‘If the French Kingship had not, by course of Nature, long to live, he of all men was the man to accelerate Nature.’
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), writing about Louis XV in The French Revolution: A History (1837)
AS SOON AS he was old enough to do so, Louis XV proved that he had learnt little or nothing from his predecessors’ mistakes. His long reign – 51 years not counting the regency – was to combine a return to Louis XIV’s excesses at Versailles with a taste for Philippe d’Orléans-style debauchery. The new Louis’s long career of self-indulgence, coupled with his mismanagement of the aristocracy, was to bring the monarchy to its knees, effectively getting it into position for the coup de grâce at the end of the century.
Like the Regent before him, the young Louis XV began modestly enough. As soon as he was crowned, he declared that Versailles would be the official venue of his court, but instead of migrating there permanently, he decided to spend only between 140 and 200 days a year at the palace, and he cut the number of courtiers and servants from 10,000 at the time of Louis XIV to only 4,000-odd. This was still a sizeable crowd, but it marked a symbolic change in emphasis. Versailles was no longer a solar system; it was more of an asteroid shower.
At the age of 15, Louis XV married a 22-year-old Polish princess, Marie, who bore twin princesses (the first of their ten children) less than two years later. In 1729, still aged only 19, Louis and Marie produced a son and heir. The young king’s dynastic duty was done.
In an attempt to free himself from political intriguers, Louis XV decided to rule almost alone alongside an ageing bishop who had been his private tutor ever since he was six. This was the 72-year-old Antoine-Hercule de Fleury, who was appointed Minister of State.
Rule by a king and a bishop was monarchy at its most absolutist, but the old clergyman, who had started his career as a young priest, brought a breath of fresh air to government. He cut spending and thereby helped to restore confidence in the currency, settling the country’s finances into a period of relative stability. He encouraged merchants to import cheap raw materials like cotton and transform them into valuable exports like clothes, harnessing and increasing the skills that would become one of the staples of France’s economy of the future. He also instigated a programme of road-building that provided work for the impoverished labouring class as well as creating a new network of trade routes.
In foreign affairs, Fleury helped Louis XV keep his promise to his great-grandfather to be a peacemaker. Fleury maintained cordial relations with both Britain and Spain, reducing the need for military spending and therefore avoiding unpopular new taxes. The satirical writer Voltaire, by nature an anti-authoritarian, had only kind words for Fleury, saying that he possessed the virtues of ‘gentleness, a sense of equality, [and] a love of order and peace’.
Even in his private life, Fleury showed exceptional restraint for the times. As a bishop, he was entitled to a large income from taxes, but he spent most of it on the poor of his diocese.
Sadly, old Fleury died in 1743, taking his spirit of moderation and careful management with him. Even so, at the beginning of Louis XV’s reign, the French people really felt that their young monarch was going to get the country back on its feet. As for the King himself, it soon became clear that he was much happier lying down.
At Versailles, Louis XV had been quick to rebel against some of his great-grandfather’s grossest absurdities: he was, for example, adamant that he would not be performing bowel movements in public. He had a commode installed in an alcove in his new, smaller bedroom at the palace, a break from the theatre that Louis XIV’s bedchamber had been.
The new King still performed a public lever (getting out of bed and dressing), but from his early twenties, this would often happen after he had crawled home after a night in a woman’s bed, or from a dance that he had attended until dawn.
Almost as soon as he had produced a male heir to the throne (Frenchwomen never got the right to become monarchs), Louis XV began to live a double life, respecting the more visible elements of palace etiquette but not letting it hamper his extra-curricular activities. Soon, rumours about his dissolute lifestyle began to circulate freely, especially because Louis was inadvertently creating a horde of gossipers who wanted to dish the dirt on him.
By reducing the number of courtiers at Versailles, and by loosening the stranglehold of daily rituals there, Louis XV might have seemed like a modernizer. But this was not the case. Perversely, whittling down the number of hangers-on at court only had the effect of making the elite more elite. In order to reduce the number rationally, Louis became stricter about the definition of nobility. To remain at court, aristocrats had to prove that their family had been of noble birth since 1400, and Louis ordered his official genealogists to write up registers of those who qualified. In doing so, he redefined the nobility as the old medieval knight class, the ‘flower of France’ – not that they had won themselves much glory at battles like Crécy and Agincourt.
The cut-off date of 1400 was even stricter than that required by French tradition. It was in 1604 under the pragmatic Henri IV that the so-called noblesse de robe (nobility of the gown) had been created, officializing the status of men ennobled when taking on a public post, usually as a judge or state administrator. In return for their promotion and the right to pass on the job and its financial rewards to their heirs, these new nobles had to pay an annual fee to the King.
