Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Lord Chamberlain" to "Luqman" / Volume 17, Slice 1 Papyras Classics

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Chapter 2

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Lord Chamberlain" to "Luqman" (part 2)

LOUDON, ERNST GIDEON, Freiherr von (1717-1790), Austrian soldier, was born at Tootzen in Livonia, on the 2nd of February 1717. His family, of Scottish origin, had been settled in that country since before 1400. His father was a lieutenant-colonel, retired on a meagre pension from the Swedish service, and the boy was sent in 1732 into the Russian army as a cadet. He took part in Field Marshal Münnich’s siege of Danzig in 1734, in the march of a Russian corps to the Rhine in 1735 and in the Turkish war 1738-1739. Dissatisfied with his prospects he resigned in 1741 and sought military employment elsewhere. He applied first to Frederick the Great, who declined his services. At Vienna he had better fortune, being made a captain in Trenck’s free corps. He took part in its forays and marches, though not in its atrocities, until wounded and taken prisoner in Alsace. He was shortly released by the advance of the main Austrian army. His next active service, still under Trenck, was in the Silesian mountains in 1745, in which campaign he greatly distinguished himself as a leader of light troops. He was present also at Soor. He retired shortly afterwards, owing to his distaste for the lawless habits of his comrades in the irregulars, and after long waiting in poverty for a regular commission he was at last made a captain in one of the frontier regiments, spending the next ten years in half-military, half-administrative work in the Carlstadt district. At Bunich, where he was stationed, he built a church and planted an oak forest now called by his name. He had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel when the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War called him again into the field. From this point began his fame as a soldier. Soon promoted colonel, he distinguished himself repeatedly and was in 1757 made a General-feldwacht-meister (major-general of cavalry) and a knight of the newly founded order of Maria Theresa. In the campaign of 1758 came his first opportunity for fighting an action as a commander-in-chief, and he used it so well that Frederick the Great was obliged to give up the siege of Olmütz and retire into Bohemia (action of Dom-stadtl, 30th of June). He was rewarded with the grade of lieutenant-field-marshal and having again shown himself an active and daring commander in the campaign of Hochkirch, he was created a Freiherr in the Austrian nobility by Maria Theresa and in the peerage of the Holy Roman Empire by her husband the emperor Francis. Maria Theresa gave him, further, the grand cross of the order she had founded and an estate near Kuttenberg in Bohemia. He was placed in command of the Austrian contingent sent to join the Russians on the Oder. At Kunersdorf he turned defeat into a brilliant victory, and was promoted Feldzeugmeister and made commander-in-chief in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. In 1760 he destroyed a whole corps of Frederick’s army under Fouqué at Landshut and stormed the important fortress of Glatz. In 1760 he sustained a reverse at Frederick’s hands in the battle of Liegnitz (Aug. 15th, 1760), which action led to bitter controversy with Daun and Lacy, the commanders of the main army, who, Loudon claimed, had left his corps unsupported. In 1761 he operated, as usual, in Silesia, but he found his Russian allies as timid as they had been after Kunersdorf, and all attempts against Frederick’s entrenched camp of Bunzelwitz (see Seven Years’ War) failed. He brilliantly seized his one fleeting opportunity, however, and stormed Schweidnitz on the night of Sept. 30/October 1st, 1761. His tireless activity continued to the end of the war, in conspicuous contrast with the temporizing strategy of Daun and Lacy. The student of the later campaigns of the Seven Years’ War will probably admit that there was need of more aggressiveness than Daun displayed, and of more caution than suited Loudon’s genius. But neither recognized this, and the last three years of the war are marked by an ever-increasing friction between the “Fabius” and the “Marcellus,” as they were called, of the Austrian army.

After the peace, therefore, when Daun became the virtual commander-in-chief of the army, Loudon fell into the background. Offers were made, by Frederick the Great amongst others, to induce Loudon to transfer his services elsewhere. Loudon did not entertain these proposals, although negotiations went on for some years, and on Lacy succeeding Daun as president of the council of war Loudon was made inspector-general of infantry. Dissensions, however, continued between Loudon and Lacy, and on the accession of Joseph II., who was intimate with his rival, Loudon retired to his estate near Kuttenberg. Maria Theresa and Kaunitz caused him, however, to be made commander-in-chief in Bohemia and Moravia in 1769. This post he held for three years, and at the end of this time, contemplating retirement from the service, he settled again on his estate. Maria Theresa once more persuaded him to remain in the army, and, as his estate had diminished in value owing to agrarian troubles in Bohemia, she repurchased it from him (1776) on generous terms. Loudon then settled at Hadersdorf near Vienna, and shortly afterwards was made a field-marshal. Of this Carlyle (Frederick the Great) records that when Frederick the Great met Loudon in 1776 he deliberately addressed him in the emperor’s presence as “Herr Feldmarschall.” But the hint was not taken until February 1778.

In 1778 came the War of the Bavarian Succession. Joseph and Lacy were now reconciled to Loudon, and Loudon and Lacy commanded the two armies in the field. On this occasion, however, Loudon seems to have in a measure fallen below his reputation, while Lacy, who was opposed to Frederick’s own army, earned new laurels. For two years after this Loudon lived quietly at Hadersdorf, and then the reverses of other generals in the Turkish War called him for the last time into the field. Though old and broken in health, he was commander-in-chief in fact as well as in name, and he won a last brilliant success by capturing Belgrade in three weeks, 1789. He died within the year, on the 14th of July at Neu-Titschein in Moravia, still on duty. His last appointment was that of commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Austria, which had been created for him by the new emperor Leopold. Loudon was buried in the grounds of Hadersdorf. Eight years before his death the emperor Joseph had caused a marble bust of this great soldier to be placed in the chamber of the council of war.

His son Johann Ludwig Alexius, Freiherr von Loudon (1762-1822) fought in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with credit, and rose to the rank of lieutenant-field-marshal.

See memoir by v. Arneth in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, s.v. “Laudon,” and life by G. B. Malleson.


His name is phonetically spelt Laudon or Laudohn by Germans, and the latter form was that adopted by himself and his family. In 1759, however, he reverted to the original Scottish form.

LOUDOUN, JOHN CAMPBELL, 1st Earl of (1598-1663), Scottish politician, eldest son of Sir James Campbell of Lawers, became Baron Loudoun in right of his wife Margaret, granddaughter of Hugh Campbell, 1st Baron Loudoun (d. 1622). He was created earl on the 12th of May 1633, but in consequence of his opposition to Charles I.’s church policy in Scotland the patent was stopped in Chancery. In 1637 he was one of the supplicants against the introduction of the English liturgy; and with John Leslie, 6th earl of Rothes, he took a leading part in the promulgation of the Covenant and in the General Assembly which met at Glasgow in the autumn of 1638. He served under General Leslie, and was one of the Scottish commissioners at the Pacification of Berwick in June 1639. In November of that year and again in 1640 the Scottish estates sent Loudoun with Charles Seton, 2nd earl of Dunfermline, to London on an embassy to Charles I. Loudoun intrigued with the French ambassador and with Thomas Savile, afterwards earl of Sussex, but without much success. He was in London when John Stewart, earl of Traquair, placed in Charles’s hands a letter signed by Loudoun and six others and addressed to Louis XIII. In spite of his protest that the letter was never sent, and that it would in any case be covered by the amnesty granted at Berwick, he was sent to the Tower. He was released in June, and two months later he re-entered England with the Scottish invading army, and was one of the commissioners at Ripon in October. In the following August (1641) Charles opened parliament at Edinburgh in person, and in pursuance of a policy of conciliation towards the leaders of the Covenant Loudoun was made lord chancellor of Scotland, and his title of earl of Loudoun was allowed. He also became first commissioner of the treasury. In 1642 he was sent by the Scottish council to York to offer to mediate in the dispute between Charles and the parliament, and later on to Oxford, but in the second of these instances Charles refused to accept his authority. He was constantly employed in subsequent negotiations, and in 1647 was sent to Charles at Carisbrooke Castle, but the “Engagement” to assist the king there made displeased the extreme Covenanters, and Loudoun was obliged to retract his support of it. He was now entirely on the side of the duke of Argyll and the preachers. He assisted in the capacity of lord chancellor at Charles II.’s coronation at Scone, and was present at Dunbar. He joined in the royalist rising of 1653, but eventually surrendered to General Monk. His estates were forfeited by Cromwell, and a sum of money settled on the countess and her heirs. At the Restoration he was removed from the chancellorship, but a pension of £1000 granted him by Charles I. in 1643 was still allowed him. In 1662 he was heavily fined. He died in Edinburgh on the 15th of March 1663.

The earl’s elder son, James (d. 1684), 2nd earl of Loudoun, passed his life out of Great Britain, and when he died at Leiden was succeeded by his son Hugh (d. 1731). The 3rd earl held various high positions in England and Scotland, being chosen one of the representative peers for Scotland at the union of the parliaments in 1707. He rendered good service to the government during the rising of 1715, especially at the battle of Sheriffmuir, and was succeeded as 4th earl by his son John (1705-1782), who fought against the Jacobites in 1745, was commander-in-chief of the British force in America in 1756 and died unmarried. The title then passed to James Mure Campbell (d. 1786), a grandson of the 2nd earl, and was afterwards borne by the marquesses of Hastings, descendants of the 5th earl’s daughter and heiress, Flora (1780-1840). Again reverting to a female on the death of Henry, 4th marquess of Hastings, in 1868, it came afterwards to Charles (b. 1855), a nephew of this marquess, who became 11th earl of Loudoun.

LOUDUN, a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Vienne, on an eminence overlooking a fertile plain, 45 m. by rail S.W. of Tours. Pop. (1906) 3931. It was formerly surrounded by walls, of which a single gateway and two towers remain. Of the old castle of the counts of Anjou which was destroyed under Richelieu, the site now forming a public promenade, a fine rectangular donjon of the 12th century is preserved; at its base traces of Roman constructions have been found, with fragments of porphyry pavement, mosaics and mural paintings. The Carmelite convent was the scene of the trial of Urban Grandier, who was burnt alive for witchcraft in 1634; the old Romanesque church of Sainte Croix, of which he was curé, is now used as a market. The church of St Pierre-du-Marché, Gothic in style with a Renaissance portal, has a lofty stone spire. There are several curious old houses in the town. Théophraste Renaudot (d. 1653), founder of the Gazette de France, was born at Loudun, where there is a statue of him. The manufacture of lace and upholstery trimming and of farm implements is carried on, and there is a considerable trade in agricultural products, wine, &c. Loudun (Laudunum in ancient times) was a town of importance during the religious wars and gave its name in 1616 to a treaty favourable to the Protestants.

LOUGHBOROUGH, a market town and municipal borough in the Loughborough (Mid) parliamentary division of Leicestershire, England, near the river Soar and on the Loughborough canal. Pop. (1901) 21,508. It is 110 m. N.N.W. of London by the Midland railway, and is served by the Great Central and a branch of the London and North-Western railways. The neighbourhood is a rich agricultural district, and to the S.W. lies the hilly tract known as Charnwood Forest. The church of All Saints stands on rising ground, and is a conspicuous object for many miles round; it is of Decorated work, and the tower is Perpendicular. The other churches are modern. Public buildings include the town hall and exchange, town offices, county hall and free library. The grammar school, founded in 1495 under the charity of Thomas Burton, occupies modern buildings in pleasant grounds. There is also a girls’ grammar school partly dependent on the same foundation. The principal industry is hosiery making; there are also engineering, iron and dye works and bell foundries. The great bell for St Paul’s cathedral, London, was cast here in 1881. Loughborough was incorporated in 1888. Area, 3045 acres.

The manor of Loughborough (Lucteburne, Lucteburg, Lughteburgh) was granted by William the Conqueror to Hugh Lupus, from whom it passed to the Despensers. In 1226-1227 when it belonged to Hugh Despenser he obtained various privileges for himself and his men and tenants there, among which were quittance from suits at the county and hundred courts, of sheriffs’ aids and of view of frankpledge, and also a market every Thursday and a fair on the vigil, day and morrow of St Peter ad vincula. The market rights were purchased by the town in 1880 from the trustees of Thomas Cradock, late lord of the manor. Edward II. visited the manor several times when it belonged to his favourite, Hugh Despenser the elder. Among the subsequent lords were Henry de Beaumont and Alice his wife, Sir Edward Hastings, created Baron Hastings of Loughborough in 1558, Colonel Henry Hastings, created baron in 1645, and the earls of Huntingdon. Alexander Wedderburn was created Baron Loughborough in 1780 when he became chief justice of the common pleas. During the 19th century most of the manorial rights were purchased by the local board. Loughborough was at first governed by a bailiff, afterwards by a local board, and was finally incorporated in 1888 under a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. It has never been represented in parliament. Lace-making was formerly the chief industry, but machines for making lace set up in the town by John Heathcote were destroyed by the Luddites in 1816, and the manufacture lost its importance. Bell-founding was introduced in 1840. John Cleveland, the Royalist poet, was born at Loughborough in 1613, John Howe the painter in 1630 and Richard Pulteney the botanist in 1730.

See Victoria County History, Leicestershire; W. G. D. Fletcher, Chapters in the History of Loughborough (1883); Sir Thomas Pochin, “Historical Description of Loughborough” (1770) (vol. viii. of Bibliotheca topographica Britannica).

LOUGHREA, a market town of Co. Galway, Ireland, pleasantly situated on the N. shore of Lough Rea, 116 m. W. from Dublin by a branch from Attymon Junction on the Midland Great Western railway. Pop. (1901), 2815. There are slight remains of an Early English Carmelite friary dating c. 1300, which escaped the Dissolution. Loughrea is the seat of the Roman Catholic bishop of Clonfert, and has a cathedral built in 1900-1905. A part of the castle of Richard de Burgh, the founder of the friary, still survives, and there are traces of the town fortifications. In the neighbourhood are a cromlech and two ruined towers, and crannogs, or ancient stockaded islands, have been discovered in the lough. Apart from the surroundings of the lough, the neighbouring country is peculiarly desolate.

LOUGHTON, an urban district in the Epping parliamentary division of Essex, England, 11½ m. N.N.E. of Liverpool Street station, London, by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901), 4730. This is one of the villages which has become the centre of a residential district, and is frequented by holiday-makers from London, owing to its proximity to the pleasant woodland scenery of Epping Forest. It lies on the eastern outskirts of the Forest, near the river Roding. There are several modern churches. The lordship of the manor was granted to Waltham Abbey. In the vicinity are large earthworks, probably of British origin, known as Loughton Camp.

LOUHANS, a town of east-central France in the old province of Franche-Comté, now capital of an arrondissement in the department of Saône-et-Loire, 34 m. N.N.E. of Mâcon by road. Pop. (1906), 3216. Its church has a fine tower of the 15th century, of which the balustrade is carved so as to form the first words of the Ave Maria. There are also a hospital of the 17th century with a collection of ancient earthenware, a town-hall of the 18th century and remains of ramparts of the 16th and 17th century. The town is the central market of the agricultural plain of Bresse; chickens form the chief article of commerce. There is also a large felt-hat manufactory.

LOUIS, or Lewis (from the Frankish Chlodowîch, Chlodwig, Latinized as Chlodowius, Lodhuwicus, Lodhuvicus, whence—in the Strassburg oath of 842—O. Fr. Lodhuwigs, then Chlovis, Loys and later Louis, whence Span. Luiz and—through the Angevin kings—Hungarian Lájos; cf. Ger. Ludwig or Ludewig, from O. H. Ger. Hluduwîc, Hludwîg, Ludhuwîg, M. H. Ger. Ludewîc; Ital. Lodovico), a masculine proper name, meaning “Fame-fight” or “Famous in fight,” from old Frankish chlud, chlod (O. H. Ger. hlud, hlod), “fame,” and wîch (O. H. Ger. wîc., wîg, A.S. wîg) “war,” “battle” (cf. Gr. Κλυτόμαχος). The name has been borne by numerous European sovereigns and others, of whom some are noticed below in the following order: (1) Roman emperors and Frankish and German kings, (2) kings of Bavaria, (3) kings of France, (4) kings of Hungary, (5) kings of Naples, (6) Louis of Nassau. (Louis Philippe, king of the French, is dealt with separately.)

LOUIS I. (778-840), surnamed the “Pious,” Roman emperor, third son of the emperor Charlemagne and his wife Hildegarde, was born at Chasseneuil in central France, and crowned king of Aquitaine in 781. He received a good education; but as his tastes were ecclesiastical rather than military, the government of his kingdom was mainly conducted by his counsellors. Louis, however, gained sound experience in warfare in the defence of Aquitaine, shared in campaigns against the Saxons and the Avars, and led an army to Italy in 792. In 794 or 795 he married Irmengarde, daughter of Ingram, count of Haspen. After the deaths of his two elder brothers, Louis, at his father’s command, crowned himself co-emperor at Aix-la-Chapelle on the 11th of September 813, and was formally associated in the government of the Empire, of which he became sole ruler, in the following January. He earned the surname of “Pious” by banishing his sisters and others of immoral life from court; by attempting to reform and purify monastic life; and by showing great liberality to the church. In October 816 he was crowned emperor at Reims by Pope Stephen IV.; and at Aix in July 817, he arranged for a division of his Empire among his sons. This was followed by a revolt of his nephew, Bernard, king of Italy; but the rising was easily suppressed, and Bernard was mutilated and killed. The emperor soon began to repent of this cruelty, and when his remorse had been accentuated by the death of his wife in 818, he pardoned the followers of Bernard and restored their estates, and in 822 did public penance at Attigny. In 819 he married Judith, daughter of Welf I., count of Bavaria, who in 823 bore him a son Charles, afterwards called the Bald. Judith made unceasing efforts to secure a kingdom for her child; and with the support of her eldest step-son Lothair, a district was carved out for Charles in 829. Discontent at this arrangement increased to the point of rebellion, which broke out the following year, provoked by Judith’s intrigues with Bernard, count of Barcelona, whom she had installed as her favourite at court. Lothair and his brother Pippin joined the rebels, and after Judith had been sent into a convent and Bernard had fled to Spain, an assembly was held at Compiègne, when Louis was practically deposed and Lothair became the real ruler of the Empire. Sympathy was, however, soon aroused for the emperor, who was treated as a prisoner, and a second assembly was held at Nimwegen in October 830 when, with the concurrence of his sons Pippin and Louis, he was restored to power and Judith returned to court.

Further trouble between Pippin and his father led to the nominal transfer of Aquitaine from Pippin to his brother Charles in 831. The emperor’s plans for a division of his dominions then led to a revolt of his three sons. Louis met them in June 833 near Kolmar, but owing possibly to the influence of Pope Gregory IV., who took part in the negotiations, he found himself deserted by his supporters, and the treachery and falsehood which marked the proceedings gave to the place the name of Lügenfeld, or the “field of lies.” Judith, charged with infidelity, was again banished; Louis was sent into the monastery of St Medard at Soissons; and the government of the Empire was assumed by his sons. The emperor was forced to confess his sins, and declare himself unworthy of the throne, but Lothair did not succeed in his efforts to make his father a monk. Sympathy was again felt for Louis, and when the younger Louis had failed to induce Lothair to treat the emperor in a more becoming fashion, he and Pippin took up arms on behalf of their father. The result was that in March 834 Louis was restored to power at St Denis; Judith once more returned to his side and the kingdoms of Louis and Pippin were increased. The struggle with Lothair continued until the autumn, when he submitted to the emperor and was confined to Italy. To make the restoration more complete, a great assembly at Diedenhofen declared the deposition of Louis to have been contrary to law, and a few days later he was publicly restored in the cathedral of Metz. In December 838 Pippin died, and a new arrangement was made by which the Empire, except Bavaria, the kingdom of Louis, was divided between Lothair, now reconciled to his father, and Charles. The emperor was returning from suppressing a revolt on the part of his son Louis, provoked by this disposition, when he died on the 20th of June 840 on an island in the Rhine near Ingelheim. He was buried in the church of St Arnulf at Metz. Louis was a man of strong frame, who loved the chase, and did not shrink from the hardships of war. He was, however, easily influenced and was unequal to the government of the Empire bequeathed to him by his father. No sustained effort was made to ward off the inroads of the Danes and others, who were constantly attacking the borders of the Empire. Louis, who is also called Le Débonnaire, counts as Louis I., king of France.

See Annales Fuldenses; Annales Bertiniani; Thegan, Vita Hludowici; the Vita Hludowici attributed to Astronomus; Ermoldus Nigellus, In honorem Hludowici imperatoris; Nithard, Historiarum libri, all in the Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores, Bände i. and ii. (Hanover and Berlin, 1826 fol.); E. Mühlbacher, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern (Innsbruck, 1881); and Deutsche Geschichte unter den Karolingern (Stuttgart, 1886); B. Simson, Jahrbücher des fränkischen Reichs unter Ludwig dem Frommen (Leipzig, 1874-1876); and E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reiches (Leipzig, 1887-1888).

(A. W. H.*)

LOUIS II. (825-875), Roman emperor, eldest son of the emperor Lothair I., was designated king of Italy in 839, and taking up his residence in that country was crowned king at Rome by Pope Sergius II. on the 15th of June 844. He at once preferred a claim to the rights of an emperor in the city, which was decisively rejected; but in 850 he was crowned joint emperor at Rome by Pope Leo IV., and soon afterwards married his cousin, Engelberga, a daughter of King Louis the German, and undertook the independent government of Italy. He took the field against the Saracens; quashed some accusations against Pope Leo; held a diet at Pavia; and on the death of his father in September 855 became sole emperor. The division of Lothair’s dominions, by which he obtained no territory outside Italy, aroused his discontent, and in 857 he allied himself with Louis the German against his brother Lothair, king of Lorraine, and King Charles the Bald. But after Louis had secured the election of Nicholas I. as pope in 858, he became reconciled with his brother, and received some lands south of the Jura in return for assistance given to Lothair in his efforts to obtain a divorce from his wife, Teutberga. In 863, on the death of his brother Charles, Louis received the kingdom of Provence, and in 864 came into collision with Pope Nicholas I. over his brother’s divorce. The archbishops, who had been deposed by Nicholas for proclaiming this marriage invalid, obtained the support of the emperor, who reached Rome with an army in February 864; but, having been seized with fever, he made peace with the pope and left the city. In his efforts to restore order in Italy, Louis met with considerable success both against the turbulent princes of the peninsula and against the Saracens who were ravaging southern Italy. In 866 he routed these invaders, but could not follow up his successes owing to the want of a fleet. So in 869 he made an alliance with the eastern emperor, Basil I., who sent him some ships to assist in the capture of Bari, the headquarters of the Saracens, which succumbed in 871. Meanwhile his brother Lothair had died in 869, and owing to his detention in southern Italy he was unable to prevent the partition of Lorraine between Louis the German and Charles the Bald. Some jealousy between Louis and Basil followed the victory at Bari, and in reply to an insult from the eastern emperor Louis attempted to justify his right to the title “emperor of the Romans.” He had withdrawn into Benevento to prepare for a further campaign, when he was treacherously attacked in his palace, robbed and imprisoned by Adelchis, prince of Benevento, in August 871. The landing of fresh bands of Saracens compelled Adelchis to release his prisoner a month later, and Louis was forced to swear he would take no revenge for this injury, nor ever enter Benevento with an army. Returning to Rome, he was released from his oath, and was crowned a second time as emperor by Pope Adrian II. on the 18th of May 872. He won further successes against the Saracens, who were driven from Capua, but the attempts of the emperor to punish Adelchis were not very successful. Returning to northern Italy, he died, somewhere in the province of Brescia, on the 12th of August 875, and was buried in the church of St Ambrose at Milan, having named as his successor in Italy his cousin Carloman, son of Louis the German. Louis was an excellent ruler, of whom it was said “in his time there was great peace, because every one could enjoy his own possessions.”

See Annales Bertiniani, Chronica S. Benedicti Casinensis, both in the Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores, Bände i. and iii. (Hanover and Berlin, 1826 fol.); E. Mühlbacher, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern (Innsbruck, 1881); Th. Sickel, Acta regum et imperatorum Karolinorum, digesta et enarrata (Vienna, 1867-1868); and E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reiches (Leipzig, 1887-1888).

(A. W. H.*)

LOUIS III. (c. 880-928), surnamed the “Blind,” Roman emperor, was a son of Boso, king of Provence or Lower Burgundy, and Irmengarde, daughter of the emperor Louis II. The emperor Charles the Fat took Louis under his protection on the death of Boso in 887; but Provence was in a state of wild disorder, and it was not until 890, when Irmengarde had secured the support of the Bavarian king Arnulf and of Pope Stephen V., that Louis was recognized as king. In 900, after the death of the emperor Arnulf, he went to Italy to obtain the imperial crown. He was chosen king of the Lombards at Pavia, and crowned emperor at Rome in February 901 by Pope Benedict IV. He gained a temporary authority in northern Italy, but was soon compelled by his rival Berengar, margrave of Friuli, to leave the country and to swear he would never return. In spite of his oath he went again to Italy in 904, where he secured the submission of Lombardy; but on the 21st of July 905 he was surprised at Verona by Berengar, who deprived him of his sight and sent him back to Provence, where he passed his days in enforced inactivity until his death in September 928. He married Adelaide, possibly a daughter of Rudolph I., king of Upper Burgundy. His eldest son, Charles Constantine, succeeded to no more than the county of Vienne.

See Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, Bände ix. and x. (Göttingen, 1862-1886); E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reichs (Leipzig, 1887-1888); and Gesta Berengarii imperatoris (Halle, 1871); and F. de Gingins-la-Sarra. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Provence et de Bourgogne Jurane (Zürich, 1851).

(A. W. H.*)

LOUIS IV., or V. (c. 1287-1347), surnamed the Bavarian, Roman emperor and duke of Upper Bavaria, was the second son of Louis II., duke of Upper Bavaria and count palatine of the Rhine, and Matilda, daughter of the German king Rudolph I. Having lost his father in 1294 he inherited, jointly with his elder brother Rudolph, Upper Bavaria and the Palatinate, but passed his time mainly at the court of the Habsburgs in Vienna, while his early experiences of warfare were gained in the campaigns of his uncle, the German king Albert I. He was soon at variance with his brother over their joint possessions. Albert taking the part of Louis in this quarrel, Rudolph promised in 1301 to admit his brother to a share in the government of Bavaria and the Palatinate. When Albert was murdered in May 1308, Louis became a candidate for the German throne; but his claim was not strongly supported. The new king, Henry VII., was very friendly with Rudolph, and as the promise of 1301 had not been carried out, Louis demanded a partition of their lands. Upper Bavaria was accordingly divided in 1310, and Louis received the north-western part of the duchy; but Rudolph refused to surrender any part of the Palatinate. In 1310, on the death of Stephen I., duke of Lower Bavaria, Louis undertook the guardianship of his two young sons. This led to a war between the brothers, which lasted till June 1313, when peace was made at Munich. Many of the nobles in Lower Bavaria, however, angered at Louis, called in the aid of Frederick I. (the Fair), duke of Austria; but he was defeated at Gammelsdorf on the 9th of November 1313, a victory which not only led to peace, but conferred considerable renown on Louis.

In August 1313 the German throne had again become vacant, and Louis was chosen at Frankfort on the 20th of October 1314 by a majority of the electors, and his coronation followed at Aix-la-Chapelle on the 25th of November. A minority of princes had, however, supported Frederick of Austria; and a war followed between the rivals, during which Louis was supported by the cities and the districts of the middle and lower Rhine. His embarrassments were complicated by a renewal of the dispute with his brother; but when this had been disposed of in 1317 by Rudolph’s renunciation of his claims on upper Bavaria and the Palatinate in consideration of a yearly subsidy, Louis was able to give undivided attention to the war with Frederick, and obtained several fresh allies. On the 28th of September 1322 a battle was fought at Mühldorf, which ended in a complete victory for Louis, owing mainly to the timely aid of Frederick IV. of Hohenzollern, burgrave of Nüremburg. Frederick of Austria was taken prisoner, but the struggle was continued by his brother Leopold until the latter’s death in 1326. Attempts to enable the two kings to rule Germany jointly failed, and about 1326 Frederick returned to Austria, leaving Louis in undisputed possession of the country. Before this conclusion, however, a new enemy had taken the field. Supported by Philip V. of France in his desire to free Italy entirely from German influence, Pope John XXII. refused to recognize either Frederick or Louis, and asserted his own right to administer the empire during a vacancy. After the battle of Mühldorf Louis sent Berthold of Neifen, count of Marstetten, into Italy with an army, which soon compelled the papal troops to raise the siege at Milan. The pope threatened Louis with excommunication unless he resigned his kingdom within three months. The king thereupon appealed to a general council, and was placed under the papal ban on the 23rd of March 1324, a sentence which he answered by publishing his charges against the pope. In the contest Louis was helped by the Minorites, who were upholding against John the principal of clerical poverty, and by the writings of Marsilius of Padua (who dedicated to Louis his Defensor pacis), William of Occam, John of Jandun and others. Taking the offensive, Louis met his Ghibelline supporters at Trent and reached Italy in March 1327; and in May he received the Lombard crown at Milan. Although the pope renewed his fulminations Louis compelled Pisa to surrender, and was hailed with great rejoicing in Rome. On the 17th of January 1328 he was crowned emperor in St Peter’s by Sciarra Colonna, a Roman noble; and he answered the continued attacks of Pope John by pronouncing his deposition, and proclaiming Peter of Corvara pope as Nicholas V. He then undertook an expedition against John’s ally, Robert, king of Naples, but, disunion among his troops and scarcity of money and provisions, drove him again to Rome, where, finding that his exactions had diminished his popularity, he left the city, and after passing six months at Pisa, returned to Germany in January 1330. The struggle with the pope was renewed in Germany, and when a formidable league had been formed against Louis, his thoughts turned to a reconciliation. He was prepared to assent to very humiliating terms, and even agreed to abdicate; but the negotiations, which were prolonged by further demands on the part of the pope, were interrupted by his death in December 1334. John’s successor, Benedict XII., seemed more anxious to come to an arrangement, but was prevented from doing so by the influence of Philip VI. of France. Overtures for peace were made to Philip, but without success; and in July 1337 Louis concluded an alliance with Edward III., king of England, and made active preparations for war. During these years his attention was also occupied by a quarrel with John, king of Bohemia, over the possession of Tirol, by a campaign in Lower Bavaria, and a futile expedition against Nicholas I., bishop of Constance. But although his position was shaken by the indifferent success which attended these campaigns, it was improved when the electors meeting at Rense in July 1338 banded themselves together to defend their elective rights, and when the diet at Frankfort confirmed a decree which declared that the German king did not need the papal approbation to make his election valid.

