Louis XV (Versailles, 15 February 1710 – Versailles, 10 May 1774) ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death on 10 May 1774. Coming to the throne at the age of five, Louis initially reigned with the aid of the Régent, Philippe, duc d'Orléans, his great-uncle. He took formal personal control of the government of France on his thirteenth birthday, 15 February 1723. Unexpectedly surviving the death of most of the royal family between 1711-1715, which saw the deaths of Louis XIV and the three following members of the line of succession, Louis XV enjoyed a favourable reputation at the beginning of his reign and earned the epithet "le Bien-Aimé" ("the Beloved"). In time, his lack of morals, general inability to effectively reform France and the Monarchy, and the perceived failings of his foreign policy caused him to lose the admiration of his subjects and when he died he was one of the most unpopular kings of France. 

Louis XV was born in the Palace of Versailles on 15 February 1710, during the reign of his great-grandfather Louis XIV, to the third surviving son of Louis, le Grand Dauphin, that is Louis, duc de Bourgogne and his wife, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy. At birth, he received the customary title of younger sons, the "duc d'Anjou". Moreover, as a great-grandson of the reigning king, he was a "Petit-Fils de France". Louis, le Grand Dauphin, the only surviving legitimate son of Louis XIV, had, with his wife, Marie-Anne-Victoire de Bavière, three sons, the duc de Bourgogne (Louis XV's father), Philippe, duc d'Anjou (who became King of Spain) and Charles, duc de Berry. Louis' mother, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy was the eldest daughter of Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy and Anne-Marie d'Orléans. Through her mother, Marie-Adélaïde was the granddaughter of Philippe I, duc d'Orléans, the younger brother of Louis XIV, and was the second cousin of her husband, Louis, duc de Bourgogne. She was betrothed to him by the Treaty of Turin in 1695, and they married on 7 December 1697. Marie-Adélaïde was a very lively young woman who reminded Louis XIV of his earlier days and of whom he was consequently very fond.

This recent marriage, combined with a royal family that had produced six male heirs in three generations (one son, three grandsons, and two great-grandsons from his oldest grandson), seemed to ensure the prospects of the House of Bourbon and the line of succession. However, subsequent events caused a number of members of the French royal family to be removed from the picture. In 1700, Philippe, duc d'Anjou, Louis' uncle, became King of Spain as Philip V, inheriting the crown through the claims of his grandmother, Marie-Thérèse d' Autriche, wife of Louis XIV and a Spanish princess. Upon his accession, Louis XIV had perfunctorily confirmed in the Parlement of Paris Philip V's rights to the French throne, which as a matter of France's Ancien Régime constitutional laws of succession could not be altered or removed. As a result, European fears of a Franco-Spanish union had increased and the War of the Spanish Succession had occurred. The war had not been proceeding smoothly for France and the chances of peace on terms allowing Philip V to govern Spain while at the same time retaining his right to the French throne were slight. These chances would appear even worse as a result of the events of 1711-1712.

In April 1711, the Grand Dauphin suddenly died, making the duc de Bourgogne the new Dauphin. This, in itself, while unfortunate, was not great cause for concern since the duc de Bourgogne still had two sons, Louis, duc de Bretagne and the future Louis XV. This changed less than a year later when Marie-Adélaïde contracted smallpox (or measles) and died on 12 February 1712. Her husband, who had reputedly remained by her side all through her sickness, was heartbroken by the death of his wife and died before the end of the week of the same disease. Within a week of his death, it was clear that the couple's two children had been infected. The elder son, the duc de Bretagne, was repeatedly treated by bloodletting in an effort to save him. This effort was unsuccessful and he died on 8 March 1712. His younger brother, the duc d'Anjou, was personally treated by his governess, Madame de Ventadour, who forbade any bloodletting. Finally, the duc de Berry, youngest son of le Grand Dauphin and, after the death of his elder brother, the likely regent of the latest Dauphin, died in a 1714 hunting accident. As a result of these deaths, the fate of the dynasty now lay in the survival of a four-year-old child. The death of this child would leave Louis XIV with two possible successors: Philip V or Philippe II, duc d'Orléans, the nephew of Louis XIV and the first cousin of the late Grand Dauphin. However, Philip V had, as a result of the Treaty of Utrecht, renounced all rights to the French succession. Nevertheless. Phillip V claimed that, according to the French Law of Succession, he could not be deprived of his rights to the throne. Because most European powers at the time saw the direct union of Frace and Spain under one ruler as a significant threat, the prospect of such a union threatened to unleash another European war in addition to a civil war in France.

