6
Louis le Bien-Aimé and the Rhetoric of the Royal Body
Thomas E. Kaiser
It is fortunate for our monarch that he became the well-loved; if not, he would have been the well-dethroned.
Marquis d'Argenson
When at his death Louis XV's eulogists recalled and celebrated the most memorable events of his long and not always glorious reign, they almost invariably came to fix upon that moment in August 1744 when, following his successful debut as a field commander, Louis had fallen ill in the city of Metz—gravely so, it had seemed—miraculously recovered, and soon after "received" the title of bien-aimé (well-loved) from his adoring and grateful people. "Oh Metz!" intoned the abbé Coger, "you were ... the theater of the most touching scene that has ever been offered to humanity! All hearts, in unanimous concert, proclaimed him Louis le Bien-Aimé; superb monuments announce this title to posterity."[1] During the last two centuries, Louis's biographers have surely presented a far more critical view of his reign than did his eulogists; yet they have
I should like to thank the following for their cogent comments on and criticisms of this article: Sarah Hanley, Sarah Maza, Robert Morrisey, Jan Goldstein, Katie Crawford, and Jo Margadant.
[1] François Marie Coger, Oraison funèbre de ... Louis XV ... prononcée le 3 octobre 1774 au Collège Mazaprin (Paris, 1774), 12.
continued to reconstruct the restoration of the royal body at Metz in much the same way as did many of his contemporaries—namely, as a major boon to the monarchy that, as one recent biographer has put it, left "no doubt that the French loved their monarch passionately."[2] Together with the victory of Fontenoy less than a year later, the events of Metz have been commonly considered to be the high point of the reign, after which diplomatic disappointments, military reversals, and Jansenist controversy eroded the great popularity Louis had allegedly enjoyed in happier, earlier years.[3]
But did Metz really constitute such an undiluted triumph? In this essay I reconsider the events of Metz in order to place them within a larger perspective of royal self-representation and contemporary judgment of Louis XV. To be sure, Louis's recovery may in fact have given his subjects temporary hopes for the rejuvenation of the French state, a reflection of the belief, explicated in the contributions to this volume of Jeffrey Merrick and Abby Zanger, that the king's two bodies—his mortal corps and his immortal office—had come to intersect within the ideology of dynastic absolutism. Yet the generation of these hopes, I argue, occurred at a time of increasing despair regarding the health of the king and the direction of the monarchy. Louis's subsequent acclamation as the bien-aimé , hardly so spontaneous an affair as has been traditionally believed, was in fact most notable for reinforcing a vision of kingship that Louis XV—already suspected of abdicating his royal responsibilities in the pursuit of pleasure—could not sustain. Crucial in this regard was Louis's return to sexual promiscuity, which not only raised traditional fears of female usurpation of royal power but also appeared to violate an implicit "love" contract between Louis and his people that royal propaganda efforts—seemingly crowned with success by the events of Metz—had underscored for decades as the informal basis of royal authority. In the end, I will demonstrate how the monarchy, by seizing on the events at Metz as its most important moment of self-definition, wound up advancing a strategy that placed it in an untenable rhetorical position with regard to its critics and thereby placed in jeopardy the very authority it had sought to strengthen.
The title of bien-aimé bestowed on Louis XV—the first French king since Charles VI to bear it—had roots deep in the traditions of the medieval
[2] Olivier Bernier, Louis the Beloved: The Life of Louis XV (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), 130.
[3] See, for example, Michel Antoine, who has written of a "volte-face" in public opinion around 1748 that gave rise to "aversions unknown until then." Michel Antoine, Louis XV (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 603.
French monarchy. That French kings and their subjects were tied together by a special, divine love was a commonplace of medieval French political theology, a correlate of the deeply embedded idea that collectively the French nation constituted a divinely blessed corpus mysticum to which all members owed a supreme obligation as part of their Christian duty.[4]
Paternalistic models of kingship could be easily accommodated within the conception of the corpus mysticum as a society held together by love. As head of the family/nation, a father / king might on occasion appear as a punishing patriarch, but he was much more frequently associated with the "softer" bonds of mutual affection and indulgence that supposedly joined together king and subjects. In Claude de Seyssel's estimation, a king bound to his subjects by "paternal love, justice, and fair treatment" stood in bold contrast to "princes and monarchs who wish to dominate and command their subjects beyond reason and who try to hold them in servile fear by ambitious and tyrannical domination."[5]
Demonstrated through acts of justice and reason, royal paternal love was also manifested through the establishment of peace and harmony that promised in their wake times of material abundance. The propaganda halo painted around Henri IV continually reinforced the notion that this monarch, whose "benevolence toward his people aroused a reciprocal love," was responsible for restoring pastoral tranquillity after the conflict of the religious wars and thereby represented through his very presence a "horn of abundance." Mythologically represented as the Gallic Hercules, Henri IV was hailed as restorer of a Saturnine age, the bringer of arts to humanity and thereby the instigator of peace, fertility, and plenty.[6]
[4] As Jacques Krynen has recently pointed out, there is as yet no study of love as a political virtue; see his L'Empire du roi: Idées et croyances politiques en France, XIIIe–XVe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 458. But cf. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 232–72; Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.), chap. 10; and Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 334–35.
[5] Claude de Seyssel, Proem ... to the Translation of the History by Appian of Alexandria Entitled "The Deeds of the Romans," in The Monarchy of France , trans. J. H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 180. On the king as father, see Pierre Ronzeaud, Peuple et représentations sous le règne de Louis XIV: Les Répresentations du peuple dans la littérature politique en France sous le règne de Louis XIV (Aix-en-Provence: Presses de I'Université de Provence, 1988), chap. 9.
[6] Quoted in Jacques Hennequin, Henri IV dans ses oraisons funèbres, ou la naissance d'une légende (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), 127, 125. See also Corrado Vivanti, "Henry IV, the Gallic Hercules," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 176–97; and Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), conclusion.
The pastoral image of monarchy based on love, harmony, and peace was far too useful for the French monarchy ever to be abandoned during the Old Regime, and it would continue to be invoked routinely upon the resolution of troubling domestic and foreign conflicts. At the same time, it constituted only part of the monarchy's arsenal of political mythology, having to compete—when it could not be effectively integrated—with other myths, especially those associated with the powerful cult of heroic kingship that found its main theme in the pursuit of glory, particularly military glory. According to one close study, allusions to Henri IV as a pacific monarch were outnumbered by allusions to him as a conquering hero, the reincarnation of Jupiter, Mars, Alexander, and Caesar; according to another study, Louis XIV's reign was similarly characterized by a hegemonic discourse whose "webs of myths and facts ... bound the prince to the pursuit of gloire ."[7] Clearly, the best strategy from the standpoint of royal image-makers was to maintain images of the king as both conqueror and père du peuple . Court librettists under the Sun King tried earnestly to reconcile these images of Louis XIV with such phrases as "he has served himself with Victory in order to enable Peace to triumph," while other masters of royal rhetoric sought the same end by routinely drawing sharp lines between the fear the king inspired in his enemies and the love he inspired in his people.[8]
Notwithstanding such efforts, the space between these two mythologies was never completely sealed. As Robert Isherwood has shown, alternations between peace and war policies forced Louis XIV's court musicians to shift abruptly and sometimes awkwardly between tropes of love and glory; as one contemporary complained politely, "The muses find in him so many different qualities that they do not know how to blend the ones suitable for praising a conqueror with the sweet and amorous tones which are suitable to his pacific virtues."[9] Similarly, the distinction made between fear among enemies and love among subjects did not always persuade; as one academician later put it, "It is difficult for a great King to
[7] François Bardon, Le Portrait mythologique à la cour de France sous Henri IV et Louis XIII: Mythologie et politique (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1974), 243; Orest Ranum,Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 337. On the war image in general, see Joel Cornette, Le Roi de guerre: Essai sur la souveraineté dans la France du Grand Siècle (Paris: Payot, 1993).
[8] Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); Jean de La Bruyère, "Discours prononcé dans I'Académic Française le lundi quinzième juin 1693," in Les Caractères de Theophraste traduits du grec avec Les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), 511.
[9] Isherwood, Music , 287.
make his neighbors tremble without making his Subjects groan."[10] On balance it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Louis XIV's image as conqueror tended to obscure his image as père du peuple and that this result was intentional; informed seventeenth-century opinion followed Machiavelli in supposing that fear provided a more reliable bond between sovereign and subject than did love.[11] And whatever the other avenues available, it was in war, as one academician put it, that great princes "principally arrive at glory, because the most renowned have arrived there through valor, victory, and conquests."[12]
With the rise of foreign and domestic sentiment against Louis's wars and repressive religious policies in the late years of the reign, an ever-growing chorus of royal critics came to impugn Louis's apparent lust for conquest, invoking the père du peuple image as a means for showing just how far Louis had fallen short of his royal responsibilities.[13] Most prominent among these critics was the exiled ex-courtier and archbishop Fénelon, author of the widely read roman à clef Les Aventures de Télémaque and advocate of what one historian has termed "Christian agrarianism."[14] Calling Louis to account for his material extravagance, his reckless pursuit of military conquest, and his indifference to the sufferings of his subjects, Fénelon employed a language of the pastoral and "pure love," drawing inspiration from traditional notions of the king as père du peuple , provider of justice, peace, and abundance. This language was notable for the way it tended to subvert, rather than blend, with the cult of military glory.[15]
[10] Recueil des harangues prononcées par messieurs de l'Academie Françoise (Paris, 1735), 4:425.
