Louis XV (sep 2, 1715 – may 10, 1774)

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great-grandson of Louis XIV and the third son of Louis Duke of Burgundy/le Petit Dauphin (1682–1712), and his wife Marie Adélaïde of Savoy. When he was born in 1710, he was named the Duke of Anjou. The possibility of his becoming King seemed very remote; the King's oldest son and heir, Louis Le Grand Dauphin, Louis's father le Petit Dauphin and his elder surviving brother were ahead of him in the succession. However, the Grand Dauphin died of smallpox on 14 April 1711. On 12 February 1712 the mother of Louis, Marie Adélaïde, was stricken with measles and died, followed on 18 February by Louis's father. In March, both Louis and his older brother contracted measles, and the elder Louis died. When Louis XIV died on 1 September 1715, Louis, at the age of five, inherited the throne. Until he reached maturity (then defined as his 13th birthday) on 15 February 1723, the kingdom was ruled by Louis XIV's nephew Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, as Regent of France (the Duke was the son of Monsieur, Louis XIV's brother, and his second wife). Cardinal Fleury was his chief minister from 1726 until the Cardinal's death in 1743, at which time the young king took sole control of the kingdom.
His reign of almost 59 years (from 1715–1774) was the second longest in the history of France, exceeded only by his predecessor and great-grandfather, Louis XIV. In 1748, Louis returned the Austrian Netherlands, won at the Battle of Fontenoy of 1745. He ceded New France in North America to Spain and Great Britain at the conclusion of the disastrous Seven Years' War in 1763. He incorporated the territories of the Duchy of Lorraine and the Corsican Republic into the Kingdom of France. He was succeeded in 1774 by his grandson Louis XVI, who was executed by guillotine during the French Revolution. Two of his other grandsons, Louis XVIII and Charles X, occupied the throne of France after the fall of Napoleon I. Historians generally give his reign very low marks, especially as wars drained the treasury and set the stage for the governmental collapse and French Revolution in the 1780s.

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