After the fall of Robespierre, he was recalled to the Convention, when he was instrumental in bringing Carrier and the others responsible for the Noyades of Nantes to justice. His influence was now considerable; he was elected a member of the Committee of the Constitution, president of the Assembly, and member of the Committee of Public Safety, against the overgrown power of which he had in earlier days protested. His hatred of the Mountain had not made him reactionary; he was soon regarded as one of the mainstays of the “Jacobins,” and La Sentinelle reappeared, under his auspices, preaching union among republicans. Under the Directory (1795) he was elected a member of the Council of Five Hundred, of which he was secretary, and also a member of the Institute. Meanwhile he had returned to his old trade and set up a bookseller’s shop in the Palais Royal. But, in spite of the fact that he had once more denounced the Jacobins in La Sentinelle, his name had become identified with all that the combative spirits of the jeunesse dorée most disliked; his shop was attacked by the “young men” with cries of “À bas la Loupe, à bas la belle Lodoïska, à bas les gardes du corps de Louvet!” he and his wife were insulted in the streets and the theatres: “À bas les Louvets et les Louvetants!” and he was compelled to leave Paris. The Directory appointed him to the consulship at Palermo, but he died on the 25th of August 1797 before taking up his post.
In 1795 Louvet published a portion of his Memoirs under the title of Quelques notices pour l’histoire et le récit de mes périls depuis le 31 mai 1793. They were mainly written in the various hiding-places in which Louvet took refuge, and they give a vivid picture of the sufferings of the proscribed Girondists. They form an invaluable document for the study of the psychology of the Revolution; for in spite of their considerable literary art, they are artless in their revelation of the mental and moral state of their author, a characteristic type of the honest, sentimental, somewhat hysterical and wholly unbalanced minds nurtured on the abstractions of the philosophes. The first complete edition of the Mémoires de Louvet de Couvrai, edited, with preface, notes and tables, by F. A. Aulard, was published at Paris in 1889.
LOUVIERS, a town of north-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Eure, 17½ m. S.S.E. of Rouen by road. Pop. (1906) 9449. Louviers is pleasantly situated in a green valley surrounded by wooded hills, on the Eure, which here divides into several branches. The old part of the town, built of wood, stands on the left bank of the river; the more modern portions, in brick and hewn stone, on the right. There are spacious squares, and the place is surrounded by boulevards. The Gothic church of Notre-Dame has a south portal which ranks among the most beautiful works of the kind produced in the 15th century; it contains fine stained glass of the 15th and 16th centuries and other works of art. The hôtel-de-ville, a large modern building, contains a museum and library. The chief industry is cloth and flannel manufacture. There are wool-spinning and fulling mills, thread factories and manufactories of spinning and weaving machinery, and enamel ware; leather-working, dyeing, metal-founding and bell-founding are also carried on. The town is the seat of a sub-prefect and has a court of first instance, a tribunal of commerce, a chamber of arts and manufactures, and a council of trade arbitrators.
Louviers (Lovera) was originally a villa of the dukes of Normandy and in the middle ages belonged to the archbishops of Rouen; its cloth-making industry first arose in the beginning of the 13th century. It changed hands once and again during the Hundred Years’ War, and from Charles VII. it received extensive privileges, and the title of Louviers le Franc for the bravery of its inhabitants in driving the English from Pont de l’Arche, Verneuil and Harcourt. It passed through various troubles successively at the period of the League of the Public Weal under Louis XI., in the religious wars (when the parlement of Rouen sat for a time at Louviers) and in the wars of the Fronde.
See G. Petit, Hist. de Louviers (Louviers, 1877).
LOUVOIS, FRANÇOIS MICHEL LE TELLIER, Marquis de (1641-1691), French statesman, war minister of Louis XIV., was born at Paris on the 18th of January 1641. His father, Michel le Tellier (q.v.), married him to an heiress, the marquise de Courtenvaux, and instructed him in the management of state business. The young man won the king’s confidence, and in 1666 he succeeded his father as war minister. His talents were perceived by Turenne in the war of Devolution (1667-68), who gave him instruction in the art of providing armies. After the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louvois devoted himself to organizing the French army. The years between 1668 and 1672, says Camille Rousset, “were years of preparation, when Lionne was labouring with all his might to find allies, Colbert to find money, and Louvois soldiers for Louis.” The work of Louvois in these years is bound up with the historical development of the French army and of armies in general (see [Army]). Here need only be mentioned Louvois’s reorganization of the military orders of merit, his foundation of the Hôtel des Invalides, and the almost forcible enrolment of the nobility and gentry of France, in which Louvois carried out part of Louis’s measures for curbing the spirit of independence by service in the army or at court. The success of his measures is to be seen in the victories of the great war of 1672-78. After the peace of Nijmwegen Louvois was high in favour, his father had been made chancellor, and the influence of Colbert was waning. The ten years of peace between 1678 and 1688 were distinguished in French history by the rise of Madame de Maintenon, the capture of Strassburg and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in all of which Louvois bore a prominent part. The surprise of Strassburg in 1681 in time of peace was not only planned but executed by Louvois and Monclar. A saving clause in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which provided for some liberty of conscience, if not of worship, Louvois sharply annulled with the phrase “Sa majesté veut qu’on fasse sentir les dernières rigueurs à ceux qui ne voudront pas se faire de sa religion.” He claimed also the credit of inventing the dragonnades, and mitigated the rigour of the soldiery only in so far as the licence accorded was prejudicial to discipline. Discipline, indeed, and complete subjection to the royal authority was the political faith of Louvois. Colbert died in 1683, and had been replaced by Le Pelletier, an adherent of Louvois, in the controller-generalship of finances, and by Louvois himself in his ministry for public buildings, which he took that he might be the minister able to gratify the king’s two favourite pastimes, war and building. Louvois was able to superintend the successes of the first years of the war of the League of Augsburg, but died suddenly of apoplexy after leaving the king’s cabinet on July 16, 1691. His sudden death caused a suspicion of poison. Louvois was one of the greatest of the rare class of great war ministers. French history can only point to Carnot as his equal. Both had to organize armies out of old material on a new system, both were admirable contrivers of campaigns, and both devoted themselves to the material well-being of the soldiers. In private life and in the means employed for gaining his ends, Louvois was unscrupulous and shameless.
The principal authority for Louvois’s life and times is Camille Rousset’s Histoire de Louvois (Paris, 1872), a great work founded on the 900 volumes of his despatches at the Depôt de la Guerre. Saint Simon from his class prejudices is hardly to be trusted, but Madame de Sévigné throws many side-lights on his times. Testament politique de Louvois (1695) is spurious.