‘Aucun homme n’a reçu de la nature le droit de commander les autres.’
‘No man has received from Nature the right to command others.’
Denis Diderot (1713–84), French philosopher and writer, in his Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772
WHILE THE MONARCHY was edging its way towards the guillotine, some truly positive things were happening in France. Louis XV’s reign saw huge advances in the sciences, and the emergence of some of the greatest writers in the French language. This was the siècle des Lumières – the Age of Enlightenment.
Cartography was one of Louis XV’s favourite sciences, and he commissioned a 180-page map of France, the most accurate ever produced, from the cartographer César-François Cassini, an undertaking that took some 30 years to complete. Cassini and his son began by triangulating the coast and the main transport routes of France; then the rest of the country was filled in over a period of some 60 years by the succeeding generations of the Cassini family. The result was astonishingly accurate, and a real scientific triumph for France.
Initially, Louis XV had promised to payroll the whole project, and even when he ran out of cash during the Seven Years War, he helped Cassini to set up a private company financed by subscribers (one of the first among them being the official royal mistress, Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour). Louis also gave Cassini the rights to sell the maps – all in all, he was behaving like a royal patron at his productive best.
On a similarly geographical theme, Louis XV was also a supporter of the navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who fought in the unsuccessful French campaign to hang on to Canada and then sailed around the world, setting up the first colony in the Falkland Islands (which were quickly snatched from him by the Spanish).
In 1766 Louis XV entrusted Bougainville with a mission to (amongst other things) explore the Pacific Ocean looking for ‘valuable metals and spices’, to ‘examine the lands, trees and main productions; bring back samples and drawings of everything he [Bougainville] considers noteworthy’ and ‘note as many places as possible that might serve as stop-overs for ships … and anything that might be useful for navigation’. In essence, Louis XV wanted to know everything about the vast expanse of ocean between the west coast of the Americas and the east of Africa.
Bougainville fulfilled his mission. The navigator and his team discovered new plant species (including the flower that would bear Bougainville’s name), mapped countless useful atolls, and even inadvertently gave France the honour of providing the first female circumnavigator of the globe. After several months at sea, Bougainville discovered that one of his deckhands, Jean Bart, was actually a woman, the lover of the expedition’s botanist. She was put ashore in Mauritius, but had already sailed around the world.
During his various missions to the South Seas, Bougainville was a serious rival to the Englishman James Cook, who was so keen to destroy the Frenchman’s reputation that he blamed French sailors for tarnishing the earthly paradise of Tahiti by giving the grass-skirted girls syphilis. But when Bougainville published his Voyage autour du monde (Voyage around the World) in 1771, no one gave a thought to sexually transmitted diseases. The whole of Europe was fascinated by his depiction of ‘le paradis polynésien’ and its scantily clad maidens whose families thought it polite to let the visiting sailors enjoy unlimited casual sex.fn1
Louis XV was also a keen follower of developments in watchmaking, which was of course a vital part of the developing science of navigation. At the time, even the best watches were only accurate to about half an hour. Not a great problem in a world quiet enough for several reliable church clocks to be within earshot of any town-dweller, but still something of an embarrassment for what was meant to be a precision science.
Louis gave patronage to several of the best watchmakers in Europe, paying them generous salaries as royal horlogiers (clockmakers) and attracting some of the most skilled craftsmen on the continent to Paris. One of these was the Swiss-born Ferdinand Berthoud, who came to France in 1745. In 1761 he began building his first marine chronometer to aid the calculation of longitude. At the same time, a Paris-born clockmaker, Pierre Le Roy, made several advancements in clock mechanisms, including a vital invention that would stop marine chronometers becoming unreliable as temperatures changed during long voyages, causing the metal parts to expand and contract.
Louis XV ordered tests of these French discoveries aboard navy ships, enabling France to lead the field for several years – or at least to keep abreast of their rivals, the British, who, with typical pragmatism, were borrowing the French technology and making it more practical.
However, Louis XV’s interest in clockmaking was by no means completely scientific. He also loved watches as jewels, and was just as excited by advances in watch miniaturization as he was in measuring longitude. When a young watchmaker called Pierre-Augustin Caronfn2 published a paper on making almost flat watches (embossed with plenty of jewels, of course), Louis XV invited him to court and commissioned a miniature timepiece for his mistress, Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour. The resulting watch was just one centimetre in diameter and set on top of a ring. It was wound up by turning the bezel (head) of the ring, and set using a tiny key.
As well as being an impressive piece of diamond-encrusted bling, the watch was an almost miraculous work of precision engineering, the equivalent at the time of shrinking mobile phones from bricks to credit-card holders in the 1990s (though of course they have since expanded again into slices of toast). The existence of such a small, accurate watch made France a world leader in sophistication, a place where technology and beauty could be combined to create modern miracles. (But only, of course, if you were very, very rich.)
Botany was another of Louis XV’s passions. Admittedly this was encouraged in him by Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour when he stopped sleeping with her – she thought he needed a hobby. But Louis threw himself into botany with almost the same energy that he was devoting to having sex with young prostitutes, and from 1759 to 1774, he supervised and funded the creation of a botanical garden at Versailles containing around 4,000 species – the biggest in Europe. (The British didn’t start developing Kew Gardens until the 1770s.)
He commissioned open-air plantations, tropical greenhouses and even a canal for aquatic species, and put together a team of botanists who were sent on plant-gathering expeditions to Africa, Asia Minor, Mexico and throughout Europe (including of course those accompanying Bougainville to the Pacific). They brought back little-known plants like coffee, pineapples and cherries, as well as collecting and protecting rare species from all over France, including every variety of native strawberry.
The Versailles botanists, headed by a modest man called Bernard de Jussieu who invented a new way of classifying flowering plants but didn’t bother to publish it, also carried out important experiments to improve food crops, discovering that potatoes grown by the Germans were more efficient than French varieties (quelle surprise), and developing cures for cereal diseases in an attempt to ward off France’s frequent famines.
It was a noble scientific enterprise that couldn’t possibly have a downside – except in Louis XV’s hands. Typically, he managed to create one critical flaw, albeit accidentally and posthumously.
The new buildings around his botanical garden included the aforementioned ‘hermitage’ intended for his mistress, Jeanne-Antoinette. It was a square construction with sides of 23 metres that contained ‘only’ about 20 main rooms, as well as kitchens, bathrooms and a warren of tiny servants’ bedrooms. A bijou cottage by Versailles standards. But this was the Petit Trianon that would later be converted by Marie-Antoinette into a fantasy farm where she would gambol with lambs and pretend to be a peasant – a piece of role pay that would disgust the French public and knock one of the final nails into the royal family’s coffin.
