member of the family.

Charles grew into a handsome young man, tall, slim and broad-shouldered, with a fine, rather small head, very well set, with large brown eyes, black hair and the Bourbon nose. When he was only sixteen he was married to an equally juvenile Princess of Sardinia, Maria Theresa, daughter of Victor Amadeus III and sister to Madame. She was a dwarf, four foot high, with a grotesquely long nose, and completely characterless. They had two sons, Louis, Duc d’Angoulême, born in 1775, and Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de Berry, born in 1778; there were also two daughters who died young. But it was never more than a marriage of state.

The one responsible post given to Artois was that of Colonel-General of the Swiss Guards, and when he was seventeen he began to drill them. Maurepas, Minister for the Royal Household, rebuked him. ‘You have acquired a liking for drill, Monseigneur. That does not become a Prince. Run up debts and we will pay them.’ Charles thought this an excellent suggestion. He introduced English horse racing to France, importing English mounts and jockeys, and also started cabriolet racing, an early form of trotting in which he sometimes competed himself. The fashionable world flocked to his race meetings in the Bois de Boulogne. Charles bet heavily, but always seemed to lose, losses equalled by his card debts. In addition, he inherited the Bourbon mania for field sports; in 1785 he spent fifty-three days hunting boar, running down and personally dispatching eighty-nine animals (for a loss of eleven hounds killed and nearly 200 wounded). As might be expected, he was soon in debt, despite an income of almost £ 150,000; by 1781 it was reported that he owed 21 million livres—nearly £ 900,000. When he needed money he simply went to his brother, swearing and shouting until the King gave in.

According to the Austrian ambassador, the young Artois was frequently drunk and often violently rude. If there were spectators when he played tennis, he shouted insults until they left the court; once, after ordering ‘all Jews and bastards’ to leave, he noticed a single officer sitting calmly on the bench; asked angrily why he had not left with the others, the officer replied that he was neither a Jew nor a bastard. Charles surpassed himself at a masked ball in Paris in March 1778. He was escorting Mme Canillac, a lady of the town, when they met the Duchesse de Bourbon. After exchanging a few words, the irritated Duchess reached up and snatched off his mask whereupon he pulled her nose so hard and painfully that she wept. Her husband promptly challenged him to a duel; they met early one morning in the Bois de Boulogne, the fight being stopped after the Duke wounded Charles in the hand. Shortly afterwards, when the Bourbons went to the play they were received with such enthusiastic cheers that the Duchess again dissolved into tears.

Artois had the pathological sensuality of his house. Not only did he run through all the most famous prostitutes in Paris, but he seduced many court ladies including the Duchesse de Guiche whom, so Hézecques tells us, ‘the public long looked upon as one of his easiest conquests’. Hézecques also explains how Charles possessed ‘that fashionable ease and light amiability which please women. One can well believe the rumours that few beauties could be cruel to him.’

It was to please a woman who was a friend and not a mistress that in 1779 Artois built the Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne. He had bet the Queen 100,000 livres that he could build and furnish a palace within nine weeks, and with the architect Bélanger and a thousand workmen he won his bet. The tiny white palace in the Etruscan style reveals another side of Charles besides mere extravagance; he was the only member of the Royal Family in his generation to have more than a casual interest in the arts; the Bagatelle is a perfect example of Neo-Classical art, and with its furniture and decoration is one of the most representative ensembles of the period.

Charles’s rudeness was only a passing phase and he became a rather popular figure. Hézecques claims that before the Revolution ‘the Comte d’Artois was adored by the people as he was affable to everyone and had our nation’s cheerful temperament. His habit of driving about Paris and even his extravagance contributed to his popularity.’ Mme de Campan confirms this, saying that ‘the Parisians showed real affection for him’.

His one public-spirited action was to join the French army at the siege of Gibraltar in 1779. He was accompanied by his bosom friend, the Créole Marquis de Vaudreuil, and by M de Bourbon with whom he had been reconciled. They travelled in some comfort, their baggage and servants filling thirty-five carriages. He spent two months in the trenches, his visit being the routine morale-boosting tour of royalty visiting troops in the field—an affair of parades and dinner parties rather than fighting. Nevertheless Paris welcomed him home as a hero.

Otherwise Artois led a life of uninterrupted frivolity. He was fond of theatricals, acting many times in Marie Antoinette’s little theatre at the Petit Trianon, notably as Figaro. He also gave an epic performance walking the tightrope. He had become the Queen’s chevalier servant, escorting her to all the smart Paris plays and balls.

Ironically, it was through his membership of the Queen’s set that in 1785 Charles met the woman who reformed him, Mme de Polastron, the sister-in-law of Yolande de Polignac. Louise de Lussan d’Esparbés, Vicomtesse de Polastron, was only twenty-one, a delicate, nervous ash-blonde with china-blue eyes, a wonderfully sweet smile and a low voice; Lamartine describes her as ‘the perfection of tenderness’. Charles and Louise fell completely and unreservedly in love. Even Hézecques admits that ‘the passion of Mme de Polastron for the Comte d’Artois was as unconcealed as it was genuine, for heartfelt affection was their only bond’. Charles confided to one of Louise’s friends, the Marquise de Lage, ‘It’s really true—in all the world I live for her alone. Never, no never, was Heaven pleased to form two hearts, two beings better suited to each other. I truly believe it, I even dare be sure of it, and you can have no idea how proud the very idea makes me. But if I deserve your friend, if my heart is worthy of making her happy, it is to her alone that I owe it. It is her advice, still more her sentiments, which have purified my soul and renewed it. Think what I owe her for teaching me how to be happy!’

Louise made Charles more responsible and he began to take a disastrous interest in public life. During the Assembly of Notables in 1787, he displayed an obvious distaste for reform, even if he did not support the révolte nobilaire. Calonne was a friend who had paid his debts twice, but when he was gone Charles attacked Loménie de Brienne, just as formerly he had attacked Necker, ‘the fornicating foreign bastard’. He then resisted the doubling of the Tiers Etat’s representation in the States General, warned the King that the country was in the throes of a dangerous revolution (though agreeing that the tax burden must be shared more fairly) and opposed Necker’s recall. By 1789 Artois was the acknowledged leader of the court party.

He had also again become one of the most unpopular men in France. It was known that he had done his best to stop the King making any concessions and the mob shouted abuse at him in the streets. The evening after the Bastille fell he tried to enlist support among the troops, buying them wine; he had a scheme for marching on the Assembly and arresting its members. Next day Louis was shown a pamphlet listing ‘enemies of the people’; Artois’s name came first. Seriously alarmed for his brother’s safety, the King ordered him to leave France.

That night Charles escaped from his flat at Versailles, through a secret door. He rode to Chantilly where he borrowed a carriage from his cousin Condé, then drove to Valenciennes and crossed the Belgian frontier. A tutor followed with his sons, whom he sent to their grandfather at Turin, but their mother stayed at Versailles. Charles, who expected to be out of France for three months at most, was soon joined by Condé, and by the Polignacs and other members of the Queen’s set (this flight by Artois and his friends later became known as ‘The First Emigration’).

The Emperor Joseph II made it plain that M d’Artois was not welcome in the Austrian Netherlands. So, after a delightful month with Louise in Switzerland, Charles presented himself to his father-in-law at Turin, where he was joined by his wife. King Victor Amadeus gave them a palace and an allowance but Charles had to be on his best behaviour, attending Mass daily and, so it was said, even sleeping with his wife; he did not dare see his mistress. In the end he informed the new Emperor—Leopold II, Marie Antoinette’s second brother, who had succeeded Joseph in 1790—that life at Turin had become unbearable. Leopold told Charles to go to Coblenz which belonged to their cousin, the Elector Clement Wenceslas of Trier. Accompanied by sixty followers, Charles arrived there in June 1791 and was given the Castle of Schonbornslust for his residence.

Louise’s friend, Mme de Lage, witnessed Artois’s entry into Coblenz. ‘Everyone was saying, “There he is, our Prince, our hope, the scion of Henri IV.” They crowded round, all wanting to touch him. He possessed the sort of charm which bewitches the French and a way of looking at you like Louis XV, or so elderly people said.’ Charles told the émigré troops that success was certain, even if not quite as near as he had hoped. Louise joined him and gave her entire fortune to help the White army.