Members of the noblesse de robe were looked down upon by the older noblesse d’épée (nobility of the sword), who, as their name suggests, had usually been given titles after military service. In fact, by tradition, officer rank in the army was only open to members of the noblesse d’épée.
But Louis XV went even further, limiting his courtiers to the even older noblesse d’ancienne extraction, whose titles were so ancient that no one really knew why they were noble unless they bore the name of a battle.
Aristocrats were accustomed to being listed and defined – decades earlier, Louis XIV had ordered a register to be drawn up, though all he wanted to do was to cut out tax evasion by families falsely claiming to be noble, and he didn’t care when a dynasty had earned or bought its title.
Now, however, Louis XV was ordering his genealogists to give a royal slap in the face to men who had won battles for Louis XIV, as well as those who had simply been filling the royal coffers by paying the annual subscription for their job title since 1604. It was a stark message to anyone with social ambitions – know your place – and it came at exactly the wrong time for the monarchy, which needed to broaden its support, not set the ambitious, rising classes against it.
It was also a warning to the country’s administrators, who felt entitled to their highly lucrative jobs, that the monarchy felt no innate solidarity towards them. They would have to stand up to the royal family if they wanted to hold on to their money, status and power. And this was exactly what they did in 1749, when Louis XV tried to introduce a 5 per cent income tax on the clergy and the aristocracy, who had previously been exempt from taxes. The provincial parliaments (which were controlled by the local nobility) and the clergy encouraged riots against the reform, and Louis was forced to back down.
The lesson was clear: it was possible for the privileged classes to beat off the King’s attempts to introduce even a small measure of social equality. But the full repercussions of this defeat would not be felt until the last few years of Louis XV’s reign. For the moment, there was a shaky, top-heavy, status quo.
Amongst the noblesse at court, the climate of snobbery became so intense that it began to permeate the language. Like British MPs referring to the House of Commons as ‘this place’ or actors refusing to name the Scottish play, courtiers would never mention the name of Versailles, preferring to call it ‘ce pays-ci’ (‘this country’). Anyone using the V-word was looked down on as an outsider.
Champagne was not referred to by the truly chic as champagne – it had to be called vin de Champagne. Even coins got new names (appropriately, given the trauma that the currency had just gone through) and a louis d’or was known to courtiers as a ‘louis en or’. Pronunciations changed, too – it became vulgar to pronounce the last syllables of some words – sac (bag), for example, became sa. It was all getting too effete for words.
Of course, if someone was beautiful or brilliant, he or she could break through the firewall of snobbery. This was especially true of women who wanted to sleep with Louis XV. Most famous of these was his long-term official mistress, Madame de Pompadour, the daughter of a government bureaucrat who had been forced to abandon his family and go into exile after being accused of selling black-market food during a minor famine in 1725. Unfortunately for his daughter, his faults went even deeper than his conscience – his surname was Poisson. The future lover of Louis XV was born Jeanne-Antoinette Fish.
In a fairly typical French story, Jeanne-Antoinette was rumoured to be the illegitimate daughter of her mother’s lover, a vastly wealthy royal tax collector called Charles François Paul Le Normant de Tournehem, who married off the young, good-looking Jeanne-Antoinette to his nephew. Now head of a rich household, she began to host literary salons in Paris and to act in theatrical soirées at her husband’s nearby château – which happened to be in a royal hunting forest.
Louis XV had preserved the royal tradition of hunting almost every day except Sunday, and was a regular visitor to his forests all around Paris. Whenever he travelled out to the woodland near Jeanne-Antoinette’s château, she would go for a carriage ride in the grounds and pop out from behind a tree as the King rode by.
She was careful to dress in bright colours, usually blue and pink, but even without the bright colours, Jeanne-Antoinette’s charms were highly noticeable: one of Louis XV’s huntsmen wrote that she was ‘svelte, relaxed, supple and elegant’, and had ‘a perfectly formed nose, a charming mouth, very beautiful teeth, the most delicious smile’ and eyes that ‘lent themselves to all types of seduction’.
This attention-seeking wasn’t only Jeanne-Antoinette’s idea. Her uncle-in-law (and possible biological father) was anxious to restore the reputation of some financier friends of his who had been disgraced during the John Law fiasco (see above, Chapter 3). This band of old bankers therefore decided that the svelte and supple young Jeanne-Antoinette would become Louis XV’s mistress. Jeanne-Antoinette was delighted. Her husband, who was apparently very much in love with his vivacious wife, had no say in the matter.