Under Louis XV’s patronage, France also created the greatest compendium of knowledge in the western world, Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie,fn3 ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (a métier is a trade or craft), published in Paris in instalments between 1751 and 1772. The first volume features a dedication in capital letters: ‘Avec Approbation et Privilège du Roi’ – ‘with the King’s approval and favour’.
Initially intended as a translation of the Cyclopaedia, published in two volumes in 1728 by the English writer Ephraim Chambers, the French editor/publisher Diderot expanded the work into a 35-volume megalith, including 12 volumes of illustrations. Diderot commissioned 68,000 entries from about 160 contributors, as well as writing some himself.
Given the huge scope of the work, Diderot stooped to a fair amount of plagiarism from existing scientific books, and stole whole volumes of illustrations. He admitted that some of the entries were ‘weak, mediocre and even outright bad’, but his priority was to get this wealth of knowledge and opinion into the public arena. The result was the most complete description of the known universe that had ever been attempted, starting with a five-page essay on the uses of the letter A in the French language and ending with a description of Zzuéné, a city in ancient Egypt.
The Encyclopédie included entries on all aspects of the sciences, on geography, the arts and language, as well as opinion pieces on religion, war, slavery (especially the need to abolish it, at a time when France was battling to hold on to its Caribbean sugar plantations) – and on politics.
The most telling of these political essays is probably the one-page entry on ‘monarchy’, on page 636 of volume 10 (‘Mame-Mz’). It starts out neutrally enough, giving a factual description of a regime in which ‘sovereign power … resides indivisibly in one man called a king, monarch or emperor’. It is interesting to see that these ‘modern’ French thinkers discounted influential monarchs like Elizabeth I of England, Mary, Queen of Scots (who was half-French) and especially Catherine the Great, who had been on the Russian throne for three years in 1765 when this volume was published. In the 1750s, supposedly the most enlightened men in France had not seen the light about the equality of the sexes.
After the simple definition of monarchy, the description gets more controversial, and the author (‘D. J.’, alias Louis de Jaucourt, who wrote almost a quarter of the whole Encyclopédie) declares that: ‘Unlike a republic, a monarchy is not based on principles of good morality’ (an obvious dig at Louis XV’s failings). A monarchy is a self-serving regime, he continues, because ‘the virtues shown are less about one’s duty to others than one’s duty to oneself’ – a startlingly modern version of John F. Kennedy’s famous ‘ask not what your country can do for you’.
Then comes a lucid breakdown of how power was exercised by the absolutist French monarchy:
Since it is only from the monarch that one may receive wealth, honours and rewards, the desire to deserve them sustains the throne … If the monarch is virtuous, and dispenses rewards and punishments justly, everyone is keen to deserve his bounty, and his reign is a golden age. If the monarch is not virtuous … it degenerates into baseness and slavery.
D. J. goes on, helpfully, to list different ways in which a monarchy can fall: if public servants are showing misplaced loyalty to the King rather than to the country; if a monarch tries to intimidate his people, or encourages them to have children just to provide more taxpayers; or even if the King becomes too frivolous – another below-the-belt stab at Louis XV.
The timing of volume 10’s publication was a stroke of incredible luck. In the month it appeared, December 1765, the heir to the throne, Louis XV’s son Louis Ferdinand, died prematurely, leaving Louis XV’s 11-year-old grandson to be groomed as the future Louis XVI. The Encyclopédie’s definition of monarchy ends with a warning:
Someone will tell the subjects of a monarchy on the brink of falling: ‘A prince is born to you who will restore it [the monarchy] in all its glory. Nature has blessed this successor with a wealth of virtues and qualities that will delight you; you just have to assist him in their development.’ Alas! People, I fear that the hopes you are given will be disappointed. Monsters will choke this beautiful flower at its birth; their poisonous breath will extinguish the goodness from this heir to the throne … They will fill his soul with errors, prejudice and superstition … They will infect this tender shoot with the spirit of domination that possesses them. These are the main causes of the decadence and fall of the most flourishing monarchies.
In short, D. J. was telling his readers not to believe all the hype when a fresh face comes to the throne – the subtext being ‘look what became of the infant Louis XV’. If Diderot and his fellow authors had simply picked up volume 10 and hit Louis XV over the head, they couldn’t have been more provocative.
After this swipe at the crown, one might have expected the entry for ‘Révolution’ to say something along the lines of ‘meet you all outside the Bastille on 14 July’, but it is decidedly muted. It even states that Cromwell’s takeover in Britain had ‘no valid religious pretext’ – so the Encyclopédie seems to have taken the orthodox French Catholic line.
Similarly, at ‘République’ (also signed ‘D. J.’), there are stark warnings about abuses of power even after a monarchy has fallen. If a republic is too big, he warns, an over-powerful governing body can ‘ravage the state’ and ‘destroy each citizen with its demands’. ‘There are great fortunes and therefore no moderation,’ he adds, and ‘the common good is sacrificed to a thousand vested interests.’
D. J. prefers small, Greek-style city republics where the leaders are a close-knit community and have to respect the wishes of their fellow citizens. Perhaps he thought that the French monarchy might be replaced by the republics of Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg and Marseille, with more rural versions in places like Brittany and Normandy. If so, he was something of a prophet, because one result of the French Revolution would be the division of the country into its départements, each with its own président. The difference he didn’t foresee was that once a French republic was firmly established, it would retain a monarch-style national president who lives in a palace and looks down with regal detachment on the plebs below.
Overall, the Encyclopédie was the biggest stage on which the philosophers commonly known as the ‘Lumières’ analysed their world, both through a definition of abstract ideas and a detailed examination of history – and one thing that their reasoning condemned was the abuse of power and privilege under Louis XV. Of course they could not say this outright. They knew that the royal and religious censors would study any entries likely to be controversial. Sometimes Diderot tried to bamboozle the censors by making criticisms under an apparently neutral entry. For example, the Encyclopédie gives a factual treatment to France’s Franciscan monks (the ‘Cordeliers’), but mocks them savagely at the entry for ‘Capuchon’ (hood), making fun of a 100-year schism in the order over the shape of their hoods.