Louis devoted considerable thought and time to extending the possessions of the Wittelsbach family, to which he belonged. Tirol had for some time been a subject of contention between the emperor and other princes. The heiress of this county, Margaret Maultasch, had married John Henry, margrave of Moravia, son of King John of Bohemia. Having quarrelled with her husband, Margaret fled to the protection of Louis, who seized the opportunity to declare her marriage void and to unite her in 1342 with his son Louis. The emperor also increased his possessions by his own marriage. In 1322 his first wife, Beatrice, daughter of Henry III., count of Glogau, had died after thirteen years of married life, and Louis then married Margaret, daughter of William III., count of Holland. When her brother, count William IV., died childless in 1345, the emperor obtained possession of Holland, Zealand and Friesland. In 1341 he recovered a portion of the Palatinate, and soon deserted Edward of England and came to terms with Philip of France. The acquisition of the territories, and especially of Tirol, had provided Louis with many enemies, prominent among whom were John of Bohemia and his family, that of Luxemburg. John, therefore, entered into an alliance with Pope Clement VI. The course of the war which ensued in Germany was such as to compel the emperor to submit to humiliating terms, though he stopped short of accepting the election of Charles, margrave of Moravia (afterwards the emperor Charles IV.) as German king in July 1346. Charles consequently attacked Tirol; but Louis, who appeared to have considerable chances of success, died suddenly at a bear-hunt near Munich on the 11th of October 1347. He was buried in the Frauenkirche at Munich, where a statue was erected to his memory in 1622 by Maximilian I., elector of Bavaria, and where a second was unveiled in 1905. He had seven sons, three of whom were subsequently electors of Brandenburg, and ten daughters.

Various estimates have been formed of the character of Louis. As a soldier he possessed skill as well as bravery, but he lacked perseverance and decision in his political relations. At one time haughtily defying the pope, at another abjectly craving his pardon, he seems a very inglorious figure; and the fact that he remained almost undisturbed in the possession of Germany in spite of the utmost efforts of the popes, is due rather to the political and intellectual tendencies of the time than to his own good qualities. Nevertheless he ruled Bavaria with considerable success. He befriended the towns, encouraged trade and commerce and gave a new system of laws to the duchy. German took the place of Latin in the imperial charters, and although not a scholar, the emperor was a patron of learning. Louis was a man of graceful appearance, with ruddy countenance and prominent nose.

Bibliography.—Many of the authorities for the life and reign of Louis are found in the Fontes rerum Germanicarum, Bände i. and iv., edited by J. F. Böhmer (Stuttgart, 1843-1868). Among these is the Vita Ludovici IV., by an unknown author. A number of important documents are found in the Regesta imperii 1314-1347, edited by J. F. Böhmer and J. Ficker (Innsbruck, 1865); Acta imperii selecta, edited by J. F. Böhmer and J. Ficker (Innsbruck, 1870); Urkunden zur Geschichte des Römerzuges Königs Ludwigs des Bayern, edited by J. Ficker (Innsbruck, 1865); Urkundliche Beiträge zur Geschichte Kaisers Ludwigs IV., edited by C. Höfler (Munich, 1839); Vatikanische Urkunden zur Geschichte Kaisers Ludwigs des Bayern, Bände v. and vi. (Stuttgart, 1877-1888); Vatikanische Akten zur Deutschen Geschichte in der Zeit Kaisers Ludwigs des Bayern, edited by S. Riezler (Innsbruck, 1891). In the Forschungen zur Deutschen Geschichte (Göttingen, 1862-1886), Band xx., is found Urkunden zur Bairischen und Deutschen Geschichte 1256-1343, edited by S. Riezler; and in Band xiii. is C. Häutle’s Beiträge zum Itinerar Kaiser Ludwigs.

The following may also be consulted: C. Gewoldus, Defensio Ludovici IV. contra A. Bzovium (Ingolstadt, 1618); J. G. Herwartus, Ludovicus IV. imperator defensus (Mainz, 1618); N. Burgundus, Historia Bavarica sive Ludovicus IV. imperator (Ingolstadt, 1636). The best modern authorities are F. von Weech, Kaiser Ludwig der Bayer und König Johann von Böhmen (Munich, 1860); S. Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwigs des Bayern (Leipzig, 1874); C. Mühling, Die Geschichte der Doppelwahl des Jahres 1314 (Munich, 1882); R. Döbner, Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Ludwig IV. dem Bayern und Friedrich dem Schönen von Oesterreich (Göttingen, 1875); W. Altmann, Der Römerzug Ludwigs des Bayern (Berlin, 1886); A. Chroust, Beiträge zur Geschichte Ludwigs des Bayern und seiner Zeit (Gotha, 1877); K. Müller, Der Kampf Ludwigs des Bayern mit der römischen Curie (Tübingen, 1879-1880); W. Preger, Der Kirchenpolitische Kampf unter Ludwig dem Bayern (Munich, 1877); Sievers, Die politischen Beziehungen Kaiser Ludwigs des Bayern zu Frankreich (Berlin, 1896); Steinberger, Kaiser Ludwig der Bayer (Münich, 1901); and Ueding, Ludwig der Bayer und die niederrheinischen Städte (Paderborn, 1904).

(A. W. H.*)

LOUIS (804-876) surnamed the “German,” king of the East Franks, was the third son of the emperor Louis I. and his wife Irmengarde. His early years were partly spent at the court of his grandfather Charlemagne, whose special affection he is said to have won. When the emperor Louis divided his dominions between his sons in 817, Louis received Bavaria and the neighbouring lands, but did not undertake the government until 825, when he became involved in war with the Slavonic tribes on his eastern frontier. In 827 he married Emma, daughter of Welf I., count of Bavaria, and sister of his stepmother Judith; and he soon began to interfere in the quarrels arising from Judith’s efforts to secure a kingdom for her own son Charles, and the consequent struggles of Louis and his brothers with the emperor Louis I. (q.v.). When the elder Louis died in 840 and his eldest son Lothair claimed the whole Empire, Louis in alliance with his half-brother, king Charles the Bald, defeated Lothair at Fontenoy on the 25th of June 841. In June 842 the three brothers met on an island in the Sâone to negotiate a peace, and each appointed forty representatives to arrange the boundaries of their respective kingdoms. This developed into the treaty of Verdun concluded in August 843, by which Louis received the bulk of the lands of the Carolingian empire lying east of the Rhine, together with a district around Spires, Worms and Mainz, on the left bank of the river. His territories included Bavaria, where he made Regensburg the centre of his government, Thuringia, Franconia and Saxony. He may truly be called the founder of the German kingdom, though his attempts to maintain the unity of the Empire proved futile. Having in 842 crushed a rising in Saxony, he compelled the Abotrites to own his authority, and undertook campaigns against the Bohemians, the Moravians and other tribes, but was not very successful in freeing his shores from the ravages of Danish pirates. At his instance synods and assemblies were held where laws were decreed for the better government of church and state. In 853 and the following years Louis made more than one attempt to secure the throne of Aquitaine, which the people of that country offered him in their disgust with the cruel misrule of Charles the Bald. But though he met with sufficient success to encourage him to issue a charter in 858, dated “the first year of the reign in West Francia,” treachery and desertion in his army, and the loyalty to Charles of the Aquitanian bishops brought about the failure of the enterprise, which Louis renounced by a treaty signed at Coblenz on the 7th of June 860.

In 855 the emperor Lothair died, and was succeeded in Italy by his eldest son Louis II., and in the northern part of his kingdom by his second son, Lothair. The comparative weakness of these kingdoms, together with the disorder caused by the matrimonial troubles of Lothair, afforded a suitable opening for the intrigues of Louis and Charles the Bald, whose interest was increased by the fact that both their nephews were without male issue. Louis supported Lothair in his efforts to divorce his wife Teutberga, for which he received a promise of Alsace, while Charles opposed the divorce. But in 865 Louis and Charles meeting near Toul, renewed the peace of Coblenz, and doubtless discussed the possibility of dividing Lothair’s kingdom. In 868 at Metz they agreed definitely to a partition; but when Lothair died in 869, Louis was lying seriously ill, and his armies were engaged with the Moravians. Charles the Bald accordingly seized the whole kingdom; but Louis, having recovered, compelled him by a threat of war to agree to the treaty of Mersen, which divided it between the claimants. The later years of Louis were troubled by risings on the part of his sons, the eldest of whom, Carloman, revolted in 861 and again two years later; an example that was followed by the second son Louis, who in a further rising was joined by his brother Charles. A report that the emperor Louis II. was dead led to peace between father and sons. The emperor, however, was not dead, but a prisoner; and as he was not only the nephew, but also the son-in-law of Louis, that monarch hoped to secure both the imperial dignity and the Italian kingdom for his son Carloman. Meeting his daughter Engelberga, the wife of Louis II., at Trent in 872, Louis made an alliance with her against Charles the Bald, and in 874 visited Italy doubtless on the same errand. The emperor, having named Carloman as his successor, died in August 875, but Charles the Bald reached Italy before his rival, and by persuading Carloman, when he did cross the Alps, to return, secured the imperial crown. Louis was preparing for war when he died on the 28th of September 876 at Frankfort, and was buried at Lorsch, leaving three sons and three daughters. Louis was in war and peace alike, the most competent of the descendants of Charlemagne. He obtained for his kingdom a certain degree of security in face of the attacks of Normans, Hungarians, Moravians and others. He lived in close alliance with the Church, to which he was very generous, and entered eagerly into schemes for the conversion of his heathen neighbours.

See Annales Fuldenses; Annales Bertiniani; Nithard, Historiarum Libri, all in the Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores, Bände i. and ii. (Hanover and Berlin, 1826 seq.); E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reiches (Leipzig, 1887-1888); Th. Sickel, Die Urkunden Ludwigs des Deutschen (Vienna, 1861-1862); E. Mühlbacher, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern (Innsbruck, 1881); and A. Krohn, Ludwig der Deutsche (Saarbrücken, 1872).

(A. W. H.*)

LOUIS I., king of Bavaria (1786-1868), son of the then prince, afterwards duke and elector, Max Joseph of Zweibrücken and his wife Princess Augusta of Hesse-Darmstadt ( -1796), was born at Strassburg on the 25th of August 1786. He received a careful education at home, afterwards (in 1803) going to the Bavarian national university of Landshut and to Göttingen. As a young man he was drawn into the Romantic movement then at its height; but both the classics and contemporary classical poetry took hold upon his receptive mind (he visited Goethe in 1827). He had himself strong artistic tendencies, though his numerous poems show but little proof of this, and as a patron of the arts he proved himself as great as any who had ever occupied a German, throne, and more than a mere dilettante. His first visit to Italy, in 1804, had an important influence upon this side of his development.

But even in Italy the crown prince (his father had become elector in 1799 and king of Bavaria in 1805) did not forget his nationality. He soon made himself leader of the small anti-French party in Bavaria. Napoleon sought in vain to win him over, and Louis fell more and more out of favour with him. Napoleon was even reported to have said: “Qui m’empêche de laisser fusiller ce prince?” Their relations continued to be strained, although in the campaigns of 1807 and 1809, in which Bavaria was among the allies of France, Louis won his laurels in the field.

The crown prince was also averse from a Napoleonic marriage, and preferred to marry (October 12, 1810) the Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen (1792-1854). Three daughters and four sons were born of this marriage, one of whom succeeded him as Maximilian II., while another, Luitpold, became prince regent of Bavaria on the death of Louis II.

During the time that he was crown prince Louis resided chiefly at Innsbruck or Salzburg as governor of the circle of the Inn and Salzach. In 1815 he attended the Congress of Vienna, where he was especially occupied in endeavouring to obtain the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany; and later in the year he was with the allies in Paris, using his influence to secure the return of the art treasures carried off by the French.

After 1815 also the crown prince maintained his anti-French attitude, and it was mainly his influence that in 1817 secured the fall of Montgelas, the minister with French sympathies. Opposed to absolutism, Louis took great interest in the work of organizing the Bavarian constitution (1818) and defended it against Metternich and the Carlsbad Decrees (1819); he was also one of the most zealous of the ardent Philhellenes in Germany at the time. He succeeded to the crown of Bavaria on the 12th of October 1825, and at once embarked upon a moderate constitutional policy, in which he found himself in general agreement with the parliament. Although he displayed a loyal attachment to the Catholic Church, especially owing to his artistic sympathies, he none the less opposed all its more exaggerated pretensions, especially as represented by the Jesuits, whom he condemned as un-German. In the year of his accession he abolished an old edict concerning the censorship. He also furthered in many ways the internal administration of the state, and especially that of the finances. His personal tastes, apart from his activities as a Maecenas, being economical, he endeavoured also to limit public expenditure, in a way which was not always a benefit to the country. Bavaria’s power of self-defence especially was weakened by his economies and by his lack of interest in the military aspect of things.

He was a warm friend of learning, and in 1826 transferred the university of Landshut to Munich, where he placed it under his special protection. Prominent scholars were summoned to it, mostly belonging to the Romantic School, such as Goerres, Schubert and Schelling, though others were not discouraged. In the course of his visits to Italy he formed friendships with famous artists such as Thorwaldsen and Cornelius. He was especially anxious to obtain works of art, mainly sculpture, for the famous Munich collections which he started, and in this he had the advantage of the assistance of the painter Martin Wagner. He also set on foot movements for excavation and the collection of works of art in Greece, with excellent results.

Under the influence of the July revolution of 1830, however, he also began to be drawn into the current of reaction; and though he still declared himself openly against absolutism, and never took up such a hostile attitude towards constitutional ideas as his brother-in-law King Frederick William IV., he allowed the reactionary system of surveillance which commended itself to the German Confederation after 1830 to be introduced into Bavaria (see Bavaria: History). He continued, on the other hand, to do much for the economic development of the country. As a follower of the ideas of Friedrich List, he furthered the foundation of the Zollverein in the year 1833 and the making of canals. Railways he looked upon as a “necessary evil.”

In external politics peace was maintained on the whole after 1825. Temporary diplomatic complications arose between Bavaria and Baden in connexion with Louis’s favourite project of winning back the part then belonging to Baden of the old Palatinate, the land of his birth, which was always very dear to him.

Of European importance was his enthusiasm for the liberation of Greece from the rule of Turkey. Not only did he erect the Propyläen at Munich in her honour, but he also helped her in the most generous way both with money and diplomatic resources. And after his second son Otto had become king of Greece in 1832, Greek affairs became from time to time the central point of his foreign policy. In 1835 he made a visit to Greece, partly political, partly inspired by his old interest in art. But his son proved unequal to his task, and in 1862 was forced to abdicate (see Otho, king of Greece). For this unfortunate issue Louis was not without blame; for from the very first, owing to an exaggerated idealism and love of antiquity, he had totally misunderstood the national character of the Greeks and the problems involved in the attempts to govern them by bureaucratic methods.

In Bavaria, too, his government became more and more conservative, especially after Karl Abel became the head of the ministry in 1837. The king had not yet, it is true, altogether committed himself to the clerical ultras, and on the occasion of the dispute about the bishops in Prussia in the same year had taken up a wise attitude of compromise. But in Bavaria itself the strict Catholic party influenced affairs more and more decisively. For a while, indeed, this opposition did not impair the king’s popularity, due to his amiable character, his extraordinary services in beautifying his capital of Munich, and to his benevolence (it has been reckoned that he personally received about 10,000 letters asking for help every year, and that the money he devoted to charity amounted to about a fifth of his income). The year 1846, however, brought a change which had sad consequences. This was due to the king’s relations with the Spanish dancer Lola Montez, who appeared in Munich in October 1846, and soon succeeded by her beauty and wit in fascinating the king, who was always susceptible to feminine charms. The political importance of this lay in the fact that the royal mistress began to use her great influence against the clerical policy of the Abel ministry. So when the king was preparing the way for ennobling her, in order to introduce her into court circles, which were unwilling to receive her, the ministry protested in the famous memorandum of the 11th of February 1847 against the king’s demand for her naturalization as a Bavarian, the necessary preliminary to her ennoblement. The position was still further embittered by the fact that, owing to an indiscretion, the memorandum became known to the public. Thereupon the king, irritated and outraged, replaced Abel’s Clerical ministry by a more accommodating Liberal one under Zu Rhein under which Lola Montez without more difficulty became Countess Landsberg. Meanwhile, the criticism and opposition of the people, and especially of the students, was turned against the new leader of the court of Munich. On top of this came the revolutionary movement of 1848. The king’s position became more and more difficult, and under the pressure of popular opposition he was forced to banish the countess. But neither this nor the king’s liberal proclamation of the 6th of March succeeded in establishing peace, and in the capital especially the situation became increasingly threatening. All this made such a deep impression on the king, that on the 20th of March 1848 he abdicated in favour of his son Maximilian.

He now retired entirely into private life, and continued to play the Maecenas magnificently, frequently staying at his villa in Rome, the Villa Malta, and enjoying extraordinary vigour of mind and body up to the end of his days. His popularity, which had been shaken by the Montez affair, he soon recovered, especially among artists. To him Munich owes her finest art collections and most remarkable buildings. The monarch’s artistic sense led him not only to adorn his house with a number of works of antique art, but also to study German medieval art, which he did to good effect. To him Munich owes the acquisition of the famous Rhenish collection of the Boisserée brothers. The king also worked with great zeal for the care of monuments, and the cathedrals of Spires and Cologne enjoyed his special care. He was also an unfailing supporter of contemporary painting, in so far as it responded to his romantic tendencies, and he gave a fresh impulse to the arts of working in metal and glass. As visible signs of his permanent services to art Munich possesses the Walhalla, the Glyptothek, the two Pinakotheken, the Odeon, the University, and many other magnificent buildings both sacred and profane. The rôle which the Bavarian capital now plays as the leading art centre of Germany would have been an impossibility without the splendid munificence of Louis I.

He died on the 28th of February 1868 at Nice, and on the 9th of March was buried in Munich, amid demonstrations of great popular feeling.

The chief part of Louis’s records is contained in seven sealed chests in the archives of his family, and by the provisions of his will these were not to be opened till the year 1918. These records contain an extraordinarily large and valuable mass of historical material, including, as one item, 246 volumes of the king’s diary.

Bibliography.—Of the numerous pamphlets, especially of the years 1846-1848, we need only mention here: P. Erdmann, Lola Montez und die Jesuiten (1847); Geheimbericht über Bayern (1847), published by Fowmier in Deutsche Revue, vol. 27. See also F. v. Ritter, Beiträge zur Regierungsgeschichte König Ludwigs I. (1825-1826) (2 vols., 1853-1855); Sepp, Ludwig I. Augustus, König von Bayern und das Zeitalter der Wiedergeburt der Künste (1869; 2nd ed., 1903); Ottokar Lorenz, Drei Bücher Geschichte (1876; 2nd ed., 1879); K. Th. v. Heigel, Ludwig I. (1872; 2nd ed., 1888); “Ludwig I. und Martin Wagner,” Neue historische Vorträge (1883); “Ludwig I.,” Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (1884); “Ludwig I. als Freund der Geschichte” and “Kronprinz Ludwig in den Feldzügen von 1807 und 1809,” in Historische Vorträge und Studien (1887); Die Verlegung der Universität nach München, Rektoratsrede (1887); “Ludwig I. und die Münchener Hochschule,” Quellen und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte Bayerns, n.s. (1890); “Ludwig I. als Erzieher seines Volkes,” ib.; Reidelbach, Ludwig I. und seine Kunstschöpfungen (1887; 2nd ed., 1888); L. Trose, Ludwig I. in seinen Briefen an seinen Sohn, den König Otto von Griechenland (1891); L. v. Kobell, Unter den vier ersten Königen Bayerns (1894); A. Fournier, “Aus den Tagen der Lola Montez,” Neue Deutsche Rundschau (1901); M. Doeberé, “Ludwig I. und die deutsche Frage,” Festgabe für Heigel (1903); E. Füchs, Lola Montez in der Karrikatüre (1904); L. Brunner, Nürnberg 1848-1849 (1907).

(J. Hn.)

LOUIS II., king of Bavaria (1845-1886), son of his predecessor Maximilian II. and his wife Maria, daughter of Prince William of Prussia, was born at Nymphenburg on the 25th of August 1845. Together with his brother Otto, three years younger than himself, Louis received, in accordance with the wishes of his learned father, a simple and serious education modelled on that of the German Gymnasien, of which the classical languages are the chief feature. Of modern languages the crown prince learnt only French, of which he remained fond all his life. The practical value of the prince’s training was small. It was not till he was eighteen years old that he received his first pocket-money, and at that age he had no ideas about money and its value. Military instruction, physical exercises and sport, in spite of the crown prince’s strong physique, received little attention. Thus Louis did not come enough into contact with young men of his own age, and consequently soon developed a taste for solitude, which was found at an early age to be combined with the romantic tendencies and musical and theatrical tastes traditional in his family.

Louis succeeded to the throne on the 10th of March 1864, at the age of eighteen. The early years of his reign were marked by a series of most serious political defeats for Bavaria. In the Schleswig-Holstein question, though he was opposed to Prussia and a friend of Duke Frederick VIII. of Augustenburg, he did not command the material forces necessary effectively to resist the powerful policy of Bismarck. Again, in the war of 1866, Louis and his minister von der Pfordten took the side of Austria, and at the conclusion of peace (August 22) Bavaria had, in addition to the surrender of certain small portions of her territory, to agree to the foundation of the North German Confederation under the leadership of Prussia. The king’s Bavarian patriotism, one of the few steadfast ideas underlying his policy, was deeply wounded by these occurrences, but he was face to face with the inevitable, and on the 10th of August wrote a letter of reconciliation to King William of Prussia. The defeat of Bavaria in 1866 showed clearly the necessity for a reform of the army. Under the new Liberal ministry of Hohenlohe (December 29, 1866—February 13, 1870) and under Prauckh as minister of war, a series of reforms were carried through which prepared for the victories of 1870. As regards his ecclesiastical policy, though Louis remained personally true to the Catholic Church, he strove for a greater independence of the Vatican. He maintained friendly relations with Ignaz von Döllinger, the leader of the more liberal Catholics who opposed the definition of papal infallibility, but without extending his protection to the anti-Roman movement of the Old Catholics. In spite of this the Old Bavarian opposition was so aroused by the Liberalism of the Hohenlohe ministry that at the beginning of 1870 Louis had to form a more Conservative cabinet under Count Bray-Steinburg. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War he at once took the side of Prussia, and gave orders for mobilization. In 1871 it was he who offered the imperial crown to the king of Prussia; but this was not done on his own initiative. Bismarck not only determined the king of Bavaria to take the decisive step which put an end to a serious diplomatic crisis, but actually drafted the letter to King William which Louis copied and despatched without changing a word. Louis placed very few difficulties in the way of the new German Empire under the leadership of Prussia, though his Bavarian particularism remained unchanged.

Though up till the beginning of the year 1880 he did not cease to give some attention to state affairs, the king’s interests lay in quite other spheres. His personal idiosyncrasies had, in fact, developed meanwhile in a most unhappy direction. His enthusiasm for all that is beautiful soon led him into dangerous bypaths. It found its most innocent expression in the earliest years of his reign when he formed an intimate friendship with Richard Wagner, whom from May 1864 to December 1865 he had constantly in his company. Louis was entirely possessed by the soaring ideas of the master, and was energetic in their realization. He not only established Wagner’s material position at the moment by paying 18,000 gulden of debts for him and granting him a yearly income of 4000 gulden (afterwards increased to 8000), but he also proceeded to realize the ambitious artistic plans of the master. A series of brilliant model performances of the Wagnerian music-dramas was instituted in Munich under the personal patronage of the king, and when the further plan of erecting a great festival theatre in Munich for the performance of Wagner’s “music of the future” broke down in the face of the passive resistance of the local circles interested, the royal enthusiast conceived the idea of building at Bayreuth, according to Wagner’s new principles, a theatre worthy of the music-dramas. For a time Louis was entirely under Wagner’s influence, the fantastic tendencies of whose art cast a spell over him, and there is extant a series of emotional letters of the king to Wagner. Wagner, on the whole, used his influence in artistic and not in political affairs. In spite of this the opposition to him became permanent. Public opinion in Bavaria for the most part turned against him. He was attacked for his foreign origin, his extravagance, his intrigues, his artistic utopias, and last but by no means least, for his unwholesome influence over the king. Louis in the end was compelled to give him up. But the relations between king and artist were by no means at an end. In face of the war which was imminent in 1866, and in the midst of the preparation for war, the king hastened in May to Triebschen, near Lucerne, in order to see Wagner again. In 1868 they were seen together in public for the last time at the festival performances in Munich. In 1876 Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen was performed for the first time at Bayreuth in the presence of the king. Later, in 1881, the king formed a similar friendship with Joseph Kainz the actor, but it soon came to an end. In January 1867 the young king became betrothed to Duchess Sophie of Bavaria (afterwards Duchesse d’Alençon), daughter of Duke Max and sister of the empress of Austria; but the betrothal was dissolved in October of the same year.

Though even in his later years he remained interested in lofty and intellectual pursuits, as may be gathered, apart from his enthusiasm for art and nature, from his wide reading in history, serious poetry and philosophy, yet in his private life there became increasingly marked the signs of moral and mental weakness which gradually gained the mastery over his once pure and noble nature. A prominent feature was his blind craving for solitude. He cut himself off from society, and avoided all intercourse with his family, even with his devotedly affectionate mother. With his ministers he came to communicate in writing only. At the end he was surrounded only by inferior favourites and servants. His life was now spent almost entirely in his castles far from the capital, which irked him more and more, or in short and hasty journeys, in which he always travelled incognito. Even the theatre he could now only enjoy alone. He arranged private performances in his castles or in Munich at fabulous cost, and appointed an official poet to his household. Later his avoidance of society developed into a dread of it, accompanied by a fear of assassination and delusions that he was being followed.

Side by side with this pathological development his inborn self-consciousness increased apace, turning more and more to megalomania, and impelling the weak-willed monarch to those extraordinary displays of magnificence which can still be admired to-day in the castles built or altered by him, such as Berg on the Starnberger See, Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee, Hohenschwangau, Neuschwanstein, &c., which are among the most splendid buildings in Germany. It is characteristic of the extravagance of the king’s ideas that he adopted as his model the style of Louis XIV. and fell into the habit of imitating the Roi Soleil. He no longer stayed for any length of time in one castle. Often he scoured the country in wild nocturnal rides, and madness gained upon him apace. His mania for buying things and making presents was comparatively harmless, but more serious matters were the wild extravagance which in 1880 involved him in financial ruin, his fits of destructive rage, and the tendency to the most cruel forms of abnormal vice. None the less, at the time when the king’s mental weakness was increasing, his character still retained lovable traits—his simple sense of beauty, his kindliness, and his highly developed understanding of art and artistic crafts. Louis’s love of beauty also brought material profit to Bavaria.

But the financial and political dangers which arose from the king’s way of life were so great that interference became necessary. On the 8th of June 1886 medical opinion declared him to be affected with chronic and incurable madness and he was pronounced incapable of governing. On the 10th of June his uncle, Prince Luitpold, assumed the regency, and after violent resistance the late king was placed under the charge of a mental specialist. On the 13th of June 1886 he met with his death by drowning in the Starnberger See, together with his doctor von Gudden, who had unwisely gone for a walk alone with his patient, whose physical strength was enormous. The details of his death will never be fully known, as the only possible eye-witness died with him. An examination of the brain revealed a condition of incurable insanity, and the faculty submitted a report giving the terrible details of his malady. Louis’s brother Otto, who succeeded him as king of Bavaria, was also incurably insane.

Bibliography.—K. v. Heigel, Ludwig II. (1893); Luise v. Kobell, Unter den vier ersten Königen Bayerns (1894); C. Bujer, Ludwig II. (1897); Luise v. Kobell, “Wilhelm I. und Ludwig II.” Deutsche Revue, 22; Ludwig II. und die Kunst (1898); Ludwig II. und Bismarck (1870, 1899); Anonym, Endlich völlige Klarheit über den Tod des Königs Ludwig II. ... (1900); Freiherr v. Völderndorff, “Aus meiner Hofzeit,” in Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte (1900); Francis Gerard, The Romance of Ludwig II. of Bavaria; J. Bainville, Louis II. de Bavière (Paris, 1900); E. v. Possart, Die Separatvorstellungen von König Ludwig II. (1901); O. Bray-Steinburg, Denkwürdigkeiten (1901); S. Röcke, Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner (1903); W. Busch, Die Kämpfe über Reichsverfassung und Kaisertum (1906); Chlodwig Hohenlohe, Denkwürdigkeiten (2 vols., 1907); A. v. Ruville, Bayern und die Wiederaufrichtung des Deutschen Reiches (1909); K. A. v. Müller, Bayern im Jahre 1866 und die Berufung des Fürsten Hohenlohe (1909); G. Kuntzel, Bismarck und Bayern in der Zeit der Reichsgründung (1910); Hesselbarth, Die Enstehung des deutsch-framözischen Krieges (1910); W. Strohmayer, “Die Ahnentafel Ludwigs II. und Ottos I.,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, vol. vii. (1910).

(J. Hn.)


It was on Wagner’s advice that the king appointed Hohenlohe prime minister in 1866. See Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst, Prince Chlodwig zu, under Hohenlohe. [Ed.]

Hohenlohe (Denkwürdigkeiten) comments on the fact that the king did not even take the trouble to review the troops proceeding to the war. [Ed.]

LOUIS II. (846-879), king of France, called “le Bègue” or “the Stammerer,” was a son of Charles II. the Bald, Roman emperor and king of the West Franks, and was born on the 1st of November 846. After the death of his elder brother Charles in 866 he became king of Aquitaine, and in October 877 he succeeded his father as king of the West Franks, but not as emperor. Having made extensive concessions to the nobles both clerical and lay, he was crowned king by Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, on the 8th of December following, and in September 878 he took advantage of the presence of Pope John VIII. at the council of Troyes to be consecrated afresh. After a feeble and ineffectual reign of eighteen months Louis died at Compiègne on the 10th or 11th of April 879. The king is described as “un homme simple et doux, aimant la paix, la justice et la religion.” By his first wife, Ansgarde, a Burgundian princess, he had two sons, his successors, Louis III. and Carloman; by his second wife, Adelaide, he had a posthumous son, Charles the Simple, who also became king of France.

(A. W. H.*)


The emperor Louis I. is counted as Louis I., king of France.

