IN A LIBRARY RESERVED FOR HIS USE ALONE, A LITTLE messy—many books not put back on their shelves, files scattered on table and chairs, and sometimes on the floor—a tall young man with very blue eyes was slowly turning a globe of impressive size, and then he moved on to another one. Nations, continents, seas, and oceans revolved beneath his fingers. He seemed fascinated by this splendid pair of globes, true works of art, that he had just acquired and installed in this room where he loved to spend time, like a pair of domestic animals. As they turned, he traveled in his imagination from one country to another, changing climates or sailing down long rivers. As a child he had already been fascinated by geography, and he admired beautiful maps almost as much as works of art. Guided and encouraged by his tutor in the subject, Philippe Buache, he had learned at a very early age to draw maps to scale as elegant as they were precise. For example, at the age of eleven, he had drawn a map of the forest of Fontainebleau in which no pertinent detail was omitted, so that a lost traveler would easily have been able to find his way by using this document. Had the circumstances of his birth been different he might well have become one of the great explorers of his time, leader of a scientific expedition opening unknown lands to French influence. He would have to realize this dream through a glorious intermediary. Aside from his Mercator maps, his copiously illustrated books, and his globes, he had a precious tool for anyone curious about the outside world: a powerful telescope set up in the highest room in the château. From this observatory, he could watch everything that was going on in the courtyards, the park, on the roads, and in the neighboring hamlets.
This young man enamored of his solitude, even though he was married, was, of course, the new king, Louis XVI. The château was the huge Versailles in which he had resigned himself to living in September 1774. His library, located in the petit appartement, was the room where he spent the most time, studying dossiers submitted by ministers, reports from spies, and letters stolen by the secret service, and reflecting on the decisions that he wished he did not have to make, delaying them as long as possible. It was here that he also carefully recorded every detail of his latest hunting party, a sport to which he had an almost neurotic attachment, forgetting not a single swallow killed for pleasure nor the dogs killed by accident, and setting out a precise plan of action for the next expedition. He also very succinctly recorded the events that had marked his day along with even the slightest expenditures.
When the problems confronting him seemed too complex and his responsibilities too burdensome, he went up one flight to find relaxation in a workshop he had fitted out and equipped with a forge, which gave the room its name. Wearing a leather apron around his already substantial girth, Louis XVI took great pleasure in making locks in his workshop. Professionals considered him skillful and competent, although his technical training was insufficient to allow him to copy the splendid decorated locks with complicated mechanisms that he collected.
His innocent mania of indulging in humble manual labor, which was not at all a source of vanity, later became an activity for which the melancholy monarch was criticized. Weren’t there better things for him to be doing, in light of the crisis the country was going through, than wasting time reading maps, dismantling locks, or exhausting himself in endless hunting parties, sometimes spending eight hours on horseback? These criticisms—except perhaps with regard to hunting—seem misplaced, in view of the king’s constancy as a faithful husband and the fact that he spent less time in his library and his forge than his predecessors had devoted to their numerous mistresses.
This rather awkward young man with a fleshy face and a gangling stride, who was embarrassed by his powerful frame (he could lift a shovel with an adolescent sitting on it), sincerely loved his subjects. He wanted to work for their happiness and preserve the popularity that marked his first encounters with crowds. Unfortunately, he did not know how to go about achieving a goal that seemed within his reach. It was as though everything had been working together since his childhood to make it impossible for him to exercise the office of king that his tutors mistakenly prided themselves on having prepared him to assume.
As though it had not been enough to crush him by comparing him to his elder brother, the Duke de Bourgogne, dead at fourteen, who had embodied all the hopes of the royal family, he was led to believe that even his younger brothers, Artois and Provence, were more brilliant than he, and that it was a pity he preceded them in the order of succession. After his father died, his grandfather, Louis XV, showed little interest in him, and the little comfort he received from his very devout mother, the inconsolable widow Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, was swept away when she died of tuberculosis when the Dauphin was only ten. Envied by his brothers, as he was throughout his life, receiving few signs of tenderness from his sisters or his amiable but sanctimonious and distant aunts, it was inevitable that Louis would turn in on himself. When he did venture to talk, however, he clearly demonstrated some cleverness. David Hume, the Francophile historian and philosopher, who had had the opportunity to converse with the Dauphin when he visited Versailles, lavishly praised his precocious intelligence.
