Louis François I de Bourbon, prince de Conti
Louis François de Bourbon, prince de Conti (born August 13, 1717 - August 2, 1776 ) belonged to the House of Bourbon-Conti , the third branch of the Bourbons .
As Prince of the Blood (and cousin of Louis XV ) he was a Pair de France , member of the upper house of the French Parliament ; in the 1730s and 1740s he distinguished himself as a troop leader of the French armies (victor in the Battle of Coni), especially during the Polish and Austrian Wars of Succession . He was chief diplomat of the French secret network of the Secret du roi until the 1760s and since 1749 Grand Prior of the Order of Malta , based in the Enclos du Temple in Paris. Until 1756/57 he was one of the king's closest confidants at court, after the break with Louis XV. the sharpest aristocratic adversary against absolute monarchy. In addition to his political activity, he is best known as a great art collector and promoter of the theater and opera in Paris; he protected and promoted Rousseau as well as Beaumarchais and protected the most important Jansenists around Louis Adrien Le Paige on the side of parliament. In the last years of his life he was one of the worst opponents of the révolution de Maupeou of 1770, in which the old parliament was dissolved, and led the feudal-aristocratic front against the liberal reforms of Turgot under Louis XVI. on.
Conti as a courtier
"Mon cousin, l'avocat" was the name of Louis XV. his cousin Louis François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (also spelled “Conty” in the 18th century) not without irony. As the Prince of Blood , he represented the values and ideas of the French high nobility par excellence . As a talented and ambitious man, he tried to measure himself against the king in all areas. Characterized by his contemporaries as “proud, amiable, ambitious” and at the same time as “Frondeur, a gourmand, lazy, noble and dissolute” ( Charles Joseph de Ligne ), Conti embodied like no other the paradoxes of the aristocracy in the outgoing Ancien Régime. Ambitious and hungry for power, he sought constant confrontation with Louis XV.
Until the 1740s, the young prince fought as a celebrated war hero on the battlefields of Europe. Young, ambitious and talented, after leaving the army, he looked for new tasks that matched his ambitions. Louis XV valued his cousin for his abilities and feared him for his political ambitions. As for Conti's grandfather François-Louis de Bourbon (1664–1709), who was perceived by Louis XIV as a political threat, Conti's ambitions should be satisfied with the Polish throne. In order to be elected as king in succession to August III. to secure, installed Louis XV. At the end of the 1740s, a secret network of informants paralleled the regular diplomatic service. The secret du roi under Conti's direction was a Europe-wide espionage system that had the goal of enforcing the prince among the European powers and in Poland as the new king. The special position at court as a close confidante of the monarch and ministre sans portefeuille attracted Conti to the opposition of Madame de Pompadour . The men belonging to their circle like Cardinal François-Joachim de Bernis pursued a policy that was contrary to Conti's interests. The prince was kept out of the negotiations in the run-up to the reversal of the alliances by clever intrigues of the Pompadour . The king knew that his cousin was against this policy and did not consult with him any further. The withholding of high military tasks at the beginning of the Seven Years' War led to a final break between Conti and Louis XV in 1756.
Conti as a rebel
Like his cousins from the House of Condé and Orléans , the Prince de Conti was also a committed fighter for the cause of the aristocracy against an excessive position of the king. In their eyes it should only be a primus inter pares , who should give the greats of the country a say in government business. In the imagination of parts of the high aristocracy, the parliaments as sovereign courts of justice would have to control the royal decisions. The conflicts between king, aristocracy and parliaments became more and more vehement with the rise of the monarch to absolute ruler. The aristocracy, weakened since the failure of the fronde princière and the fronde parlementaire in the 17th century, gained new self-confidence as a result of the Régence . Especially after the death of the ruling Cardinal Fleury in 1743, Louis XV. Difficulties in curbing the princes frondeurs and the parliament based on the lois fondamentales of the kingdom. The Prince de Conti belonged as a peer to the parliament of Paris. By 1756 , Conti was trusted by both the king and parliament, so that he could mediate between the two conflicting parties. After his final break with Louis XV. at the beginning of the Seven Years' War he became one of the monarch's most influential opponents.
