Louis XVI


Louis XVI was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. The son of Louis, Dauphin of France, and Maria Josepha of Saxony, Louis became the new Dauphin when his father died in 1765. In 1770, he married Marie Antoinette. He became King of France and Navarre on his paternal grandfather's death on 10 May 1774, and reigned until the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792. From 1791 onwards, he used the style of king of the French.
The first part of Louis XVI's reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolishing the death penalty for deserters. The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation. Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it led to food scarcity which, during a particularly bad harvest in 1775, prompted the masses to revolt. From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the ancien régime.
This led to the convening of the Estates General of 1789. Discontent among France's middle and lower classes intensified opposition to the French aristocracy and the absolute monarchy led by Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. Tensions progressively rose, punctuated by violent riots such as the storming of the Bastille, which forced Louis to recognize the legislative authority of the National Assembly.
Louis's indecisiveness and conservatism toward the demands of the Estates led many to despise him as the embodiment of ancien régime tyranny, and his popularity deteriorated progressively. His unsuccessful flight to Varennes in June 1791 seemed to confirm suspicions that the king hoped for foreign intervention to restore his power, deeply undermining his legitimacy. Four months later, the constitutional monarchy was declared, and the replacement of the monarchy with a republic became an ever-increasing possibility. The growth of anti-clericalism among revolutionaries resulted in the abolition of the dîme and several government policies aimed at the dechristianization of France.
With the outbreak of civil and international war, Louis XVI was arrested during the Insurrection of 10 August 1792. One month later, the monarchy was abolished and the French First Republic was proclaimed on 21 September 1792. The former king became a desacralized French citizen, addressed as Citoyen Louis Capet in reference to his ancestor Hugh Capet. Louis was tried by the National Convention, found guilty of high treason, and executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793. Louis XVI's death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Thérèse, was released to her Austrian relatives in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.

Childhood

Louis-Auguste de France, who was given the title Duke of Berry at birth, was born in the Palace of Versailles on 23 August 1754. One of seven children, he was the second surviving son of Louis, the Dauphin of France and the grandson of Louis XV and of his consort, Maria Leszczyńska. His mother was Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, the daughter of Augustus III, Prince-elector of Saxony and King of Poland and Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria.
Louis-Auguste was overlooked by his parents who favored his older brother, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, who was regarded as bright and handsome but died at the age of nine in 1761. Louis-Auguste, a strong and healthy boy but very shy, excelled in his studies and had a strong taste for Latin, history, geography, and astronomy and became fluent in Italian and English. His tutors in mathematics and physics had high praises for his work. Le Blonde, his mathematics instructor, wrote that the prince's studies were "proofs of intelligence and the excellence of judgement," though flattery was to be expected when addressing a prince. Louis-Auguste's apparent mathematical skills are corroborated by his enjoyment of cartography, which would have required an understanding of scale and projections. He also enjoyed physical activities such as hunting with his grandfather and rough play with his younger brothers, Louis-Stanislas, Count of Provence, and Charles-Philipe, Count of Artois. From an early age, Louis-Auguste was encouraged in another of his interests, locksmithing, which was seen as a useful pursuit for a child.
When his father died of tuberculosis on 20 December 1765, the eleven-year-old Louis-Auguste became the new Dauphin. His mother never recovered from the loss of her husband and died on 13 March 1767, also from tuberculosis. The strict and conservative education he received from Paul François de Quelen de la Vauguyon, "gouverneur des Enfants de France", from 1760 until his marriage in 1770, did not prepare him for the throne that he was to inherit in 1774 after the death of his grandfather, Louis XV. Throughout his education, Louis-Auguste received a mixture of studies particular to religion, morality, and humanities. His instructors may have also had a good hand in shaping Louis-Auguste into the indecisive king that he became. Abbé Berthier, his instructor, taught him that timidity was a value in strong monarchs, and Abbé Soldini, his confessor, instructed him not to let people read his mind.