The defeat at Valmy stunned the émigrés. On 19 November 1792 Artois wrote, ‘One needs the pen of a Jeremiah, my dear Vaudreuil, to give you a picture of the situation since you left … everything is falling to pieces and we are all starving to death.’ He hints that he might commit suicide ‘were I not attached to life by a bond which every day grows dearer, more precious and more essential … Thank God that at least my friend [Louise] is well.’

After two miserable months at Hamm, Charles set off to ask Catherine the Great for help. The Russian Empress, never indifferent to a handsome man, gave him a million francs and advised him to join the Chouans. ‘You are one of Europe’s great Princes,’ Catherine told him, ‘but there are times when you should forget it.’ His self-esteem restored, he left St Petersburg in excellent spirits that spring, in a Russian warship bound for England, where he landed at Hull in May 1793. But the English government did not respond to a letter which he brought from the Empress, suggesting that they send troops to the Vendée.

Instead of joining the Chouans, Artois idled away his time at Hamm with Louise who, terrified, held him back when a gamble might have saved the Royalist cause. At the end of 1794, at the Duke of York’s invitation, he joined the staff of the British expeditionary force in Holland, spending the winter with them at Arnhem. When the British were driven back, he wandered from Rotterdam to Osnabruck and then to Bremen in a most unprincely way; little is known of his movements at that date but it is said poverty forced him to eat in the cheapest and most squalid inns, at the public table. Finally, in July 1795, a British warship arrived at Hamburg to take him to England.

Already English and émigré troops had landed at Quiberon Bay, and had been swiftly routed by General Hoche, who shot all Royalist prisoners. The British government decided to try again, and to make use of Artois whom Louis XVIII had appointed Lieutenant-General of France. At the end of September Charles and a new expeditionary force of 4,000 men sailed from Portsmouth to land at Port-Breton on the Ile d’Yeu, just off the Vendéen coast. He contacted the Chouan leader, Charette de la Contrie, asking where he should join him on the mainland. Unfortunately Charette was cut off by General Hoche, who concentrated 50,000 men opposite the Ile d’Yeu. Frightful weather and an almost complete lack of supplies demoralized the Royalists, as more and more Republican troops arrived every day. On 18 November Artois took his expedition back to England. He was not cut out to be a Bonnie Prince Charlie.

He dared not land at Portsmouth, where he faced arrest for debts contracted in equipping the émigré armies. Eventually arrangements were made for him to travel secretly to Edinburgh, where he moved into Holyrood House in January 1796; as a royal palace Holyrood conferred immunity from arrest, but he was only able to venture outside its grounds on Sundays. The gloomy palace, in the dark and squalid Old Town which better-class people had long since abandoned, was a crumbling ruin with few habitable rooms. Much of Charles’s allowance of £ 7,000 was spent in providing for indigent courtiers who, for lack of accommodation in the palace, were forced to take wretched lodgings in the Old Town. However he was comforted by the arrival of Louise. (He had completely lost contact with his wife, who eventually died in Austria in 1808.) For all the discomfort of Edinburgh, he had had quite enough of adventures. In 1797 he forbade another Vendéen rising. He wrote, ‘I refuse to authorize an insurrection in the Western Provinces—I cannot let myself be responsible for the useless shedding of blood.’

Charles X in robes of state, by Gerard

Henri V, Comte de Chambord

Comtesse de Chambord

In August 1799, Charles at last reached an arrangement with his creditors and left Edinburgh for London, where he rented a house, 46 Baker Street. Louise de Polastron found a little house just round the corner, 18 Thayer Street, which still exists; here Charles spent most of his time playing whist; he regarded failure to call on Louise as a personal insult. He also went into English society, Lady Harrington’s being a favourite drawing-room, where he often met the Prince of Wales. Mme de Boigne saw them both there, and says of Charles that ‘though his face was not so handsome as the Englishman’s, he had more grace and dignity while his bearing and way of dressing and manner of entering and leaving a room were incomparable.’ Not that Charles neglected the émigré community. He received once a week and gave three annual dinners—on New Year’s Day, St Louis’s Day and St Charles’s Day. He also made a point of visiting émigré schools, contributing to their maintenance. He even found time to be kind to the young Duc d’Orléans, Egalité’s son, who was shunned by most émigrés.

Mme de Polastron had developed tuberculosis. It was aggravated by the foggy Edinburgh climate, and then by her cold damp bedroom in Thayer Street; in addition, her spirits were worn down by a nagging conscience—a devout Catholic, she never ceased to worry about the irregularity of her relationship with Charles. Everyone else saw a deterioration in her appearance, but he was too much in love to notice. Finally friends called in George III’s personal physician, Sir Henry Halford. His diagnosis was: ‘The patient is in the last stage of consumption, and I fear that it is already too late to stop it.’ On his instructions, Charles at once moved her into a stable, then an accepted cure for tuberculosis, in Brompton Grove (now Ovington Square). But it was obvious that Louise was failing, so she was taken back to Thayer Street, where Charles’s chaplain, Père Latil, forbade her to see her lover and made her prepare her soul. She died on 27 March 1804, aged forty.

Louise’s final moments are described by the Duchesse de Gontaut, who was nursing her. Charles had at last been let in, to say goodbye. ‘She raised her hands to heaven and said, “A favour, Monsieur, grant me one request—give yourself to God, surrender yourself entirely to Him!” He fell on his knees and said, “As God is my witness, I swear it!” She repeated “Entirely to God!” Her head fell against my shoulder; that word was the last she uttered—she had ceased to breathe. Monsieur threw up his arms and uttered a dreadful scream.’ Charles confessed and communicated the same day, receiving the sacraments from Latil. Henceforward he was a changed man, who heard Mass daily and spent long hours in prayer.

1804 was altogether a wretched year for him. In March the last serious Royalist plot against Napoleon failed; of its leaders, the Chouan Cadoudal was shot and General Moreau exiled, while General Pichegru committed suicide. Axel Fersen met Charles that autumn and says in his memoirs, ‘He was kind enough to read me the entire account of the recent conspiracy involving Pichegru and Moreau. The whole plan had been his idea.’ In May Bonaparte proclaimed himself ‘Napoleon I, Emperor of the French’. The King had written from Mittau to condole with Artois on Louise’s death, and at the King’s suggestion he joined him in Sweden in October; they had not met for ten years and fell into each other’s arms in tears. Together they issued a formal protest at Bonaparte’s usurpation. But nobody took the Bourbons seriously any more.

Charles went back to Baker Street and his whist parties. Later he moved in with the King at Hartwell. His sons lived there too, though Berry spent most of his time with Amy Brown and their children (there were even rumours of a secret marriage which had later to be annulled by the Pope). However, Angoulême, that ugly and ungracious little man, did not stray—his wife ruled him with an iron hand. It was said that Artois looked the grand seigneur as much as his sons behaved like plebeians. None the less, London society lionized them.

Hope revived in 1813, when Napoleon’s reverses became serious. In January 1814 Artois sailed from Yarmouth, landing in Holland, and eventually entered Franche Comté by Switzerland. But most Frenchmen had forgotten the Bourbons, while the allies, who were still thinking of coming to terms with Napoleon, ignored him. However, everything changed when, on 6 April, the French Senate offered the crown to Louis XVIII.

On the morning of 12 April 1814 Artois, in his capacity of Lieutenant-General and escorted by Napoleonic Marshals, rode into Paris on a white horse, wearing the blue and silver uniform of the National Guard. Still a strikingly handsome man at fifty-seven, he made a most felicitous speech, ending with the words, ‘Nothing is changed, save that there is one more Frenchman.’ The streets rang with shouts of ‘Vive les Bourbons! Vive le Roi! Vive Monsieur!’ as he rode to Nôtre-Dame to give thanks. Some people actually embraced his knees. When Charles entered the Tuileries he was asked if he was tired; he replied, ‘Why should I be tired? This is the first happy day I have known for thirty years.’