At last, during one of her gawdy apparitions, Louis noticed her, and sent her a deer that he had hunted. At the time, it was considered an honour to receive a large bloody animal carcass from an admirer. As we saw earlier, Louis XIV was liberal with gifts of dead birds.
In February 1745, Jeanne-Antoinette, now known by her married name, Madame d’Étiolles, was invited to a masked ball celebrating the wedding between Louis XV’s son and a Spanish princess. Jeanne-Antoinette was disguised as Diana the huntress, and quickly ensnared a certain male yew tree who apparently invited her to climb into his branches. Soon afterwards, her marriage was annulled and she was living on the second floor of the palace of Versailles, just above the King’s own apartments, the two sets of rooms linked by a ‘secret’ staircase.
This adultery was all very open because by now the mother of Louis XV’s children, Marie, had decided that ten pregnancies were enough, and had given up her place in his bed to young pretenders. She had withdrawn into a life of prayer, etiquette and charitable good works that would endear her to the people long after Louis XV had ruined his own, and the Crown’s, reputation.
The arrival of a black marketeer’s daughter as official mistress to the King was a bourgeois bombshell to his snobbish courtiers. As well as being low-born, she spoke vulgar French, and never mastered the courtiers’ jargon or refined accent. Luckily for the gossips, her maiden name, Poisson, was a gift. In Paris, street singers began to entertain the crowds with satirical songs about her, nicknamed ‘poissonades’. One of these compared her to a fishwife:
Si la cour se ravale,
De quoi s’étonne-t-on?
N’est-ce pas de la Halle
Que nous vient le Poisson?
(If the tone at court is being lowered,
Why is anyone surprised?
Isn’t it from the market hall
That we get fish?)
Another songster was even more brutal, calling her ‘une bâtarde de catin’ – ‘a bastard slut’. Perhaps it was this bitchiness that encouraged the King to compensate by lavishing gifts – and a title – on his common-born mistress. In June 1745 he made her a marquise by buying her the estate and associated noble title of Pompadour in central France.fn1 A year later, he bought her another château at Crécy just outside Paris – she had it completely renovated, with frescoes by the country’s most fashionable artist, François Boucher, and rebuilt the nearby village to make it look more picturesque. Louis XV even gave her six hectares of the royal grounds at Versailles and had a ‘hermitage’ built for her so that she could escape the sneers of his courtiers. (Of this refuge, more later.)
Despite being a bourgeoise interloper with no real right to be at court, Jeanne-Antoinette, now officially known as Madame de Pompadour, came to dominate her royal lover’s life. He was prone to sudden mood swings, and if a minister or advisor began to depress the King with bad news or a request for complicated advice, she would order the public servant out of the room and turn the conversation to frivolities. And Louis would acquiesce.
His increasing indifference about protocol (ironic after his initial insistence on having only the most noble of nobles at court) became so bad that even royals could be insulted with no comeback. At a supper in 1745, the Princesse de Conti, a granddaughter of Louis XIV, went into a dining room to find that there were no seats available. No one stood up to let her sit down, and she stormed out, saying that she had never seen ‘des gens si malhonnêtes’ (‘such ill-bred people’).
Thanks to jealous aristocratic gossips and satirical songs, this kind of behaviour became public knowledge, and the general perception was that Louis XV was losing control of his own palace – and all because he was thinking with his trousers.
By 1752, Jeanne-Antoinette’s charms were no longer enough to enthral her royal lover, but she was determined not to lose her privileged place at the palace. She therefore set herself up as his procurer. With the aid of the King’s head valet, Dominique Lebel, she began to provide the middle-aged monarch with an inexhaustible supply of sexual entertainment.
For Jeanne-Antoinette, the vital thing was that none of the girls should replace her as official mistress, so they had to be vetted. No witty, intelligent, over-ambitious beauties would be allowed in the King’s bed. They had to be simple sex objects – and preferably far too young to be seen with Louis in public. Because of their reduced status, and age, they were known as the King’s petites maîtresses – little mistresses.
As a venue for the vetting, Jeanne-Antoinette installed a sort of brothel-antechamber in the so-called ‘Parc-aux-Cerfs’ (‘Deer Park’) area of Versailles – an apt name given that she had met the King during a deer hunt, and then dressed up as a huntress to snare him. Here, prostitutes from Paris would be checked over for signs of excess intelligence or ambition (and presumably disease), before being smuggled into the King’s bedroom as his after-dinner treat.
