title: Louis XV

text: With the end of the war, Louis decided to take the opportunity to reduce the debt and modernize the system of taxation of the Kingdom. The package of reforms was put together by his finance minister D'Arnouville and was approved by the King and presented in two decrees issued in May 1749. The first measure was an issue of bonds, paying five percent interest, to pay off the 36 million "livres" of debt caused by the cost of the war. This new measure was an immediate success. The second measure was the abolition of the "dixième", a tax of ten percent of revenue, which had been created to finance the war, and its replacement by the "vingtième", a tax of five percent on net revenue, which, unlike the "dixième", taxed the income of all French citizens, including for the first time the income from the property of the clergy and the nobility.


title: Louis XV

text: While the new tax was supported by many, including Voltaire, it met immediate and fierce resistance from both the nobility and the church. When on 5 May 1749 it was presented for formal registration to the "Parlement" of Paris, the assembly composed of high nobles and wealthy Parisians who had purchased seats, it was rejected by a vote of one hundred and six to forty nine; the majority asked for more time to consider the project. The King responded by demanding immediate registration, which the "Parlement" reluctantly granted on 19 May. Resistance to the new measures grew with the church and in the provinces, which had their own "parlements". While the "Parlements" of Burgundy, Provence and Artois bowed to the King's demands, Brittany and Languedoc refused. The royal government closed down the "Parlement" of Brittany, ordered the members of the "Parlement" of Languedoc to return to their estates and parishes, and took direct control of the Provence.


title: Louis XV

text: Within Paris, the battle between the King and "Parlement" was fought over the status of the "Hôpital Général", a semi-religious organization which operated six different hospitals and shelters in Paris, with a staff of some five thousand persons. Many of the hospital staff and officials were Jansenists, while the board of directors of the hospital included many prominent members of the "Parlement of Paris". In 1749, the King decided to purge the hospital of Jansenists and corruption, appointed a new "Supérieure" against the will of the administrators, who resigned, then appointed four temporary administrators, and asked the First President of the Parlement of Paris, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, to implement his decree for the reorganization of the hospital. De Maupeou refused to carry out the decree without the authorization of the Parlement, and the Parlement, without taking any action, went on vacation. On 20 November, when the Parlement returned, the King again summoned de Maupeou for an audience and again demanded action without delay. This time the "Parlement" members met but refused to discuss the Hospital. On 28 January 1752, the King instructed the Grand Council to change the administration of the Hospital without the approval of the "Parlement". Voltaire, describing the affair, wrote, "Never before has such a small affair caused such a great emotion of the spirit." It was the first overt disobedience of the legislature against the King, and one of the first signs that the Parlement believed it, not the King, was the legitimate source of laws in the nation.


title: Louis XV

text: The King's original plans to tax the church also ran into difficulty. A royal decree ordered all the clergy to submit a declaration of their revenue by 17 February 1751, but that day passed without any declarations given. Instead it became known that the King had quietly issued a new decree in December 1750, canceling the tax and relying again, entirely, on the "don gratuit", the voluntary donation by the church of 1,500,000 livres. Under the new decree, instead of a tax, the church would each year collect a comparable sum and donate it freely to the government. His support for the church came both from the teachings of his tutor, Cardinal Fleury, and his gratitude to Archbishop de Beaumont, who defended him against the attacks of the Jansenists and the criticisms of the Parlement, and the Archbishop's tolerance of the King's own personal life and mistresses.


title: Louis XV

text: Despite the French victories, the war dragged on both in the Netherlands and in Italy, where Maréchal Belle-Isle was besieging the Austrians in Genoa. By the summer of 1747 France occupied the entire Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). In March 1748, Louis proposed a conference in Aix-en-Chapelle to bring the war to an end. The process was advanced by the capture of Maastricht by the Maréchal de Saxe on 10 April 1748. Britain, pressed by the threat of a French invasion of the rest of the Netherlands, urged a quick settlement, despite objections from Austria and Sardinina. The Treaty was quickly negotiated and signed by all the parties in September and October 1748. Louis was also eager for a quick settlement, because the naval war with Britain was extremely costly to French maritime trade. The proposition of Louis was surprisingly generous; in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louis offered to return all of the territories he had conquered in the Netherlands to the Austrians, Maastricht to the Dutch, Nice and Savoy to the Sardinians, and Madras in India to the English. The Austrians would give the Duchy of Parma and some other territory to the infant Spanish King, Philippe, while Britain would give France Louisburg and the island of Cape Breton, both in Nova Scotia. France also agreed to expel the Stuart pretender to the English throne from its territory.


title: Louis XV

text: The end of the war had caused celebration in Paris, but the publication of the details of the treaty on 14 January 1749 caused dismay and anger. The Stuart pretender to the British throne refused to leave Paris and was acclaimed by the Parisians. He was finally arrested on 10 December 1748, and transported by force to Switzerland. The French military commanders, including De Saxe, were furious about giving up the Spanish Netherlands. The King's defense of his action was practical: he did not want the Netherlands to be a permanent source of contention between France and other powers; he also felt that France had already reached its proper borders, and it was better to cultivate its prosperity rather than make it larger. His basis was also religious; he had been taught by Fleury that the Seventh Commandment forbade taking the property of others by fraud or violence. Louis often cited a Latin maxim declaring, "if anyone who asks by what means he can best defend a kingdom, the answer is, by never wishing to augment it." He also received support from Voltaire, who wrote, "It seems better, and even more useful for the court of France to think about the happiness of its allies, rather than to be given two or three Flemish towns which would have been the eternal object of jealousy." The King did not have the communication skills to explain his decision to the French public, and did not see any need to do so. The news that the king had restored the Southern Netherlands to Austria was met with disbelief and bitterness. The French obtained so little of what they had fought for that they adopted the expressions "Bête comme la paix" ("Stupid as the peace") and "Travailler pour le roi de Prusse" ("To work for the king of Prussia", i.e. working for nothing).


title: Louis XV

text: Louis had been very much in love with the Queen, and they were inseparable in the early years of his reign, but as his family grew, and the Queen was constantly pregnant or exhausted by her maternities, he began to look elsewhere. He first became attached to one of the ladies of the Queen's court, Louise Julie de Mailly, who was the same age as he and from an ancient noble family. Without courtship or ceremony, he made her his mistress, and raised her to the rank of Duchess. The Duke of Luynes commented on the King's behavior: "The King loves women, and yet there is absolutely no gallantry in his spirit." In 1738, after the Queen lost an unborn child, her doctors forbade her to have relations with the King for a time. The King was offended by her refusal and thereafter never shared her bed. Acknowledging that he was committing adultery, Louis refused thereafter to go to confession and to take the sacrament. The Cardinal de Fleury tried to persuade him to confess and to give up his mistress, but without success.


title: Louis XV

text: In 1738, the King turned his attentions to the sister of Louise Julie, Pauline Félicité de Mailly. Pauline-Félicité became pregnant in 1740, allegedly by the King, and subsequently died during childbirth. (The illegitimate son of the King and Pauline Félicité came to be known as "Demi-Louis" due to his visual resemblance to his father who took care of his financial needs but gave him little attention.) Pauline-Félicité's death caused the King to go into mourning and for a time he turned to religion for consolation. When the King finally recovered his spirits, Louise Julie introduced the King to her youngest sister, Marie Anne de Mailly. The King was immediately attracted to Marie Anne, however she insisted that he expel her older sister from the Court before she would become his mistress. The King gave in, and on 4 October 1742, Marie Anne was named a Lady of the Court of the Queen, and a month later the King ordered her older sister to leave the Court and to live in Paris. The King made his new mistress the Duchess of Châteauroux. The King's relationships with the sisters became a subject of gossip in the court and in Paris, where a popular comic poem was recited, ending: "Choosing an entire family – is that being unfaithful, or constant?"


title: Louis XV

text: In June 1744, the King left Versailles in order to take personal command of his armies fighting in the War of the Austrian Succession. This otherwise popular move was marred by the King's indiscreet decision to bring along Marie Anne. When Marie Anne visited the King in Metz in August 1744 she was accompanied by her sister Diane Adélaïde de Mailly. While an amiable companion, Marie Anne did not consider her simple sister to be much of a rival, however it was rumored at the time that one of the methods by which Marie Anne kept the interest of the king was to periodically offer him a ménage à trois with Diane Adélaïde. These widespread rumors made the sisters' visit to the King in Metz a national scandal and during their notorious visit the King suddenly fell gravely ill. Death appeared imminent, yet the King's chaplain refused him absolution unless he renounced his mistress, which he did. Marie Anne left The Court and after the King recovered he made a triumphal entry into Paris. On 25 November, Minister Maurepas was obliged to recall Marie Anne to Versailles, but she soon fell sick with convulsive pains and died on 8 December 1744. Following her death the King consoled himself with Diane Adélaïde until he met Madame de Pompadour in 1745.


title: Louis XV

text: The King's adultery confession, which was distributed publicly, embarrassed him and tarnished the prestige of the monarchy. Although Louis XV's recovery earned him the epithet "well-beloved" from a public relieved by his survival, the events at Metz diminished his standing. The military successes of the War of the Austrian Succession inclined the French public to overlook Louis' adulteries, but after 1748, in the wake of the anger over the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, pamphlets against the king's mistresses were widely distributed and read.


title: Louis XV

text: Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour, was the most famous and influential of the mistresses of Louis XV. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Paris "fermier-general", and was married to a banker, Charles Guillaume Lenormant d'Étoiles. She was noticed by the King following one of his hunts, and formally met him at a costume ball celebrating carnival in 1745. By July, she was the King's mistress and was formally given the title of the Marquise de Pompadour. For the next twenty years, she was the King's confidante and advisor, helping him choose or demote ministers. Her opinions led to the downfall of some very competent ministers, including Machault d'Aurnouville and the Marquis d'Argenson, and to the promotion of a number of incompetent military commanders. Her most successful choice was the promotion of the Duke de Choiseul, who became one of the King's most effective ministers. She ceased to be sexually active with the King in 1750, but remained his closest advisor and titular mistress. She was promoted to Duchess in 1752, and Dame of the Queen's Palace in 1756, and was an important patron of music and the arts, as well as religious establishments. She remained close to the King until her death in 1764. He was devastated, and remained in seclusion for several weeks after she died.


