ABSTRACT
Louis XV, the physical embodiment of French cultural and political authority for most of the eighteenth century, was called many names, not all of them complimentary, during his long and not entirely illustrious reign. The list of epithets has expanded ever since but Louis has never, as far as I know, been described as a fluvial geomorphologist, even though a very slender case can be made for considering France’s penultimate pre-Revolutionary monarch in precisely these terms. Nestling among the 12,300 printed laws, edicts, and ordinances misleadingly attributed to the author name “Louis XV” in the electronic catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is a printed volume whose title sets it apart from this mountain of official documentation. The book in question turns out to be, on closer inspection, a short geographical treatise entitled Cours des Principaux Fleuves et Rivières de l’Europe. This seems, on the face of it, to have been Louis’s one and only proper publication.