Marriage and family life

On 19 April 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis XVI married the fourteen-year-old Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, his second cousin once removed and the youngest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa.
This marriage was met with hostility from the French public. France's alliance with its traditional enemy Austria had pulled the country into the disastrous Seven Years' War, in which it was defeated by the British and the Prussians, both in Europe and in North America. By the time that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were married, the French people generally disliked the Austrian alliance, and Marie Antoinette was seen as an unwelcome foreigner. For the young couple, the marriage was initially amiable but distant. Louis XVI's shyness and, among other factors, the young age and inexperience of the newlyweds meant that the fifteen-year-old bridegroom failed to consummate the union with his fourteen-year-old bride. His fear of being manipulated by her for Austrian purposes caused him to behave coldly towards her in public. Correspondence between Marie Antoinette's mother and Austria's French ambassador Florimond Claude, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau express a desire for Marie Antoinette to exercise authority in the French court and to encourage Louis XVI to dedicate more attention to his role as prince. To their disappointment, however, the princess did not seem overly interested in "serious affairs". Over time, the couple became closer, though while their marriage was reportedly consummated in July 1773, it did not actually happen until 1777.
The couple's failure to produce children for several years placed a strain upon their marriage, exacerbated by the publication of obscene pamphlets mocking their infertility. One such pamphlet questioned, "Can the King do it? Can't the King do it?".
The couple's initial failure to have children aroused contemporary debate that has continued among historians. One suggestion is that Louis XVI suffered from a physical dysfunction, most often thought to be phimosis, a suggestion first made in late 1772 by the royal doctors. Adherents of this view suggest that he was circumcised to relieve the condition seven years after their marriage. Louis XVI's doctors were not in favour of the surgery – the operation was delicate and traumatic, and capable of doing "as much harm as good" to an adult man. The argument for phimosis and a resulting operation is mostly seen to originate from Stefan Zweig's 1932 biography of Marie Antoinette.
Most modern historians doubt that Louis XVI had surgery. As 1777, the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported that Louis XVI had definitely declined the operation. Louis XVI was frequently declared to be perfectly capable of sexual intercourse, as confirmed by Marie Antoinette's brother Joseph II; and during the time he was supposed to have had the operation, his journal records him hunting almost every day, which would not have been possible for weeks after circumcision. The couple's sexual problems are now attributed to other factors. Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette discusses Joseph II's letter on the matter to one of his brothers after he visited Versailles in 1777. Joseph describes in frank detail Louis XVI's sexual inadequacy and Marie Antoinette's lack of interest. Joseph described the couple as "complete fumblers"; however, with Joseph's advice, Louis XVI began to apply himself more effectively, and in the third week of March 1778 Marie Antoinette became pregnant.
Eventually, the royal couple had four children. According to Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan, Marie Antoinette's lady-in-waiting, the queen also suffered two miscarriages. The first, in 1779, a few months after the birth of her first child, is mentioned by Empress Maria Theresa in a July letter to her daughter. Madame Campan states that Louis XVI spent an entire morning consoling his wife at her bedside, and swore everyone to secrecy. Marie Antoinette suffered a second miscarriage on the night of 2–3 November 1783.
Their live-born children were:
In addition to his biological children, Louis XVI also adopted six children: "Armand" Francois-Michel Gagné, a poor orphan adopted in 1776; Jean Amilcar, a Senegalese slave boy given to the queen by Stanislas de Boufflers in 1787, freed, baptized, adopted and placed in a pension; Ernestine Lambriquet, daughter of two servants at the palace, who was raised as the playmate of his daughter and whom he adopted after the death of her mother in 1788; and finally "Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire, who was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters after the death of her parents, an usher and his wife in service of the king.
Of these adoptees, only Armand, Ernestine and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also formally foster children of the royal couple, lived at the queen's expense until her imprisonment, which proved fatal for at least Amilcar, who was evicted from his boarding school, and reportedly starved to death on the street. Armand and Zoe had a position which was more similar to that of Ernestine: Armand lived at court with the king and queen until the outbreak of the revolution, when he left them because of his republican sympathies, and Zoe was chosen to be the playmate of the Dauphin, just as Ernestine had once been selected as the playmate of Marie Thérèse, and sent away to her sisters in a convent boarding school before the Flight to Varennes in 1791.