Louis XVIII

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis XVIII spent twenty-three years as a king without a kingdom. Born on the 17th of November 1755 at the Palace of Versailles, he outlasted the Revolution that killed his brother, the exile that scattered his court, and the emperor who remade Europe in his own image. He would not sit on the French throne until 1814, when he was nearly sixty years old.

  His story raises questions that go to the heart of what monarchy means. How does a man govern a country that has already guillotined one king from his family? How does an institution built on divine right survive the age of constitutions? And what kind of person waits twenty-three years for a crown, and then spends his reign trying not to lose it the way his brother did?

• 2. Versailles, 1755

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  Louis Stanislas Xavier was christened six months after his birth, in keeping with Bourbon family tradition. He was born without a name and remained so until his baptism, at which point he also became a Knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit. The name Louis was standard for a French prince. Stanislas honoured his great-grandfather King Stanislaus I of Poland, who was still living. Xavier came from Saint Francis Xavier, a patron saint of his mother's family.

  At birth he stood fourth in line to the throne of France. His father the Dauphin died in 1765, and the death of his elder brother the Duke of Burgundy in 1761 rearranged the succession further. By the time Louis XV still reigned, Louis Stanislas had become second in line, behind his elder brother the future Louis XVI.

  His household, established in April 1771 when he turned fifteen, startled contemporaries with its scale. By 1773 he employed three hundred and ninety servants. He was also granted four titles by his grandfather in that same month: Duke of Anjou, Count of Maine, Count of Perche, and Count of Senoches. In daily life he went by the title Count of Provence.

• 3. A Difficult Marriage

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  On the 16th of April 1771, Louis Stanislas was married by proxy to Princess Maria Giuseppina of Savoy, daughter of Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy. The in-person ceremony followed on the 14th of May at the Palace of Versailles. A luxurious ball followed on the 20th of May.

  Louis Stanislas found his wife repulsive. Biographers disagree about the exact cause, with some pointing to his alleged impotence and others to his wife's poor personal hygiene. She never brushed her teeth, plucked her eyebrows, or used perfumes. Biographer Antonia Fraser is among those who weighed in on the debate. The marriage went unconsummated for years.

  Despite the reality, Louis publicly boasted that the couple enjoyed vigorous conjugal relations. He even announced a pregnancy he could not have produced, purely to irritate his brother Louis Auguste and Marie Antoinette, who had not yet consummated their own marriage. The Count of Provence did eventually impregnate his wife in 1774, but the pregnancy ended in miscarriage. A second pregnancy in 1781 also miscarried, and the marriage remained childless.

  By 1780, Louis had fallen in love with Anne Nompar de Caumont, Countess of Balbi, who had entered the service of his wife. He installed her as his mistress and commissioned a pavilion for her on palace grounds at Versailles, a property that became known as the Parc Balbi. There Louis kept a library of over eleven thousand books and spent several hours reading each morning.

• 4. Revolution and Flight

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  When the Estates-General convened in May 1789, the Count of Provence favoured a hard line against the Third Estate. On the 17th of June, the Third Estate declared itself a National Assembly. The Count urged Louis XVI to act against this declaration; the King vacillated.

  On the 11th of July, Louis XVI dismissed his popular finance minister Jacques Necker. The following day, the charge of the Royal German Cavalry Regiment against a crowd at the Tuileries gardens helped ignite the Storming of the Bastille two days later. The King's brother, Charles, Comte d'Artois, left France on the 16th of July with his family and settled in Turin.

  The Count of Provence chose to stay at Versailles. When the Royal Family was forced from Versailles after the Women's March on the 5th of October 1789, Provence and his wife lodged in the Luxembourg Palace while the rest of the Royal Family moved to the Tuileries. He fled France in conjunction with the royal family's failed Flight to Varennes in June 1791, escaping to the Austrian Netherlands, where he immediately proclaimed himself regent of France.

  He joined the other princes-in-exile at Coblenz, where he, the Count of Artois, and the Condé princes announced their intent to invade France. Louis XVI was greatly annoyed. In January 1792, the Legislative Assembly declared all émigrés traitors and confiscated their property. On the 21st of September 1792, the National Convention abolished the monarchy entirely.

• 5. Twenty-Three Years Without a Throne

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  Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, leaving his young son Louis Charles as the nominal king. When Louis XVII died in prison in June 1795, his only surviving sibling was his sister Marie-Thérèse, who was excluded from the throne by Salic law. On the 16th of June, the princes-in-exile declared the Count of Provence "King Louis XVIII".

  His first act as self-declared king was to issue the Declaration of Verona, a manifesto beckoning France back to the monarchy, which he described as "the glory of France for fourteen centuries". The declaration was not well received, and he was forced to abandon Verona when Napoleon invaded the Republic of Venice in 1796.

  What followed was years of shuffling between courts willing to tolerate him. Tsar Paul I offered him Jelgava Palace in Courland (now Latvia) in 1798, along with a pension that was later discontinued. In a modest two-bedroom apartment above a shop in Blankenburg, he had lived before that. In Warsaw from 1801 to 1804, he used the pseudonym Comte d'Isle, named after his estate in Languedoc. At one point the Prussian authorities, trying to honour his arrival, played La Marseillaise by mistake, and later apologised.