[11] Gabriel Naudé, for example, believed that only "the rigor of punishments" and the "fear of the gods and their thunder" could maintain people in their duty; see his Considérations politiques sur les coups d'état (Paris: Editions de Paris, 1989), 141. On the Machiavellian outlook in general, see the useful E. Thuau, Raison d'état et pensée politique à l'époque de Richelieu (Paris: A. Colin, 1966).
[12] Recueil des harangues , 1: 382.
[13] Ronzeaud, Peuple et representations , 334–38. For eighteenth-century appropriation of the patriarchal image by royal critics, see the excellent article by Jeffrey Merrick, "Patriarchalism and Constitutionalism in Eighteenth-Century Parlementary Discourse," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1991): 317–30.
[14] The phrase is taken from Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XTV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), chap. 5. On the pervasive influence of Fénelon, see Albert Cherel, Fénelon au XVIIIe siècle en France (1715–1820), son prestige, son influence (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970). According to Cherel, the Télémaque , originally published in 1699, appeared in sixteen editions by the end of the reign and was widely imitated.
[15] On Fénelonian "pure love," see Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 338–43. As Keohane makes clear, Fénelonian "pure love" differed from Jansenist notions of love, which were built on the idea that pursuing enlightened self-interest promoted social utility. In proclaiming that a prince should "gratify all wishes," crafters of the image of Louis as the bien-aimé borrowed more from the latter than the former; love for the prince was hardly selfless. See Houdar de La Motte, Fables nouvelles dediées au roy (Paris, 1719), 138. On Fénelon and the image of the père du peuple , see Ronzeaud, Peuples et répresentations , 329–31.
Confronted by such growing criticism, royal propagandists responded in kind, demonstrating far more resourcefulness and flexibility in their packaging of monarchy than most historians, content with reducing all Old Regime royalist ideology to a monolithic "absolutism," have attributed to them. Just as the creatures of Foreign Minister Colbert de Torcy answered the widely circulated attacks on French foreign policy in much the same juridically and historically based idiom in which these attacks were expressed, [16] court poets, who had often been obliged to seek their own glory in praising the military achievements of their king, gradually shifted their emphasis to praise of the king's promotion of domestic tranquillity. As the cardinal Polignac observed before the Académie Française in 1713, the Muses had always preferred times of peace and tranquillity: "If sometimes they sing of combat to celebrate the virtues of heroes, soon after they deplore the tumult of arms, which causes the fine arts to languish; but when Peace returns on earth ... it is then that they reach the height of their desires."[17] Very gently the notion of glory itself was detached from conquest. As the abbé Mignon explained, to locate Louis's virtues it would be necessary to look "beyond his victories," for his virtue is "stronger than that of his armies" and the "grandeur" of all true heroes "resides in their souls and not in the arms of their soldiers."[18]
Elaborated at length by the academician Louis de Sacy in his Traité de la gloire of 1715, this notion of glory was used to project a notion of kingship distinct from that associated with Alexander and Caesar. A hero was not just a "valiant man" but a "valiant, good, just, human, wise, modest man, who does not rush into danger, and who does not spill blood like ferocious beasts out of love of carnage or hope of booty." Service to his people alone had to be the sole concern of the king/hero, for only through such service could he win their abiding love. "The only taste they [kings] seek to satisfy is to reconcile themselves to the love of their sub-
[16] See Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda Under Louis XIV: Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); also Thomas E. Kaiser, "The Abbé Dubos and the Historical Defense of Monarchy in Early Eighteenth-Century France," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , no. 267 (1989): 77–102.
[17] Recueil des harangues , 3:525–26.
[18] Ibid., 409–10.
jects; the sole interest that dominates them is to make their subjects happy."[19]
Two points regarding this utilitarian notion of monarchy based on love between king and subjects deserve emphasis here. First, it was notable for its narrowing of the social and political distance between subject and sovereign that had appeared so enormous in the propaganda of Louis XIV's early and middle reign, propaganda in which Louis had been made to appear a colossus, a godlike figure well beyond the status of ordinary mortals.[20] Taking a cue from the anti-French propagandists who had sought to diminish Louis's stature by stressing his personal failings, Sacy acknowledged that kings were fallible, that they were subject "to all weaknesses, exposed to all the misfortunes of humanity."[21] Second, Sacy sought to invest the ultimate judgment of royal glory in the public at large, in what he called "public opinion." Although he conceded that the public—which he never defined very precisely—might make temporary errors, Sacy, like other contemporaries who sought to rehabilitate the validity of "public opinion" and the political judgments made by it, believed that in the long run the public—"always equitable, and sole legitimate dispenser of great reputations"—would make fair and responsible decisions regarding their kings when guided by men of letters, and that these decisions could "not be too much respected" if only because such attributions of glory originated in the hearts of the king's own subjects.[22]
Already articulated before his accession to the throne, these notions underpinned the entire presentation of monarchy during Louis XIV's early reign. Fully aware of the opprobrium heaped on Louis XIV and critically aware of the desperate need for peace felt by a country weakened by protracted warfare and a government facing bankruptcy,[23] the Regency, established in September 1715, took no time representing itself in images of pastoral monarchy. The last words supposedly said by the dying king to
[19] Louis de Sacy, Traité de la gloire (Paris, 1715), 184–87,190, 195.
[20] Nicole Ferrier-Caverivière, L'Image de Louis XIV dans la littérature française de 1660–1715 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 181: "Grandiose and immovable, grandiose because immovable, thus appears the monarch."
[21] Sacy, Traité , 194.
[22] Ibid., 54, 59, 241. On the rehabilitation of "public opinion" in this period from various perspectives, see my articles "The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Public Opinion, and the Reconstitution of the French Monarchy,"Journal of Modern History 55 (1983): 618–43; "Rhetoric in the Service of the King: The Abbé Dubos and the Concept of Public Judgment," Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1989–90): 182–99; and "Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit,"Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 1–28.
[23] The best general treatment remains Henri Leclercq, Histoire de la Régence pendant la minoritè de Louis XV , 3 vols. (Paris: E. Champion, 1921–22).
his successor—in which the Sun King warned his great-grandson against imitating his war policies and urged him to succor his subjects—were soon published by the government and frequently recalled thereafter in royal discourse.[24] In his appearance before the Paris Parlement on the eve of his confirmation as regent, the duc d'Orléans—who, according to Saint-Simon, believed himself to resemble the fondly remembered Henri IV and affected his mannerisms—invoked Fénelonian rhetoric from the Télémaque , which had granted the king as pére du peuple "an absolute power to do good" and "tied his hands once he wishes to do evil."[25] Fénelonian references continued to appear over the course of Louis XV's early reign, during which Louis was hailed as the "new Telemachus," and his tutor, the maréchal Villeroy, as his "Mentor."[26] Much the same point was made through persistent references to Louis XV as the new Solomon, whose virtues as the peace king were discreetly, but nevertheless firmly, distinguished from those of his predecessor, the reincarnation of the more warlike David. "The pacific Solomon has succeeded the bellicose David," pronounced an academician in 1721. "He will triumph over our domestic problems through abundance, just as Louis XIV triumphed over our enemies through the terror of his arms."[27]
At the heart of this revived image of a pastoral, paternal monarch lay the celebration of the young king as both the giver and recipient of his subjects' love. Louis XV's childhood copybooks reveal a vigorous effort on the part of his preceptor, the future cardinal Fleury, to teach the young monarch that love, not fear, should bind him to his people. They are filled
[24] Louis XIV, Derniers paroles du roy Louis XIV au Louis XV, son arrière petit-fils (n.p., [1715]), published by the Imprimerie du Cabinet du Roy, gives one version of these words. They were recalled, for example, by the court poet Antoine Danchet in his "Discours dans I'Assemblée publique tenue au Louvre le jour de Saint Louis, 25 août 1732," in which Louis XV was said to be "bound by the last instructions of his August great-grandfather" and was hailed not as "a Conqueror who burns to extend his domination" but as a "father who seeks to make his children happy" (Oeuvres mêlées de M. Danchet [Paris, 1751], 4:206).
[25] Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires , ed. A. de Boislisle, 41 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1879–1928), 26:268; François de Salignac de la Motte Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque , ed. A. Cahen (Paris: Hachette, 1927), 1:191; François Isambert et al., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises (Paris: Belin-Leprieur, 1821–33), 21:20. The similarity between the texts has been noted in George Havens, The Age of Ideas (New York: H. Holt, 1955), 62.
[26] Carolet, Bouquet présenté au roy le jour de Saint Louis de l'année mil sept cent vingt un (n.p., [1721]). Another example is the reference made in the speech of Louis de Sacy before the Académie Française in 1718: "Cast your eyes on those who nurture this precious see of the common happiness, and never stop promising yourselves a Telemachus, because there are still Mentors" (Recueil des harangues , 4:128).
