LUIGI XVIII of Bourbon, king of FRANCE. — Born at Versailles on 17 Nov. 1755, died in Paris on 16 Sept. 1824. Luigi Stanislao Saverio, Count of Provence, son of the Dauphin Luigi (son of Luigi XV) and of Maria Giuseppina of Saxony, and therefore the younger brother of Luigi XVI, in his youth devoted himself to literary studies, though participating in political life as an opponent of his sister-in-law Maria Antonietta.
With the outbreak of the Revolution, he fled to Koblenz and there—as later at Verona, Mitau, and in England—he was recognized as the leader of the royalist émigrés. Proclaiming himself regent upon the death of his brother the King, and thus sovereign in 1795, as soon as he learned of the death of his nephew Luigi XVII in the Temple prison, he unsuccessfully negotiated with Napoleon for the restoration of the monarchy; the assassination of the Duke of Enghien was the bloody response of the First Consul. After defeating the Emperor at Leipzig and forcing his abdication, L. returned to Paris in May 1814 and promulgated a constitutional charter, at the same time personally directing the political action of Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna so that France might be restored to the frontiers of 1789, including, despite the protests and efforts of Cardinal Consalvi, the former papal territories of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin.
The “Hundred Days” forced him into exile once more, from which he returned after Waterloo; but this time the restoration appeared to be imposed by the allied armies, whereas the previous year he had been welcomed to Paris with genuine enthusiasm. Even so, L. did not repeal the Constitution of 1814, sought to moderate the excesses of the “White Terror,” and dissolved, as too reactionary, the Chamber elected in 1815, the so-called “Chamber found impossible.” Assisted excellently by the Duke of Richelieu and by Decazes, he governed with moderation, deaf to the advice of his brother the Count of Artois, leader of the “Ultras”; but after the assassination of the presumptive heir, the Duke of Berry (1820), he was obliged to call Villèle to power with an authoritarian program. In 1822 he authorized his nephew the Duke of Angoulême to lead the French expedition across the Pyrenees against the Spanish liberals, as decreed by the Holy Alliance at the Congress of Verona. By nature good-humoredly skeptical and tinged with Voltaireanism, his ecclesiastical policy was not free from Gallican tendencies, albeit moderate; the prevalence of these tendencies in the Chamber also caused the negotiations agreed in 1816 and 1817 to fail, resulting simply and solely in a return not to the Concordat of 1516, as L. desired, but to the Napoleonic one, as Pius VII wished.
He was succeeded—last of the direct line of the Bourbons—by his brother Carlo X, since he had no male issue by Maria Luisa of Savoy, whom he had married in 1771. — See pl. CXV.