Some notes about Louis XVI's upbringing:
With the king washing his hands of his grandchildren's education, the dauphin asked their governor, La Vauguyon to suggest preceptors and do a little teaching himself. It is said that La Vauguyon got the job by bribing a valet to find out what the dauphin was currently reading so that he could casually drop references to it. La Vauguyon's contribution consisted mostly of nauseous pieties. He wrote an 'abbreviated summary of the virtues' of the duc de Bourgogne, skipping over his faults and placing in his mouth words that surely even that hypocritical little boy could never have had the effrontery to utter on his deathbed: 'Here I am like a second paschal lamb ready to be immolated for The Lord.' Berry was meant to meditate on his brother's said virtues. In 1763 La Vauguyon drew up a general plan for Berry's education but it was so stuffed with pieties and flatteries that it proved too much even for the dauphin, who, to his credit, opted for a more practical education. In some ways it was quite up -to -date, with due attention to the sciences at which Berry excelled.
Thirty years ago this would have been a controversial statement. How could Louis XVI have 'excelled' at anything except hunting and ironwork? He was a dullard – how else could he have thrown away his throne when George III of England rose to an equal challenge. However, a re-assessment of Louis XVI's general abilities was initiated when Madame Girault de Coursac performed an imaginative reconstruction of the boy's homework. Her conclusion was that, in contrast to the traditional view of Louis-Auguste as a dull and lazy boy, he was a precocious child and was particularly adept at 'science' subjects such as mathematics, physics and geography. Her claims are based on her attempt to recreate his lessons using the publications of his tutors. In 1768, when Louis-Auguste was fourteen, Le Blonde dedicated his
Éléments d'Algèbre to his royal pupil, writing in the preface: … the pleasure you found in the solution of the majority of the problems it contains and the ease with which you grasped the key to their solution are new proofs of your intelligence and the excellence of your judgement …' The
Éléments d'Algèbre contains linear simultaneous equations, quadratic equations, the concept of real and imaginary numbers, and progressions and series. The Abbé Nollet, in the preface to
L'Art des expériences of 1770, the basis of his university course of experimental physics, claims a similar degree of comprehension for the royal dedicatee. Unfortunately, Madame de Coursac does not discount the degree of flattery necessarily involved in such dedications, though, to be credible, flattery must bear some relationship to truth – it would have been an impressive thing for the boy to have been set the problems, regardless of whether he had solved them.
We are, though, able to control and modify Coursac's verdict using other evidence. The dauphin was not one to overrate his son's abilities. Indeed he felt it necessary to obtain reassurance from a Jesuit proto-psychologist that his son's apparent backwardness resulted from shyness and deliberate reserve. Watching the three boys, Berry, Provence and Artois, playing, the priest observed that, though Berry lacked the vivacity and gracious manners of his siblings, he was in no wise inferior 'as to the solidity of his judgement and his good heart'.
9 The dauphin's relief betrayed his lack of faith in his son, but he revised his opinion when he wrote to his friend, the bishop of Nancy, 'Berry is making great progress in Latin and astonishing progress in history which he learns through facts and chronologies which is the best way for him, given his admirable memory. Provence's progress is even greater given his natural talent and you would never believe how many Latin words he had crammed into his skull in a month!'
10 (The dauphin personally examined the boys in Latin and history
Some objective confirmation of Berry's mathematical abilities comes from his skill in cartography, which has always been generally acknowledged. His tutor in geography was Philippe Buache, the leading cartographer of the day, who specialized in oceanic exploration. Louis was an adept and enthusiastic pupil and would always have a map-in-progress on his table throughout his reign. As dauphin he made a splendid map of the environs of Versailles, which is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
11 To make this Louis would have had to understand the mathematics behind scale and projection. Likewise, some of the problems Le Blonde claimed Louis solved involved compound interest on loans. Louis understood this matter as king, as well as the effects of inflation
12 and market forces.
13
Thus far Louis-Auguste's education was similar to that to be had by anyone whose parents were able to employ the best private tutors; but it was considered necessary to train a future king more specifically in his métier. Louis-Auguste's training in the theory of kingship is summarized in
Les Réflexions sur mes entretiens avec M. de La Vauguyon, on which he started work when he was thirteen. Following a suggestion of the dauphin's, La Vauguyon asked Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, and the Jesuit Berthier to draw up some maxims concerning kingship. Moreau, who can be called the philosopher of the
dévots, if that is not a contradiction in terms, would have the post of historiographer royal created for him in 1774 by his pupil, then the new king. La Vauguyon next discussed the maxims thoroughly with his royal pupil, who, between 1767 and 1769, condensed them into thirty-three 'reflections'. These have been in the public domain since their publication in 1851.
14 While far too much has been made of them, both as an assessment of Louis-Auguste's abilities or as pointers to the policies he would pursue as king, the lad did a competent job of mastering and summarising the texts, albeit without the sparkle or verbal felicity of his brother, Provence. It has rightly been said that Louis-Auguste's 'reflections' are 'banal', though the banality lies as much in the original as the commentary on these hopelessly outdated 'pastorals on paternal monarchy'.
15 One of the reflections, however – that entitled 'On my faults' – is significant: 'My greatest fault is a sluggishness of mind which renders mental efforts wearisome and painful. I want absolutely to conquer this defect and after I have done so, as I hope to … I shall cultivate the good things which are said to be in me'.
