Episode 25: The King Is Dead

This is The Siècle, Episode 25: The King Is Dead.

In the spring of 1824, France’s ultraroyalists won a landslide victory in elections for the Chamber of Deputies: 416 deputies for the right and far-right, against just 34 for the left — down from 110 liberal seats before this election.¹

Nearly a decade prior, King Louis XVIII had dubbed another ultraroyalist-dominated parliament the Chambre introuvable, a difficult-to-translate phrase that some translators have rendered as “The Unexpected Chamber,” in the sense of “such a freakish chamber that it could never be matched.”² But now that it had in fact been matched, the pun-loving Louis came up with a new nickname for the 1824 Chamber: not the Chambre introuvable but the Chambre retrouvée, or the “Rediscovered Chamber.”³

The positive tone here reflected a change in Louis’s outlook from 1815, or perhaps a change in situation, or both. While he had clashed with and ultimately dissolved the ultraroyalist Chambre introuvable as a threat to the nation’s stability, in 1824 he worked closely with an ultraroyalist government. Louis had even reconciled with his ultraroyalist brother, the Comte d’Artois, who had often led a far-right opposition group to Louis’ own governments. The gossip at the time, as Louis accepted the ultraroyalist Villèle government from 1821 onward, was that Louis had “virtually abdicated” and that Artois was now in charge. Louis, it was said, “will see in his life what would have happened after,” once Artois took the throne.⁴

Louis Ducis, “Louis XVIII and the French royal family assisting at the return of the troops of the Spanish expedition from the balcony of the Tuileries, 1823.” Louis XVIII, seated, clasps the hand of his bowing nephew, the Duc D’Angoulême. Louis’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, stands to his left. To Angoulême’s right, his wife the Duchesse d’Angoulême holds the infant Duc de Berry. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

But there was a very real question about how long Louis’s life would last. The 68-year-old king had long been obese and in poor health, including a notable attack of gout in early 1814 that delayed his return to France after Napoleon’s first abdication.⁵ By 1820, his legs, “long afflicted by gout, gangrene and diabetes,” were effectively paralyzed, and he was moved around the palace in a wheelchair.⁶ But in the 1820s, things had clearly gotten even worse. The Duke of Wellington visited Paris in December 1822, as part of the diplomatic maneuvering around the Spanish crisis, and was shocked by Louis’s appearance. Wellington wrote,

Before I went to the King, I had heard that His Majesty was of late much altered, but I am much concerned to have to inform you that I found him more altered than I had expected. From his appearance I should suppose that he had had a paralytic attack. One of his Majesty’s eyes was more closed than the other and his head, which was in a great degree sunk upon his chest, inclined to one side.⁷

But Wellington noted that the king maintained his mental faculties, even if he did seem less focused than previously. Louis still met with his ministers and was involved in policy — Artois, ostensibly the king-in-all-but-name, was still left depending on gossip to find out what had happened in meetings of the king’s ministers.⁸

Above: Thomas Lawrence, “Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington,” 1814. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

At this time, the two most important of those ultraroyalist ministers were the Comte de Villèle, the dour but effective finance minister and prime minister, and François-René de Chateaubriand, the celebrated author who was serving as foreign minister. I talked about both men, including their roles in bringing about the 1823 French intervention in Spain, back in Episode 18.

“The last wound of the Revolution”

Louis had one major policy he wanted his ministers to get passed for him while he was still alive. He wanted to heal the so-called “last wound of the Revolution,” the property that had been seized from nobles by revolutionary governments, and then re-sold to ordinary people. We talked about these so-called biens nationaux all the way back in Episode 1, where they contributed to the instability of Louis’s government in 1814. Many ultraroyalists believed the country should re-confiscate the biens nationaux and return them to their original owners — a plan fiercely opposed, as you might expect, by the roughly 10 percent of France that owned some of this property. The belief that Louis’s government might interfere with the biens nationaux had made many people open to alternative governments, an openness Louis had tried to counter by loudly insisting he had no intention of doing so.⁹

By 1824 he still wasn’t about to re-confiscate the biens nationaux, as much as some ultraroyalists still wanted to. But he thought something needed to be done about the situation, since the agitation by nobles and clergy to recover their seized property never ceased to rile up the current owners of the property. Louis’s solution: pay the émigrés off.