LOUIS III. (c. 863-882), king of France, was a son of Louis II. and with his brother Carloman succeeded his father as king in April 879. A strong party, however, cast some doubts upon the legitimacy of the young princes, as the marriage of their parents had not been recognized by the emperor Charles the Bald; consequently it was proposed to offer the crown to the East Frankish ruler Louis, a son of Louis the German. But this plan came to nothing, and in September 879 the brothers were crowned at Ferrières by Ansègisus, archbishop of Sens. A few months later they divided their kingdom, Louis receiving the part of France north of the Loire. They acted together against the Northmen, over whom in August 881 they gained a memorable victory. They also turned against Boso who had been set up as king in Burgundy and Provence. On the 5th of August 882 Louis died at St Denis. He left no sons and Carloman became sole king.

(A. W. H.*)

LOUIS IV. (921-954), king of France, surnamed “d’Outremer” (Transmarinus), was the son of Charles III. the Simple. In consequence of the imprisonment of his father in 922, his mother Odgiva (Eadgyfu), sister of the English king Æthelstan, fled to England with the young Louis—a circumstance to which he owes his surname. On the death of the usurper Rudolph (Raoul), Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh the Great, count of Paris, and the other nobles between whom France was divided, chose Louis for their king, and the lad was brought over from England and consecrated at Laon on the 19th of June 936. Although his de facto sovereignty was confined to the town of Laon and to some places in the north of France, Louis displayed a zeal beyond his years in procuring the recognition of his authority by his turbulent vassals. The beginning of his reign was marked by a disastrous irruption of the Hungarians into Burgundy and Aquitaine (937). In 939 Louis became involved in a struggle with the emperor Otto the Great on the question of Lorraine, the nobles of which district had sworn an oath of fidelity to the king of France. When Louis married Gerberga, sister of Otto, and widow of Giselbert, duke of Lorraine, there seemed to be a fair prospect of peace; but the war was resumed, Otto supporting the rebel lords of the kingdom of France, and peace was not declared until 942, at the treaty of Visé-sur-Meuse. On the death of William Longsword, duke of Normandy, who had been assassinated by Arnulf, count of Flanders, in December 942, Louis endeavoured to obtain possession of the person of Richard, the young son and heir of the late duke. After an unsuccessful expedition into Normandy, Louis fell into the hands of his adversaries, and was for some time kept prisoner at Rouen (945), and subsequently handed over to Hugh the Great, who only consented to release him on condition that he should surrender Laon. Menaced, however, by Louis’ brother-in-law, Otto the Great, and excommunicated by the council of Ingelheim (948), the powerful vassal was forced to make submission and to restore Laon to his sovereign. The last years of the reign were troubled by fresh difficulties with Hugh the Great and also by an irruption of the Hungarians into the south of France. Louis died on the 10th of September 954, and was succeeded by his son Lothair.

The chief authority for the reign is the chronicler Flodoard. See also Ph. Lauer, La Règne de Louis IV d’Outre-Mer (Paris, 1900); and A. Heil, Die politischen Beziehungen zwischen Otto dem Grossen und Ludwig IV. von Frankreich (Berlin, 1904).

(R. Po.)

LOUIS V. (967-987), king of France, succeeded his father Lothair in March 986 at the age of nineteen, and finally embroiled the Carolingian dynasty with Hugh Capet and Adalberon, archbishop of Reims. From the absence of any important event in his one year’s reign the medieval chroniclers designated him by the words “qui nihil fecit,” i.e. “le Fainéant” or “do-nothing.” Louis died in May 987, his mother Emma being accused of having poisoned him. He had married Adelaide, sister of Geoffrey Grisegonelle, count of Anjou, but had no issue. His heir by blood was Charles, duke of Lower Lorraine, son of Louis IV., but the defection of the bishops and the treason of Adalberon (Ascelinus), bishop of Laon, assured the success of Hugh Capet.

See F. Lot, Les Derniers Carolingiens (Paris, 1891); and the Recueil des actes de Lothaire et de Louis V, edited by L. Halphen and F. Lot (1908).

(R. Po.)

LOUIS VI. (1081-1137), king of France, surnamed “the Fat,” was the son of Philip I. of France and Bertha of Holland. He was also surnamed the “Wide-awake” and “the Bruiser,” and lost none of his energy when he earned the nickname by which he is known in history. In 1098 Louis was made a knight, and about the same time was associated with his father in the government, which the growing infirmities of Philip left more and more to his son, in spite of the opposition of Bertrada, the queen, whose criminal union with Philip had brought the anathema of the church. From 1100 to 1108 Louis by his victorious wars on the English and brigands had secured the army on his side, while the court supported Bertrada. Unable to make headway against him in war she attempted to poison him, and contemporary chroniclers attributed to this poison the pallor of his face, which seems to have been in remarkable contrast to his stalwart, and later his corpulent figure. Louis’ reign is one of the most important in the history of France. He is little less than the second founder of the Capetian dynasty. When the feeble and incompetent Philip I. died (29th of July 1108) Louis was faced by feudal barons as powerful as himself, and ready to rise against him. He was forced to have himself hurriedly crowned at Orleans, supported by a handful of vassals and some ecclesiastics. As king he continued the policy he had followed during the previous eight years, of securing the roads leading to Paris by putting down feudal brigands and destroying their strongholds in the Île-de-France. The castle of the most notorious of these, Hugues du Puiset, was three times taken and burned by the king’s men, but Hugues was spared to go back each time to his robber life, until he died on a crusade. In the north, Thomas de Marle, son of Enguerrand de Coucy, carried on a career of rapine and murder for almost thirty years before the king succeeded in taking him prisoner (1130). Twenty-four years of continuous war finally rooted out the robber barons who lived on the plunder of the roads leading to Paris: the lords of Montlhéri, who commanded the roads to Orleans, Melun and the south, those of Montmorency near St Denis on the north (who had to restore what they had robbed the abbey of St Denis), those of Le Puiset toward the west, on the way to Chartres, and many others. Parallel with this consolidation of his power in the ancestral domains Louis met energetically the Anglo-Norman danger, warring with Henry I. of England for twenty-five years. After the victory of Tinchebray (1106) Louis supported the claims of William Clito, son of Robert, duke of Normandy, against Henry I. A ruthless war followed, in which Louis was at times reduced to the sorest straits. In 1119, at a council held at Reims under the presidency of Pope Calixtus II., the enemies were reconciled; but William Clito’s claims were not satisfied, and in 1123 war began again on a larger scale. Henry I. induced the emperor Henry V. to join in the attack upon France; and, his heir having been drowned in the loss of the “White Ship,” won the count of Anjou by marrying his only daughter Matilda to Geoffrey, the Angevin heir (1127). The invasion of Henry V. was met by something like a national army, which gathered under Louis at Reims. “For a few days at least, the lord of the Île-de-France was truly a king of France” (Luchaire). Suger proudly gives the list of barons who appeared. Henry V. came no farther than Metz. Royalty had won great prestige. Even Theobald, count of Chartres, the king’s greatest enemy, the soul of feudal coalitions, came with his contingent. Shortly afterwards (1126), Louis was able to overawe the great count of Aquitaine, William IX., and force his vassal, the count of Auvergne, to treat justly the bishop of Clermont. In Flanders Louis interfered upon the assassination of Charles the Good. He caused the barons to elect as their count in Arras the same William Clito who claimed Normandy, and who was closely bound to the king. For a while Louis had Flanders absolutely at his disposal, but he had hardly left William alone (1127) when his brutal oppression roused both towns and nobles, who declared that Louis had no right to interfere in Flanders. The death of William Clito, and a savage war with his own seneschal, prevented Louis from effectually resenting this attitude; but Thierry of Alsace, the new count, consented in 1128 to receive from Louis the investiture of all his French fiefs, and henceforth lived on good terms with him. In all his wars—those mentioned are but a part of them—Louis fought in person. Proud of his strength, reckless in the charge as on the march, plunging into swollen rivers, entering blazing castles, he gained the reputation of a national hero, the protector of the poor, the church, the peasants and the towns. The communal movement grew during his reign, and he encouraged it on the fiefs of his vassals in order to weaken them; but the title “Father of the Communes” by which he was known in history is not deserved, though he did grant some privileges to towns on his domains. Neither was Louis the author of the movement for the emancipation of the serfs, as was formerly claimed. His attitude toward the movement was like that of his predecessors and contemporaries, to favour emancipation when it promised greater chance of profit, greater scope for exploitation of the peasants; otherwise to oppose it. He was a great benefactor to the church, aided the new, reformed monastic congregations of Cîteau, Prémontré and Fontevrault, and chose his two chief ministers from the clergy. Étienne de Garlande, whom Louis raised from obscurity to be archdeacon of Notre Dame at Paris, chancellor and seneschal of France, was all-powerful with the king from 1108 to 1127. His relatives monopolized the highest offices of the state. But the queen Adelaide became his enemy; both Ivo of Chartres and St Bernard bitterly attacked him; and the king suddenly stripped him of all his offices and honours. Joining the rebellious barons, Étienne then led a bitter war against the king for three years. When Louis had reduced him to terms he pardoned him and restored him to the chancellorship (1132), but not to his old power. Suger (q.v.), administrator of St Denis, enters the scene toward the close of this reign, but his great work belongs to the next. Louis VI. died on the 1st of August 1137, just a few days after his son, Louis the Young, had set out for the far south-west, the Aquitaine which had been won by the marriage with Eleanor. His wife was Adelaide, or Alice, daughter of Humbert II., count of Savoy, by whom he had seven sons and a daughter.

See A. Luchaire, Louis le Gros, annales de sa vie et son règne (1890), and the same writer’s volume, Les Premiers Capétiens, in E. Lavisse’s Histoire de France.

(J. T. S.*)

LOUIS VII. (c. 1121-1180), king of France, son of Louis VI. the Fat, was associated with his father and anointed by Innocent II. in 1131. In 1137 he succeeded his father, and in the same year married at Bordeaux Eleanor, heiress of William II., duke of Aquitaine. In the first part of his reign he was vigorous and jealous of his prerogatives, but after his crusade his religiosity developed to such an extent as to make him utterly inefficient. His accession was marked by no disturbances, save the risings of the burgesses of Orleans and of Poitiers, who wished to organize communes. But soon he came into violent conflict with Pope Innocent II. The archbishopric of Bourges became vacant, and the king supported as candidate the chancellor Cadurc, against the pope’s nominee Pierre de la Châtre, swearing upon relics that so long as he lived Pierre should never enter Bourges. This brought the interdict upon the king’s lands. At the same time he became involved in a war with Theobald, count of Champagne, by permitting Rodolphe (Raoul), count of Vermandois and seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife, Theobald’s niece, and to marry Petronille of Aquitaine, sister of the queen of France. The war, which lasted two years (1142-44), was marked by the occupation of Champagne by the royal army and the capture of Vitry, where many persons perished in the burning of the church. Geoffrey the Handsome, count of Anjou, by his conquest of Normandy threatened the royal domains, and Louis VII. by a clever manœuvre threw his army on the Norman frontier and gained Gisors, one of the keys of Normandy. At his court which met in Bourges Louis declared on Christmas Day 1145 his intention of going on a crusade. St Bernard assured its popularity by his preaching at Vézelay (Easter 1146), and Louis set out from Metz in June 1147, on the overland route to Syria. The expedition was disastrous, and he regained France in 1149, overcome by the humiliation of the crusade. In the rest of his reign he showed much feebleness and poor judgment. He committed a grave political blunder in causing a council at Beaugency (on the 21st of March 1152) to annul his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, under pretext of kinship, but really owing to violent quarrels during the crusade. Eleanor married Henry II. of England in the following May, and brought him the duchy of Aquitaine. Louis VII. led a half-hearted war against Henry for having married without the authorization of his suzerain; but in August 1154 gave up his rights over Aquitaine, and contented himself with an indemnity. In 1154 Louis married Constance, daughter of the king of Castile, and their daughter Marguerite he affianced imprudently by the treaty of Gisors (1158) to Henry, eldest son of the king of England, promising as dowry the Vexin and Gisors. Five weeks after the death of Constance, on the 4th of October 1160, Louis VII. married Adèle of Champagne, and Henry II. to counterbalance the aid this would give the king of France, had the marriage of their infant children celebrated at once. Louis VII. gave little sign of understanding the danger of the growing Angevin power, though in 1159 he made an expedition in the south to aid Raymond V., count of Toulouse, who had been attacked by Henry II. At the same time the emperor Frederick I. in the east was making good the imperial claims on Arles. When the schism broke out, Louis took the part of the pope Alexander III., the enemy of Frederick, and after two comedy-like failures of Frederick to meet Louis VII. at Saint Jean de Losne (on the 29th of August and the 22nd of September 1162), Louis definitely gave himself up to the cause of Alexander, who lived at Sens from 1163 to 1165. Alexander gave the king, in return for his loyal support, the golden rose. Louis VII. received Thomas Becket and tried to reconcile him with King Henry II. He supported Henry’s rebellious sons, but acted slowly and feebly, and so contributed largely to the break up of the coalition (1173-1174). Finally in 1177 the pope intervened to bring the two kings to terms at Vitry. By his third wife, Adèle, Louis had an heir, the future Philip Augustus, born on the 21st of August 1165. He had him crowned at Reims in 1179, but, already stricken with paralysis, he himself was not able to be present at the ceremony, and died on the 18th of September 1180. His reign from the point of view of royal territory and military power, was a period of retrogression. Yet the royal authority had made progress in the parts of France distant from the royal domains. More direct and more frequent connexion was made with distant feudatories, a result largely due to the alliance of the clergy with the crown. Louis thus reaped the reward for services rendered the church during the least successful portion of his reign.

See R. Hirsch, Studien zur Geschichte König Ludwigs VII. von Frankreich (1892); A. Cartellieri, Philipp II. August von Frankreich bis zum Tode seines Vaters, 1165-1180 (1891); and A. Luchaire in E. Lavisse’s Histoire de France, tome iii. 1st part, pp. 1-81.

(J. T. S.*)

LOUIS VIII. (1187-1226), king of France, eldest son of Philip Augustus and of Isabella of Hainaut, was born in Paris on the 5th of September 1187. Louis was short, thin, pale-faced, with studious tastes, cold and placid temper, sober and chaste in his life. He left the reputation of a saint, but was also a warrior prince. In 1213 he led the campaign against Ferrand, count of Flanders; in 1214, while Philip Augustus was winning the victory of Bouvines, he held John of England in check, and was victorious at La Roche-aux-Moines. In the autumn of 1215 Louis received from a group of English barons, headed by Geoffrey de Mandeville, a request to “pluck them out of the hand of this tyrant” (John). Some 7000 French knights were sent over to England during the winter and two more contingents followed, but it was only after twenty-four English hostages had arrived in Paris that Louis himself prepared to invade England. The expedition was forbidden by the papal legate, but Louis set out from Calais on the 20th and landed at Stonor on the 22nd of May 1216. In three months he had obtained a strong foothold in eastern England, and in the end of July he laid siege to Dover, while part of his army besieged Windsor with a view to securing the safety of London. The pretexts on which he claimed the English crown were set down in a memorandum drawn up by French lawyers in 1215. These claims—that John had forfeited the crown by the murder of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, and that the English barons had the right to dispose of the vacant throne—lost their plausibility on the death of King John and the accession of his infant son as Henry III. in October 1216. The papal legate, Gualo, who had forbidden the enterprise, had arrived in England at the same time as Louis. He excommunicated the French troops and the English rebels, and Henry III. found a valiant defender in William Marshal, earl of Pembroke. After the “Fair of Lincoln,” in which his army was defeated, Louis was compelled to resign his pretensions, though by a secret article of the treaty of Lambeth (September 1217) he secured a small war indemnity. Louis had assisted Simon de Montfort in his war against the Albigenses in 1215, and after his return to France he again joined the crusade. With Simon’s son and successor, Amauri de Montfort, he directed the brutal massacre which followed the capture of Marmande. Philip II., suspicious of his son until the close of his life, took precautions to assure his obedience, narrowly watched his administration in Artois, which Louis held from his mother Isabella, and, contrary to the custom of the kings of France, did not associate his son with him by having him crowned. Philip Augustus dying on the 14th of July 1223, Louis VIII. was anointed at Reims on the 6th of August following. He surrounded himself with councillors whom his father had chosen and formed, and continued his father’s policy. His reign was taken up with two great designs: to destroy the power of the Plantagenets, and to conquer the heretical south of France. An expedition conquered Poitou and Saintonge (1224); in 1226 he led the crusade against the Albigenses in the south, forced Avignon to capitulate and received the submission of Languedoc. While passing the Auvergne on his return to Paris, he was stricken with dysentery, and died at Montpensier on the 8th of November 1226. His reign, short as it was, brought gains both to the royal domains and to the power of the crown over the feudal lords. He had married in 1200 Blanche of Castile, daughter of Alphonso IX. of Castile and granddaughter of Henry II. of England, who bore him twelve children; his eldest surviving son was his successor, Louis IX.

See C. Petit-Dutaillis, Étude sur la vie et le règne de Louis VIII. (Paris, 1894); and E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, tome iii. (1901).

(M. Br.)

LOUIS IX. (1214-1270), king of France, known as Saint Louis, was born on the 25th of April 1214, and was baptized at Poissy. His father, Louis VIII., died in 1226, leaving the first minority since the accession of the Capetians, but his mother, Queen Blanche of Castile, proved more than a match for the feudal nobility. She secured her son’s coronation at Reims on the 29th of November 1226; and, mainly by the aid of the papal legate, Romano Bonaventura, bishop of Porto (d. 1243), and of Thibaut IV., count of Champagne, was able to thwart the rebellious plans of Pierre Mauclerc, duke of Brittany, and Philippe Hurepel, a natural son of Philip Augustus. Mauclerc’s opposition was not finally overcome, however, until 1234. Then in 1236 Thibaut, who had become king of Navarre, turned against the queen, formed an alliance with Brittany, marrying his daughter without royal consent to Jean le Roux, Mauclerc’s son, and attempted to make a new feudal league. The final triumph of the regent was shown when the king’s army assembled at Vincennes. His summons met with such general and prompt obedience as to awe Thibaut into submission without striking a blow. Thus the reign of Louis IX. began with royal prerogatives fully maintained; the kingdom was well under control, and Mauclerc and Thibaut were both obliged to go on crusade. But the influence of the strong-willed queen-mother continued to make itself felt to the close of her life. Louis IX. did not lack independence of character, but his confidence in his mother had been amply justified and he always acted in her presence like a child. This confidence he withheld from his wife, Margaret, daughter of Raymond Berenger, count of Provence, whom he married at Sens in May 1234. The reign was comparatively uneventful. A rising of the nobles of the south-west, stirred up by Isabella, widow of King John of England, and her husband, Hugh de Lusignan, count of the Marche, upon the occasion of the investment of Alphonse of Poitiers with the fiefs left him by Louis VIII. as a result of the Albigensian crusade, reached threatening dimensions in 1242, but the king’s armies easily overran Count Hugh’s territories, and defeated Henry III. of England, who had come to his aid, at Saintes. Isabella and her husband were forced to submit, and Raymond VII., count of Toulouse, yielded without resistance upon the advent of two royal armies, and accepted the peace of Lorris in January 1243. This was the last rising of the nobles in Louis’s reign.

At the end of 1244, during an illness, Louis took the cross. He had already been much distressed by the plight of John of Brienne, emperor at Constantinople, and bought from him the crown of thorns, parts of the true cross, the holy lance, and the holy sponge. The Sainte Chapelle in Paris still stands as a monument to the value of these relics to the saintly king. But the quarrel between the papacy and the emperor Frederick II., in which Louis maintained a watchful neutrality—only interfering to prevent the capture of Innocent IV. at Lyons—and the difficulties of preparation, delayed the embarkation until August 1248. His defeat and capture at Mansura, in February 1250, the next four years spent in Syria in captivity, in diplomatic intrigues, and finally in raising the fortifications of Caesarea and Joppa,—these events belong to the history of the crusades (q.v.). His return to France was urgently needed, as Blanche of Castile, whom he had left as regent, had died in November 1252, and upon the removal of her strong hand feudal turbulence had begun to show itself.

This period between his first and second crusades (1254-1269) is the real age of Saint Louis in the history of France. He imposed peace between warring factions of his nobility by mere moral force, backed up by something like an awakened public opinion. His nobles often chafed under his unrelenting justice but never dared rebel. The most famous of his settlements was the treaty of Paris, drawn up in May 1258 and ratified in December 1259, by which the claims of Henry III. of England were adjusted. Henry renounced absolutely Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Poitou, and received, on condition of recognizing Louis as liege suzerain, all the fiefs and domains of the king of France in the dioceses of Limoges, Cahors and Perigueux, and the expectation of Saintonge south of the Charente, and Agenais, if they should fall to the crown of France by the death of Alphonse of Poitiers. In addition, Louis promised to provide Henry with sufficient money to maintain 500 knights for two years. This treaty was very unpopular in France, since the king surrendered a large part of France that Henry had not won; but Louis was satisfied that the absolute sovereignty over the northern provinces more than equalled the loss in the south. Historians still disagree as to its wisdom. Louis made a similar compromise with the king of Aragon in the treaty of Corbeil, 1258, whereby he gave up the claims of kings of France to Roussillon and Barcelona, which went back to the conquest of Charlemagne. The king of Aragon in his turn gave up his claims to part of Provence and Languedoc, with the exception of Narbonne. Louis’s position was strikingly shown in 1264 when the English barons submitted their attempt to bind Henry III. by the Provisions of Oxford to his arbitration. His reply in the “Dit” or Mise of Amiens was a flat denial of all the claims of the barons and failed to avert the civil war. Louis was more successful in preventing feuds between his own nobles: between the counts of Brittany and Champagne over the succession to Navarre; the dauphin of Vienne (Guigues VII.) and Charles of Anjou; the count of Burgundy and the count of Châlons; Henry of Luxemburg and the duke of Lorraine with the count of Bar. Upon the whole he maintained peace with his neighbours, although both Germany and England were torn with civil wars. He reluctantly consented to sanction the conquest of Naples by his brother, Charles, duke of Anjou, and it is possible that he yielded here in the belief that it was a step toward another crusade.

On the 24th of March 1267, Louis called to Paris such of his knights as were not with Charles of Anjou in Naples. No one knew why he had called them; but when the king in full assembly proclaimed his purpose of going on a second crusade, few ventured to refuse the cross. Three years of preparation followed; then on the 1st of July 1270 they sailed from Aigues Mortes for Tunis, whither the expedition seems to have been directed by the machinations of Charles of Anjou, who, it is claimed, persuaded his brother that the key to Egypt and to Jerusalem was that part of Africa which was his own most dangerous neighbour. After seventeen days’ voyage to Carthage, one month of the summer’s heat and plague decimated the army, and when Charles of Anjou arrived he found that Louis himself had died of the plague on the 25th of August 1270.

Saint Louis stands in history as the ideal king of the middle ages. An accomplished knight, physically strong in spite of his ascetic practices, fearless in battle, heroic in adversity, of imperious temperament, unyielding when sure of the justness of his cause, energetic and firm, he was indeed “every inch a king.” Joinville says that he was taller by a head than any of his knights. His devotions would have worn out a less robust saint. He fasted much, loved sermons, regularly heard two masses a day and all the offices, dressing at midnight for matins in his chapel, and surrounded even when he travelled by priests on horseback chanting the hours. After his return from the first crusade, he wore only grey woollens in winter, dark silks in summer. He built hospitals, visited and tended the sick himself, gave charity to over a hundred beggars daily. Yet he safeguarded the royal dignity by bringing them in at the back door of the palace, and by a courtly display greater than ever before in France. His naturally cold temperament was somewhat relieved by a sense of humour, which however did not prevent his making presents of haircloth shirts to his friends. He had no favourite, nor prime minister. Louis was canonized in 1297.

As a statesman Louis IX. has left no distinct monument. The famous “Établissements of St Louis” has been shown in our own day to have been private compilation. It was a coutumier drawn up before 1273, including, as well as some royal decrees, the civil and feudal law of Anjou, Maine and the Orléanais. Recent researches have also denied Louis the credit of having aided the communes. He exploited them to the full. His standpoint in this respect was distinctly feudal. He treated his clergy as he did his barons, enforcing the supremacy of royal justice, and strongly opposing the exactions of the pope until the latter part of his reign, when he joined forces with him to extort as much as possible from the clergy. At the end of the reign most of the sees and monasteries of France were in debt to the Lombard bankers. Finally, the reign of Saint Louis saw the introduction of the pontifical inquisition into France.

There are numerous portraits of St Louis, but they are unauthentic and contradictory. In 1903 M. Salomon Reinach claimed to have found in the heads sculptured in the angles of the arches of the chapel at St Germain portraits of St Louis, his brothers and sisters, and Queen Marguerite, or Blanche, made between 1235 and 1240. This conjectured portrait somewhat resembles the modern type, which is based upon a statue of Charles V. once in the church of the Celestins in Paris, and which Lenoir mistakenly identified as that of Louis IX. The king had eleven children, six sons and five daughters, among them being his successor, Philip III., and Robert, count of Clermont, the ancestor of Henry IV.

The best contemporary accounts of Louis IX. are the famous Memoirs of the Sire Jean de Joinville (q.v.), published by N. de Wailly for the Soc. de l’Hist. de France, under the title Histoire de Saint Louis (Paris, 1868), and again with translation (1874); English translation by J. Hutton (1868). See also William of Nangis, Gesta Ludovici IX., edited by M. Bouquet in vol. xx. of the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France. Of modern works may be mentioned C. V. Langlois in E. Lavisse’s Histoire de France, tome iii., with references to literature; Frederick Perry, Saint Louis, the Most Christian King (New York, 1901); E. J. Davis, The Invasion of Egypt by Louis IX. of France (1898); H. A. Wallon, Saint Louis et son temps (1875); A. Lecoy de la Marche, Saint Louis (Tours, 1891); and E. Berger, Saint Louis et Innocent IV (Paris, 1893), and Histoire de Blanche de Castille (1895). See also The Court of a Saint, by Winifred F. Knox (1909).

(J. T. S.*)

LOUIS X. (1289-1316), king of France and Navarre, called le Hutin or “the Quarreller,” was the son of Philip IV. and of Jeanne of Navarre. He was born at Paris on the 4th of October 1289, took the title king of Navarre on the death of his mother, on the 2nd of April 1305, and succeeded Philip IV. in France on the 29th of November 1314, being crowned at Reims in August 1315. The origin of his surname is uncertain. Louis X. is a somewhat indistinct figure among the kings of France, the preponderating influence at court during his short reign being that of his uncle, Charles of Valois. The reign began with reaction against the policy of Philip IV. Private vengeance was wreaked on Enguerrand de Marigny, who was hanged, Pierre de Latilli, bishop of Châlons and chancellor, and Raoul de Presle, advocate of the parlement, who were imprisoned. The leagues of the lesser country gentry, formed in 1314 before the accession of Louis, continued to demand the ancient privileges of the nobility,—tourneys, private wars and judgment of nobles not by king’s officers but by their peers—and to protest against the direct call by the king of their vassals to the royal army. Louis X. granted them charters in which he made apparent concessions, but used evasive formulas which in reality ceded nothing. There was a charter to the Normans, one to the Burgundians, one to the Languedocians (1315). Robert de Béthune, count of Flanders, refused to do homage, and his French fiefs were declared confiscate by a court of his peers. In August 1315 Louis X. led an army toward Lille, but the flooded Lys barred his passage, the ground was so soaked with rains that the army could not advance, and it was thrown back, without a battle, on Tournai. Need of money inspired one famous ordinance of this reign; in 1315 the serfs of the royal domains were invited to buy their civil liberty,—an invitation which did not meet with great enthusiasm, as the freedman was merely freed for further exploitation, and Philip V. was obliged to renew it in 1318. Louis X. died suddenly on the 5th of June 1316. His first wife was Margaret, daughter of Robert II., duke of Burgundy; she was accused of adultery and died a prisoner in the château Gaillard. By her he had one daughter, Jeanne, wife of Philip, count of Evreux and king of Navarre. By his second wife Clémence, daughter of Charles Martel, titular king of Hungary, he left a posthumous son, King John I.

See Ch. Dufayard, “La réaction feodale sous les fils de Philippe le Bel,” in Revue historique (1894); Paul Lehugeur, Histoire de Philippe le Long, roi de France (Paris, 1897); and Joseph Petit, Charles de Valois (Paris, 1900).

(J. T. S.*)

LOUIS XI. (1423-1483), king of France, the son of Charles VII. and his queen, Marie of Anjou, was born on the 3rd of July 1423, at Bourges, where his father, then nicknamed the “King of Bourges,” had taken refuge from the English. At the birth of Louis XI. part of France was in English hands; when he was five years old, Joan of Arc appeared; he was just six when his father was crowned at Reims. But his boyhood was spent apart from these stirring events, in the castle of Loches, where his father visited him rarely. John Gerson, the foremost theologian of France, wrote a manual of instructions (still extant) for the first of his tutors, Jean Majoris, a canon of Reims. His second tutor, Bernard of Armagnac, was noted for his piety and humility. If, as has been claimed, Louis owed to them any of his tendency to prefer the society of the poor, or rather of the bourgeois, to that of the nobility, their example was his best lesson in the craft of kingship. In June 1436, when scarcely thirteen, he was married to Margaret (c. 1425-1445), daughter of James I. of Scotland, a princess of about his own age, but sickly and romantic, and in every way his opposite. Three years after this unhappy marriage Louis entered upon his stormy political career. Sent by his father in 1439 to direct the defence of Languedoc against the English, and to put down the brigandage in Poitou, he was induced by the rebellious nobles to betray his trust and place himself at the head of the Praguerie (q.v.). Charles VII. pardoned him this rebellion, due to his ambition and the seductive proposal of the nobles to make him regent. The following year he was fighting the English, and in 1443 aided his father to suppress the revolt of the count of Armagnac. His first important command, however, was in the next year, when he led an army of from 15,000 to 20,000 mercenaries and brigands,—the product of the Hundred Years’ War,—against the Swiss of the canton of Basel. The heroism of some two hundred Swiss, who for a while held thousands of the French army at bay, made a great impression on the young prince. After an ineffective siege of Basel, he made peace with the Swiss confederation, and led his robber soldiers into Alsace to ravage the country of the Habsburgs, who refused him the promised winter quarters. Meanwhile his father, making a parallel campaign in Lorraine, had assembled his first brilliant court at Nancy, and when Louis returned it was to find the king completely under the spell of Agnes Sorel. He at first made overtures to members of her party, and upon their rejection through fear of his ambition, his deadly hatred of her and of them involved the king. The death in 1445 of his wife Margaret, who was a great favourite of Charles VII., made the rupture complete. From that year until the death of the king father and son were enemies. Louis began his rebellious career by a futile attempt to seduce the cities of Agenais into treason, and then he prepared a plot to seize the king and his minister Pierre de Brézé. Antoine de Chabannes, who was to be the instrument of the plot, revealed it to Charles, and Louis was mildly punished by being sent off to Dauphiné (1447). He never saw his father again.

