The Bourbon Kings of France (22 page)

By 1750 Louis was at last growing unpopular. Ridiculously, he was suspected of speculating in the grain trade and forcing up the price of bread. When a new road was being built from Versailles to Compiègne, he had it re-routed to by-pass Paris, explaining, ‘I do not see why I should go where people call me Herod.’ (This was a reference to a popular scare that the government were abducting children to send to the colonies; according to Michelet there were even rumours that Louis bathed daily in children’s blood ‘to renew his exhausted frame’.) The fact that taxation had not been decreased after the end of the war in 1748 did not endear him to his subjects. However, the principal reason for the King’s unpopularity was his association with Mme de Pompadour who had incurred the traditional hatred for all royal mistresses. Her bourgeois origins irritated the court—she was the first commoner to be
maîtresse en titre
—while everyone disliked her connection with a tax-farmer’s family. Increases in taxation were invariably blamed on her extravagance (and admittedly she spent over a million and a half of the King’s money, reckoned in English pounds of the period, in the course of her career). Savage pamphlets, the
Poissonades
, circulated, lampooning the poor woman without mercy. It was common knowledge that she ruled Louis. After meeting her, the Prince de Ligne described Mme de Pompadour as ‘a second Queen’, and M d’Argenson says in 1756, ‘She is more the First Minister than ever.’

Oddly enough, France was more prosperous than ever before. As Pierre Gaxotte says, the reign of Louis XV was truly ‘an era of agriculturists, bankers, ironmasters, shipwrights and planners’. For, after Orry’s stabilization of the currency in 1726, a period of really remarkable economic expansion had set in and lasted for the rest of the reign. Admittedly the peasantry in many areas were often near starvation when there was a bad harvest, but on the whole agriculture flourished, though there were very few ‘improving’ landlords. There was also an industrial revolution, with an impressive increase in the number of mines and foundries. In addition, there was a marked growth in trade with the colonies. Sugar, rum, tobacco and coffee flowed into the great French seaports, much of it to be re-exported, bringing economic wealth and capturing a considerable part of the European market from the English.

Machault—Orry’s successor as Controller-General—tried to introduce a new and equitable tax system, the
vingtième
, in 1749–51. This was to be a five per cent wealth tax on real property and capital, which would replace the old system with its inefficiency and injustices; under the new scheme everyone—noble and priest, bourgeois and peasant farmer—would pay, except tenant farmers or wage earners who were to be exempt. The scheme was quickly killed by the privileged classes—notably the clergy in general assembly and the Parlements.

The Parlements were challenging the monarchy once more. These powerful legal corporations, exclusive, rich and noble, had become bastions of reaction and privilege. The
noblesse de l’épée
were incapable of mounting another Fronde, and the mantle of rebellion had fallen on the Parlementaires who, once bourgeois and loyal, had with increasing exclusiveness grown feudal and fractious. By ‘liberty’ this judicial aristocracy meant a kind of legal neo-feudalism; in 1734 they burnt Voltaire’s
Lettres Philosophiques
, and they resisted any attempt to reform their archaic and often cruel statutes. They claimed to be the custodians of the law with supreme jurisdiction, and as such to constitute a ‘Senate of the Nation’ which spoke for France. Although entirely selfish and reactionary, they none the less managed to attract popular support in their self-styled rôle of ‘Fathers of the People’. Louis was not far wrong in describing the Parlement of Paris as ‘an assembly of republicans’. They were also the greatest single obstacle to reforming the
Ancien Régime
.

In the 1750s the Parlementaires derived considerable strength from their support of the Jansenists. Although by then this sect had its mindless fanatics, it did not derive its support from mere popular superstition alone, as is too often suggested; whole monasteries adopted the theology of Port Royal—in the middle of the eighteenth century an entire Carthusian community fled from Paris to join the Jansenists in Utrecht. Jansenists were popular because of their defiance of the Pope, they enlisted qualified support from the
Philosophes
in their feud with the Jesuits, and they inspired respect by their piety. (In the next century even Stendhal admired their survivors, in
Le Rouge et Le Noir
.) By their reliance on the lower clergy in their battle with the bishops, the Jansenists undermined authority and helped spread republican ideas.