title: Louis XV

text: The peace achieved by Louis with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle lasted only seven years. At the end of August 1755, Marie Therese, the Empress of Austria, discreetly wrote a letter to Louis XV, which was passed by the Austrian ambassador in Paris to Madame de Pomapadour for delivery to the King. She proposed a secret alliance between Austria and France, to meet the threats of the growing power of Prussia, which was still formally an ally of France, and Britain.


title: Louis XV

text: In the New World, conflict had already begun between Britain and France. The French colonies were at an enormous demographic disadvantage; there were less than 70,000 French colonists spread over a territory from the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes extending down the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys down to Louisiana (named for Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV); compared with 300,000 in the British colonies. To defend its territories. France had constructed Fort Duquesne to defend their frontier against the indigenous Americans; Britain sent the young George Washington with a small force to construct his own fortification, Fort Necessity, nearby. In 1752, after the killing of French envoy, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, the French sent reinforcements and compelled Washington and his men to withdraw.


title: Louis XV

text: The undeclared French and Indian War followed, with Britain treating the French colonies as an enemy. In 1755, the British seized 300 French merchant ships. In January 1756, Louis sent an ultimatum to London, which was rejected by the British government. A few months later, on 16 January 1756, Frederick the Great of Prussia signed the Treaty of Westminster, allying himself with Britain. Louis responded immediately on 1 May 1756 by sealing a formal defensive treaty with Austria, the first Treaty of Versailles, offering to defend Austria in case of a Prussian attack. This was a complete reversal of France's historic conflict with Austria, which had been underway for nearly two hundred years, and it was shocking to many in the French Court.


title: Louis XV

text: Louis declared war on Great Britain on 9 June 1756, and success seemed certain. A French fleet in the Mediterranean defeated the British at the Battle of Minorca of 1756, and captured that island. The French army greatly outnumbered the British and Prussians on the continent. The French army won the surrender of the British forces of the Duke of Comberland at Closterseven. Another French army invaded Saxony and Hanover, the ancestral home of King George II. However, the best French commander, Maurice de Saxe, had died two years after the War of the Austrian Succession, and the new French commanders, Charles, Prince of Soubise, the Duke D'Estrees and the Duke de Broglie detested each other, and were rarely willing to cooperate.


title: Louis XV

text: In August Frederick of Prussia made a lightning strike into Saxony and on 5 November 1757, though outnumbered by the French nearly two to one, decisively defeated the army of the Prince de Soubise at the Battle of Rossbach. The new British Prime Minister, William Pitt, named a new commander, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and the French armies were gradually pushed back to the Rhine, and defeated again at the Battle of Krefeld on 23 June. Thereafter, Britain and Prussia held the upper hand, tying down the French army in the German states along the Rhine.


title: Louis XV

text: British naval supremacy prevented France from reinforcing its colonies overseas, and British naval squadrons raided the French coast at Cancale and Le Havre and landed on the Ile d'Aix and Le Havre. In 1759 the British seized Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies, and captured Port Louis and Quebec. A series of naval defeats forced Louis to abandon plans for invasion of Britain. In India, the French colony at Pondicherry was surrounded by the British, and surrendered the following year. On 8 September 1760, Montreal surrendered, bringing to an end French rule in Canada. Martinique fell to the British in 1762.


title: Louis XV

text: On 5 January 1757, as the King was getting into his carriage in the courtyard of the Grand Trianon Versailles, a demented man, Robert-François Damiens, pushed through the King's guards and attacked the King, stabbing him in the side with a small knife. The King's guards seized Damien, and the King ordered them to hold him but not harm him. The King walked up the steps to his rooms at the Trianon, where he found he was bleeding profusely. He summoned his doctor and a priest, and then fainted. Louis was saved from greater harm by the thickness of the winter clothing he was wearing. When the news reached Paris, anxious crowds gathered in the streets. The Pope, the Empress of Austria, and King George II, with whom France was at war, sent messages hoping for his swift recovery. Damien was tortured to see if he had accomplices, and was tried before the Parlement of Paris, which had been the most vocal critic of the King. The Parlement demonstrated its loyalty to the King by sentencing Damiens to the most severe possible penalty. On 28–29 March 1757 Damien was executed on the Place de Grève in Paris by drawing and quartering, following which his body was burned on a bonfire. The house where he was born was burned down, his father, wife and daughter were banished from France, and his brothers and sisters were required to change their name.


title: Louis XV

text: The King recovered physically very quickly, but the attack had a depressive effect on his spirits. One of his chief courtiers, Duford de Cheverny, wrote afterwards: "it was easy to see that when members of the court congratulated him on his recovery, he replied, 'yes, the body is going well', but touched his head and said, 'but this goes badly, and this is impossible to heal.' After the assassination attempt, the King invited his heir, the Dauphin, to attend all of the Royal Council meetings, and quietly closed down the chateau at Versailles where he had met with his short-term mistresses."


title: Louis XV

text: The "Parlements" were assemblies of nobles in Paris and older regions of France, whose members served as magistrates and judged civil cases. Their members included both hereditary nobles and wealthy citizens who had purchased their seats. Several of the Parlements, such as those of Rouen and Provence, had been in existence for centuries, and saw themselves as the legitimate governments in their provinces. As Louis reorganized the government and appointed his own intendants in the provinces, the authority and prestige of the Parlements decreased, and the price of the seats dropped. In Franche-Comté, Bordelaise and Rouen, the Parlements refused to follow the decrees of the royal intendants. When the intendants attempted to assert their authority and collect taxes from all classes, the Parlements went on strike, refusing to proceed with the judgment of civil cases. The civil justice system came to a halt. In 1761, the provincial "Parlement" of Normandy in Rouen wrote a protest to the King, explaining that the King had the exclusive power to tax, but the Parlement had the exclusive right to collect the money. The King rejected the explanation and overruled the "Parlement", banished some of his most provocative Parliament members to their estates. For the rest of his reign, the Parlements swore allegiance to the King, but took every opportunity to resist his new taxes and the King's authority. This was one of the seeds of resistance to the King's authority that was to turn into a Revolution less than thirty years later.


title: Louis XV

text: The Comte d'Argenson served as the Minister of War from 1743 until 1747. He was an advocate of the continuation of the absolute monarchy in the style of Louis XIV. He was responsible for creating the first school for engineers in France at Mézières (1749–50); thanks to the trained engineers, France had the finest system of roads and bridges in Europe. He also established the military academy, the École Militaire, and, following the model of the Prussians, established military training camps and exercises, and helped rebuild French military power.


title: Louis XV

text: Machaud D'Arnouville was brought into the government with the sponsorship of d'Argenson, but the two men gradually became rivals and enemies. D'Arnouville was the Controller of Finances from 1745 to 1754, then Minister of Navy from 1754 to 1757. He was the creator of the unpopular "Vingtieme" tax (1749), which taxed all citizens, including the nobility, at the same rate, and also freed the prices of grain (1754), which initially greatly increased agricultural production. The fluctuation of grain prices would eventually become a factor in the French Revolution.


title: Louis XV

text: On 1 February 1757, the King abruptly dismissed both d'Arnouville and d'Argenson, and exiled them to their estates. The King held them responsible for not preventing the assassination attempt, and their government displeased Madame de Pompadour.


title: Louis XV

text: Louis named the Duke de Choiseul as his minister of foreign affairs on 3 December 1758, following the recommendation of Madame de Pompadour. In 1763, he became Minister of War, giving the role of minister of foreign affairs to his cousin, the Duc de Praslin. A few months later, he also became the Minister of the Navy, and became the most influential and powerful member of the government. In the council and circles of government, he was the leader of the "philosophe" faction, which included Madame de Pompadour, which sought to appease the Parlements and the Jansenists. On the diplomatic front, he negotiated a "Family Pact" with the Bourbon monarch of Spain (1761); negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1761, and completed the integration of Lorraine into France (1766) upon the death of the King's father-in-law Stanislaus I Leszczyński, Duke of Lorraine. He incorporated Corsica into France (1768), and negotiated the marriage of his grandson, the future Louis XVI with Marie Antoinette (1770).


title: Louis XV

text: His most notable accomplishment was the modernization of the French military, based on the lessons learned during the Seven Years' War. Under Choiseul, the government, rather than the officers, took the responsibility of training, giving uniforms, and training soldiers. The artillery was standardized, and new tactics, based on the Prussian model, were adopted and taught. The Navy in 1763 had been reduced to just 47 vessels and twenty frigates, three times smaller than the British Royal Navy fleet. He launched a major shipbuilding program to construct eighty vessels and forty-five new frigates, which would allow the French fleet, combined with the allied Spanish fleet, to outnumber the Royal Navy.


title: Louis XV

text: In 1764, at the urging of the Parlement, Madame Pompadour and his foreign minister, the Duc de Chosieul, Louis decided upon the Suppression of Jesuit Order in France. The Jesuits in France numbered 3,500; they had 150 establishments in France, including 85 colleges, which were considered the best in France; their graduates included Voltaire and Diderot. The Confessor of the King, by a tradition dating back to Henry IV, was a Jesuit. Agitation against the Jesuits began in 1760 in the provincial Parlements, where the Gallicans, supporters of a specifically French version of Catholicism, were strong. The complaint against the Jesuits was that they were independent of the authority of the King and the hierarchy of the church in France. The Jesuits had already been expelled from Portugal and its colony of Brazil in 1759, because of conflicts with the government and church hierarchy there.


title: Louis XV

text: In France, the Parlements had taken the lead in attacking the Jesuits. On 12 February 1762, the Parlement of Rouen declared the Jesuits outside the law, forbid them to hold public positions or to teach, and demanded that they take an oath repudiating their beliefs. Between April and September 1762, the Parlements of Rennes, Bordeaux, Paris and Metz joined in the condemnation, followed in 1763 by Aix, Toulouse, Pau, Dijon and Grenoble. By the end of the year only the Parlements of Besançon, Douai, and the governments of Colmar, Flanders, Alsace and Franche-Comté, plus the Duchy of Lorraine, run by the Queen's father, the former King Stanislaus, permitted the Jesuits to function.


