Book 1: Death of Louis XV
Background
Book I of Volume 1 deals with the final days of Louis XV, great-grandson of the previous king Louis XIV, the absolute monarch of “L'État, c'est moi” fame who was known as the Sun King.
Louis XIV had achieved this status after emerging victorious from the Fronde, a series of civil wars in between 1648 and 1653 in which the king confronted the combined power of the nobility, the princes, and the important law courts known as the parlements.
The parlements will loom large in our story. Despite their relationship with the English word parliament, the parlements were not legislative but judicial bodies. They were the courts of last resort with wide-ranging authority, particularly over the fraught issue of taxation. There were 13 of them, with the most important being the Parlement of Paris. In addition to their judicial authority they had another important power: in order for a law to go into effect it first had to be “registered” (or published) by the parlement. They claimed this right on the basis of their so-called “Right of Remonstrance”, which began as the right to advise the King by publishing a formal statement of grievances but over time grew in scope.
The King had a couple of tools for combatting the parlements’ refusal to register laws, most notably (1) the lit de justice (lit. “bed of justice”) in which the king appeared in person to the parlement, in which case the parlement’s powers were suspended for the duration of the session, and (2) the lettre de cachet (“letter of the (royal) mark”) which contained orders that could not be appealed. Louis XIV had effectively wielded these instruments to render the Right of Remonstrance a legal fiction.
His successor Louis XV was an unlikely king. At the time of his birth in 1710, three Louises stood between him and the throne: his grandfather (“Le Grand Dauphin”), his father (“Le Petit Dauphin”) and his older brother (yes, also named Louis - much redundancy was built into these families). But within a year, starting in April 1711, all three of them, as well as Louis’ mother, died variously of tuberculosis and measles. (It is thought that Louis was saved from the same fate only by a nurse who hid him in a cupboard rather than allow him to undergo the questionable treatment of bloodletting when he too contracted measles.)
And so Louis, at the age of two, became heir to a French throne for which he was not suited, and which he achieved at the age of five upon the death of the Sun King in 1715.
By tradition, the Kingdom of France must be governed by a regent until the king reached the ripe age of 13. In this case, the role fell to Louis' great-uncle Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. However, the Sun King had distrusted Philippe as an atheist and a libertine (and we will see that their was perhaps something in the water in the Orléans household). He wished instead for his favorite but illegitimate son the Duke of Maine to rule. To achieve this, Louis XIV wrote into his will a regency council that was heavily biased towards the Duke of Maine and his allies.
But not so fast, said Philippe, and isn’t it convenient that these neutered parlements need to register the will? In exchange for the restoration of the Right of Remonstrance, the Parlement of Paris refused to register the dead King’s amended will, effectively giving Philippe total control over the government, and paving the way for the conflict that would define the politics of the last days of the ancien régime...