In 1752, the Archbishop of Paris forbade his clergy to give the last rites to dying men who could not produce a certificate proving that they had been shriven by a non-Jansenist priest. The Parlement thereupon ordered his pastoral letters to be burnt by the public hangman. The Crown intervened and a furious quarrel ensued, a number of magistrates being banished. Although the Jansenist conflict died down briefly in 1757—thanks to intervention by Rome—the Parlement of Paris then tried to unite with the provincial Parlements to form a single body which would work towards obtaining the powers of the English Parliament. Louis angrily ordered them to confine themselves to their normal business.

The King was keenly aware that the monarchy was in danger. ‘At least it will last my time,’ he muttered grimly to a friend. For his authority was under ceaseless attack from the privileged classes. In this context one should no longer distinguish between nobility of the sword and nobility of the robe; by the late 1750s some of the Dukes and Peers—‘obscure men of illustrious origin’ as Michelet calls them—were beginning to side with the Parlementaires. An aristocratic counter-revolution was taking place; as Tocqueville first recognized, the nobles were becoming a closed caste. Louis XIV had carefully excluded the nobility from the councils of state, but by the mid-eighteenth century they occupied almost all government posts, even those of the
Intendants
; the higher clergy were exclusively noble; the Parlements refused to admit lawyers who could not show four quarterings; and the army was becoming steadily more patrician.

Louis XV understood very well that the state’s financial machinery was inadequate and that corruption was spreading. Unfortunately his pessimism made him reluctant to act—as C P Gooch says, ‘for him all evils were incurable.’ Furthermore, the growth of literacy and the new critical climate introduced by the Enlightenment made it difficult for an eighteenth-century King of France to act in the way that Louis XIV had done—this was the age of Voltaire, no longer of Bossuet.

Louis XV’s unpopularity was made known to him in a peculiarly unpleasant fashion in January 1757. Ironically, he had already predicted that he would die like Henri IV. One snowy afternoon, as he was descending the Dogs’ Staircase at Versailles, an out-of-work serving man called Damiens stabbed him with a little pen-knife. At first Louis thought he had merely been hit. But touching his ribs he found them covered in blood, and cried, ‘Arrest that man, but don’t hurt him!’ Then he muttered, ‘Why do they want to kill me? I’ve harmed no one.’ He walked upstairs without assistance, but then fainted—from shock rather than loss of blood. Reviving, he demanded a doctor and confessor—above all he feared to die unshriven. Summoning his family, he informed the Queen, ‘I have been assassinated’, and told the Daulphin, ‘Govern better than I have done’, after which he asked their pardon for his scandalous life. When the priest came, after an hour and a half’s confession, he begged for the last rites.

Yet the assassin’s ‘weapon’ had had to penetrate a fur overcoat, a velvet jacket and two shirts. The wound was hardly more than a scratch, but Louis insisted, ‘I shall not recover.’ Eventually his huntsman, deeply trusted, managed to convince him that the wound was not mortal. Even so, the King refused to emerge from behind his curtains for over a week. He would not see Mme de Pompadour who feared that her reign was over; for some it was a day of Dupes; M d’Argenson refused to censor the royal post for her and was dismissed as soon as Louis was in circulation again.

At Fontenoy, in killing many dangerous stags with the sword, and in nursing the Dauphin’s smallpox, Louis XV had shown that he was no coward. To say that his behaviour on this occasion was due to his obsessive fear of damnation—he was not frightened of death—is only part of the explanation. His terror has an uncanny resemblance to the mood of Henri IV on the eve of his own assassination. In fact Louis showed many symptoms of a manic-depressive state. Revealingly, he told his doctor, ‘My body is all right, but this is bad and won’t heal’, pointing to his forehead. It is only fair to add that Damiens’s peculiarly horrible torture and execution—he suffered all the barbarous penalties for regicide—were imposed by the Parlement and not by the King.

The Seven Years War had begun in the previous year, 1756. Already the English, jealous of French colonial prosperity, had ordered its navy to board French merchantmen and even men-of-war. Meanwhile, France had realized that her traditional foe, Austria, was no longer her real enemy. At the same time the English, determined that the war should be fought on land as well as at sea, subsidized Frederick of Prussia, who was alarmed by the new Franco-Austrian alliance. He swiftly invaded and conquered Saxony, an ally of Austria, and won a series of victories in Bohemia.