title: Louis XV

text: The campaign against the Jesuits divided the royal household; his son the Dauphin, his daughters and the Queen supported the Jesuits, while Madame de Pompadaour, whose influence in the court was criticized by the Jesuits, wanted them gone. The indecisive King declared two years later that he had made the decision against his own feelings. The Jesuits departed, and were welcomed in Prussia and in Russia. The departure of the Jesuits weakened the church in France, and especially weakened the authority of the King, who, like a constitutional monarch, acted on behalf of the Parliament against his own beliefs.


title: Louis XV

text: Under the government of Choiseul, the Parlements of several French provinces continued to swear obedience to the King, while refusing to obey his "intendents" or to accept his new taxes. The Parlement of Franche-Comté in Besançon refused to collect the "vingtieme" tax imposed by the King to finance the war, claiming that only the Parlement could impose taxes. The King's government immediately dismissed the leaders of the Parlement and confined them to their residences. The Parlement of Normandy immediately supported that of Besançon; it wrote a remonstrance to the King on 5 July 1760, declaring that the Parlements represented all classes: "One King, one law, one Parlement; the law of the kingdom is a sacred pact of your alliance with the French nation; it is a kind of contract which destines the King to reign and the people to obey. In truth, no one except God can compel you to obey this sacred pact… but we can ask you, with respect, with submission… to keep your promises." This was too much for the King. He responded on 31 January 1761 that the Parlement's complaint "contained principles so false and so contrary to my authority and with expressions so indecent, particularly in connection with my Chancellor who only explained to you my wishes… that I send your letter back to you." The Parlement members of Besançon remained in exile.


title: Louis XV

text: The Parlement of Bordeaux went even further in its resistance to the royal government; in 1757 it brought accusations of corruption against the members of the government of the city of Bergerac, named by the Royal Council of the King. When the Royal Council blocked the pursuits of the Parlement, the Parlement wrote a protest to the King, declaring, "Sire, your Parlement cannot recognize any intermediate power between it and your person; no, your Council has over the Parlement no authority, superiority, or jurisdiction."


title: Louis XV

text: The prolonged war drained the treasury of the Kingdom; France paid not only for its own army, but subsidized the armies of its allies; in 1759 France paid 19 million livres to its allies, an amount which Choiseul reduced by one-third in 1761. His new finance minister, Étienne de Silhouette imposed new taxes aimed at the wealthy; taxes on horses, carriages, silk, paintings, coffee and furs, and other luxury goods. The new taxes were extremely unpopular with the aristocracy and wealthy; Silhouette was dismissed after eight months, and his name became the common expression for paper cutouts made from a shadow, which, like his ministry, lasted only a moment. The King announced that he was giving his silver service to the mint, to be melted down and made into money.


title: Louis XV

text: The new Controller of Finances, Henri Bertin, a protege of Madame Pompadour named on 23 November 1759, reduced the luxury taxes of his predecessor, and instead proposed a broadening of the tax base to include those classes which had long been excluded, and a new survey of the wealth of the nobility. Once again the Parliaments rebelled. When the Lieutenant General of Normandy appeared before the Parliament to register the decree, it refused to register or collect the new taxes. The same scene was reproduced in the other Parlements. Once again the King yielded to Madame de Pomapdour and her allies; the new decrees were withdrawn, Bertin was moved to a different position, the tax rolls were not enlarged, and no new taxes were collected; the debt remained.


title: Louis XV

text: The war with Great Britain continued, despite the death of King George II on 25 October 1760; the British Prime Minister William Pitt rejected French proposals for suggestions for negotiations. On 15 August 1761, France, Spain, Naples and Parma, all ruled by monarchs of the Bourbon family, signed the first "Family Pact" with a system of reciprocal guarantees of support if one or the other were attacked. At the same time, they signed a secret treaty with Charles III of Spain engaging Spain to declare war on Great Britain if the war was not over by May 1762. Learning of this pact, William Pitt wanted to declare an immediate war on Spain, but the new British King, George III, rejected the idea. The military forces of Frederick the Great in Prussia had been nearly exhausted in the long war against the combined forces of Austria and Russia; but Frederick was saved by the sudden death of the Tsarina Elizabeth in 1762, and her replacement by Peter III of Russia, a fervent admirer of the Prussian King.


title: Louis XV

text: Choiseul had taken over direction of the French navy as well as the army in October 1761, and he pressed for an offensive to bring the war to a successful end. He persuaded the Parlements and the chambers of commerce of the major French cities to sponsor the construction of warships, and rebuilt the French Navy. The French army launched a new offensive against the Prussians and Spain, as promised by its agreement with France, launched an invasion in Portugal, an ally of Britain. However, once again the French initiatives were not enough. The French offensive in Hesse-Kassel was defeated by the Prussians, the Spanish army in Portugal made little progress, and the British took the opportunity to land on Martinique and to invade Spain's colony Cuba. Choiseul decided it was time to end the war. The preliminary negotiations opened at the Palace of Fontainebleau on 3 November 1762, and ended hostilities between Great Britain, France and Spain. The final treaty was signed in Paris on 10 February 1763. As a result of the War, France gave up its minor possessions in the West Indies; Marie Galante, Tobago and La Desiderade, but received back Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Santa Lucia, which, because of their sugar plantations, were considered of more value than all of its territories in Canada; France kept only the Iles of Saint Pierre and Miquelon. The valley of the Ohio, and the territories along the west bank of the Mississippi River were ceded to Spain. Louis formally ratified the treaty on 23 February, on the same day that his statue was unveiled on the Place Louis XV (today the Place de la Concorde)


title: Louis XV

text: The winter of 1763–64 was particularly harsh; Madame de Pompadour contracted pneumonia, and died on 15 April. The King was deeply affected, but, strictly observing court protocol, he did not attend her funeral, because she was too far below his rank, and, though mourning, carried on court business as usual. Maneuvering immediately began within the court to replace Madame de Pompadour; a leading candidate was Duchess of Gramont, the sister of Choiseul, but the King showed no interest in a new mistress, and in February 1765 he closed down the Parc-aux-Cerfs, where he had previously met his "petites maitresses".


title: Louis XV

text: The resistance of the Parlements to the King's authority continued. The Parlements of the provinces began to quarrel with the Parlement of Paris over which more truly represented the nation. In March 1764, the Parlement of Navarre in Pau, the smallest province, refused to accept the taxation authority of the Grand Council of the King. This time the King took action, arresting and replacing the President and leading officers of the Parlement, and replacing them with officers loyal to the King. The Parlements of Toulouse, Besançon and Rouen protested, but the King persisted. In 1765 the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes denied the authority of the King's officers to impose taxes without its permission, and went on strike. The King summoned the Parlement to Versailles, where he had his lecture read to them. This had little effect; when the King had his decree to the Parlement posted on the walls of Rennes, the Parlement ordered that the posters with the King's proclamation be taken down. The King issued letters of cachet that forbade the Parlement members to leave Rennes, but the judicial system remained on strike.


title: Louis XV

text: The end of 1765 brought another personal tragedy; his son and heir Louis contracted tuberculosis. He travelled with the King to the Palace of Fontainebleau. The King distracted himself by secluding himself with the astronomer César-François Cassini de Thury and making astronomic calculations, while the doctors tried, without success, to treat his son. The Dauphin died on 20 December 1765. The succession was assured, since the Dauphin had a son, the future Louis XVI, who was of age to rule, but the death put him into a deep depression. He drafted his own will, writing: "If I made errors, it was not from a lack of will, but from a lack of talents, and for not having been supported as I wished to have been, particularly in matters of religion."


title: Louis XV

text: The Queen, who was deeply affected by the death of the Dauphin in 1765, followed by the death of her father in 1766 and, finally, that of her daughter-in-law, died on 24 June 1768.


title: Louis XV

text: In January 1766, while the King was still mourning the death of the Dauphin, the Parlement of Brittany issued another rejection of the King's authority to collect taxes. When he ignored it, both the Parlement of Rennes and the Parlement of Rouen wrote him again, complaining that he was ignoring "the oath that you took to the nation when accepting the crown." When this part of the letter was read to the King, he interrupted the reading and declared that this accusation was false; he had taken an oath to God alone, not to the nation. On 3 March 1766, with only a few hours notice, he traveled in person from Versailles to the meeting of the Parlement of Paris at the Palais de la Cité and appeared before the members. In his message, read to them by one of his ministers, he declared, "It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides...To me alone belongs the legislative power, without dependence and without sharing...The public order emanates entirely from me...Confusion and anarchy are taking the place of legitimate order, and the scandalous spectacle of a contradictory rivaling my sovereign power reduces me to the sad necessity to use all the power that I received from God to preserve my peoples from the sad consequences of these enterprises." The speech, immediately termed "the flagellation", was published in official press, and circulated to all levels of government. It became his political testament. The conflict between the Parlements and King was muted for a time, but not resolved.


title: Louis XV

text: After the death of the Madame de Pompadour, several women in the court sought to replace her, including the Duchess of Gramont, the sister of the Duke of Choiseul, the King's chief minister. However, the King's favor turned to Jeanne Bécu, the comtesse du Barry. She was thirty-three years younger than the King. She was the illegitimate daughter of Anne Bécu, a seamstress. She was raised by the Dames de Sacre-Coeur, and had various jobs as a shop assistant and designer of dresses before she became the mistress of Jean du Barry, the brother of a count. She began to hold a salon, which attracted writers and aristocrats. Since Jean du Barry was already married, to give her legitimacy he arranged for her to become engaged to his brother, Comte Guillaume du Barry, a retired soldier. They were married on 1 September 1768, and then, without spending the night with her, Guillaume retired to his home in Languedoc. Through her acquaintances with the nobility, she was invited to Versailles, where the King saw her and was immediately attracted to her. He invited her to Fontainebleau, and then asked her to live in the Palace of Versailles. Her appearance at the Court scandalized the Duke de Choiseul, but pleased the enemies of the Duke within the Court.


