With the image of this erased birth, the childhood of the future king proceeded in the shade of his/her big brother, the duke of Burgundy, Dauphin shining, capricious and authoritative which monopolized all the love of his/her parents. All intended, indeed, the duke of Burgundy to being a king. The fate decided some differently, since the Dolphin died out at Easter 1761, at the ten years age. Louis XV and the parents of the Dolphin did not comfort this loss. The duke of Berry, from now on direct heir to the throne after his father, did not profit for all that a renewal family affection.  

The education of the king
The new Dolphin was all the more forsaken by his/her parents that all in its person was ungrateful. Morbid, already large at twenty years, afflicted with a prognathism which it held of its Habsbourg ancestors, it was of gloomy mood and showed leaning worrying for loneliness. This difficulty of communicating was still reinforced by an austere education, haunted by the crushing memory of exceptional qualities of the late brother. The duke of Vauguyon, governor of the children of the House of France, endeavoured to teach a quite traditional program to him, mixture of humanities, morals and religion. Of this education, the future Louis XVI kept a great piety, a taste pronounced for the study (it had several languages, of solid knowledge in the fields geographical, scientific and maritime), but its principal defect remained its incapacity to make a decision. On the other hand, it exulted in the pleasures of hunting and remained of long hours, only, in its workshop above its apartment to exert its manual talents, to forge locks.  

An unhappy marriage
By its marriage finally, the Dolphin still knew the bad luck and disgrace. Held by the requirements of the foreign policy, Louis XV decided to marry the future king with Marie-Antoinette, girl of the Marie-Therese empress, in order to reinforce free-Austrian alliance. The union was celebrated in 1770, but was consumed with sorrow by Louis XVI in 1773, even in 1777 only. The subject became pretext with mockery, and the king, taking into consideration this marital fiasco, was well quickly suspecté of impotence. Added to a hesitant behavior, these railleuses plots contributed to forge the image of a weak king, operates by an “Austrian” Marie-Antoinette to want the good of the kingdom too much. The facts however were not so simple.

A difficult heritage

The last years of the reign of Louis XV had been remembered by a resumption in energetic hand of the levers of the power. This policy, which brought in the fields legal and financial of the daring reforms and attacked the privileges of the aristocracy and the members of Parliament, illustrated however, with the eyes of a dissatisfied and morose public opinion, the despotism of a rejected king. When, on on May 10th, 1774, Louis XV died out, the advent of the young person Louis XVI caused by contrast of many hopes.  

Between conservatives and reformists
The resumption in hand of the kingdom supposed from the start which one showed will. Since the middle of the century, a preserving coalition, represented in the Parliaments, at the court, in the Church and within the governmental bureaucracy, was especially worried to defend its privileges vis-a-vis the reforming projects of monarchy. This opposition claimed to affirm its political prerogatives and to close the rows of the orders privileged with the newcomers of the middle-class. In addition, the transformations of the company related to the economic growth of the century, the aspirations of part of the elites of the third state, the diffusion of the ideals of the Lights nourished the will of reform and made the opposition to progress difficult. Between these two poles, it was necessary for monarchy tact and determination.  

The way was all the more narrow as the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI marked the end of a long economic clearing (1720-1770). The recession was going to make more delicate the payment of the budget deficit of monarchy and more extreme the question of the tax. To cleanse finances, it was necessary to widen the number of the taxpayers and to attack the special fiscal advantages. The preserving positions of the members of Parliament prohibited any institutional modification and left of another choice only one preliminary reform of the Parliaments. Such was already the direction of the policy of Louis XV and Maupeou.

Whereas Louis XVI claimed to give himself the means of reforming his kingdom, it restored with the preserving noblesse de robe its prestige and its political weapon, the right of remonstrance. Maupeou, disgraced, understood it well while writing: “I had saved with the king a lawsuit which had lasted for three centuries, if he wants to still lose it, he is well the Master.”  

The failure of Turgot
Between Lights and tradition, this contradictory policy was dictated by the preoccupation with a popularity of the young monarch and by its ideas of aristocrat conformist. On the whole, the reign of Louis XVI was going to be a succession of backings vis-a-vis the essential reforms. Turgot, the first, suffered from royal inconstancies. In the economic domain, it founded the freedom of the trade and freedom of movement of the grains (1774) in difficult circumstances (war of the Flours, 1775); it removed the corporations with the profit of the freedom of company (1776). Having imposed a train of immediate economies, it posed the bases of a tax reform by removing the royal drudgery, which weighed on the only commoners, and considered the creation of a payable territorial contribution by all the owners (1776). But, vis-a-vis the cabal of the privileged people offended with the idea to have to pay they also taxes, it was returned by Louis XVI (May 1776), with the despair of a broad fraction of the partisans of the Lights.  

Necker with Finances
The successor of Turgot, Clugny, destroyed his work to try to reconcile monarchy and the privileged people, without solving the serious budgetary matter. Maurepas then imposed on the direction of Finances the Genevese Jacques Necker (1732-1804). This one was made popular while financing the war of America (1778-1783) without resorting to the tax. But the loans, in the long term, weighed down the budget deficit.

