Death of Louis XV
Louis XV died of smallpox at Versailles on 10 May 1774, and the court left the palace before the body could be moved. He had reigned for fifty-nine years, having come to the throne at five in 1715 as the great-grandson of Louis XIV, most of whose direct heirs had died in a run of measles and smallpox within a year. He was called the Beloved after an illness in 1744 and was thoroughly unpopular by the end. The reign had real achievements — Lorraine acquired, the finances repeatedly reformed, the Jesuits expelled, and a late attempt under Chancellor Maupeou to break the parlements that had blocked every tax reform for decades — and a catalogue of disasters: the Seven Years' War, which lost Canada and India, and the cost of it. His mistresses, Pompadour and then du Barry, were a permanent grievance in a country that resented paying for them. The death itself was a public spectacle in the way that royal deaths were. He was not told what he had for days, the disease being visible to everyone else; he sent du Barry away in order to receive the sacraments; and a candle was placed in a window and extinguished at the moment of death, at which the whole court reportedly ran through the halls to greet the new king. The corpse was so putrefied that it was buried at speed and without the usual ceremony, in a procession that was jeered. His grandson Louis XVI was nineteen. The reforms were reversed within months.
- Year: 1774 CE
- Category: Political