The French army was in a parlous condition. Undeterred by terrible punishments, thousands deserted the colours every year, while since Saxe’s death there were no great commanders; the rank of Marshal of France had become a mere court perquisite instead of a victor’s accolade. Louis XV’s one positive contribution was the foundation of the Ecole Militaire in 1752, an officer-cadet school for the sons of country gentlemen. French troops have seldom been so badly led as they were during the Seven Years War.

To begin with, the French offensive went well enough. Marshal d’Estrées defeated the English and occupied Hanover; however Richelieu threw away the victory by allowing the Duke of Cumberland to escape. In 1757 there took place one of the most terrible disasters ever suffered by a French army. It was commanded by a brave and elegant friend of Mme de Pompadour, Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, who marched into Saxony with 50,000 men, to attack Frederick who had only 20,000. But Richelieu and the allied generals had, with criminal incompetence, omitted to provide food for the French troops; they had not eaten for three days and were scarcely able to walk when they arrived at the little village of Rosbach where Frederick was waiting for them. None the less, the French marched doggedly towards the enemy. Suddenly they were mown down by hidden artillery, and then their unprotected right flank was overwhelmed by General von Seydlitz’s cavalry. The Prussians lost 165 men; 3,000 Frenchmen were killed, 7,000 taken prisoner. Soubise, the descendant of so many Huguenot paladins, wrote to the King, ‘I write to Your Majesty in an agony of despair. Your army has been totally routed; I cannot tell you how many of your officers were killed or captured or are missing.’ France was so horrified that the Dauphin begged to be sent to the front, without success. Next year, at Krefeld, Frederick again defeated the French.

Meanwhile the French navy was being annihilated. Thirty-seven ships of the line and fifty-six frigates were sunk by the English, the remnant of the fleets being finally destroyed by Admiral Hawke at Quiberon Bay in 1759. The enemy blockaded every French port, raiding Normandy and Brittany, and put the entire French coast in a stage of siege—any sorties were blown out of the water. It was impossible to send aid to the colonies. There were only 5,000 troops in Canada, badly short of ammunition and provisions; in 1759 Quebec fell to an English army of 40,000. Most of the French possessions in the Caribbean were overrun, in India Pondicherry fell and even in Africa Senegal was occupied. It was the most disastrous war which France had known for a hundred and fifty years.

Contemporaries tended to blame poor Mme de Pompadour. Undoubtedly she meddled in politics, making and unmaking ministers—she had had the excellent Orry dismissed in 1745, to please her tax-farmer friends. For her, politics was a matter of personalities—Bernis said she judged affairs of state like a child—and she chose people for amiable qualities rather than abilities. Between 1755 and 1763 no less than twenty-five ministers were appointed and dismissed, ‘falling one after the other like the figures in a magic lantern’, said Voltaire. D’Argenson commented,
‘C’est la vide qui règne.’
Nor was France able to make peace when Frederick openly laughed at ‘
Cotillon
(Petticoat) II’ and named one of his bitch puppies ‘Pompadour’.

Even if the idea of a woman prime minister does not seem so outrageous nowadays, it is difficult to find an explanation, let alone an excuse, for Louis XV’s trust in his mistress’s political judgement. Yet the twenty-five ministers were only peripheral; the key men were sound enough throughout the war, for the ‘harlotocracy’—Carlyle’s cruel definition—secured the appointment of Bernis and then Choiseul.

The Abbé François Joachim de Bernis had attached himself to Mme de Pompadour even before her meeting with the King, in poverty-stricken days when his highest ambition had been a garret under the eaves of Versailles. He was a light-weight, timid, hypochondriacal, an amateur of flowery verse, essentially a man of pleasure and fashion whose chief talents were those of the drawing-room. But, although he lacked the character to give them force, his political views were shrewd and sensible—he was a pioneer advocate of the Austrian alliance. The court did not take the fat little Abbé very seriously. However, Mme de Pompadour had him appointed Ambassador to Venice, where he did so well that, in 1755, he was made Minister of Foreign Affairs and charged with negotiating the new alliance with Austria. He was wise enough to see that any continuation of the war would benefit only England, a defeatist attitude which was too pessimistic even for Louis. Despairingly, the Abbé wrote, ‘I feel myself to be the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Limbo.’ He resigned in December, consoled with a Red Hat.