Louis set out to govern his principality as though it were an independent state. He dismissed the governor; he determined advantageously to himself the boundaries between his state and the territories of the duke of Savoy and of the papacy; and he enforced his authority over perhaps the most unruly nobility in western Europe, both lay and ecclesiastical. The right of private warfare was abolished; the bishops were obliged to give up most of their temporal jurisdiction, the scope of their courts was limited, and appeals to Rome were curtailed. On the other hand, Louis granted privileges to the towns and consistently used their alliance to overthrow the nobility. He watched the roads, built new ones, opened markets, protected the only bankers of the country, the Jews, and reorganized the administration so as to draw the utmost revenue possible from the prosperity thus secured. His ambition led him into foreign entanglements; he made a secret treaty with the duke of Savoy which was to give him right of way to Genoa, and made arrangements for a partition of the duchy of Milan. The alliance with Savoy was sealed by the marriage of Louis with Charlotte, daughter of Duke Lodovico, in 1452, in spite of the formal prohibition of Charles VII. The king marched south, but withdrew again leaving his son unsubdued. Four years later, as Charles came to the Bourbonnais, Louis, fearing for his life, fled to Flanders to the court of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, leaving Dauphiné to be definitely annexed to the crown of France. The policy of the dauphin was reversed, his ten years’ work was undone. Meanwhile he was installed in the castle of Genappe, in Brabant, where he remained until the death of his father. For this he waited impatiently five years, keeping himself posted by spies of every stage of the king’s last illness, and thus laying himself open to the accusation, believed in by Charles himself, that he had hastened the end by poison, a charge which modern historians deny.

On the 15th of August 1461, Louis was anointed at Reims, and Philip of Burgundy, as doyen of the peers of France, placed the crown on his head. For two months Philip acted as though the king were still his protégé. But in the midst of the festivities with which he was entertaining Paris, the duke found that Louis ventured to refuse his candidates for office, and on the 24th of September the new king left abruptly for Touraine. His first act was to strike at the faithful ministers of Charles VII. Pierre de Brézé and Antoine de Chabannes were captured and imprisoned, as well as men of sterling worth like Étienne Chevalier. But the king’s shrewdness triumphed before long over his vengeance, and the more serviceable of the officers of Charles VII. were for the most part soon reinstated, Louis’ advisers were mostly men of the middle class. He had a ready purse for men of talent, drawing them from England, Scotland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Such a motley throng of competent men had never before been seen at the court of France. Their origin, their previous crimes or virtues, their avarice or brutality, were indifferent to him so long as they served him loyally. Torture and imprisonment awaited them, whether of high or low degree, if he fancied that they were betraying him. Among the most prominent of these men in addition to Brézé, Chevalier and Chabannes, were Tristan Lermite, Jean de Daillon, Olivier le Dain (the barber), and after 1472, Philippe de Commines, drawn from the service of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who became his most intimate adviser and biographer. Surrounded by men like these Louis fought the last great battle of French royalty with feudalism.

Louis XI. began his reign with the same high-handed treatment of the nobles which had marked his rule in Dauphiné, going so far as to forbid them to hunt without his permission. He forced the clergy to pay long-neglected feudal dues, and intrigued against the great houses of Anjou and Orleans in Italy. The malcontent nobles soon began to plan revolt. Discharged officers of Charles VII. like Jean Dunois and John II. duke of Bourbon, stirred up hostility to the new men of the king, and Francis II. duke of Brittany was soon embroiled with Louis over an attempt to assert royal control over that practically independent duchy. The dissatisfied nobility found their greatest ally in Charles the Bold, afterwards duke of Burgundy, and in 1465 formed a “league of public welfare” and declared war on their king. The nominal head was the king’s brother Charles, duke of Berry, then eighteen years old, a weak character, the tool of the rebels as he was later the dupe of the king. Every great noble in France was in the league, except Gaston de Foix—who kept the south of France for the king,—and the counts of Vendôme and Eu. The whole country seemed on the verge of anarchy. It was saved by the refusal of the lesser gentry to rise, and by the alliance of the king with the citizen class, which was not led astray by the pretences of regard for the public weal which cloaked the designs of the leaguers. After a successful campaign in the Bourbonnais, Louis fought an indecisive battle with the Burgundians who had marched on Paris at Montlhéry, on the 16th of July 1465, and then stood a short siege in Paris. On the 28th of September he made a truce with Charles the Bold, and in October the treaties of Conflans and Saint Maur-les-Fossés, ended the war. The king yielded at all points; gave up the “Somme towns” in Picardy, for which he had paid 200,000 gold crowns, to Philip the Good, thus bringing the Burgundians close to Paris and to Normandy. Charles, the king’s brother, was given Normandy as an apanage, thus joining the territories of the rebellious duke of Brittany with those of Charles the Bold. The public weal was no longer talked about, while the kingdom was plundered both by royal tax gatherers and by unsubdued feudal lords to pay the cost of the war.

After this failure Louis set to work to repair his mistakes. The duke of Bourbon was won over by the gift of the government of the centre of France, and Dunois and Chabannes by restoring them their estates. Two months after he had granted Normandy to Charles, he took advantage of a quarrel between the duke of Brittany and his brother to take it again, sending the duke of Bourbon “to aid” Charles, while Dunois and Chabannes prepared for the struggle with Burgundy. The death of Duke Philip, on the 15th of June 1467, gave Charles the Bold a free hand. He gained over Edward IV. of England, whose sister Margaret he married; but while he was celebrating the wedding Louis invaded Brittany and detached Duke Francis from alliance with him. Normandy was completely reduced. The king had won a great triumph. It was followed by his greatest mistake. Eager as he always was to try diplomacy instead of war, Louis sent a gift of 60,000 golden crowns to Charles and secured a safe conduct from him for an interview. The interview took place on the 9th of October 1468 at Péronne. News came on the 11th that, instigated by the king of France, the people of Liége had massacred their bishop and the ducal governor. The news was false, but Charles, furious at such apparent duplicity, took Louis prisoner, only releasing him, three days later, on the king signing a treaty which granted Flanders freedom from interference from the parlement of Paris, and agreeing to accompany Charles to the siege of his own ally, Liége. Louis made light of the whole incident in his letters, but it marked the greatest humiliation of his life, and he was only too glad to find a scapegoat in Cardinal Jean Balue, who was accused of having plotted the treason of Péronne. Balue thereupon joined Guillaume de Harancourt, bishop of Verdun, in an intrigue to induce Charles of France to demand Champagne and Brie in accordance with the king’s promise to Charles the Bold, instead of distant Guienne where the king was determined to place him. The discovery of this conspiracy placed these two high dignitaries in prison (April 1469). Balue (q.v.) spent eleven years in prison quarters, comfortable enough, in spite of the legend to the contrary, while Harancourt was shut up in an iron cage until 1482. Then Louis, inducing his brother to accept Guienne,—where, surrounded by faithful royal officers, he was harmless for the time being,—undertook to play off the Lancastrians against Edward IV. who, as the ally of Charles the Bold, was menacing the coast of Normandy. Warwick, the king-maker, and Queen Margaret were aided in the expedition which in 1470 again placed Henry VI. upon the English throne. In the autumn Louis himself took the offensive, and royal troops overran Picardy and the Maconnais to Burgundy itself. But the tide turned against Louis in 1471. While Edward IV. won back England by the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, Charles the Bold besieged Amiens, and Louis was glad to make a truce, availing himself of the double dealing of the constable, the count of Saint Pol, who, trying to win an independent position for himself in Picardy, refused his aid to Charles unless he would definitely join the French nobility in another rising against the king. This rising was to be aided by the invasion of France by John II. of Aragon, Yolande, duchess of Savoy, and Edward IV. of England, who was to be given the old Plantagenet inheritance. The country was saved a desperate civil war by the death of the king’s brother, Charles, the nominal head of the coalition, on the 24th of May 1472. Louis’ joy on receiving news of this death knew no bounds. Charles the Bold, who had again invaded France, failed to take Beauvais, and was obliged to make a lasting truce. His projects were henceforth to be directed towards Germany. Louis then forced the duke of Brittany to make peace, and turned against John V. count of Armagnac, whose death at the opening of March 1473 ended the power of one of the most dangerous houses of the south. The first period of Louis’ reign was closed, and with it closed for ever the danger of dismemberment of France. John of Aragon continued the war in Roussillon and Cerdagne, which Louis had seized ten years before, and a most desperate rising of the inhabitants protracted the struggle for two years. After the capture of Perpignan on the 10th of March 1475, the wise and temperate government of Imbert de Batarnay and Boffile de Juge slowly pacified the new provinces. The death of Gaston IV. count of Foix in 1472 opened up the long diplomatic struggle for Navarre, which was destined to pass to the loyal family of Albret shortly after the death of Louis. His policy had won the line of the Pyrenees for France.

The overthrow of Charles the Bold was the second great task of Louis XI. This he accomplished by a policy much like that of Pitt against Napoleon. Louis was the soul of all hostile coalitions, especially urging on the Swiss and Sigismund of Austria, who ruled Tirol and Alsace. Charles’s ally, Edward IV., invaded France in June 1475, but Louis bought him off on the 29th of August at Picquigny—where the two sovereigns met on a bridge over the Somme, with a strong grille between them, Edward receiving 75,000 crowns, and a promise of a pension of 50,000 crowns annually. The dauphin Charles was to marry Edward’s daughter. Bribery of the English ministers was not spared, and in September the invaders recrossed to England. The count of Saint Pol, who had continued to play his double part, was surrendered by Charles to Louis, and executed, as was also Jacques d’Armagnac, duke of Nemours. With his vassals terrorized and subdued, Louis continued to subsidize the Swiss and René II. of Lorraine in their war upon Charles. The defeat and death of the duke of Burgundy at Nancy on the 5th of January 1477 was the crowning triumph of Louis’ diplomacy. But in his eagerness to seize the whole inheritance of his rival, Louis drove his daughter and heiress, Mary of Burgundy, into marriage with Maximilian of Austria (afterwards the emperor Maximilian I.), who successfully defended Flanders after a savage raid by Antoine de Chabannes. The battle of Guinegate on the 7th of August 1479 was indecisive, and definite peace was not established until after the death of Mary, when by the treaty of Arras (1482) Louis received Picardy, Artois and the Boulonnais, as well as the duchy of Burgundy and Franche Comté. The Austrians were left in Flanders, a menace and a danger. Louis failed here and in Spain; this failure being an indirect cause of that vast family compact which surrounded France later with the empire of Charles V. His interference in Spain had made both John II. of Aragon and Henry IV. of Castile his enemies, and so he was unable to prevent the marriage of their heirs, Ferdinand and Isabella. But the results of these marriages could not be foreseen, and the unification of France proved of more value than the possession of so widespread an empire. This unification was completed (except for Brittany) and the frontiers enlarged by the acquisition, upon the death of René of Anjou in 1480, of the duchies of Anjou and Bar, and in 1481 of Maine and Provence upon the death of Charles II., count of Maine. Of the inheritance of the house of Anjou only Lorraine escaped the king.

Failure in Spain was compensated for in Italy. Without waging war Louis made himself virtual arbiter of the fate of the principalities in the north, and his court was always besieged by ambassadors from them. After the death of Charles the Bold, Yolande, duchess of Savoy, was obliged to accept the control of Louis, who was her brother. In Milan he helped to place Lodovico il Moro in power in 1479, but he reaped less from this supple tyrant than he had expected. Pope Sixtus IV. the enemy of the Medici, was also the enemy of the king of France. Louis, who at the opening of his reign had denounced the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, had played fast and loose with the papacy. When Sixtus threatened Florence after the Pazzi conspiracy, 1478, Louis aided Lorenzo dei Medici to form an alliance with Naples, which forced the papacy to come to terms.

More than any other king of France, Louis XI. was a “bourgeois king.” The upper bourgeois, the aristocracy of his “good cities,” were his allies both against the nobles and against the artisan class, whenever they revolted, driven to desperation by the oppressive royal taxes which furnished the money for his wars or diplomacy. He ruled like a modern capitalist; placed his bribes like investments in the courts of his enemies; and, while draining the land of enormous sums, was pitiless toward the two productive portions of his realm, the country population and the artisans. His heartlessness toward the former provoked even an accomplice like Commines to protest. The latter were kept down by numerous edicts, tending to restrict to certain privileged families the rank of master workman in the gilds. There was the paternalism of a Frederick the Great in his encouragement of the silk industry,—“which all idle people ought to be made to work at,”—in his encouragement of commerce through the newly acquired port of Marseilles and the opening up of market placed. He even dreamed of a great trading company “of two hundred thousand livres or more,” to monopolize the trade of the Mediterranean, and planned to unify the various systems of weights and measures. In 1479 he called a meeting of two burgesses from each “good city” of his realm to consider means for preventing the influx of foreign coin. Impatient of all restraint upon his personal rule, he was continually in violent dispute with the parlement of Paris, and made “justice” another name for arbitrary government; yet he dreamed of a unification of the local customary laws (coûtumes) of France. He was the perfect model of a tyrant. The states-general met but once in his reign, in 1468, and then no talk of grievances was allowed; his object was only to get them to declare Normandy inalienable from the crown. They were informed that the king could raise his revenue without consulting them. Yet his budgets were enormously greater than ever before. In 1481 the taille alone brought in 4,600,000 livres, and even at the peaceful close of his reign his whole budget was 4,655,000 livres—as against 1,800,000 livres at the close of his father’s reign.

The king who did most for French royalty would have made a sorry figure at the court of a Louis XIV. He was ungainly, with rickety legs. His eyes were keen and piercing, but a long hooked nose lent grotesqueness to a face marked with cunning rather than with dignity. Its ugliness was emphasized by the old felt hat which he wore,—its sole ornament the leaden figure of a saint. Until the close of his life, when he tried to mislead ambassadors as to the state of his health by gorgeous robes, he wore the meanest clothes. Dressed in grey like a pilgrim, and accompanied by five or six trustworthy servants, he would set out on his interminable travels, “ambling along on a good mule.” Thus he traversed France, avoiding all ceremony, entering towns by back streets, receiving ambassadors in wayside huts, dining in public houses, enjoying the loose manners and language of his associates, and incidentally learning at first hand the condition of his people and the possibilities of using or taxing them—his needs of them rather than theirs of him. He loved to win men, especially those of the middle class, by affability and familiarity, employing all his arts to cajole and seduce those whom he needed. Yet his honied words easily turned to gall. He talked rapidly and much, sometimes for hours at a time, and most indiscreetly. He was not an agreeable companion, violent in his passions, nervous, restless, and in old age extremely irascible. Utterly unscrupulous, and without a trace of pity, he treated men like pawns, and was content only with absolute obedience.

But this Machiavellian prince was the genuine son of St Louis. His religiosity was genuine if degenerate. He lavished presents on influential saints, built shrines, sent gifts to churches, went on frequent pilgrimages and spent much time in prayer—employing his consummate diplomacy to win celestial allies, and rewarding them richly when their aid secured him any advantage. St Martin of Tours received 1200 crowns after the capture of Perpignan. He tried to bribe the saints of his enemies, as he did their ministers. An unfaltering faith taught him the value of religion—as a branch of politics. Finally, more in the spirit of orthodoxy, he used the same arts to make sure of heaven. When the ring of St Zanobius and the blood of Cape Verde turtles gave him no relief from his last illness, he showered gifts upon his patron saints, secured for his own benefit the masses of his clergy, and the most potent prayers in Christendom, those of the two most effective saints of his day, Bernardin of Doulins and Francis of Paolo.

During the last two or three years of his life Louis lived in great isolation, “seeing no one, speaking with no one, except such as he commanded,” in the château of Plessis-les-Tours, that “spider’s nest” bristling with watch towers, and guarded only by the most trusty servitors. A swarm of astrologers and physicians preyed upon his fears—and his purse. But, however foolish in his credulity, he still made his strong hand felt both in France and in Italy, remaining to the last “the terrible king.” His fervent prayers were interrupted by instructions for the regency which was to follow. He died on the 30th of August 1483, and was buried, according to his own wish, without royal state, in the church at Cléry, instead of at St Denis. He left a son, his successor, Charles VIII., and two daughters.

See the admirable résumé by Charles Petit-Dutaillis in Lavisse’s Histoire de France, tome iv. pt. ii. (1902), and bibliographical indications given there. Michelet’s wonderful depiction in his Histoire de France (livres 13 to 17) has never been surpassed for graphic word-painting, but it is inaccurate in details, and superseded in scholarship. Of the original sources for the reign the Lettres de Louis XI. (edited by Charavay and Vaesen, 8 vols., 1883-1902), the celebrated Mémoires of Philippe de Commines and the Journal of Jean de Royl naturally come first. The great mass of literature on the period is analysed in masterly fashion by A. Molinier, Sources de l’histoire de France (tome v. pp. 1-146), and to this exhaustive bibliography the reader is referred for further research. See also C. Hare, The Life of Louis XI. (London, 1907).

(J. T. S.*)

LOUIS XII. (1462-1515), king of France, was grandson of Louis of Orleans, the brother of Charles VI., and son of the poet prince, Charles of Orleans, who, after the battle of Agincourt, spent twenty-five years of captivity in England. Louis was duke of Orleans until his accession to the throne, and he was fourteen years old when Louis XI. gave him the hand of his second daughter, Joan the Lame. In the first years of the reign of Charles VIII., Louis made a determined stand against the government of the Beaujeus, stirred up coalitions of the feudal nobles against them, and was finally defeated and taken prisoner at St Aubin du Cormier in 1488. Charles VIII. set him at liberty in 1491. These successive checks tamed him a little. In the Italian expedition of 1494 he commanded the vanguard of the royal army, occupied Genoa, and remained in the north of Italy, menacing Milan, on which he was already dreaming of asserting his rights. The children of Charles VIII. having died in infancy, he became heir-presumptive to the throne, and succeeded Charles in 1499. Louis was then thirty-six years old, but he seems to have grown old prematurely. He was fragile, narrow-shouldered and of a sickly constitution. His intelligence was mediocre, his character weak, and he allowed himself to be dominated by his wife, Anne of Brittany, and his favourite the Cardinal d’Amboise. He was a good king, full of moderation and humanity, and bent upon maintaining order and improving the administration of justice. He enjoyed a genuine popularity, and in 1506 the estates of Tours conferred on him the surname of Père du Peuple. His foreign policy, which was directed wholly towards Italy, was for the most part unskilful; to his claims on Naples he added those on Milan, which he based on the marriage of his grandfather, Louis of Orleans, with Valentina Visconti. He led in person several armies into Italy, and proved as severe and pitiless towards his enemies as he was gentle and clement towards his subjects. Louis had two daughters. After his accession he had divorced his virtuous and ill-favoured queen, Joan, and had married, in 1499, Anne of Brittany, the widow of Charles VIII. On her death in January 1514, in order to detach England from the alliance against him, he married on the 9th of October 1514, Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII. of England (see Mary, queen of France). He died on the 1st of January 1515.

For a bibliography of the printed sources see Henri Hauser, Les Sources de l’histoire de France, XVIe siècle, vol. 1. (Paris, 1906). The principal secondary authorities are De Maulde, Histoire de Louis XII. (Paris, 1889-1893); Le Roux de Lincy, Vie de la reine Anne de Bretagne (Paris, 1860); H. Lemonnier, Les Guerres d’Italie (Paris, 1903) in the Histoire de France by E. Lavisse.

(J. I.)

LOUIS XIII. (1601-1643), king of France, was the son of Henry IV. and of Marie de’ Medici. He became king on his father’s assassination in 1610; but his mother at once seized the full powers of regent. She determined to reverse the policy of her husband and to bring France into alliance with Spain and the Austrian house, upon which power Henry had been meditating an attack at the time of his death. Two marriages were designed to cement this alliance. Louis was to marry Anne of Austria, daughter of the Spanish king, Philip III., and the Spanish prince, afterwards Philip IV., himself was to marry the Princess Elizabeth, the king’s sister. Notwithstanding the opposition of the Protestants and nobles of France, the queen carried through her purpose and the marriages were concluded in 1615. The next years were full of civil war and political intrigue, during which the queen relied upon the Marshal d’Ancre. Louis XIII. was a backward boy, and his education had been much neglected. We have the fullest details of his private life, and yet his character remains something of a mystery. He was fond of field sports and seemed to acquiesce in his mother’s occupation of power and in the rule of her favourites. But throughout his life he concealed his purposes even from his closest friends; sometimes it seems as if he were hardly conscious of them himself. In 1617 he was much attached to Charles d’Albert, sieur de Luynes; and with his help he arrested Marshal d’Ancre, and on his resistance had him assassinated. From this time to her death the relation between the king and his mother was one of concealed or open hostility. The article on France must be consulted for the intricate events of the following years.

The decisive incident for his private life as well as for his reign was the entrance of Cardinal Richelieu, hitherto the queen’s chief adviser, into the king’s council in 1624. Henceforth the policy of France was directed by Richelieu, who took up in its main features the system of Protestant alliances and opposition to the power of Austria and Spain, which had been begun by Henry IV. and had been interrupted by the queen-mother during the regency; while he asserted the power of the crown against all rivals at home. This policy had remarkable results for the king’s private life. It not only brought him into unremitting conflict with the Protestants and the nobles of France, but also made him the enemy of his mother, of his brother Gaston of Orleans, who made himself the champion of the cause of the nobles, and sometimes even of his wife. It is not easy to define his relations to Richelieu. He was convinced of his loyalty and of his genius, and in the end always supported his policy. But he disliked the friction with his family circle which this policy produced. In the difficulty with which he expressed himself and in a certain indecision of character the king was curiously unlike his father, the frank and impetuous Henry of Navarre, and his absolute son Louis XIV. He took a great interest in all the externals of war. He was present, and is said to have played an important part at the passage of Susa in 1629, and also eagerly participated in the siege of Rochelle, which surrendered in the same year. But for the most part his share in the great events of the reign was a passive one. The one all-important fact was that he supported his great minister. There were certain occasions when it seemed as if that support would be denied. The chief of these was what is known as the “Day of Dupes” (1630). Then the queen-mother and the king’s brother passionately attacked the minister, and for a moment it was believed that Richelieu was dismissed and that the queen-mother and a Spanish policy had triumphed. But the sequel only strengthened the power of the minister. He regained his ascendancy over the king, punished his enemies and forced Marie de’ Medici and Gaston of Orleans to sue for pardon. In 1631 Gaston fled to Lorraine and the queen-mother to Brussels. Gaston soon returned, to plot, to fail and to sue for pardon again and again; but Marie de’Medici ended her life in exile.

Richelieu’s position was much strengthened by these incidents, but to the end of life he had to struggle against conspiracies which were designed to deprive him of the king’s support, and usually Gaston of Orleans had some share in these movements. In 1632 the duke of Montmorency’s conspiracy brought its leader to the scaffold. But the last great effort to overthrow Richelieu was closely connected with the king. Louis XIII. had from the beginning of his reign had favourites—young men for the most part with whom he lived freely and intimately and spoke of public affairs lightly and unreservedly; and who in consequence often exaggerated their influence over him. Henri d’Effiat, marquis de Cinq-Mars, was the last of these favourites. The king is said to have allowed him to speak hostilely of Richelieu and even to recall the assassination of Marshal d’Ancre. Cinq-Mars believed himself secure of the king’s favour. He entered into negotiations with Spain and was secretly supported by Gaston of Orleans. But Richelieu discovered his treasonous relations with Spain and by this means defeated his plot. Louis was reconciled to his minister. “We have lived too long together to be separated” he is reported to have said (September 1642). Yet when Richelieu died in December of the same year he allowed himself to speak of him in a jealous and satirical tone. He died himself a few months later (May 1643).

His nature was timid, lethargic and melancholy, and his court was not marked by the scandals which had been seen under Henry IV. Yet Mademoiselle de la Fayette and Madame d’Hautefort and others are said to have been his mistresses. His brother Gaston survived him, but gave unexpectedly little trouble during the wars of the Fronde which ensued on the death of Louis XIII.

The chief source of information on Louis XIII.’s life is to be found in the contemporary memoirs, of which the chief are: Bassompierre, Fontenay-Mareuil, Gaston d’Orléans, Montrésor, Omer Talon. Richelieu’s own Memoirs are chiefly concerned with politics and diplomacy. Of modern works those most directly bearing on the king’s personal life are R. de Beauchamp, Louis XIII. d’après sa correspondance avec le cardinal de Richelieu; G. Hanotaux, Histoire du cardinal de Richelieu (1893-1896); Rossignol, Louis XIII. avant Richelieu; M. Topin, Louis XIII. et Richelieu (1876). See too Professor R. Lodge, Richelieu; J. B. H. R. Capefigue, Richelieu, Mazarin et la Fronde (1835-1836); and Dr J. H. Bridges, Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert (1866).

For full bibliography see G. Monod, Bibliographie de l’histoire de France; Cambridge Modern History, vol. iv. (“The Thirty Years’ War”); Lavisse et Rambaud, Histoire générale, vol. v. (“Guerres de religion”).

(A. J. G.*)

LOUIS XIV. (1638-1715), king of France, was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the 5th of September 1638. His father, Louis XIII., had married Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III., king of Spain, in 1615, but for twenty years the marriage had remained without issue. The childlessness of the king was a constant threat to the policy of his great minister Richelieu; for the king’s brother and heir, Gaston of Orleans, was a determined opponent of that policy. The birth of the prince who was destined to reign as Louis XIV. was therefore hailed as a triumph, not less important than any of those won by diplomacy or arms. The death of his father made Louis XIV. king on the 14th of May 1643, but he had to wait sixteen years before he began to rule. Power lay for some time in the hands of the queen-mother and in those of her minister, Cardinal Mazarin, who found it difficult to maintain the power of the throne and the integrity of French territory during the domestic troubles of the Fronde and the last stages of the Thirty Year’s War. The minister was hated as a foreigner, and the childhood of the king weakened the royal authority. Twice the court had to flee from Paris; once when there was a rumour of intended flight the populace was admitted to see the king in his bed. The memory of these humiliations played their part in developing later the autocratic ideas of Louis. Mazarin, in spite of all disadvantages, triumphed alike over his domestic and his foreign opponents. The Fronde was at an end by 1653; the peace of Westphalia (1648) and the peace of the Pyrenees (1659) marked the success of the arms and of the diplomacy of France. Louis XIV. was now twenty-one years of age and was anxious to rule as well as to reign. The peace of the Pyrenees was a decisive event in his personal history as well as in that of France, for one of its most important stipulations referred to his marriage. He had already been strongly attracted to one of the nieces of Mazarin, but reasons of state triumphed over personal impulse; and it was agreed that the new friendship with Spain should be cemented by the marriage of Louis to his cousin, the Infanta Maria Theresa. A large dowry was stipulated for; and in consideration of this the king promised to forgo all claims that his wife might otherwise possess to the Spanish crown or any part of its territories. The dowry was never paid, and the king held himself free of his promise.

The marriage took place at once, and the king entered Paris in triumph in 1660. Mazarin died in the next year; but so strong was the feeling that the kings of France could only rule through a first minister that it was generally expected that Mazarin would soon have a successor. The king, however, at once announced his intention of being his own first minister; and from this resolution he never swerved. Whatever great qualities he may have lacked he certainly possessed industry and patience in the highest degree. He built up a thoroughly personal system of government, and presided constantly over the council and many of its committees. He was fond of gaiety and of sport; but neither ever turned him away from the punctual and laborious discharge of his royal duties. Even the greatest of his ministers found themselves controlled by the king. Fouquet, the finance minister, had accumulated enormous wealth during the late disturbances, and seemed to possess power and ambition too great for a subject. Louis XIV. found it necessary almost to conspire against him; he was overthrown and condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Those who had most of the king’s confidence afterwards were Colbert for home affairs; Lionne for diplomacy; Louvois for war; but as his reign proceeded he became more self-confident and more intolerant of independence of judgment in his ministers.

His court was from the first one of great brilliance. In art and in literature, the great period, which is usually called by the king’s name, had in some respects passed its zenith when he began to reign. But France was unquestionably the first state in Europe both in arms and arts, and within France the authority of the king was practically undisputed. The nation, proud of its pre-eminence and weary of civil war, saw in the king its true representative and the guarantee of its unity and success. Louis was singularly well fitted by his physical and intellectual gifts for the rôle of Grand Monarque and he played it to perfection. His wife Maria Theresa bore him children but there was no community of tastes between them, and the chief influence at court is to be found not in the queen but in the succession of avowed mistresses. Mademoiselle de la Vallière held the position from 1662 to 1670; she was then ousted by Madame de Montespan, who had fiercely intrigued for it, and whose proud and ambitious temper offered a great contrast to her rival. She held her position from 1670 to 1679 and then gave place to the still more famous Madame de Maintenon, who ruled, however, not as mistress but as wife. The events that brought about this incident form the strangest episode in the king’s private life. Madame de Maintenon was the widow of the dramatist Scarron, and first came into relationship with the king as governess to his illegitimate children. She was a woman of unstained life and strongly religious temperament; and it was by this that she gained so great an influence over the king. Through her influence the king was reconciled to his wife, and, when Maria Theresa died in 1683, Madame de Maintenon shortly afterwards (in 1684) became the king’s wife, though this was never officially declared. Under her influence the court lost most of its gaiety, and religion came to exercise much control over the life and the policy of the king.

The first years of the king’s rule were marked by the great schemes of Colbert for the financial, commercial, industrial and naval reorganization of France, and in these schemes Louis took a deep interest. But in 1667 began the long series of wars, which lasted with little real intermission to the end of the reign (see France). In the steps that led to these wars and in their conduct the egotistic ambition and the vanity of the king played an important part; though he never showed real military skill and took no share in any military operations except in certain sieges. The War of Devolution (or the Queen’s War) in 1667-68 to enforce the queen’s claim to certain districts in the Spanish Netherlands, led to the Dutch War (1672-78), and in both these wars the supremacy of the French armies was clearly apparent. The next decade (1678-1688) was the real turning-point in the history of the reign, and the strength of France was seriously diminished. The chief cause of this is to be found in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The church had always opposed this settlement and had succeeded in altering it in many points. Now the new religious zeal and the autocratic temper of Louis XIV. came to the support of the church. The French Huguenots found their privileges decreased, and then, in 1685, the edict was altogether withdrawn. The results were ruinous to France. It was not only that she lost many thousands of her best citizens, but this blow against Protestantism deprived her of those Protestant alliances in Europe which had been in the past her great diplomatic support. Then the English Revolution came in 1688 and changed England from a wavering ally into the most determined of the enemies of France.