  Napoleon tried to force Louis to renounce his claim to the French throne in 1803. Louis refused. When Napoleon declared himself Emperor in May 1804, Louis issued a statement condemning the move. By 1805, he had substantially revised his public politics, issuing a declaration that promised to retain the Napoleonic administrative and judicial system, abolish conscription, reduce taxes, and grant amnesty broadly. These positions were largely shaped by his closest advisor, Antoine de Bésiade, Count of Avaray.

  Louis finally arrived in England in November 1807, landing at Great Yarmouth on the Eastern coast, and taking up residence at Gosfield Hall in Essex, leased from the Marquess of Buckingham. He then moved to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, where over one hundred courtiers were housed and where he paid £500 a year in rent to the owner, Sir George Lee.

• 6. Return and Restoration

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  Allied troops entered Paris on the 31st of March 1814. Five days after the French Senate invited Louis to resume the throne, Napoleon abdicated on the 11th of April. Louis was unable to walk and had to send the Count of Artois ahead in January 1814 as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom.

  On the 3rd of May, Louis entered Paris and that same day took up residence in the Tuileries Palace. The French Senate had offered him the throne on conditions including a bicameral parliament and the tricolour flag. He rejected this constitution and responded with his own: the Charter of 1814, a document of seventy-six articles. It guaranteed freedom of religion, a Chamber of Deputies and a Chamber of Peers, and a degree of press freedom. To vote, a citizen had to pay over a thousand francs per year in tax and be over forty years old. Only ninety thousand citizens were eligible.

  On the 30th of May 1814, Louis signed the Treaty of Paris, giving France her 1792 borders and freeing her from any war indemnity. The terms were generous. They would not remain so after Napoleon returned.

  On the 26th of February 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba with roughly one thousand troops and landed near Cannes on the 1st of March. Louis was not initially alarmed. But Louis had failed to purge Bonapartist officers from the military, and mass desertions followed. On the 19th of March, with the army outside Paris having defected to Napoleon, Louis fled at midnight with a small escort, travelling to Lille and then into the Netherlands, stopping at Ghent.

  Napoleon's second reign ended at the Battle of Waterloo on the 18th of June 1815, where the armies of the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal Blücher defeated him decisively. Louis returned "in the baggage train of the enemy", as it was put at the time, using Wellington's troops to open the route to Paris. He entered the capital on the 8th of July to crowds so loud that Wellington later recalled he could not converse with the King that evening.

• 7. Ruling a Fractured Country

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  The second restoration brought with it the White Terror: the purge of Napoleonic officials from government across southern France, accompanied by executions and assassination. The Napoleonic marshal Guillaume Marie Anne Brune was savagely assassinated and his remains thrown into the Rhône River. Louis publicly deplored such acts. His government executed Napoleon's Marshal Michel Ney in December 1815 for treason. It is estimated that between fifty thousand and eighty thousand officials were purged during the Second White Terror.

  The peace terms after the Hundred Days were far harsher than those Louis had signed in May 1814. France's borders were drawn back to their 1790 extent. France had to pay a war indemnity of seven hundred million francs to the Allies, and to pay one hundred and fifty million francs per year for an occupation army for at least five years.

  The elections of August 1815 produced the Chambre introuvable, a chamber so extreme in its ultra-royalism that Louis himself coined the name. Prime Minister Talleyrand resigned on the 20th of September 1815 and was replaced by the Duke of Richelieu. Louis dissolved the Chambre introuvable on the 5th of September 1816 as anti-monarchical sentiment rose.

  In 1818, a military law passed by the Chambers increased army size by over one hundred thousand. That October, Richelieu persuaded the Allied Powers to withdraw their occupation armies early in exchange for a sum of over two hundred million francs. The same year saw the formation of the Quintuple Alliance.

  On the 14th of February 1820, Louis's nephew Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, was assassinated at the Paris Opera. Louis broke with royal tradition by attending the funeral, since French kings had historically been kept away from direct contact with death. Berry's wife gave birth to a posthumous son in September 1820, Henry, Duke of Bordeaux, whom the Bourbons nicknamed Dieudonné, or God-given, believing the child had secured the dynasty's future.

  In 1823, France intervened militarily in Spain to crush a revolt against King Ferdinand VII, a campaign led by the Duke of Angoulême that succeeded.

• 8. The End of a Reign

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  By the spring of 1824, Louis XVIII's health had collapsed. He was suffering from obesity, gout, and gangrene in both his legs and his spine, in its dry and wet forms. He died on the 16th of September 1824, surrounded by members of the extended royal family and government officials.

  His was not a graceful death by any measure, but it carried a distinction no subsequent French monarch could claim. Louis XVIII was the last king or emperor of France to die while still reigning. His successor Charles X abdicated in 1830. Louis Philippe I, who reigned from 1830 to 1848, was deposed. Napoleon III, who reigned from 1852 to 1870, was also deposed.

  His body was treated by the French scientist Antoine Germain Labarraque, who applied chlorides of lime, a technique that had advanced in the early 1820s as part of the young science of disinfection. The treatment allowed the corpse to be presented to the public, in the words of the original record, "without any odour". Louis XVIII was interred at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the traditional necropolis of French kings.