Louis was interested not only in geographical maps and the flora and fauna of distant countries; he read a good deal: ancient and modern history, and works on law, economics, and trade. He did not forget the Encyclopédistes and the philosophes, although he tended instinctively to mistrust their arguments, which, although seductive in some respects, seemed to him to endanger the established order, dictated, in his view, by God and Christian faith. For, although not a fanatic, the prince was a sincere believer who always followed his religious duties. His chaplain, Abbé Soldini, unfortunately treated him as a fragile creature who had to be protected from the devil’s snares; he advised the Dauphin against reading novels, loathsome books that could only trouble the spirit of honest readers. As for the man in charge of his education, the vain and hypocritical Duke de La Vauguyon, his pedagogical system had the most negative effects. Not only did he exalt the memory of Louis XVI’s prematurely deceased father, leading his pupil to think that it would be difficult to live up to this admirable model, but most important, La Vauguyon provided contradictory advice. On the one hand, he demonstrated the necessity of calling on the advice of older figures endowed with experience; on the other, he tried to persuade Louis that an absolute monarch was a man who had to exercise his crushing power in solitude, not place too much trust in his ministers, and suspect even his friends, because everyone around him had a particular interest to protect or promote. The result was that the king, who had a kindly and amiable nature, became suspicious, while he lacked confidence and dreaded above all having to decide. Without realizing it, those in charge of his education had turned the terrible grandeur of the power of an absolute monarch into a kind of bogeyman for the man who was going to have to wear the crown. The historian Nicolas Moreau, who intended to portray for the Dauphin men as they were in reality and to show the development of ways of thinking toward the aspiration for more tolerance and freedom, was removed by the lugubrious La Vauguyon; it was fortunate he did not do the same to the geographer Buache.
When rule over the country fell to him, Louis XVI thought about establishing a new government to replace the trio made up of Chancellor Maupéou, the Duke d’Aiguillon, and Abbé Terray, who had been administering France with some difficulty during the last part of the reign of Louis XV. The dispute between the Parlement and royal authority was not really over, the Jesuits’ friends continued to hound the men who had contributed to their expulsion, and the finances were in a pitiful state. The young king needed to have by his side men who owed their ascent to him alone and who would not be tempted to remind him at every moment what his grandfather had done or said.
A significant portion of the ruling class and of public opinion thought that the moment was ripe for Choiseul to return in triumph. He had been dismissed by Louis XV in December 1770 and was still, theoretically, required to live on his sumptuous estate, Chanteloup. He had many supporters and far from negligible assets. After all, the queen owed him her marriage, and he had been dismissed primarily because of his hostility to Du Barry, whom the royal couple detested—one of Louis’s first acts as a king was to have her confined to a convent.
Impatient as he was to return to public life, where he thought he would have no trouble manipulating the young king, Choiseul was unaware of Louis’s antipathy toward him. Louis XVI had not forgotten that “Europe’s coachman” had considered his father sanctimonious and narrow-minded, and had held Louis himself and his brothers and sisters in contempt because their mother came from Saxony. Nor had he forgotten hearing that Choiseul had been behind the poisoning of his parents, an absurd accusation that gives some idea of the rumor factory of Versailles, where the wildest stories were circulated by the most prestigious figures.
The director of Louis’s education, La Vauguyon, was an enemy of Choiseul, and he warned his pupil against the danger he represented. The influence of Marie Antoinette, the most eminent of Choiseul’s supporters, was ineffective against this hostility and prejudice, although not entirely: the king agreed to remove the prohibition against Choiseul traveling outside his estate. This was enough to lead Choiseul to believe that everything would work out in the end, although Louis had already chosen the seventy-four-year-old Maurepas as his chief adviser. As a political virtuoso, Choiseul thought he would be able to make short work of Maurepas. He hastened to Versailles to declare his gratitude and devotion to his new sovereign, certain that he would be appointed to some ministry that he could use as a springboard. Louis XVI overcame his timidity and found enough self-confidence to chill Choiseul’s enthusiasm with a single sentence. As the king passed through the Hall of Mirrors and the former minister bowed in front of him, the crowd of courtiers anticipating a scene of reconciliation and already murmuring in approval were surprised. Louis XVI said in a contemptuous tone: “Well, M. de Choiseul, you’ve gotten fat, you’re losing your hair, you’re going bald.” That was enough to tell Choiseul that he would have no success, and he returned to his estate the next day. But he tried again the following year on the occasion of the coronation in Reims. All of French nobility had traveled to Reims to declare their loyalty to the king, along with accredited diplomats and envoys of foreign powers. It was inconceivable that such a great nobleman as Choiseul could remain in a sulk at home. The queen, assisted by Artois, laid the groundwork. The court was abuzz when it was announced that an audience had been granted to Choiseul, and it was thought that the days of the government in place were numbered. But the king suspected he was being manipulated, and when the duke bowed to kiss his hand, Louis, as though horrified, withdrew it immediately, turned his head away, and expressed his feelings in a grimace that witnesses found frightening. This was the end of Choiseul’s political career, and the queen accepted her defeat. In subsequent years, the king had ministers of varying qualities. Vergennes, who moved from the post of ambassador to Sweden to head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was particularly remarkable. But none had the brilliance and imagination of Choiseul, which would have been of great help. He and the king might have found a basis for coming to an understanding in naval policy. Even before the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Choiseul had begun discreetly working to restore a powerful navy, and Louis XVI, with his enthusiasm for geography and adventurous expeditions, was determined from the moment of his accession to show the French flag on every ocean in strong rivalry with Britain. He turned out, despite his lack of naval experience, to deserve the name he was given of “sailor-king.”
Nonetheless, because of his open-mindedness and his connections with the philosophes of the Enlightenment, Choiseul might have been able to keep the king from making many mistakes and to set the French monarchy on the path to the modern world.