Specifically, Louis proposed to use state funds to compensate former émigrés for the land that had been seized from them. The idea was that this was both right to do, and also practical — once the émigrés had been compensated, they’d stop agitating to get their old land back, making not only them happier, but also the current owners of the biens nationaux who would now be more secure in their property.

Below: François Séraphin Delpech, after Jean Sébastien Rouillard, “Jean-Baptiste Guillaume Joseph, comte de Villèle,” c. 1815-1825. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

But giving an estimated billion francs in taxpayer money to the generally wealthy aristocracy was, unsurprisingly, controversial — even before you got to the plan to pay for the so-called “milliard des émigrés, or “émigrés’ billion.” Louis’s prime minister, the Comte de Villèle, thought he had the perfect solution: refinance the national debt.

France in 1824 owed nearly 4 billion francs in sovereign debt, and much of that was owed to its own citizens, in the form of bonds paying 5 percent interest. These bonds were common investment opportunities, featuring both in the portfolios of wealthy investors and as pensions for craftsmen or servants.¹⁰ In the unstable years after Waterloo, these bonds had originally traded at a steep discount, as low as 60 percent of their face value, to compensate buyers for the risk that France might go bankrupt. But renewed stability and balanced budgets had restored confidence in the kingdom’s finances, and by 1824, French bonds were back up to face value.¹¹ With all that in mind, Villèle thought it was fair to give the bondholders a bit of a haircut, and to cut the interest rate on these bonds from 5 percent to 3 percent — saving the French government 28 million francs per year.¹²

There wasn’t anything tyrannical about that. The French government had the legal right to call these 5 percent back, either for their value or for a new, less-lucrative bond.¹³ But that didn’t mean that the French bondholders were happy about seeing their income slashed by 40 percent, even without considering how controversial paying off the émigrés was.

The bill to convert the French bonds passed the Chamber of Deputies narrowly. Many of the elected deputies there derived their income primarily through rural landholdings, and so weren’t necessarily opposed to harming bondholders — especially since these landowners resented the fact that government bonds were tax-exempt, unlike land. Bond investments, one deputy said in the debates, “enjoyed all the advantages: it produced substantial interest, its principal was always available, and yet it did not pay any tax.”¹⁴

But the bill had to pass the Chamber of Peers, too, and the Peers proved another matter altogether. For one thing, many of its members had been appointed by Louis during more liberal phases of the Restoration, with backgrounds under Napoleon’s empire rather than the ancien régime. These nouveau aristocrats looked dimly on paying off the émigrés.¹⁵

On top of that, many of the peers who did support the émigré payoff had selfish reasons to be fiercely opposed to paying for it by converting bonds. Almost all the peers owned large amounts of bonds, and some of them had large shares of their fortunes tied up in them. Similarly, the Catholic Church was also a huge bondholder, which was of particular importance to the various bishops sitting in the chamber. A 40 percent reduction in bond revenue was therefore met with much skepticism among the peers — though in public debates, they tended to highlight instead the risks to small bondholders, such as poor widows relying on their investment income to survive.¹⁶

As such, despite strong pressure from Louis and his ministry, passage of the bond conversion was by no means assured. Making things worse, Louis’s ministry was not in fact all applying strong pressure to pass the bill. Conspicuously not defending it in the Chamber of Peers, where he sat, was Chateaubriand, the foreign minister. More scandalously, Chateaubriand was rumored to have spoken out against the measure in aristocratic salons; one report says Louis was given an intercepted letter in which Chateaubriand lobbied the Archbishop of Paris to vote no.¹⁷

Counter-opposition

Below: Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, “Chateaubriand Meditating on the Ruins of Rome.” After 1808. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

After the Peers rejected the bill, 128 to 94, Louis is said to have gone ballistic, saying that “Chateaubriand has betrayed us like a scamp.” The king had never particularly liked Chateaubriand, especially after the writer published an inflammatory pamphlet in 1816 condemning the dissolution of the Chambre introuvable.¹⁸ Now he got his revenge.