As a young child Louis XV was made aware of the heavy responsibility that rested on his shoulders. He was now an orphan, with no surviving siblings, no legitimate uncles or aunts except for Philip V, and no legitimate first cousins (except those in Madrid). His only close relation was the duc d'Orléans, Louis XIV's nephew. On 1 September 1715, Louis XIV died of gangrene after having reigned for 72 years. In August 1714, he made a will which granted a prominent role in the anticipated regency to his sons by his mistress, Madame de Montespan: Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine and Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, comte de Toulouse, who had been legitimated at the insistence of Louis's second wife, Françoise d'Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon. The will enhanced the positions of Toulouse and the elder son, Maine, at the expense of the man who was expected to become regent and rule France until Louis XV reached adulthood, Philippe d'Orléans, son of Louis XIV's younger brother. The will stipulated that until the new king reached the age of majority, the nation was to be governed by a Regency Council made up of fourteen members. Philippe d'Orléans was named president of the council, but all decisions were to be taken by majority vote. The composition of the council, including Maine, Toulouse, and various members of Louis XIV's administration, meant that Orléans was often outvoted. The content of the will had become known before Louis XIV died, and the various factions had already begun the process of gaining supporters. Orléans enjoyed the support of many amongst the old sword nobility (noblesse d'épée), descending from medieval knights, as opposed to the noblesse de robe, the new aristocracy of recently ennobled lawyers and civil servants. Louis XIV had often excluded the noblesse d'épée from government in favour of commoners from the bourgeoisie who often entered the noblesse de robe and whom he could control better. Thus the noblesse d'épée yearned for a change of policy more favourable to them, and were greatly displeased with the legitimisation of Maine and Toulouse, which they regarded as an affront to the traditional rules of inheritance. The Parlement of Paris, another political entity which Louis XIV had shut out of power, also supported the Orléans regency and hoped that a change of course in the government would increase its influence. Religion was also a factor. Madame de Maintenon was a supporter of the Jesuits, the Pope, and the Pope's controversial Bull Unigenitus, which was a 1713 papal bull directed against the Jansenists, a Catholic group popular in France who were deemed to have Protestant tendencies. Orléans, by contrast, was supported by the Jansenists and the Gallicans (French Catholics who wanted their church to be more independent from Rome) who hoped he would dislodge the Jesuit-Papist group from power after his accession to the regency. In the final weeks before his death, Louis XIV arrived at a reconciliation with his nephew Philippe d'Orléans. Bidding adieu to the closest courtiers and ministers on 26 August, Louis told them: Always obey the orders my nephew Philippe d'Orléans will give you; he will govern the kingdom".

During the days prior to the king's death, Philippe d'Orléans met with and made promises to various aristocrats, clergymen, and members of the Parlement of Paris to secure their support. He promised the aristocrats places on the new government councils he intended to form, which would be known as the polysynody; he assured Jansenists and Gallicans he would be lenient regarding Unigenitus; and he promised the Parlement he would restore the right of remonstrance (the right to criticize and delay royal edicts), which had been taken away from the Parlement by Louis XIV in 1673. On 2 September, the day after Louis XIV died, there was a special session of the Parlement of Paris. It was attended not only by the magistrates who were usually there, but also by the peers and princes of the blood. The king's will was read, and the future of the government decided. Philippe d'Orléans addressed the assembly. He stated his claim to the regency, and asked that he be given full power. He mentioned the recent conversation he had with Louis in which the king had stated that he would govern. He reminded those present of the arrangements he had negotiated with them over the preceding days. The Parlement responded positively to these arguments. As a result, he was granted the right to choose his own Regency Council. Thus the king's written will was to a large extent nullified, and Philippe d'Orléans became regent. In exchange, the Parlement recovered its right of remonstrance. Orléans also made the important symbolic decision to relocate the government to Paris, and disbanded the court in Versailles.