The war with the Grand Alliance, of which King William III. was the heart and soul, lasted from 1688 to 1697; and the treaty of Ryswick, which brought it to an end, deprived France of certain territories on her frontier. But Louis saw in the Spanish question a chance of more than making up for this loss. The Spanish king Charles II. was dying, and the future of the possessions of Spain was doubtful. The astute diplomacy of Louis succeeded in winning the inheritance for his grandson Philip. But this involved France and Europe in an immense war (1700) and by the peace of Utrecht (1713), though the French prince retained the Spanish crown, France had again to make concessions of territory.

Louis XIV. had shown wonderful tenacity of purpose during this disastrous war, and sometimes a nobler and more national spirit than during the years of his triumphs. But the condition of France was terrible. She was burdened with debt; the reforms of Colbert were ruined; and opposition to the king’s régime began to make itself felt. Peace brought some relief to France, but the last years of the king’s life were gloomy in the extreme. His numerous descendants seemed at one time to place the succession beyond all difficulty. But his eldest son, the dauphin, died in April 1711; his eldest grandson the duke of Burgundy in February 1712; and his great-grandson the duke of Brittany in March 1712. The heir to the throne was now the duke of Burgundy’s son, the duke of Anjou, afterwards Louis XV. The king died on the 1st of September 1715, after the longest recorded reign in European history. The judgment of posterity has not repeated the flattering verdict of his contemporaries; but he remains the model of a great king in all that concerns the externals of kingship.

The reign of Louis XIV. is particularly rich in memoirs describing the life of the court. The chief are Madame de Motteville’s memoirs for the period of the Fronde, and the letters cf Madame de Sévigné and the memoirs of Saint-Simon for the later period. The king’s ideas are best seen in the Mémoires de Louis XIV. pour l’instruction du dauphin (edited by Dreyss, 2 vols.). His private life is revealed in the letters of Madame de Maintenon and in those of Madame, Duchesse d’Orléans. Of the ordinary historians of France Michelet is fullest on the private life of the king. Mention may also be made of Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV.; P. Clément, Histoire de la vie et de l’administration de Colbert; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de lundi. Full bibliographies of the reign will be found in G. Monod’s Bibliographie de l’histoire de France; vol. v. (“The Age of Louis XIV.”) of the Cambridge Modern History; and vol. vi. (“Louis XIV.”) of the Histoire générale of Lavisse and Rambaud.

(A. J. G.*)

LOUIS XV. (1710-1774), king of France, was the great-grandson of Louis XIV. and the third son of Louis, duke of Burgundy, and Marie Adelaide, princess of Savoy. The first son had died in 1705, and in 1712 the second son, the duke of Brittany, as well as his father and mother, was carried off by a mysterious disease. Louis was thus unexpectedly brought into the line of the succession, and was only five years old when Louis XIV. died. The dead king had endeavoured by his will to control the administration even after his death by a carefully selected council of regency, in which the duke of Orleans should have only the nominal presidency; but with the help of the parlement of Paris the arrangement was at once set aside, and the duke was declared regent with full traditional powers. The duke had capacity, but his life was so licentious that what influence he had upon the king was for evil. Fleury, bishop of Fréjus, was appointed his tutor, and the little king was sincerely attached to him. The king attained his legal majority at the age of thirteen, shortly before the death of the duke of Orleans. His first minister was the incapable duke of Bourbon, who in 1725 procured the repudiation of the Spanish princess, to whom the king had been betrothed, and his marriage to Maria Leszczynska, daughter of the exiled king of Poland, then resident in Alsace. In 1726 the duke of Bourbon was displaced by the king’s tutor, Bishop (afterwards Cardinal) Fleury, who exercised almost absolute power, for the king took little interest in affairs of state. His administration was successful and peaceful until the year 1734, when a disputed succession in Poland brought about the interference of France on behalf of the queen’s father. France was unsuccessful in her immediate object, but at the peace of Vienna (1735) secured the possession of Lorraine. Up to this point the reign had been prosperous; but from this time on it is a record of declining national strength, which was not compensated by some days of military glory. Fleury’s great age (he died still in office at the age of ninety) prevented him from really controlling the policy of France and of Europe. In 1740 the war of the Austrian Succession broke out and France drifted into it as an ally of Frederick of Prussia and the enemy of England, and of Maria Theresa of Austria.

On Fleury’s death in 1743 no one took his place, and the king professed to adopt the example of Louis XIV. and to establish a personal autocracy. But he was not strong enough in will or intellect to give unity to the administration. The marquis d’Argenson writes that at the council table Louis “opened his mouth, said little and thought not at all,” and again that “under the appearance of personal monarchy it was really anarchy that reigned.” He had followed too in his domestic life the example of his predecessors. The queen for some time seems to have secured his affections, and she bore him seven children. But soon we hear of the royal mistresses. The first to acquire notoriety was the duchess of Châteauroux, the third sister of one family who held this position. She was at least in part the cause of the only moment of popularity which the king enjoyed. She urged him to take part personally in the war. France had just received a humiliating check at Dettingen, and the invasion of the north-eastern frontier was feared. The king went to Metz in 1744, and his presence there did something to ward off the danger. While the nation felt genuine gratitude for his energy and its success, he was reported to have fallen dangerously ill. The king, of whom it was said that the fear of hell was the only part of religion which had any reality for him, now dismissed the duchess of Châteauroux and promised amendment. Prayers were offered everywhere for his recovery, and the country was swept by a delirium of loyal enthusiasm, which conferred on him the title of Louis le bien aimé. But his future life disappointed all these hopes. The duchess of Châteauroux died in the same year, but her place was taken in 1745 by Madame de Pompadour. This woman had philanthropic impulses and some real interest in art and letters; but her influence on public affairs was a fatal one. She had many rivals during her lifetime and on her death in 1764 she was succeeded by Madame du Barry (q.v.). But the mention of these three women gives no idea of the degradation of the king’s life. There has doubtless been exaggeration as to certain details, and the story of his seraglio at the Parc aux cerfs is largely apocryphal. But it would be difficult to mention the name of any European king whose private life shows such a record of vulgar vice unredeemed by higher aims of any kind. He was not without ambition, but without sufficient tenacity of purpose to come near to realizing it. To the last he maintained the pretence of personal rule, but the machinery of government fell out of gear, and the disorder of the finances was never remedied before the revolution of 1789.

The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), which ended the war of the Austrian Succession, brought no gains to France in spite of her victories at Fontenoy and Raucoux; and the king was blamed for the diplomatic failure. The interval between this war and the Seven Years’ War (1756) saw that great reversal of alliances which is sometimes called the “Diplomatic Revolution”; whereby France repudiated the alliance of Frederick the Great and joined hands with her old enemy Austria. The intrigues of Madame de Pompadour played in this change an important though not a decisive part. It was the cause of immense disasters to France; for after a promising beginning, both by land and sea, France suffered reverses which lost her both India and Canada and deprived her of the leading position which she had so long held in Europe. Her humiliation was declared by the peace of Paris (1763).

The article on the history of France (q.v.) shows how there arose during the last years of Louis XV.’s reign a strong reaction against the monarchy and its methods. Military success had given it its strength; and its prestige was ruined by military failure. In the parlements, provincial and Parisian; in religion and in literature, a note of opposition is struck which was never to die until the monarchy was overthrown. France annexed Corsica in 1768, but this was felt to be the work of the minister Chauvelin, and reflected no credit on the king. He died in 1774 of smallpox. If the reign of his predecessor shows us almost the ideal of personal monarchy we may see in that of Louis XV. all the vices and errors exemplified which lie in wait for absolute hereditary rule which has survived the period of its usefulness.

For the king’s life generally see the memoirs of Saint-Simon, d’Argenson, Villars and Barbier, and for the details of his private life E. Boutaric, Correspondance secrète de Louis XV.; Madame de Pompadour’s Correspondance published by P. Malassi; Dietric, Les Maîtresses de Louis XV.; and Fleury, Louis XV. intimes et les petites maîtresses (1909).

For the system of secret diplomacy and organized espionage, known as the Secret du roi, carried on under the auspices of Louis XV., see Albert duc de Broglie, Le Secret du roi. Correspondance secrète de Louis XV. avec ses agents diplomatiques 1752-1774 (Paris, 1878); and for a general account of the reign, H. Carré, La France sous Louis XV. (Paris, 1891). For other works, general and special, see G. Monod, Bibliographie de la France, and the bibliography in the Histoire générale of Lavisse and Rambaud, vol. vii., and the Cambridge Modern History, vol. vi.

(A. J. G.*)

LOUIS XVI. (1754-1793), king of France, was the son of Louis, dauphin of France, the son of Louis XV., and of Marie Joseph of Saxony, and was born at Versailles on the 23rd of August 1754, being baptized as Louis Augustus. His father’s death in 1765 made him heir to the throne, and in 1770 he was married to Marie Antoinette, daughter of the empress Maria Theresa. He was just twenty years old when the death of Louis XV. on the 10th of May 1774 placed him on the throne. He began his reign under good auspices, with Turgot, the greatest living French statesman, in charge of the disorganized finances; but in less than two years he had yielded to the demand of the vested interests attacked by Turgot’s reforms, and dismissed him. Turgot’s successor, Necker, however, continued the régime of reform until 1781, and it was only with Necker’s dismissal that the period of reaction began. Marie Antoinette then obtained that ascendancy over her husband which was partly responsible for the extravagance of the ministry of Calonne, and brought on the Revolution by the resulting financial embarrassment. The third part of his reign began with the meeting of the states-general on the 4th of May 1789, which marked the opening of the Revolution. The revolt of Paris and the taking of the Bastille on the 14th of July were its results. The suspicion, not without justification, of a second attempt at a coup d’état led on the 6th of October to the “capture” of the king and royal family at Versailles by a mob from Paris, and their transference to the Tuileries. In spite of the growing radicalism of the clubs, however, loyalty to the king remained surprisingly strong. When he swore to maintain the constitution, then in progress of construction, at the festival of the federation on the 14th of July 1790, he was at the height of his popularity. Even his attempted flight on the 20th of June 1791 did not entirely turn the nation against him, although he left documents which proved his opposition to the whole Revolution. Arrested at Varennes, and brought back to Paris, he was maintained as a constitutional king, and took his oath on the 13th of September 1791. But already a party was forming in Paris which demanded his deposition. This first became noticeable in connexion with the affair of the Champ de Mars on the 17th of July 1791. Crushed for a time the party gained strength through the winter of 1791-1792. The declaration of war against the emperor Francis II., nephew of Marie Antoinette, was forced upon the king by those who wished to discredit him by failure, or to compel him to declare himself openly an enemy to the Revolution. Their policy proved effective. The failure of the war, which intensified popular hatred of the Austrian queen, involved the king; and the invasion of the Tuileries on the 20th of June 1792 was but the prelude to the conspiracy which resulted, on the 10th of August, in the capture of the palace and the “suspension” of royalty by the Legislative Assembly until the convocation of a national convention in September. On the 21st of September 1792 the Convention declared royalty abolished, and in January it tried the king for his treason against the nation, and condemned him to death. He was executed on the 21st of January 1793.

Louis XVI. was weak in character and mentally dull. His courage and dignity during his trial and on the scaffold has left him a better reputation than he deserves. His diary shows how little he understood, or cared for, the business of a king. Days on which he had not shot anything at the hunt were blank days for him. The entry on the 14th of July 1789 was “nothing”! The greater part of his time was spent hunting. He also amused himself making locks, and a little at masonry. Awkward and uncourtly, at heart shy, he was but a poor figurehead for the stately court of France. At first he did not care for Marie Antoinette, but after he came under her influence, her thoughtless conduct compromised him, and it was largely she who encouraged him in underhand opposition to the Revolution while he pretended to accept it. The only point on which he had of his own initiative shown a strong objection to revolutionary measures was in the matter of the civil constitution of the clergy. A devoted and sincere Roman Catholic, he refused at first to sanction a constitution for the church in France without the pope’s approval, and after he had been compelled to allow the constitution to become law he resolved to oppose the Revolution definitely by intrigues. His policy was both feeble and false. He was singularly unfortunate even when he gave in, delaying his acquiescence until it had the air of a surrender. It is often said that Louis XVI. was the victim of the faults of his predecessors. He was also the victim of his own.

Having lost his elder son in 1789 Louis left two children, Louis Charles, usually known as Louis XVII., and Marie Thérèse Charlotte (1778-1851), who married her cousin, Louis, duke of Angoulême, son of Charles X., in 1799. The “orphan of the Temple,” as the princess was called, was in prison for three years, during which time she remained ignorant of the fate which had befallen her parents. She died on the 19th of October 1851. Her life by G. Lenôtre has been translated into English by J. L. May (1908).

See the articles French Revolution and Marie Antoinette. F. X. J. Droz, Histoire du règne de Louis XVI. (3 vols., Paris, 1860), a sane and good history of the period; and Arsène Houssaye, Louis XVI. (Paris, 1891). See also the numerous memoirs of the time, and the marquis de Ségur’s Au couchant de la monarchie, Louis XVI. et Turgot (1910).

For bibliographies see G. Monod, Bibl. de la France; Lavisse et Rambaud, Hist. Univ., vols. vii. and viii.; and the Cambridge Modem History, vol. viii.

(R. A.*)


The responsibility of Marie Antoinette for the policy of the king before and during the Revolution has been the subject of much controversy. In general it may be said that her influence on politics has been much exaggerated. (See Marie Antoinette.) [Ed.]

LOUIS XVII. (1785-1795?), titular king of France, second son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, was born at Versailles on the 27th of March 1785, was christened the same day Louis Charles, and given the title of duke of Normandy. Louis Charles became dauphin on the death of his elder brother on the 4th of June 1789. It is only with his incarceration in the Temple on the 13th of August 1792, that his history, apart from that of his parents, becomes of interest. The royal party included, beside the king and queen, their daughter Marie Thérèse Charlotte (Madame Royale), the king’s sister Madame Élisabeth, the valet Cléry and others. The prisoners were lodged at first in the smaller Tower, but were removed to the larger Tower on the 27th of October. Louis Charles was then separated from his mother and aunt to be put in his father’s charge, except for a few hours daily, but was restored to the women when Louis was isolated from his family at the beginning of his trial in December.

On the 21st of January 1793 Louis became, for the royalists, king of France, and a week later the comte de Provence arrogated to himself the title of regent. From that moment began new plots for the escape of the prisoners from the Temple, the chief of which were engineered by the Chevalier de Jarjayes, the baron de Batz, and the faithful Lady Atkyns. On the 3rd of July the little dauphin was again separated from his mother, this time to be given into the keeping of the cobbler Antoine Simon who had been named his guardian by the Committee of General Security. The tales told by the royalist writers of the barbarous cruelty inflicted by Simon and his wife on the child are not proven. Marie Jeanne, in fact, took great care of the child’s person, and there is documentary evidence to prove that he had air and food. But the Simons were obviously grotesquely unfit guardians for a prince, and they doubtless caused much suffering to the impressionable child, who was made on occasion to eat and drink to excess, and learnt the language of the gutter. But the scenes related by A. de Beauchesne of the physical martyrdom of the child are not supported by any other testimony, though he was at this time seen by a great number of people. On the 6th of October Pache, Chaumette, Hébert and others visited him and secured from him admissions of infamous accusations against his mother, with his signature to a list of her alleged crimes since her entry in the Temple, and next day he was confronted with his sister Marie Thérèse for the last time.

Simon’s wife now fell ill, and on the 19th of January 1794 the Simons left the Temple, after securing a receipt for the safe transfer of their prisoner, who was declared to be in good health. A large part of the Temple records from that time onwards were destroyed under the Restoration, so that exact knowledge of the facts is practically impossible. Two days after the departure of the Simons the prisoner is said by the Restoration historians to have been put in a dark room which was barricaded like the cage of a wild animal. The story runs that food was passed through the bars to the child, who survived in spite of the accumulated filth of his surroundings. Robespierre visited Marie Thérèse on the 11th of May, but no one, according to the legend, entered the dauphin’s room for six months until Barras visited the prison after the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794). Barras’s account of the visit describes the child as suffering from extreme neglect, but conveys no idea of the alleged walling in. It is nevertheless certain that during the first half of 1794 he was very strictly secluded; he had no special guardian, but was under the charge of guards changed from day to day. The child made no complaint to Barras of his treatment, probably because he feared to do so. He was then cleansed and re-clothed, his room cleaned, and during the day he was visited by his new attendant, a creole and a compatriot of Joséphine de Beauharnais, named Jean Jacques Christophe Laurent (1770-1807), who had from the 8th of November onwards assistance for his charge from a man named Gomin. The child was now taken out to walk on the roof of the Tower. From about the time of Gomin’s entrance the prisoner was inspected, not by delegates of the Commune, but by representatives of the civil committee of the 48 sections of Paris. The rare recurrence of the same inspectors would obviously facilitate fraud, if any such were intended. From the end of October onwards the child maintained an obstinate silence, explained by Laurent as a determination taken on the day he made his deposition against his mother. On the 19th of December 1794 he was visited by three commissioners from the Committee of General Security—J. B. Harmand de la Meuse, J. B. C. Mathieu and J. Reverchon—who extracted no word from him. On Laurent’s retirement Étienne Lasne was appointed on the 31st of March 1795 to be the child’s guardian. In May 1795 the prisoner was seriously ill, and a doctor, P. J. Desault, well acquainted with the dauphin, having visited him seven months earlier, was summoned. Desault died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison, on the 1st of June, and it was some days before doctors Pelletan and Dumangin were called. Then it was announced that on the 8th Louis Charles died. Next day an autopsy was held at which it was stated that a child apparently about ten years of age, “which the commissioners told us was the late Louis Capet’s son,” had died of a scrofulous affection of long standing. He was buried on the 10th in the cemetery of Ste Marguerite, but no stone was erected to mark the spot.

The weak parts of this story are the sudden and unexplained departure of the Simons; the subsequent useless cruelty of treating the child like a wild beast and keeping him in a dark room practically out of sight (unless any doubt of his identity was possible), while his sister was in comparative comfort; the cause of death, declared to be of long standing, but in fact developed with such rapidity; the insufficient excuse provided for the child’s muteness under Gomin’s régime (he had answered Barras) and the irregularities in the formalities in attending the death and the funeral, when a simple identification of the body by Marie Thérèse would have prevented any question of resuscitated dauphins. Both Barras and Harmand de la Meuse are said to have given leave for the brother and sister to see each other, but the meeting was never permitted. The argument from the sudden disappearance of persons in a position to know something of the truth is of a less convincing character. It may be noted that the more famous of the persons alleged by partisans of subsequent pretenders to have been hustled out of the world for their connexion with the secret are the empress Joséphine, the due d’Enghien and the duc de Berri.

Immediately on the announcement of the dauphin’s death there arose a rumour that he had escaped. Simien-Despréaux, one of Louis XVIII.’s own authors, stated at a later period (1814) that Louis XVII. was living and that among the signatories of the treaty of April 13th were some who possessed proofs of his existence; and Eckard, one of the mainstays of the official account, left among his unpublished papers a statement that many members of “an assembly of our wise men” obstinately named Louis XVII. as the prince whom their wishes demanded. Unfortunately the removal of the child suited the plans of the comte de Provence (now Louis XVIII. for the émigrés) as well as it suited the revolutionary government, and no serious attempt was made by the royal family to ascertain the truth, though they paid none of the tributes to the memory of the dead king which might reasonably have been expected, had they been convinced of his death. Even his sister wore no mourning for him until she arrived at Vienna and saw that this was expected of her. In spite of the massive literature which has accumulated on the subject, neither his death in the Temple nor his escape therefrom has been definitely established, though a very strong presumption is established in favour of the latter.

Some forty candidates for his honours were forthcoming under the Restoration. The most important of these pretenders were Karl Wilhelm Naundorff and the comte de Richemont. Naundorff’s story rested on a series of complicated intrigues. According to him Barras determined to save the dauphin in order to please Joséphine Beauharnais, the future empress, having conceived the idea of using the dauphin’s existence as a means of dominating the comte de Provence in the event of a restoration. The dauphin was concealed in the fourth storey of the Tower, a wooden figure being substituted for him. Laurent, to protect himself from the consequences of the substitution, replaced the wooden figure by a deaf mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death certificate. The deaf mute was also concealed in the Temple. It was not the dead child, but the dauphin who left the prison in the coffin, whence he was extracted by his friends on the way to the cemetery. Richemont’s tale that the woman Simon, who was genuinely attached to him, smuggled him out in a basket, is simple and more credible, and does not necessarily invalidate the story of the subsequent operations with the deaf mute and the scrofulous patient, Laurent in that case being deceived from the beginning, but it renders them extremely unlikely. A third pretender, Eleazar Williams, did not affect to know anything of his escape. He possessed, he said, no consciousness of his early years, only emerging from idiocy at the age of thirteen, when he was living with an Indian family in New York State. He was a missionary to the Indians when the prince de Joinville, son of Louis Philippe, met him, and after some conversation asked him to sign a document abdicating his rights in favour of Louis Philippe, in return for which he, the dauphin (alias Eleazar Williams), was to receive the private inheritance which was his. This Eleazar refused to do. The wildness of this tale refutes itself.

Richemont (Henri Ethelbert Louis Victor Hébert) was in prison in Milan for seven years and began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. In 1833 he was again arrested, was brought to trial in the following year and was condemned to twelve years’ imprisonment. He escaped after a few months and left the country, to return in 1840. He died at Gleize on the 10th of August 1853, the name of Louis Charles de France being inscribed on his tomb until the government ordered its removal.

Naundorff, or Naündorff, who had arrived from nowhere in Berlin in 1810, with papers giving the name Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, in order to escape the persecutions of which he declared himself the object, settled at Spandau in 1812 as a clockmaker, and married in 1818 Johanna Einert. In 1822 he removed to Brandenburg, and in 1828 to Crossen, near Frankfort. He was imprisoned from 1825 to 1828 for coining, though apparently on insufficient evidence, and in 1833 came to push his claims in Paris, where he was recognized as the dauphin by many persons formerly connected with the court of Louis XVI. Expelled from France in 1836, the day after bringing a suit against the duchess of Angoulême for the restitution of the dauphin’s private property, he lived in exile till his death at Delft on the 10th of August 1845, and his tomb was inscribed “Louis XVII., roi de France et de Navarre (Charles Louis, duc de Normandie).” The Dutch authorities who had inscribed on his death certificate the name of Charles Louis de Bourbon, duc de Normandie (Louis XVII.) permitted his son to bear the name de Bourbon, and when the family appealed in 1850-1851, and again in 1874, for the restitution of their civil rights as heirs of Louis XVI. no less an advocate than Jules Favre pleaded their cause. Of all the pretenders Naundorff has the best case. He was certainly not the Jew of Prussian Poland which his enemies declared him to be, and he has to this day a circle of devoted adherents. Since he was sincerely convinced of his own rights, it is surprising that he put forward no claim in 1814.

If the dauphin did escape, it seems probable that he perished shortly afterwards or lived in a safe obscurity. The account of the substitution in the Temple is well substantiated, even to the names of the substitutes. The curious imbroglio deceived royalists and republicans alike. Lady Atkyns was trying by every possible means to get the dauphin out of his prison when he was apparently already in safe hands, if not outside the Temple walls. A child was in fact delivered to her agents, but he was a deaf mute. That there was fraud, and complicated fraud, in the guardians of the dauphin may be taken as proved by a succession of writers from 1850 onwards, and more recently by Frédéric Barbey, who wisely attempts no ultimate solution. When the partisans of Richemont or Naundorff come to the post-Temple careers of their heroes, they become in most cases so uncritical as to be unconvincing.

The official version of the dauphin’s history as accepted under the Restoration was drawn up by Simien Despréaux in his uncritical Louis XVII. (1817), and is found, fortified by documents, in M. Eckard’s Mémoires historiques sur Louis XVII. (1817) and in A. de Beauchesne’s Louis XVII., sa vie, son agonie, sa mort. Captivité de la famille royale au Temple (2 vols., 1852, and many subsequent editions), containing copies of original documents, and essential to the study of the question, although its sentimental pictures of the boy martyr can no longer be accepted. L. de la Sicotière, “Les faux Louis XVII.,” in Revue des questions historiques (vol. xxxii., 1882), deals with the pretenders Jean Marie Hervagault, Mathurin Bruneau and the rest; see also Dr Cabanes, Les Morts mystérieuses de l’histoire (1901), and revised catalogue of the J. Sanford Saltus collection of Louis XVII. books (New York, 1908). Catherine Welch, in The Little Dauphin (1908) gives a résumé of the various sides of the question.

Madame Royale’s own account of the captivity of the Temple was first printed with additions and suppressions in 1817, and often subsequently, the best edition being that from her autograph text by G. Lenôtre, La Fille de Louis XVI., Marie Thérèse Charlotte de France, duchesse d’Angoulême, le Temple, l’échange, l’exil (1907). There are two collections of writings on the subject: Marie Thérèse de France, compiled (1852) by the marquis de Pastoret, and comprising beside the memoir written by Marie Thérèse herself, articles by M. de Montbel, Sainte-Beuve, J. Lemoine, La Guéronnière and extracts from Joseph Weber’s memoirs; and Mémoires de Marie Thérèse duchesse d’Angoulême, comprising extracts from the narratives of Charles Goret (Mon Témoignage, 1852), of C. F. Beaulieu (Mémoire adressée à la nation, 1795), of L. G. Michaud (Opinion d’un Français, 1795) and of Mme de Tourzel (Mémoires 1883). Cf. A. Lanne, La Sœur de Louis XVII., and the articles on “Madame Royale,” on the “Captivité de la famille royale au Temple” and on the “Mise en liberté de Madame” in M. Tourneux’s Bibliographie de l’histoire de Paris pendant la révolution française (vol. iv., 1906, and vol. i., 1890).

Naündorff.—For the case of Naündorff see his own narrative, Abrégé de l’histoire des infortunes du Dauphin (London, 1836; Eng. trans., 1838); also Modeste Gruau de la Barre, Intrigues dévoilées ou Louis XVII. ... (3 vols., Rotterdam, 1846-1848); O. Friedrichs, Correspondance intime et inédite de Louis XVII. (Naündorff) 1834-1838 (2 vols., 1904); Plaidoirie de Jules Favre devant la cour d’appel de Paris pour les héritiers de feu Charles-Guillaume Naündorff (1874); H. Provins, Le Dernier roi légitime de France (2 vols., the first of which consists of destructive criticism of Beauchesne and his followers, 1889); A. Lanne, “Louis XVII. et le secret de la Révolution,” Bulletin mensuel (1893 et seq.) of the Société des études sur la question Louis XVII., also La Légitimité (Bordeaux, Toulouse, 1883-1898). See further the article “Naündorff” in M. Tourneux, Bibl. de la ville de Paris pendant la Révolution, vol. iv. (1906).

Williams.—J. H. Hanson, The Lost Prince: Facts tending to prove the Identity of Louis XVII. of France and the Rev. Eleazer Williams (London and New York, 1854).

De Richemont.—Mémoires du duc de Normandie, fils de Louis XVI., écrits et publiés par lui-même (Paris, 1831), compiled, according to Quérard, by E. T. Bourg, called Saint Edme; Morin de Guérivière, Quelques souvenirs ... (Paris, 1832); and J. Suvigny, La Restauration convaincue ... ou preuves de l’existence du fils de Louis XVI. (Paris, 1851).

The widespread interest taken in Louis XVII. is shown by the fact that since 1905 a monthly periodical has appeared in Paris on this subject, entitled Revue historique de la question Louis XVII., also by the promised examination of the subject by the Société d’Histoire contemporaine.

(M. Br.)


F. A. Regnier de Jarjayes (1745-1822). See P. Gaulot, Un Complot sous la Terreur.

Jean, baron de Batz (1761-1822), attempted to carry off the dauphin in 1794. See G. Lenôtre, Un Conspirateur royaliste pendant la Terreur, le baron de Batz (1896).

Charlotte Walpole (c. 1785-1836), an English actress who married in 1779 Sir Edward Atkyns, and spent most of her life in France. She expended large sums in trying to secure the escape of the prisoners of the Temple. See F. Barbey, A Friend of Marie Antoinette (Eng. ed. 1906).

Antoine Simon (1736-1794) married Marie Jeanne Aladame, and belonged to the section of the Cordeliers. They owed their position to Anaxagoras Chaumette, procureur of the Commune, and to the fact that Simon had prevented one of the attempts of the baron de Batz. Simon was sent to the guillotine with Robespierre in 1794, and two years later Marie Jeanne entered a hospital for incurables in the rue de Sèvres, where she constantly affirmed the dauphin’s escape. She was secretly visited after the Restoration by the duchess of Angoulême. On the 16th of November 1816, she was interrogated by the police, who frightened her into silence about the supposed substitution of another child for the dauphin. She died in 1819. See G. Lenôtre, Vieilles maisons, vieux papiers (2nd series, 1903).

In a bulletin dated May 17-24, Paris, and enclosed by Francis Drake (June 17, 1794) at Milan to Lord Grenville, it is stated (Hist. MSS. Comm. Fortescue Papers at Dropmore, vol. ii. 576-577) that Robespierre in the night of 23-24 May fetched the king (the dauphin) from the Temple and took him to Meudon. “The fact is certain, although only known to the Committee of Public Safety. It is said to be ascertained that he was brought back to the Temple the night of 24-25th, and that this was a test to assure the ease of seizing him.” This police report at least serves to show the kind of rumour then current.