[27] Recueil des harangues , 4:229.
with fables preaching messages such as "a king who is the terror of his subjects instead of being their defender and father is more unfortunate than the vilest of all animals"; with precepts such as "to call the King father and pastor of the people is not so much to recite a panegyric as to call him by his proper name and define what it is to be a King"; and with promises to his subjects such as "I will act so that I am loved by my subjects, because it is much better for a king to be loved than to be feared; he who is loved is protected from all snares, he who is feared fears as well and he who fears cannot be happy."[28] Impressed upon the young sovereign himself, such messages were broadcast publicly throughout the early reign with monotonous regularity. Upon his recovery from what appeared to be a serious illness in 1721, Louis was regaled by the court poet Danchet with the words "It is not the magnificence, / Nor the glory of great deeds, / It is the mutual love of peoples and kings / Which from a brilliant throne establishes power / ... We love him, our love desires / That he govern his subjects, / Less as King than as Father." Similarly, on the occasion of his marriage, Louis was complimented at Fontainebleau for preferring "the sweet pleasure of making himself loved to the most legitimate right of making himself feared by his Subjects."[29]
Although Louis remained without an official sobriquet until the late summer of 1744, anticipations of the bien-aimé title are not hard to find much earlier. On Louis's return trip from his coronation in 1722, he was hailed in a celebration by the court poet Houdar de La Motte as "the most lovable King" and "the most loved King" (le Roi le plus aimable, le Roi le plus aimé ), and upon his recovery from an illness in 1729 he was acknowledged as "the most cherished of Kings" (le plus chéri des Rois ).[30] It would thus not require much of a linguistic stretch when, upon recovery from another apparently life-threatening illness, Louis was recognized as the bien-aimé for the first time on the Day of St. Louis 1744.[31]
If such were the messages regarding Louis XV imparted by the monarchy, how were they received? The standard notion that Louis XV enjoyed
[28] Bibliothèque Nationale [henceforth cited as BN], ms. fr. 2325, fol. 73; ms. fr. 2324, fol. 8; ms. fr. 2322, fol. 216.
[29] Danchet, Oeuvres , 4:9; Louis Pierre Daudet, Journal histarique du voyage de S.A.S. Mademoiselle de Clermont (Chaalons, 1725), 302.
[30] Louis Pierre Daudet, Journal historique du premier voyage du Roi Louis XV dans la ville de Compiègne (Paris, 1729), 277.
[31] The first attribution I have been able to document is that of the abbé Josset, Compliment fait à la Reine ... lorsqu'il a prononcé devant sa Majesté le Panégyrique de Saint Louis dans l'éalise des R.R. P.P. Jesuites de Metz, le 25 août 1744 (n.p., n.d.), 4. Josset later claimed to have been the first to use the title with regard to Louis XV; see Charles Philippe d'Albert, due de Luynes, Mémoires du duc de Luynes sur la cour de Louis XV, 1735–1758 (Paris, 1860–65), 9:117. A query into the use of the term bien-aimé in texts for the period 1550–1789 in the database of the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) at the University of Chicago reveals that it was commonly used as a term of endearment between lovers and among family members in secular literature and frequently used in reference to biblical figures, especially Jesus, in religious literature. I should like to thank Robert Morrisey for facilitating my use of this excellent research resource.
a relatively high reputation among his subjects until the late 1740s has recently been undermined by Arlette Farge through her research into the most complete extant record of early-eighteenth-century French political sentiment—namely, the reports of Parisian police spies (mouches or mouchards ), who infiltrated Parisian courts of law, cafés, public walkways, and private houses.[32] These reports must be used critically and do not constitute scientific opinion polls; gathered from a nonrandom segment of the population, they no doubt reflect biases of their compilers. Yet, particularly when corroborated by other sources, these reports offer an invaluable window on public political sentiment, providing at the very least a useful sampling of different kinds of contemporary political discourse and one indication of the frequency of such discourse. Moreover, since the monarchy—including the king, who often read them—relied on these reports as indices of public sentiment, they are evidence for what public authorities took to be "public opinion" regarding major figures within the monarchy and its political initiatives.[33]
[32] Arlette Farge, Dire et mal dire: L'Opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1992). These reports are partially to be found in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal [henceforth cited as BA], AB MSS. 10155–10170, which cover the period 1724–41. For the period 27 July 1742 through 18 August 1743, see Edmond-Jean-François Barbier, Chronique de la Régence et du règne de Louis XV (1718–1763), ou Journal de Barbier (Paris, 1857–66), 8: 129–348. Another series, which Farge has apparently not consulted, can be found in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris [henceforth cited as BHVP], MSS. 616–26; it extends from 1737 through the critical year of 1744. Although I agree with Farge's general conclusions regarding negative opinion of Louis XV, I do not accept all her contentions regarding the nature of the public surveyed, nor her view that this opinion was unresponsive to the more elitist controversies between the monarchy and the parlements. See also Frantz Funck-Brentano, Figaro et ses depanciers (Paris: Hachette, 1909), 175ff.; and Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, Logiques de la foule: L'Affaire des enlèvements d'enfants Paris 1750 (Paris: Hachette, 1988).
[33] That Louis was informed of these reports is indicated by various sources, including the reliable Charles Philippe d'Albert in his Mémoires , 4:280; and a letter of 29 January 1743 from Maurepas to Marville published in A. de Boislisle, ed., Lettres de M. Marville, lieutenant général de police au ministre Maurepas, 1742–1747 (Paris: H. Champion, 1896–1903), 1: 104. Lest one assume that pressure from above inclined police spies to underreport or soften comments critical of the government, consider the police report of 17 June 1743, which, after recording unflattering public discussion of royal "dissipation," recalled—undoubtedly for purposes of self-protection—the issuance of "definite orders that have been received to produce a faithful account of all that is said even with respect to the king" (Barbier, Chronique , 8:301).
Judging from contemporary journals and mémoires that recorded public opinion before the police reports begin in 1724, it appears that Louis, a beautiful, if often sickly, orphan, who had barely managed to survive the wave of death that had swept over the royal house in the last years of the previous reign, enjoyed a period of public infatuation that lasted until his adolescence. To be sure, any assessment of public perceptions of the king throughout the early decades of the reign must take into account the public's knowledge that, had Louis died, France, already nearly financially prostrate from Louis XIV's last war, would almost certainly have been drawn into yet another disastrous international conflict. In the event of Louis's death, Philip V, king of Spain and, according to French dynastic law, Louis's heir to the French throne until the birth of the dauphin in 1729, would in all likelihood have reasserted the right to succeed that he earlier had been obligated to renounce, thereby unraveling the entire peace settlement reached at Utrecht in 1713.[34] This knowledge notwithstanding, it is hard not to credit royal image-makers with some measure of success, given that accounts of Louis are saturated with the same sentiments of love and affection that the monarchy itself wished to project. Upon Louis's recovery from his illness in 1721, recorded Charles Duclos, Paris exploded with a "transports of joy," the hearts of its people "feeling the tenderest love" for their prince. To Mathieu Marais, the king at his coronation in 1722 "resembled Love" itself; his status as the "new Solomon" was confirmed when, still a child, he "wisely" settled a rather silly dispute over which ballet was to be performed at a court function.[35]
Such nearly universal adulation began to dissipate as the king entered adolescence. Jansenist dissent may well have played a role here, but it is hard to deny that the king, too, by virtue of his own shyness, his craving for privacy, and his apparent indifference in the face of his subjects' suffering, contributed to malaise across the wider population.[36] Already in No-
[34] For one standard account of the renunciation and its diplomatic aftermath, see Alfred Baudrillart, Philippe V et la cour de France , 5 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1890–91). I have dealt with some of the legal and ideological considerations in "Abbé Dubos and the Historical Defense of Monarchy." Philip had been anxious to reassert his claim many times, as during the Cellamare conspiracy.
[35] Charles Duclos, Mémoires secrets sur les règnes de Louis XIV et de Louis XV, in Nouvelle Collection des mémoires pour servir à la France (Paris, 1839) 10:578; Mathieu Marais Journal et mémoires de Mathieu Marais ... sur la régence et le règne de Louis XV (Paris, 1863–64) 2:364, 47–48.
[36] On Jansenism, see Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the "Ancien Régime," 1750–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacrilization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). As for Louis himself, a number of biographers have tried to rescue him from the charge of laziness and indifference, but acknowledge that Louis's retiring personality did not help matters; see especially Antoine, Louis XV . On Louis's withdrawal from the public sphere, see J. de Viguerie, "Le Roi et le public: L'Exemple de Louis XV," Revue historique , no. 563 (1987): 23–34.
vember 1722, Marais recorded that at age twelve Louis "no longer wishes to study" and was openly mocking his tutors. Two years later, according to policy spy reports, it was said that Louis's pursuit of pleasures "promises nothing good." "He is, people say, very proud, very absolute, and pleases himself by doing everything according to whim." In 1725, rumor had it that the king "thinks of nothing but his pleasures, that he likes nothing that might divert him from them." In the following year, it was said that the king had become "addicted to hunting." Hunting was by no means considered an inappropriate activity for a king, but Louis's immoderate passion for it led observers to conclude that he "does not want to open his eyes to the state of the Kingdom." One wisecrack of 1728, which revealed some of the problems inherent in the projection of Louis as the pastoral king, had it that Louis could only be spoken of as "a do-nothing king, of whom history will not say that he had defeated all the Nations of Europe as had his great-grandfather, but that he made war only on deer."[37]
Beginning in 1736, public dismay at Louis's addiction to hunting was joined by worries over his reported heavy drinking. Reports that Louis's personality was being altered "by the excessive quantity of wine [he] drinks at parties with the lords of his court" began to raise public fears that the king was ruining his health. By 1737 rumor had it that because of the "excess of wine" consumed daily, the king had aged, lost weight, and was seriously ill, and that his physicians had given him only six months to live if he did not restrict his drinking. It was soon reported that wine was no longer strong enough for the king, that he was now mixing different liquors which he and his "companions in debauchery" consumed until they collapsed on the floor and "lost their reason." Additional "evidence" for the corruption of the royal body came from reports in 1738 that the king had promenaded drunk along the roof of Versailles, causing some to fear that "the mind of this prince is dissipating, and that he was falling into madness." It would not be long before it was said that the king was spitting blood.[38]
[37] Marais, Journal , 2:421; BA, AB MS. 10155, fols. 17, 145, 153; AB MS. 101558, fol. 164. A similar rhetorical strategy was used in a song circulating in 1732 that satirized the government's handling of the Jansenist stronghold of St. Médard: "Without powder and without canon / He [Louis] closed St. Médard in his name / These are his war exploits" (BN, ms. fr. 15133, fol. 113).