He was ruler of France for nearly three weeks. But while he charmed the Marshals’ wives, his liking for gentlemen of the Ancien Régime and open contempt for the achievements of the past twenty years made many people uneasy. He seems to have expected to remain in power, with his brother as a mere figurehead; his motive being not so much ambition as a profound distrust of Louis’s moderate policies. But Louis XVIII, who entered Paris on 3 May, was determined to reign. The Duc de Duras asked him whether the crown was truly re-established. Louis replied, ‘It will stay in our hands if I outlive my brother. But if he outlives me, then I guarantee nothing.’

When the Hundred Days came, Charles went to the provinces to try and rally support. On hearing that the King had fled, he gave up hope and, escorted by 300 picked cavalry, rode to Belgium where he joined his brother. During the uncertain days at Ghent, he was obviously convinced that Louis’s moderation was responsible for their misfortunes. He had always considered that a show of firmness could have stopped the Revolution in 1789; now he believed that the concessions made to the Revolution had paved the way for Napoleon’s return.

After the royal family came back to Paris in 1815, Artois steadily opposed Louis XVIII’s moderate policies, though never in public. But everybody knew Monsieur’s real opinions, that he was encouraging the White Terror. However, the dissolution of the Chambre Introuvable in 1816 put an end to the Ultra majority and diminished his political influence.

Artois was not quite so foolish as is generally assumed. The Ultras were much more than a mere mob of blimpish backwoodsmen; they intended to rebuild, rather than resurrect, the Ancien Régime, and their political ideas were so far removed from pre-1789 attitudes as to constitute a Revolution of the Right. They were not only men of the Emigration, but also the heirs of the Notables and Parlementaires of the revolte nobilaire of 1787; they accepted Parliamentary government readily, as a means of controlling the King and of perpetuating their own power. And Charles, far from being an Absolutist, believed that a strong monarchy in partnership with a strong ruling class offered the best hope of a lasting Restoration.

The Ultras possessed two formidable political thinkers in Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, the ‘Prophets of the Past’. Bonald, arguing that the traditional social order had been divinely revealed, proposed an alliance of ‘Throne and Altar’. The Comte de Maistre regarded the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution as Satanic in origin; because of Original Sin men could not be made good simply by restructuring society; the only solution was a rigidly hierarchical society based on ultramontane Catholicism. His belief that ‘Spiritual absolutism is the sole principle of stability and continuity’ has something of Orwell’s 1984 about it, as does his grim Eulogy of the Executioner—‘take away from the world that incomparable agent and in a moment order becomes chaos.’ Bonald and de Maistre were supported by translations of Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, while Romanticism and the emotional Christianity of Chateaubriand supplied the enthusiasm. To be a true Ultra, one had to be a pious Catholic; as a modern historian has written, ‘Gone was the frivolous, Godless aristocracy of Ancien Régime France; in its place was a spiritually and politically regenerated caste.’

Charles was unmistakably a man of the nineteenth century, in contrast to Louis XVIII who always remained one of the eighteenth. He readily adopted the new political ideas, corresponding with de Maistre while still in exile. If he did not share his brother’s literary tastes, one need not believe that ‘he never read a book’; we know he was familiar with both de Maistre’s and Bonald’s political writings and with Scott’s novels. His weakness came not from stupidity—although admittedly he was only of mediocre intelligence—but from invariably seeing things as he wished them to be. Unfortunately this was a fault common to almost his entire circle of friends and advisers. Lady Morgan observed in 1816, ‘There appears, indeed, among these ardent royalists a resolute determination to see every object through the medium of their own wishes.’

Throughout Louis’s reign, Charles vehemently opposed any policy of compromise with the Liberals. On one occasion he threatened to leave the Tuileries with his sons, whereupon the infuriated King screamed that there were still prisons for rebellious princes. In 1818 Charles actually begged Wellington to stay with his army of occupation. In the summer of that year there were rumours that he was plotting to seize the throne, the so called ‘Conspiracy of the Water’s Edge’, but so desperate a course was out of character, though he considered the policies of Richelieu and Decazes disastrous—‘a programme which includes persecution of the King’s friends and of those of the realm and contempt for monarchical institutions.’

If he was unhappy about his brother’s government, Charles was content with his family. He quickly took to his new daughter-in-law, Caroline de Berry. After the sadness of a grandson and a grand-daughter dying in infancy, he was overjoyed at the birth of a healthy child in September 1819, Louise-Marie-Thérèse. She was given the ancient title of ‘Mademoiselle’.

Charles was heartbroken by Berry’s murder in 1820. He also realized that the dynasty faced extinction; Angoulême was impotent, while even Purs admitted that he seemed unfitted to be King, with no thoughts beyond his hounds and his chess. In tears, Charles actually discussed the possibility of remarrying with his friend Vitrolles, who suggested the sister of Ferdinand VII of Spain, the widowed Duchess of Lucca; he was sufficiently interested to ask Vitrolles what she looked like, but abandoned the idea when Caroline de Berry gave birth to her miraculous son.

His grandson became the most important person in Charles’s life. Young Henri and Mademoiselle watched constantly from the windows of the Elysée, where they lived, for the arrival of his fast little phaeton and then ran eagerly to greet ‘Bon-papa’ who was more like a father than a grandfather. He let them do literally what they wanted; when Sir Thomas Lawrence was painting his portrait, Charles refused to send his grandchildren out of the room, although they were tormenting both Sir Thomas and himself.

As a result of Berry’s murder the Ultras came to power. Although Artois asked Richelieu to take Decazes’s place as Prime Minister, he soon engineered his resignation. It was this which made the King complain angrily of Charles, ‘He conspired against Louis XVI, he conspires against me and one day he will probably conspire against himself.’ What really irritated the King was that with Villèle’s appointment as chief minister, Charles had all but taken over the government.

Artois deserves some credit for supporting Villèle; even if he was generally acknowledged by the Ultras as their leader, Villèle’s charmlessness, caution and lack of enthusiasm can hardly have appealed to Charles. Villèle was one of the most gifted finance ministers in French history, who not only put public accounting on a lastingly regular basis but directly contributed to the increase in banking, and encouraged his friend Baron Jacques de Rothschild to settle in Paris. For almost every year of his administration the budget showed a surplus. Prosperity was evident in industrial development throughout the 1820s. New coal mines were dug, the canal system was lengthened, a steamboat service was started on the Loire, and a French locomotive was constructed in 1827. Roads began to be macadamed. In Paris, the first pavements were built and omnibus services were introduced; gas lighting spread throughout the entire capital.

Prosperity was one of the two planks of Artois’s simple scheme for strengthening the monarchy. The other was glory. He shared the indignation of most Frenchmen at losing the ‘natural’ frontiers of 1792; he too had been humiliated by Waterloo, even if it had saved the Bourbons. The triumph of the French army in Spain exceeded his wildest hopes. In December 1823, at an official dinner at the Hôtel de Ville, he saluted ‘the glory of French arms’; the applause was so great that he was overcome by emotion and could not finish his speech.

The discord between Artois and the King vanished as Louis’s health deteriorated. Charles was genuinely grief-stricken at his brother’s deathbed, so much so that he did not realize Louis had gone until the Baron de Damas whispered, ‘Sire, the King is dead.’ Charles bent and kissed Louis’s cold hand. Then Damas flung open the doors to announce to the waiting courtiers, ‘Messieurs, the King is dead. The King, Messieurs.’

Next day Charles told his grandchildren, who were puzzled by the violet coat he wore in mourning, that although he was King now he would see them just as much as ever, and nothing would part them from him. Mademoiselle, who was only five, was very worried, murmuring, ‘King—that’s not the worst of it’; her governess, Mme de Gontaut, suspected the little girl thought her grandfather would henceforth be confined to a wheel-chair like poor old Louis.

According to custom, Charles was not present at Louis XVIII’s funeral when Saint-Denis, hung with black velvet but ablaze with candles, saw the ancient rites for the last time, complete even to the laying-up of the King’s helmet and spurs. Later Charles congratulated old Marquis de Dreux-Brézé, Grand Master of the Ceremonies of France, on his conduct of the service. The Grand Master apologized for any mistakes; ‘Next time we will do better.’ ‘Thank you, Brézé, but I am in no hurry,’ replied the King.

