Hog Weed
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Louis XV (1715-1774) assumed the throne in the wake of his great- grandfather, the "Sun King" Louis XIV, who ruled from 1643-1715, and under whom France grew to become the strongest and most culturally influential state in Europe. Yet the fifty-nine year reign of Louis XV evidences the difficulties, contradictions, traditions, and new ideas that characterized France under the Old Regime, the political, societal, and cultural schema that prevailed in France under the French monarchs before the French Revolution. To understand how the revolution actually changed the ancien regime (Old Regime), we must first understand that schema of French society.
Since the organization of nation-states, France, like most other European nations, was a monarchy whose kings claimed a divine right to absolute rule. By claiming their justification to rule as descended from God, monarchs minimized challenge to their authority. Similarly, by ruling absolutely, without input from the people or a legislative body, politics and society were kept in line with the monarch's views, whims, and desire to remain in power. In France, the royal Bourbon family held dynastic control until the revolution.
The French aristocracy, however, was generally unhappy with absolute rule by the Bourbons. After all, they too came from illustrious and wealth families, some even related to the Bourbon line. Though they resisted democracy for obvious reasons, historic tensions between the French nobles and the king were never too far under the surface of French society...