Chief amongst the censors was the Church, which rightly felt itself under attack. After all, it had long been opposed to scientific explanations for apparently divine phenomena. Only a century earlier, Galileo had been tried by the Inquisition and forced to recant his heretical theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
Riffling suspiciously through the Encyclopédie, the French clergy was furious to see a reminder under ‘Église’ (Church) that ‘Jesus Christ founded the Church in a state of poverty’, compared to the modern Catholic Church’s wealth of land and money. The Encyclopédie also criticized the idea of imposing any punishment other than excommunication for heresy, thereby undermining centuries of burnings and only slightly less fatal forms of torture.
It was perhaps not surprising that Diderot’s great work was anti-establishment. In 1749, after starting work on the Encyclopédie, he was arrested and imprisoned for three months in the château de Vincennes, to the east of Paris. This was where Louis XV had spent the first few months waiting to accede to the throne, but the conditions of Diderot’s confinement were less luxurious. He was charged with ‘impiety’, based on sections of his book Lettres sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voyent (Letters on the Blind, Intended for Those Who Can See) in which he discussed perception and the need to question everything around us, including religious faith. At one point his book suggests that it is just as absurd to accept the Christian view of the universe as it is to mock a pagan for believing that the world is held up by an elephant standing on a tortoise’s backfn4 – not the kind of argument that went down well with eighteenth-century French bishops. Eventually, Diderot was only released from his cell after intense lobbying by booksellers and aristocratic bibliophiles.
As soon as the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie were published, the clergymen whispering in the King’s ear about morality convinced him and his Council of State to ban the books as an attack on religion. The ban was soon lifted, though, and the volumes continued to appear at a rate of about one per year, with the bigots combing each new publication for outright heresy or political subversion.
In 1757, they saw their chance. Louis XV had been severely shaken by the attempt on his life (see above, Chapter 4), and was afraid of troublemakers. Despite his sympathy for the sciences, he was willing to listen to accusations that the Encyclopédie was fomenting instability. The would-be assassin Damiens had been caught with an unusual amount of cash in his pocket (one louis – not a fortune, but a suspicious sum for an out-of-work servant), and it was easy to allege that he had been paid by subversive, irreligious elements. Royal approval for the Encyclopédie was therefore withdrawn and Pope Clement XIII listed the book in the Church’s official Index Librorum Prohibitorum, alongside such great names as Copernicus, Erasmus and Martin Luther.fn5
From then on, volumes of the Encyclopédie were published under a Swiss banner, even though Louis XV’s royal printer, André le Breton, was producing them in Paris, where they were widely available under the counter. This was not unusual. In the eighteenth century, there was a huge market for seditious books in France, where dangerous ideas were the equivalent of Swedish films in 1950s England, or rock music in the Soviet bloc.
Combining the new taste for science with a growing desire for anti-establishment satire, the Encyclopédie was a huge success, selling around 24,000 copies, including pirate copies and abridged editions. From the 1750s onward, France was flooded with science-based sedition.
The Encyclopédie could have been a beacon for the world, calling attention to the enlightened, modern-thinking regime of Louis XV. But with the aid of his powerful religious advisors, Louis turned the authors against him, so that each new volume contained brilliantly argued denouncements of state-sanctioned bigotry and despotism. Instead of harnessing the power of the Lumières, the establishment had become their self-appointed victim.
Sadly for the monarchy, Louis XV’s reign was also a golden age of satirical writing.
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (usually known as Montesquieu to save breath and ink), had been writing satire while Louis XV was still a child. His Lettres persanes (Persian Letters), published in 1721, were critiques of France in the form of 161 postcards home from two supposedly naive Persian travellers. Alongside harmless caricatures of snobbish ways of dressing and speaking, and affectionate remarks about Frenchwomen, there were also vitriolic attacks on the monarchy and religious oppression. Unsurprisingly, the book had to be published anonymously and imported from Amsterdam.
Montesquieu’s other great anti-establishment book was De l’esprit des lois (On the Spirit of Laws) published in 1748 – also anonymously – in Geneva and Amsterdam. It contains a carefully reasoned attack on absolutist monarchy and an idealistic defence of republicanism. It also lambasts any hypocritical Christian attempt to defend slavery, naively asking the reader why God would not have attributed a soul to black bodies as well as white. It even condemns Europeans for ‘exterminating’ Native Americans.
Not surprisingly, Montesquieu was given the accolade of being added to the Pope’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1751, but died soon afterwards. Even so, his books lived on, not least as lengthy quotations in the Encyclopédie’s political entries. And by the time the Revolution came, his ideas were being bandied about as established truths – though not all his pleas for benevolent, democratic rule would be listened to.
But probably the most famous of the subversive French thinkers snapping at Louis XV’s heels was Voltaire – real name François-Marie Arouet. Voltaire was a member of the French establishment, the son of a man who collected the tax on spices, and who got rich on his commission. Voltaire was groomed to succeed his father in the lucrative job, but was barely out of his teens when he discovered that he could have a lot more fun showing off his acerbic wit in Paris’s chic literary salons.
However, the young Voltaire chose the wrong butt for his jokes. Accused of writing an insulting poem about the Regent, Philippe d’Orléans, he was exiled to the provinces (a heinous punishment at the time). On his return to Paris, he repeated his offence, and, when arrested, complained to the police that the Regent deserved it: ‘He exiled me because I let the public know that his daughter is a whore.’ This earned him 11 months in the Bastille.
Members of well-to-do families were often sent to the Bastille – a nobleman could have anyone who annoyed him locked up simply by requesting a so-called ‘lettre de cachet’ (‘letter with the royal seal’). Sometimes, fathers would do this to protect their own wayward sons who were in danger of committing a capital crime like treason or sodomy. It was not exactly a bread-and-water, chained-to-the-dripping-walls imprisonment, but it was a humiliating exile from public life, and an abuse of power, and Voltaire’s stay in the notorious prison turned him into a lifelong anti-authoritarian.
Still aged only 23, he dropped his family name Arouet, which sounded like à rouer – to be thrashed – or un roué – the nickname for an immoral crony of the Regent – and adopted the more modern-sounding Voltaire.
It didn’t take the rebranded satirist long to get himself sent to the Bastille yet again. Enjoying real success with his plays, and becoming something of a star at the salons, the skinny, nakedly ambitious young wit began to get up the noses of Paris’s aristocrats. One evening at dinner, Voltaire was delighting the company with his observations when a boorish nobleman butted in. This was Guy-Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, Chevalier de Rohan, Comte de Chabot (in those days, French aristocrats carried the whole of their family tree around with them in their names), who was known as a crooked moneylender. He asked who the loud commoner was.