Charles X made his joyeuse entrée into his capital on Monday 27 September 1824. He refused to take precautions against assassination. ‘Why should I? They can’t hate me without knowing me and I’m quite sure that when they do know me they won’t hate me.’ It was raining, but at the barrier at the Etoile the King mounted a magnificent Arab horse, as a hundred and one guns boomed out in salute, and then began his triumphal way to Nôtre-Dame, down the Champs-Elysées and along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. At the Elysée he insisted on riding out of the procession to greet his grandchildren who were waving from one of the windows. The crowd were delirious; even that sour republican, Benjamin Constant, found himself shouting, ‘Vive le Roi’—‘Aha, I have captured you at last,’ laughed the King who heard him. When he came home at last to the Tuileries, Charles was asked if he was weary; he answered happily, ‘No, joy never tires one.’ The cheers were even louder three days later when he reviewed his army on the Champs de Mars. The King’s popularity owed something to an ordinance abolishing press censorship, but more to his undeniable charm.

Even at sixty-seven, Louis XVI’s youngest brother was the glamorous sort of Bourbon. Although his hair was white, he had the physique and bearing of a man twenty years younger and looked especially impressive on horseback. His friendliness could be overwhelming. Comte de Puymaigre says, ‘If one had been awed by Louis XVIII’s imposing manner, the same could not be said of Charles X; when strolling with him one had constantly to remind oneself that one was talking to the King of France.’ He received persons of plebeian origin in exactly the same way as he received Dukes. Indeed, Charles X deserved the title of ‘First Gentleman in Europe’ far more than George IV; his character was infinitely more honourable than that of the fat hedonist across the Channel. There were no greedy mistresses, no scandals, no ruinous extravagance.

Lamartine, who often met him, analysed the character of King Charles. ‘He had a typically French temperament—light, quick, spontaneous, always ready with an amusing reply, a friendly smile, a frank look, a hand extended, thoroughly amiable in manner; always wanting to please and be liked, a person one could confide in, with a loyalty in friendship rare in a King, genuinely modest, anxiously seeking the best advice, scrupulously conscientious and hard on himself while indulgent to others.’ But the founder of the Second Republic also saw much to criticize; he considered that—in modern terms—Charles was essentially a lightweight without the brains or the character necessary for a ruler in his circumstances. ‘Looking at him, we were attracted by the man but distrusted the monarch.’

Charles X was crowned at Rheims on Sunday 29 May 1825. A spectator, Comte d’Haussonville, noted with amusement that the King’s distinguished bearing ‘evoked a thousand little cries of ecstasy from my lady neighbours’. Clad only in a crimson satin shirt, Charles lay full length at the feet of the Archbishop-Duke, once the humble Père Latil, to be anointed with the chrism of Clovis; enough oil had been saved from the breaking of the sainte ampoule at the Revolution to suffice for just one coronation. (Louis XVIII had refused to be crowned, pleading ill-health.) The service was attended by many leading intellectuals including Chateaubriand, Lamartine who wrote a Chant du Sacre, and Victor Hugo who produced his regulation ode (‘O God! Keep always this King whom a people adore’). Hugo recalls that it was a radiant day, and how the long clear windows (the stained glass had been broken during the Revolution) let dazzling daylight into the cathedral. ‘All the light of May was in that church,’ says Hugo, ‘gilding the Archbishop and the altar with its rays.’ Doves were released, to fly in the luminous cloud of incense which filled the nave. When he had been crowned and enthroned, the cathedral doors were thrown open and the people acclaimed the Most Christian King in his diamond crown, roaring cannon and trumpets salutes, heralds throwing gold and silver medals into the crowd. Afterwards he banqueted on a dais, still wearing his crown, with the Dauphin and the Dukes of Bourbon and Orléans in their coronets. Next day he held a chapter of the Knights of the Saint-Esprit, and the day after rode on a white horse to the Hospital of Saint-Marcoul where he touched one hundred and twenty-four sufferers for the Evil.

There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the crowd’s welcome when Charles returned to Paris. Yet far from being an ill-considered revival, the coronation of 1825 was well suited to the prevailing mood of historical Romanticism. The period’s Liberals were inspired by a creed far more fantastic than that of the Ultras; they saw the Revolution as the culmination of a 1,300-year-old struggle by the Gallo-Romans against Frankish oppressors, whose latter-day representatives were the nobility.

The Ultras may be forgiven for thinking, in the age of Metternich and pre-Reform Bill England, that the times seemed ripe for putting their ideas into practice. The enactment of the dramatic law of sacrilege in 1825—condemning those who stole communion vessels containing the consecrated Host to lose both hand and head—was a sign and token of the new alliance between throne and altar. It was never enforced.

The law had the King’s fervent support. Guizot, a Protestant, calls Charles ‘a submissive bigot to his fingertips’, and the royal enthusiasm for taking part in religious processions—he was constantly walking round Nôtre-Dame under a canopy—might seem to confirm Guizot’s opinion. Nothing damaged Charles more than being identified with the aggressive clergy of the period; he was even suspected of being a secret Jesuit. Yet in private life he was an unusually tolerant man, who never criticized any of his courtiers for a lack of belief.

An attempt in 1826 to restore primogeniture (and end the break-up of great estates) aroused such fury throughout the entire country, even among noble families, that Villèle desisted. However, the government did succeed in indemnifying the émigrés. A thousand million francs (£ 40 million) was raised by lowering the interest on government bonds by two per cent. As over four-fifths of those indemnified belonged to the nobility and clergy, and as the majority of bond holders were bourgeois, the measure naturally outraged the middle-class. But it brought security to everyone who had purchased confiscated émigré property during the Revolution.

Charles was very fashionable in his Romantic Philhellenism. When the English Foreign Secretary, George Canning, visited Paris with his wife in 1826, the King took them to a play in the theatre at Saint-Cloud; Canning was even invited to dinner with the Royal Family at the Tuileries (it was the first time Charles had sat at the same table as a commoner since becoming King). What Charles wanted was English co-operation in working for Greek independence. He got it. In October 1827, in Navarrino Bay, a combined Anglo-French fleet sank the Turkish navy, while the following year General Maison threw the Pasha of Egypt and his troops out of the Morea.

Unlike Louis XVIII, Charles presided over all cabinet meetings. He hunted only two days a week, although so fond of his sport that Parisians nicknamed him ‘Robin des Bois’. The King’s favourite time of the year was October, when he went to Compiègne for a fortnight devoted entirely to hunting. Lamartine says that ‘a love of horses, a taste for the greenwood, the music of hounds, the thrill of following stag and roebuck, the stirring gone-away and hallali sounded on the braying horns, always excited him, just as a brave man responds to the smell of battle.’ He adds that hounds and horses were a way of life for Charles. The old King loved the open air and all its pleasures, even to just lying on his back on the grass at Saint-Cloud.

While Charles did not have favourites, he had a little circle of close friends—the Duc de Montmorency, the Duc de Doudeauville, the Duc de Blacas, the Prince de Polignac and the Baron de Damas. Their amusements were rather limited, being restricted to innumerable whist parties. Indeed, apart from cards and hunting, the King’s one indulgence was a certain love of display; the smallsword which he wore on ceremonial occasions had its hilt encrusted with diamonds (today it may be seen at the Louvre in the Galerie d’Appollon). Even this was only because he thought his subjects expected it of him. In fact he had so little time for luxury that M de Doudeauville had to remonstrate with him about the shabbiness of his bedroom.

Sometimes the King went out into society, as when he attended the Mary Stuart ball organized by Mme de Berry at the Pavillon de Marsan for the carnival of 1829. He particularly enjoyed going to the Opéra.

Charles had a pleasant taste in music. Rossini’s comic opera, Il Viaggio di Rheims, in honour of the coronation, won the composer the posts of Master of the King’s Music and Inspecteur Général du Chant en France. After the triumphant success of Le Comte Ory in 1828, the government offered Rossini an annual pension in return for six operas; Charles, who deeply admired his work, personally signed the contract. It quickly resulted in William Tell which took Paris by storm in 1829—the King awarded Rossini the Légion d’Honneur only four days after the first performance. Charles also commissioned an opera from Meyerbeer, Robert le Diable.

