The Bourbon Kings of France by Seward Desmond

Author:Seward, Desmond [Seward, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0094600805
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-06-17T23:00:00+00:00

‘The Suicide of France’

LOUIS XVI (1774–1793)

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‘I should like to be known as “Louis the Serious” ’

No king has been more unfortunate than Louis XVI. Yet had he reigned happily and prosperously, he would probably have been regarded as the dullest and most commonplace monarch in all French history. As it was, his tragic destiny showed him to be in some ways one of the noblest, if not one of the wisest, men who has ever tried to rule France.

Louis’s personality is inextricably involved with the French Revolution. As it approaches, there is a steadily increasing note of drama in his story; at the end, the constantly changing attitude of his subjects towards him is terrifying. Unfortunately, in a book of this size one can only offer a brief and superficial account of the Revolution. Perhaps this is not altogether a handicap, for Louis as a human being is so often lost sight of amid the cataclysm; most studies concentrate on the perplexed, doomed ruler of 1789–93 and tend to neglect the odd young King of the 1770s and 1780s.

Louis XVI was born at Versailles on 27 August 1754, the third son of the Dauphin Louis and Marie Joséphine of Saxony, christened Louis-Auguste and created Duc de Berry. His childhood was no less overshadowed by death than that of Louis XV. His eldest brother, the Duc d’Aquitaine, died long before Louis-Auguste was born and the second, the Duc de Bourgogne, died in 1761; his father died in 1765 and his mother in 1768; by the time he was fourteen he was an orphan. Unfortunately, unlike his grandfather, there was no Mme de Ventadour to take the place of his mother, while the old King although fond of him—Louis-Auguste called him ‘Papa Roi’—seems to have kept his distance.

His earliest memories were of his precociously brilliant elder brother boasting how he would conquer England, and then dying painfully at ten of lymphatic glanditis—scrofula, the King’s Evil itself. Louis-Auguste himself fell ill with the same tuberculosis at the age of seven, and, like Henri IV, was sent to the country where he acquired his iron health. His governor was M de Vauguyon, a pedantic Breton Duke whose piety had impressed his father; Louis-Auguste was rather frightened of him. The boy was oddly inarticulate and unselfconfident. His younger brothers, the sly and clever Provence and the handsome, lively Artois, made him feel inferior; he once said ‘I love no one because no one loves me’. His usual companions were grooms and stable-boys. His aunts felt sorry for the lonely, gloomy child, particularly Adelaide who used to say, ‘My poor Berry, you must make yourself at home with me—make a noise, shout, break things—but do something!’

Vauguyon instilled an almost excessive piety into him. Louis-Auguste was good at his Latin, learnt to speak German, and memorized much history even if he had small power of analysing it. Geography was the chief joy of his studies—he drew maps to perfection. He also read English with surprising ease, especially English history.

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