LUIGI XVIII of Borbone, king of FRANCIA. — B. at Versailles on 17 November 1755, d. in Parigi on 16 September 1824. Luigi Stanislao Saverio, count of Provenza, son of the dauphin Luigi (son of Luigi XV) and of Maria Giuseppina of Sassonia, and therefore younger brother of Luigi XVI, devoted himself in his youth to literary studies, while also taking part in political life as an opponent of his sister-in-law Maria Antonietta.
When the Revolution broke out, he took refuge in Coblenza and there—as later in Verona, Mittau, and England—was the recognized leader of the royalist émigrés. Having proclaimed himself regent upon the death of his brother the King, and then sovereign in 1795, as soon as he received news of the death of his nephew Luigi XVII in the Temple prison, he unsuccessfully negotiated with Napoleon, hoping that he would restore the monarchy: the assassination of the duke of Enghien was the bloody response of the First Consul. After the Emperor was defeated at Lipsia and forced to abdicate, L. returned to Parigi in May 1814 and promulgated a constitutional charter, while at the same time personally directing Talleyrand’s political action at the Congress of Vienna so that France might be restored to the frontiers of 1789, with the addition—despite the protests and efforts of card. Consalvi—of the former Papal territories of Avignone and the contado Venassino.
The “Hundred Days” forced him once again into exile, from which he returned after Waterloo; but this time the restoration appeared to have been imposed by the allied armies, whereas the previous year he had been received in Parigi with sincere enthusiasm. Nevertheless, L. did not abrogate the Constitution of ’14, sought to moderate the excesses of the “White Terror,” and dissolved, because it was too reactionary, the Chamber that had emerged from the elections of 1815, the so-called “Unobtainable Chamber.” Ably assisted by the duke of Richelieu and Décazes, he governed moderately, deaf to the counsel of his brother, the count d’Artois, leader of the “ultras”; but after the assassination of the heir presumptive, the duke of Berry (1820), he was forced to call Villèle to the government, with an authoritarian programme. In 1822 he authorized his nephew, the duke of Angoulême, to lead the French expedition across the Pyrenees against the Spanish liberals, as decided by the Holy Alliance at the Congress of Verona. Good-naturedly skeptical by nature and touched with Voltairianism, his ecclesiastical policy was not free of Gallican tendencies, albeit moderate ones; the predominance of these tendencies, including in the Chamber, caused the concordat negotiations of 1816 and ’17 to fail, with the result being a simple return not to the Concordat of 1516, as L. desired, but to the Napoleonic one, as Pius VII desired.
He was succeeded—the last of the direct branch of the Borbone—by his brother Carlo X, since he had had no male offspring by Maria Luisa of Savoia, whom he married in 1771. — Vedi tav. CXV.