In February 1830 Charles gave further proof of his tolerance of new fashions. Victor Hugo’s Hernani, a play which broke every rule of French classical drama, had been put on at the Odéon and caused a pitched battle between traditionalists and Romantics. Six outraged representatives of the Académie Française waited on the King, imploring him to stop the production. To their horror he refused, laughing and saying, ‘In matters of comedy, gentlemen, I am only one of the audience.’ In the event, Hernani heralded the triumph of French Romanticism and transformed French drama.

By this time Charles was politically in very deep waters. There had been too many unpopular measures; attempts at election rigging, the total surrender of education into clerical hands, the sacking of large numbers of Imperial officers, and a new and heavy-handed press censorship. In any case the bourgeoisie resented being ruled by men who were, like Stendhal’s Marquis de la Mole, despising anyone not descended from ‘people who had ridden in the royal carriages’. Still more unsettling was the economic depression of 1826 whose effects lasted for several years. When the King reviewed the National Guard on the Champs de Mars one beautiful spring Sunday in 1827, they booed him so loudly that his horse shied and nearly threw him. To yells of ‘A bas les ministres! A bas les Jésuites!’ he answered, ‘I came here to receive homage, not to be given advice.’ With his usual elegance Charles—who was now seventy—continued his inspection, riding along the ranks, gracefully acknowledging cheers and ignoring insults. Next day the National Guard was disbanded, on Villèle’s advice.

To the King’s surprise, Villèle lost the election of November 1827. The number of Liberal and government deputies was roughly the same, about 175 each; dissident Ultras amounted to 75. Despite everything Charles could do to dissuade him, Villèle insisted on resigning. With his customary gaucheness, the Dauphin explained to him, ‘You’re too unpopular.’ The former Prime Minister answered the silly little man, ‘I hope to God I’m the only one who has become unpopular.’ The Dauphin’s wife, Mme d’Angoulême, warned the King that in letting Villèle go ‘you have just taken the first step down from your throne’.

Villèle’s successor was the Vicomte de Martignac, a lawyer from Bordeaux. He was an Ultra, though of a much more moderate kind than his predecessor. Charles disliked his anti-clericalism, and had no real confidence in him, but let him try. Like Richelieu, Martignac wooed the centre, relaxing press censorship and placing the educational activities of the Jesuits under restraint, gestures which earned his government some slight popularity. When the King toured Alsace in autumn 1828, he was cheered so enthusiastically that he exclaimed, ‘Had I known how much I was liked, I would have kept Villèle.’ The poor man believed from now on that outside Paris his people really did ‘adore’ him. Meanwhile Martignac’s supporters drifted away steadily throughout 1829.

Although Charles read all the Liberal newspapers conscientiously, he could never understand that the opposition to the Ultras was social and anti-clerical, rather than political. Neither he nor any of his narrow circle realized that the vast mass of articulate Frenchmen detested being dictated to by haughty émigrés and overbearing priests. He now chose to appoint a chief minister who was a grand seigneur, and whose mentality he found more congenial than that of petty provincial nobles like Martignac and Villèle.

In August 1829 a new government was formed with Prince Jules de Polignac as its leader. ‘Dear Jules’, who had been born in 1780, may not have been Charles’s son, as has sometimes been suggested, but with his charm and his piety and his vagueness, he undoubtedly had a good deal in common with the King. In politics, Polignac was a Pur of Purs who believed that God had chosen him to save France from atheism and revolution—he had visions like Jeanne d’Arc. His appointment was the biggest mistake of Charles’s entire life. Yet the simple old King was not the only person to be deceived; the great Duke of Wellington thought Polignac to be the ablest man that France had had since the Restoration. As for a hard line policy, even Villèle wrote to tell the King that he did not believe that the royal authority could be maintained by making concessions and ‘by looking for support to those who want to tear it down’.

There was general astonishment at the new ministry. Mme d’Angoulême told the King, ‘This is an adventure and I don’t like adventures—they’ve never brought us luck.’ Talleyrand foresaw the end of the Restoration, and M d’Orléans began to see interesting prospects, concealing his pleasure when the young Adolphe Thiers suggested in a Liberal newspaper that the older branch of the Bourbons should be replaced by the younger; Charles had always been kind to him, even granting him the coveted ‘Royal Highness’, which Louis XVIII had withheld, but Louis Philippe was not noted for gratitude. The opposition to Polignac in the press, the salons and the cafés grew frenzied, while that in the Chambers was so violent that Greville heard that ‘the King does nothing but cry’. Charles could never realize that, by employing Polignac as his chief minister, he had made himself the embodiment of vengeful reaction, and he was deeply distressed by the lack of cheering when he rode through the Paris streets.

Naively, the King believed that all would be well if sufficient military glory were forthcoming. The unrest among the Catholic Belgians, who hated their new Dutch masters, gave Charles and Polignac an intoxicating vision of regaining the Rhine frontier and even the whole of Belgium; the dream was dissipated by Prussian opposition. Luckily Dey Hussein of Algiers struck the French Consul with his fan, which was a good enough excuse to invade the pirates’ lair. In May 1830 a fleet of 469 merchantmen, escorted by 100 warships, took 38,000 troops and 4,500 horses to Africa. The army, commanded by the Minister for War, General de Bourmont (the ‘traitor of Waterloo’) entered the city of Algiers on 5 July 1830 and hoisted the Lilies over the Kasbah. The cost of the entire expedition was paid for by the Dey’s treasure.

Meanwhile at the opening of the Chambers in March 1830, Charles more or less threatened, in an extraordinary speech from the throne, that if necessary he would use force to keep his ministers. The opposition replied with an Address to the King, demanding that he appoint his ministers from the majority in the lower chamber—the Charter had never made clear how they were to be chosen. But if Charles were to accept the will of the majority, he would surrender the government of France to men who were hostile to the Bourbons and to the whole concept of the restored monarchy. Charles, believing as he did in a strong monarchy, had once exclaimed, ‘I would rather earn my bread than reign like the King of England!’ He therefore ordered new elections to take place in June and July; in a proclamation he explained to the electors that to maintain the Charter, ‘I must be able to use freely the sacred rights which are the prerogative of my crown’, ending rather pathetically, ‘It is your King who asks you, it is a father who calls on you.’ But the electorate were unmoved; out of 428 deputies returned, 274 were supporters of the Address.

As Charles saw it, in his simplicity, he now had only one course—to change the electoral system. Strictly speaking, there was provision for this in the Charter. The King told his cabinet that the men of the Left were trying to pull down the monarchy, and he reminded them how weakness had destroyed Louis XVI. ‘I remember very well what happened. The first concession made by my brother was the signal for his destruction … rather than be carted to the scaffold we will fight and they will have to kill us in the saddle.’ In his blindness, Charles saw his measures as essentially legal and in no way a coup d’état. ‘Dear Jules’, who was acting as Minister for War in Bourmont’s absence, assured him that there would be no trouble and that in 1830 Frenchmen cared more for prosperity than politics. On 26 July the King therefore issued his ‘Four Ordinances of Saint-Cloud’; these dissolved the new Chamber of Deputies before it had even met, restricted the franchise to 10,000 landowners, and called fresh elections; they also imposed the first really rigorous press censorship since the Empire.

That day Charles went hunting. As he was about to leave Saint-Cloud, Mme de Berry ran up, waving the Moniteur in which the ordinances had been published. She cried, ‘You are a real King at last! My son will owe his crown to you and his mother thanks you deeply.’

