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Louis XV was born at Verailles on February 15, 1710, while his great-grandfather Louis XVI was still on the throne. He
was the son of Louis, Duke of Burgundy and of Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy. Marie-Adélaïde was a very lively woman of whom the
old king Louis XIV was very fond, and the young couple, deeply in love with each other had rejuvenated the court of the old
king and become the centre of attraction in Versailles. Louis XV had a brother, Louis, Duke of Brittany, who was older by
three years. The Duke of Burgundy was the eldest son of Louis, the Grand Dauphin, who was the only son of Louis XIV. The Duke
of Burgundy had two younger brothers: Philip, Duke of Anjou, soon to be confirmed as Philip V of Spain, and Charles, Duke
of Berry. Thus, by 1710, Louis XIV had plenty of male descendants: one son, three grandsons, and two great-grandsons from
his oldest grandson.
Louis XV is the king with the most ambivalent personality in the history of France. Though he has
been much maligned by historians, modern research has argued that he was in fact very intelligent and dedicated to the task
of ruling the largest kingdom of Europe. However, his indecisiveness, fuelled by his awareness of the complexity of problems
ahead, as well as his profound timidity, hidden behind the mask of an imperious king, account for the poor results achieved
during his reign. In many ways, Louis XV prefigures the bourgeois rulers of the romantic 19th century: although dutifully
playing the role of the imperial king carved out by his great-grandfather Louis Louis XIV, Louis XV in fact cherished nothing
more than his private life far away from pomp and ceremony. Having lost his mother while still an infant, he always longed
for a motherly and reassuring presence, which he tried to find in the intimate company of women, for which he was much criticised
both during and after his life.
Louis ascended the throne at the age of twenty; he was of average intelligence, but was not overly concerned with
the running of the country. In the French imagination, he was seen as representing everything that the Estates opposed: centralized
government, wealth, indifference. His wife, Marie Antoinette, was vilified by all the members of the Estates as indifferenct
and calculating. The reality, however, was probably much different. Like most noblewomen, she was raised in an isolated atmosphere;
her life at the French court was, like Louis's, utterly isolated from the non-aristrocratic world. The Revolution took her
and Louis by surprise; while she was vilified and hated by the Revolutionaries and the Third Estate, she had no part in any
of the abuses of the government or the nobility which precipitated the Revolution. Her portrait, painted by Elisabeth Vigee-Le
Brun, in fact displays none of the distance typical of royal portraits.
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