title: Louis XV

text: For du Barry to be presented at Court, she had to be formally presented by a member of the nobility. The elderly Contesse de Béarn was persuaded to make the presentation for a large fee, and she was presented on 22 April 1769. None of the ladies of the Court attended, and Choiseul himself, to show his displeasure, hosted a large reception the following day, which all the Court, except du Barry, attended.


title: Louis XV

text: The King soon installed her in the Palace of Versailles, and in 1771 gave her the new Pavillon de Louveciennes. Choiseul sowed a strong dislike for du Barry, as did Marie Antoinette, who arrived in Versailles and married the Dauphin on 16 May 1770. She described the Comtesse as "the most stupid and impertinent creature imaginable". However, the King kept du Barry close to him until the final days before his death, when he sent her away before he made confession. The presence of du Barry at the court scandalized the high members of the aristocracy. Outside the Court, the opponents of the King in the Parlements used her presence to ridicule and attack the King. She was the target of dozens of scandalous pamphlets accusing her of every possible immoral act. Decades later, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, the Comtesse was targeted by the Jacobins as a symbol of the hated old regime; she was guillotined on 8 December 1793.


title: Louis XV

text: The borders of France were enlarged for the last time before the Revolution by two additions; the Duchy of Lorraine, ruled by the King's father-in-law, Stanislaus, reverted to France after his death, and was officially joined to the kingdom 27–28 March 1766. The acquisition of Corsica was more complicated. The island formally belonged to the Republic of Genoa, but an independent Republic of Corsica had been proclaimed in 1755 by Pasquale Paoli, and the rebels controlled most of the island. The Republic of Genoa did not have the military forces to conquer the island, and permitted Louis to send French troops to occupy the ports and major cities, to keep the island from falling into British hands. When the war ended, the island was formally granted to France by Treaty of Versailles on 19 May 1768. Louis sent the army to subdue the Corsican rebels; the army on the island eventually numbered twenty-seven thousand soldiers. In May 1769 the Corsican rebels were defeated at the Battle of Ponte Novu, and Paoli took refuge in England. In 1770 the island formally became a Province of France.


title: Louis XV

text: Two men had an enormous influence on the economic policies of the King. François Quesnay was the best-known economist in France. He was the King's doctor, and treated Madame de Pompadour, but was also a celebrated economic theorist, whose collected writings, "Tableau Économique" (1758), were avidly read by the King and his Court: Louis referred to him as "my thinker." His students included the Marquis de Mirabeau and Adam Smith. He was a critic of government regulation, and coined the term "bureaucracy" (literally "A government of desks"). The other was his disciple, the Minister of the Commerce of the King, Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay. The two men advocated removing as many restrictions as possible from the economy, to encourage greater production and trade. De Gournay's famous expression, "laissez faire, laissez passer" ("it be done, let it pass") was later adopted as the slogan of a whole school of free market economics.


title: Louis XV

text: De Gournay and Quesnay proposed in particular the liberalization of agricultural markets, which were strictly controlled, to encourage greater production, competition and lower prices. Following the doctrines of Quesnay and de Gournay, Louis's controller of finances, Henri Bertin, created a new Society of Agriculture and an Agricultural Committee within the government, comparable to those existing to support commerce. In May 1763, Bertin issued a decree permitting the tax-free circulation of grain. In August 1764, Bertin permitted the export of grain from twenty-seven French ports, later expanded to thirty-six. At the same time he established a large zone around Paris, where grain was reserved exclusively for feeding the Parisians, and established a cap on the grain price, which, if it was passed, would cause the exports to cease.


title: Louis XV

text: The policy of freeing grain prices was effective in good years, and resulted in increased trade and lower prices, but during years with poor harvests; 1766, 1767 and 1768, prices went up. Most of the Parlements, in regions which produced grain, supported the policy, but others, including Paris and Rouen, were highly critical. In those cities rumors began to circulate of a mythical "Starvation Pact", a supposed plot by the government to deliberately starve and eliminate the poor. These rumors eventually became one of the factors that provoked the French Revolution.


title: Louis XV

text: The Duc de Choiseul devoted all of his considerable energy and talents to preparing a new war against Britain. In 1764, in a former Jesuit school he had closed, he created a new military preparatory school, to prepare students for the recently founded Military Academy. In 1769 he raised the Naval school to the level of a royal academy, to train officers for his new fleet. In the same year he established a military engineering school. He provided the army with hundreds of new cannon, which would be used with great success decades later during the French Revolution and by Napoleon. Using the Prussian army as a model, he reformed French military doctrine, making the state and not the officers responsible for training and equipping soldiers. A large part of the French Navy had been sunk or captured by the British in the Seven Years' War. In addition to the existing naval arsenals in Toulon, Brest and Rochefort, he opened two more in Marseille (1762) and Lorient (1764). The arsenals began building new ships; by 1772 the Navy had sixty-six ships of the line, thirty-five frigates, and twenty-one new corvettes. He and his allies in the government began planning for an invasion of England, and his government looked for new ways to challenge Great Britain. When the Duc de Broglie learned that the British were planning to tax the citizens of the British colonies in America, he wrote to the King: "It will be very curious to know what the result will be, and if their execution doesn't result in a Revolution in those states."


title: Louis XV

text: Choiseul combined his military preparations for war with a diplomatic alliance, the Pacte de Famille or Pact of the Family, which united with other countries ruled by Kings of the Bourbon dynasty; Spain, ruled by Louis's cousin Charles III of Spain, the Naples and Tuscany. Choiseul was so entirely focused on Great Britain as his future enemy that he almost entirely neglected the rest of Europe. He had no accredited Ambassadors in Poland, Prussia or Russia during most of the period, and stood by while Russia imposed its own candidate for King of Poland, and when Turkey and Russia went to war in 1768–70.


title: Louis XV

text: A new conflict between Great Britain and Spain over the remote Falkland Islands in 1770 brought about Choiseul's downfall. The British had established a settlement in the islands, which were also claimed by Spain. In early 1770 the Spanish governor of Buenos Aires sent five warships full of troops to the islands, ordering the British to leave. The British prepared to depart. When the news reached London, the British government demanded that the Spanish leave. Both sides began to prepare for war.


title: Louis XV

text: The possibility of a new war came just as France was undergoing a new confrontation between the King's government and the Parlement of Brittany, which once again refused to recognize the power of the King's government to impose taxes. The King wrote immediately to his cousin, the King of Spain, who wrote back that Spain did not want a war. Louis replied, "Gentleness and patience have guided me to the present, but my parlements, pushing to limit, have forgotten themselves to the point of disputing the sovereign authority that we possess only from the will of God. I am resolved to make myself obeyed by all available means..." On 24 December, the King sent a short note to Choiseul dismissing him from his post and ordering him to return to his home in Chanteloup and to remain there. A similar note went to his cousin. Choiseul asked for two days to manage his affairs, but the King refused. Explaining the decision later to the Duke de Broglie, the King wrote, "The principles of the Choiseuls are too contrary to religion, and therefore to royal authority."


title: Louis XV

text: The King passed the leadership of the government to a triumvirate of three conservative ministers, led by his Chancellor, René de Maupeou, who had been President of the Parlement from 1763 to 1768. Maupeou and two other conservative ministers, Abbot Terray for finance and the Duc d'Aiguillon for foreign affairs and war, took charge of the government. They became known as "The Triumvirate".


title: Louis XV

text: The first priority of Maupeou was to bring the unruly Parlements under control, and to continue with his program for the modernization of the state. Most of the members of the Parlement of Paris were on a virtual strike, refusing to render justice or approve the King's decrees. On 21 January 1771, royal agents and musketeers arrived at the homes of each of the Parlement members, informing them that their positions were confiscated and ordering them to leave Paris and return to their home provinces, and not to leave them. This was followed in February by an even more radical measure: the regional Parlements were replaced as the high courts of civil justice by six new regional high councils, to judge serious criminal and civil cases. Another decree announced the abolition of the high fees demanded by the Parlements for resolving civil cases, which were the source of their members' income; civil justice was to be rendered without charge. The powers of the Parlement of Paris alone were largely unchanged. Without the provincial parliaments, the government was able enact new laws and taxes without opposition. However, after the King's death, the nobility demanded and received the restoration of the regional parlements.


title: Louis XV

text: Abbot Terray was nominally a priest, though his government career was entirely secular, and his personal life was considered scandalous. He was an efficient and relentless tax collector; he opened a school to train tax inspectors, and worked to see that taxes were imposed and collected with the same precision and vigor in all regions, without interference from the local nobility. When he first took his position, the state had a budget deficit of 60 million livres, and a long-term debt of 100 million livres. By 1774, revenues had been increased by 60 million livres and the debt reduced to 20 million livres. He also reimposed the regulation of the price of grain, which had been freed in 1763 and 1764; these controls were an issue which would disturb the government and provoke agitation until the French Revolution.


title: Louis XV

text: The foreign affairs post had been left vacant by Choiseul, who acted as his own foreign minister. Following the dismissal of Choiseul, the King encouraged his cousin and ally Charles III of Spain to settle the crisis over the Falkland Islands with the aim of avoiding a war. Due to Choiseul's sole focus on a war with Britain, he had completely ignored the rest of Europe. France did not even have an ambassador in Vienna, and Russia and Prussia divided up an old French ally, Poland, without protest from France. Another ally of France, Sweden, also risked being divided between Russia and Prussia upon the death of its King in 1771. The Prince Royal, Gustav III of Sweden, was staying in Paris at the time. He had a long meeting with Louis XV, who promised to support him. With French funding, and assistance from Louis's personal secret intelligence service, the "Secret du Roi", Gustave III returned to Stockholm. On 19 August 1772, at his command, the Swedish royal guard imprisoned the Swedish Senate, and two days later he was proclaimed King by the Diet. Russia and Prussia, occupied with the division of Poland, protested but did not intervene.