Voltaire replied: ‘He is a man who does not drag a great name about with him, but who honours the name he bears.’ It was a neat slap in the face to the snobbish loan shark, who promptly had Voltaire beaten up by his servants, while Rohan himself looked on. When Voltaire boasted that he was taking fencing lessons in order to challenge the cowardly Rohan to a duel, the nobleman panicked and obtained a lettre de cachet. Voltaire was back at the Bastille for a month, then banished from France, unable to return without Louis XV’s permission.
It was an exile that would cost the French monarchy dear.
It was 1726, and Voltaire crossed the Channel to England. Here, over the next three or four years, he was to write a book that, alongside the Encyclopédie (which Diderot was just starting to compile), would begin to eat away at the root of the monarchy as efficiently as the gangrene in Louis XIV’s leg.
Hard as it is to believe, Voltaire found early-eighteenth-century England astonishingly democratic. This was a corrupt nation where MPs could get elected for life by buying enough land in a so-called ‘pocket borough’ (later more accurately dubbed a ‘rotten borough’), a country where whole villages and their occupants belonged to the local squire, and whose capital city teemed with urban poor. But Voltaire was taken under the wing of a common-born merchant called Everard Falkener, who would later become Britain’s ambassador to Turkey, a posting that would have been reserved for a nobleman under Louis XV’s regime. Through Voltaire’s fog-tinted lenses, Falkener became a symbol of British upward mobility. And with Everard’s encouragement, Voltaire threw himself into the game of social advancement, bringing out a private edition of one of his plays, Henriade, about France’s King Henri IV, and making himself a tidy profit of £2,000. Voltaire never lost this taste for gambling, investing and lending money to friends to start up business ventures, and would later go on debt-collecting tours around Europe.
In London, Voltaire met two of his literary heroes: Alexander Pope, author of the gently satirical Rape of the Lock, a poem in which a frivolous nobleman steals (‘rapes’) a lock of a society girl’s hair; and the Anglo-Irish Jonathan Swift, whom Voltaire saw as a model of anti-establishment writing, not knowing perhaps that Swift’s best-selling Gulliver’s Travels had had its more seditious passages cut out by its publisher to avoid arrest.
In any case, Voltaire donned the mantle of the freethinking London satirist, and started writing what would become Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Angloisfn6 et autres sujets (Letters Written from London on the English and Other Subjects).
The book was, more or less, a series of love letters about Britain purportedly written to a French friend, in much the same vein as Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. Voltaire waxed lyrical about religious freedom in Britain at a time when the clergy still held France in the grip of its jewelled gloves. He took an overt swipe at hypocritical French clergymen: ‘The priests here [in England] are almost all married. And the awkward manners they acquired at university, coupled with their limited contact with women, means that most bishops make do with their own wife.’
Voltaire praised the British tax system, which was based on income rather than social status, and the entrepreneurial spirit that allowed British businessmen to rise up in society alongside the aristocrats.
Worst of all from Louis XV’s point of view, Voltaire took up Montesquieu’s anti-absolutist banner, calling for the monarch’s power to be reined in by an elected parliament:
England is the only nation on Earth that has managed to limit the power of kings by resisting them, and has finally established a wise system of government in which the ruler is all-powerful when it comes to doing good, and has his hands tied if he attempts to do evil.
According to Voltaire, France needed a British-style monarchy. It was time for Louis XV’s creaky defence of the ancient French status quo to end.
This was incendiary stuff, far more dangerous than a poem about the Regent’s slutty daughter. Written in Voltaire’s punchy, witty style, it was bound to capture the French imagination. The only thing that wasn’t punchy was the long title, so Voltaire changed it to Lettres philosophiques – which was also pretty provocative given that at the time ‘philosophical’ was considered by the Church as the opposite of ‘religious’.
In 1728, before he had finished writing the book, Voltaire was given leave to return to France. He decided it was wiser to sneak in, and entered the country disguised as an Englishman. While putting the final touches to his text and working out how to publish it without earning a return trip to the Bastille, he lay low for a few years and put together a rainy-day fund in case he needed to escape again.
Finally in 1734, Lettres philosophiques was published and, within days, confiscated copies were being burnt outside the Palais de Justice in Paris. The ban naturally guaranteed the book’s success, and it was said that even illiterate people bought it just for the titillation of owning such forbidden literary fruit.
Voltaire had fully anticipated the scandal, and the book was published anonymously, mainly abroad. But his witty style was as recognizable as his opinions, and the police raided his Paris apartment in search of evidence against him. They found nothing conclusive, but under Louis XV no proof was necessary – all it took to get yourself thrown in the Bastille was to be annoying – so Voltaire found himself the target of yet another lettre de cachet, which he avoided by hiding out at the château of his lover, the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet, 250 kilometres away in far-flung eastern France.
No one came looking for him, but the authorities knew a dangerous enemy when they saw one, and Voltaire was destined to spend most of the rest of his life in exile from Paris, trying to redeem himself. Just a year after the publication of Lettres philosophiques, he signed a pledge avowing his ‘complete submission to the religion of his fathers’, and was told that he could return to Paris if he wanted – but that the lettre de cachet still stood, meaning that he might find himself being dragged out of bed by the police.
The risk was too great, and Louis XV never signed the pardon that would have allowed Voltaire to return to take his place in Europe’s capital of freethinking. Even so, Voltaire kept up a barrage of books, letters and pamphlets defending his ideas, especially his hatred of religious intolerance. He made sure that, unlike the Encyclopédie, his texts were short and affordable. He even called one of them his Portable Philosophical Dictionary and wrote in the introduction that readers didn’t need to plough through it all from A to Z – the idea was that ‘anywhere one opens it, one will find food for thought’. He was the consummate communicator. If he were alive today he would be posting one-minute satirical rants on YouTube.
All in all, from the monarchy’s point of view, Louis XV was probably wise to keep such a virulent critic at a distance. Voltaire would have to wait until 1778, and the more forgiving attitude of the young Louis XVI, before he could return to Paris. By then the 83-year-old writer was dying of prostate cancer, and had only a few months to live.
So it was a noble gesture on Louis XVI’s part to allow such a living symbol of subversion to come home. Though, as we shall see, giving apparent royal approval to hard-hitting satire was something that the monarchy would come to regret.
Other writers of the period also deserve a mention here, all of whom would have claimed that they wrote to demand drastic reform, if not outright revolution, and that they wanted to free France of religious bigotry and censorship.
