alternatehistory.com

The following was first purposed by me in a thread I started here:
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=92051

What follows below is my rough draft of a TL to that effect; questions, comments, advice and criticism are all welcomed, as is general discussion.

Enjoy :)

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Prologue: 1747-1767
In early 1747, Louis-Ferdinand (b. 1729), dauphin of France and only son of Louis XV was married to the princess Maria Josepha of Saxony. The marriage was the dauphin’s second, his previous wife, the Spanish infanta María Teresa having died in childbirth the year before (and her young daughter and namesake, Marie-Thérèse, only surviving her by two years).
The dauphin and his wife would have eight children:
  • Marie-Zéphyrine, who died aged only five years (b. 1750)
  • Louis-Joseph-Xavier, duc de Bourgogne (b. 1751)
  • Xavier-Marie-Joseph, duc d’Aquitaine, who died before his first birthday (b. 1753)
  • Louis-Auguste, duc de Berry, who died of consumption at the age of six (b. 1754)
  • Louis-Stanislas, comte de Provence (b. 1755)
  • Charles, comte d’Artois (b. 1757)
  • Marie-Clotilde (b. 1759)
  • Élisabeth (b. 1764)
Tragically, the dauphin did not survive his father and died at the palace of Fontainebleau of consumption, aged only 36. His wife, devastated by the death of her husband, soon sank into a deep depression; her health declined and within two years she had followed the dauphin to the grave, having also contracted tuberculosis…



Early Years: 1774-1776
King Louis XV of France dies at Versailles in early May, having contracted smallpox several weeks before; the king is sixty-four years old and has reigned for nearly six decades. The king is succeeded by his grandson, the dauphin Louis-Joseph-Xavier, who accedes to the throne as King Louis XVI of France and Navarre.

Louis, the man:
Aged only twenty-three, Louis XVI is a young monarch, though he is nevertheless considered very worthy of his crown.
Well educated in everything from statecraft to philosophy, King Louis is known to have reformist sympathies and to be highly influenced by the Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, in personality, the king is known to be very similar to his great-great-great-grandfather, Louis XIV, having an iron will, a firm belief in the divine right of kings and an overwhelming desire to preserve his absolutism at all costs (and against all who would dare to oppose it).
The king is, however, different from his ancestor in the respect that he also believes that it is a sovereign’s duty to rule wisely and benevolently, preferably influenced by the Enlightenment and its philosophies.
While pious enough, Louis is not however a dévot by any means, and it is known that some of his opinions and views even border on Gallicism.
Despite all of this, the king is also a Bourbon through and through, and is known to share the strong sexual appetite that many of his forebears have possessed; indeed, his desires are almost comparable to those of his grandfather Louis XV (whom he seeks to emulate in all things and has always worshiped and seen as a sort of quasi-paternal figure in his life, ever since the death of his father the dauphin). There is one very important difference between the two kings however: unlike his grandfather, Louis XVI is a borderline misogynist, who believes that female intervention in politics is akin to disaster. He will, thus, not allow any of his mistresses to cross from the bedroom over to the council table.
This attitude, indeed, extends to the king’s wife, Maria Carolina of Austria (b. 1752), with whom there is little love lost.
Louis and Maria Carolina (called “Marie-Caroline” in France) have been married for over six years, ever since he was sixteen and she fifteen. The marriage was arranged to cement the new alliance between Austria and France and was, at the time, the triumph of the duc de Choiseul, the king’s secretary of state for foreign affairs. But much has changed since then.
Choiseul’s disastrous fiscal policy, his quarreling with King Louis XV’s powerful mistress Madame du Barry, and most of all, his support for war with Britain have led to his downfall and he is currently living in exile at his country chateau. Further, Franco-Austrian relations have been souring lately to a certain degree due to Choiseul’s downfall and the decidedly anti-Austrian attitude of the current ministry (though nothing has yet manifest in this direction).
In response, the new queen, Marie-Caroline, is known to be allying herself more closely to the pro-Austrian party at court, and she is known to meddle in politics as much as she can to secure favorable relations with her homeland. This has increased tensions between the king and his wife, as her blatant favoritism of the Austrian party has led to a strained marriage and an increase in anti-Austrian feelings in the new king as a reaction to his wife’s intrigues.
Their marital unhappiness notwithstanding, the couple have managed to at least produce several children; indeed, from 1770 to 1779 the queen will bear her husband seven children, of which four will survive to adulthood: the dauphin Louis-François (b. 1770), Marie-Thérèse (b. 1772 and known as “Madame Royale”), Philippe-Charles (b. 1775 and known as “the duc de Normandie”), and Louise-Élisabeth (b. 1779).