title: Louis XV

text: In the last years of his reign, the court of Versailles was a theater of manners. Marie-Antoinette, a resident since her marriage, had difficulty disguising her dislike for the King's mistress, Madame du Barry. The King constructed a set of luxurious rooms for Madame du Barry on the floor above his offices; Madame du Barry also reigned in the Petit Trianon, which the King had built for Madame de Pompadour, and in the Pavillon de Louveciennes, also built for Madame de Pompadour. The Court was divided between those who welcomed Madame du Barry, and those of the older aristocracy, such as the Duc de Choiseul plus Marie-Antoinette, who scorned her. The King continued his grand construction projects, including the opera theater of the Palace of Versailles, completed for the celebration of the wedding of the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, and the new Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde) in Paris, whose centerpiece was an equestrian statue of the King, modeled after that of Louis XIV on the Place Vendôme.


title: Louis XV

text: On 26 April 1774, the King left for the Petit Trianon with Madame du Barry and several nobles from his entourage, and reported that he felt ill. He participated in the hunt the next day, but rode in his carriage instead of on horseback. That evening he was still feeling ill, and sent for the Court physician, Le Mariniére. At the surgeon's insistence, the King was brought back to the Palace of Versailles for treatment, along with Madame du Barry and the others. The King was attended by six physicians, six surgeons, each of whom took his pulse and gave his diagnosis. He was bled three times by the surgeons, without effect. When some red eruptions appeared on his skin, the doctors first diagnosed "petite variole", or smallpox, which caused optimism, since the patient and doctors both believed he had already had the illness. The members of the family, particularly the Dauphin and Marie-Antoinette, were asked to leave, since they had not already had the illness, and had no immunity. Madame du Barry remained with him. As the hours passed, the red eruptions of the disease grew worse, and the doctors began to fear for his life. On the morning of 1 May, the Archbishop of Paris arrived, but was kept out of the King's room to avoid alarming him. The King remained conscious and cheerful. However, on 3 May, he studied the eruptions on his hands, summoned the Archbishop, and announced, "I have the petite variole." The Archbishop instructed him to prepare for the final rites. That night, the King summoned Madame du Barry, informed her of the diagnosis, and said, "We cannot recommence the scandal of Metz. If I had known what I know now, you would not have been admitted. I owe it to God and to my people. Therefore, you have to leave tomorrow." On 7 May, he summoned his confessor and was given the final rites. The illness continued its course; one visitor on 9 May, the Duc de Croy, said the King's face resembled, with the darkening of the eruptions of the smallpox, "a mask of bronze". Louis died at 3:15 in the morning on 10 May 1774.


title: Louis XV

text: Several of his contemporaries who worked closely with him tried to describe the personality of Louis XV. The Duke de Croy wrote: "He had a memory, presence, and justness of spirit that was unique. He was gentle, an excellent father, and the most honest individual in the world. He was well informed in the sciences...but with a modesty which, with him, was almost a vice. He always saw more correctly than others, but he always believed he was wrong... He had the greatest bravery, but a bravery that was too modest. He never dared to decide for himself, but always, out of modesty, turned for advice to others, even when he saw more accurately than they did...Louis XIV had been too proud, but Louis XV was not proud enough. Other than his excessive modesty, his great and sole vice was women; He believed that only his mistresses loved him enough to tell him the truth. For that reason he allowed them to lead him, which contributed to his failure with finance, which was the worse aspect of his reign."


title: Louis XV

text: Others, like d'Argenson, his Minister of War commented on his extreme shyness and timidity; his inability to make conversation with others. The Duke of Luynes remarked that he often seemed to want to speak, but "his timidity stopped him and the expressions did not come; one felt that he wanted to say something obliging, but he often ended by simply asking a frivolous question."


title: Louis XV

text: Another characteristic remarked by contemporaries was his penchant for secrecy. "No one was a greater expert at dissimulation than the King", wrote d'Argenson. "He worked from morning to night to dissimulate; he did not say a word, make a gesture or demarche except to hide what he really wanted."


title: Louis XV

text: "He was the most excellent of men", wrote another contemporary, Duffort de Cheverny, "but, in defiance of himself, he spoke about the affairs of state as if someone else was governing."


title: Louis XV

text: The most famous remark attributed to Louis XV (or sometimes to Madame de Pompadour) is "Après nous, le déluge" ("After us, the deluge"). It is commonly explained as his indifference to financial excesses, and a prediction of the French Revolution to come. The remark is usually taken out of its original context. It was made in 1757, a year which saw the crushing defeat of the French army by the Prussians at the Battle of Rossbach and the assassination attempt on the King. The "Deluge" the King referred to was not a revolution, but the arrival of Halley's Comet, which was predicted to pass by the earth in 1757, and which was commonly blamed for having caused the flood described in the Bible, with predictions of a new deluge when it returned. The King was a proficient amateur astronomer, who collaborated with the best French astronomers. Biographer Michel Antoine wrote that the King's remark "was a manner of evoking, with his scientific culture and a good dose of black humor, this sinister year beginning with the assassination attempt by Damiens and ending with the Prussian victory". Halley's Comet finally passed the earth in April 1759, and caused enormous public attention and anxiety, but no floods.


title: Louis XV

text: Another popular legend concerned the Maison-aux-Cerfs, the house in Versailles where, when he was no longer having sexual relations with Madame de Pompadour, he sometimes slept with his "petites maitresses", young women recruited for that purpose. Popular legends at the time described it as a kind of harem, organized by Madame de Pompadour, where a group of women were kidnapped and kept for the King's pleasure. The legend circulated widely in pamphlets with lurid illustrations, and made its way into some later biographies of the King. In reality it had only one occupant at a time, for brief periods. Madame Pompadour herself accepted it as a preferable alternative to a rival at court, as she stated: "It is his heart I want! All these little girls with no education will not take it from me. I would not be so calm if I saw some pretty woman of the court or the capital trying to conquer it."


title: Louis XV

text: Louis was a major patron of architecture; he spent more money on buildings over the course of his reign than Louis XIV. His major architectural projects were the work of his favorite court architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel. They included the Ecole Militaire (1751–1770); the Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde (1763–83); the Petit Trianon at Versailles (1762–64), and the opera theater of the Palace of Versailles. Louis began construction of the Church of Saint-Geneviève, now the Pantheon (1758–90). He also constructed monumental squares and surrounding buildings in the centers of Nancy, Bordeaux, and Rennes. His workshops produced fine furniture, porcelain, tapestries and other goods in the Louis XV Style which were exported to all the capital cities of Europe.


title: Louis XV

text: The King, the Queen and her daughters were major patrons of music. The queen and her children played the clavecin, under the instruction of François Couperin. The young Mozart came to Paris and wrote two sonatas for clavecin and violin which he dedicated to Madame Victoire, the King's daughter. Jean-Marie Leclair was appointed Director of the Music of the Chapel and the Apartments in 1733, Leclair resigned in 1736 following a dispute with another royal appointee Jean-Pierre Guignon. The most important musical figure of the reign was Jean Philippe Rameau, who was the court composer through the 1740s and 1750s, and wrote more than thirty operas for Louis and his court. The King himself, like his grandfather Louis XIV, was taught to dance ballet but danced only once in public, in 1725.


title: Louis XV

text: Louis XV, guided largely by Madame de Pompadour, was the most important art patron of the period. He commissioned François Boucher to paint pastoral scenes for his apartments in Versailles, and gave him the title of First Painter of the King in 1765. Other artists patronized by the King included Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Jean Marc Nattier, and the sculptor Edme Bouchardon. Bouchardon created the monumental statue of Louis XV on horseback which was the centerpiece of Place Louis XV until it was pulled down during the Revolution.


title: Louis XV

text: The French philosophical movement later called the Enlightenment began and gathered force during the reign of Louis XV; in 1746 Diderot published his "Pensées philosophiques", followed in 1749 by his "Lettres sur les Aveugles" and the first volume of the "Encyclopédie", in 1751. Montesquieu published "De l'esprit des Lois", in 1748. Voltaire published "le Siecle de Louis XIV" and "l'Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations", in 1756. Rousseau became known in 1750 by the publication of "Discours sur les sciences et les arts", followed in 1755 by "Discours sur les origins et les fondaments de l'inégalité". These were accompanied by new works on economics, finance, and commerce by the elder Mirabeau, François Quesnay and other scientific thinkers which undermined all of the standard assumptions of royal government, economics and fiscal policy.


title: Louis XV

text: The censors of Louis XV at first permitted these publications; the first volume of the "Encyclopédie" received official permission because the government censors believed it was purely a collection of scientific articles. The project soon included a multitude of authors, including Rousseau, and had four thousand subscribers. Only later did the government and King himself take notice, after the church attacked the "Encylopédie" for questioning official church doctrines. The King personally removed Diderot from the list of those nominated for the Académie française, and in 1759 the "Encyclopédie" was formally banned.


title: Louis XV

text: Rousseau had a resounding success in 1756 with his opera "Devin du Village", and was invited to Versailles to meet the King, but he refused. Instead, he wrote the "Contrat Social" calling for a new system based upon political and economic equality, published in 1762. Increasingly solitary and unstable, he wandered from province to province, before returning to Paris, where he died in solitude in 1778. His ideas, composed during the reign of Louis XV, were adopted by the revolutionaries who overthrew Louis XVI in 1789.


title: Louis XV

text: In the 1740s Voltaire was welcomed to the court as a playwright and poet, but his low rank as the son of a notary and the fact his father was also a Jansenist soon displeased the King and the Queen, and he was finally forced to depart Versailles. He went to Berlin, where he became a counselor to Frederick the Great, before living in Geneva and Savoy, far from Paris. On one issue in particular Voltaire took the side of Louis XV; when the King suppressed the "parlements" of nobles, demanded that all classes be taxed equally, and removed the charges which plaintiffs had to pay in order to have their cases heard. He wrote: "Parlements of the King! You are charged with rendering justice to the people! Render justice upon yourselves!...There is in the entire world no judicial court which has ever tried to share the power of the sovereign." However, the King's lack of further reforms in his last years disappointed Voltaire. When the King died, Voltaire wrote of his reign, "Fifty-six years, consumed with fatigues and wanderings."