The regent conducted affairs of state from his Parisian palace, the Palais Royal. The young Louis XV was moved to the modern lodgings attached to the medieval fortress of Vincennes, located 7 km/4.5 miles east of Paris in the Forest of Vincennes, where the air was deemed more wholesome and healthy than in Paris. But, a few weeks later, as the severity of winter fell upon Vincennes, the young king was moved to the Tuileries Palace, in the center of Paris, near the Palais Royal. In keeping with French royal tradition, that princes should be put in the care of men when they reached their seventh birthdays, Louis was separated from his governess, Madame de Ventadour, in February 1717, and placed in the care of the duc de Villeroi, who had been designated as his governor in Louis XIV's will of August 1714. The duc de Villeroi served under the formal authority of the duc du Maine, who was charged with overseeing the king's education. He was aided by André-Hercule de Fleury (later to become Cardinal de Fleury), who served as the king's tutor. As his tutor Fleury gave him an excellent education. Louis was taught by renowned professors such as the geographer Guillaume Delisle. Louis XV had a curious and open-minded personality. He was an avid reader, and he developed eclectic tastes. Later in life Louis XV advocated the creation of departments in physics (1769) and mechanics (1773) at the Collège de France.

During the Régence, Philippe d'Orléans, in keeping with his promises, favoured the nobility (aristocrats) who had been deprived of power during the reign of Louis XIV. He established the so-called polysynody (15 September 1715), a short-lived structure of councils that gave the aristocracy more input in decision making. He concluded an alliance with Great Britain and the Netherlands in 1717 (Triple Alliance) in an effort to prevent Philip V of Spain from claiming the crown of France should the young Louis XV die. Confronted with a total lack of expertise amongst the aristocracy in government affairs, the regent reverted to the monarchical organisation of government that existed under Louis XIV and, by 1718, reinstated secretaries of state. Cardinal Dubois, close confidant of the regent, was made prime minister in 1722. In an attempt to replenish the French treasury, the regency tried a number of original financial experiments, notable amongst which was the famous inflationary scheme of John Law. The bursting of the speculative bubble fueled by Law's system brought about the ruin of many aristocrats.

In 1721, Louis XV was betrothed to his first cousin, Infanta Mariana Victoria of Spain. The eleven-year-old king was not interested in the arrival of his future wife, the three-year-old Spanish Infanta. In June 1722, the young king and the court returned to Versailles, where they would stay until the end of the reign. In October of the same year, Louis XV was officially crowned in Reims Cathedral. On 15 February 1723, the king's majority was declared by the Parlement of Paris. This ended the Regency. Initially, Louis XV left the duc d'Orléans in charge of state affairs. The duc d'Orléans was made first minister on the death of Cardinal Dubois in August 1723, and he himself died in December of the same year. Following the advice of Fleury, Louis XV appointed his cousin, Louis Henri, duc de Bourbon, to replace the late duc d'Orléans. The duc de Bourbon was worried by the health of the young king. His primary motivation was a desire to prevent the family of the late regent, the House of Orléans, from ascending the throne should the king die. The duc de Bourbon saw the House of Orléans as his enemy. The king was quite frail, and several alerts led to concern for his life. The Spanish Infanta was too young to produce an heir. Thus, the duc de Bourbon set about choosing a European princess old enough to produce an heir. Eventually, the twenty-one year old Maria Leszczyńska, daughter of Stanisław Leszczyński, the deposed King of Poland was chosen. An impoverished and plain-looking princess who had followed her father's misfortunes, she was nonetheless said to be virtuous. In addition, she was from a royal family which had never intermarried with the French royal family. The relatively low status of her father would also ensure that the marriage would not cause diplomatic embarrassment to France by having to choose one royal court over another. The marriage was celebrated in September 1725. Louis's marriage to Marie Leszczyńska produced many children, but the king was persistently (and notoriously) unfaithful. Some of his mistresses, such as Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, are as well-known as the king himself, and his affairs with three Mailly-Nesle sisters are documented by the formal agreements into which he entered. In his later years, Louis developed a penchant for young girls, keeping several at a time in a personal seraglio known as the Parc aux Cerfs ("Deer Park"), one of whose inhabitants, Marie-Louise O'Murphy, was immortalised in a painting by Boucher.