Louis, the king:
After the death of King Louis XV, the court immediately moves with all haste to the palace of Fontainebleau, to allow for Versailles to be aired and disinfected. While he is there, the new king immediately sets to work taking over the reins of government.
Refusing to bow to pressure from the court aristocracy, King Louis decides to retain his father’s unpopular chancellor, René de Maupeou, and his equally unpopular controller-general of finances, Joseph-Marie, the abbé Terray. The move is heavily criticized by many belonging to both the old nobility and the newer, civil nobility. Nevertheless, refusing to bow to public pressure, the king decides to continue with his grandfather’s policy of reform.
The reforms of Maupeou over the last few years (and by association his fellow minister Terray) have been very controversial. While Maupeou has managed to stabilize French finances and considerably increase government revenue, his methods have not been popular with the nobility. The chancellor has reformed two very important French taxes, the vingtième and the capitation, and managed to legally force the nobility to pay them (many aristocrats having thus far managed to successfully commit large-scale tax evasion, even though they are only legally exempt from the taille and a few other minor taxes). He has also secured private deals with a majority of the farmer generals (the privatized tax collectors of France) and managed to ensure favorable government terms for the leasing of tax collection.
Maupeou has also come into conflict with the Parlement of Paris, the superior court charged with registering royal laws and edicts (and having the right to issue remonstrations against legislation it deems objectionable). The Parlement, whose members are all of the leading families of the civil nobility, has attempted to resist many of Maupeou’s reforms and this has resulted in conflict with the crown. This conflict was suspended after a lit de justice was held by King Louis XV three years before, in which he forced the body to register a series of decrees which not only implemented Maupeou’s reforms, but also severely limited the body’s right of remonstrance, and legally abolished its right to implement a general strike (on pain of confiscation of goods).
After these reforms were passed through, the Parlement of Paris was suspended by royal edict, and its functions handed over to the royal council pending its reform.
Ignoring the protests of the nobility, the ever-absolutist and strong willed King Louis XVI decides to continue his grandfather’s reforms. Royal assent is thus given to Maupeou’s plans for a general overhaul and reform of the national judicial system.