LOUIS XVIII. (Louis le Désiré) (1755-1824). Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, comte de Provence, third son of the dauphin Louis, son of Louis XV., and of Maria Josepha of Saxony, was born at Versailles on the 17th of November 1755. His education was supervised by the devout duc de la Vauguyon, but his own taste was for the writings of Voltaire and the encyclopaedists. On the 14th of May 1771 took place his marriage with Louise-Marie-Joséphine of Savoy, by whom he had no children. His position at court was uncomfortable, for though ambitious and conscious of possessing greater abilities than his brother (Louis XVI.), his scope for action was restricted; he consequently devoted his energies largely to intrigue, especially against Marie Antoinette, whom he hated. During the long absence of heirs to Louis XVI., “Monsieur,” as heir to the throne, courted popularity and took an active part in politics, but the birth of a dauphin (1781) was a blow to his ambitions. He opposed the revival of the parlements, wrote a number of political pamphlets, and at the Assembly of Notables presided, like the other princes of the blood, over a bureau, to which was given the name of the Comité des sages; he also advocated the double representation of the tiers. At the same time he cultivated literature, entertaining poets and writers both at the Luxembourg and at his château of Brunoy (see Dubois-Corneau, Le Comte de Provence à Brunoy, 1909), and gaining a reputation for wit by his verses and mots in the salon of the charming and witty comtesse de Balbi, one of Madame’s ladies, who had become his mistress, and till 1793 exerted considerable influence over him. He did not emigrate after the taking of the Bastille, but, possibly from motives of ambition, remained in Paris. Mirabeau thought at one time of making him chief minister in his projected constitutional government (see Corr. de Mirabeau et La Marck, ed. Bacourt, i. 434, 436, 442), but was disappointed by his caution and timidity. The affaire Favras (Dec. 1789) aroused great feeling against Monsieur, who was believed by many to have conspired with Favras, only to abandon him (see Lafayette’s Mems. and Corr. of Mirabeau). In June 1791, at the time of the flight to Varennes, Monsieur also fled by a different route, and, in company with the comte d’Avaray—who subsequently replaced Mme de Balbi as his confidant, and largely influenced his policy during the emigration—succeeded in reaching Brussels, where he joined the comte d’Artois and proceeded to Coblenz, which now became the headquarters of the emigration.

Here, living in royal state, he put himself at the head of the counter-revolutionary movement, appointing ambassadors, soliciting the aid of the European sovereigns, and especially of Catherine II. of Russia. Out of touch with affairs in France and surrounded by violent anti-revolutionists, headed by Calonne and the comte d’Artois, he followed an entirely selfish policy, flouting the National Assembly (see his reply to the summons of the National Assembly, in Daudet, op. cit. i. 96), issuing uncompromising manifestoes (Sept. 1791, Aug. 1792, &c.), and obstructing in every way the representatives of the king and queen. After Valmy he had to retire to Hamm in Westphalia, where, on the death of Louis XVI., he proclaimed himself regent; from here he went south, with the idea of encouraging the royalist feeling in the south of France, and settled at Verona, where on the death of Louis XVII. (8th of June 1795) he took the title of Louis XVIII. At this time ended his liaison with Mme de Balbi, and the influence of d’Avaray reached its height. From this time onward his life is a record of constant wanderings, negotiations and conspiracies. In April 1796 he joined Condé’s army on the German frontier, but was shortly requested to leave the country, and accepted the hospitality of the duke of Brunswick at Blanckenberg till 1797, when, this refuge being no longer open to him, the emperor Paul I. permitted him to settle at Mittau in Courland, where he stayed till 1801. All this time he was in close communication with the royalists in France, but was much embarrassed by the conflicting policy pursued by the comte d’Artois from England, and was largely at the mercy of corrupt and dishonest agents. At Mittau was realized his cherished plan of marrying Madame Royale, daughter of Louis XVI., to the duc d’Angoulême, elder son of the comte d’Artois. From Mittau, too, was sent his well-known letter to Bonaparte (1799) calling upon him to play the part of Monk, a proposal contemptuously refused (E. Daudet, Hist. de l’émigration, ii. 371, 436), though Louis in turn declined to accept a pension from Bonaparte, and later, in 1803, though his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, refused to abdicate at his suggestion and accept an indemnity.

Suddenly expelled from Mittau in 1801 by the capricious Paul I., Louis made his way, in the depth of winter, to Warsaw, where he stayed for three years. All this time he was trying to convert France to the royalist cause, and had a “conseil royal” in Paris, founded at the end of 1799 by Royer-Collard, Montesquiou and Clermont-Gallerande, the actions of which were much impeded by the activity of the rival committee of the comte d’Artois (see E. Daudet, op. cit. ii., and Remâcle, Bonaparte et les Bourbons, Paris, 1899), but after 1800, and still more after the failure of the royalist conspiracy of Cadoudal, Pichegru and Moreau, followed by the execution of the duc d’Enghien (March 1804), and the assumption by Napoleon of the title of emperor (May 1804), the royalist cause appeared quite hopeless. In September 1804 Louis met the comte d’Artois at Calmar in Sweden, and they issued a protest against Napoleon’s action, but being warned that he must not return to Poland, he gained permission from Alexander I. again to retire to Mittau. After Tilsit, however (1807), he was again forced to depart, and took refuge in England, where he stayed first at Gosfield in Essex, and afterwards (1809 onwards) at Hartwell in Buckinghamshire. In 1810 his wife died, and in 1811 d’Avaray died, his place as favourite being taken by the comte de Blacas. After Napoleon’s defeats in 1813 the hopes of the royalists revived, and Louis issued a fresh manifesto, in which he promised to recognize the results of the Revolution. Negotiations were also opened with Bernadotte, who seemed willing to support his cause, but was really playing for his own hand.

In March 1814 the Allies entered Paris, and thanks to Talleyrand’s negotiations the restoration of the Bourbons was effected, Louis XVIII. entering Paris on the 2nd of May 1814, after issuing the declaration of St Ouen, in which he promised to grant the nation a constitution (octroyer une charte). He was now nearly sixty, wearied by adversity, and a sufferer from gout and obesity. But though clear-sighted, widely read and a good diplomatist, his impressionable and sentimental nature made him too subject to personal and family influences. His concessions to the reactionary and clerical party of the émigrés, headed by the comte d’Artois and the duchesse d’Angoulême, aroused suspicions of his loyalty to the constitution, the creation of his Maison militaire alienated the army, and the constant presence of Blacas made the formation of a united ministry impossible. After the Hundred Days, during which the king was forced to flee to Ghent, the dismissal of Blacas was made one of the conditions of his second restoration. On the 8th of July he again entered Paris, “in the baggage train of the allied armies,” as his enemies said, but in spite of this was received with the greatest enthusiasm by a people weary of wars and looking for constitutional government. He was forced to retain Talleyrand and Fouché in his first ministry, but took the first opportunity of ridding himself of them when the elections of 1815 assured him of a strong royalist majority in the chamber (the chambre introuvable, a name given it by Louis himself). At this time he came into contact with the young comte (afterwards duc) Decazes, prefect of the police under Fouché, and minister of police in Richelieu’s ministry, who now became his favourite and gained his entire confidence (see E. Daudet, Louis XVIII. et le duc Decazes). Having obtained a ministry in which he could trust, having as members the duc de Richelieu and Decazes, the king now gave it his loyal support and did his best to shield his ministers from the attacks of the royal family. In September 1816, alarmed at the violence of the chambre introuvable, he was persuaded to dissolve it. An attempt on the part of the Ultras to regain their ascendancy over the king, by conniving at the sudden return of Blacas from Rome to Paris, ended in failure.

The events and ministerial changes of Louis XVIII.’s reign are described under the article France: History, but it may be said here that the king’s policy throughout was one of prudence and common sense. His position was more passive than active, and consisted in giving his support as far as possible to the ministry of the day. While Decazes was still in power, the king’s policy to a large extent followed his, and was rather liberal and moderate, but after the assassination of the duc de Berry (1820), when he saw that Decazes could no longer carry on the government, he sorrowfully acquiesced in his departure, showered honours upon him, and transferred his support to Richelieu, the head of the new ministry. In the absence of Decazes a new favourite was found to amuse the king’s old age, Madame du Cayla (Zoé Talon, comtesse du Cayla), a protégée of the vicomte Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld and consequently a creature of the Ultras. As the king became more and more infirm, his power of resistance to the intrigues of the Ultras became weaker. The birth of a posthumous son to the duc de Berry (Sept. 1820), the death of Napoleon (5th of May 1821) and the resignation of Richelieu left him entirely in their hands, and after Villèle had formed a ministry of a royalist character the comte d’Artois was associated with the government, which passed more and more out of the king’s hands. He died on the 16th of September 1824, worn out in body, but still retaining flashes of his former clear insight and scepticism. The character of Louis XVIII. may be summed up in the words of Bonaparte, quoted by Sorel (L’Europe et la Rév. fr. viii. 416 footnote), “C’est Louis XVI. avec moins de franchise et plus d’esprit.” He had all the Bourbon characteristics, especially their love of power, combined with a certain nobility of demeanour, and a consciousness of his dignity as king. But his nature was cold, unsympathetic and calculating, combined with a talent for intrigue, to which was added an excellent memory and a ready wit. An interesting judgment of him is contained in Queen Victoria’s Letters, vol. i., in a letter of Leopold I., king of the Belgians, to the queen before her accession, dated the 18th of November 1836, “Poor Charles X. is dead.... History will state that Louis XVIII. was a most liberal monarch, reigning with great mildness and justice to his end, but that his brother, from his despotic and harsh disposition, upset all the other had done and lost the throne. Louis XVIII. was a clever, hard-hearted man, shackled by no principle, very proud and false. Charles X. an honest man, a kind friend,” &c. &c. This seems fairly just as a personal estimate, though it does not do justice to their respective political rôles.

Bibliography.—There is no trustworthy or complete edition of the writings and correspondence of Louis XVIII. The Mémoires de Louis XVIII. recueillis et mis en ordre par M. le duc de D. ... (12 vols., Paris, 1832-1833) are compiled by Lamothe-Langon, a well-known compiler of more or less apocryphal memoirs. From the hand of Louis XVIII. are: Relation d’un voyage à Bruxelles et à Coblentz, 1791 (Paris, 1823, with dedication to d’Avaray); and Journal de Marie-Thérèse de France, duchesse d’Angoulême, corrigé et annoté par Louis XVIII., ed. Imbert de St Amand (Paris, 1896). Some of his letters are contained in collections, such as Lettres d’Artwell; correspondance politique et privée de Louis XVIII., roi de France (Paris, 1830; letters addressed to d’Avaray); Lettres et instructions de Louis XVIII. au comte de Saint-Priest, ed. Barante (Paris, 1845); Talleyrand et Louis XVIII., corr. pendant le congrès de Vienne, 1814-1815, ed. Pallain (1881; trans., 2 vols., 1881); see also the corr. of Castlereagh, Metternich, J. de Maistre, the Wellington Dispatches, &c., and such collections as Corr. diplomatique de Pozzo di Borgo avec le comte de Nesselrode (2 vols., 1890-1897), the correspondence of C. de Rémusat, Villèle, &c. The works of E. Daudet are of the greatest importance, and based on original documents; the chief are: La Terreur Blanche (Paris, 1878); Hist. de la restauration 1814-1830 (1882); Louis XVIII. et le duc Decazes (1899); Hist. de l’émigration, in three studies: (i.) Les Bourbons et la Russie (1886), (ii.) Les Émigrés et la seconde coalition (1886), (iii.) Coblenz, 1789-1793 (1890). Developed from these with the addition of much further material is his Hist. de l’émigration (3 vols., 1904-1907). Also based on original documents is E. Romberg and A. Malet, Louis XVIII. et les cent-jours à Gand (1898). See also G. Stenger, Le Retour des Bourbons (1908); Cte. L. de Remâcle, Bonaparte et les Bourbons. Relations secrèts des agents du cte. de Provence sous le consulat (Paris, 1899). For various episodes, see Vicomte de Reiset, La Comtesse de Balbi (Paris, 1908; contains a long bibliography, chiefly of memoirs concerning the emigration, and is based on documents); J. B. H. R. Capefigue, La Comtesse du Cayla (Paris, 1866); J. Turquan, Les Favorites de Louis XVIII. (Paris, 1900); see also the chief memoirs of the period, such as those of Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, Guizot, duc de Broglie, Villèle, Vitrolles, Pasquier, the comtesse de Boigne (ed. Nicoullaud, Paris, 1907), the Vicomte L. F. Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld (15 vols., Paris, 1861-1864); and the writings of Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand, &c.

General Works.—See the histories of France, the Emigration, the Restoration and especially the very full bibliographies to chapters i., ii. and iii. of Cambridge Modern History, and Lavisse and Rambaud, Hist. générale, vol. x.

(C. B. P.)


See Arneth and Geffroy, Corr. de Marie-Thérèse avec le comte de Mercy-Argenteau, vol. i., “Mercy to Maria Theresa, June 22nd, 1771,” also i. 261, ii. 186, 352, 393. Marie Antoinette says (ii. 393): “... à un caractère très faible, il joint une marche souterraine, et quelquefois très basse.”

See his letters to Gustavus III. of Sweden in A. Geffroy, Gustave III et la cour de France, vol. ii. appendix.

Two pamphlets at least are ascribed to him: “Les Mannequins, conte ou histoire, comme l’on voudra” (against Turgot; anon., Paris, 1776) and “Description historique d’un monstre symbolique pris vivant sur les bords du lac Fagua, près de Santa-Fé, par les soins de Francisco Xaveiro de Neunris” (against Calonne; Paris, 1784) (A. Debidour in La Grande Encyclopédie).

It has frequently been alleged that his relations with Mme de Balbi, and indeed with women generally, were of a platonic nature. De Reiset (La Comtesse de Balbi, pp. 152-161) produces evidence to disprove this assertion.

Antoine-Louis-François de Bésiade, comte, afterwards duc, d’Avaray. In spite of his loyalty and devotion, the effect of his influence on Louis XVIII. may be gathered from a letter of J. de Maistre to Blacas, quoted by E. Daudet, Hist. de l’émigration, ii. 11: “celui qui n’a pu dans aucun pays aborder aucun homme politique sans l’aliéner n’est pas fait pour les affaires.”

See Klinckowström, Le Comte de Fersen et la cour de France. Fersen says (i. 7), “Monsieur ferait mieux seul, mais il est entièrement subjugué par l’autre” (i.e. the comte d’Artois, who was in turn under the influence of Calonne). See Daudet, op. cit. vol. i.

See E. Daudet, La Conjuration de Pichegru (Paris, 1901).

Pierre-Louis-Casimir, comte (afterwards duc) de Blacas d’Aulps, was as rigidly royalist as d’Avaray, but more able. E. Daudet, Hist. de l’émigration, i. 458, quotes a judgment of him by J. de Maistre: “Il est né homme d état et ambassadeur.”

See account by Decazes in E. Daudet, Louis XVIII. et le duc Decazes, pp. 48-49, and an interesting “secret and confidential” letter of Castlereagh to Liverpool (July 8, 1815) in the unpublished Foreign Office records: “The king sent for the duke and me this evening to the Thuilleries.... We found him in a state of great emotion and exaltation at the reception he had met with from his subjects, which appears to have been even more animated than on his former entrance. Indeed, during the long audience to which we were admitted, it was almost impossible to converse, so loud were the shouts of the people in the Thuilleries Gardens, which were full, though it was then dark. Previous to the king’s dismissing us, he carried the duke and me to the open window. Candles were then brought, which enabled the people to see the king with the duke by his side. They ran from all parts of the Gardens, and formed a solid mass of an immense extent, rending the air with acclamations. The town is very generally illuminated, and I understand from men who have traversed the principal streets that every demonstration of joy was manifested by the inhabitants.”

It is as yet not proved that Blacas returned from his embassy in response to a summons from the Ultras. But whether it was on his own initiative or not, there can be no doubt as to the hopes which they built on his arrival (see Daudet, Louis XVIII. et le duc Decazes).

LOUIS I. (1326-1382), called “the great,” king of Hungary and Poland, was the third son of Charles Robert, king of Hungary, and Elizabeth, daughter of the Polish king, Ladislaus Lokietek. In 1342 he succeeded his father as king of Hungary and was crowned at Székesfehérvár on the 21st of July with great enthusiasm. Though only sixteen he understood Latin, German and Italian as well as his mother tongue. He owed his relatively excellent education to the care of his mother, a woman of profound political sagacity, who was his chief counsellor in diplomatic affairs during the greater part of his long reign. Italian politics first occupied his attention. As a ruler of a rising great power in search of a seaboard he was the natural adversary of the Venetian republic, which already aimed at making the Adriatic a purely Venetian sea and resented the proximity of the Magyars in Dalmatia. The first trial of strength began in 1345, when the city of Zara placed herself under the protection of Hungary and was thereupon invested by the Venetians. Louis fought a battle beneath the walls of Zara (July 1st, 1346), which has been immortalized by Tintoretto, but was defeated and compelled to abandon the city to the republic. The struggle was renewed eleven years later when Louis, having formed, with infinite trouble, a league of all the enemies of Venice, including the emperor, the Habsburgs, Genoa and other Italian towns, attacked his maritime rival with such vigour that she sued for peace, and by the treaty of Zara (February 18th, 1358) ceded most of the Dalmatian towns and renounced the title of duke of Dalmatia and Croatia, hitherto borne by the doge. Far more important than the treaty itself was the consequent voluntary submission of the independent republic of Ragusa to the suzerainty of the crown of St Stephen the same year, Louis, in return for an annual tribute of 500 ducats and a fleet, undertaking to defend Ragusa against all her enemies. Still more glorious for Hungary was Louis’s third war with Venice (1378-1381), when he was again aided by the Genoese. At an early stage of the contest Venice was so hardly pressed that she offered to do homage to Hungary for all her possessions. But her immense resources enabled her to rally her forces, and peace was finally concluded between all the powers concerned at the congress of Turin (1381), Venice virtually surrendering Dalmatia to Louis and undertaking to pay him an annual tribute of 7000 ducats. The persistent hostility of Venice is partially attributable to her constant fear lest Louis should inherit the crown of Naples and thus threaten her trade and her sea-power from two sides simultaneously. Louis’s younger brother Andrew had wedded Joanna, granddaughter and heiress of old King Robert of Naples, on whose death, in 1343, she reigned in her own right, refused her consort any share in the government, and is very strongly suspected of having secured his removal by assassination on the night of the 19th of September 1345. She then married Prince Louis of Taranto, and strong in the double support of the papal court at Avignon and of the Venetian republic (both of whom were opposed to Magyar aggrandisement in Italy) questioned the right of Louis to the two Sicilies, which he claimed as the next heir of his murdered brother. In 1347, and again in 1350, Louis occupied Naples and craved permission to be crowned king, but the papal see was inexorable and he was compelled to withdraw. The matter was not decided till 1378 when Joanna, having made the mistake of recognizing the antipope Clement VII., was promptly deposed and excommunicated in favour of Prince Charles of Durazzo, who had been brought up at the Hungarian court. Louis, always inexhaustible in expedients, determined to indemnify himself in the north for his disappointments in the south. With the Habsburgs, Hungary’s natural rivals in the west, Louis generally maintained friendly relations. From 1358 to 1368, however, the restless ambition of Rudolph, duke of Austria, who acquired Tirol and raised Vienna to the first rank among the cities of Europe, caused Louis great uneasiness. But Louis always preferred arbitration to war, and the peace congresses of Nagyszombat (1360) and of Pressburg (1360) summoned by him adjusted all the outstanding differences between the central European powers. Louis’s diplomacy, moreover, was materially assisted by his lifelong alliance with his uncle, the childless Casimir the Great of Poland, who had appointed him his successor; and on Casimir’s death Louis was solemnly crowned king of Poland at Cracow (Nov. 17, 1370). This personal union of the two countries was more glorious than profitable. Louis could give little attention to his unruly Polish subjects and was never very happy among them. Immovably entrenched behind their privileges, they rendered him only the minimum of service; but he compelled their representatives, assembled at Kassa, to recognize his daughter Maria and her affianced husband, Count Sigismund of Brandenburg, as their future king and queen by locking the gates of the city and allowing none to leave it till they had consented to his wishes (1374). Louis is the first European monarch who came into collision with the Turks. He seems to have arrested their triumphant career (c. 1372), and the fine church erected by him at Maria-Zell is a lasting memorial of his victories. From the first he took a just view of the Turkish peril, but the peculiar local and religious difficulties of the whole situation in the Balkans prevented him from dealing with it effectually (see Hungary, History). Louis died suddenly at Nagyszombat on the 10th of September 1382. He left two daughters Maria and Jadwiga (the latter he destined for the throne of Hungary) under the guardianship of his widow, the daughter of the valiant ban of Bosnia, Stephen Kotromaníc, whom he married in 1353, and who was in every way worthy of him.

See Rationes Collectorum Pontif. in Hungaria, 1281-1375 (Budapest, 1887); Dano Gruber, The Struggle of Louis I. with the Venetians for Dalmatia (Croat.) (Agram, 1903); Antal Pór, Life of Louis the Great (Hung.) (Budapest, 1892); and History of the Hungarian Nation (Hung.) (vol. 3, Budapest, 1895).

(R. N. B.)

LOUIS II. (1506-1526), king of Hungary and Bohemia, was the only son of Wladislaus II., king of Hungary and Bohemia, and the French princess Anne of Candale. Prematurely born at Buda on the 1st of July 1506, it required all the resources of medical science to keep the sickly child alive, yet he developed so precociously that at the age of thirteen he was well bearded and moustached, while at eighteen his hair was silvery white. His parts were good and he could speak and write six languages at a very early age, but the zeal of his guardians and tutors to make a man of him betimes nearly ruined his feeble constitution, while the riotous life led by him and his young consort, Maria of Austria, whom he wedded on the 13th of January 1522, speedily disqualified him for affairs, so that at last he became an object of ridicule at his own court. He was crowned king of Hungary on the 4th of June 1508, and king of Bohemia on the 11th of May 1509, and was declared of age when he succeeded his father on the 11th of December 1521. But during the greater part of his reign he was the puppet of the magnates and kept in such penury that he was often obliged to pawn his jewels to get proper food and clothing. His guardians, Cardinal Bakócz and Count George of Brandenburg-Anspach, shamefully neglected him, squandered the royal revenues and distracted the whole kingdom with their endless dissensions. Matters grew even worse on the death of Bakócz, when the magnates István Báthory, János Zapolya and István Verböczy fought each other furiously, and used the diets as their tools. Added to these troubles was the ever-present Turkish peril, which became acute after the king, with insensate levity, arrested the Ottoman envoy Berham in 1521 and refused to unite with Suleiman in a league against the Habsburgs. Nevertheless in the last extremity Louis showed more of manhood than any of his counsellors. It was he who restored something like order by intervening between the magnates and the gentry at the diet of 1525. It was he who collected in his camp at Tolna the army of 25,000 men which perished utterly on the fatal field of Mohács on the 29th of August 1526. He was drowned in the swollen stream of Csele on his flight from the field, being the second prince of the house of Jagiello who laid down his life for Hungary.

See Rerum Hungaricarum libri (vol. 2, ed. Ferencz Toldy, Budapest, 1867); and József Podhradczky, King Louis (Hung.) (Budapest, 1860).

(R. N. B.)

LOUIS, the name of three kings of Naples, members of the house of Anjou.

Louis I., duke of Anjou and count of Maine (1339-1384), was the second son of John II., king of France, and was born at Vincennes on the 23rd of July 1339. Having been given the duchy of Anjou in 1356 he led a wing of the French army at the battle of Poitiers and was sent to England as a hostage after the conclusion of the treaty of Brétigny in 1360, but he broke his parole in 1363 and so brought about King John’s return into captivity. He took part in the war against England which was renewed in 1369, uniting the rival houses of Foix and Armagnac in the common cause, and in other ways rendering good service to his brother, King Charles V. Anjou’s entrance into the troubled politics of Italy was one result of the papal schism which opened in 1378. Anxious to secure the support of France, the antipope Clement VII. persuaded the queen of Naples, Joanna I., to name Louis as her heir, and about the same time the death of Charles V. (September 1380) placed the duke in the position of regent of France. Neglecting France to prosecute his ambitions in Italy, he collected money and marched on Naples; but although helped by Amadeus VI., count of Savoy, he was unable to drive his rival, Charles, duke of Durazzo, from Naples. His army was destroyed by disease and Louis himself died at Biseglia, near Bari, on the 20th of September 1384, leaving two sons, his successor, Louis II., and Charles, duke of Calabria.

Louis II., duke of Anjou (1377-1417), born at Toulon on the 7th of October 1377, took up the struggle for Naples after his father’s death and was crowned king by Clement VII. in 1389. After carrying on the contest for some years his enemies prevailed and he was compelled to take refuge in France, where he took part in the intestine strife which was desolating that kingdom. A few years later he made other attempts to secure the kingdom of Naples, which was now in the possession of Ladislas, a son of his father’s foeman, Charles of Durazzo, and he gained a victory at Roccoserra in May 1411. Soon, however, he was again driven back to France, and after sharing anew in the civil wars of his country he died at Angers on the 29th of April 1417. His wife was Yolande, a daughter of John I., king of Aragon, and his son was his successor, Louis III.

Louis III., duke of Anjou (1403-1434), born on the 25th of September 1403, made in his turn an attempt to conquer Naples. This was in 1420, and he had met with considerable success in his task when he died at Cosenza on the 15th of November 1434. In 1424 Louis received from King Charles VII. the duchy of Touraine.

Another titular king of Naples of this name was Louis, a son of Philip, prince of Taranto. In 1346 he became the husband of Joanna I., queen of Naples, and in 1352 he was crowned king. After making an attempt to conquer Sicily he died on the 26th of May 1362.

LOUIS (893-911), surnamed the “Child,” king of the Franks, son of the emperor Arnulf, was born at Ottingen, designated by Arnulf as his successor in Germany in 897, and crowned on the 4th of February 900. Although he never received the imperial crown, he is sometimes referred to as the emperor Louis IV. His chief adviser was Hatto I., archbishop of Mainz; and during his reign the kingdom was ravaged by Hungarians and torn with internal strife. He appears to have passed his time in journeys from place to place, and in 910 was the nominal leader of an expedition against the Hungarians which was defeated near Augsburg. Louis, who was the last of the German Carolingians, died in August or September 911 and was buried at Regensburg.

See Regino von Prüm, “Chronicon,” in the Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores, Band i. (Hanover and Berlin, 1826); E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reichs (Leipzig, 1887-1888); O. Dietrich, Beiträge zur Geschichte Arnolfs von Kärnthen und Ludwigs des Kindes (Berlin, 1890); and E. Mühlbacher, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern (Innsbruck, 1881).

(A. W. H.*)

LOUIS OF NASSAU (1538-1574), son of William, count of Nassau, and Juliana von Stolberg, and younger brother of William the Silent, took an active part in the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish domination. He was one of the leaders of the league of nobles who signed the document known as “the Compromise” in 1566, and a little later was a member of the deputation who presented the petition of grievances called “the Request” to the regent, Margaret of Parma. It was on this occasion that the appellation of “the Beggars” (les Gueux) was first given to the opponents of King Philip’s policy. On the arrival of Alva at Brussels, Count Louis, with his brother William, withdrew from the Netherlands and raised a body of troops in defence of the patriot cause. In the spring of 1568 Louis invaded Friesland, and at Heiligerlee, on the 23rd of May, completely defeated a Spanish force under Count Aremberg, who was killed. Alva then advanced to meet the invaders with a large army, and at Jemmingen (July 21), with very slight loss, annihilated the levies of Louis, who himself escaped by swimming from the field across an estuary of the Ems. He now joined the army of his brother William, which had in October to beat a hasty retreat before Alva’s superior skill. Then Louis, in company with his brothers William and Henry, made his way across the French frontier to the camp of the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny. Louis took an active part in the campaign and fought heroically at Jarnac and Moncontour. In 1572 Louis, not deterred by previous disaster, raised a small force in France, and, suddenly entering Hainaut, captured Mons (May 23). Here he was besieged by Don Frederick of Toledo, Alva’s natural son, who blockaded all approach to the town. William made an attempt to relieve his brother, but failed, and Mons had to surrender (September 17). Louis, who was sick with fever, withdrew to his ancestral home, Dillenburg, to recruit his health, and then once more to devote his energies to the raising of money and troops for another invasion of the Netherlands. In the hope of drawing away the Spaniards from the siege of Leiden by a diversion in the south, Louis, with his brothers John and Henry, at the head of a force of mixed nationalities and little discipline, crossed the frontier near Maastricht, and advanced as far as the Mookerheide near Nijmwegen. Here he was attacked by a body of Spanish veterans under an experienced leader, Sancho d’Avila, and speedily routed. In the disorderly flight both Louis and his younger brother Henry, refusing to abandon the field, lost their lives. Their bodies were never recovered. Thus perished at the age of thirty-six one of the most chivalrous and gifted of a gallant band of brothers, four of whom laid down their lives in their country’s cause.

See P. J. Blok, Lodewijk von Nassau, 1538-1574 (The Hague, 1689), and the Cambridge Modern History, vol. iii. chs. vi. and vii., and bibliography (1904); also A. J. Van der Aa, Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden (22 vols., Haarlem, 1852-1878).

LOUIS, JOSEPH DOMINIQUE, Baron (1755-1837), French statesman and financier, was born at Toul (Meurthe) on the 13th of November 1755. At the outbreak of the Revolution the abbé Louis (he had early taken orders) had already some reputation as a financial expert. He was in favour of the constitutional movement, and on the great festival of federation (July 14, 1790) he assisted Talleyrand, then bishop of Autun, to celebrate mass at the altar erected in the Champ de Mars. In 1792, however, he emigrated to England, where he spent his time studying English institutions and especially the financial system of Pitt. Returning to France on the establishment of the Consulate he served successively in the ministry of war, the council of state, and in the finance department in Holland and in Paris. Made a baron of the empire in 1809 he nevertheless supported the Bourbon restoration and was minister of finance in 1814-1815. Baron Louis was deputy from 1815 to 1824 and from 1827 to 1832. He resumed the portfolio of finance in 1815, which he held also in the Decazes ministry of 1818; he was the first minister of finance under the government of Louis Philippe, and held the same portfolio in 1831-1832. In 1832 he was made a peer of France and he died on the 26th of August 1837.

LOUIS PHILIPPE I., king of the French (1773-1850), was the eldest son of Louis Philip Joseph, duke of Orleans (known during the Revolution as Philippe Egalité) and of Louise Marie Adelaide de Bourbon, daughter of the duc de Penthièvre, and was born at the Palais Royal in Paris on the 6th of October 1773. On his father’s side he was descended from the brother of Louis XIV., on his mother’s from the count of Toulouse, “legitimated” son of Louis XIV. and Madame de Montespan. The legend that he was a supposititious child, really the son of an Italian police constable named Chiapponi, is dealt with elsewhere (see Maria Stella, countess of Newborough). The god-parents of the duke of Valois, as he was entitled till 1785, were Louis XVI. and Queen Marie Antoinette; his governess was the famous Madame de Genlis, to whose influence he doubtless owed many of the qualities which later distinguished him: his wide, if superficial knowledge, his orderliness, and perhaps his parsimony. Known since 1785 as the duc de Chartres, he was sixteen at the outbreak of the Revolution, into which—like his father—he threw himself with ardour. In 1790 he joined the Jacobin Club, in which the moderate elements still predominated, and was assiduous in attendance at the debates of the National Assembly. He thus became a persona grata with the party in power; he was already a colonel of dragoons, and in 1792 he was given a command in the army of the North. As a lieutenant-general, at the age of eighteen, he was present at the cannonade of Valmy (Sept. 20) and played a conspicuous part in the victory of Jemappes (Nov. 6).