These include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose theory that nature was in essence good, and that uneducated peasants were therefore inherently noble, would be dramatically disproved when roving bands of the rural poor started tearing aristocrats limb from limb during the Revolution.
However, far more interesting in terms of their impact on the monarchy were Sade and Beaumarchais – the first an outlaw and pornographer, the second a satirist and sometime courtier at Versailles: two very different men who had an equally damaging effect on Louis XV’s reputation.
To his fans, the Marquis de Sade was a resistance fighter against sexual repression and literary censorship. To the modern legal system, he would be a paedophile, kidnapper, rapist and murderer who boasted about his exploits in print. But more than anything, Sade was a logical product of Louis XV’s regime – an amoral aristocrat who thought he could live out his deranged sexual fantasies with total impunity because of his social position. The regime censored him, but only in the way that a factory owner might try to cover up evidence that he was polluting the water table.
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade came from a noble family that could trace its title back to the thirteenth century. He was born in 1740, in one of the biggest palaces in Paris, the hôtel de Condé, home of the Prince de Condé, who was a grandson of Louis XIV via a royal mistress. Sade’s mother was a lady-in-waiting to the Prince’s wife.
The infant marquis (the title given to the son of a count)fn7 therefore grew up at the heart of the French establishment. In his novel Aline et Valcour (a comparison between a cannibalistic African nation and a South Sea paradise), Sade later admitted that all this ‘luxury and abundance’ had made him feel superior as a child, so that he became ‘haughty, despotic and irascible’ – though why he needed to confess this is not clear, because such sentiments were absolutely normal for someone of his class.
At 14 Sade joined the King’s light cavalry, whose officers all came from France’s oldest noble families, before transferring to a regiment nominally headed by the infant brother of Louis XVI, Louis Stanislas, the future King Louis XVIII (the puppet monarch who would be placed on the throne after the fall of Napoleon in 1814). Sade saw action against Prussia, and one of his officers described him as ‘very disturbed, but very brave’.
While in uniform, Sade began to make a name for himself by frequenting brothels and seducing actresses. Again, this was typical of his class, but his bad reputation scared off several aristocratic brides, and he eventually had to marry the daughter of a rich tax official so that he could keep up a façade of respectability while he pursued his sexual hobbies.
Consorting with prostitutes – even very young ones – was not illegal, and neither was picking up poor girls in the street and persuading them to do sexual favours in return for ‘charity’, so Sade would have been able to carry on regardless if he hadn’t strayed into more dangerous territory.
In 1763, a fan-maker called Jeanne Testard agreed to spend the night with Sade in Paris, and quickly regretted it. Afterwards she rushed to the police to complain. In her statement, she said that Sade had called the Virgin Mary a ‘bastard’, and had boasted that he had put communion wafers into a woman’s vagina and then penetrated her, shouting, ‘If you’re God, avenge yourself!’ Jeanne herself had seen him masturbate over a crucifix, and he had ordered Jeanne to defecate on a statue of Christ (which she had refused to do). She said Sade had invited her to meet in a church the following Sunday so that they could repeat his sexual ritual with communion wafers.
Apparently, Jeanne wasn’t the only girl to complain, and Louis XV ordered Sade to be locked up in the dungeons at the château de Vincennes. Thanks to his influential family, though, the young nobleman was soon released.
After this, Sade seems to have toned down his activities – or paid the girls enough to buy their silence – and his next arrest didn’t come until Easter Sunday 1768, when he kidnapped a 36-year-old widow called Rose Keller.
Following her husband’s death, Rose had been reduced to begging, and Sade picked her up and offered her a job as the concièrge of a house in the village of Arcueil, just outside Paris. What she didn’t know was that the house was a secret bachelor pad that Sade kept as a venue for his orgies.
He took Rose there in a carriage with the curtains drawn so that she wouldn’t know where she was going, and when they arrived, he locked her in a bedroom while he went downstairs to party with some prostitutes. Returning an hour later, he was dressed in a butcher’s apron. He forced the terrified Jeanne to strip at sword point, and then tied her up and whipped her. After treating her wounds with a lotion, he left her overnight, returning next day to masturbate and whip her again, threatening to kill her if she didn’t stop screaming. Again, he treated her wounds with his lotion and left her, but this time she managed to escape through a window and appeal for help. Despite offers from Sade to pay Rose off, the horrified villagers fetched a police lieutenant who arrested him.
Of course, Sade’s family did their best to stifle the affair, claiming that he could not be tried by an ordinary judge because his alleged crimes were ‘not covered by the law’. The case therefore went before a royal court, where everyone expected Sade to be let off. After all, his defence was watertight: she was a prostitute, he had paid her, and the only reason he had whipped her was that he had wanted to test the efficiency of his lotion. Aristocrats could thrash commoners whenever they wanted, as Voltaire had discovered to his cost (see section III above). Sade himself had once beaten up a coachman for daring to demand payment. Case closed, it seemed.
However, Rose Keller had also made allegations of blasphemy, and it was these that earned Sade his prison sentence – a six-month stint in the château at Saumur on the Loire.
The rest of Sade’s life was a series of close shaves and imprisonments. In 1772 he held an orgy at which he served cake laced with a beetle-based aphrodisiac. It was said that some of the guests died of poisoning. Sade was sentenced to death for sodomizing girls during the orgy, but escaped to Italy – with a nun. In 1774 he hired five ‘very young’ girls as servants and was sued by their parents for kidnapping. In 1777 the father of another kidnapped girl shot at Sade while rescuing his daughter from the marquis’s clutches.
Rumours about what Sade did with his young ‘servants’ were so lurid that his mother-in-law issued a lettre de cachet against him for his own good. She knew that if he came to trial again, he would probably end up on the blasphemer’s bonfire. It was during his long period in detention from 1777–90, mainly at the Bastille, that Sade committed his long career to paper, in books like The 120 Days of Sodom, the story of four noblemen (including a bishop) who lock 46 young prisoners of both sexes in a castle where they carry out every imaginable sexual experiment before killing their victims.
He also wrote more sober works, like his Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, in which the latter excuses his amorality by saying that he was ‘corrupted by nature’, and argues calmly against the existence of God.