On June 6, Chateaubriand unsuspectingly paid a visit to the Tuileries Palace, only to be met by his secretary, bearing a note from Villèle curtly announcing that Chateaubriand had been fired. As offensive as being dismissed was, what really grated Chateaubriand was the manner of the dismissal: he had found out second-hand, with neither Louis nor Villèle having the guts to tell him to his face. Villèle later claimed there had been a mix-up, with a direct letter of dismissal being delayed by accident. But Chateaubriand wasn’t mollified. It was “a letter,” Chateaubriand wrote in his memoirs, “which we would be ashamed to address to a thieving valet whom we would throw out of the house without ceremony or remorse.”¹⁹

Louis and Villèle may have been satisfied, but they had made a dangerous enemy. Chateaubriand was popular in the aristocratic salons of Paris, where so much elite opinion was shaped, as well as with many younger ultra-royalists. He was also one of the greatest writers of the age, who meant his pen when he said he “closed my door to those who had betrayed me, … and I took up arms.”²⁰ Chateaubriand went into opposition, and brought with him “the most influential newspaper of the day,”²¹ the royalist Journal des débats, which immediately began to attack Villèle’s ministry with a venom “unparalleled in any of the liberal papers.”²² The Journal had twice the circulation of any other royalist newspaper, and now denounced Villèle’s “timid, colorless administration,” his “deception,” his “shady despotism,” his “corruption raised to a system.”²³

Chateaubriand’s defection was only the most significant turn in a fascinating development: the splintering of the ultra-royalist faction soon after they finally attained complete power in France. Villèle himself predicted such an outcome, saying that “the absence, in the chamber, of deputies representing revolutionary principles is going to break royalist solidarity… We are going to begin firing on ourselves.” Despite foreseeing this problem, however, the gifted but stubborn Villèle was not a skilled enough politician to prevent it.²⁴ And of course, there were personal issues at stake as well as political: the romantic writer and world traveller Chateaubriand and the cold, technocratic Villèle were “poorly equipped to understand or even respect each other,” as historian René Rémond writes.²⁵

Chateaubriand’s dissident faction joined another group of ultra-royalists in the so-called counter-opposition: the fire-eaters of the far right, for whom the ultra-royalist Villèle was a squishy sell-out. Dubbed “the impatient ones” for their unwillingness to compromise, these men were led by the Count de La Bourdonnaye, who had infamously declared in 1815 that the only way to root out liberals and Bonapartists was “irons, executioners and torture,” and that “As defenders of humanity, we must be ready to spill a few drops of blood in order to avoid having it run in torrents.”²⁶ The subsequent years had not mellowed La Bourdonnaye, who was dubbed the “White Jacobin” for allegedly combining the spirit of the Jacobin revolutionaries with the goals of the far right.²⁷ This far-right faction was disproportionately wealthy, noble, and former émigrés, even compared to their less extreme comrades on the right.²⁸ Villèle’s ministry still had a majority, but it was no longer as sturdy as it had once appeared.

Above: J.D. Dallet, “François-Régis de La Bourdonnaye, Comte de La Bretèche,” c. 1820s. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The king’s favorite

Against this political backdrop and his declining health, one might be tempted to assume Louis unhappy — a cantankerous, slowly dying old man. But that wouldn’t be accurate. In these twilight years, the king had acquired a new source of happiness: a 39-year-old countess named Zoë du Cayla.