title: Louis XV

text: For much of his lifetime Louis XV was celebrated as a national hero. Edmé Bouchardon's equestrian statue of Louis was originally conceived to commemorate the monarch's victorious role in the War of the Austrian Succession. He portrayed the king as peacemaker. It was not unveiled until 1763, following France's defeat in the Seven Years' War. Designed as a symbol of loyalty to the king, Bouchardon's work was used by the Crown for a public relations event staged to restore public confidence in a monarchy in decline. It used art as propaganda on a grand scale. This statue was located on the "Place Louis XV" and was torn down during the Revolution.


title: Louis XV

text: French culture and influence were at their height in the first half of the eighteenth century, but most scholars agree that Louis XV's decisions damaged the power of France, weakened the treasury, discredited the absolute monarchy, and made it more vulnerable to distrust and destruction. Scholars point to the French Revolution, which broke out 15 years after his death. Norman Davies characterized Louis XV's reign as "one of debilitating stagnation", characterized by lost wars, endless clashes between the Court and the Parlements, and religious feuds. Jerome Blum described him as "a perpetual adolescent called to do a man's job."


title: Louis XV

text: The view of many historians is that Louis was unequal to the high expectations of his subjects. Robert Harris wrote in 1987 that, "Historians have depicted this ruler as one of the weakest of the Bourbons, a do-nothing king who left affairs of state to ministers while indulging in his hobbies of hunting and womanizing." Harris added that ministers rose and fell according to his mistresses' opinions, seriously undermining the prestige of the monarchy.


title: Louis XV

text: Trends in 20th century French historiography, especially the Annales School, have deprecated biography and ignored the King. English historian William Doyle wrote:


title: Louis XV

text: Some scholars have ignored the king's own actions and turned instead to his image in the mind of the public. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the leader of the Annales School, noted that the king was handsome, athletic, intelligent and an excellent hunter, but that he disappointed the people. He did not keep up the practice of Mass and performing his religious obligations to the people. Le Roy Ladurie wrote that the people felt he had reduced the sacred nature of the monarchy, and thereby diminished himself.


title: Louis XV

text: According to Kenneth N. Jassie and Jeffrey Merrick, contemporary songs, poems, and public declarations typically portrayed a king as "master", unblemished "Christian", and benevolent provider ("baker"). Young Louis' failings were attributed to inexperience and manipulation by his handlers. Jassie and Merrick argued in 1994 that the king's troubles mounted steadily, and the people blamed and ridiculed his debauchery. The king ignored the famines and crises of the nation. The people reviled the king in popular protest, and finally celebrated his death. The monarchy survived—for a while—but Louis XV left his successor with a damaging legacy of popular discontent.


title: Louis XV

text: Some sermons on his death in 1774 praised the monarch and went out of their way to excuse his faults. Jeffrey Merrick wrote in 1986, "But those ecclesiastics who not only raised their eyebrows over the sins of the Beloved but also expressed doubts about his policies reflected the corporate attitude of the First Estate more accurately." They prayed the new king would restore morality at court and better serve the will of God.


title: Louis XV

text: The financial strain imposed by the wars and excesses of the royal court, and the consequent dissatisfaction with the monarchy, contributed to the national unrest that culminated in the French Revolution of 1789. The historian Colin Jones argued in 2011 that Louis XV left France with serious financial difficulties: "The military disasters of the Seven Years' War led to acute state financial crisis.". Ultimately, he wrote, Louis XV failed to overcome these fiscal problems, mainly because he was incapable of pulling together conflicting parties and interests in his entourage. Although aware of the forces of anti-monarchism threatening his family's rule, he did not do anything to stop them.


title: Louis XV

text: A few scholars have defended Louis, arguing that his highly negative reputation was based on propaganda meant to justify the French Revolution. Olivier Bernier in his 1984 biography argued that Louis was both popular and a leader in reforming France. During his 59-year reign, France was never threatened by conquest as no foreign army crossed its borders (though some of its overseas colonies were lost). He was known popularly as "Le Bien-aimé" (the well-beloved). Many of his subjects prayed for his recovery during his serious illness in Metz in 1744. His dismissal of the Parlement of Paris and his chief minister, Choiseul, in 1771, were attempts to wrest control of government from those Louis considered corrupt. He changed the tax code to try to balance the national budget. Bernier argued that these acts would have avoided the French Revolution, but his successor, Louis XVI, reversed his policies. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret wrote that Louis XV's tarnished reputation was created fifteen years after his death, to justify the French Revolution, and that the nobility during his reign were competent.


title: Louis XV

text: E. H. Gombrich wrote in 1935, "Louis XV and Louis XVI, the Sun King's [Louis XIV] successors, were incompetent, and content merely to imitate their great predecessor's outward show of power. The pomp and magnificence remained...Finance ministers soon became expert swindlers, cheating and extorting on a grand scale. The peasants worked till they dropped and citizens were forced to pay huge taxes."


title: Louis XV

text: Jeffrey Merrick wrote in 1986 that Louis XV's weak and ineffective rule accelerated the general decline that culminated in the French Revolution in 1789. The king was a notorious womaniser; the monarch's virility was supposed to be another way in which his power was manifested. Nevertheless, Merrick wrote, popular faith in the monarchy was shaken by the scandals of Louis’ private life and by the end of his life he had become despised.


title: Louis XV

text: Many historians agreed that in terms of culture and art, France reached a high point under Louis XV. However, he was blamed for the many diplomatic, military and economic reverses. His reign was marked by ministerial instability, while his "prestige was ruined by military failure and colonial losses", concluded Jean-Denis Lepage.


title: Louis XV

text: Louis XV had several illegitimate children, although the exact number is unknown. Historiography suggest the following as possible issue of the King:


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: Danielle Bregoli (born March 26, 2003), known professionally as Bhad Bhabie (, "bad baby"), is an American rapper and internet personality. She first became known from an appearance on "Dr. Phil" in September 2016, in which she uttered the phrase, "Cash me ousside, how bout dah?", which became a viral video meme and catchphrase.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In 2017, Bregoli became the youngest female rapper ever to appear on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart with her debut single "These Heaux". She subsequently signed a record deal with Atlantic Records and has since expanded into a reality show, a makeup brand, tours, and a music career. Bregoli released her first mixtape, "15", in September 2018. Its lead single, "Hi Bich", became her second single to appear on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: Bregoli was born and raised in Boynton Beach, Florida. Her parents, Ira Peskowitz and Barbara Ann Bregoli, dated for a year before Barbara became pregnant, later separating when she was an infant. Her father is Ashkenazi Jewish and her mother is of Italian descent. Bregoli was raised in a Catholic household primarily by her mother, and is estranged from her father, a deputy who works for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. Through her father, she has two younger half-brothers.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On September 14, 2016, Bregoli and her mother Barbara Ann were interviewed on "Dr. Phil" for a segment titled "I Want to Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-Old Daughter Who Tried to Frame Me for a Crime". They appeared on the show to discuss Bregoli's behavior, which included stealing a crew member's car while the episode was being filmed. When Bregoli became irritated at the audience's laughter, she responded to them by saying "Catch me outside, how about that?", challenging them to a fight outside the studio. Her affected accent made the phrase sound like "Cash me ousside, how bout dah", which became a meme, and Bregoli became known as the "'Cash Me Outside' Girl". On February 10, 2017, Bregoli reappeared on the show, but without a studio audience due to the response at her previous appearance. Her first appearance on the show, and the catchphrase it spawned, would inspire a single based on the clip, ("Cash Me Outside") which was recorded by DJ Suede The Remix God, and entered the "Billboard" Hot 100, Streaming Songs, and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts in its March 4, 2017 issue. The song, in turn, led to a series of dance videos that were uploaded onto YouTube.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: Bregoli and her mother sued three companies for "infringing her intellectual property rights" by using her signature catchphrase without consent. She also threatened to sue Walmart for using her catchphrase on T-shirts. She was nominated for the 2017 MTV Movie & TV Awards in the "Trending" category based on the catchphrase.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: Following her appearance on "Dr. Phil", Bregoli spent time at the Turn-About Ranch, a facility for "troubled teens" in Escalante, Utah. She was later arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of grand theft, marijuana possession, and filing a false police report, for which she was sentenced to five years' probation in July 2017, but it ended earlier in March 2018, after she hired a new lawyer. In March 2021, Bregoli uploaded a video to her YouTube channel in which she says she experienced and witnessed abuse at the Turn-About Ranch. She accused staffers of forcing her to sit still for three days straight without being allowed to sleep, using physical restraint on other teenagers, and ignoring reports of bullying. She also criticized Dr. Phil for sending teenagers on his show to the facility. He responded via an April 2021 interview with NewsNation that he is unaware of the ranch's actions and does not get feedback from them, to which Bregoli reacted by saying in a second video that the ranch sends progress reports directly to the show.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In early 2017, Bregoli was signed by music manager Adam Kluger and initially received industry backlash.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: Bregoli released her first single "These Heaux" (pronounced "hoes") on August 24, 2017. The recording reached number 77 on the "Billboard" Hot 100, making Bregoli the youngest female rap artist to debut on the music chart. The success of "These Heaux" prompted Atlantic Records to sign Bregoli to a multi-album recording contract. In September 2017, she remixed the Kodak Black song "Roll in Peace" and Tee Grizzley and Lil Yachty song "From the D to the A". On September 22, 2017, she released "Hi Bich" which reached number 17 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and a day after, "Whachu Know", as a single alongside the video, which received over 3 million views in 24 hours. After a shorter break, on November 30, 2017, she released another single "I Got It", followed by "Mama Don't Worry (Still Ain't Dirty)" in December. In the latter, she's rapping about her past, and that her appearance in "Dr. Phil" should be forgotten. This theme is echoed in the video for "Both of Em", in which she buries her old self in a shallow grave. In "Hi Bich (Remix)" she collaborates for the first time with other artists, including YBN Nahmir, Rich the Kid and Asian Doll (in the video, YBN Nahmir was replaced by MadeinTYO for unknown reasons).