[38] BA, AB MS. 10165, fol. 501; AB MS. 10166, fols. 139, 159, 165, 216, 248, 524. The duc de Luynes (Mémoires , 1:287–88) corroborates the claim that Louis walked on the roof of Versailles with his companions in this period, though he does not indicate that Louis was intoxicated at the time.
While public concern for the king's health and sanity was reported to be genuine, police spy reports suggested that this concern was less a result of genuine affection for the king than of the political effects his death might have. Fears persisted of a possible Spanish intervention in French dynastic affairs. To be sure, in 1729 a dauphin was born, and he was for three years joined by a brother who died in 1733. But given the dauphin's young age and reportedly uncertain health, "many people" were said to think that Louis's death would still be "the worst disaster that could happen to the state," that it would create division within the kingdom and allow a pro-Spanish party to form and seek the succession of a Spanish Bourbon should the dauphin die in turn.[39] As for Louis's rapport with his people, the king was time and again reported to be a figure both remote and uncaring. One report had it that he had failed to punish a royal Swiss guard who had raped and killed a girl of nine. Another indicated that Louis had given the fishwives of Paris such a cold reception when they arrived at Versailles to offer their compliments on one of Louis's many recoveries from illness—a much colder reception, they said, than those they had received on similar occasions under Louis XIV—that they promised never to come again. Speculating on an appropriate sobriquet for an effigy of the king, one wag reportedly suggested that none was more appropriate than "Louis the Taciturn."[40] But much more was at issue here than callousness and diffidence: during the food shortage of 1740, persistent rumor directly implicated the king in a plot to profit from grain speculation at the expense of his own people, as it would ten years later in a plot to abduct children.[41]
Louis's reported behavior understandably led some observers to impugn his innate moral character and intelligence; in their eyes, Louis appeared "stupid" and an "imbecile."[42] But the more common and more charitable interpretation of his behavior was in its way more politically explosive. Louis, according to one endlessly repeated line of argument, was inclined toward selfishness and self-indulgence and avoided serious involvement in state affairs because he had been purposely miseducated
[39] BA, AB MS. 10166, fol. 485; AB MS. 10167, fol. 115.
[40] BA AB MS. 10158, fols. 120, 317; AB MS. 10165, fol. 44.
[41] On the king's involvement in the "famine plot," see BA, AB MS. 10167, fol. 133; and for a general analysis, Steven Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France , Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 72, pt. 3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1982), 44–45. On the king's imputed role in child abduction, see Farge and Revel, Logiques de la foule , 121ff.
[42] BA, AB MS. 10161, fols. 181, 207. As one political song put it, "Is he a Tyrant, (no) / He is a fool" (AB MS. 10161, fol. 403).
by the cardinal Fleury, who had sought to concentrate power in his own hands by endlessly diverting the king from his duties. "He is not naturally bad, and if something happens in his Kingdom detrimental to his Subjects, it is not his doing, but that of his Ministers." Lacking not so much a will to do good as any controlling political will at all, the king became discursively represented as a slave of his own appetites and the puppet of a ministerial clique, while the body politic incorporated within his own rotting person became depicted as vulnerable to the influence of nefarious forces, not the least of which was the Jesuits. "Those who frequent the court say the king in no way knows what is happening in his kingdom, that His Majesty leaves everything to M. Cardinal Fleury, ... in short, that M. Cardinal Fleury is the King of the King."[43]
Serious as matters seemed, the public persistently nursed the hope that the king would retake control of his body and his state—the connection between the two is clear—and it reacted positively to whatever sporadic evidence it had that such was taking place. A report of 9 May 1737 noting how the public was "thrilled to learn the King is taking precautions to manage his health according to the salutary advice given to His Majesty" contained as well the news that the public thought Louis was finally getting interested in affairs of state, "for which people hope the most and expect to result in a great good."[44] Although this apparent invigoration of the royal will passed quickly, the death of cardinal Fleury in January 1743 once again raised hopes that Louis would finally settle down to the business of governing himself, now that this former preceptor, first minister, and reputed royal alter ego was gone from the scene. Even if skeptics remained, the diarist Barbier reported that the public in general regarded "the king with admiration" for having declared to his ministers that he would be ready to hear pressing concerns of state at any time. "He is accessible, he speaks wonderfully, he renders justice, and he works with knowledge of affairs," Barbier observed, a sentiment reflected as well in a police report recording that the public had begun to perceive in the king a trace of Louis XIV's dedication because of his new promise that he would not allow his trips and pleasures to interrupt his work.[45]
As it turned out, Louis's apparent inability to maintain interest in public affairs reasserted itself, causing a particularly serious letdown in many
[43] BA, AB MS. 10159, fol. 270; AB MS. 10160, fols. 129, 145, 193; AB MS. 10162, fols. 263, 320; AB MS. 10168, fol. 279; AB MS. 10161, fol. 218.
[44] BHVP, MS. 616, fol. 14–2.
[45] Edmond-Jean-François Barbier, Journal historique et anecdotique du règne de Louis XV (Paris, 1847–56), 2:350; BHVP, MS. 623, fol. 126.
observers of the monarchy both inside and outside the government and instilling a terrifying sense of political drift. Ministers were being chosen or rejected on temperamental whims, noted the marquis d'Argenson in early April 1743, and what, he asked himself, did the king have to show after two months for his new supposed leadership?[46] Louis's apparently irremediable inability to act decisively, wrote the cardinal de Tencin of the Royal Council to the duc de Richelieu in October, was allowing individual ministers to run their departments virtually without direction from the king.[47] The maréchal de Noailles—the king's confidant and influential adviser, a seasoned government official and a top military commander—summed up the situation in a letter to Louis of 8 July: an escalating crisis of state had now developed, he warned, "a sort of enervation, indolence, and numbness in all the parts of the administration of the government to which the fastest remedy must be applied, without which, Sire, your kingdom will be menaced by the greatest disasters." If paralysis at the top was causing chaos in the state, he contended in a subsequent mémoire , the result was not only poor administration, but a crippling blow to the domestic and foreign prestige of the monarchy. "The public and foreigners assert that the government has no fixed plan; it is easy to imagine the bad effects that such an opinion must be producing and the general discredit that must be the result."[48]
In his correspondence with the king, Noailles proceeded to call for a new, general plan intended to reinvigorate and coordinate the various activities of state and "to raise opinion as much at home as abroad," but he frankly warned Louis that the plan would have to bear the king's personal mark; "It must be the work of Your Majesty.... It must be [Your Majesty] who speaks, decides, and orders as master."[49] Seizing on an already circulating notion that Louis would now make his debut as field commander of his armies,[50] Noailles on 16 August recognized such a personal intervention of the king as the sine qua non of his entire plan to
[46] René de Voyer de Palmy, marquis d'Argenson, Journal et mémoires du marquis d'Argenson , 9 vols. (Paris: Mme Veuve Jules Renouard, 1859-67), 4:60–61.
[47] Bibliothèque Victor Cousin, MS. 64, fol. 158.
[48] Camille Roussel, ed., Correspondance de Louis XV et du maréchal de Noailles (Paris: P. Dupont, 1865), 1:147–48, 2:61. According to Antoine, Louis XV , Noailles had the greatest influence over the king during this period. See also BA, AB MS. 10029 (Journal de Mouchy), fol. 146, which notes the king's "blind confidence" in Noailles.
[49] Roussel (ed.), Correspondance , 2:69.
[50] Antoine, Louis XV , 363–64, cites a letter of April 1743 to the duc de Broglie in which Louis expressed a strong desire to go to the front, not in order to gain personal glory, but to share the pains of his soldiers.
rescue the king and the state, being "indispensable in every respect," "the only means to save your State which is in danger, as one should not hide from you," and the best means to ensure "the personal honor of Your Majesty." What was particularly striking in Noailles's argument was his insistence that royal firmness and recourse to military action not be allowed to inspire fresh visions and imputations of French wars of conquest, which had in the past "revolted all Europe against the ambition of France" and given rise to "all odious reproaches that had called for total sacrifice against its aggrandizement." Declaring war against "the spirit of conquest," Noailles urged the king to work for peace, to act openly, and to commit himself to the rigid rule of law: "A king of France, in governing himself invariably by maxims, is necessarily a great King," wrote Noailles, and "his credit and influence will always be proportionate to the opinion one has of his justice, his fidelity, and his firmness."[51]
Over the next nine months, Noailles, supported by the king's mistress, Madame de la Tournelle (later the duchesse de Châteauroux), planned with Louis his arrival at the front, selecting the optimal time for the king's military debut—"the most likely to cover in glory and to reestablish the prosperity of his affairs"—with a studied calculation worthy of the best public relations agent. To be sure, diplomatic and military factors also came into play in this calculation, but clearly more than field position was at issue when, for example, Noailles pointed out to Louis in a letter of 11 September how a defeat soon after the king's arrival "would be one of the most unhappy events."[52] News of the king's intentions began to leak out such that over the early months of 1744 his impending departure for Flanders became a common topic of conversation in such places as the Café Procope.[53] On 3 May 1744, Louis left Versailles for the front in Flanders.