Right: François Gérard, detail from “Portrait of Zoë Victoire Talon, comtesse du Cayla” 1825. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Madame du Cayla, as she was known, had first met Louis in 1817, when she was trying to arrange a separation from Monsieur de Cayla, and to keep custody of their two children. Louis was charmed by the woman — as had been her mother-in-law, who took Zoë’s side against her own son — and invited her back to see him again. “It goes without saying,” Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny notes, “that she won her suit.”²⁹ Louis continued to exchange letters with her for some time. But her big break came in 1820, when Louis was forced to part ways with his old favorite, Élie Decazes, as I discussed in Episode 14. Madame du Cayla stepped into the emotional void left by this separation, and soon the two were seeing each other once per week, where “Louis’s orders were that they should not be disturbed under any circumstances.”³⁰

The nature of this relationship has occasioned quite a bit of historical speculation. Louis’s biographer Philip Mansel’s judgment is that it probably was not a sexual relationship — “Louis,” Mansel says, was by this point “far past that.” There was probably some physical component: Contemporary court gossip sneered that Louis snorted snuff tobacco off Madame du Cayla’s bosom, and that one time the king had fallen over while fondling her, but that his valets had ignored the bell summoning them to help because of how strict Louis’s orders not to be disturbed were. (This latter story, Mansel writes, was probably true.) The king enjoyed Du Cayla’s company, and enjoyed spoiling her two children. She understood his jokes and references, and he enjoyed spending time planning the parties she hosted.³¹ Unlike some past royal mistresses, Madame du Cayla was never given apartments in the royal palace, and those private visits with the king were strictly scheduled: exactly two hours every Wednesday afternoon.³²

But on top of these personal pleasures for the old widower king, his relationship with Madame du Cayla also had an important political component. She was close to a number of prominent ultra-royalists, and worked with them to influence his feelings in their favor. For example, ultras would pass on to Madame du Cayla admiring remarks that Artois had supposedly said about the king, which she could then mention to the king as gossip. In the early years of their relationship, a chain of letters was set up whereby Villèle would meet each morning with a friend of Madame du Cayla’s, who would then write her a letter mentioning various political points. Du Cayla, then, would mention those same points in her own daily letters to the king. Her influence on national policy was probably far less than her contemporary rivals put it. But she did help bring about the reconciliation between the king and Artois. She also helped mediate the often stilted personal relationship between Louis and Villèle, who was not comfortable in court socialization; at Madame du Cayla’s prompting, Louis would shower Villèle with flattering remarks, which “meant so much” to the proud but relatively low-born minister.³³

“A king may die, but he should never be ill”

Amid all of this, Louis’s health continued to deteriorate. For years, he had been unable to walk under his own power. On Nov. 23, 1823, Louis visited Notre Dame Cathedral for a church service giving thanks for the “liberation” of Spain; the king fell asleep in the service several times, and the bandage on his bad leg came loose, dripping liquid onto the cathedral floor. It was the last time the king would be seen in public outside of the palace. In March of the next year, when Louis gave his traditional speech opening the new session of the Chamber of Deputies, he fell asleep mid-speech. Some — though not all — of Louis’s ministers tell stories of the king in this final period rambling on in council meetings about “forgotten operas of his youth.”³⁴

For most Parisians, who were not distinguished enough to gain audiences with the king in the Tuileries Palace, their principal interaction with the ailing king was during his regular carriage rides. As often as five days per week throughout his reign, Louis would be helped into a carriage, which would then travel through the streets of Paris and the surrounding countryside, surrounded by servants, guards, and a second carriage in case of a breakdown.³⁵ Victor Hugo, in his Les Misérables, describes Louis’s carriage rides as being of great interest to the people of Paris, and so regular that one could set one’s watch by it — “‘It’s two o’clock,’ they said. ‘He’s on his way back to the Tuileries.’” The rides, said Hugo — who lived in Paris during these final years of Louis’s reign, as a young royalist — were “speedy but impressive.” Louis “had a fondness for driving at a gallop,” Hugo wrote, “being unable to walk he liked to run — a cripple who would gladly have harnessed the lightning.”

