The Nuttall Encyclopædia / Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge

by P. Austin Nuttall

[Louis VI., le Gros] (i. e. the Fat), was son of Philip I.; was associated in the royal power with his father from 1098 to 1108, and sole king from 1108 till 1137; in his struggle against the great vassals he, by the help of the clergy and the bourgeois, centralised the government in the crown; had trouble with Henry I. of England as Lord Superior of Normandy, and was defeated by him in battle in 1119; under his reign the burgesses achieved their independence, and though he did nothing to initiate the movement he knew how to profit from the achievement in the interest of the monarchy.

[Louis VII., the Young], son of the preceding, married Eleanor of Aquitaine; took part in the second crusade; on his return divorced his queen for her profligacy in his absence, who married Henry II. of England, and brought with her as dowry to Henry the richest provinces of France, which gave rise to the Hundred Years' War (1120-1180).

[Louis VIII., the Lion], son of Philip Augustus; offered by the barons of England the crown of England, he was crowned at London in 1216, but defeated at Lincoln next year, he was obliged to recross the Channel; became king of France in 1223; he took several towns from the English, and conducted a crusade against the Albigenses (1187-1226).

[Louis IX., Saint Louis], son of the preceding; was a minor at the death of his father, and the country was governed by his mother, Blanche of Castile, with a strong hand; on attaining his majority he found himself engaged with the English under Henry, who had been called on to assist certain of the great barons in revolt, but in 1242 he defeated them in three engagements; under a vow he made during a dangerous illness he became a crusader, and in 1249 landed in Egypt with 40,000 men, but in an engagement was taken prisoner by the Saracens; released in 1250 on payment of a large ransom, though he did not return home for two years after, till on hearing of the death of his mother, who had been regent during his absence; on his return he applied himself to the affairs of his kingdom and the establishment of the royal power, but undertaking a second crusade in 1270, he got as far as Tunis, where a plague broke out in the camp, and he became one of the victims, and one of his sons before him; he was an eminently good and pious man, and was canonised by Boniface VIII. in 1297 (1215-1270).

[Louis XI.], son of Charles VII., born at Bourges, of a cruel and treacherous nature, took part in two insurrections against his father, by whom he had been pardoned after the first and from whom he had to flee after the second for refuge to Burgundy, where he remained till his father's death in 1461; he signalised the commencement of his reign by severe measures against the great vassals, which provoked a revolt, headed by the Dukes of Burgundy and Bretagne, which he succeeded in subduing more by his crafty policy than force of arms; involved afterwards in a war with Charles the Bold of Burgundy and soliciting an interview, he was discovered by Charles to have been sowing treason among his subjects, taken prisoner, and only released on a solemn protestation of innocence; notwithstanding the sinister and often cruel character of his policy, he did much to develop the resources of the country and advance the cause of good government by the patronage of learning; the crimes he had committed weighed heavily on his mind towards the end of his days, and he died in great fear of death and the judgment (1423-1483).

[Louis XIII.], the son of Henry IV.; being only nine years old at the death of his father, the government was conducted by Marie de' Medicis, his mother, and at his accession the country was a prey to civil dissensions, which increased on the young king's marriage with a Spanish princess; the Huguenots rose in arms, but a peace was concluded in 1623; it was now Richelieu came to the front and assumed the reins with his threefold policy of taming the nobles, checkmating the Huguenots, and humbling the house of Austria; Rochelle, the head-quarters of the Huguenots, revolted, the English assisting them, but by the strategy adopted the city was taken and the English driven to sea; henceforth the king was nobody and the cardinal was king; the cardinal died in 1642 and the king the year after, leaving two sons, Louis, who succeeded him, and Philip, Duke of Orleans and the first of his line (1601-1644).

