Louis XV: The Well-Beloved Becomes the Well-Hated

Louis XV's personal rule (1723-1774) began promisingly. The young king, handsome and initially popular, seemed to embody monarchy's renewal. His marriage to Marie Leszczyńska, though politically insignificant, produced the desired heir. Cardinal Fleury's long ministry (1726-1743) provided stable, pacific government that allowed financial recovery. Yet the reign's trajectory—from the "Well-Beloved" of his subjects' acclaim to the "Well-Hated" of his final years—illustrated the monarchy's deepening crisis.

The king's character proved fundamentally unsuited to absolute monarchy's demands. Intelligent but lazy, sensual but conscience-stricken, Louis possessed neither his great-grandfather's work ethic nor his sense of royal duty. His famous declaration "After me, the deluge" (possibly apocryphal but capturing his attitude) reflected deep pessimism about the monarchy's future. His withdrawal from active governance, punctuated by sporadic interventions, created governmental paralysis that competent ministers could only partially overcome.

The role of royal mistresses reached unprecedented political importance under Louis XV. Madame de Pompadour (1745-1764), bourgeois by birth but elevated by royal passion, effectively governed France for two decades. Her influence extended from artistic patronage—she sponsored the Sèvres porcelain manufacture and protected the Encyclopedists—to foreign policy and ministerial appointments. Madame du Barry (1768-1774), her successor, lacked Pompadour's intelligence but similarly demonstrated how royal government had become personalized to the point of dysfunction.

The desacralization of monarchy accelerated under Louis XV. His flagrant adultery, conducted without Louis XIV's concern for appearances, scandalized devout opinion. The attempted assassination by Damiens (1757), though failing, shocked contemporaries by revealing that regicide was again conceivable. Scandalous pamphlets, the "chroniques scandaleuses," portrayed the king as debauched and impotent, imagery that undermined royal majesty more effectively than philosophical criticism. The monarchy's sacred aura, carefully cultivated for centuries, dissipated in the face of all-too-human behavior.