The Man Who Would Be King: The Life of Philippe d'Orleans, Regent of France by Christine Pevitt Weidenfeld & Nicolson 366pp, £25 in UK
French absolutism was at its zenith from 1661 to 1774, during which time France had three all-powerful rulers: Louis XIV, Cardinal Fleury and Louis XV. There was just one brief interregnum, from 1715-23, when Philippe d'Orleans governed the country more precariously, as Regent during Louis XV's childhood. The flavour of the Regency period is captured precisely in the paintings of Watteau, whose short life as a mature painter almost exactly coincided with the eight years of Orleans's hegemony. Here, in her debut as an author, Christine Pevitt brings the Regent excitingly to life.
Philippe d'Orleans (1674-1723) was the grandson of Louis XIII and nephew of the "Sun King", who disliked him. More talented than most of his fellow oligarchs, he was always an enigma. Sceptical to a degree unusual even in a cynical age, he had wit and charm which concealed his very low opinion of human nature. Bisexual, amoral and godless, he appeared to be more tolerant and compassionate than his contemporaries, but when roused could be as deadly as a mamba: he got rid of his mistress Madame de Parabere in a brutal but effective way by telling her: "What a beautiful head, I could have it cut off whenever I wished." Apparently scholarly and erudite, he actually despised learning and was merely a good skimmer with a great memory. He was also physically courageous, as he showed at the battles of Steenkirk and Neerwinden in 1692, and commanded successfully in Italy and Spain.
For much of his early manhood he was in exile, out of favour at louis XIV's court. In the last years of the Sun King's reign he was suspected, unjustly, of poisoning the Dauphin and his family, who actually died of smallpox and scarlet fever, and of sleeping with his own daughter. His sexual promiscuity gave rise to the second suspicion, while the first was the result of his interest in chemistry; to the untutored mind this meant he was an expert in poisons and to the tutored it meant he dabbled in alchemy. The wall outside his Parisian seat at the Palais-Royale was daubed with the following: "Here they play Lot's game and make fine poisons."
When Louis XV died in 1715, Orleans proved himself a shrewd political operator. It took him just twenty-four hours to overturn the late king's will and outwit all political opponents so as to emerge as Regent with plenipotentiary powers. Louis XIV's will had made him simply primus inter pares in a Regency Council, a mere chairman with a casting vote, but Orleans revealed himself a political alchemist, at least, by marginalising his enemies as if by magic. Once he controlled all the levers of power, he set France on a new course. He reversed the previous traditional alliance with Spain and instead made common cause against Madrid with England, Holland and the emperor in the much-discussed Quadruple Alliance of 1717. While abandoning the Stuart Pretender he made a confidant of the Scots Jacobite John Law. This was perhaps his greatest mistake. Law's ambitious scheme for a central bank led to the great speculative crash of the "Mississippi Bubble", an event almost simultaneous with the South Sea Bubble in England.
The standard scholarly life of Orleans is by J.H. Shennan. Christine Pevitt restricts herself to printed primary sources but has put together an excellent narrative, counterpointing high politics with vignettes of everyday life in the Paris streets. A silly, gushing introduction in which the author records her impressions of Paris leads one to expect the worst, but even good pilots can have bad take-offs and, once safely airborne, Pevitt does an extremely efficient job of underlining the ambiguity and complexity in Orleans's character. She suggests, plausibly, that Orleans was like Henry IV in Part One of the Shakespeare play, a man who concealed his talents at first under a carapace of debauchery, drunkenness, sexual promiscuity and cynicism. This is an auspicious debut by a promising author.
Frank McLynn is a biographer and critic