The republic had meanwhile been proclaimed, and the duc de Chartres, who like his father had taken the name of Egalité, posed as its zealous adherent. Fortunately for him, he was too young to be elected deputy to the Convention, and while his father was voting for the death of Louis XVI. he was serving under Dumouriez in Holland. He shared in the disastrous day of Neerwinden (March 18, 1793); was an accomplice of Dumouriez in the plot to march on Paris and overthrow the republic, and on the 5th of April escaped with him from the enraged soldiers into the Austrian lines. He was destined not to return to France for twenty years. He went first, with his sister Madame Adelaide, to Switzerland where he obtained a situation for a few months as professor in the college of Reichenau under an assumed name, mainly in order to escape from the fury of the émigrés. The execution of his father in November 1793 had made him duke of Orleans, and he now became the centre of the intrigues of the Orleanist party. In 1795 he was at Hamburg with Dumouriez, who still hoped to make him king. With characteristic caution Louis Philippe refused to commit himself by any overt pretensions, and announced his intention of going to America; but in the hope that something might happen in France to his advantage, he postponed his departure, travelling instead through the Scandinavian countries as far north as Lapland. But in 1796, the Directory having offered to release his mother and his two brothers, who had been kept in prison since the Terror, on condition that he went to America, he set sail for the United States, and in October settled in Philadelphia, where in February 1797 he was joined by his brothers the duc de Montpensier and the comte de Beaujolais. Two years were spent by them in travels in New England, the region of the Great Lakes, and of the Mississippi; then the news of the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire decided them to return to Europe. They returned in 1800, only to find Napoleon Bonaparte’s power firmly established. Immediately on his arrival, in February 1800, the duke of Orleans, at the suggestion of Dumouriez, sought an interview with the comte d’Artois, through whose instrumentality he was reconciled with the exiled king Louis XVIII., who bestowed upon his brothers the order of the Saint Esprit. The duke, however, refused to join the army of Condé and to fight against France, an attitude in which he persisted throughout, while maintaining his loyalty to the king. He settled with his brothers at Twickenham, near London, where he lived till 1807—for the most part in studious retirement.

On the 18th of May 1807 the duc de Montpensier died at Christchurch in Hampshire, where he had been taken for change of air, of consumption. The comte de Beaujolais was ill of the same disease and in 1808 the duke took him to Malta, where he died on the 29th of May. The duke now, in response to an invitation from King Ferdinand IV., visited Palermo where, on the 25th of November 1809 he married Princess Maria Amelia, the king’s daughter. He remained in Sicily until the news of Napoleon’s abdication recalled him to France. He was cordially received by Louis XVIII.; his military rank was confirmed, he was named colonel-general of hussars, and such of the vast Orleans estates as had not been sold were restored to him by royal ordinance. The object may have been, as M. Debidour suggests, to compromise him with the revolutionary parties and to bind him to the throne; but it is more probable that it was no more than an expression of the good will which the king had shown him ever since 1800. The immediate effect was to make him enormously rich, his wealth being increased by his natural aptitude for business until, after the death of his mother in 1821, his fortune was reckoned at some £8,000,000.

Meanwhile, in the heated atmosphere of the reaction, his sympathy with the Liberal opposition brought him again under suspicion. His attitude in the House of Peers in the autumn of 1815 cost him a two years’ exile to Twickenham; he courted popularity by having his children educated en bourgeois at the public schools; and the Palais Royal became the rendezvous of all the leaders of that middle-class opinion by which he was ultimately to be raised to the throne.

His opportunity came with the revolution of 1830. During the three “July days” the duke kept himself discreetly in the background, retiring first to Neuilly, then to Raincy. Meanwhile, Thiers issued a proclamation pointing out that a Republic would embroil France with all Europe, while the duke of Orleans, who was “a prince devoted to the principles of the Revolution” and had “carried the tricolour under fire” would be a “citizen king” such as the country desired. This view was that of the rump of the chamber still sitting at the Palais Bourbon, and a deputation headed by Thiers and Laffitte waited upon the duke to invite him to place himself at the head of affairs. He returned with them to Paris on the 30th, and was elected by the deputies lieutenant-general of the realm. The next day, wrapped in a tricolour scarf and preceded by a drummer, he went on foot to the Hôtel de Ville—the headquarters of the republican party—where he was publicly embraced by Lafayette as a symbol that the republicans acknowledged the impossibility of realizing their own ideals and were prepared to accept a monarchy based on the popular will. Hitherto, in letters to Charles X., he had protested the loyalty of his intentions, and the king now nominated him lieutenant-general and then, abdicating in favour of his grandson the comte de Chambord appointed him regent. On the 7th of August, however, the Chamber by a large majority declared Charles X. deposed, and proclaimed Louis Philippe “King of the French, by the grace of God and the will of the people.”

The career of Louis Philippe as King of the French is dealt with elsewhere (see France: History). Here it must suffice to note something of his personal attitude towards affairs and the general effects which this produced. For the trappings of authority he cared little. To conciliate the revolutionary passion for equality he was content to veil his kingship for a while under a middle-class disguise. He erased the royal lilies from the panels of his carriages; and the Palais Royal, like the White House at Washington, stood open to all and sundry who cared to come and shake hands with the head of the state. This pose served to keep the democrats of the capital in a good temper, and so leave him free to consolidate the somewhat unstable foundation of his throne and to persuade his European fellow-sovereigns to acknowledge in him not a revolutionary but a conservative force. But when once his position at home and abroad had been established, it became increasingly clear that he possessed all the Bourbon tenaciousness of personal power. When a “party of Resistance” came into office with Casimir-Périer in March 1831, the speech from the throne proclaimed that “France has desired that the monarchy should become national, it does not desire that it should be powerless”; and the migration of the royal family to the Tuileries symbolized the right of the king not only to reign but to rule. Republican and Socialist agitation, culminating in a series of dangerous risings, strengthened the position of the king as defender of middle-class interest; and since the middle classes constituted the pays légal which alone was represented in Parliament, he came to regard his position as unassailable, especially after the suppression of the risings under Blanqui and Barbès in 1839. Little by little his policy, always supported by a majority in a house of representatives elected by a corrupt and narrow franchise, became more reactionary and purely dynastic. His position in France seeming to be unassailable, he sought to strengthen it in Europe by family alliances. The fact that his daughter Louise was the consort of Leopold I., king of the Belgians, had brought him into intimate and cordial relations with the English court, which did much to cement the entente cordiale with Great Britain. Broken in 1840 during the affair of Mehemet Ali (q.v.) the entente was patched up in 1841 by the Straits Convention and re-cemented by visits paid by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the Château d’Eu in 1843 and 1845 and of Louis Philippe to Windsor in 1844, only to be irretrievably wrecked by the affair of the “Spanish marriages,” a deliberate attempt to revive the traditional Bourbon policy of French predominance in Spain. If in this matter Louis Philippe had seemed to sacrifice the international position of France to dynastic interests, his attempt to re-establish it by allying himself with the reactionary monarchies against the Liberals of Switzerland finally alienated from him the French Liberal opinion on which his authority was based. When, in February 1848, Paris rose against him, he found that he was practically isolated in France.

Charles X., after abdicating, had made a dignified exit from France, marching to the coast surrounded by the cavalry, infantry and artillery of his Guard. Louis Philippe was less happily situated. Escaping with the queen from the Tuileries by a back entrance, he made his way with her in disguise to Honfleur, where the royal couple found refuge in a gardener’s cottage. They were ultimately smuggled out of the country by the British consul at Havre as Mr and Mrs Smith, arriving at Newhaven “unprovided with anything but the clothes they wore.” They settled at Claremont, placed at their disposal by Queen Victoria, under the incognito of count and countess of Neuilly. Here on the 26th of August 1850, Louis Philippe died.

The character of Louis Philippe is admirably traced by Queen Victoria in a memorandum of May 2, 1855, in which she compares him with Napoleon III. She speaks of his “vast knowledge upon all and every subject,” and “his great activity of mind.” He was, unlike Napoleon, “thoroughly French in character, possessing all the liveliness and talkativeness of that people.” But she also speaks of the “tricks and over-reachings” practised by him, “who in great as well as in small things took a pleasure in being cleverer and more cunning than others, often when there was no advantage to be gained by it, and which was, unfortunately, strikingly displayed in the transactions connected with the Spanish marriages, which led to the king’s downfall, and ruined him in the eyes of all Europe” (Letters, pop. ed., iii. 122).

Louis Philippe had eight children. His eldest son, the popular Ferdinand Philippe, duke of Orleans (b. 1810), who had married Princess Helena of Mecklenburg, was killed in a carriage accident on the 13th of July 1842, leaving two sons, the comte de Paris and the duc de Chartres. The other children were Louise, consort of Leopold I., king of the Belgians; Marie, who married Prince Alexander of Württemberg and died in 1839; Louis Charles, duc de Nemours; Clementine, married to the duke of Coburg-Kohary; François Ferdinand, prince de Joinville; Henri Eugène, duc d’Aumale (q.v.); Antoine Philippe, duc de Montpensier, who married the Infanta, younger sister of Queen Isabella of Spain.

Authorities.—F. A. Gruyer, La Jeunesse du roi Louis-Philippe, d’après les pourtraits et des tableaux (Paris, 1909), édition de luxe, with beautiful reproductions of portraits, miniatures, &c.; Marquis de Flers, Louis-Philippe, vie anecdotique, 1773-1850 (Paris, 1891); E. Daudet, Hist. de l’émigration (3 vols., Paris, 1886-1890). Of general works on Louis Philippe’s reign may be mentioned Louis Blanc, Hist. de Dix Ans, 1830-1840 (5 vols., Paris, 1841-1844), from the republican point of view; J. O. d’Haussonville, Hist. de la politique extérieure de la monarchie de juillet, 1830-1848 (2 vols., Paris, 1850); V. de Nouvion, Hist. de Louis-Philippe (4 vols., Paris, 1857-1861); F. Guizot, France under Louis Philippe, 1841-1847 (Eng. trans., 1865); Karl Hillebrand, Geschichte Frankreichs von der Thronbesteigung Louis Philippes, 1830-1841 (2 vols., Gotha, 1877-1879); V. du Bled, Hist. de la monarchie de juillet (2 vols., Paris, 1887); P. Thureau-Dangin, Hist. de la monarchie de juillet (Paris, 1887, &c.); A. Malet, “La France sous la monarchie de juillet,” in Lavisse and Rambaud’s Hist. Générale, vol. x. ch. x. (Paris, 1898); G. Weill, La France sous la monarchie de juillet (Paris, 1902); Émile Bourgeois, “The Orleans Monarchy,” ch. xv. of vol. x., and “The Fall of Constitutionalism in France,” ch. ii. of vol. xi. of the Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge, 1907 and 1909). Further works will be found in the bibliographies attached by M. Bourgeois to his chapters (vol. x. p. 844, vol. xi. p. 874; the latter including works on the revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic). To the list of published correspondence and memoirs there mentioned may be added the Chronique of the duchesse de Dino (Paris, 1909).

Louis Philippe himself published the Journal du duc de Chartres, 1790-1791; Mon Journal, événements de 1815 (2 vols., 1849); Discours, allocutions et réponses de S. M. Louis-Philippe, 1830-1846; and after his death was issued his Correspondance, mémoire et discours inédits (Paris, 1863).

(W. A. P.)


As M. Chabaud de la Tour. He was examined as to his fitness before being appointed. Gruyer, p. 165.

This at least was his own claim and the Orleanist view. The matter became a question of partisan controversy, the legitimists asserting that he frequently offered to serve against France, but that his offers were contemptuously refused. A. Debidour in the article “Louis-Philippe” in La Grande Encyclopédie supports the latter view; but see Gruyer, La Jeunesse, and E. Daudet, “Une réconciliation de famille en 1800,” in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept. 15, 1905, p. 301. M. Daudet gives the account of the interview left by the comte d’Artois, and he also makes it clear that Louis Philippe, while protesting his loyalty to the head of his house, did not disguise his opinion that a Restoration would only be possible if the king accepted the essential changes made by the Revolution.

To say that these protestations were hypocritical is to assume too much. Personal ambition doubtless played a part; but he must have soon realized that the French people had wearied of “legitimism” and that a regency in the circumstances was impossible.

There is a vivid account in Mr Featherstonhaugh to Lord Palmerston, Havre, March 3, 1848, in The Letters of Queen Victoria (pop. ed., ii. 156).

LOUISBURG, a town and port of entry of Cape Breton county, Nova Scotia, Canada, on the Sydney & Louisburg railway, 39 m. from Sydney. Pop. (1901) 1588. Under the French régime, Louisburg was second only to Quebec. A fortress was erected at enormous expense, and the city was the centre of the cod-fisheries. The fortress was, however, captured in 1745 by the American colonists, under Sir William Pepperrell (1696-1759), assisted by the British fleet, and again in 1758 by a British land and sea force under General Jeffrey Amherst (1717-1797) and Admiral Boscawen. The jealousy of the British settlement of Halifax led to its almost utter destruction, and only a few case-mates now remain. Under English rule a fishing village grew up on the other side of the harbour, and has now become the winter shipping port of the Dominion Coal Company. The harbour is deep, spacious and open all the year round, though occasionally blocked by drift ice in the spring.

LOUISE [Auguste Wilhelmine Amalie Luise] (1776-1810), queen of Prussia, was born on the 10th of March 1776 in Hanover, where her father, Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was field-marshal of the household brigade. Her mother was a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt. In 1793 Louise met at Frankfort the crown prince of Prussia, afterwards King Frederick William III., who was so fascinated by her beauty, and by the nobleness of her character, that he asked her to become his wife. They were married on the 24th of December of the same year. As queen of Prussia she commanded universal respect and affection, and nothing in Prussian history is more pathetic than the dignity and unflinching courage with which she bore the sufferings inflicted on her and her family during the war between Prussia and France. After the battle of Jena she went with her husband to Königsberg, and when the battles of Eylau and Friedland had placed Prussia absolutely at the mercy of France, she made a personal appeal to Napoleon at his headquarters in Tilsit, but without success. Early in 1808 she accompanied the king from Memel to Königsberg, whence, towards the end of the year, she visited St Petersburg, returning to Berlin on the 23rd of December 1809. During the war Napoleon attempted to destroy the queen’s reputation, but the only effect of his charges in Prussia was to make her more deeply beloved. On the 19th of July 1810 she died in her husband’s arms, while visiting her father in Strelitz. She was buried in the garden of the palace at Charlottenburg, where a mausoleum, containing a fine recumbent statue by Rauch, was built over her grave. In 1840 her husband was buried by her side. The Louise Foundation (Luisenstift) for the education of girls was established in her honour, and in 1814 Frederick William III. instituted the Order of Louise (Luisenorden). In 1880 a statue of Queen Louise was erected in the Thiergarten at Berlin.

See F. Adami, Luise, Königin von Preussen (7th ed., 1875); E. Engel, Königin Luise (1876); A. Kluckhohn, Luise, Königin von Preussen (1876); Mommsen and Treitschke, Königin Luise (1876); in English, Hudson, Life and Times of Louisa, Queen of Prussia (1874); G. Horn, Das Buch von der Königin Luise (Berlin, 1883); A. Lonke, Königin Luise von Preussen (Leipzig, 1903); H. von Petersdorff, “Königin Luise,” Frauenleben, Bd. i. (Bielefeld, 1903, 2nd ed., 1904).

LOUISE OF SAVOY (1476-1531), duchess of Angoulême, mother of Francis I. of France, was daughter of a cadet of the house of Savoy, Philip, count of Bresse, afterwards duke of Savoy. Through her mother, Marguerite de Bourbon, she was niece of Pierre de Bourbon, sire de Beaujeu, afterwards duke of Bourbon. At the age of twelve she was married to Charles of Valois, count of Angoulême, great-grandson of King Charles V. The count died in 1496, leaving her the mother of two children, Marguerite (b. 1492) and Francis (b. 1494). The accession of Louis XII., who was childless, made Francis of Angoulême the heir-presumptive to the throne of France. Louise brought her children to the court, and received Amboise as her residence. She lived henceforth in fear lest Louis should have a son; and in consequence there was a secret rivalry between her and the queen, Anne of Brittany. Finally, her son became king on the 1st of January 1515 by the death of Louis XII. From him Louise received the county of Angoulême, which was erected into a duchy, the duchy of Anjou, and the counties of Maine and Beaufort. She was then given the title of “Madame.” From 1515 to her death, she took the chief share in the government. The part she played has been variously judged, and is not yet completely elucidated. It is certain that Louise had a clear head, practical good sense and tenacity. In the critical situation after the battle of Pavia (1525) she proved herself equal to the emergency, maintained order in the kingdom, and manœuvred very skilfully to detach Henry VIII. of England from the imperial alliance. But she appears to have been passionate, exceedingly rapacious and ever careful of her own interest. In her malignant disputes with the constable de Bourbon on the question of his wife’s succession, she goaded him to extreme measures, and her rapacity showed itself also in her dealings with the surintendant des finances, J. de Beaune, baron de Samblançay (d. 1527), who diverted the money intended for the French soldiers in Italy into the coffers of the queen, and suffered death in consequence. She died in 1531, and Francis reunited to the crown her domains, which comprised the Bourbonnais, Beaujolais, Auvergne, la Marche, Angoumois, Maine and Anjou.

There is extant a Journal of Louise of Savoy, the authenticity of which seems certain. It consists of brief notes—generally very exact and sometimes ironical—which go as far as the year 1522. The only trustworthy text is that published by Guichenon in his Histoire généalogique de la maison de Savoie (ed. of 1778-1780, vol. iv.).

See Poésies de François Ier et de Louise de Savoie ..., ed. by Champollion-Figeac (1847); De Maulde, Louise de Savoie et François Ier (1895); G. Jacqueton, La Politique extérieure de Louise de Savoie ... (1892); H. Hauser, “Étude critique sur le Journal de Louise de Savoie,” in the Revue historique, vol. 86 (1904).

LOUISIADE ARCHIPELAGO, a chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean, extending south-eastward from the easternmost promontory of New Guinea, and included in the Australian territory of Papua (British New Guinea). The islands number over eighty, and are interspersed with reefs. They are rich in tropical forest products, and gold has been discovered on the chief island, Tagula or South-east (area 380 sq. m.) and on Misima or St Aignan. The natives are of Papuan type, and practise cannibalism. The islands were probably observed by Torres in 1606, but were named by L. A. de Bougainville in 1768 after Louis XV.

LOUISIANA, one of the Southern States of the United States of America, lying on the N. coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Beginning on the N., its boundary follows eastward the parallel of 33° N., separating Louisiana from Arkansas; then descends the Mississippi river, separating it from the state of Mississippi, southward to 31°; passes eastward on this parallel to the Pearl river, still with the state of Mississippi on the E.; and descends this river to the Gulf. On the W. the Sabine river, from the Gulf to 32° N., and, thence to the parallel of 33°, a line a little W. of (and parallel to) the meridian of 94° W., separate Louisiana from Texas. Including islands in the Gulf, the stretch of latitude is approximately 4° and of longitude 5°. The total area is 48,506 sq. m., of which 3097 sq. m. are water surface (including 1060 sq. m. of landlocked coastal bays called “lakes”). The coast line is about 1500 m.

Physical Features.—Geologically Louisiana is a very recent creation, and belongs to the “Coastal Plain Province.” Most of the rocks or soils composing its surface were formed as submarine deposits; the easternmost and southernmost parts are true river deposits. These facts are the key to the state’s chorography. The average elevation of the state above the sea is only about 75 ft., and practically the only parts more than 400 ft. high are hills in Sabine, Claiborne and Vernon parishes. The physiographic features are few and very simple. The essential elements are five: diluvial plains, coast marshes, prairies, “bluffs” and “pine-hills” (to use the local nomenclature). These were successive stages in the geologic process which has created, and is still actively modifying, the state. They are all seen, spread from N. to S., west of the Mississippi, and also, save only the prairies, in the so-called “Florida parishes” E. of the Mississippi.

These different elements in the region W. of the Mississippi are arranged from N. to S. in the order of decreasing geologic age and maturity. Beginning with elevations of about 400 ft. near the Arkansas line, there is a gentle slope toward the S.E. The northern part can best be regarded as a low plateau (once marine sediments) sloping southward, traversed by the large diluvial valleys of the Mississippi, Red and Ouachita rivers, and recut by smaller tributaries into smaller plateaus and rather uniform flat-topped hills. The “bluffs” (remnants of an eroded plain formed of alluvion deposits over an old, mature and drowned topography) run through the second tier of parishes W. of the Mississippi above the Red river. Below this river prairie areas become increasingly common, constituting the entire S.W. corner of the state. They are usually only 20 to 30 ft. above the sea in this district, never above 70, and are generally treeless except for marginal timber along the sluggish, meandering streams. One of their peculiar features—the sandy circular “mounds,” 2 to 10 ft. high and 20 to 30 or even 50 ft. in diameter, sometimes surmounted by trees in the midst of a treeless plain and sometimes arranged in circles and on radii, and decreasing in size with distance from the centre of the field—has been variously explained. The mounds were probably formed by some gentle eruptive action like that exhibited in the “mud hills” along the Mississippi below New Orleans; but no explanation is generally accepted. The prairies shade off into the coast marshes. This fringe of wooded swamp and sea marsh is generally 20 to 30, but in places even 50 and 60 m. in width. Where the marsh is open and grassy, flooded only at high tides or in rainy seasons, and the ground firm enough to bear cattle, it is used as range. Considerable tracts have also been diked and reclaimed for cotton, sugar and especially for rice culture. The tidal action of the gulf is so slight and the marshes are so low that perfect drainage cannot be obtained through tide gates, which must therefore be supplemented by pumping machinery when rains are heavy or landward winds long prevail. Slight ridges along the streams and bayous which traverse it, and occasional patches of slightly elevated prairie, relieve in a measure the monotonous expanse. It is in and along the borders of this coast swamp region that most of the rice and much of the sugar cane of the state are grown. Long bar-like “islands” (conspicuous high land rising above the marsh and prairie)—Orange, Petite Anse, Grand Cote, Cote Blanche and Belle Isle—offer very interesting topographical and geological problems. “Trembling prairies”—land that trembles under the tread of men or cattle—are common near the coast. Most of the swamp fringe is reclaimable. The marshes encroach most upon the parishes of St Charles, Orleans and Plaquemines. In St Charles the cultivable strip of land along the river is only about 3 m. wide. In Orleans the city of New Orleans occupies nearly all the high ground and encroaches on the swamps. In Plaquemines there is practically no cultivable land below Forts Jackson and St Philip, and above there is only a narrow strip.

The alluvial lands include the river flood plains. The principal rivers are the Mississippi, which flows nearly 600 m. through and along the border of the state, the Red river, the Ouachita (or Washita), Sabine and Pearl; all except the last are navigable at all stages of the water. There are many “bayous,” several of which are of great importance, both for navigation and for drainage. They may be characterized as secondary outlets of the rivers or flood distributaries. Among them are Bayou Teche, Bayou Plaquemine, Atchafalaya Bayou, Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Bœuf. Almost all secondary water-courses, particularly if they have sluggish currents, are known as bayous. Some might well be called lakes, and others rivers. The alluvial portion of the state, especially below the mouth of the Red river, is an intricate network of these bayous, which, before their closure by a levee system, served partially, in time of flood, to carry off the escaping surplus of river waters. They are comparatively inactive at all seasons; indeed, the action of the tides and back-waters and the tangle of vegetation in the sombre swamps and forests through which they run, often render their currents almost imperceptible at ordinary water. Navigable waters are said to penetrate all but four of the parishes of the state, their total length approximating 3800 m.

Each of the larger streams, as well as a large proportion of the smaller ones, is accompanied by a belt of bottom land, of greater or less width, lying low as regards the stream, and liable to overflow at times of high water. These flood plains form collectively what is known as the alluvial region, which extends in a broad belt down the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Ouachita and its branches and the Red river to and beyond the limits of the state. Its breadth along the Mississippi within Louisiana ranges from 10 to 50 or 60 m., and that along the Red river and the Ouachita has an average breadth of 10 m. Through its great flood-plain the Mississippi river winds upon the summit of a ridge formed by its own deposits. In each direction the country falls away in a succession of minor undulations, the summits of the ridges being occupied by the streams and bayous. Nearly all of this vast flood-plain lies below the level of high water in the Mississippi, and, but for the protection afforded by the levees, every considerable rise of its waters would inundate vast areas of fertile and cultivated land. The low regions of Louisiana, including the alluvial lands and the coast swamps, comprise about 20,000 sq. m., or nearly one-half the area of the state. The remainder consists of the uplands of prairie and forest.

The alluvial region of the state in 1909 was mainly protected against overflow from the Mississippi river by 754 m. of levee on the Mississippi river within the state, and 84 m. on the Mississippi river, Cypress and Amos Bayou in Arkansas, forming part of the general system which extends through other states, 1000 m. up to the highlands about the junction of the Ohio river. The state and the national government co-operate in the construction and maintenance of this system, but the Federal government did not give material aid (the only exception being the grant of swamp lands in 1850) until the exceptionally disastrous flood in 1882. For about a century and a half before that time, levee building had been undertaken in a more or less spasmodic and tentative way, first by riparian proprietors, then by local combinations of public and private interests, and finally by the state, acting through levee districts, advised by a Board of Engineers. The Federal government, after its participation in the work, acted through a Board of Engineers, known as the “Mississippi River Commission.” The system of 754 m. of Mississippi river levees, within the state, was built almost entirely after 1866, and represents an expenditure of about $43,000,000 for primary construction alone; of this sum, the national government contributed probably a third (the state expended about $24,000,000 on levees before the Civil War). Some of the levees, especially those in swampy regions where outlet bayous are closed, are of extraordinary solidity and dimensions, being 20 to 40 ft. high, or even more, across streams or bayous—formerly outlets—with bases of 8 or 10 ft. to one of height. The task of maintenance consists almost entirely in closing the gaps which occur when the banks on which the levees are built cave into the river. Levee systems on some of the interior or tributary rivers, aggregating some 602 m., are exclusively built and maintained by the state. Louisiana also contributes largely to the 84 m. of levee in Arkansas, necessary to its security from overflow. The improvement of bayous, channels, the construction of canals and the drainage of swamp lands also contribute to the protection of the state.

The lakes are mainly in three classes. First come the coast lagoons, many of which are merely landlocked salt-water bays, the waters of which rise and fall with the tides. Of this class are Pontchartrain, Borgne, Maurepas and Sabine. These are simply parts of the sea which have escaped the filling-in process carried on by the great river and the lesser streams. A second class, called “ox-bow” lakes, large in numbers but small in area, includes ordinary cut-off meanders along the Mississippi and Red rivers. A third class, those upon the Red river and its branches, are caused mainly by the partial stoppage of the water above Shreveport by the “raft,” a mass of drift such as frequently gathers in western rivers, which for a distance of 45 m. almost completely closed the channel until it was broken up by government engineers. These lakes are much larger at flood season than at other times, and have been much reduced in size by the cutting of a channel through the raft. Lakes of this class are sometimes formed by the choking of the mouth of feeble tributaries by silt deposited by the Red river where the currents meet.

Mineral Resources.—Mineral resources are few, but important. In the Tertiary region are found small quantities of iron ore and an indifferent brown coal. The important mineral products are salt, sulphur, petroleum and natural gas. The deposit of rock salt on Petite Anse Island, in the coast swamp region, has been extensively worked since its discovery during the Civil War. The deposit is in places 1000 ft. thick, and yields salt of extraordinary purity (sometimes 99% pure). There are large deposits also on Orange Island (in places at least 1800 ft. thick), on Week’s Island, on Belle Isle and probably beneath the intervening marshes. In 1907 Louisiana ranked sixth among the salt-producing states of the country (after New York, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas and California), its output being valued at $226,892, only a few hundred dollars more than that of Texas. Near Lake Charles, at Sulphur, are very extraordinary sulphur deposits. The beds lie several (for the most part four to six) hundred feet underground and are of disputed origin. Many regard them as products of an extinct volcano; according to others they are of vegetable origin (they are found in conjunction with gypsum). They were discovered before 1870 by searchers after petroleum, but their exploitation remained in the experimental stage until about 1900. The sulphur is dissolved by superheated water forced down pipes, and the water with sulphur in solution is forced upward by hot air pressure through other pipes; the sulphur comes, 99% pure, to the surface of the ground, where it is cooled in immense bins, and then broken up and loaded directly upon cars for shipment. These mines divide with the Sicilian mines the control of the sulphur market of the world. The value of the sulphur taken from the mines of Louisiana in 1907 was a little more than $5,000,000. Evidences of petroleum were discovered long ago, in the very field where in recent years the Beaumont and Vinton wells were bored. In 1909 Jennings was the chief field in Louisiana, lesser fields being at Welsh, Anse la Butte, Caddo and Vinton. The Jennings field, one of the greatest in the United States, produced up to and including 1907 more than 26,000,000 barrels of high-grade oil, twelve-thirteenths of which came from an area of only 50 acres, one well producing a tenth of the entire output. In 1907 the state produced 5,000,221 barrels of petroleum, valued at $4,063,033. Natural gas is found in Caddo parish, about 20 m. N. of Shreveport. The depth of the wells is from 840 to 2150 ft.; two wells completed in 1907 had a daily capacity estimated at 35,000,000 to 50,000,000 ft. Shreveport, Oil City, Blanchard, Mooringsport, Bossier City and Texarkana are supplied with natural gas by pipe lines from this field. Kaolin is found in the state; in 1907 the total value of all clay products was $928,579.