Very quickly, it was necessary to return to the ideas of Turgot, together with a reform project of the local government (creation of provincial assemblies charged to distribute the tax) leading to an increased political participation of the middle-class. Once again, the privileged people made block. To protect itself some, Necker published a Report with the king (1781) on public finances, apology for its management which remained quiet on the deficit and the financing of the war. The opinion retained of it especially the amount of the royal pensions to the courtiers. Upset and pushed by his entourage, the king returned Necker (May 1783).  

Fallen through reforms
Succession of ministries reduced to the impotence or not very bold (Jolly de Fleury, 1781-1783; Lefèvre d' Ormesson, 1783) as well as the cost of the war of America had put the State at the edge of the bankruptcy (80 million deficit in 1783). Louis XVI, on the councils of Vergennes, secretary of foreign affairs, called Calonne (1734-1802) with the system check of Finances. The euphoria born of the French victory in America (1783) enabled him to restore confidence and to borrow again.

But in 1786, fault of capital, the policy of expédients had to cease, and one thought once more of the essential reform. To circumvent the opposition of the members of Parliament, Calonne made convene by the king an assembly the notable ones before whom it presented, in February 1787, a reform project tax and administrative, strongly inspired by the ideas of its predecessors. Too much timid, the project of provincial assemblies, simply advisory, did not carry the adhesion of the not-privileged people. Too much bold, the tax reform was repudiated by the coalition of the privileged people. Louis XVI moved back for the third time by thanking his minister (April 23rd, 1787).  

A prestigious foreign policy
As much the interior policy Louis XVI missed firmness, as much the radiation external of France was a success. Initiated by Vergennes with subtleties of the international relations, Louis XVI carried a real interest there. He took care thus of the restoration of the royal marine, after the heavy maritime and colonial defeat vis-a-vis in England, at the time of the Seven Year old war. The king did not hide his anglophobia and shared the sights of his minister, eager to give again in France a position of referee in Europe. For that, Louis XVI and Vergennes tried to avoid all new continental conflict. It was necessary to control the ambitions of the emperor of Austria Joseph II, which wanted to seize Bavaria (1778-1779) and, with the assistance of Russia, to dismantle the Ottoman Empire (1782-1784).  

American colonies
But the glory of Louis XVI shone especially at the time of the war of American Independence carried out by the thirteen American colonies against their English metropolis. After having financed in writing pad a traffic of weapons and having let leave the volunteers (whose marquis of Fayette) to the help of the “insurgents”, Louis XVI signed a treaty of alliance with the Americans (1778). France then set up a coalition joining together Spain and Holland to throw English maritime supremacy low. From 1778 to 1781, the war extended to all the oceans from the sphere. The Franco-American victory of Yorktown (October 1781) was the ultimate point of the engagements in America. The treaty of Versailles (September 3rd, 1783) gave independence to the Americans and marked a crushing argument to the English expansion. France obtained some satisfactions, quite poor however in comparison with the enormous accomplished financial effort. Twenty years after the shame of the treaty of Paris (1763), this “policy of Don Quichotte” had however allowed the rebirth of French prestige.

A weakened economy
In order to consolidate peace, France then concludes several commercial treaties with the great powers, including with England (1786). This free-trade policy stimulated the maritime trade, but it worsened appreciably, because of English competition, the difficulties of certain industries already affected by a general economic deceleration. In fact, this glory, so expensively resurrected, was transitory and without real long-term benefit for the king. The disappearance of Vergennes, in February 1787, only left Louis XVI, with the threshold of the storm.

The acts of authority of the king came to hitch. When Louis XVI returned to the policy of Maupeou in spring 1788 (reform of the Minister of Justice Lamoignon), because of the oppositions met by the successor of Calonne, Loménie de Brienne, it was too late. It did nothing but consolidate the “despotic” image of monarchy. Quickly constrained to convene the general states, the king put the finger in gears which it would control never again. With the setting with bottom of the Former regime (the king was brought back of force from Versailles to Paris on on October 6th, 1789), it did not find any more political will sufficient to face the events. Louis XVI folded up himself on the defense of the principles of the monarchy of divine right, those of his education, those which his/her fathers had bequeathed to him. Its resistances and its reversals ruined the institutional compromise elaborate by the Constituent one. Incompetent to play the part of a constitutional king, run up against in his religious principles by the civil Constitution of the clergy, it chooses the escape and failed (in Varennes, on on June 21st, 1791).  

Judgment
Forming a ministry of Gironde, in March 1792, the king lives in the war, for reciprocal ratios of those of the revolutionists, the means of leaving the situation where it had been locked up. But the veto which it put at the decrees public safety, after the first French defeats, raised against him the people of Paris: the insurrection of August 10th, 1792 reversed the king, who, the 13, was imprisoned with the Temple. Regarded as “traitor” with the nation, “Louis Capet” will be condemned by a Convention eager to break any bond with the past. Louis XVI walked to his torment, courageously, on on January 21st, 1793. The symbolic range of this death went far beyond the personality of a king who had discouraged many trusty servants and whose good will could not suffice vis-a-vis for the political shockwave and social which shook its century.