The most famous of these was Marie-Louise O’Murphy, who in 1752 was immortalized lying naked on a divan by the painter François Boucher, her pink buttocks and smooth thighs splayed, apparently just before or after a visit from a lover. Casanova was a huge fan of the painting, and said of it that: ‘The skilful artist painted her legs and her thighs so that the eye could not help desiring to see more.’ Louis XV seems to have agreed whole-heartedly with Casanova (on more things than art).
Mademoiselle O’Murphy was a fairly typical visitor to the Parc-aux-Cerfs. She was the daughter of a petty criminal and a prostitute, both of Irish immigrant stock, and a sister to three prostitutes who had once followed the French army to Flanders. She was only one of many young girls who modelled for Boucher, a painter known as a supplier of mild pornography to the art-loving aristocracy.
Casanova boasted that he had shown Boucher’s painting to Louis XV, who then asked to see the model in the flesh, but in fact a copy of the picture belonged to Jeanne-Antoinette’s brother, a more likely source of female company for the King. In any case, on the strength of her portrait, young Marie-Louise was taken out to the Parc-aux-Cerfs and became a regular visitor there between 1752 and 1755. She gave birth to a daughter, almost certainly Louis XV’s child, in 1754, when she was just 16.
It is easy to imagine the jaded King looking forward to his nightly amusements – and his subjects did a lot of imagining. Louis XV was widely perceived as a man who expended all his energies on these dalliances, forgetting his duty and pulling the monarchy down to unprecedented levels of depravity.
The song quoted above making fun of Jeanne-Antoinette’s maiden name contains some lines about this royal negligence:
Jadis c’était Versailles
Qui donnait le bon goût;
Aujourd’hui la canaille
Règne, tient le haut bout.
(Once it was Versailles that
Set standards of good taste;
Today it is the riff-raff
Who reign, who have the upper hand.)
Another song gave a detailed criticism of the whole of Louis XV’s government and all his policies at home and abroad. It had a refrain that went:
Ah le voilà, ah le voici,
Celui qui n’en a nul souci.
(There he is, here he is,
The man without a care in the world.)
The song showed that Louis XV was increasingly seen as a worthless king who fiddled with his mistresses while France burned.
In the past, people had baulked at, or even rebelled against, Louis XIV’s taxes, and disapproved of some of his excesses, but they had never looked down on him. This scorn for a king was a royal novelty – and a dangerous one.
Louis XV’s negligence was also having a visible impact on Versailles. Courtiers with rooms in the palace took to throwing their rubbish out of the window into the park. One of the biggest fountains in the grounds, the bassin de Neptune, built by Louis XIV’s great architect Le Nôtre, was used as a dump by the kitchen staff. An ornamental lake, the pièce d’eau des Suisses, was turned into a laundry.
Thieves would steal lead from the massive network of water pipes that criss-crossed the gardens, vandals would break statues, and courtiers were not safe from common criminals entering the château itself – it was a far cry from the days when the aristocrats could be sure that the hand picking their pocket would be neatly manicured.
This climate of laissez-faire almost cost Louis XV his life.
In the early evening of 5 January 1757, the King came down a stairway lined with his guards, on his way out of the palace of Versailles. He was about to climb aboard a carriage when a man sprang out of the shadows and tapped him on the shoulder. When Louis didn’t turn round, the attacker stabbed him in the side with an eight-centimetre blade. Bleeding profusely, the King was led back up the stairs, asking his attendants, ‘Why would anyone want to kill me? I’ve never hurt anyone.’ In his bedroom, he declared that he was about to die, and then passed out.
As was the custom at the time, a surgeon did his best to help the wounded King on his way off this mortal coil by bleeding him further, but luckily for Louis, he regained consciousness during the treatment, and had the strength to tell his wife Marie: ‘Je suis assassiné’ (‘I am murdered’) – perhaps a reference to the surgeon.
Meanwhile, the attacker had been seized by the guards. Robert-François Damiens was a 41-year-old former valet at a Jesuit school, a job he had lost when he broke the vow of celibacy, who had thereafter worked as a servant in the homes of some of Louis XV’s most virulent opponents in the noblesse de robe.
Damiens had rented a sword and hat to make himself look noble, and entered the palace along with other people seeking a royal audience. He had then awaited his chance to push through the line of guards, and stabbed Louis.
The King’s assailant was taken to the Bastille and tortured, and swore first that he had accomplices, and then that he had acted alone. It was assumed that he had been sent either by a faction of the clergy or by the parliamentarians whom Louis was still trying to tax. According to Louis XV’s Foreign Secretary, the Marquis d’Argenson, Damiens showed no remorse at all, and told his interrogators that ‘the King governed badly, and it would have been a great service to the country to kill him.’