Sade claimed to be one of the freethinking Lumières – ‘Je suis philosophe’ – an atheistic thinker along the lines of Diderot, Voltaire and their contemporaries (from whom he borrowed most of his philosophical arguments). But Sade’s interpretation of freedom seems to have been very much an establishment one: as a rich nobleman, he claimed the right to do whatever he wanted to anyone poor enough to accept ritual abuse in exchange for money. In essence, it was a (much) more violent version of what Louis XV was doing with the young girls provided for his amusement at Versailles. The Marquis de Sade was simply a perverse exaggeration of the accepted standards of the time, the ugly face of the absolutist monarchy and its unshakeable prejudices.
Even though he was imprisoned by both Louis XV and XVI, in the French public imagination, Sade must have been a reminder of what the idle rich could do to the poor, as long as they were more discreet, and less blasphemous, about it than the marquis had been.
Sade was the ugly grimace behind the face powder, and yet another blemish on the monarchy’s rapidly worsening complexion.
Beaumarchais, meanwhile, started out at the opposite end of the social spectrum to Sade. But like Sade, he only seems to have discovered his passion for freethinking and democracy after committing a crime and ending up in prison.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais first came to Louis XV’s attention as a brilliant watchmaker in the 1750s (see section I above). As humble Monsieur Caron, he had been one of the low-born but handsome high achievers who managed to break through the barrier of snobbery surrounding Versailles. Once he had caught Louis XV’s eye with his miraculously miniature watch, he wormed his way further into the royal family by becoming the harp teacher to four of the King’s daughters – Caron had also invented a mechanism that made the harp’s foot pedal work more smoothly.
Now a regular at Versailles, Caron made friends with one of the King’s financial advisors, Joseph Pâris Duverney – one of the men who had helped Louis XV clear up the mess after collapse of the economy in 1720. Pâris let Caron in on lucrative investments that paid well enough for the ladies’ harp teacher to buy himself a job as a secrétaire du Roi – and the noble title that went with it.
The new suffix to his name, de Beaumarchais, was a passport to even higher social advancement. Under the patronage of Louis XV’s cousin, Louis-François de Bourbon-Conti, the exharpist acquired yet another royal job as lieutenant général des chasses – one of the men responsible for running the King’s hunt.
Now noble and comfortably off, Beaumarchais had time to develop his literary career. He had always written – he claimed to have created the anti-establishment character of Figaro when he was only nine years old – but for the moment, he began to put on plays with titles like Jean Bête à la foire (Stupid John at the Fair) that made fun of the uncultured French proles he would champion in his later, more famous plays. He was the witty court jester writing in-jokes for the Versailles in-crowd.
In 1770, though, Beaumarchais seems to have grown over-confident. When his financial mentor Joseph Pâris Duverney died, leaving a fortune to Beaumarchais, the family contested the will. An investigator called Louis-Valentin Goëzman was put on the case, and Beaumarchais decided that the court case could be won with a bribe. Goëzman’s wife accepted a watch and a small sum of money – apparently too small, because Goëzman submitted a report suggesting that Beaumarchais was guilty of forging the will, a crime that was punished with a fine.
By this time, Beaumarchais was already in prison after getting in a fight with a (slightly more noble) nobleman who accused the interloper of stealing his mistress. Behind bars, his only weapon was his pen, and he took to writing satirical pamphlets against Goëzman, helping to create a literary genre of the time, the mémoire judiciaire or legal memoir, in which accuser and accused could battle out their court case via the printing press and the literary salon, throwing ‘anonymous’ insults and allegations at each other. Public opinion would side with the wittier pamphleteer, and judges, who were members of the chattering classes, would be tempted to do the same, especially if the pamphlet sold well enough to finance a decent bribe.
Beaumarchais had already been prosecuted for his forgery, but thanks to his four acerbic mémoires, Goëzman lost his job. This didn’t help Beaumarchais much, though – Louis XV read the pamphlets and was so incensed by these attempts to pervert the course of justice, as well as the forgery of a courtier’s will, that Beaumarchais was stripped of his money and civil rights. He was back to zero.
To redeem himself, in early 1774 Beaumarchais (he managed to hang on to his name) agreed to work for the King on another literary matter.
A notorious pimp and blackmailer called Charles Théveneau de Morande (note the ‘de’ – this was yet another rogue aristocrat) was threatening to publish salacious (and partially true) rumours about Louis XV’s new mistress, Madame du Barry. These weren’t hard to invent – Jeanne du Barry was the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and a monk, and had enjoyed a successful career as a high-class prostitute, passing through several noble hands before, at the age of 25, netting the dream sugar daddy, the then 58-year-old king. She was something of a figure of fun at Versailles – even more straight-talking than Madame de Pompadour before her, with an even stronger lower-class accent. It is said that she once told Louis XV that he had knocked over a cup with the line: ‘Hey, France, your coffee is buggering off!’
The blackmailer Morande had run away to London to escape imprisonment for previous crimes, and was in dire need of money. He therefore chose a sure-fire hit title for his work – The Secret Memoirs of a Public Woman, or Research into the Adventures of Madame la Comtesse du Barry from the Cradle to the Royal Bed, Enriched with Anecdotes and Incidents Relating to the Plot and Noble Actions of the Duc d’Aiguillon (a reference to a boast by said duke that he had bedded the King’s mistress). It wasn’t exactly catchy, but it was certainly catch-all, and Louis XV knew that the book would be a bestseller.
Morande was demanding 1,000 louis in cash plus a life pension of 4,000 per annum – vast sums that would keep him a lot more comfortably than pimping. Louis XV dispatched Beaumarchais to London to negotiate. A more efficient dictator might have sent a messenger with a poisoned dagger, but Beaumarchais was simply instructed to hand over a heap of coins and make promises about future income. In return, Morande had the unpublished books burned in a brick oven at St Pancras, closing one of the most profitable literary deals of the century.
This success naturally began to encourager les autres like wild-fire, and it suddenly became fashionable to write scurrilous rumours about the royal family in the hope of cashing in, either through blackmail or book sales. Thanks to Louis XV’s bad reputation, almost anything was believable, and, adding irony to irony, Louis was forced to allow Beaumarchais to hire Morande to combat the trend, with only partial success.
The scurrilous mémoire, the genre that Beaumarchais had helped to create, became the literary sensation of the period, a sort of eighteenth-century gutter press. Suddenly it was highly profitable to dash to the printer and publish any titbit of gossip about the royal family – true, false or anywhere in between.