Chateaubriand wrote sadly, ‘Yet another government hurling itself down from Nôtre-Dame.’ By that evening, a Monday, the mob was in the streets and stoning ministers. On the next day the army had to be called out; most of the troops were in Algeria or on the Belgian frontier, and the effective garrison of Paris was down to 9,000 men. Polignac concealed the gravity of the situation from Charles, who was still at Saint-Cloud, telling him it was nothing but a riot, and that were he mistaken ‘I shall give Your Majesty my head in atonement’—he also spoke of a reassuring vision he had had of Our Lady. Meanwhile barricades were going up, arsenals being stormed. By Thursday 29 July the mob—mainly petit bourgeois rather than working-class, and led by Napoleonic veterans—had taken the Louvre and the Tuileries, and the army was retreating, many men deserting to the rebels. Yet few deputies had any wish to depose Charles X; they only wanted to be rid of Polignac. If the King had been at the Tuileries in the centre of Paris, instead of outside at Saint-Cloud, a compromise would have been reached.

At last, from the terrace at Saint-Cloud, through a spy glass, poor Charles saw the tricolore flying from Nôtre-Dame. He sent an emissary, promising to dismiss Polignac and withdraw the ordinances, and appointed the Duc de Mortemart as Prime Minister. But it was too late. Soon the situation at Saint-Cloud became so dangerous that the King had to move to the Grand Trianon, and then to Rambouillet. Throughout, the old monarch displayed his habitual dignity. Each time the cannon were heard, he gently flicked the cloth of his card-table as though he had seen a spot of dust. Later, with his usual simplicity, he told Mme de Gontaut that he had only tried to appear calm because it seemed the best thing to do. The Duchess says she cried when she saw his sad, resigned face and knew that he realized it was all over.

On 1 August Charles appointed the Duc d’Orléans Lieutenant-General of France. On 2 August 1830, at Rambouillet, he abdicated; for a brief moment there was a Louis XIX until the Dauphin also signed an act of abdication. Then Charles saluted his grandson as King, and presented the ten-year-old Henri V to his guards. Orléans cunningly pretended that he had no authority until the Chambers had debated the abdication; as he expected, the deputies refused to accept the boy. On 7 August Orléans, produced ‘like a rabbit out of a hat’ by the Liberals, was proclaimed ‘Louis Philippe, King of the French’.

Charles had waited trustingly at Rambouillet for the Lieutenant-General to proclaim Henri V. On 3 August, however, hearing that an armed rabble was approaching (some by the new omnibuses), he decided to leave France, although he could have cut them to ribbons. Indeed, as Chateaubriand points out, had Charles fallen back on Chartres or Tours, the monarchy would have survived, as most of the army was loyal. However, like his martyred brother, the old King was not prepared to shed French blood.

But he did not depart like Napoleon, cowering in a closed carriage, or like Louis Philippe in 1848, disguised as an English tourist. Even the sternest critics of Charles X admit that the dignity of his exit had something of the old grandeur of the House of France. Accompanied by cavalry, artillery and infantry of the guard, he marched to Cherbourg beneath the Lilies, insisting on the observance of every detail of etiquette as though he were still King. French monarchs always dined alone at a square table, and when only a round one could be found, he ordered it to be cut square. At Cherbourg, on 16 August, after saying goodbye to his guards, he boarded a ship bound for England. He wept as it set sail.

Charles landed at Weymouth, staying briefly at Lulworth Castle nearby before travelling to Holyrood which had once more been made available. To his relief, he discovered that nearly £ 500,000 in gold had been deposited in a London bank by Louis XVIII, in 1814, for just such an emergency. He spent two years in Edinburgh, much more agreeably than before as he was able to leave Holyrood and shoot with the Scots nobility; a great walker, he enjoyed strolling through the Edinburgh streets, when he was usually followed by a large and friendly crowd.

In the summer of 1832, without Charles’s permission, Caroline de Berry tried to raise the Vendée for her son. The little rising was easily crushed, and later she was captured. She was then discovered to be pregnant, and Louis Philippe arranged for her delivery to be witnessed by government officials. It was hastily explained that the Duchess had secretly married her secretary the year before, but she was completely discredited. Charles never saw her again.

In September 1832 the King left Scotland for Bohemia, where he found a suitably regal residence in the Gothic Hradschin at Prague. Chateaubriand visited him there, to be shown in by the ever-faithful Blacas, and was much moved. He wrote, ‘Charles X, if he distressed me as a monarch, always endeared himself to me as a man.’ The King still thought that he had been right to act as he had. ‘I wanted to leave my grandson a throne more secure than mine was.’ With his unquenchable optimism the old man was certain that one day the French would call Henri back, nor was his instinct entirely wrong. Meanwhile he was as charming as ever, shot a little, played cards and said his prayers.

In the autumn of 1836 a cholera epidemic made the King move his little court from Prague to Gorizia in north-eastern Italy, not far from Trieste. On the morning of 5 November it was realized that he had contracted the dreaded disease. He died the following day and, shrouded in the habit of a Franciscan, was buried in the friary of Castagnavizza, where he still lies. Chateaubriand comments that, when the thirty-fifth successor of Hugues Capet died, ‘an entire era of the world’s history went with him’.

‘Poor Charles X is dead’, King Leopold of the Belgians told his niece, the English Princess Victoria. (Leopold’s letter is often quoted, but is too important to omit.) ‘History will state that Louis XVIII was a most liberal monarch, reigning with great mildness and justice to his end, but that his brother, from his despotic and harsh disposition, upset all the other had done and lost the throne. Louis XVIII was a clever, hard-hearted man, shackled by no principle, very proud and false. Charles X an honest man, a kind friend, an honourable master, sincere in his opinions and inclined to do everything that is right.’

Indeed, in a simpler political climate Charles might have had a peaceful and prosperous reign. It is not true, as is so often alleged, that he tried to restore the Ancien Régime; never for one moment did he attempt to destroy the legal and administrative institutions which his brother had inherited in 1814, and even in 1830 he believed that he was acting constitutionally. He was particularly unfortunate in his choice of Polignac—almost anyone else could have avoided the storm. A contemporary wrote, ‘A time will come when, secretly or openly, half the French people will regret the departure of that old man and that child and will say, “If the 1830 Revolution was to be tried all over again, it would not succeed.” ’ The writer was Balzac.

The Third Restoration

HENRI V (1830–1883)

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‘Henri V will never abandon the flag of Henri IV’

There are some kings who never reigned, whom history none the less calls King. James III of England and Louis XVII are familiar enough. Henri V is less well known.

Many contemporaries saw the Revolution of 1830 as a French version of the English Revolution of 1688, equating the Bourbons with the Stuarts, and in many ways Legitimism, the creed of those loyal to the Bourbon dynasty, was a kind of French Jacobitism. Its supporters included every Frenchman who loved the old kings and the old religion, while it had all the poignant romance common to great lost causes of the Right. But for many years Legitimism was very far from being a lost cause. For France did not finally make up her mind what sort of government she really wanted until the very end of the nineteenth century. In 1830, even Liberals like Stendhal thought a republic ‘a horrible condition anywhere else than in America—’tis the real cholera morbus’; and without Louis Philippe and the division among Royalists, France would almost certainly have remained a monarchy into the present century. Fervent Legitimists believed that Heaven would not allow the Orleanists—‘the regicide dynasty’—to keep the throne they had stolen, and all good Catholics prayed hopefully for a Third Restoration.

Furthermore, besides the simple creed of the Dukes and country squires, there was also an intellectual Legitimism. Balzac, Vigny, Gustave Doré and later Taine, Renan and even Pasteur, were all Legitimists. Taine and Renan, who were ‘scientific’ historians, launched a powerfully argued attack on the entire philosophy of the Revolution and on the whole cult of reason and democracy (which had been accepted by Orléanism).

Henri - Charles - Ferdinand - Marie - Dieudonné d’Artois de Bourbon, Duc de Bordeaux, styled Comte de Chambord and known to his followers as King Henri V, had been born in 1820, the son of the murdered Berry. Fatherless, forbidden to see his mother after her disgrace in 1832, deprived of his adored grandfather in 1836, Henri spent his youth in Austria in the midst of fanatical Ultra exiles. His aunt d’Angoulême filled him with tales of her martyred parents, while Jesuit tutors—arch-reactionaries in the nineteenth century—instilled an uncompromising piety into the boy, as well as some rather slanted history. He grew up unused to being contradicted, for his courtiers still followed the old etiquette, and it is hardly surprising that he acquired too much faith in his own judgement. The old King had been a father rather than a grandfather to him, and fundamentally Henri’s political convictions were those of Charles X: later he derided ‘sterile parliamentary confrontations from which the sovereign usually emerges so weakened as to be all but powerless’. Above all, he grew up to be a Catholic of the penitential sort, expecting affliction rather than mercy from his God; his natural haughtiness was tempered by genuine humility. He was devout to the point of mysticism, a faithful husband and a loyal friend. Of all his dynasty, he resembled most his great-grandfather—the Dauphin Louis, son of Louis XV.

