ABSTRACT
In France no leader worthy of Pitt’s steel had hitherto appeared. Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour and the Abbe de Bernis were contemptible enemies. Endowed by nature with ability and political sagacity, Louis XV allowed his talents to rust in sloth and luxury, relieved only by rare flashes of insight never followed up. Tenacious of the personal and irresponsible power bequeathed to him by his great-grandfather, he had not the resolution to use that power for a consistent national policy, but frittered it away in secret intrigues against his own ministers and the projects which he had himself sanctioned. No flattery was too gross for his inordinate vanity, no pleasure of the sense too scandalous for his jaded appetite. Wearied of every sensation but that of his own existence, to which he clung with a pusillanimous terror of the hereafter, he showed during his long life no trace of a single virtue, or of one amiable characteristic. Faithless to man and woman, he would dismiss with a curt word of displeasure and without thought of faithful service to himself or the nation the minister who would not pander to his whims, or the mistress who had ceased to satisfy his passing lust or seemed to be endangering his prospect of heaven. In religion he was a bigot and believed that, as the anointed of the Lord, God would not permit him to be damned as long as he protected and supported the Catholic faith. Nothing indeed reconciled him so much to the Austrian alliance as the conviction that it would enable him to crush the Protestant power of Prussia. Of this vilest of the Bourbons Pope Benedict XIV had said some years earlier: ‘No better proof of the existence of a Providence is needed than the sight of France’s prosperity under Louis XV.’