The attempt to rescue the king's glory by way of his personal appearance at the front led a few months later to the critical moment at Metz, but its
[51] Roussel (ed.), Correspondance , 1:181; 2:90, 121, 123. On the image France tried to cultivate abroad in the mid-eighteenth century, see Albert Babeau, "L'Appel à l'opinion publique de l'Europe au milieu du XVIIIe siècle," Séances et travaux de l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques , n.s., 162 (1904): 161–78.
[52] Roussel (ed.), Correspondance , 2:13. Antoine, Louis XV , 364, points out that had the king himself fought at the front in this period, he would have had to do so under the command of the Elector of Bavaria and later Holy Roman Emperor, which would have constituted an unacceptable affront to the royal dignity. The involvement of the duchesse de Châteauroux is indicated in Marie-Anne de Nesle, duchesse de Châteauroux, Correspondance de Mme. de Châteauroux, in Mémoires de la duchesse de Brancas , ed. Eugène Asse (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1890), 106ff.
[53] BHVP, MS. 624, fol. 6; BA, AB MS. 10029 (Journal de Mouchy), fol. 131.
political significance can be grasped only if it is placed within the long tradition of early modern political misogyny and sexual slander. For no sooner had Louis arrived in Flanders than two of his mistresses, the duchesse de Châteauroux and Madame de Lauraguais—sisters not only to one another but also to two earlier mistresses of the king—arrived as well, thereby setting in motion a complex of responses that had their roots deep in the political culture of the Old Regime.
Although the history of political misogyny and sexual slander remains to be written, recent research has made abundantly clear the highly gendered nature of Old Regime institutions and the deep fears regarding rule by women that infused them.[54] What motivated such fears was not simply belief in the innate incapacity of women for sovereign rule, developed at length by Jean Bodin,[55] but also suspicions regarding the ease with which women could undermine the entire mission of the state by corrupting the king's natural goodness: "The public danger does not lie at all in that a women is called Queen, or wears a crown," wrote one polemicist, "but in that most often she governs everything through the cravings of immoderate passions."[56] As Bishop Bossuet put it to the court in the next century, nothing puts us further from the path God has chosen for us than the pursuit of sensual pleasure, for it overwhelms and disorients reason, making it unable to "respond to itself" and, in leading us to seek ever-changing ends, distracts us from the one true good.[57]
To be sure, it was generally conceded that the king was entitled to enjoy many pleasures, including sexual gratification outside marriage. Indeed, royal entertainments celebrated the king's pursuit of such pleasures as an agreeable aspect of his humanity, and, as in the case of Louis XIV, even clergymen like Bossuet were forced to accommodate themselves to
[54] For a theoretical perspective, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and for institutions, see the now classic article of Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 4–27. On specific cases, see Jeffrey Merrick, "Sexual Politics and Public Order in Late-Eighteenth-Century France: The Mémoires Secrets and the Correspondance Secrète ," Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 68–84; Thomas E. Kaiser, "Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power," French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 1025–44; and the literature, too vast to indicate here, on Marie Antoinette. On the common use of sexual slurs against women in the eighteenth century, see David Garrioch, "Verbal Insults in Eighteenth-Century Paris," in The Social History of Language , ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 5.
[55] Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la republique (n.p.: Fayard, 1986), vol. 6, bk. 6, chap. 5.
[56] Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et déportemens de la reyne Cathérine de Médicis, Roine Mère (n.p., 1578), lxxxi.
[57] Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, "Troisième Dimanche de Carême ... prêché à la Cour, en 1662," Oeuvres complètes de Bossuet (Paris, 1862), 2:278.
their sovereign's many adulterous relationships.[58] Yet there was a persistent concern underlying the celebration of les menus plaisirs that the king might be overindulging himself to the detriment of the public good and that, in particular, royal mistresses—whose proximity to the royal person could give them a special influence over the royal will—had subverted that will through seduction for purposes of retaining their position or, worse, interfering directly in the affairs of state. Hence, the monarchy repeatedly tried to reassure the public that the king was not abandoning his royal duties and that the pleasures he sought humanized him but did not turn his head. "Louis is always wise, he regulates his desires," ran the text of one Benserade royal ballet, "and rises above his pleasures." "The shepherd [i.e., Louis] is never without something to do," went another, "... business goes before pleasure." And again: "Even though he is at an age when we feel a strong desire for pleasure, do not believe his pleasure wins out, he always returns to his sheep."[59] In his behavior at court, noted Ezéchiel Spanheim, Louis affected "to have no favorites or mistresses except to refresh his spirit or to satisfy his passion, giving them no more control of his will or of government."[60]
Scattered evidence from court journals indicates that Louis XIV was thought to have successfully insulated his pursuit of women from royal governance during the early part of his personal reign. Louise de La Vallière, who was later held up frequently as a model royal mistress, was considered either to have had too "little mind" (Madame de La Fayette) or been too "tender and virtuous" (Madame de Caylus) to have had political ambitions; as Madame de La Fayette put it, "She dreamed only of being loved by the king and of loving him."[61] As the reign proceeded, how-
[58] Jean-Marie Apostilidès, Le Roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981), 99, points out that royal gazetteers reassured the public after each royal fête that such diversions helped the king do his Job better. On royal mistresses and the Church, see Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, La Vie quotidienne des femmes du roi d'Agnès Sorel à Marie-Antoinette (n.p.: Hachette, 1990), chap. 4.; and Georges Couton, La Chair et l'âme: Louis XIV entre ses maîtresses et Bossuet (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1995).
[59] Isaac de Benserade, Les Oeuvres de Monsieur Benserade (Paris, 1697), 2:367, 360, 285.
[60] Ezéchiel Spanheim, Relation de la cour de France en 1690 (Paris: H. Loones, 1882), 3. Louis advised the duc d'Anjou to take time to amuse himself, but never to abandon business for pleasure; see his Mémoires pour les années 1661 et 1666, suivis des réflexions sur le métier de roi, des instructions au duc d'Anjou et d'un projet de harangue (Paris: Editions Bossard, 1923), 229.
[61] Mme de LaFayette, Histoire de Madame d'Henriette d'Angleterre , and Mme. de Caylus, Souvenirs de Mme de Caylus, in Nouvelle Collection des mémoires pour servir à la France (Paris, 1839), 8:189, 480–81, respectively. The abbé Choisy attributed to La Vallière "no ambition, no views" (quoted in Georges Mongrédien, La Vie privée Louis XIV [Paris: Hachette, 1938], 74).
ever, perceptions of the king's mistresses began to change. Madame de Montespan, more "ambitious" for herself and a far more imposing presence at court, was a fairly controversial figure.[62] Yet of all Louis's mistresses, it was Madame de Maintenon, later Louis's morganatic wife, who generated the most vicious and greatest quantity of criticism. Although Maintenon had her defenders, who doted on her piety, her somewhat mysterious relationship with the king—she spent time alone with him almost daily—ignited the worst fears at court and beyond regarding the usurpation of royal authority. "Success, complete confidence, rare dependence, total power, universal public adoration of ministers, generals of armies, the most intimate royal family," wrote Saint-Simon, "all, in a word, at her feet; everything considered acceptable with her, everything objectionable without her, men, business, things, decisions, justice, favors, religion, everything without exception in her hand, the King and the State her victims." "People no longer doubt the refined politics of Mme. de Maintenon, who gives her protection in turn to each minister to engage them in her interests and who balances their authority," noted the marquis de Sourches in 1686.[63] Within and outside the court there circulated songs advancing similar themes.[64] "It is said that one prince today / Controls everything himself; / This is but a slander. / A women in penance, / Widow of a little turd, / Holds the tiller of France; / That is the pure truth." Or: "A King by his victory / Once crowned / Loses the luster of his glory / By a fool governed; / Everywhere one hears it said / Unhappy day! / Cursed is the rule of his love."[65]
In such lyrics and other literature, many of the tropes used earlier in reference to presumed power-hungry women were repeated, just as they
[62] For conflicting comment, see Mme de Caylus, Souvenirs , 482; Saint-Simon, Mémoires , 28:179; and Mme de Sévigné, Lettres de Madame de Sévigné, de sa famille, et de ses amis (Paris: Hachette, 1862–66), 5:421. Louis's relatively brief relationship with Mile de Fontanges appeared more like Louis's relationship with La Vallière; according to Mme de Caylus (Souvenirs , 480), the king was attracted only to her face and was ashamed of her speech and "stupidity," while the ascerbic Liselotte thought her "beautiful as an angel ... but ... a stupid little fool." See also Elisabeth-Charlotte de Bavière, quoted in John Wolf, Louis XIV (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 321.
[63] Saint-Simon, Mémoires , 28:214; Louis-François de Bouchet, marquis de Sourches, Mémoires du marquis de Sourches sur le règne de Louis XIV (Paris, 1882–93), 1:379.
[64] Like the authorship of this material, the audience for the literature discussed below is hard to determine, but police records suggest that political songs did circulate beyond the capital. BN, ms. fr. N.A. 1891, fol. 75, shows that in 1706 a number of individuals were arrested for having composed "insolent songs against the King and Mme. de Maintenon" and for having "spread them in Paris and in the Kingdom."
