Regency of Philippe d'Orléans
When Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715 after a 72-year reign, he left behind a bankrupt state, a five-year-old great-grandson (Louis XV), and a court longing for liberation from Versailles protocol. Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, became Regent. He moved the court from Versailles back to Paris, relaxed censorship, released political prisoners, and transferred executive power from the old council-ministers to aristocratic councils (the Polysynodie) — a short-lived experiment in noble government. Most dramatically, he embraced the financial schemes of the Scottish economist John Law, who created the Banque Générale (1716), took over the Mississippi Company (1717), and inflated a speculative bubble that briefly made France appear prosperous before the system collapsed in 1720. The Regency's social atmosphere — libertine, witty, artistically experimental — gave birth to the Rococo style and the salon culture that would flourish through the century. When Louis XV reached majority in 1723, the Regency ended, but its relaxation of absolutist rigidity had set a tone: the ancien régime would never quite recover the austere discipline of Louis XIV's later years.
- Year: 1715 CE
- Category: Political