After breaking with the king in 1756/1757, Conti left Versailles and from then on led the life of a rebellious aristocrat in Paris. Louis-François de Bourbon was considered one of the most brilliant heads of the parliamentary opposition to Louis XV. Unlike most of his blood cousins, he was known for his "éloquence mâle et persuasive". In addition to his rhetorical skills, he had excellent legal and political knowledge. In political terms, he always underlined the need for a balance of power between king, nobility and parliament. At every conceivable opportunity he agitated against the overwhelming power of the monarch. For example, with the protection of the Jansenists around Louis Adrien Le Paige , who in the eyes of the royal family were considered oppositionists because of their quasi-Protestant criticism of the church and rulership, as well as with the establishment of a common front of the Princes of the Blood against the king after its dissolution of parliament in 1770 , whose chancellor Maupeou exiled resisting members of parliament. Even after the re-establishment of the old parliament by Louis XVI. In 1774 he criticized the new royal policy and that of the Physiocrats around Turgot , to whose overthrow Conti contributed. From his mini-Versailles in the Temple , the prince sought every opportunity to weaken royal authority in the 1760s and 1770s.
His commitment on the part of parliament against the absolute power of the king went hand in hand with a pronounced interest in art and science: in the 1760s and 1770s, the prince built up one of the most extensive art and curiosity collections of his time that met the demands of a museum today would have. The more than a thousand paintings, drawings and sculptures in the Conti Collection included the most important Italian, French and Nordic artists from the 16th to 18th centuries. This included countless natural and technical objects that were used to illustrate all kinds of cultural techniques and which heralded the Enlightenment's thirst for knowledge.
After breaking with the royal family and leaving Versailles, he never again held an important political office. He died almost two years after the death of his cousin Louis XV, at the height of his reputation among parts of the Parisian population, the parliamentarians and the princes and dukes. As a staunch atheist, he was the first prince of the House of Bourbon to refuse the sacraments, which is why he was buried in a small circle in Isle-Adam, the Conti country seat, in 1776. Until the end, the aristocrat defending his feudal class privileges held fast to his convictions and thus remained one of the great exceptional phenomena among the French princes of the 18th century.
family
Louis Francois was married to Louise Diane d'Orléans , the youngest daughter of the French regent Philip of Orléans . From this marriage only the son Louis François II. De Bourbon, prince de Conti , who lived from 1734 to 1814 and with whom the house of Conti went out.
Remarks
- ↑ Prince de Ligne 1990, p. 479
- ^ Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, dep man, naf 36, I
- ↑ Capon 1907, p. 164
literature
- Les Trésors des princes de Bourbon Conti , exhibition catalog L'Isle-Adam, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Louis-Senlecq, publ. by Frédéric Chappey, Paris: Somogy éditions d'art 2000, ISBN 2-85056-398-6 .
- Bussmann, Frédéric. The Prince de Conti and the Cabinet of the Temple. Highly aristocratic collecting in the outgoing Ancien Régime , dissertation Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin 2005.
- Capon, Yves, and Robert Yve-Plessis. Vie privée du prince de Conty, Louis-François de Bourbon (1717–1776) , Paris: Jean Schemit 1907 (= Paris gallant au XVIIIe siècle , vol. 3).
- Ligne, Charles-Joseph, prince de. Mémoires, lettres et pensées , ed. by Alexis Payne, Paris: Bourin 1990, ISBN 2-87686-044-9 .
- Nielen, Marie-Adélaïde. Maison de Conti. Répertoire numérique détaillé des papiers séquestrés à la révolution francaise , Paris: Center historique des archives nationales 2004, ISBN 2-86000-308-8 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Conti, Louis François I de Bourbon, prince de |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bourbon, Louis François I. de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French nobleman |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 13, 1717 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 2, 1776 |
| Place of death | Paris , Palais du Temple |