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On March 26, 2018, she celebrated her birthday with a new song release, "Gucci Flip Flops", featuring Lil Yachty. Two days later, she received a gold certification from the RIAA for her single "Hi Bich". In mid-April, she released a freestyle called "Who Run It".


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: Her first tour across North America and Europe, together with Asian Doll, began on April 14, 2018, performing the first and second legs.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On May 2, 2018, the video for "Gucci Flip Flops" was released. Following the video's release, the song became a worldwide hit. It debuted on Billboard's Hot 100 Chart at number 80 and peaked at 79, becoming her third charting single on the chart. She received a 2018 Billboard Music Award nomination in the category of Best Female Rap Artist, along with Cardi B and Nicki Minaj.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On June 14, 2018, Bregoli released another single "Trust Me" featuring Ty Dolla Sign. On July 26, she released the video for "Trust Me", featuring guest appearances from Theo Von and Bella Thorne.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On August 14, 2018, Bregoli announced her upcoming mixtape "15". It would feature guest appearances from Lil Yachty, Ty Dolla $ign, YG, Lil Baby, City Girls, and Asian Doll. One day later, she received a gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America for her single "Gucci Flip Flops".


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On August 30, 2018, Bregoli released her new single "Yung and Bhad" featuring City Girls. Two days before the release of her debut mixtape, she released a music video for Thot Opps (Clout Drop) and Bout That. On September 18, 2018, she released "15". She released the single "Geek'd" featuring Lil Baby, with a music video released two days later. Other album tracks such as "No More Love", "Famous", "Count It" and "Shhh" were presented as video shorts on YouTube. On October 17, she released "Juice" featuring rapper YG. A music video for "Juice" was also released, with a guest appearance from UFC Women's Featherweight Champion Cris Cyborg, but YG did not appear on the video.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On November 6, 2018, she embarked on the third and fourth legs of her tour, on the west coast of the US and Australia/New Zealand respectively. The tour received good reviews, stating Bregoli's stage presence made the show, some even comparing her to Britney Spears on the early years of her career.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On November 16, controversy arose when she threw her drink at, and attempted to assault, fellow rapper Iggy Azalea while attending Cardi B's Fashion Nova launch party. Bregoli told paparazzi that she had done it due to prior comments Azalea made on Instagram, while Azalea responded with a series of tweets condemning Bregoli.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In January 2019, Bregoli released two singles: "Babyface Savage" featuring Tory Lanez and "Bestie" featuring Kodak Black. Babyface Savage gained a lot of traction in YouTube and Twitter especially, with many clips of the songs gaining tens of thousands retweets and likes. The song also charted on Canada and on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 in the US, extending her record of the youngest female to have more entries in over 20 years. The music video reached 20 million views in under 2 months. Bestie's music video, directed by Michael Garcia, came out February 25 and was praised for its visuals and storyline. It featured product placement by multiple brands and had a guest appearance by DMX.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In the same month, she announced an endorsement deal with Copycat Beauty, where she will promote the brand's products on her social media and music videos. She reportedly will be making a percentage of the sales for the six-month deal. The deal was successful, as the company's sales spiked, reaching 500,000 on the first day.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: Bregoli also released the trailer of her new reality show, "Bringing Up Bhabie", which would detail her daily life and her building her music career. The show came out on Snapchat as one of their many Snap Originals. The first season had 12 episodes, and TMZ reported outstanding ratings of over 10 million unique viewers in its first 24 hours. They also reported she was set to make over 10 million dollars during 2019. During September 2019, the reality show was renewed by Snapchat for a second season due to air in Summer 2020, but later delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and canceled later that year.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: During April and May 2019, Bregoli released a remix of "Bestie" by Spenda C Nola Bounce and a radio version of the song with Megan Thee Stallion. She released the version with Megan in order for her song to be played on the radio as radio stations were boycotting Kodak Black at the time. Bregoli also released the double singles "Lotta Dem" and her song "Spaz", which features YBN Nahmir. The making of the "Spaz" music video was recorded for her Snapchat show "Bringing Up Bhabie".


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: The following month, she released another single called "Get Like Me", which features NLE Choppa. On August 22, 2019, she announced the release of her new game "Ride or Die", which features Bregoli as an animated character where the player has to get her to run from the police.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In December 2019, a video of Bregoli wearing box braids was posted to Instagram, causing controversy over cultural appropriation and her subsequent decision to go on a social media hiatus. In February 2020, she ended her hiatus with a freestyle to Nicki Minaj's song "Yikes" and another song called "$" with Lil Gotit.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On April 22, 2020, she released her first single of 2020, titled "That's What I Said", a track addressing her critics.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On March 17, 2020, actress Skai Jackson filed a restraining order against Bregoli following a heavily documented feud in which Bregoli sent Jackson death threats and repeatedly harassed Jackson's mother on social media. Jackson dropped the restraining order on June 15.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In June, Bregoli entered a 31-day rehab facility for childhood trauma and addiction to prescription medication. She received support from celebrities such as Demi Lovato, Blac Chyna and Charli XCX.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In October, she released her second single of 2020, "Do It Like Me", which quickly went viral on the social media platform TikTok.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On April 1, 2021, six days after her eighteenth birthday, Bregoli opened an OnlyFans account, earning over $1 million in revenue in the first six hours, including over $757,000 from subscriptions, $267,000 from message payments, and $5,000 in tips. She later demonstrated evidence of earnings of more than $50 million, which was initially met with skepticism.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: On April 4, TMZ reported that she and Paris Hilton were collaborating on a troubled teen program to focus on abuse experienced by teens at camps.


title: Bhad Bhabie

text: In September 2021, she launched her own record label, Bhad Music, where she will release her upcoming debut EP. On September 17, she released her first single of 2021, "Miss Understood", which peaked at 8 on the Billboard Digital Song Sales Chart. It is scheduled to be the lead single of her upcoming debut EP.


title: Nutty Putty Cave

text: Nutty Putty Cave is a hydrothermal cave located west of Utah Lake in Utah County, Utah, United States. Formerly popular with cavers and known for its narrow passageways, Nutty Putty has been closed to the public since 2009 following a fatal accident that year.


title: Nutty Putty Cave

text: The cave, first explored in 1960 by Dale Green and friends, is currently owned by the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, and managed by the Utah Timpanogos Grotto. The cave system was named after the soft, brown, putty-like texture of the clay found in many of its passages. Green originally thought of calling it "Silly Putty" but later decided "Nutty Putty" sounded better. It contains 1,400 feet (430m) of chutes and tunnels and, prior to closure, had been accessible via a narrow surface hole.


title: Nutty Putty Cave

text: Before 2009, this cave had four separate rescues of cavers and Boy Scouts, who got stuck inside the cave's tight twists, turns, and crawls. In 2006, an effort was put forth to study and severely limit the number of visitors allowed inside the cave. It was estimated the cave was receiving over 5,000 visitors per year, with many visitors often entering the cave late at night and failing to take proper safety precautions. The cave’s popularity had caused excessive smoothing of the rock inside the cave to the point it was predicted a fatality would occur in one of the cave's more prominent features, a 45-degree room called "The Big Slide". On May 24, 2006, a gate was installed, and the cave was temporarily closed. In early 2009, proper management was established and an application process was developed to ensure safety precautions were being met. On May 18, 2009, the cave was reopened to the public.


title: Nutty Putty Cave

text: On November 24, 2009, a man named John Edward Jones (January 21, 1983 – November 25, 2009) became stuck and subsequently died in the cave after being trapped inside for 28 hours. While exploring with his brother, Jones mistook a narrow tunnel for the similarly tight "Birth Canal" passageway and became stuck upside-down in an area measuring 10 by 18 inches (25 by 46 cm), around 400 feet (120 m) from the cave's entrance. Jones was held in place like a hook, unable to move without causing serious harm due to the bends his body was placed in. A large team of rescue workers came to his assistance but were unable to retrieve Jones using a sophisticated rope-and-pulley system after a pulley failed mid-extrication. Jones ultimately suffered cardiac arrest due to the strain placed upon his body over several hours by his inverted, compressed position. Rescuers concluded that it would be too dangerous to attempt to retrieve his body; the landowner and Jones' family came to an agreement that the cave would be permanently closed with the body sealed inside, as a memorial to Jones. Explosives were used to collapse the ceiling close to Jones' body, and the entrance hole was filled with concrete to prevent further access.


title: Nutty Putty Cave

text: The closure of the cave was opposed by some members of the spelunking community. Facebook community groups petitioned to save the cave but failed. The cave was closed prior to Jones' death, but cavers had cut their way through the gated entrance. On April 4, 2018, the plaque that was engraved to Jones was reported to have been vandalized.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2008, he made his acting debut in "Cloverfield", and from 2010 to 2014, he voiced Tuffnut Thorston in the first two "How to Train Your Dragon" films. From 2014 to 2017, he starred as Erlich Bachman in the HBO sitcom "Silicon Valley" and also played Marvel Comics character Weasel in 2016's "Deadpool" and its 2018 sequel. Miller also has had roles in films such as "Yogi Bear", "She's Out of My League", "", "Big Hero 6", "Hell and Back", "Office Christmas Party", "The Emoji Movie", and "Ready Player One".


title: T.J. Miller

text: Miller was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of Leslie Miller, a clinical psychologist, and Kent Miller, an attorney from Chanute, Kansas. He attended Graland Country Day School and graduated from Denver's East High School, where he participated in drama productions. His father, who is Christian, is of English, Scottish, German and Swedish ancestry, whereas his mother, who is Ashkenazi Jewish, is of German-Jewish, Austrian-Jewish, and Russian-Jewish ancestry.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2003, Miller graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. with a B.A. in psychology with a concentration in situation theory and social influence. At GWU, he was a member of the comedy group receSs and the Lambda chapter of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. While in college, Miller studied the circus arts at Frichess Theatre Urbain in Paris and attended the British American Drama Academy in London, where he studied Shakespeare for a summer.