The description of Louis’s carriage rides, set in December 1823 and with a faint connection to Jean Valjean’s flight from the law, mentions how onlookers could catch only a glimpse of Louis as he sped past, “a broad, firm, ruddy face, the forehead freshly powdered, a proud, hard, penetrating gaze, a cultivated smile, two large, plumed epaulettes on a bourgeois frockcoat, … and a wide blue sash over a large belly.”³⁶

But even this daily ritual was coming to an end. Louis’s final carriage ride was on August 28, 1824. “What a terrible sight the royal carriage must have been,” Mansel muses, “inside just a tiny bent form with his head on his knees.” At Louis’s final court reception, “people were appalled… to see how thin and blind and bent he was, and to hear how faint his voice had become.” But Louis forced himself to address a few words to each person there.³⁷

Louis persisted in these excruciating public events because he believed it was important to keep up appearances. He was fond of saying, “A king may die, but he should never be ill.” Such an illness would transfix the nation: “It means,” he said, “they must close the Stock Exchange and places of amusement; my sufferings will be protracted, and I do not want public interests to suffer for such a length of time.”³⁸ Louis and his entire court persisted in this charade until Sept. 11, 1824, when Madame du Cayla was prevailed upon by Louis’s family to broach the hard subject of his now imminent death. The king agreed to take last rites, and on Sept. 12, the king was put down onto what everyone knew was his death bed.³⁹ The official newspaper, the Moniteur, published a collection of rare front-page announcements from the king’s household.

St. Denis — Givet

The first, dated 6 a.m. on Sept. 12, announced for the first time to the public that, “The King’s chronic and long-seated infirmities have become sensibly worse for some time past, his health has been very considerably impaired and his condition necessitates more frequent consultations.” Louis, the notice read, had hoped “that he might be restored to his usual state of health; but the fact cannot now be disguised that his strength has declined considerably and that the hopes entertained are less likely to be realised.”

The second, dated 9 p.m., was even more concerning. “The fever has increased during the day,” it read. “The lower limbs have become extremely cold. Weakness and lethargy have also increased, and the pulse has become very weak and irregular.”⁴⁰

Louis’s fear had come to pass: as he went to his deathbed, the stock exchange and theaters were closed down until further notice, and prayers for his health were ordered in every parish in the country. A huge crowd gathered outside the palace, keeping a silent vigil as Louis slowly died.

Below: The royal necropolis at the Basilica of Saint Denis. Photo by Wikimedia user Ninaras, Jan. 11, 2016. CC BY 4.0

Despite his physical decline — the gross details of which I will tuck away in a footnote at thesiecle.com/episode25⁴¹ — Louis retained some key aspects of his character up until the end. There was his “inflexible regard for his dignity,” as when he lectured his doctor for ordering attendants to “take off his shirt” instead of to “take off His Majesty’s shirt.” And there was his lifelong love of bad puns. On one of these final days, the king was asked to give the watchword and password for the palace guards, as per usual. The dying king gave his two responses: “St. Denis — Givet.” St. Denis is the name of a basilica in the Parisian suburbs, and Givet is a French city near the border of what is today Belgium. But the Basilica of St. Denis was also the famous burial place of French kings, and “Givet” sounds like the phrase “j’y vais,” French for “I’m going there.”⁴²

At 4 a.m. on Sept. 16, 1824, Louis XVIII of France died in his palace. surrounded by priests, his family, and a host of courtiers.⁴³ He was 68 years old, and had ruled France for 10 years — or for 29 years, if, as Louis insisted, you dated his reign from the death of his brother’s son, the uncrowned Louis XVII, back in 1795, two decades before Louis would finally assume the throne.

Charles Abraham Chasselat, Louis XVIII lies in state in the Tuileries Palace, September 1824. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

And now we rate him

So what are we to make of King Louis XVIII? He’s a surprisingly tricky figure to pin down.

On the one hand, Louis obviously suffers immensely — then and now — in comparison to the man he twice succeeded on the French throne. Napoleon was an era-defining figure, one of the most important and most famous people in history. Even Louis’s greatest admirers would be forced to concede that he wasn’t.

On the other hand, Napoleon, while reshaping France and Europe, was also responsible for tremendous amounts of bloodshed and chaos. Napoleon was an autocrat who ran roughshod over electoral institutions, while Louis — despite his clashes with the Chambre introuvable — largely worked with the parliaments France’s voters sent him, whether they were liberal or royalist in coloring. Should Louis’s lack of aggression really count against him so much? It all depends on what you value in a ruler.