The ministry of the duc de Bourbon was marked by many incidents which resulted in serious economic and social problems. These included; persecution of Protestants (1726), monetary manipulations, the creation of new taxes, such as the fiftieth (cinquantième) in 1725, and the high price of grain. As a result of de Bourbon's rising unpopularity in 1726 the king dismissed him. As his replacement, to serve as first minister, the king selected his old tutor, Cardinal de Fleury. From 1726 until his death in 1743, Cardinal de Fleury ruled France with the king's assent. It was the most peaceful and prosperous part of the reign of Louis XV, despite some Parlement and Jansenist unrest. After the financial and human losses suffered at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, the rule of Fleury, is seen by historians as a period of "recovery". With the help of controllers-general of finances Michel Robert Le Peletier des Forts (1726-1730) and Philibert Orry (1730-1745), Fleury stabilized the French currency (1726) and balanced the budget in 1738. Economic expansion was also a central goal of the government: communications were improved, with the completion of the Saint-Quentin canal (linking the Oise and Somme rivers) in 1738, later extended to the Escaut River and the Low Countries, and with the systematic building of a national road network. By the middle of the 18th century, France had the most modern and extensive road network in the world. The ponts et chaussées engineers, built modern highways, many of which are still in use today, stretching from Paris to the most distant borders of France. Trade was also stimulated by the Bureau and the Council of Commerce, and French foreign maritime trade increased from 80 to 308 million livres between 1716 and 1748. However, rigid Colbertist laws (prefiguring dirigisme) hindered industrial development.

In foreign relations, Fleury sought peace by attempting to maintain the alliance with England and pursuing reconciliation with Spain. In September 1729, at the end of her third pregnancy, the queen finally gave birth to a male child, heir to the throne, the Dauphin Louis (1729-1765). The birth of a long awaited heir, which ensured the survival of the dynasty for the first time since 1712, was welcomed with tremendous joy and celebration in all spheres of French society. The young king was extremely popular at the time. In 1733, on the advice of his secretary of state for foreign affairs Germain Louis Chauvelin (1727-1737), the king abandoned Fleury's peace policy to intervene in the War of the Polish Succession. In addition to attempting to restore his father-in-law Stanisław Leszczyński to the Polish throne, the king also hoped to wrest the long-coveted duchy of Lorraine from its duke, Francis III. The duke's expected marriage to Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI's daughter, Maria Theresa, would bring Austrian power dangerously close to the French border. In the end, the half-hearted French intervention did not allow Stanisław to recover his throne. In the west, however, French troops rapidly overran Lorraine, and peace was restored as early as 1735. By the Treaty of Vienna (November 1738), Stanisław was compensated for the loss of his Polish throne with the duchy of Lorraine, which would eventually pass to King Louis as his son-in-law, while Duke Francis III of Lorraine was made heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as compensation for the loss of Lorraine. The war cost France very little, compared to the financial and human drains of Louis XIV's wars, and was a clear success for French diplomacy. The acquisition of Lorraine (effective in 1766 at Stanislaus' death) was to be the last territorial expansion of France on the continent before the French Revolution. Shortly after this favourable result, France's mediation in the war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire led to the Treaty of Belgrade (September 1739) which favoured the Ottoman Empire, beneficiary of a Franco-Ottoman alliance against the Habsburgs since the early 16th century. As a result, in 1740 the Ottoman Empire renewed the French capitulations, which marked the supremacy of French trade in the Middle East. With these successes, Louis XV's prestige reached its highest point.