[65] P. G. Brunet, Le Nouveau Siècle de Louis XIV, ou choix de chansons historiques et satiriques presque route inédites de 167 à 1712 (Paris, 1857), 193, 310.
would be reiterated with regard to Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette: the king has lost control of his reason—"it is Maintenon / who guides the king's reason"; "Gods, what horrible disorder / Louis, your reason sleeps"; the woman is a demon—"I have seen under the cloak of a women / A demon lay down the law"; "this shrew of Hell / Who imposes on us her rule of iron;" "Detestable creole witch / Fatal Maintenon"; the woman is a prostitute—"See this holy whore / How she controls this empire;" the king must reassert control over his own sexuality to reestablish the people as the proper object of his love—"Reign over yourself, it is time / You will make fewer malcontents, / Choose sincere Ministers / And be the Father of your People."[66]
Demonic possession aside, it was by no means immediately obvious to contemporaries precisely how Madame de Maintenon, a woman three years older than Louis and no longer the beauty she had once been, maintained her hold over the king. This was a mystery to which a generation of contemporary prose writers, claiming to base their accounts on "veritable" sources and often concealing their true publishers under fictitious names, devoted ever more fantastic accounts.[67] Two explanations gained currency in this connection. The first, which impugned Maintenon's piety as a mere cover for her supposed nefarious dealings, contended that she had been seduced by the king's allegedly lubricious Jesuit confessor, Père La Chaise, and that La Chaise had used his spiritual influence over Louis XIV to reinforce her position of power while conspiring with her to lead Louis into wars of "universal monarchy" against Protestant powers.[68] A second, more widely circulated explanation—one sufficiently credible for the usually sober marquis d'Argenson to take seriously—centered on Madame de Maintenon's school for aristocratic young women, Saint-Cyr, which, according to such accounts, provided a never-ending source of nubile young females for Louis's pleasure. Having lost her own sexual allure, Madame de Maintenon could maintain her position of power in-
[66] BN, ms. fr. 12694, fols. 524,179; ms. fr. 12695, fols. 675, 654; ms. fr. 12694, fol. 443; Brunet, Nouveau Siècle , 237; BN, ms. fr. 12695, fol. 656.
[67] Some of this literature is examined in H. Gillot, Le Règne de Louis XIV et l'opinion publique en Allemagne (Paris: E. Champion, 1914), 21–27; and P.J.W. Malssen, Louis XIV d'après les pamphlets répandus en Hollande (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1936). For the use of one prominent publisher's pseudonym, see Léonce Janmart de Brouillant, La Liberté de la presse en France au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Histoire de Pierre du Marteau, imprimeur à Cologne (Geneva: Slatkine, 1971). A useful bibliography to such literature is provided in Ralph Cople-stone Williams, Bibliography of the Seventeenth-Century Novel in France (New York: Century, 1931), 218ff.
[68] Anon., La Cassette ouverte de l'illustre créole, ou les amours de madame de Maintenon (Villefranche, 1691); Anon., Histoire du père La Chaise (Cologne, 1693, 1695).
definitely by serving as madam of this royal "seraglio" on the periphery of Versailles. "As soon as the King has cast his eyes on some Nymph, ... Mme de Mainterion takes great care to catechize her and to instruct her in the manner in which she should receive the honor that the King pays her."[69]
The ultimate impact of Madame de Maintenon's usurpation of royal prerogative was represented as the emasculation of the king. The king's oversexuality, his "too much love," was explicitly linked to royal impotence—excess, in other words, giving rise to insufficiency.[70] Much the same symbolic neutering of the royal body was effected mythologically by drawing on an ancient Roman variant of the Hercules corpus, a corpus that had previously often been used to enhance monarchical glory. Directing this variant against the monarchy, satirists now recast Madame de Maintenon in the role of Omphale, a Lydian queen with whom Hercules—the epitome of Louis XIV—had become so infatuated that he had exchanged his lion's skin for her clothes and performed at her feet the traditionally female gender-linked task of spinning yarn. "He wants to follow the path of Hercules," went one political song of 1710, "And for the queen Omphale /Spin until death." Referring explicitly to the same myth, another text remarked upon the "weakness, which effeminates the courage of a hero, and makes him lose all the luster of his most sublime qualities."[71]
Louis XV's accession to the crown in 1715 at the age of five would suspend the leveling of this sort of sexual slander at the reigning king himself, but this did not mean that those who had been or were closely associated with the monarchy would now be spared. For one thing, works directed against Louis XIV and his mistresses and first published during
[69] Anon., Suite de la France galante, ou les derniers dérèglements de la cour , in Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, Histoire amoureuses des Gaules, suivie des romans historico-satiriques du XVIIe siècle , ed. Paul Boiteau and C. L. Livet (Paris, 1856–76), 3:151. See also Anon., L'Esprit familier de Trianon, ou l'apparition de la duchesse de Fontange (Paris, 1695); Anon., Le Tombeau des amours de Louis le Grand, & ses dernières galanteries (Cologne, 1695); Anon., Scarron apparu à madame de Maintenon et les reproches qu'il lui fait sur ses amours avec Louis le Grand (Cologne, 1694). Gillot, Règne , 26, discusses variants of this account, including one in which Louis gains his title of père du peuple as a result of his seduction of nine-year-olds, and one in which young victims of royal debauch were housed in a convent near Paris. On d'Argenson's discussion of Saint-Cyr as a royal bordello, see his Journal , 1: 20–21.
[70] Anon., Les Nouvelles Amours de Louis XIV (1691), in DeBois-Jourdain, Mélanges historiques, satiriques et anecdotiques (Paris, 1807), 1:138.
[71] BN, ms. fr. 12694, fol. 533; Anon., Scarron , 22. On the classical sources of the Hercules/Omphale myth, see Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines (Paris: Hachette, 1900), 3:100.
the previous reign continued to circulate, as indicated by police records that chronicle frequent arrests of individuals accused of distributing such materials through the 1730s.[72] For another, the Regency—infamous for such works as Voltaire's "Puer Regnante" and Lagrange-Chancel's Les Philippes , which accused the regent of incest, sodomy, and the attempted murder of Louis XV—provided an ample target for fresh sexual slander, as did, to a lesser extent, the administration of the due de Bourbon and succeeding ministries.[73] The point to be emphasized here is that at the time Louis XV began his active pursuit of women, the long tradition of sexual slander reflecting deep suspicions of women and of their political influence was surely still alive and available for deployment against any public figure, not excepting the king himself.
Begun sometime in the mid-1730s, the king's extramarital liaisons became matters of public knowledge by 1737, at which time they do not appear to have aroused much negative comment.[74] Indeed, there were those who approved of them, such as the diarist Barbier, who suggested in January 1739 that such dalliance might at least distract Louis from his inordinate passion for hunting and help "improve his mind and sentiments."[75] In these early years, some observers even doubted that the king had much interest in sex, that because he was "susceptible to no passion for women" his liaison with Madame de Mailly would be "without consequence" and that because the king "does not like women and has a fickle mind" no long-term relationship would be possible. Some remarked upon the "modest" sums Louis was said to be granting Madame de Mailly (a mere 10,000 livres a month), suggesting that they were so small it seemed as
[72] BN, ms. fr. N.A. 1891, fols. 105ff. As noted above, Mme de Maintenon did not leave behind a uniformly bad reputation. According to La Beaumelle, she was "regarded at Saint-Cyr as a saint, at the court as a hypocrite, in Paris as a person of intellect, and in all the rest of Europe as a women without morals [moeurs ]." Whatever the precise situation, La Beaumelle, in trying to restore her reputation in his 1756 edition of her works, noted that she had been "outraged in a thousand libelles ," whose authors—"discontented officiers , overcredulous foreigners, impassioned Huguenots"—had impugned her with the "crimes of Agrippina and Brunehault." See Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de madame de Maintenon (Amsterdam, 1756), 1:viii.
[73] Joseph de Lagrange-Chancel, Les Philippiques, odes (Paris, 1875); François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Oeuvres complètes , ed. Louis Moland (Paris, 1877–85), 1:296. BN, ms. fr. N.A. 1891, fol. 157, for example, records the arrest of a M. Mahudel in 1725 for distributing libelles against the government with illustrations that were "licentious and against good mores." A compilation of the supposed misdeeds of female French rulers over the ages was published anonymously during the French Revolution under the title Les Crimes des reines de France depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu'à Marie-Antoinette (Paris, 1791).
[74] BA, AB MS. 10166, records intermittent comment beginning in the spring of 1737.
[75] Barbier Journal historique , 2:212.
though she could not possibly be his mistress, or, if she was, that she must be motivated by true love. If Louis's early liaisons were criticized, it was because of the coldhearted, ungallant way in which he was thought to be hurting the queen by parading his mistresses through Versailles, something that, it was said, Louis XIV had never done out of consideration for Marie-Thérèse. Such actions, according to one report, clearly indicated that "Louis the Fourteenth had feelings, but that Louis the Fifteenth has none of any sort."[76]
Although there remained those who did not begrudge the king the sort of extramarital affairs common among members of the court, commentary began to grow more hostile around 1740. The king's refusal to touch for scrofula—hitherto practiced four times a year—and his nonobservance of Easter in 1739, which, according to Barbier, caused great scandal in Versailles and Paris, were linked directly to his liaison with Madame de Mailly.[77] Although some still thought the two were incompatible—"Bacchus and love do not get along"—the "debauchery" previously associated with the king's heavy drinking now began to become associated with the king's supposedly more active sexual life. "It continues to be said that the court is a land of debauchery and voluptuousness," ran one police spy report of February 1740, "that the ladies there are most lascivious and work at nothing but to corrupt the court with the luxury that surrounds them.... There is no lady of the court who does not aspire to become to the King what ... Mailly is to his Majesty." By April, rumors circulated that the king intended to "wallow" in adultery, that the king's licentious behavior was setting an example that all courtiers had begun to imitate, that all ladies of the court were concubines of the king. In September it was reported that the tower at the royal château of Choisy had been garnished with placards reading "Royal Bordello." In January 1741, drawings of secret parties of the king with Madame de Mailly and other courtiers were reported circulating through Paris, and in March it was reported that the duc de Tremouille had died from smallpox contracted at these "parties of pleasure." By 1742 the king had become sufficiently associated with the pursuit of sexual pleasure to trigger the ancient worries over female usurpation of power. Songs passed through the court and capital attributing to Madame de Mailly "all the hardships we feel."[78]
It is hardly a surprise, then, that when the project to send the king to
[76] BA, AB MS. 10166, fols. 355, 365, 217.