16
This shows self-knowledge – much of the erudition Louis-Auguste was to achieve derived from a sense of duty rather than one of pleasure – but also self-deprecation, for there were subjects for which he showed natural aptitude and from which he derived considerable pleasure. These were practical ones: not the amateur blacksmithing for which he was and is pilloried and for which he showed no particular talent, rather the natural sciences, geography, history and languages.
In any case, the material on which the boy had to reflect was hardly calculated to stimulate a thirst for abstract reasoning. However, another work of Moreau's did have an immense influence on the future king. Indeed,
Les Devoirs du prince has been called (with some exaggeration) 'a blueprint for the reign of Louis XVI'.
17
Moreau's
Les Devoirs du prince certainly has its fair share of rhapsodizing about paternal monarchy and has little purchase on the modern mind – and, most likely, neither did it capture that of Louis-Auguste. For example, the king's legislative role is compared with that of Moses, and the ten commandments are given almost
in extenso. However, halfway through the book Moreau forgets that he is a half-baked
publiciste and remembers that he has worked with the dauphin in the struggle to take the propaganda fight to the
parlementaires (he would assist the chancellor Maupeou in implementing his reforms in 1771). In short, like the dauphin, Moreau thought that Louis XV, by letting his position go undefended, was selling the pass.
18 In 1766 Louis XV did, briefly, re-assert his authority in what has become known as the
séance de flagellation, letting the
parlement feel the edge of his tongue for encroaching on his sovereign authority. The heart of that speech had been written by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, a brilliant classical scholar at the time beginning his career in the royal administration as a
maître des requêtes, presenting reports to the royal council. Moreau, who had lent Calonne archival material for his report, considered it to be 'the strongest one that has ever been written against the
parlements'.
19 The closeness of Moreau's and Calonne's views and their cumulative impact on Louis XVI would be manifested in the programme Calonne as finance minister presented to the Assembly of Notables in 1787.
Moreau defined sovereignty in a way that was relevant to present conflicts. The idea of royal sovereignty went back to Bodin in the sixteenth century, if not before, and had been echoed in the old texts, but Moreau defined it in relation to disputes with the
parlement. He emphasized that the essence of sovereignty was legislative self-sufficiency. Power was not shared, because French kings were 'clothed in an absolute power for which they are responsible only to God'.
20 In the Moreau-inspired
séance de flagellation, Louis XV had declared, 'legislative power belongs to me unfettered and undivided'. Legislative power therefore remained the bedrock of Louis XVI's beliefs: in June 1791, in the episode known as the flight to Varennes, he fled Paris to raise his standard in defence of his legislative powers.
So far, so conventional – anyone in the
dévot circle would have held similar beliefs. But Moreau was not a typical member of the parti
dévot and he carried the implications of legislative supremacy to regions which would have made them quake: state law could override both customary laws and fiscal privilege, however time-honoured. This was the essence of Calonne's 1787 programme, which Louis XVI embraced wholeheartedly.
So Moreau provides the key to one of the enigmas concerning Louis XVI: why did this conservative,
dévot-reared monarch embark on the royal revolution of 1787 which both trailed and led to the larger Revolution of 1789? In
Les Devoirs du prince can be found, in embryo, much of the 1787 programme. In particular, Moreau eloquently expounds the central tenet that all classes of society should pay a strict proportion of their wealth regardless of social privilege. This was a question not only of natural justice, which the kings were traditionally meant to uphold, but also of simple economics: if the peasants paid so much tax that they had literally to eat their seed corn, there would be no crop to tax next year and the economy would stagnate. This idea made central the importance of agriculture, a centrality which was exaggerated by the eponymous
Économistes, otherwise known as the Physiocrats.
Neither Moreau nor Calonne was a fully -fledged Physiocrat, but they did believe in their central tenet that land is the basis of all wealth. Moreau thought that the best form of direct tax was one 'levied on landed properties which is itself a fixed percentage of their product'. He added that taxation of individuals rather than their property was nearly always unjust.
21 Some of the elements of physiocracy can actually be derived from the pastorals on paternal monarchy of Fénélon and Bossuet; St Louis, dispensing justice under an oak tree, would have wanted fair assessments had general taxation existed in his time. So would Moses. But Moreau was able to translate this into a modern programme and make the application of justice less abstract; thus Louis-Auguste was able to find in the
Devoirs a relevance which in the old texts had eluded him. If there had not been this dynamic paradox within Louis XVI, the
dévot-philosophe, the years of his reign would have been as placid as his external demeanour.
Just as paradoxical as his political thinking was Louis-Auguste's attitude towards England, which can be described most succinctly using the hackneyed phrase 'a love-hate relationship'. It was a relationship that had as an obvious consequence the war against England which resulted in American independence and the near-bankrupting of France; but it also resulted in the harder to demonstrate influence of English political institutions on France. In any effort to explore this influence, a good starting point is Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas, who was appointed naval minister in 1723 but had been dismissed and exiled to his estates in 1749 for circulating scurrilous verses about Madame de Pompadour. Despite, or rather because of this, Maurepas continued to enjoy the confidence of the young court centred on the dauphin. Maurepas was also a personal friend of La Vauguyon, who turned to him to provide tutors for his charges. This was a stroke of fortune for Maurepas, who, by placing his protégés about the future king, was able to mitigate the loss of influence and contacts which were the purpose of internal exile. This is the simplest explanation of why Louis XVI made him his chief minister.