In appearance, Henri V was the short, stout sort of Bourbon, his face that of a man of sorrows, mournful and austere. Apart from brilliant, piercing eyes, a heavy beard and a curious hairiness, his chief characteristic was a pronounced limp due to a riding accident when he was twenty-one. In manner he was unmistakably regal, though reserved and silent. He undoubtedly possessed what is nowadays known as ‘charisma’.

In 1843 the King set out on a long European tour, arriving in England later that year, much to Queen Victoria’s emotion. He stayed in Belgrave Square, from where he issued a manifesto: Legitimists sang Vive Henri Quatre under his window while he received their leaders. In 1846—after a sad little romance with a Russian Grand Duchess, broken off by order of the Tsar—he married a Habsburg, Archduchess Marie Theresa, daughter of the Duke of Modena. She was a tall, angular old maid, three years older than he, soured by premature deafness, arrogant and blindly reactionary in her political and religious views, and with a deep distrust of the pagan French (whose language she spoke with a peculiarly ugly accent). They were to be childless.

Henri’s sister, Mademoiselle, had left him the year before to marry their cousin, the future Charles III of Parma. The young Duke was assassinated in 1854, whereupon Mademoiselle became Regent for her six-year-old son, Robert I. But in 1860 even Parma was lost to the Bourbons, when the Risorgimento swept Robert off his throne and incorporated the Duchy into the new Kingdom of Italy. Poor battered Mademoiselle died four years later.

After the ‘Revolution of Contempt’ had ejected Louis Philippe and his Bourgeois Monarchy in 1848, and during the subsequent reaction, the majority in the French Assembly was divided between Legitimist and Orleanist deputies. A group of the former went to meet Henri at Wiesbaden to discuss the situation with him, but no positive policy emerged. Legitimist officers planned a coup d’état for 1849, but it never took place. In the event, Louis Napoleon took advantage of the Royalists’ disunity to give the French the strong monarchy which they sought and set himself up as Napoleon III. But the tawdry Opèra Bouffe world of the Second Empire, with its crowned adventurer, its flash court and its foreign business barons, thoroughly disgusted the Legitimists, and indeed many other Frenchmen as well.

The Legitimist party was both well supported and well organized. There were three sorts of Legitimist. First, men of action like the Duc des Cars and General de Saint-Priest, who would have liked a coup d’état. Then the parliamentarians, such as Pierre-Antoine Berryer, a golden-voiced lawyer from Lorraine who was called ‘the tribune of the monarchy’. Although of bourgeois origin, he was the idol of the French nobility on account of his wonderful speeches: Emile Olivier (Napoleon III’s ‘liberal’ prime minister) said, ‘He who has never heard Berryer speaking on one of his good days, does not know what oratory is.’ Berryer hoped for a decentralized constitutional monarchy. Decentralization—and hatred of Paris—was one of the inspirations of the third group, the populist Legitimists, who tried to forge a kind of radical Tory alliance with the Republicans; they were led by the Marquis de Rochejacquelein, who advocated universal suffrage. Some of these democratic noblemen even went so far as to argue that true virtue was to be found only in peasants.

These three Legitimist groupings were co-ordinated by a high command in Paris which was appointed by the King. The Bureau du Roi consisted of twelve devoted noblemen who met once a week under the chairmanship of the Duc de Levis or the Duc des Cars—or later, the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé (one meets again all the old names so familiar under the Ancien Régime and during the Restoration). Besides laying down guidelines for policy, the Bureau also organized fund-raising, with gratifying results: despite their lamentations, the upper ranks of the French nobility had remained surprisingly wealthy. At local level there was a network of clubs and secret societies: in some instances, Freemasons’ Lodges were actually taken over. There was even a Legitimist news agency, founded in 1848 by a M de Saint-Chéron; the Correspondance Saint-Chéron sent out well-composed press releases to newspapers all over France.

From the 1840s to the 1870s, the Legitimist party was probably the best organized and best disciplined political opposition in French history. Another Louis XVIII would have regained his throne easily in 1849 or after 1870. Alas, Henri V was incapable of being a politician. In a sense he was not even a Legitimist—to himself and to his more deluded followers he was simply the re-incarnation of la vieille France, a formula which was hardly an election winner. Legitimist leaders complained respectfully but bitterly of their King’s lack of leadership.

Henri lived happily enough in his castle at Frohsdorf (in Upper Austria, near Salzburg) with a little court of devoted friends headed by Blacas’s son, where he was treated with simple yet impressive etiquette. He hunted and shot and played his whist and attended Mass, just as his grandfather had done, his chief pleasure being his beautiful grey horses. He was fond of his charmless, sterile wife, who loved him deeply. A romantic whose favourite authors were Dumas and Chateaubriand, his fantasies of Old France were far preferable to the reality. Only if the country which had beheaded his great-uncle, rejected his grandfather, murdered his father and disgraced his mother, begged him humbly to return, would he contemplate ascending the throne of his ancestors. He wanted no coups d’état, no Vendées, no counter-revolutions; everything must be left to Divine Providence. With his Wagnerian isolation, dreaming medieval dreams in his lonely turrets, he has been compared to the Bavarian Ludwig II at Neuschwanstein.

The extraordinarily unreal atmosphere of his court was typified by the elder Blacas. When the old Duke died in 1839, he left instructions for his body to be buried at the feet of Charles X, in the best traditions of thirteenth-century French chivalry. This mock-medievalism was to be the ruin of the Legitimist cause.

However, Henri made a political move in 1859, when the Risorgimento threatened the Papal States. He announced that he was ready to ‘pay with his blood for a cause which was that of France, the Church and God’. There was an enthusiastic response to his appeal. Legitimist volunteers flocked to the Pope’s army to become the redoubtable Zouaves Pontificales, who fought beneath the Bourbon Lilies; a detachment from the Vendée was only dissuaded with difficulty from wearing the Crusaders’ cross.

Then, unexpectedly, Napoleon III was utterly defeated by the Prussians at Sédan on 2 September 1870, and a provisional republic was proclaimed two days later. In the general election of February the following year, the Right triumphed—180 Legitimists were returned, together with over 200 Orleanists and 30 Bonapartists, to be faced by only 200 Republicans who were split into moderates and extremists. The Left were thrown into even more disorder in the spring by the Communards’ Revolution in Paris, and by its savage repression. All that stood in the way of a restoration was the President, Adolphe Thiers, who had been prominent in bringing down Henri’s grandfather and who believed that a republic ‘would divide Frenchmen least’; and the disunity of the monarchists.

One should not forget how alarming the idea of a republic must have seemed to many Frenchmen in 1871. The only European republic which then existed was Switzerland, while memories of the Revolution and of 1848 and its riots, and the recent and bloody experience of the Commune, did not inspire confidence among moderates. Furthermore, conservatism was strengthened by the current Catholic revival, a kind of moral rearmament which expressed itself in huge pilgrimages and in building a great basilica at Montmartre to atone for the sins of France.

The law which exiled the Bourbons was repealed. Henri returned briefly to France in 1871, spending three days at his château of Chambord. Here he issued a proclamation declaring that, while he would never abandon the Lilies—‘I will not let the standard of Henri IV, of François I, of Jeanne d’Arc, be torn from my hands’—he was ready to accept parliamentary government. He then left France. The Orleanists tried desperately to persuade him to make way for the Comte de Paris, but in January 1872 Henri issued a second proclamation, refusing to abdicate; in February he held a monster rally at Antwerp. The impasse between Legitimists and Orleanists lasted for another year.