[77] Pierre Narbonne, Journal des règnes de Louis XIV et Louis XV de l'année 1702 à l'année, 1744 (Paris, 1866), 616; Barbier Journal historique , 2:223–24.
[78] BA, AB MS. 10167, fols. 73, 45, 88, 144, 46, 243; BHVP, MS. 626, fol. 251; MS. 623, fol. 123.
the front in Flanders arose, the duc de Noailles—though not the coterie around the duc de Richelieu, who sought to use the duchesse de Châteauroux as a means for exerting influence on the king—opposed her proposals to join Louis at the front. It was not easy, however, to dissuade either the duchesse or Louis—who, police reports suggest, was unaccountably unaware of how the many graces he had granted his new mistress had opened "the door to satire and impertinence." Although a police report of 25 April 1744 indicated that "we have finally made the King understand how it suits his glory that he not allow a mistress to follow him," the duchesse de Châteauroux and her sister joined him in June.[79]
The immediate impact of Louis's taking charge at the front was as great as Noailles had hoped. Reports received by the police praised the actions of the king, noting particularly his affability, goodness, and, perhaps most important, his ability "to make himself adored." Made public shortly after his departure, a letter to the dauphin, in which Louis wrote of his devotion to his people, had a wonderfully tonic effect on his subjects, according to the police, since it helped dispel the belief that Louis cared nothing for them. "The King has advanced a great deal in winning the hearts of his subjects," observed one police report;"... times have changed a great deal." When Louis won military encounters at Menin, Courtrai, and Ypres, the gap between the royal image and public opinion appeared to be closing. Although the public seemed proud of the king's military prowess, they emphasized not his lust for conquest, but—taking a leaf from the royal scriptwriters—his desire for peace. "He does not yield to the inhuman ardor / Which has only blood for its object /... It is peace that Louis wants to bring to the earth."[80]
Yet the prospect of a visit to Flanders by the king's mistresses haunted the public; while some, like the marquis d'Argenson, saw no real harm in Louis's dalliance at the front, others warned of "the most unhappy consequences for the king's glory."[81] To be sure, Louis XIV had visited the front with his mistresses, but only in the company of the queen, whose presence, as Primi Visconti noted, was necessary for the king to entertain his mistresses "without scandal."[82] But now there seemed no possibility that Marie Leszczynska would join the royal party. At the front, the "superstitious" Flemish reacted badly to the arrival of the duchesse de Château-
[79] Roussel (ed.), Correspondance , 2:18; BA, AB MS. 10029, fol. 142.
[80] BA, AB MS. 10029, fols. 150, 151, 159.; BHVP, MS. 625, fol. 4.
[81] D'Argenson, Journal , 4:103–4; BA, AB MS. 10029, fol. 161.
[82] Primi Visconti, Mémoires ... sur la cour de Louis XIV (Paris: Perrin, 1988), 15.
roux and her sister in Lille, attributing a fire to celestial disapproval of their coming and serenading them charivari-style beneath their windows with the lyrics "Beautiful Châteauroux / I will become mad / If I do not make love to you."[83]
Matters came to a head in August, after eastern France was invaded and looted by the Austrians—and in response to which Louis left Flanders for Alsace. But on 8 August Louis fell ill, thereby setting in motion the celebrated scenes at Metz. Apparently on the verge of death, Louis was forced by the bishop of Soissons to confess and publicly repudiate his sexual promiscuity and to banish the royal mistresses; otherwise the bishop, himself involved in a political cabal against the Richelieu coterie, threatened to withhold last rites. Word of Louis's illness had already spread, causing great and, given the wartime conditions, understandable alarm. Whatever genuine feelings for Louis there may have been, these feelings were hedged with concerns that the Austrians might try to capitalize militarily on his illness, and the prospect of the succession of a dauphin not quite fifteen no doubt aroused fears as well.[84] Given these sentiments and the general hostility to the mistresses—who were widely blamed for Louis's illness and nearly murdered by angry crowds following their humiliating exile from Metz—it is understandable that the combination of Louis's repudiation of these two courtesans and his recovery later in August reportedly sent his subjects into paroxysms of joy, the likes of which France had not seen for decades. In ridding himself of disease and its apparent cause, the king, through the good offices of the bishop of Soissons, appeared, at least for the moment, to have purged the body politic of female-induced corruption and so resacralized it. "If God brings back this Charming King / [God's] Grace has made a Penitent / His Sins will then be Finished / Hallelujah."[85] From the standpoint of monarchical propaganda, what was crucial was the fact that after fifty years of insistence that the king and his people were bound by mutual love, there had now emerged apparently incontrovertible evidence that such truly was the case; the gap between image and reality finally seemed to have been closed.[86]
So critical a moment did this appear that the state's ideological apparatus lost no time in scripting the text for the months of celebrations to
[83] D'Argenson, Journal , 4:104.
[84] BHVP, MS. 625, fol. 90.
[85] BN, ms. fr. 15134, fol. 912.
[86] Boislisle, Lettres , 1:187, contains a letter from Maurepas to Marville that acknowledges "how [Louis] is dear to his subjects."
follow, and none other than Louis himself led this effort, indirectly overseeing the great festival held in Paris on 10 September and even personally selecting the medal struck to commemorate his recovery that bore the inscription "God the Conservator."[87] But it was an abbé Josset, canon of the cathedral in Metz, who on 25 August managed to compress into one sobriquet the most successful of all the laudations offered Louis:
The Good King! The Great King! From the Other End of the Kingdom he came to our help, he came to defend these Frontiers from the ravages of the Enemy; his love for us made him disregard all the dangers of war.... No, no Prince was ever more ... lamented, more bitterly mourned, more ardently desired; and if History one day gives him some title, what title more merited, more justly acquired, and more Honorable for a King than that of LOUIS LE BIEN-AIMÉ .[88]
It was of course precisely this title that history did grant him—with some considerable connivance of the crown. On 7 September, the police of Paris posted orders, which were also proclaimed orally by town criers, that instigated and regulated the celebration of the king's recovery and in particular commanded citizens to decorate and illuminate their houses. According to official reports, on the evening of 10 September all the shops of Paris, large and small alike, were bedecked with the inscription etched in lights "Long live Louis the bien-aimé ."[89] On 17 September, Pannard's Les Fêtes sincères , hailing Louis as the bien-aimé , opened at the Comédie des Italiens, where it played for more than two months to audiences totaling nearly four thousand.[90] At least in one case the monarchy did almost literally put the words it wanted to hear in the mouths of its subjects: Jacques Bailly, general guardian of the king's paintings, composed a vaudeville, including the words "Louis my dear / Long live Louis the Bien-Aimé ," that was recited by the fishwives of Les Halles on 10 September.[91] Needless to say, official news outlets of the crown covered such stories at length and in great detail, especially the Mercure de France , which
[87] Archives Nationales, K. 1007, no. 146, contains many details on the organization of various celebrations, including the one on 10 September. On the medal, see Boislisle, Lettres , 1:189, 195.
[88] Josset, Compliment , 4.
[89] Ordonnance de police qui enjoint aux Habitans de la Ville & des Faubourgs de Paris d'illuminer leur Fenestres le jeudy du présent mois, en rejouissance de l'heureux rétablissement de la Santé du Roy, 7 séptembre 1744; Gazette de France 39 (19 September 1744), 453.
[90] Clarence D. Brenner, The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 1716–1793 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 141–42.
[91] Mercure de France 47 (1744): 2315–18.
devoted over a hundred pages to the many celebrations of the king's recovery and to public praise of the king's virtues.
So critical was the acquisition of the bien-aimé title to the ideological fortunes of the crown that the monarchy not only never abandoned it, but also turned the events surrounding conferral of the title into one of the reign's essential political myths. Two themes, from the very outset, would be stressed: first, the spontaneous, genuine nature of public grieving for the king in his illness and of public joy at his recovery, and second, the broad social base of such sentiment—comprising peasant, bourgeois, and aristocrat alike. There could be no mistaking the sincerity of the people's response to the king's actions, one journal put it, for it was easy to distinguish between "exterior demonstrations, which are merely the forced tribute of duty or convention, from the natural ecstasy that gives rise to sentiment." Journal coverage of celebrations in Paris by the Gazette de France caused at least one reader to remark on "the manner in which the title Bien-Aimé was given to the King, not by courtesans, but by the people." "One would say that joy has given place to no other sentiment," the Gazette observed, "that all Parisians composed but one single family, united by ties of tenderness as much as by those of blood, and that they were brothers concerned only with rejoicing at what their father has bestowed upon them."[92] It seemed as if the mystical body of the realm had been reconstituted and rejuvenated, held together by love under the paternal care of the king.