[Louis XIV.], the "Grand Monarque," son of the preceding, was only nine when his father died, and the government was in the hands of his mother, Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Mazarin, her minister; under the regency the glory of France was maintained in the field, but her internal peace was disturbed by the insubordination of the parlement and the troubles of the Fronde; by a compact on the part of Mazarin with Spain before he died Louis was married to the Infanta Maria Theresa in 1659, and in 1660 he announced his intention to rule the kingdom alone, which he did for 54 years with a decision and energy no one gave him credit for, in fulfilment of his famous protestation L'état, c'est moi, choosing Colbert to control finance, Louvois to reorganise the army, and Vauban to fortify the frontier towns; he sought to be as absolute in his foreign relations as in his internal administration, and hence the long succession of wars which, while they brought glory to France, ended in exhausting her; at home he suffered no one in religious matters to think otherwise than himself; he revoked the Edict of Nantes, sanctioned the dragonnades in the Cévennes, and to extirpate heresy encouraged every form of cruelty; yet when we look at the men who adorned it, the reign of Louis XIV. was one of the most illustrious in letters and the arts in the history of France: Corneille, Racine, and Molière eminent in the drama, La Fontaine and Boileau in poetry, Bossuet in oratory, Bruyère and Rochefoucauld in morals, Pascal in philosophy, Saint-Simon and Retz in history, and Poussin, Lorraine, Lebrun, Perault, &c., in art (1636-1715).

[Louis XV.], Bien-Aimé (i. e. Well-Beloved), great-grandson of the preceding, and only five at his death, the country during his minority being under the regency of Philip, Duke of Orleans; the regency was rendered disastrous by the failure of the Mississippi Scheme of Law and a war with Spain, caused by the rejection of a Spanish princess for Louis, and by his marriage to Maria Lesczynski, the daughter of Stanislas of Poland; Louis was crowned king in 1722 and declared of age the following year; in 1726 Cardinal Fleury, who had been his tutor, became his minister, and under him occurred the war of the succession to Poland, concluded by the treaty of Vienna, and the war of the Austrian succession, concluded by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle; with the death of his minister Louis gave way to his licentious propensities, and in all matters of state allowed himself to be swayed by unworthy favourites who pandered to his lusts, the most conspicuous among them being Madame de Pompadour and Dame de Barry, her successor in crime; under them, and the corrupt court they presided over, the country went step by step to ruin, and she was powerless to withstand the military ascendency of England, which deprived her of all her colonies both in the East and in the West; though Choiseul, his last "substantial" minister, tried hard by a family compact of the Bourbons to collect her scattered strength; the situation did not trouble Louis; "it will last all my time," he said, and he let things go; suffering from a disease contracted by vice, he was seized with confluent smallpox, and died in misery, to the relief of the nation, which could not restrain its joy (1710-1774).

[Louis XVI.], the grandson of the preceding and his successor; had in 1770 married Marie Antoinette, the youngest daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, and a woman young, beautiful, and accomplished, in high esteem for the purity of her character; his accession was hailed with enthusiasm, and he set himself to restore the ruined finances of the country by taking into his counsel those who could best advise him in her straitened state, but these one and all found the problem an impossible one, owing to the unwillingness of the nobility to sacrifice any of their privileges for the public good; this led to the summoning of the States-General in 1789, and the outbreak of the Revolution by the fall of the Bastille in July of that year; in the midst of this Louis, well-intentioned but without strength of character, was submissive to the wishes of his court and the queen, lost his popularity by his hesitating conduct, the secret support he gave to the [Emigrants] (q. v.), his attempt at flight, and by his negotiations with foreign enemies, and subjected himself to persecution at the hands of the nation; he was therefore suspended from his functions, shut up in the Temple, arraigned before the Convention, and condemned to death as "guilty of conspiracy against the liberty of the nation and a crime against the general safety of the State"; he was accordingly guillotined on the 21st January; he protested his innocence on the scaffold, but his voice was drowned by the beating of drums; he was accompanied by the Abbé Edgeworth, his confessor, who, as he laid his head on the block, exclaimed, "Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven" (1754-1793).

[Louis XVII.], second son of the preceding, shut up in the Temple, was, after the execution of his mother, proclaimed king by the Emigrants, and handed over in his prison to the care of one Simon, a shoemaker, in service about the prison, to bring him up in the principles of Sansculottism; Simon taught him to drink, dance, and sing the carmagnole; he died in prison "amid squalor and darkness," his shirt not changed for six months (1785-1796).