More broadly, there’s the question of Louis’s regime itself. How harshly should we judge him for those mistakes of the first year, the ones that helped lead to Napoleon reclaiming the throne for the Hundred Days? As I said at the very beginning of Episode 1, Louis had spent much of his life trying to retake his throne, and he blew it all in less than a year. On the other hand, perhaps those early mistakes wouldn’t have been so devastating had the Allies not exiled Napoleon so Elba, so tantalizingly close to the French coast.

Below: Michel Marigny after François Gérard, “Louis XVIII meditates on the Charter, seated at his table in the Tuileries Palace,” c. 1824. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Looked at from one view, Louis pursued a noble goal as king: reconciling a country divided by a generation of trauma and strife. And by the time he died, he appeared to have largely succeeded. France was stable and at peace. It had a balanced budget, peace with its neighbors, and had even managed to regain some of France’s international prestige after a regime that began with France occupied and humiliated. The Charter he gave France helped strike a balance between old and new, and will endure for a surprisingly long time as France’s constitution.

From another point of view, Louis had been placed on his throne by foreign invaders, and then after losing it, had it happen again. His was a regime born in national defeat, and upheld by repression — dramatically in the 1815 White Terror and the 1822 Carbonari uprisings, and consistently throughout by a pervasive network of secret police, informers, and agents provocateur. His vaunted respect for French parliaments might mean less when you remember that only the richest 1 percent of Frenchmen had the right to vote — an electorate made even more exclusionary by 1820’s “Law of the Double Vote,” which let the super-rich have an even bigger say in electing parliament than the ordinary voters. And even these elections were hardly what we today would call free and fair, with aggressive government interference to try to elect favored candidates.

So should we see Louis as a tyrant, or as a comparatively benevolent monarch? As the king who tried to bring back the ancien régime after a generation of enlightenment? Or as the king who preserved most of the past generation’s reforms, bridging the old order and the new?

Whichever side you come down on, there’s one accomplishment no one can take away from Louis: he died on the throne, still king of France.

That’s more than can be said for Louis’s older brother, Louis XVI. Or for Napoleon. In fact — spoiler alert — Louis XVIII is the last French monarch ever to die while still ruling. Every subsequent king or emperor will finish out their days in exile, having been driven out by revolution or military defeat. Whatever his faults, Louis avoided that fate. Given France’s turbulent politics since 1789, that’s quite the accomplishment.

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My thanks again to all of you for listening to and supporting the show. I’m especially grateful to those of you who back me on Patreon, supporting me for as little as a dollar a month. Your support pays for my hosting costs, helps me buy a continuous stream of new books, and maybe one day, when all of, you know, this, is over, might help me conduct some hands-on research for the show in France itself. Quite a lot of you have signed on since I last thanked new patrons, so thank you to: députés Josh Hisley, Leo Tihinen, Richard Hatfield, Avery, Carl Thomas, Mehmet Baran, Rosa, Sean Hirschten, Graham Linn, Grace Riley, Gabriel Spaeti, Alastair Whyte, Erik McDonald, Evelyn Browne, Robert Woodley and Henry Parker, and my new backers at the sénateur level: Thomas Casey, Tim Nelson, Daniel Kleinsorge and Robert Hall. (My apologies again for any of the names I mangled there.) If you’d like to join them, you can learn more about how to support the show at thesiecle.com/support.

I’d also like to thank the anonymous backer who bought me a copy of the book Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work, because yes, there are episodes coming on French culture during this period as well as French politics. If you sent me this, let me know, so I can thank you properly!

In the meantime, I’m curious as to your thoughts. You’ve listened to 25-plus episodes of The Siècle so far, all set during the reign of King Louis XVIII. Now he’s finally dead. So I want to hear from you as to how you judge him as a king of France. Visit @thesiecle on Twitter, or facebook.com/thesiecle, and let me know your verdict!

And stay tuned for some exciting future episodes of The Siècle. Louis XVIII is dead, which means his brother, the Comte d’Artois, is in line to inherit the French throne. But before he does, we’re going to take a step back and revisit the events of the past 10 years through the eyes of the man about to become King Charles X of France, but who for years has been known by a more commonplace honorific. Join me next time in The Siècle, Episode 26: Monsieur.