How well did the myth of the bien-aimé serve the long-range interests of the monarchy? There is no straightforward way to measure its benefits, but the evidence suggests that it ultimately proved highly problematic. At the core of the difficulties lay the contradiction of an absolutist regime deriving its informal—that is, nonjuridical—political authority from the love of its people. As pointed out above, the recasting of the king as the people's love object implicitly, and sometimes even explicitly, narrowed the distance between ruler and ruled, thereby serving to dispel the mystique of monarchy. When censors would grant permission, as they did to
[92] Suite de la clef, ou Journal historique sur les matières du tems 56 (1744): 312; Président de Levy, Journal historique, ou fastes du règne de Louis XV, surnommé le Bien Aimé (Paris, 1766), 2:423n; Gazette de France 39 (1744): 454. To be sure, under Louis's later reign there was—understandably, considering the frequent warfare—a return to more militaristic representations of the king, but these representations continued to portray Louis as lover of peace, father, and so on. For an excellent discussion, see Jeffrey Merrick, "Politics on Pedestals: Royal Monuments in Eighteenth-Century France," French History 5 (1991): 234–64.
one anonymous poet, to write on the occasion of Louis's return to Paris from Metz, "Ah! to serve what one loves, is that obedience? / Be a citizen King, all citizens are King," obedience may have been made to seem sweeter and hence more acceptable, but at the same time sovereignty in the case of a "citizen King" became perilously close to being represented as popular rule.[93] Indeed, the emphasis on the sincerity and universality of Louis's acclamation after Metz made the king's mandate, albeit originally from God, seem almost elective. No one, Voltaire pointed out, knew whether the people loved the king better than the people themselves; if so, then investment of authority through love could not be a matter of obligation or customary law so much as choice.[94] "What Law solicits us to do," ran one poetic tribute, "Is never as valuable as a Voluntary Act; /... He is no longer King except by my free choice, / Such as he has done [is] such as I would choose /... If the Scepter is given for merit, / He should be elected, if he is not my born King."[95]
Such discourse would put later critics of royal policy in a strong rhetorical position to put pressure on the king when his policies, as they so often did, failed to attract wide support; for critics could now credibly threaten the king with loss of his authority should he continue to support the unpopular initiatives his administration had undertaken. Opponents of Maupeou would use Louis's sobriquet in such a manner to push Louis into dismissing the hated minister: "If the name of Bien-Aimé cannot naturally be taken from a good Prince, the luster of his glory would be obscured, however, by the hardness and tyranny of a Minister, if [the Prince] suffered his violence any longer.... Ah! Sire, prisons filled with your faithful subjects: Vincennes, the Bastille ... lettres de cachet without number, hard exiles, espionage that holds us in fear: is that the reign of Louis the Bien-Aimé "[96] Even more hostile critics, like a poet outraged by Louis's arrest of Charles Edward, the Pretender's son, pointed out the irony of the king's title, calling it "specious": "Examine the error of the title that was given to you Louis the Bien-Aymé is Louis without a crown."[97] "Incestuous tyrant, inhuman traitorous forger," wrote another, "How dare
[93] Anon., Au Roy entrant à Paris à son retour de Metz (Paris, 1744), 4 (censor's approval on 22 October 1744).
[94] Voltaire, Oeuvres , 23:268.
[95] Anon., La Quatre-jovialinaire (The Hague, 1745), 79–81.
[96] Anon., Maupeou tyran sous le règne de Louis le Bien-Aimé (n.p., 1773), 92–93.
[97] BHVP, MS. 649, fols. 56, 50. On this affair, see Thomas E. Kaiser, "The Drama of Charles Edward Stuart, Jacobite Propaganda, and French Political Protest, 1745–1750," Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (1997): 365–81.
you arrogate to yourself the name of Bien-Aymé "[98] If it was the people who had the authority to confer this title, it was now "your people" who "declare you unworthy."[99] By making popular acclaim such an important pillar of royal authority, the monarchy had opened itself up to moral blackmail and put the king under a continual obligation to satisfy public demands.
And the plain fact was that, apparently never truly popular during his early reign, Louis was even less so later, as higher taxes, Jansenist controversy, disappointing military outcomes, and other developments took their toll such that even the royalist Jacob-Nicolas Moreau had to admit at Louis's death, "Never was a prince less missed than the poor Louis XV."[100] The bookseller Hardy observed just how problems of the reign had undermined Louis's acquired title: "The decay of finance and the disorder that had been introduced for a number of years in all parts of the administration by a conduct as odious as it was reprehensible of different ministers ... unhappily had caused. Louis XV surnamed the Bien-Aimé to lose this glorious title that the people had awarded him in 1744 in the just ecstasy of their love."[101]
Especially important to the erosion of the bien-aimé title was Louis's return to promiscuity. For although Louis did banish his mistresses at Metz, he reinstated them three months later, causing much the same sort of letdown among his subjects that had occurred following earlier disappointments of reform hopes. In 1745 his liaison with Madame de Pompadour became a matter of instant public knowledge; and although this relationship did not at first meet with a universally hostile reaction, some almost immediately perceived in it a replay of Louis XIV's relationship with Madame de Maintenon (the Parc-aux-Cerfs under Pompadour would be imagined to serve the same purpose as Saint-Cyr under Maintenon) and yet another threat to the autonomy of the royal will. Inspired in part by the parti dévot centered on the queen and dauphin, a new wave of scurrilous attacks on the king's sexual life and on Pompadour passed through the public; devastating verbal assaults in the form of satirical songs and thinly veiled allegorical novels were accompanied by threats of assassination upon the latest object of the king's lust.[102] In the end, Pom-
[98] Emile Raunié, ed., Chansonnier historique du XVIIIes siècle (Paris, 1879–84), 7:222.
[99] Ibid.
[100] Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Mes Souvenirs , ed. Camille Hermelin (Paris, 1898–1901) 1:379.
[101] BN, ms. fr. 6681 ("Mes loisirs"), fol. 335.
[102] BHVP, MS. 580, fol. 244; MS. 649, fols. 55–56. On dévot discourse, see Van Kley, Damiens , 234–42. The novel literature includes Marie-Magdeleine de Bonafons, Tanastés, conte allégorique (The Hague, 1745); François-Vincent Toussaint, Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de Perse (Amsterdam, 1745); and [Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle], Les Amours de Zéokinizal (Amsterdam, 1748). The police were most concerned about Tanastés and incarcerated its author for nearly twelve years; see BA, AB MS. 11582, on her case. At her interrogation Bonafons said "her imagination had been helped by the discourse she had heard in public." According to the police, the work had acquired a wide reputation; see Boislisle, Lettres , 3:98–100.
padour would be charged with causing "anarchy, disorder, and all the woes of France," indeed, with having brought France to verge of "despotism."[103]
What needs emphasis here is that much as a royal liaison with an "ambitious" mistress might well have triggered anxiety over the custody of the state under any reign, Louis XV's relationships with his mistresses proved particularly problematic in a regime that relied so heavily for its authority on bonds of mutual love between the king and his subjects. For even if it was true, as one bishop thought, that the only thing necessary for a French king to make himself loved by his subjects was for him to love them,[104] Louis's promiscuity indicated that he lacked this minimal but essential prerequisite, since he appeared all too ready to sacrifice the good of his people to placate his ever-demanding mistresses. Already in the case of Madame de Mailly it was said that any natural love felt by Louis for his people had been lost out of "passion" for her, such that "he forgot with her all the rest of the world."[105] In much the same way later on, it would be written that Louis, "in letting the reins of his empire fall in the hands of [Pompadour]," had "seemed to renounce ... the love of his peoples."[106] As one political song sadly put it, "the King regards Madame de Pompadour tenderly/ ... and the People indifferently."[107] The crux of Louis's problem lay in the monarchy's inability, despite efforts to prove Louis a king with his subjects' best interests at heart, to overcome his image as a ruler "sensual, indelicate, and lazy," for whom "pleasure was the only object" and the satisfaction of his lusts preferable to winning "the love of all the French."[108] In the end, the king's two bodies appeared to be separating, as the mortal royal person sought pleasure and escape from
[103] [Bouffonidor], Les Fastes de Louis XV, de ses ministres, généraux, et autres personnages de son règne (Villefranche, 1782), 2:477; on Pompadour, the separation of the king's two bodies, and "despotism," see Kaiser, "Madame de Pompadour."
[104] Jean-Louis Buisson de Beauteville, Mandement ... qui ordonne ... des prières pour le repos de l'âme du feu roi (Paris, 1774), II.
[105] [La Beaumelle], Les Amours , 53.
[106] [Mouffle d'Angerville], Vie privée , 2:301.
[107] BN, ms. fr. 13659, fol. 208bis .
[108] Raunié, Chansonnier , 8:314–15.
responsibility in the boudoirs of the royal mistresses while the immortal royal dignitas was effectively abandoned.
In his account of the origins of the French Revolution, William Doyle contends that the French monarchy was "not overthrown by the opposition to its policies, much less by revolutionaries dedicated to its destruction," but fell, rather, "because of its own contradictions."[109] I have sought in this essay to demonstrate how the monarchy helped generate such contradictions with regard to royalist ideology by promoting an image of the king it could not sustain. Just as the monarchy's attempts to answer its critics in their own language of law and history ultimately prompted even more crushing critiques of royal policies and institutions, so did the crown's effort to construct Louis as the bien-aimé backfire, allowing opposition parties to exploit the gap between image and perceived reality. Thus, while the parti dévot hammered away at Louis's personal failings, the Jansenists and parlementaires struck at the juridical foundations of absolute monarchy. Indeed, the critiques of the king's person could only bolster the monarchy's institutional critics; for once the king's body and will were presumed to be corrupted, the French nation had every reason to seeks restraints and limits on the royal prerogative through constitutional means. The notion of the bien-aimé , a rhetorical trap of the monarchy's own design, provided one mechanism whereby the monarchy unwittingly helped to effect its own eventual demise.
[109] William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution , 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 115.