title: T.J. Miller

text: After college, Miller moved to Chicago and began to perform improvisation and stand-up comedy, performing with many local troupes. He toured with The Second City for two years. In 2008, he was named one of "Variety"'s 10 Comics To Watch.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2011, Miller released a comedy special, "No Real Reason", and a comedy album, "Mash Up Audiofile" in 2012.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2015, he was part of Funny or Die's "Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival," a touring show which included Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari, and other comics.


title: T.J. Miller

text: On June 17, 2017, HBO premiered his hour-long stand-up special, "T.J. Miller: Meticulously Ridiculous", which was filmed in Miller's native Denver at the end of his 2016 "Meticulously Ridiculous Tour".


title: T.J. Miller

text: In October 2017, Miller began his "Touring In Perpetuity Tour", a self described "One Man Philosophy Circus."


title: T.J. Miller

text: Miller appeared frequently as a member of the "round table" on "Chelsea Lately". He appeared as Marmaduke Brooker in "Carpoolers", which ran for 13 episodes on ABC in 20072008. In 2012, he voiced Robbie Valentino on the Disney channel cartoon "Gravity Falls". On December 13, 2010, October 28, 2011, and June 14, 2012, he performed stand-up on "Conan". On November 15, 2011, his stand-up special "No Real Reason" premiered on Comedy Central. In 2011, he hosted a special called "Mash Up", which was picked up in 2012 for a full season by Comedy Central. He starred in the Fox TV series "The Goodwin Games" as Jimmy Goodwin.


title: T.J. Miller

text: Miller starred in the HBO sitcom "Silicon Valley", which has been met with widespread critical acclaim and he won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2015. In May 2017, Miller and HBO jointly announced that Miller would not be returning for the 5th season of "Silicon Valley".


title: T.J. Miller

text: As a commercial actor, he voiced a talking ball of mucus in commercials for Mucinex and starred as Greg the Genie in a promotional campaign for Slim Jim meat snacks.


title: T.J. Miller

text: He voiced Gorburger, a giant blue monster talk show host, on "The Gorburger Show", which originally aired on Funny or Die and YouTube for 2 seasons in 201213, then on Comedy Central for a 3rd season in 2017 before being cancelled.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In "Cloverfield", Miller's film debut, he appeared onscreen for only a few minutes, but his voice was heard in almost every scene as the character who videotaped most of the events depicted. In 2009, he played Cessna Jim in "" and the dim-witted grindcore musician Rory in Mike Judge's comedy "Extract". In 2010, he co-starred in "She's Out of My League" as Stainer, played Brian the Concierge in "Get Him to the Greek" and appeared in a supporting role in the film "Unstoppable".


title: T.J. Miller

text: He voiced the character 'Tuffnut' in the Oscar-nominated animated films "How to Train Your Dragon" and "How to Train Your Dragon 2". He also played Dan in "Gulliver's Travels", released in December 2010.


title: T.J. Miller

text: He played the supporting character of Ranger Jones in the live-action/animated "Yogi Bear" 2010 film. Unlike his character on the cartoon show, he is "dumb-but-not-in-a-funny-way", according to the "Buffalo News". He was cast in the part after two auditions; as a joke, he sent Warner Bros. an improvised video audition with an actual bear, though he had already been offered the part before they received it.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2011, he appeared in the film "Our Idiot Brother". He had a cameo as administrative personnel for "Rolling Stone" in the 2012 film "Rock of Ages". He starred in the 2016 movie "Search Party" alongside Adam Pally.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2014, he appeared in "". In November 2014, he was the voice of Fred in the superhero CGI film "Big Hero 6". He also played Weasel in "Deadpool" and "Deadpool 2". In 2017, he portrayed the voice of the main protagonist Gene, a meh emoji with abnormal expressions, in the animated "The Emoji Movie," which received extremely negative reviews. In late March 2018, he appeared in a supporting role as I-R0K in the film "Ready Player One", which was directed by Steven Spielberg.


title: T.J. Miller

text: On September 12, 2011, Miller released a comedy rap concept album titled "The Extended Play E.P." The album features comedians Bo Burnham, Doug Benson, Pete Holmes and hip-hop artists Ugly Duckling and Johnny Polygon.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2012, Miller released "The Extended Play E.P. Illegal Art Remix Tape." Also in 2012, Miller released "Mash Up Audiofile" on Comedy Central Records to mixed reviews.


title: T.J. Miller

text: Miller started appearing on Chicago-based comedy Podcast Red Bar Radio in 2006 as a semi-regular co-host. He hosts a podcast with friend and fellow comedian Cash Levy, titled "Cashing in With TJ Miller", which began airing in March 2012 on the Nerdist Network. He is also a frequent guest on Doug Benson's podcast "Doug Loves Movies".


title: T.J. Miller

text: In 2014, Miller became engaged to his longtime girlfriend, actress and installation artist Kate Gorney, who changed her last name to Miller. They were married at the Denver Botanic Gardens on September 6, 2015.


title: T.J. Miller

text: Miller described learning about an undiagnosed cerebral arteriovenous malformation on his right frontal lobe on the Pete Holmes podcast "You Made It Weird" on October 28, 2011. He stated that he became more philosophical, narrated his behaviors, and was unable to sleep while filming "Yogi Bear" in New Zealand in 2010. His brain surgery was successful, though there was a 10 percent risk of fatality.


title: T.J. Miller

text: On December 9, 2016, Miller was arrested and jailed in Los Angeles for allegedly assaulting a driver of the Uber car service company following a debate he had with the driver over Donald Trump, of whom Miller is a critic. He was released on his own recognizance after bail was set at $20,000. Miller reached a settlement with the driver in March 2018.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In late 2017, allegations against Miller from his time in college in 2001 resurfaced, part of the Me Too movement and Weinstein effect. An anonymous woman who attended George Washington University with Miller told "The Daily Beast" reporter Asawin Suebsaeng that Miller (her then-boyfriend) became violent with her during a sexual encounter; he allegedly choked, shook, and punched her in the mouth, all without her consent.


title: T.J. Miller

text: Suebsaeng attempted to contact witnesses and other people involved with the case, some of whom corroborated the accuser's story, adding that it was brought to the attention of the college at the time. Student conduct proceedings were held, the results of which are sealed, although Suebsaeng wrote that "knowledgeable sources" had said that he was declared to be "expelled" at the conclusion of the proceedings.


title: T.J. Miller

text: The Millers responded to the allegations, characterizing the accuser as a vindictive former colleague in a campus comedy troupe who was asked to leave due to inappropriate behavior. The statement said that "[s]adly she is now using the current climate to bandwagon and launch these false accusations again", and also stated that her accusation "undermines the important movement to make women feel safe coming forward about legitimate claims against real known predators".


title: T.J. Miller

text: On December 19, 2017, it was reported that Miller had sent a transphobic email to film critic Danielle Solzman, a trans woman. Solzman had previously tweeted a screenshot of the email in August with Miller's name redacted, out of fear he would take legal action against her. The email, prompted by Solzman inquiring about a transphobic slur in Miller's website description, included Miller referring to Solzman as a "weird strange terrible man" and a "fucking asshole" and saying that her "pursuit of transgender identity is nothing more than an opportunity for you to distinguish yourself as someone who is special", as well as repeatedly deadnaming her.


title: T.J. Miller

text: Solzman said she had met and befriended Miller in the Chicago improv scene, that he had been supportive of her newly coming out as a trans woman, and that she (Solzman) was unsure why Miller had become hostile. Solzman also told "HuffPost" she had attempted to interest various publications in the story the previous September and had received several anonymous text messages on Miller's behalf threatening her with blacklisting and legal action.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In response to the story, a representative for Miller said that his client was "admittedly going through some things" but denied that he was transphobic and insisted that this was "about a specific issue he has with this person".


title: T.J. Miller

text: Miller was arrested on the night of April 9, 2018, at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York on federal charges related to a fake bomb threat made while aboard an Amtrak train. According to a Department of Justice press release, he placed an emergency call on March 18, 2018, and reported that a female passenger had "a bomb in her bag" while traveling on Amtrak Train 2256 from Washington, D.C., toward Penn Station in New York City. After authorities evacuated passengers and searched Amtrak Train 2256, it turned out that Miller was actually on Amtrak Train 2258, which was also evacuated of passengers and searched.


title: T.J. Miller

text: No evidence of any explosive device or materials was detected after officials stopped and inspected both trains. According to witnesses interviewed by Amtrak investigators, he appeared to be heavily intoxicated and involved, "in hostile exchanges with a woman who was sitting in a different row from him in the first-class car", and that he had been removed from the train prior to his intended stop due to his intoxication. On April 10, 2018, he was released on a $100,000 bond following an appearance at a federal court hearing in New Haven, Connecticut. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In September 2018, it was reported that Miller was negotiating a plea deal to avoid a trial. As a result of this and the sexual assault allegations, DreamWorks Animation removed Miller from "", with Justin Rupple overdubbing his lines as Tuffnut. The preliminary hearing in the case, after several postponements, was scheduled for March 31, 2020.


title: T.J. Miller

text: In July 2021, charges against Miller were dismissed. Prosecutors said their decision was based on "expert medical analyses and reports regarding the defendant's prior brain surgery and its continued neurological impacts, which cast doubt upon the requisite legal element of intent to commit the charged offense." Miller agreed to "make full financial restitution for the costs of the law enforcement response to the false 911 call, and to continue a thorough and necessary program of Cognitive Remediation to render any recurrence of such conduct most highly unlikely".


title: T.J. Miller

text: On July 18, 2018, actress Alice Wetterlund, who played a recurring character on "Silicon Valley", a show in which Miller starred, took to Twitter to accuse Miller of inappropriate, unprofessional behavior on set, writing, "I hope to not ruin it for you, but TJ Miller was a bully and petulant brat."


title: T.J. Miller

text: In response to her post, HBO, the network that produces the series, released a statement declaring that, "While this is the first time we have heard Alice Wetterlund comment on her experiences on 'Silicon Valley', we are disappointed to learn of her concerns. HBO and the producers have always taken very seriously our responsibility to create a welcoming and congenial environment for everyone who works on the show."