In this way, as Louis XV’s reign came to an end, public opinion was being manipulated by endless pieces of fake news, most of them alleging immoral goings-on at Versailles. It was a very twenty-first-century climate, in fact, with truth taking second place to unfounded allegation, and there was no reason why things should change after Louis XV’s death. Just a few years later, Marie-Antoinette was to fall victim to probably the biggest, and most damaging, wave of scandal ever to hit the monarchy. And some of the most savage mémoires written against her would be by one Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.fn8
But for the time being, it was still Marie-Antoinette’s grandfather-in-law, Louis XV, who was battling vainly against the tide of semi-libellous allegations being published against him, thrusting his popularity even deeper into the gutter.
Towards the end of his life, Louis XV tried to introduce a daring piece of social reform that would have freed France from the stranglehold of privileged power. Well, one of the strangleholds, anyway.
As we have already seen, in eighteenth-century France, the courts of justice were generally far from just. Judges, the most powerful members of the noblesse de robe, made fortunes from the bribes nicknamed ‘spices’ (‘épices’) that they received in return for favourable verdicts, and even if they were flagrantly corrupt, they could not be removed. In short, they had what the French today consider the ideal employment contract – the boss couldn’t tell them what to do, and couldn’t fire them no matter how bad they were at their job. Even better for them, but worse for France, having paid the King to be appointed to a job for life, the judges could bequeath their position and its noble rank to their heirs.
In a period of rule by the privileged, local corruption in the courts might not have bothered the King too much as long as it didn’t harm his friends or family, but these judges also presided over the regional parliaments that could oppose or block laws made by the royal ministers in Versailles. They were the people who had stood up to Louis XV in 1749 when he first tried to tax the nobility.
This parliamentary veto on royal laws was called the droit de remontrance, or right of remonstration. Thanks to this power, the judges liked to think of themselves as British-style parliamentarians, a force for democracy, despite the fact that they were corrupt, self-interested, unelected snobs. (In fact, many British MPs at the time were also corrupt, self-interested snobs, but at least they had been elected, albeit often by fixing elections.)
In any case, the French judges formed an immovable bedrock of power outside the King’s (or the people’s) control. They wielded this power to oppose any measure that attacked privilege in France, claiming that they were defending freedom when in reality they were only safeguarding their own income and that of their cronies.
Louis XV wasn’t the first king to try and rein them in. Louis XIV had limited the droit de remontrance after regional parliaments had played a role in the rebellion against him, the so-called ‘Fronde’ (see Chapter 1), but his immediate successor, Philippe d’Orléans, had restored it in return for their support in making him regent.
In 1763, Louis XV launched a new assault on the bastion of judiciary power, and tried to impose a tax to pay for the ruinous Seven Years War. The Breton parliament refused. This time, Louis XV was determined not to back down. On trumped-up charges involving two anonymous letters ‘verified by handwriting experts’, Louis had the chief judge of the Breton parliament, a man called Louis-René de la Chalotais, locked up in the Bastille. The rogue judge’s son and four other parliamentarians were also arrested, and their case became a public cause célèbre, with Voltaire himself stepping in and inventing the heroic legend of Chalotais denied pen and ink, having to write pleas for help from his cell with a toothpick and vinegar.
In the end, under pressure from the judiciary and the massed ranks of the philosophers, who were idealistic about parliamentary democracy, Louis XV had Chalotais exiled to Saintes, a pleasant town near the Atlantic coast. But the King had finally decided that enough was enough.
In 1766, Louis XV arrived unannounced at a session of the Paris parliament to call the judges to order. He gave a speech, assuring them that: ‘Remonstrations will always be received favourably when they are suffused with the moderation that characterizes the judiciary and the truth’ – Louis must have been biting his tongue when he put ‘judiciary’ and ‘truth’ in the same sentence. But he went on to warn that if the parliaments abused their position, ‘confusion and anarchy will take the place of legitimate order, and the scandalous spectacle of a rivalry to my sovereignty would reduce me to the sad necessity of using all the power that I have received from God to protect my people.’
Louis XV was renowned for his cold formality in public, and the speech must have sounded like a chilling threat – mess with the absolute monarch of France and you’re messing with the creator of the universe.
Louis was as good as his word. After years of stalemate and fruitless negotiation, in 1770, he ordered his chancellor, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou (usually called just Maupeou, for obvious reasons) to end the judges’ omnipotence. According to a royal edict, the regional parliaments would be allowed to ‘remonstrate’ only once with a royal bill, and would have to let it pass the second time. If they tried to avoid the issue by refusing to come to a decision, they would have their personal assets confiscated.
Being French, when threatened by the ruling class the parliaments naturally went on strike. After ignoring several calls to reconvene, all the Paris parliamentarians received home visits from armed soldiers who forced them at gunpoint to decide between accepting the King’s ruling or going into exile. Almost all of them chose exile – a mass defiance of royal sovereignty and a provocative signal to their colleagues in the rest of the country.
In reprisal, Maupeou abolished the hereditary right to sit in parliament, replacing the Paris parlement with a body of paid administrators, and announcing that similar changes would be phased in in the regions. At the same time, Maupeou declared that from now on, court cases would be completely free of charge, and overseen by judges appointed by the Crown.
This was a fundamental reform of France’s social structure, even more radical than emptying the House of Lords and confiscating all the wigs and gowns at the Old Bailey, because these French lords had derived both their titles and their income from their jobs. At a stroke, a whole tier of the aristocracy had had all its privileges, including its lucrative income from bribes, revoked, and poor people knew that they now had a chance of standing up for their legal rights. It was a French revolution.
Naturally, the judges didn’t go down without a fight. Supported by power-hungry members of Louis XV’s own family, by the rest of the aristocracy, and by troublemaking pamphleteers like Beaumarchais, who was still smarting at the humiliation imposed on him by Louis XV over the Goëzman affair, the judges fought back.
It was easy to find lines of attack. Wasn’t this ageing, lecherous king incapable of understanding serious matters of state? And wasn’t he under the thumb of his strumpet of a mistress, Madame du Barry, who was out to avenge the aristocratic snubs she had suffered since her arrival at Versailles?
The answer to those questions was a partial yes.
Louis XV didn’t want to be bothered with the day-to-day mechanics of ‘his’ reforms, and left it all to Maupeou while he continued to enjoy the pleasures of life at Versailles. But his royal pride was genuinely piqued by the judges’ refusal to bow to their sovereign, and he really did recognize the need for his government to make laws without the interference of a corrupt gang of self-serving judges.
It was true that he let Madame du Barry wage her personal campaigns against anyone who annoyed or insulted her – for example, she had undermined the King’s faith in his Minister of War and Foreign Affairs, the Duc de Choiseul, whose friends had published pornographic stories about her. Louis subsequently sent Choiseul into exile, a political mistake because he was popular amongst ordinary people.
