Foreword
This is a study of the Kings who reigned over France from 1589 until 1830. Eight monarchs are involved: Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Louis XVII, Louis XVIII and Charles X; and also a pretender, Henri V.
Surprisingly, until now there has never been a straightforward narrative account of them written for the general reader, although there are many such studies of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Yet the Bourbons have been royal since 1548, when Antoine de Bourbon married the future Queen of Navarre. They have occupied the thrones of France and Navarre, of Spain, of the two Sicilies, of Parma and Piacenza, and of Lucca. Today there is again a Bourbon King in Spain, while a Bourbon Grand Duke reigns in Luxembourg. They are best known, however, as the mighty dynasty which once ruled France.
The Bourbons ruled their homeland for over two centuries, making it the greatest power in Europe, and taming and uniting a people who are arguably the most individualist and ungovernable in the world. The France of Louis XIV overawed even her most jealous neighbours, while the France of his successors, her predominance gone, charmed and inspired them by her civilization. The Bourbon Kings were the personification of both this grandeur and this seduction.
As Nancy Mitford said, there has seldom been a dull Bourbon. They emerge from a shadowy line of medieval princes of the blood—sons of St Louis but very far from the throne—with Henri IV. The founder of the dynasty, with his infectious gaiety and his sixty-four mistresses, is still a folk hero to the French, a mighty fighter and drinker. His enigmatic son Louis XIII was in complete contrast—lonely, morose and neurotic yet brilliantly successful in his partnership with Cardinal Richelieu. Louis XIV, the Grand Monarque with his ‘red heels and his golden snuff-box and his towering periwig’, was worshipped at Versailles almost as a living idol and was one of the strangest and most remarkable kings who ever lived. Louis XV remains the most baffling of all French monarchs, intensely secretive and solitary; to at least one historian he is the most evil man ever to sit on a throne, directly responsible for the French Revolution; to another a seriously underestimated ruler who, had he lived longer, might have saved the monarchy.
Louis XVI came nearest to being a dull Bourbon, though with a consort, Marie Antoinette, who more than compensated for any dullness. But during the Revolution even Louis XVI became a figure of compelling interest, with his refusal to save himself by shedding his people’s blood and then the martyrdom in which he was soon joined by his beautiful Queen. They were followed by their son, the pitiful Louis XVII who died in prison as a lonely, diseased little boy.
The Bourbons did not come to an end with the Revolution, but the Kings of the French Restoration are practically unknown to the general reader. Yet Louis XVIII, who gave France her first workable Parliamentary regime, is probably the most unappreciated of all French rulers. His brother, the charming but inept Charles X, who finally lost the throne, was also the King who commissioned six operas from Rossini, including William Tell, and refused to ban Victor Hugo’s Hernani. Nor is it generally realized that a hundred years ago it seemed not merely possible but inevitable that the French would restore the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Charles X’s grandson, Henri V; in the early 1870s both the President of France and the majority in the National Assembly were united in wishing to summon home the last member of the dynasty to be their King.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the French under the Ancien Régime: ‘Their feeling for the King was unlike that of any modern nation for its monarch, even the most absolute; indeed that ancient loyalty which was so thoroughly eradicated by the Revolution has become almost incomprehensible to the modern mind. The King’s subjects felt towards him both the natural love of children for their father and the awe properly due to God alone.’ The winning of that loyalty, the loss of it and the failure to regain it, are the theme of this book.