Louis XV initially called for mercy for his attacker, but then issued a statement which must have sounded ironic coming from such an unpopular king: ‘Our people, to whom our life belongs as much as it does to ourselves, demand vengeance for the crime against the life that we desire to preserve for the sake of their happiness.’
Damiens was duly tried and sentenced to the punishment dished out to regicides (even those who didn’t manage to kill a king): he was to be torn into four pieces by horses after a whole list of barbarous public tortures. Hearing the sentence, Damiens quipped, ‘It’s going to be a rough day.’
On 28 March, Damiens was taken to the place de Grève in Paris (now the place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville). On a scaffold, in front of a horrified crowd, with pincers attached to his nipples, arms and legs, he had molten lead, boiling oil, hot resin and sulphur poured on him, and his right hand burnt off, before being attached to four horses and slowly dismembered. It took over two hours and he didn’t die until all four limbs had been pulled off. The crowd, usually bloodthirsty at executions, booed the 16 executioners, who themselves were horrified by what they were forced to do.fn2
As for Louis XV, he was quickly back on his feet. The wound was not deep, but he told his entourage that ‘it is deeper than you think – it strikes at my very heart.’
What he meant, of course, was that he took the attack as a sign that the people didn’t love him. In this, he was right. The Marquis d’Argenson wrote that: ‘It was noticed in Paris that the good bourgeois expressed a lot of pain at this attack [on the King], but the lower classes stayed mute.’ There were constant fears of another attempt on the King’s life or that of his heir, and Argenson predicted that: ‘In the end our fearful princes will have to live like tyrants, constantly distrusting the French people.’
They ought to have heeded his warning.
It wasn’t only Louis XV’s sexual antics that turned the people against him. He had quickly forgotten old Cardinal de Fleury’s calls for austerity, and embarked on some wild spending.
As well as giving lavish parties and balls, he would organize huge celebrations for any family occasion, like the masked ball for his son’s wedding where he had picked up Jeanne-Antoinette – and as we have already seen, he spent a fortune on land and houses for her. Similarly, when he decided that he no longer wanted to see his petite maîtresse O’Murphy after three years of regular service, he gave the teenager a parting gift of 200,000 livres – ten times the annual salary that Fleury had received as Minister of State. Louis XV’s priorities were clear – three years of sex was worth ten of government.
To celebrate the birth of one of his grandsons in 1751, Louis XV commissioned a firework display at Versailles costing an almost obscene 664,000 livres. If this wasn’t costly enough, a stray rocket fell on the roof of the stables, causing damage that cost 157,599 livres to repair.
After several mainly peaceful years under the influence of Fleury, Louis XV also got France embroiled in costly wars.
He intervened in the Austrian War of Succession, which was mainly an excuse for the whole of Europe to take sides and fight for supremacy. Typically, Louis XV supported the armies who wanted to stop a woman, Maria Theresa,fn3 becoming ruler of Austria on the grounds that females should not aspire to such high rank. She won, and became Archduchess of Austria and Queen of Hungary.
This war opposed France with Britain, Austria, Holland and Russia, amongst others, and forced Louis to lay out huge sums of money on his army and navy. His troops enjoyed some success – memorably (in French minds, at least) beating the British at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745 – but he inexplicably gave away almost all his territorial gains in the subsequent peace treaty in 1748, prompting the furious French to complain that the war had all been for nothing. They coined a new idiom: ‘bête comme la paix’, ‘as stupid as peace’. Though they would soon come to regret that.
The only compensation for Louis XV was that in 1744, on his way to join his army in the east of France, he had fallen ill with dysentery and almost died, at which point his more patriotic
The unresolved issues from the Austrian War of Succession were largely to blame for the next great conflict, the Seven Years War of 1756–63, during which Britain and France again went toe-to-toe, along with most of the rest of Europe, resulting in a massive cost in lives, money and territory. This time France was amongst the biggest losers, and ended up handing over some of its most prestigious colonies to Britain, including all but a corner of Canada, all its American colonies east of the Mississippi, Pondicherry (its main trading post in India) and several of its Caribbean islands.fn4
These territorial losses robbed France of essential earnings from its colonies, which it desperately needed to pay off the cost of war. Louis XV borrowed money as well as imposing two waves of the vingtième (twentieth), the 5 per cent tax that had caused a rebellion amongst the previously tax exempt in 1749. This time, the noblesse de robe let the tax measure through, perhaps because they realized that the nation really did need the money, so that between 1756 and 1763 income tax on all sections of the population tripled.
Losing wars and tripling income tax have never helped any leader’s popularity ratings, and Louis XV was no exception.