But the strongest accusation made against Louis XV was that by replacing the parliamentarians with royal employees, he was revealing himself as a tyrant. Even if ordinary people would gain by this reform, the judges claimed that the King was removing democratic rights. Wanting their old absolute power back, the parliamentarians managed to stir up public feelings against absolute monarchy, making Louis even more unpopular than ever.
They generally did this anonymously, or via pamphlets, because anyone openly challenging the King was bound for the Bastille. When addressing Louis directly, they were more diplomatic. One appeal cited past kings who had been more tolerant towards them, including the fifteenth-century Louis XI, who once promised parliamentarians that ‘in his lifetime he would not force them to do anything against their conscience’.fn9
In the spirit of the times, new rumours about Louis XV began to circulate. These now went far beyond stories about juvenile prostitutes. According to one story that a courtier heard, and apparently believed, the King had a secret hoard of millions in cash, and was deliberately causing anarchy in France before doing a bunk.
Another rumour sprang up, alleging that Parisians were stealing children so that Louis XV could bathe in their blood to cure his leprosy. This story caused minor rioting. In the eighteenth century, much like today, few ordinary people asked for proof that a piece of scurrilous news was true. Goodwill towards Louis XV had sunk so low that they would believe almost anything.
It was a tragic irony: Louis XV’s decision to strip away a layer of abusive privilege from French society, and ensure that a poor citizen had as much chance of winning a court case as a rich aristocrat (well, almost – favouritism would never be abolished completely), caused him to be seen by increasing numbers of his subjects as an enemy of democracy.
It was true that he had replaced the parliamentarians by his own men, but there was almost certainly more chance of unbiased government under the royal appointees than the corrupt judges.
And overall, Louis XV’s rule had not been as harmful to ordinary people as that of the ‘great’ King Louis XIV. His sex life had been a PR disaster for the monarchy, and his nickname ‘Louis le Bien-Aimé’ had been inaccurate for most of his reign, but he had done his best to limit taxation by avoiding war. The main exception was the ruinous Seven Years War of 1756–63, but that had been provoked when the Brits started grabbing French possessions in America. Since then, Louis XV had been all for peace. In fact the final straw that precipitated his minister Choiseul’s sacking was not a pornographic pamphlet about Madame du Barry. Louis had discovered that Choiseul was preparing a war against Britain, and exploded with rage: ‘Monsieur, I told you that I wanted no wars!’
At the end of his reign, Louis XV’s attempts to do good weren’t limited to preserving the peace. He genuinely seems to have been feeling the need to go out on a positive note. To repent for his sinful lifestyle, he allowed his youngest daughter, Louise, to become a Carmelite nun (well, she was 32 and unmarried), presumably so that she would use her influence on the one judge that Louis had not sacked.
In 1774, after almost 60 years on the throne, Louis XV’s own reputation was in ruins, but – astonishingly, perhaps – even he had not really shaken the foundations of the monarchy itself. The philosophes had spent decades hammering away at established religion, privilege and royal absolutism, but even the most virulently philosophical writer of the time, Voltaire, was still in favour of the monarchy per se – he simply wanted its powers to be subject to the control of a democratic parliament. The most radical rethink of the main issues of the time, Diderot’s Encyclopédie, stopped short of condemning the monarchy outright, even after the book had lost its royal seal of approval and been more or less banned by royal censors. Revolution, as in removal of the royal family, was not in the air.
All everyone seems to have wanted is for Louis XV himself to vacate the throne. After his death from the effects of smallpox on 10 May 1774, officials were so afraid that his funeral cortège through Paris would be met by people throwing rotten vegetables (or worse) that the carriage carrying his remains left Versailles at night and drove around the western edges of Paris to the traditional burial site at the basilica of Saint-Denis, just north of the city. Over the next few days, it was said that no one mourned Louis XV, and that everyday life went on as normal, except for parties celebrating the departure of the immoral old tyrant.
But Voltaire wrote a glowing eulogy that he published on 25 May. In this, he praised Louis XV for his modern, scientific mind, even saying that ‘all his servants confess that there has never been a kinder master, and all those who worked for him attest to his amiable nature … His memory will be dear to us, because his heart was good.’
Voltaire’s text alludes to the King’s immorality and unfortunate habit of letting court squabbles get out of hand, but concludes that ‘France will owe him an eternal debt for abolishing the venal judiciary … For what Louis XV established, and for what he did away with, we owe him our gratitude.’
In fact, that wasn’t the actual conclusion of Voltaire’s eulogy, because the eccentric old philosopher used Louis XV’s death as an excuse to sing the praises of inoculation against smallpox. But he gave his public-health campaign a monarchist flavour, saying ‘let inoculation guarantee us the survival of our new king, our princes and princesses!’
Voltaire was being obsequious towards the royals in the hope of ending his exile from Paris, but he also seems to have been summing up the general mood amongst the French: Louis XV has gone at last. Things can only get better. The King is dead; long live the King.
People had thought the same when old Louis XIV died in 1715. Exhausted by over-taxation, they had been glad to see the back of him. This time, though, there was a difference. Even if people didn’t want to see the monarchy toppled, they no longer felt innate respect for their sovereigns. There was no more awe. Nevertheless, it was still possible that a successful new king could restore the old majesty.
A modern parallel would be 1997 in Britain, when public opinion rounded on the Queen for her perceived heartlessness after the death of the ‘people’s princess’, Diana. The Queen and the royal family as a whole (except for young Princes William and Harry) were seen as aloof. Republicanism reared its head in the tabloids. But the Queen quickly showed that she understood what was at stake – she went live on TV to express her sorrow, and joined the mourning masses as they heaped their floral tributes outside Kensington Palace. Subsequently she relaunched the monarchy’s brand, becoming first the nation’s grandmother, then the screen partner of James Bond, a player of internet pranks alongside Prince Harry, and of course the star of great national pageants whenever another jubilee year came around, or a photogenic prince got married or had a baby. The Queen understood that as long as the monarchy is in place, it can save its reputation.
When, on 26 April 1774, Louis XV showed the first symptoms of smallpox and took to his bed at Versailles, the French monarchy was still on its feet, and very few people in France seriously wanted it to fall. It was like an exhausted relay runner, holding out the baton for the next pair of hands, confident that a new, younger member of the team would take up the challenge and run the following leg of the race.
This was the 19-year-old Louis XVI – whose first act as king would be to drop the baton.