Crowned at the age of five after a wave of illness wiped out three generations of his immediate family, King Louis XV of France ruled for fifty-nine years (1715–1774)—the second-longest reign in French history behind only his great-grandfather, Louis XIV. Celebrated in his youth as Louis le Bien-Aimé (“Louis the Well-Beloved”) when the entire country prayed at his sickbed in 1744, the monarch gradually squandered that popular affection through disastrous global wars, fiscal paralysis, and court scandals at Versailles. By the time he died of smallpox in 1774, his half-century on the throne had hollowed out the prestige of the absolute monarchy and set the stage for the French Revolution fifteen years later.
The Orphan Boy-King and the Golden Peace of Cardinal Fleury
Born at Versailles on February fifteenth, 1710, the young Duke of Anjou was never expected to wear the crown; three older males stood directly ahead of him in the line of succession. In a single tragic week in February and March 1712, however, a virulent measles epidemic killed both his mother, his father (the Duke of Burgundy), and his five-year-old older brother. Two-year-old Louis only survived because his devoted royal governess, the Duchess of Ventadour, literally locked the boy inside a bedroom and refused to let the royal physicians bleed him to death as they had his brother.
When the seventy-six-year-old Sun King died in September 1715, the five-year-old boy became King Louis XV under the Regency of his libertine cousin, Philippe, Duke of Orléans (1715–1723). After coming of age, the shy, intelligent young monarch made the wisest decision of his life: he entrusted the day-to-day governance of France for seventeen years (1726–1743) to his beloved childhood tutor, the septuagenarian Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury:
- Economic Stabilization: Following the collapse of John Law’s paper-money bubble in 1720, Fleury stabilized the gold and silver value of the French livre in 1726—giving France six decades of stable currency that fueled booming Atlantic port trade in Bordeaux and Nantes.
- Paving the Royal Highways: Fleury and Controller-General Orry expanded the network of paved royal highways across France, initiated the peaceful diplomatic acquisition of the Duchy of Lorraine (which formally joined France in 1766), and kept taxes relatively stable until Fleury died at age eighty-nine in 1743.
1744: How “The Well-Beloved” Earned and Lost His Title
After Cardinal Fleury’s death, thirty-three-year-old Louis XV announced that just like Louis XIV, he would henceforth govern without a chief minister. During the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the King rode personally to the eastern front in August 1744—only to collapse in the city of Metz with a raging, life-threatening fever. As rumors spread that the young king was dying, thousands of ordinary Parisians wept in the streets and paid for six thousand Masses at Notre-Dame Cathedral for his recovery, spontaneous devotion that earned him the official title Louis le Bien-Aimé (“the Well-Beloved”). Months later, in May 1745, Louis XV and his thirteen-year-old son stood under cannon fire alongside Marshal Maurice de Saxe at the Battle of Fontenoy, winning the greatest French battlefield victory of the eighteenth century and conquering the entirety of the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium).
Then, at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), Louis XV stunned his own subjects: desiring to act like a chivalrous Christian prince rather than a greedy merchant, he handed every single conquered Belgian city right back to Austria in exchange for almost nothing. Outraged Parisians who had paid heavy wartime taxes coined a biting street proverb that remained in the French language forever: “Bête comme la paix” (“As stupid as the peace”).
The Secret du Roi and the Disaster of the Seven Years’ War
Despite possessing a sharp, analytical mind and a passion for science, cartography, botany, and architecture, Louis XV suffered from crippling self-doubt and conflict avoidance in face-to-face cabinet meetings. Rather than firing ministers whose foreign policies he disagreed with, the King did something bizarre: beginning in the 1740s, he ran his own parallel, clandestine spy and diplomatic network behind the backs of his own official Foreign Ministers, known as the Secret du Roi (“The King’s Secret”)—often leading to comic chaos where an official French ambassador in Warsaw or Stockholm pushed one policy while the King’s secret agent in the exact same room pushed the exact opposite!
Guided by his brilliant official mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and Minister Choiseul, Louis XV executed the “Diplomatic Revolution” of 1756, abandoning France’s two-hundred-year hatred of the Austrian Habsburgs to ally with Vienna against Frederick the Great’s Prussia and Great Britain. The resulting Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was an unmitigated geopolitical catastrophe for France:
- Routed on land in Germany at the Battle of Rossbach (1757) and swept off the seas by the Royal Navy, France signed the humiliating Treaty of Paris (1763).
- In a single stroke of the pen, Louis XV lost New France (Canada), all French territory east of the Mississippi River, and French political dominance in India to Great Britain, while ceding Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain—though Minister Choiseul did manage to rebuild the French Navy afterward and purchase the island of Corsica from Genoa in 1768 (just fifteen months before a boy named Napoleon Bonaparte was born there as a French subject!).
The Damiens Knife Attack, the Parlements, and “After Me, the Deluge”
At home, the final twenty years of Louis XV’s reign were consumed by a bitter constitutional war against the aristocratic high law courts, the Parlements, which repeatedly refused to register new royal tax decrees that would force wealthy nobles and clergy to pay their fair share of France’s crushing war debts. In January 1757, as the King walked to his carriage at Versailles, a mentally disturbed servant named Robert-François Damiens stepped out of the dark and stabbed Louis XV in the ribs with a small penknife. Although the thick winter coats saved the King from a serious wound, Damiens was subjected to a gruesome four-hour public execution by drawing and quartering at the Place de Grève that horrified Enlightenment writers like Voltaire.
In 1771, Louis XV and his tough Chancellor, René Nicolas de Maupeou, finally launched a bold royal coup against the noble judges—abolishing the obstructionist Parlements and replacing them with salaried courts so the Crown could reform taxes. Had that reform survived, the French monarchy might have avoided bankruptcy. However, when the sixty-four-year-old King contracted fatal smallpox at the Petit Trianon and died in agony on May tenth, 1774—so unpopular in death that his decaying coffin had to be driven at a fast trot through the dark night to the Abbey of Saint-Denis to avoid jeering crowds—his inexperienced nineteen-year-old grandson, Louis XVI, immediately made the fatal mistake of firing Maupeou and restoring the obstructive noble judges, fulfilling the famous fatalistic warning attributed to Louis XV and Pompadour: “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”).