Climate.—The climate is semi-tropical and exceptionally equable over large areas. In the S. and S.E. the equable temperature is largely the effect of the network of bays, bayous and lakes, and throughout the state the climate is materially influenced by the prevailing southerly winds from the Gulf of Mexico. Some daily variation in the temperature of adjoining localities is caused by a dark soil in the one and a light soil in the other, but the differences of mean annual temperature are almost wholly due to differences of latitude and elevation. The mean annual temperature for a period of nineteen years (Jan. 1888 to Dec. 1906) ranged from 70° F. at Port Eads, in the extreme S.E., to 65° F. at Lake Providence, in the N.E. The mean temperature of July, the hottest month, is comparatively uniform over the state, varying only from 81° to 83°; the mean for January, the coldest month, varies from 46° in the extreme north to 56° in the extreme south. Even in the coldest localities eight or nine months are wholly free from frost, and in the coast parishes frost occurs only a few days in each year. Rainfall is usually heavy in the S.E., but it decreases toward the N.W. As much as 85.6 in. have fallen within a year at New Orleans, but in this locality the average for a year is about 57.6 in.; at Shreveport the average is 46 in., and for the entire state it is 55 in. Much more rain falls in summer than in any other season, but in some parts the heaviest rainfall is in the spring and in others in the winter. A light fall of snow is not uncommon in the northern parishes, but in the southern part of the state snow falls not oftener than once in three to five years. Hailstorms are infrequent everywhere, but especially so in the south. Only a fourth to a half of the days of the different months are wholly or partly clear even in the north, and in the same district the monthly means of relative humidity vary from 65 to 70.

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Fauna.—The entire state is included within the Austro-riparian life zone; the higher portions fall within the Carolinian area and the lower portions, including the Gulf and the Mississippi embayment almost to the N.E. corner of the state, constitute a special semi-tropical region. The native fauna of the state resembles in its general features that of the other Gulf states. The feral fauna was once rather varied. Black bears, wolves and deer are not yet extinct, and more rarely a “wild cat” (lynx) or “panther” (puma) is seen in the swamps. Of smaller mammals, raccoons, squirrels and opossums are very common. Every bayou contains alligators; and reptiles of various species, such as turtles, lizards, horned toads, rattlesnakes and moccasins are abundant. Shrimps, frogs (of great commercial importance), terrapin, clams and oysters are common. Only in very recent years have oysters, though plentiful, become of competitive importance in the national market; they are greatly favoured by state protective legislation. In 1904 a state oyster commission was created to supplant the independent control by the parishes. An important boundary dispute with Mississippi arose over beds lying near the state line. The state leases the beds at a low annual rental in tracts (limited for each person, firm or corporation to 1000 acres), and draws from them a considerable revenue. The avifauna is varied and abundant, comprising eagles, vultures (protected by law), hawks, owls, pelicans, cranes, turkeys, geese, “partridges” (called quail or “Bob White” elsewhere), ducks, &c., besides numerous smaller species, many of which are brilliant of plumage but harsh of voice.

Flora.—Heavy rainfall, high temperature and fertile soil combine to cover the greater part of the state, and particularly the alluvial regions and the coast swamps, with a most luxuriant subtropical vegetation, both arborescent and herbaceous. Louisiana is justly celebrated for the beauty and fragrance of its flowers. The range of temperature is not sufficient to give the variety of annual wild flowers of more northern climates; nevertheless flowers cover the bottom lands and uplands in great profusion. The upland flora is the more diversified. Flowering annuals are mainly aquatic. Water lilies, water hyacinths, which are an obstruction in many streams, and irises in rich variety give colour to the coast wastes and sombre bayous. Notable among the flora are roses, japonicas, hibiscus shrubs of various species, poinsettias, tea olives, crepe myrtle, jasmines, magnolias, camellias, oleanders, chrysanthemums, geraniums and plumbagos. The value and variety of the timber are very great. Much of the river swamp region is covered with cypress trees festooned with Spanish moss. The most common species in the alluvial regions and, to a less degree, in the drier portions of the swamps and in the stream bottoms of the prairies are various oaks, black, sweet and tupelo gum, holly, cotton-wood, poplar, magnolia sweet bay, the tulip tree, catalpa, black walnut, pecans, hickories, ash, beech and short-leaf pine. On drier and higher soils are the persimmon, sassafras, red maple, elm, black haw, hawthorn, various oaks (in all 10 species occur), hickories and splendid forests of long-leaf and loblolly yellow pine.

Forestry.—These forests are the greatest and finest of their kind remaining in the United States. In 1898 it was estimated by Henry Gannett (followed by the Federal census of 1900) that the timbered area covered 28,300 sq. m. Professor C. S. Sargent estimated in 1884 that the stand of short-leaf and long-leaf pines aggregated respectively 21,625 and 26,558 million feet. The timber product of 1900 ($17,294,444) was almost ten times that of 1880 ($1,764,640); and in 1905 the product value ($35,192,374) was more than twice that of 1900. Nevertheless, in 1900 the cypress forests remained practically untouched, only slight impression had been made upon the pine areas, and the hard-wood forests, except that they had been culled of their choicest oak, remained in their primal state (U.S. census). Between 1900 and 1905 furniture factories and planing mills became somewhat important. Pond pine occurs only near the Pearl river. Curly pine is fairly abundant. The eastern pine belt is composed of the long-leaf pine, interspersed with some loblolly. It covers an area of about 3900 sq. m. The south-western pine belt contains the heaviest growth of long-leaf pine timber in the world, covering an area of about 4200 sq. m., and occasionally interspersed with short-leaf pine. The short-leaf growth is especially heavy in the north-western portion of the state, while the long-leaf is found mainly in large masses N. and S. of the Red river around Alexandria as a centre. The cypress forests of the alluvial and overflowed lands in the S. of the state are among the largest and the most heavily timbered known. The hard-woods are found in the river bottoms throughout the state.

Agriculture and Soils.—Agriculture is the chief industry of the State. In 1900 26.2% of the land was in farms, and of this area about two-fifths was improved. The size of the average farm decreased in the two preceding decades from 171.3 to 95.4 acres. The percentage of farms operated by owners (i.e. owners, part owners, owners and tenants, and managers) fell from 64.8 to 42.1% from 1880 to 1900, and the percentage operated by cash tenants increased from 13.8 in 1880 to 24.9 in 1900, and by share tenants from 21.5 in 1880 to 33.0 in 1900; the percentage of farms operated by white farmers was 49.8 in 1900. The value of farm property, $198,536,906 in 1900, increased 79.8% in the preceding decade. The value of live stock in the latter year was $28,869,506. The total value of all farm products in 1899 was $72,667,302, of which $59,276,092 was the value of the distinctive crops—cotton, sugar and rice. The state bureau of agriculture in 1903 estimated that of the total area 14.9 millions of acres were timber land, 5.7 millions pasture and marsh, and 5.0 millions cultivated farm land.

In the N. there are many sandy districts in the uplands, also sandy clays; in the “second bottoms” of the streams fertile sandy loams; abundant tertiary marls in the north-central region; some gypsum in the cretaceous “islands”; and some fossiliferous marls with decomposed limestones. The prairies of south-western Louisiana have much yellow marl underlying them. Alluvial soil and bluff, the location of which has been indicated, are of primary agricultural importance. Reclaimed marsh-land and fresh alluvium (the so-called “front-lands” on rivers and bayous) are choice soil for Indian corn, sugar-cane, perique tobacco, semi-tropical fruits and cotton. The bluff lands are simply old alluvium now well drained and above all floods. The prairies of the S.W. are devoted almost exclusively to rice. On the hills yellow-leaf tobacco can be grown. Cereals and forage plants can be successfully grown everywhere, and varied and profitable agriculture is possible even on the “pine-barrens” or uplands of the N.; but more intelligent and more intensive farming is necessary than that practised by the average “piney-woods” farmer. The alluvial section of lower Louisiana is mostly devoted to sugar, and farther northward to Indian corn and cotton.

Cotton is the principal crop. In 1907 Louisiana ranked eighth in acreage of cotton (1,622,000 acres) among the states of the United States, and in 1907-1908 the cotton crop (675,428 bales) was eighth among the crops of the states. The average yield per acre varies from about .45 to .75 bale according to the season. In good seasons and exceptional localities the yield may approach a bale per acre, as in Assumption parish, and in the Mississippi valley at the junction of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. For many years there has been a reaction against the all-cotton farming system. In general, the small cotton farmer was at the mercy of the commission merchant, to whom he mortgaged his crops in advance; but this evil has lessened, and in some districts the system of advancing is either non-existent or very slightly developed.

In 1907-1908 all the sugar produced from cane grown in the United States came from Louisiana (335,000 long tons) and Texas (12,000 tons); in the same year cane sugar from Hawaii amounted to 420,000 tons, from Porto Rico to 217,000 tons and from the Philippines to 135,000 tons; and the total yield of beet sugar from the United States was 413,954 tons. Of all the cane grown, an amount between one-sixth and one-quarter—and that the best—must be reserved for seed every other year, and this is a great handicap to the state in competing with other cane regions and with the sugar beet. Of the total sugar consumption of the country in 1899-1904 Louisiana produced somewhat more than a fifteenth. Since about 1880 there have been central factories, and their increase has been a very prominent factor in the development of the industry, as it has been in Cuba. Though very much of the region S. of the Red river is fairly well suited to sugar-growing, it is still true that sugar cannot, over much of this area, be grown to so great advantage as other crops. Its hold upon the delta region is, however, almost unchallenged, especially since the rice farmers have found in the prairie lands that excel the delta for their purposes. Sugar is grown also in St Landry and the eastern part of Attakapas—a name formerly loosely applied to what are now St Mary, Iberia, Vermilion, St Martin and Lafayette parishes. Though introduced with success from Santo Domingo about the middle of the 18th century, the sugar industry practically dates from 1796, when Étienne Boré first succeeded in crystallizing and clarifying the syrup. Steam motive power was first introduced on the plantations in 1822. The average product of the ten seasons 1894-1904 was 299,745 tons. A state sugar experiment station is maintained at Audubon Park in New Orleans, its work embracing the development of seedlings, the improvement of cane varieties, the study of fungus diseases of the cane, the improvement of mill methods and the reconciliation of such methods (for example, the use of sulphur as a bleaching and clarifying agent) with the requirements of “pure food” laws. Good work has also been done by the Audubon sugar school of the state university, founded “for the highest scientific training in the growing of sugar cane and in the technology of sugar manufacture.”

Tobacco might be grown profitably over a large part of the state, but in reality very little is grown. The strong, black perique of the delta—cultivated very generally in the lower alluvial region before the Civil War, but now almost exclusively in St James parish—is a famous leaf, grown since early colonial times. Bright or yellow plug and smoking leaf are grown on the pine uplands and pine “flats,” and a small amount of cigar tobacco on the flats, prairies and “bluffs.” The total value of the tobacco crop of 35,000 ℔ in 1907 was only $10,000, an amount exceeded by each of the other 24 tobacco-growing states, and the crop was about one-twentieth of 1% of the product of the whole United States.

Rice farming, which had its beginning immediately after the Civil War and first became prominent in the ’seventies, has developed enormously since 1880. From 1879 to 1899 the product increased twenty-five fold. Formerly the grain was raised by preference in the river bottoms, which still yield, almost invariably, the earliest rice of the season and perhaps the finest. The “buckshot clays” of the backlands, which are so stiff that they can scarcely be ploughed until flooded and softened, and are remarkably retentive of moisture, are ideal rice soil; but none of the alluvial lands has an underlying hardpan, and they cannot as a rule be drained sufficiently to make the use of heavy harvesting machinery possible. In 1880 the prairies of the S.W. were opened to settlement by the railway. These prairies are traversed by ridges, which facilitate irrigation, and are underlaid by an impervious subsoil, which facilitates both effective storage and drainage. Thus the use of machinery became possible, and this revolutionized the entire industry. The year 1884 may be taken as the initial date of the new period, and the grain is now harvested exactly as is wheat in the west-central states. Previously the grain had ordinarily been cut with sickles and harvested by hand. The farms were also small, usually from 5 to 10 acres. They are now very much larger. All the prairies district—the centre of which is Crowley—is becoming one great rice field. Some rice also is grown on the lowlands of the Mississippi valley, notably in Plaquemines, Jefferson and Lafourche parishes. In the decade 1881-1890 Louisiana produced about half of the total yield of the country, and from 1891 to 1900 about five-sevenths. In 1904 and 1906 the Louisiana crop, about one-half of the total yield of the country, was larger than that of any other state; but in 1905 and in 1907 (6,192,955 ℔ and 7,378,000 ℔ respectively) the Louisiana crop was second in size to that of Texas. Carolina and Honduras rices were practically the only varieties until after 1896. Since that time select Japanese species, chosen for superior milling qualities, have been widely introduced, as the market prejudice in favour of head rice made the large percentage of broken rice a heavy handicap to the farmers. Hundreds of varieties have been tested by the state and federal agricultural experiment stations. A strong tendency to run to red rice (hardier, but not so marketable) has been a second great difficulty to overcome.

Irrigation is almost entirely confined to rice farms. In the prairie region there is abundant water at depths of 100 to 400 ft. beneath the surface, but this was little used for irrigation for the first few years of the development of this field, when water was pumped from the streams and canals. In 1902 nearly one-eighth of the acreage irrigated was by systems supplied from wells. The irrigated rice area increased 92.9% from 1899 to 1902, and the construction cost of irrigation works ($4,747,359 in 1902; $12.25 per irrigated acre) 87.7% in the same years. This increase was almost wholly in the prairie parishes. Of the total irrigated area for rice of 387,580 acres in 1902, 310,670 acres were in the parishes of Calcasieu, Acadia and Vermilion. In the Mississippi valley water is taken from the river by flumes in the levees or by siphons. The danger of floods and the difficulty of drainage make the extension of the practice unprofitable, and the opening of the prairies has made it unnecessary.

Many of the fruits of warm-temperate and semi-tropical lands, whether native or exotic, including oranges, olives, figs, grape-fruit, kumquats and pomegranates are cultivated. Oranges are grown especially on the coast. There are many fine groves on the Mississippi below New Orleans. The fig is a common door-yard tree as in other Gulf and South Atlantic states, and is never killed down by frost. Louisiana produced in 1899 only a fifth as great a value in sub-tropic fruits as Arizona and Texas combined. Orchard fruits are fairly varied, but, compared with other states, unimportant; and the production of small fruits is comparatively small, the largest crop being strawberries. Oranges and pears are seriously damaged by insect and fungus pests. The total value of fruit products in 1899 was $412,933. Among nuts the native pecan is exceptionally abundant, the product (637,470 ℔ in 1899) being much greater than that of any other state save Texas.

The total value of cereal products in 1899 was $14,491,796, including Indian corn valued at $10,327,723 and rice valued at $4,044,489; in 1907 it was more than $27,300,000, including Indian corn valued at $19,600,000, rice valued at $7,378,000 and oats valued at $223,000. Indian corn is grown only for home use. Dairying interests are not largely developed, and in Texas and the adjoining states the “Texas fever” and “charbon” have done great damage to cattle. Forage crops are little grown, though soil conditions are favourable. Cowpeas are a common fertilizer. Garden trucking is very slightly developed, but has been successful where it has been tried. The state maintains a crop pest commission, the duties of which include the inspection of all nursery stock sold in the state.

Manufactures.—The state’s manufacturing interests have during the last few decades grown greatly in importance. From 1890 to 1900 the capital invested, the cost of materials used and the value of output (in 1900, $121,181,683) increased respectively 225.4, 147.3 and 109.6%. The value of the factory products in 1900 was $111,397,919; in 1905 it was $186,379,592. Slightly above one-half of the product of 1900 was from New Orleans, and in 1905 about 45.4%. A constitutional amendment of 1902 exempted from parochial and municipal taxes between 1900 and 1910 practically all factories and mines in the state, employing at least five hands. Manufacturing industries are for the most part closely related to the products of the soil, about two-thirds of the value of all manufactures in 1900 and in 1905 being represented by sugar and molasses refining, lumber and timber products, cotton-seed oil and cake, and rice cleaned and polished.

Rice is milled at New Orleans, Crowley, Abbeville, Gayden, Jennings and Lake Charles. Ramie fibre and jute are available for coarse cloth; cotton weaving is almost non-existent. The lumber industry is centred chiefly in Calcasieu parish. Lake Charles, Westlake, Bogalusa, Bon Ami, Carson, Fisher, Fullerton, Leesville, Oakdale and Pickering were the leading sawmill towns of the state in 1908. Of the rarer woods particular mention may be made of curly pine, yielding a wood of beautiful figure and polish; magnolia, hard, close-grained, of fine polish and of great lasting qualities; and cypress, light, strong, easily worked and never-rotting. The timber cut of 1900 was officially stated as 1,214,387 M. ft. B.M., of which two-thirds were of yellow pine and most of the remainder of cypress. In some localities, especially in the “Florida parishes,” small quantities of rosin and turpentine are taken from the long-leaf pine, but this industry was unimportant in Louisiana before 1908. Sawdust, slabs, stumps and large quantities of logs are wasted. Other manufactures with a product value in 1905 of between $4,000,000 and $1,000,000 were: bags (not paper); foundry and machine-shop products; planing-mill products; railway cars, construction and repairs; malt liquors; men’s clothing; cooperage; food preparations; roasted and ground coffee and spice; fertilizers; cigars and cigarettes; cotton goods; and manufactured ice.

Communications.—The length of railway in the state was 1740 m. in 1890 and 4943.55 m. at the end of 1908. By the state constitution of 1898 and by amendments of 1902 and 1904 tax exemptions for ten years were granted to newly-built railroads completed before 1909. The principal roads are the Missouri Pacific (St Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern, New Orleans & North-western and St Louis, Watkins & Gulf), the Southern Pacific (Morgan’s Louisiana & Texas Railroad & Steamship Co. and the Louisiana Western), the Texas & Pacific, the Kansas City Southern, the Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific, the Louisiana Railway & Navigation Co., the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley, the Illinois Central, and the Louisiana & Arkansas. The Illinois Central, the first railway giving Louisiana connexion with the north, and of immense importance in the trade of New Orleans, has only about 100 m. of double track in the state. The problem of inland waterways has always been a most important one in northern, eastern and southern Louisiana, where there are systems of improved bayous, lakes and canals which, with the levees, make this region something like Holland, on a greater scale. Many bayous are convertible by improvement into excellent drainage and irrigation canals. The canal system is especially well developed in the parishes of the Mississippi delta, where, at the close of 1907, there were about 50 m. of these waterways of decided commercial importance. They serve the trade of Lake Pontchartrain and the Florida parishes, the lumber, coal, fish, oyster and truck trade of New Orleans, and to some extent are the highway of a miscellaneous coasting trade. The most important canal is probably the new Atchafalaya Bay canal (14 ft. deep), opened in 1907, connecting the Atchafalaya river and Morgan City with the Gulf of Mexico. In 1907 active preliminary work was begun on the Louisiana section of a great interstate inland waterway projected by the national government between the Mississippi and Rio Grande rivers, almost parallel to the Gulf Coast and running through the rice and truck-farm districts from the Teche to the Mermenton river (92 m.). The competition of the water lines is felt by all the railways, and the importance of water transportation is rapidly increasing. A state railroad commission, organized in 1899, has power to regulate railway, steamer, sleeping-car, express, telephone and telegraph rates within the state. Foreign commerce is almost wholly centred at New Orleans.

Population.—The population of the state increased in the ten decades from 1810 to 1910 successively by 100.4, 40.6, 63.4, 46.9, 36.7, 2.7, 29.3, 19.0, 23.5 and 19.9%. In 1910 it was 1,656,388 (36.5 per sq. m.). In 1900 47.1% was of negro blood, as compared with 51.5 in 1890. In 1910 there were nine cities with more than 5000 inhabitants each: New Orleans (339, 075); Shreveport (28,015); Baton Rouge (14,897), the capital; Lake Charles (11,449); Alexandria (11,213); Monroe (10,209); New Iberia (7449); Morgan (5477); Crowley (5099). The urban element is larger than in any other southern state, owing to the large population of New Orleans. The Acadians (see § History below) to-day are settled mainly in St Mary, Acadia and Vermilion parishes; lesser numbers are in Avoyelles and St Landry; and some are scattered in various other parishes. The parishes of St Mary, Iberia, Vermilion, St Martin and Lafayette are known as the Attakapas country from an Indian name. A colony of Germans sent over by John Law to the Arkansas removed to the Mississippi above New Orleans, and gave to its bank the name of the “German Coast,” by which it is still known. In recent years there has been an immigration of Italians into Louisiana, which seems likely to prove of great social and economic importance. The industrial activity of the state has required more labour than has been available. The negroes have moved more and more from the country to the towns, where they easily secure work at good wages. Owing to the inadequate supply of labour two important immigration leagues of business men were formed in 1904 and 1905, and in 1907 the state government began officially to attempt to secure desirable foreign immigration, sending agents abroad to foster it. Roman Catholics greatly predominate among religious denominations, having in 1906 477,774 members out of a total of 778,901 for all denominations; in the same year there were 185,554 Baptists, 79,464 Methodists, 9070 Protestant Episcopalians and 8350 Presbyterians.

Administration.—Since the admission of the state to the Union in 1812 there have been eight state constitutions (not counting that of 1861) admirably illustrating—and not less the Territorial government preceding them—the development of American democracy and the problems connected with the negroes. Under the Territorial government the legislative officers were not at first elective. The “parishes” date from 1807; they were based on an earlier Spanish division for religious purposes—whence the names of saints in parish nomenclature. The constitution of 1812 allowed the General Assembly to name the governor from the two candidates receiving the highest number of votes; gave the governor large powers of appointment, even of local functionaries; and required a property qualification for various offices, and even for voters. The constitution of 1845 made the popular suffrage final in the choice of the governor, abolished property qualifications, and began to pare executive powers for the benefit of the General Assembly or the people. From it dates also the constitutional recognition of the public schools. In 1852 even the judges of the supreme court were placed among the officers chosen by popular vote. The constitutions of 1864 and 1868 were of importance primarily as bearing on negro status and national politics. That of 1879 showed a profound distrust of legislative action, bred of reconstruction experiences. Nearly all special legislation was forbidden. The last constitution (1898, with 26 amendments 1898-1906), unlike all others after that of 1812, was not submitted to the people for ratification.

Under this constitution sessions of the General Assembly are biennial (meeting the second Monday in May in even-numbered years) and are limited to sixty days. The number of senators is fixed by the constitution at 39; the number of representatives is to be not more than 116 or less than 98. Any elector is eligible for election as a representative if he has been a citizen of the state for five years and a resident of the district or parish from which he is elected for two years immediately preceding the election; a change of residence from the district or parish from which he was elected vacates the seat of a representative or senator. A senator must be at least 25 years of age. Members of the legislature are elected for four years. Revenue or appropriation bills originate in the House of Representatives, but may be amended by the Senate. Contingent appropriations are forbidden, and the constitution contains a long list of subjects on which special laws may not be passed. The chief executive officers have four-year terms, neither the governor nor the treasurer being eligible for immediate re-election. The governor must be at least 30 years old and must have been a citizen of the United States and a resident of the state for 10 years next preceding his election. Within five days after the passage of any bill by the General Assembly he may veto this measure, which then becomes a law only if passed by a two-thirds vote of all members elected to each house of the General Assembly. The lieutenant governor (and then the secretary of state) succeeds to the office of governor if the governor is removed, dies or leaves the state. The five judges of the supreme court of the state are elected by the people for a term of twelve years. The supreme court is almost without exception a court of appeal with jurisdiction in cases involving at least $2000, in cases of divorce, in suits regarding adoption, legitimacy and custody of children and as regards the legality and constitutionality of taxes, fines, &c. The supreme court appoints courts of appeal to judge cases involving less than $2000. The constitution prohibits lotteries and the sale of lottery tickets.

The suffrage clauses are of particular interest, as they accomplish the practical disfranchisement of the negroes. The constitution requires that a voter must (in addition to other qualifications) either be able to show conclusively ability to read and write, or be the owner of property within the state assessed at not less than $300, on which, if personalty, all taxes are paid. But it excepts from these requirements—thus letting down the bars for illiterate whites excluded with negroes by the foregoing clauses—persons who were entitled to vote in some state on or before the 1st of January 1867 (i.e. before the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution); also the sons or grandsons of such voters, not under 21 years of age, on the 12th of May 1898; and males of foreign birth who have resided in the state for five years next preceding the date of application for registration and who were naturalized prior to 1898. The constitution provides that no person less than 60 years of age shall be permitted to vote unless he has paid an annual poll-tax of one dollar for the two years next preceding the year in which he offers to vote. Convicts not pardoned with an explicit restoration of suffrage privileges are disfranchised—a rare clause in the United States. Suffrage was by this constitution first extended to women tax-payers in questions “submitted to the tax-payers, as such.” The creation of a railroad commission was ordered and the preparation of a code of criminal law.

The Louisiana Board of Levee Commissioners was organized in 1865. The state board of health was the first one effectively organized (1855) in the United States. It encountered many difficulties, and until the definite proof of the stegomyia hypothesis of yellow-fever inoculation made by the United States army surgeons in Cuba in 1900, the greatest problem seemed insoluble. Since that time conditions of health in New Orleans have been revolutionized (in 1907 state control of maritime quarantine on the Mississippi was supplanted by that of the national government), and smaller cities and towns have been stimulated to take action by her example. Sanitary institutes are held by the state board at various towns each year for the instruction of the public. Boards of appraisers and equalization oversee the administration of the tax system; the cost of collection, owing to the fee system for payment of collectors, was higher than in any other state of the Union until 1907, when the fees were greatly reduced. The state assessment in 1901 totalled $301,215,222 and in 1907 was $508,000,000. Schools and levees absorb about half of all revenues, leaving half for the payment of interest on the state debt (bonded debt on 1st of April 1908, $11,108,300) and for expenses of government. A general primary election law for the selection, by the voters, of candidates for state office came into effect in 1906.

Law.—Louisiana has been peculiar among the states of the Union in the history of the development of its legal system. In Louisiana alone (as the state is known to-day), out of all the territory acquired from France as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, was the civil law so established under French and Spanish rule that it persisted under American dominion. In all the other states formed from the Purchase, the civil law, never existent practically, was early expressly abrogated, and the common law of England established in its place. After O’Reilly established his power in 1769 (see History, below), the Spanish law was supreme. All the old codes of the Peninsula, as well as the laws of the Indies and special royal decrees and schedules, were in force in the colony. The United States left the task of altering the laws to the people, as far as there was no conflict between them and the Constitution of the United States and fundamental American legal customs. Copies of the Spanish codes were very rare, and some of them could not be had in the colonies. Discussions of the Roman Institute and Pandects were common in the deliberations of the courts. Great confusion prevailed in the first years of American dominion owing to the diversities of languages and the grafting of such Anglo-Saxon institutions as the jury upon the older system. A provisional code of judicial procedure, prepared by Edward Livingston, was in effect in 1805 to 1825. The earliest digest, completed in 1808, was mainly a compilation of Spanish laws. The project of the Code Napoléon, however—the code itself not being available in Louisiana, though promulgated in France in 1804—was used by the compilers in the arrangement and substance of their work; and the French traditions of the colony, thus illustrated, were naturally introduced more and more into the organic commentaries and developments that grew up around the Code Napoléon. This evolution was little marked, so similar in large parts were the systems of France and Spain (although in other parts, due to the Gothic element in the Spanish, they were very different)—a similarity which explains the facility with which O’Reilly and his successors introduced the Spanish laws after 1769. The Louisiana code of 1808 was not, however, exhaustive; and the courts continued to go back to the old Spanish sources whenever the digest was inconclusive. Thus so late as 1819, when the legislature ordered the compilation of such parts of King Alfonso’s Siete Partidas (the most common authority in the colony) as were considered in force, this compilation filled a considerable volume. In 1821 the legislature authorized Livingston to prepare the “Livingston Code” of criminal law and procedure, completed in 1824 (in French and English) and published in 1833, but never adopted by the state. In 1825 legislative sanction was given to the greater part of a civil code prepared by a commission (including Livingston) appointed in 1821, and the French element became steadily more important. In its present form the law shows plainly the Latin and English elements. English law has largely moulded, for example, criminal and commercial law and the law of evidence; the development of the law of corporations, damages, prohibitions and such extraordinary remedies as the mandamus has been very similar to that in other states; while in the fusion of law and equity, and the law of successions, family relations, &c., the civil law of Spain and France has been unaffected.

Education.—Schooling was very scant before the creation of the public schools in 1854. Very little was done for education in the French and Spanish period, although the Spanish governors made commendable efforts in this regard; the first American Territorial legislature began the incorporation of feeble “colleges” and “academies.” To some of these the state gave financial aid ($1,613,898) before 1845. The public schools were flourishing at the outbreak of the Civil War. War and reconstruction threw upon them the new burden of the black children. The constitution of 1879 was illiberal in this respect, but a healthier public opinion soon prevailed. The money given by the state to the public schools is distributed among the parishes according to their school population, and the constitution of 1898 set a generous minimum to such aid. An annual poll-tax is also collected for the schools from every adult male. Local taxes, besides, are imposed, and these are becoming heavier. The parishes retain primary control of the schools. Institutes, summer schools and rural libraries have been introduced. The salaries of white teachers advanced from a monthly average of $38.87 in 1903 to $61.84 in 1906. The average attendance of enrolled black and white pupils is practically identical, but the enrolment of whites (about 52% in 1902) is somewhat higher and that of the blacks about a third lower than their ratio in the population. The school term for white children is much longer than for negroes, and white teachers are paid much better salaries—in 1906 the average monthly salary of a negro teacher was $29.15. The total enrolment is very low. But progress is now being made very rapidly in the improvement of the educational system. Higher schools include: the State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College (1860) at Baton Rouge (q.v.); Tulane University of Louisiana (1864) in New Orleans; Jefferson College (1864; Roman Catholic) at Convent; the College of the Immaculate Conception (1847; Roman Catholic) in New Orleans; St Charles College (1835; Roman Catholic) at Grand Couteau; St Joseph’s College (1849; Roman Catholic) at Baton Rouge; the following colleges for women—Silliman Collegiate Institute (1852; Presbyterian) at Clinton, Mansfield Female College (1854; Methodist Episcopal, South) at Mansfield, the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College for women (a part of Tulane University) in New Orleans and the Louisiana Female College (1856; Baptist) at Keatchie; the State Normal School of Louisiana (1884) at Natchitoches and the New Orleans Normal and Training School; the South-western Louisiana Industrial Institute at Lafayette; the Louisiana Industrial Institute at Ruston; and, among schools for negroes, the Peabody State Normal and Industrial School at Alexandria and New Orleans University (1873; Methodist Episcopal), Luther College (Evangelical Lutheran), Leland University (1870; Baptist), Straight University (Congregational) and Southern University (1883; aided by the state), all in New Orleans.