In 1740, the death of Emperor Charles VI and his succession by his daughter Maria Theresa started the European War of the Austrian Succession. The elderly Cardinal de Fleury had too little energy left to oppose this war, which was strongly supported by the anti-Austrian party at court. Renewing the cycle of conflicts so typical of Louis XIV's reign, the king entered the war in 1741 on the side of Prussia. The war would last seven years. Fleury did not live to see the end of the war. After Fleury's death, in January 1743, the king followed his predecessor's example, ruling from then on without a first minister. At the death of his old tutor Fleury in 1743, the king was 33 years old. In June 1744, the king left Versailles for the front in order to take personal command of his armies fighting in the War of the Austrian Succession.

Late in Louis’s reign Corsica and Lorraine were won, but this came only a few years after the devastating loss of nearly all of France's colonial empire to France's arch-enemy Great Britain, in the Seven Years' War. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 proved one of the most humiliating episodes of the French monarchy. France ceded India, Canada, and all lands east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain, while Spain received France's lands west of the Mississippi. France's empire in the New World was thus almost completely lost; the kingdom retained control only of some territories in the West Indies, French Guiana, and the tiny islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Canada. France's policies in the Americas and India had ended in a dismal failure. Its prestige sank dramatically.

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, later the marquise de Pompadour, who met Louis XV in February 1745 at a masked ball given in honour of the Dauphin's marriage, was the most famous mistress of the reign, and the most honourable one. She was the daughter of a chief agent of the powerful Pâris family of financiers who became embroiled in the intrigue that ousted the duc de Bourbon as head of the Regency council in favour of Cardinal de Fleury. A beautiful woman, educated, cultured, intelligent, and sincerely attached to the king, she nonetheless possessed one major shortcoming in the everyone's eyes: she was a commoner, from the bourgeoisie, and even worse, a commoner who meddled in royal politics. Despite the critics, the marquise de Pompadour had an undeniable influence on the flourishing of French arts during the reign of Louis XV, a reign that is often considered the peak of French architecture and interior design. A patron of the arts, the Marquise amassed a considerable amount of furniture and objets d'art in her various estates. She was responsible for the tremendous development of the porcelain manufactory of Sèvres, which became one of the most famous porcelain manufacturers in Europe, and her commands ensured the living of artists and families of craftsmen for many years. She was also a prominent patron of architecture, being responsible for the building of the Place Louis XV (now called Place de la Concorde) and the École Militaire in Paris, both built by herprotégé Ange-Jacques Gabriel. The École Militaire, for the creation of which she successfully lobbied the king, showed her commitment to the training of officers from poor families of the aristocracy. The Marquise was a liberal at heart and she steadily defended the Encyclopédie against the attacks of the Church. She was a supporter of the Philosophy of the Enlightenment, and tried to win the king to its new ideas, albeit not quite as successfully as she hoped. She was criticised for the lavish display of luxury in her various estates, although her rich family of financiers in many instances gave money to the government and saved the monarchy from bankruptcy. All her estates, which she had bequeathed to the state, reverted to the crown at her death.

The marquise de Pompadour was officially settled on the third floor (second storey) of the Palace of Versailles, in small but comfortable apartments that can still be visited today. There, she organised fine suppers for the king, with chosen guests, far from the pomp and etiquette of the court. The atmosphere in these private quarters was so relaxed that the king was said to serve coffee during the suppers. She often entertained the king, trying to relieve him from the state of boredom in which the court often plunged him. The king, who liked a more bourgeois lifestyle than his forefather Louis XIV, found in the private apartments of the marquise de Pompadour, located above his own office and bed chamber, the intimacy and reassuring feminine presence of which he had been deprived during his childhood. The marquise de Pompadour, who was reportedly in frail health, was no more than a friend after 1750. Although their sexual relationship stopped, she remained the close confidante and friend of the king until her death, quite a feat in the history of royal mistresses.