On 24 May 1873 Thiers fell, manœuvred into resigning by the Right. His successor was the Franco-Irish Marshal, Patrice de MacMahon, Duc de Magente; a convinced Legitimist, he only accepted the Presidency to pave the way for a Restoration. The real power behind this honourable but simple old soldier were three Orleanist Dukes: the Duc de Broglie, Prime Minister; the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier, President of the Assembly; and the Duc Decazes, Foreign Minister (and the son of Louis XVIII’s darling Elie). Then the Whigs turned Jacobite: the government, ‘the Republic of Dukes’, determined to forge an alliance with the Legitimists. The latter were nearly all noblemen, a wonderfully picturesque collection from the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the depths of the countryside; some were quite ready for another White Terror, like the fanatical Chevaux-Légers or ‘Light Horse’, but there were also those like the Comte de Falloux who believed in constitutional monarchy and accepted the Tricolore. Moderate Legitimists were prepared to bargain with the Orleanists—the fact that that mainly bourgeois party was now led by Dukes facilitated negotiations—on the basis that the childless Henri should reign so long as he lived and then be succeeded by the Orleanist Pretender, who in any case was his heir presumptive. (Louis-Philippe-Albert’s descendant is the present French Pretender, Henri, Comte de Paris.)

The army was willing to support the Restoration; an officer who protested publicly was summarily retired, and there were plenty of Legitimist generals like the Marquis de Gallifet (familiar to readers of Proust) who had slaughtered the Communards with such cruel zest. Opposition was expected in many parts of France from peasants who believed that not only would tithes and feudal dues return, but that Henri V was going to bring back the legendary droit de seigneur—the nobleman’s right to every peasant girl on her wedding night. None the less, even that great Republican Gambetta thought that as a whole France was too tired of bloodshed to resist; if the peasants did rise, the troops would crush them and the government would then be congratulated for crushing anarchy.

On 5 August 1873, two distinguished visitors arrived unexpectedly at Frohsdorf. They were Louis-Philippe-Albert, Comte de Paris and Head of the House of Orleans (he was the usurper’s grandson), and his uncle the Prince de Joinville. It was a difficult moment—Henri’s consort was known to bear a hatred for the Orleans amounting to mania. The Count, who looked more like a German professor than a French nobleman, hesitated when Henri V entered the room, then bowed and greeted his cousin as his King. Henri embraced him. ‘You were quite right to come here privately like this without waiting,’ he said. ‘The Bon Dieu will reward you.’ The Count, whom he now acknowledged as Dauphin, was in his mid-thirties and had as much practical ability as the King possessed idealism and honour—he had even studied English trade unionism. Shortly after his visit to Frohsdorf, the Comte de Paris publicly recognized Henri as ‘the sole representative of the monarchic principle in France’.

On the evening of 14 October a delegation headed by the Legitimist M Pierre Chesnelong—not a nobleman oddly enough, but a successful draper—met their King in a little pavilion in the garden of a hotel at Salzburg. During a pleasant dinner party, full agreement was reached on universal suffrage and ministerial responsibility. But then Henri announced grimly, ‘I will never abandon the White Flag,’ M Chesnelong, a glib Gascon, made his famous reply, ‘Your Majesty must allow me not to have heard those words.’ After an hour’s argument, the King reluctantly agreed that the Tricolore could remain the flag of France until after the Restoration, when he would refer the matter to the Assembly. Chesnelong returned in triumph with the wonderful news that an agreement had been reached, not only on the constitution but on the flag.

Everyone was now convinced that the King would have his own again. The President of the Assembly, the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier, declared triumphantly on 18 October, ‘In three weeks the national, hereditary and constitutional monarchy will be established.’ The Faubourg Saint-Germain ordered court dress, while coaches prepared for the Most Christian King’s joyeuse entrée into ‘his good city of Paris’ may still be seen at Chambord. Daniel Halévy writes of ‘an amazing rally of la vieille France, of the old nobles, of Dukes and country squires, of priests and heralds’. It was the French nobility’s final fling.

On 31 October 1873, on Henri’s orders, the Legitimist newspaper L’Union published a letter which he had written to M Chesnelong. The King could not abandon the White Flag. ‘I cannot agree to open a strong and healing reign by an act of weakness,’ he explained. ‘It is the fashion to contrast the stubbornness of Henri V with the flexibility of Henry IV … but I wish to remain just what I am.’

As a boy, Henri had seen the French army march off under the White Flag to conquer Algiers. With his contempt for Bonapartism, he was incapable of understanding that a new military tradition had grown up since he had left France, based on glorious victories in Italy and the Crimea, in Africa, China and Mexico, and on heroism in defeat during the martyrdom of 1870. All these campaigns had been fought under the Tricolore.

Marshal MacMahon, who had served beneath the Lilies as a young man, was thunderstruck by Henri’s decision. He said that if the army was forced to fly the White Flag, ‘the chassepots [rifles] would go off by themselves!’ Broglie decided that the only thing left was to introduce a bill extending the Marshal-President’s powers for seven years, the Septennat, in the hope of at least saving conservative government. The Third Restoration was over. As the Pope, Pio Nono, wryly observed, ‘Whoever heard of a man giving up a throne for a napkin?’

Then followed an incident as romantic as anything in those novels by Alexandre Dumas which the King enjoyed so much. The Assembly sat at Versailles, and there Henri arrived secretly on 10 November, accompanied only by his valet, to stay at a small house in the rue Saint-Louis. (He had to bring his valet, as he had never learnt how to tie his own tie.) His faithful gentlemen, the Duc de Blacas and the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé, joined him and were informed of an amazing scheme. He would appeal to MacMahon as a French nobleman, tell him to bring a cavalry brigade, then together, arm-in-arm à la Française, they would go into the Assembly, who would proclaim Henri King. Poor Blacas went to the Marshal with the preposterous plan, asking him to call on his master, by night if necessary, and leaving the key of the house in the rue Saint-Louis; obviously a King could not call on a subject. But MacMahon had taken an oath to the Assembly, and his honour would not let him break it. Henri waited in vain, before saying sadly, ‘I expected a Constable of France but I find only a Chief of Police.’ On 19 November, the Assembly voted for the Septennat—a tacit rejection of the monarchy. There is a legend that, disguised in a voluminous cloak, the King waited during a grey and misty afternoon in front of the palace, by the pedestal of Louis XIV’s statue, to hear the result.

Later a Legitimist general said, ‘If only we had known!’ But the King had left France for ever on that night of 19 November 1873, to return to his dreaming in Upper Austria. In June 1874 the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, as a last desperate step, proposed to the Assembly that the monarchy be restored; his motion was defeated by 272 notes to 79. On 30 January 1875, France became a Republic—by one vote.

King Henri, fortified by the rites of Holy Church, died at Frohsdorf on 24 August 1883 after a long and painful illness borne with much courage. He was never a bitter man, and one may guess that his last years were happier than they would have been had the Third Restoration succeeded. It is easy to blame him for throwing away the crown of France. Yet, as the late Sir Denis Brogan (hardly an admirer) writes, Henri V ‘had made, not by cowardice but by pride and dignity, the great refusal’. Professor Cobban even goes so far as to say of Henri that ‘trained as he said himself to expect nothing from God and nothing from man, free from worldly ambition or knowledge, lame, isolated, living in and for the past’, he was ‘perhaps the noblest of his line’.

It was fitting that Henri V should die childless. However magnificent in their days of glory, the Bourbons, like the dinosaurs, could not adapt to a new and alien environment. Theirs was the first great monarchy to fall before democracy, never to be restored. The failure of the Third Restoration announced the doom of all hereditary monarchies of the crowned and anointed sort, not only in Europe but throughout the entire world.

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About the Author

Desmond Seward was born in Paris and educated at Ampleforth and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of many books including The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders, The Hundred Years War, The Wars of the Roses, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry V as Warlord, Josephus, Masada and the Fall of Judaea (da Capo, US, April 2009), Wings over the Desert: in action with an RFC pilot in Palestine 1916–18 (Haynes Military, July 2009) and Old Puglia: A Portrait of South Eastern Italy (Haus August 2009).