1774-1775, the year of reform:
Maupeou’s recommendations for reform are as follows:
  • The old Parlement of Paris is permanently suppressed and a new Parlement is established in its place; this new body, however, is made up of salaried state officials (all of which must be legal experts) and not hereditary nobles who have managed to purchase their posts from the crown, as it was before. The body’s powers are much more limited than its predecessors’, as it may only offer remonstrance after it has registered legislation now, and not before as in the past. Like the older body, this new body is also prevented from striking, and is mainly judicial in function, instead of having the quasi-legislative functions of the old Parlement.
  • All other regional Parlements are likewise dissolved and replaced with new bodies modeled on the Parisian one. This decision meets with great protest by the civil nobility, though it manages to renew the faith of older nobility in the crown, as they have long resented the growing power of the “new nobles.”
  • A commission is established, by order of the king, to begin drafting a national law code applicable to all of France; the commission is further charged with drawing up a report on the state of the local judicial systems and drafting a recommendation for a new and uniform system at a local level
  • The privileges of the nobility are to be protected and legally enshrined, to ensure their support, but this is to come at the price of their sacrificing of the long-held exemption from taxation, with this special exemption considered forfeit, save the special fiscal right to be exempt from the taille and gabelle, which is still allowed to them out of royal compromise and in recognition of its historic precedent (though they will be compelled to pay all other taxes henceforth).
The king accepts all of these recommendations and immediately begins implementing them. The result is a predictable backlash of protest and criticism of the new “reform ministry” by the aristocracy. Nevertheless, the king manages to make himself popular with the third estate, especially the peasantry and the bourgeois, as his planned reforms imply that their unfair share of the tax burden will be at least partially alleviated. Interestingly enough, the king also manages to win over the clergy, who support him out of both admiration for his pro-nationalist policies in relation to the Church and also because of his protection of their legal privileges and tax exemptions; this indeed manages to work in his favor, as they grant him a much larger “voluntary tax” at the convocation of the clergy that year than usually allotted to a monarch. To ensure compliance with his orders, the iron willed Louis XVI increases the power of his provincial intendants, personally overseeing their appointments and reports.
Also at this time, the king takes personal command of foreign policy, ensuring that delicate matter of Anglo-French relations is handled well. King Louis knows that war with Britain at this point would be suicidal for French finances, still recovering from the near-bankruptcy imposed by the Seven Years War. Thus, he decides to pursue a careful policy of neutrality. Further, he decides on a decidedly anti-Austrian policy, alienating the shrinking Austrian party at court. Looking west, Louis XVI allies himself more closely with the Spanish, renewing the old family pact between the two branches of the house of Bourbon (as the king knows full well that in the event of a breakdown of Anglo-French relations, he will need all the support he can muster). Interestingly enough, the kingdom of Naples also takes on a more anti-Austrian policy at this time, even though its king, Ferdinando IV, is currently married to the youngest daughter of the Empress Maria Theresia, Maria Antonia (herself a sister of Queen Marie-Caroline). Many foreign observers comment that this is partially due to the apparent infertility of the queen of Naples, who has henceforth been incapable of conceiving a child (and indeed, will only manage to finally do so in late 1777, due to a condition which causes her to have an irregular fertility cycle). In one of his final acts for the year of 1774, Louis dismisses his secretary of state for foreign affairs, the seemingly incompetent duc d’Aiguillon, and replaces him with the ageing (but experienced) cardinal de Bernis, a well known proponent of realpolitik in the sphere of foreign affairs.
Meanwhile, in response to her husband’s current policies, Queen Marie-Caroline begins intriguing with such courtiers as the exiled duc de Choiseul and the anti-British comte de Vergennes. Their aims are simple: to block further reforms at all cost and ensure the restoration of favorable relations with Austria. The group is known as the “new Austrian party” at court; King Louis makes a point of refusing patronage to its members, much to his wife’s ire.
Later in 1775, in early June, Louis XVI is crowned at Reims amidst great pomp and ceremony (and at some expense for newly recovering state coffers). The ceremony is meant to be a show of strength for the king, and indeed, royal absolutism in general.

1776 and its events:
In the early part of 1776, Louis XVI receives the report of the judicial commission. The report, having come just as the establishment new system of Parlements has been completed, is not favorable. The legal system of France is revealed to be completely chaotic, with hundreds of different local systems and a patchwork of provincial judiciaries which are anything but uniform. Upon reading the commission’s report, Louis accepts their recommendations for a new system of courts, in which the former two-tiered system is reformed into a three-tier court system, extending uniformly from Parlements, to présidiaux, to prévôtés, with all other local systems and anomalies being scrapped. Nevertheless, against the advice of Maupeou, the king turns down the purposed legal code, seeing it as too threatening to royal absolutism. Instead, a new commission is appointed to draft a code more favorable to him, while edicts are soon after registered by the regional Parlements which provide for the creation of a new, salaried judicial system, with the new reforms scheduled to be fully functional by the end of 1778.
It is during this time that the king also manages to skillfully avoid conflict with Great Britain by denouncing the recent American declaration of independence from its motherland. Louis sees this view as in line with his own personal beliefs on the nature of royal power anyway, as rebellious subjects are not something that he feels that any god-anointed sovereign should willingly support. While this strains Franco-Spanish relations, as King Carlos III is currently contemplating sending aid the revolutionaries, tensions are easily smoothed out by the skillful cardinal de Bernis (something which the Americans will later suffer for).
[FONT=&quot]Also this year, in a private communication with Catherine II of Russia, Louis XVI assures the empress of his support for the partition of Poland and Russian claims there, essentially abandoning France’s historic alliance with Poland (though by this time he and a majority of educated opinion see any struggle for Poland’s behalf as useless). A similar communication is sent to Prussia, and the king agrees to support Russo-Prussian designs for that kingdom. No such dispatch is sent to Empress Maria Theresia, however, and this snub further manages to contribute to a general decline in good relations between the two realms. The message is clear: Austrian pretensions in Poland will not be supported, though the French will, for the time being, refrain from condemning them outright (mostly due to fiscal concerns).[/FONT]
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