Most government work was conducted in committees of ministers which met without the king. The king reviewed policy only in the Conseil d'en haut, the High Council, which was composed of the king, the dauphin, the chancellor, the contrôleur général des finances, and the secretary of state in charge of foreign affairs. Created by Louis XIV, the council was in charge of state policy regarding religion, diplomacy, and war. There, he let various political factions oppose each other and vie for influence and power: the dévot party, led by the Comte d'Argenson, secretary of state for war, opposed the parti philosophique, which supported the Enlightenment philosophy and was led by Machault d'Arnouville, controller-general of finances.

The parti philosophique was supported by the marquise de Pompadour, who acted as a sort of minister without portfolio from the time she became royal mistress in 1745 until her death in 1764. The Marquise was in favour of reforms. Supported by her clan of financiers (Pâris-Duverney, Montmartel, etc.), she obtained from the king the appointment of ministers (Bernis, secretary of state for foreign affairs, in 1757), as well as their dismissal (Orry, controller-general of finances, in 1745; Maurepas, secretary of state for the Navy, in 1749). On her advice, the king supported the policy of fiscal justice designed by Machault d'Arnouville. In order to finance the budget deficit, which amounted to 100 million livres in 1745, Machault d'Arnouville created a tax on the twentieth of all revenues which affected also the privileged classes (Edict of Marly, 1749).

After the death of Fleury, France initially experienced success abroad despite the King's loss of his trusted advisor. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), which pitted the French and Prussians against the Austrians, British, and Dutch, culminated in a series of major French victories: the Battle of Fontenoy (1745), the Battle of Rocourt (1746), and the Battle of Lauffeld (1747). The Battle of Fontenoy, won by the Maréchal de Saxe, is still remembered as one of the most decisive French victories against the British. By 1748, France occupied the entire Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium), then the wealthiest area of Europe, and appeared on its way to fulfilling its traditional dream of extending its north-eastern border to the Rhine. The embarrassment at Metz (1744) now largely forgotten, the king was at the peak of his popularity. However, at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, Louis shocked his people and the rest of Europe by agreeing to restore all his conquests to Austria. Louis XV, who at heart was not a bellicose king, unlike his great-grandfather Louis XIV, felt content to rule a nearly hexagon-shaped kingdom, which he called his pré carré (i.e. "square field"), a term still used in French politics today. He thought it better to cultivate the pré carré rather than trying to expand it. The king declared he had made peace "as a king and not as a merchant". The attitude of the king was hailed in Europe, and he became overnight the "arbiter of Europe".

By 1755, a new European conflict was brewing, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle being but a sort of truce. Already, French and British were fighting each other in North America without a declaration of war. In 1755, the British seized 300 French merchant ships, in violation of international law. A few months later, on 16 January 1756, Great Britain and Prussia signed a treaty of "neutrality". In Paris and Versailles, the parti philosophique could not hide their disappointment at this betrayal by King Frederick II of Prussia, who was until then seen as an enlightened sovereign friend of the Philosophers. Frederick II had even welcomed Voltaire in Potsdam when the famous writer had run into trouble with the dévot party in France. But the truth was that Frederick II was motivated first and foremost by personal interests and the desire to expand the territory of Prussia by any means available. He had already abandoned his French ally during the War of Austrian Succession, signing a separate peace treaty with Austria in December 1745. The Marquise de Pompadour particularly disliked Frederick II, who had always showed contempt for her, and even named one of his poodles "Pompadour". At the same time, French officials realized that the Habsburg empire of Austria was no more the danger it had been in the heyday of the Habsburgs, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, when they controlled Spain and most of Europe and presented a formidable challenge to France. The new dangerous power looming now on the horizon was Prussia. In a "reversal of alliances", the king signed the Treaty of Versailles with Austria on 1 April 1756, overruling his ministers and putting an end to more than 200 years of conflict with the Habsburgs. The new Franco-Austrian Alliance would last intermittently for the next thirty five years. Louis apparently expected that joining with Austria would prevent another war on the continent by confronting Prussia with a counter-coalition. He was mistaken. Austria was bent on regaining Silesia, which Prussia had grabbed in 1740 and had not returned. At the end of August 1756, having learned that Austria was negotiating to enlist Russia against him, Frederick II invaded Saxony without a declaration of war. He soon defeated the unprepared Saxon and Austrian armies and occupied the whole of Saxony. The Saxon ruler's younger daughter was the Dauphin's wife and his elder daughter was married to Charles VII of Naples, a Bourbon cousin. Frederick's treatment of the Polish-Saxon royal family was particularly brutal; Queen Maria Josepha, the dauphine's mother, died from maltreatment. These actions by Frederick II profoundly shocked Europe, and particularly France. The wife of the Dauphin had a miscarriage as a result of the news coming from Saxony. Louis XV was left with no choice but to enter the war. Meanwhile, Britain had already declared war on France on 18 May 1756. The ensuing Seven Years' War (1756-1763) was to have profound consequences for France and Britain.

