The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon by Colin Jones

Author:Colin Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141937205
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

C) PATRIOTISM À L’AMÉRICAINE

Despite the failure of the Turgot experiment, the young king still retained goodwill in the country at large – indeed, so unpopular had the Controller-General become by late 1775 that his dismissal gave Louis’s popularity a fillip. Despite the rumblings of reaction in the coronation, the move for reform and the mood of political renewal which had pre-dated Turgot post-dated him too. This owed a great deal to the influence of Maurepas, whose position in the king’s favour had been strengthened by Turgot’s removal – and much also to the policy issue which dominated these years, namely, France’s involvement in the War of American Independence. The ferocious sideswipes which the war allowed France to make against its traditional enemy, England, stimulated the recrudescence of a popular patriotism focused on the monarch.

Louis was still a big clumsy bear who needed licking into political shape, and he lacked any relish for rule. Though he retained much of the court etiquette inherited from his idol, Louis XIV, the young king invariably seemed more awkward on ceremonial occasions than his courtiers. His moralizing view of politics impelled him towards a style of self-presentation which stressed the humane rather than the remote and disdainful. This often emerged in a preference for a homely, familial ethos – indeed, he appeared to take most simple pleasure far removed from the stately ceremonial round, in the guise of loving husband or bourgeois paterfamilias. The duc de Croÿ recorded how, once, the king and queen and their entourages, out riding separately, chanced to encounter each other in the Bois de Boulogne. The queen ‘threw herself down from her horse, and [Louis] ran to her and kissed her on the forehead. People applauded, at which [the king] gave Marie-Antoinette two good kisses on her cheeks.’34 This informal style was sometimes rather awkward – for Louis’s natural shyness made spontaneity a bit of a problem – but was undoubtedly assisted by Marie-Antoinette’s own distaste for protocol. The queen’s patent boredom at court ceremonials was widely commented on: the Anjou priest Besnard who made a tourist visit to Versailles to witness the king’s public dinner noted the king filling his face (‘and drinking quite a bit’) while the queen scarcely opened her napkin and fiddled with her food with conspicuous ennui.35 Marie-Antoinette preferred pleasure within the ambit of a more restricted audience of courtiers and intimates. The weekly balls she organized each spring were famous – and famously exclusive. Many of the festivities in which she engaged were indeed located in the less publicly accessible royal residences such as the Trianon, where attendance was even more recherché. ‘Except for some favourites, designated by whim or intrigue’, the duc de Lévis later tartly recalled, ‘everyone was excluded: no longer were rank, service, esteem, or high birth fitting qualification to be admitted into the intimacy of the royal family.’36

The value which the royal couple accorded domestic intimacy fanned the flames of aristocratic resentment and encouraged intrigue and faction. During Louis XV’s reign, court faction had often tended to crystallize around the king’s principal mistresses.

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