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LOUIS XV. (FRANCE) LOUIS XVI. (FRANCE) 661 of the Mississippi, and the islands of Grenada, Dominica, and Tobago in the "West Indies. She came out of the contest humiliated and disgraced, with her finances exhausted and her foreign commerce nearly destroyed. During the war an attempt by a fanatic named Da- miens to assassinate the king revived for a time the popularity of Louis ; but the unfortunate issue of the contest and the ensuing distress tended much to alienate the people from the crown. Internally the kingdom was greatly disturbed by contests between the ecclesiasti- cal and civil authorities, growing out of at- tempts on the part of the clergy to enforce the papal bull Unigenitut, which were resisted by the parliaments. The king was at length induced to banish the Jesuits, whose quarrel with the Jansenists had fomented these dis- sensions. The parliament of Provence hav- ing issued a decree depriving the pope of Avi- gnon and the county of Venaissin, which had long belonged to the holy see, Louis seized those territories in 1768. In the same year Genoa ceded Corsica to France, though the French troops did not succeed in subduing the Island till the following year. The rest of this reign was occupied by struggles between the king and the parliaments, in which the royal authority finally triumphed. Louis, however, did not long enjoy his triumph. A young girl with whom he had a transient amour communicated to him the smallpox, which, together with a shameful malady from which he was already suffering, caused his death in a few days. His personal vices and his misgovernment had prepared the way for the overthrow of the monarchy, which carried with it to destruction his successor. Louis XV. was himself fully aware of the perilous state of the kingdom, and his only anxiety in his latter years was that the tottering fabric should last as long as he did. His lusts and extravagances and his needless and costly wars had exhausted the treasury and increased' the burden of debt and taxation ; and as all the taxes and imposts pressed entirely upon the citizens and peasants, while the wealthy no- bles and the clergy were exempt, the middle classes were heavily burdened, especially as the government did not collect the revenues itself, but sold them to the extortionate and unscrupulous farmers general. In the midst, however, of the national distress and the gen- eral confusion of affairs, a great intellectual movement was apparent in France during this reign, and the third estate, as the middle classes were called, gradually acquired by its wealth and intelligence a considerable degree of social and political influence. A spirit of boldness, mingled with levity in thought and intellectual speculation, was strikingly mani- fested in conversation and literature. Every- thing was doubted, everything attacked, and the shameless corruption which pervaded both church and state provoked a criticism whose searching inquiry spared neither religion nor social order nor the political organization of the country. The skeptical tendency of the times manifested itself in great writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, Oon- dillac, and Helvetius, and in works like the great Dictionnaire encyclopedique, which pro- duced an immense agitation in the public mind. The excesses of the court and of the clergy, exposed and satirized by the wits and authors, debased the monarchy and the church in the eyes of the people, and brought about an intellectual revolution, which was the pre- cursor and the cause of the political revolution which took place in the succeeding reign. LOUIS XVI., king of France, grandson and successor of the preceding, born in Versailles, Aug. 23, 1754, guillotined in Paris, Jan. 21, 1793. He was the third son of the dauphin Louis and of Maria Josepha, daughter of Fred- erick Augustus, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, and became heir presumptive on the death of his father in December, 1765. He had a vigorous physical constitution, and his features were not without dignity ; but he was awkward, reserved, taciturn, and without de- cision of character, and in public his diffidence prevented him from doing justice to himself. He was industrious, quick of comprehension, and had an extraordinary memory ; but was in- tentionally kept from acquaintance with affairs of state, though while dauphin he read much and wrote somewhat on historical matters, and was familiar with geographical and chrono- logical details. He had a fondness for me- chanical pursuits, learned the trade of a lock- smith, and took much interest in the mechani- cal part of printing. He printed himself, in 1766, 35 copies of Maximes morales et poli- tiques tirees de Telemaque, which he had col- lected from F6nelon's romance ; and he made also a translation of some portions of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which was published un- der the name of Le Clerc de Sept-Chenes, who was his reader. On May 16, 1770, he was married to Marie Antoinette, archduchess of Austria ; and on May 10, 1774, he became king by the death of his grandfather Louis XV. He appointed the aged count de Maure- pas his minister of state, and Turgot minister of finance. Sartine, Malesherbes, and the counts of Vergennes and Saint-Germain were also made members of the cabinet. Various reforms were introduced, chiefly through the exertions of Turgot, and the most offensive feudal ser- vices and imposts were abolished in spite of a strong opposition on the part of the nobility. The people were conciliated by the recall of the parliaments, Nov. 12, 1774. The king set the example of economy and retrenchment by reducing his household expenses and the num- ber of his guards. An edict declaring the in- ternal trade in grain free, and the occurrence of a partial famine at the same time, produced serious riots, in the suppression of which sev- eral hundreds were killed by the military. The king on this occasion, though at first irreso-