At home, discontent grew, fuelled by the perceived political incompetence of the king and the spending spree of the court. On 5 January 1757, would-be assassin Damiens entered the Palace of Versailles, as did thousands of people every day to petition the king. At 6pm, as night had fallen on a cold Versailles covered in snow, the king, who was visiting his daughter, left her apartments to return to the Trianon where he was staying. As he was walking in the Marble Courtyard between two lines of guards lighting the way with torches, headed toward his carriage which was waiting at the edge of the Marble Courtyard, Damiens suddenly emerged from the dark, passed through the guards, and stabbed the king in the side with a penknife. The 8.1 cm (3.2 inch) blade entered the king's body between the fourth and fifth ribs. The king, who was bleeding, remained calm and called for a confessor as he thought he would die. Thoughts of poison came to his mind. At the sight of the queen, who had come in a hurry, he asked for forgiveness for his misbehaviour. However, the king survived. He was probably saved by the thick layers of clothes he wore on that cold day, which cushioned the blade, protecting the internal organs. Allegedly, the blade penetrated only 1 cm (0.4 inch) into the king's body, leading Voltaire to mock what he called a "pinprick".

The king, bent on forgiving Damiens, could not avoid a trial for regicide. Tried by the Parlement of Paris, Damiens was executed on the Place de Grève on 28 March 1757. The king, who had displayed calm, and royal dignity on the day of the assassination attempt, sank into profound depression in the following weeks. He became convinced that he was on the wrong track. All attempts at reforms were abandoned. At the marquise de Pompadour's instigation, the king dismissed his two most hated ministers, the comte d'Argenson, secretary of state for war, and Machault d'Arnouville, keeper of the seals (justice minister) and before that controller-general of finances; and he called Choiseul to the government. Reforms would resume only with Maupeou in 1771. Louis and his minister were deeply unhappy about Great Britain's victory in the Seven Years War and in the years following the Treaty of Paris they began drawing up a long-term plan that would involve construction of a larger navy, building an anti-British coalition of states that would lead to an eventual war of revenge and see France regain its former colonies from Britain. Choiseul was the leading advocate of this scheme, and was prepared to go to war with Britain over the Falklands Crisis in 1770. Louis, however, did not believe France was ready and instead dismissed Choiseul.

Louis XV died of smallpox at the Palace of Versailles. Louis XV was the first Bourbon whose heart was not, as tradition demanded, cut out and placed in a special coffer. Instead, alcohol was poured into his coffin and his remains were soaked in quick lime. In a surreptitious late-night ceremony attended by only one courtier, the body was taken to the Saint Denis Basilica.

Louis' death saw the French monarchy at its nadir, in political, financial and moral terms. It might have recovered, but this would have required an individual of unique abilities. Since Louis XV's son, Louis, the dauphin, had died nine years earlier, the throne passed to his grandson, the conventional and unimaginative Louis XVI. Two of Louis XV's other grandchildren, Louis XVIII and Charles X, would occupy the throne of France after the fall of Napoleon I.