2F - The legacy of Louis XIV by 1715: the last years of the reign
Learn why the survival of the monarchy did not guarantee the survival of Louis's personal arrangements, how the succession crisis produced the regency of Orléans, and how to weigh the achievements and costs of the reign by 1715.
Family deaths and the succession
Louis's final years combined recovery from a dangerous war with a succession made fragile by deaths within the royal family.
The peace settlements of 1713–14 ended the War of the Spanish Succession, leaving France intact and Philip V established in Spain. They brought an opportunity for recovery, but did not cancel the debt, taxation and social hardship accumulated through war. Louis therefore approached the end of his reign with both a dynastic achievement abroad and serious problems at home.
The expected line of succession changed rapidly. Louis's son, the Grand Dauphin, died in 1711. The Grand Dauphin's eldest son, the Duke of Burgundy, died in 1712, as did Burgundy's wife and their elder surviving son, the Duke of Brittany. Burgundy's younger son, born in 1710 and then known as the Duke of Anjou, survived. He would become Louis XV. He was a different person from Louis XIV's grandson Philip, formerly Duke of Anjou and now king of Spain. The death of the Duke of Berry, another grandson of Louis XIV, in 1714 further reduced the number of adult princes in the direct family line. Versailles's account of the Grand Dauphin traces the loss of the expected heirs.
When Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, his great-grandson Louis XV was only five. The crown passed to the child, but a child could not conduct government personally. The urgent question was therefore who would exercise royal authority during his minority.
Regency
A regency is government exercised on behalf of a monarch who cannot rule personally, here because the king is a child. The regent governs in the king's name; becoming regent does not make that person king.
Philippe, Duke of Orléans, Louis XIV's nephew and the son of his younger brother, had a strong claim to lead the regency. The settlement excluding Philip V and his descendants from the French succession made the position of the Orléans branch more significant if the young king died. The possibility of a Spanish Bourbon challenge also gave an apparently domestic family question an international dimension: reopening the French succession could threaten the separation of crowns agreed at Utrecht.
The deaths did not abolish hereditary monarchy. They shifted the immediate problem from preparing an adult heir to managing a minority, and made arrangements for guardianship, councils and command politically decisive.
The will and rival centres of authority
Louis tried to shape government after his death by dividing authority rather than giving Orléans unrestricted control.
Louis had promoted his legitimised sons, especially the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse. Legitimisation gave legal recognition to sons born outside marriage, but did not remove the hostility of princes and nobles who defended the traditional distinction between such sons and the legitimate princes of the blood. In 1714, Louis admitted the legitimised sons to the succession if the legitimate lines failed. This was a separate intervention in succession arrangements, not the appointment of Maine to succeed immediately ahead of Louis XV.
The King's will of 1714, supplemented by later codicils, provided a Regency Council with Orléans at its head, but subjected him to decisions by majority vote. Maine received responsibility for the young king and authority associated with the royal household and its guards. The arrangement dispersed powers that Orléans needed if he was to govern effectively. Control of access to the child and of forces around him could influence decisions as much as a formal place at the head of a council.
Louis's design can be understood as an attempt to protect the young king and those he favoured while preventing one prince from monopolising power. It also created a potential conflict between the person claiming the regency, council members able to outvote him and the guardian of the king. The mechanism of restraint explains why Orléans had strong reasons to challenge it.
The distinction between succession and government during the minority is essential. The first concerned who inherited the crown. The second concerned who controlled decisions, appointments and the king's person while that monarch was a child. Annulment of the will's governing restraints did not mean replacing Louis XV with Orléans.
Louis could issue commands while alive, but arrangements intended to bind powerful actors after his death depended on those actors' cooperation and on institutions that would interpret and implement them. The succession thus exposed a limit of personal rule: authority exercised by a living monarch could not simply be preserved unchanged in a sealed document.
Orléans, Parlement and the formation of the regency
Orléans secured the regency by obtaining institutional support to overturn the restraints in Louis's will.
Continue this lesson.
You’re previewing NovaLearn without an account. Create a free account to read the rest.
Create free account