Fleury, ANDRÉ HERCULE DE, CARDINAL

Fleury, ANDRÉ HERCULE DE, CARDINAL, Louis XV.'s prime-minister, was born in 1653, at Lodeve, in Languedoc, became in 1677 almoner to the queen, and after her death (1683) filled the same post under Louis XIV., who in 1698 made him Bishop of Fréjus. Under Louis's will he was appointed preceptor to the heir-apparent, a child of five years, who in 1715 succeeded as Louis XV. In 1726, at the age of seventy-three, Fleury was raised by the young king to be prime-minister; in the same year he received the cardinal's hat. Fleury was honest and well meaning, but not a statesman: the extortions of the farmers-general were not checked, although it was probably for the people's sake that the minister practised a rigid economy that approached avarice and even crippled the power of France; whilst in foreign affairs he was earnestly desirous of peace, and yet was dragged by court intrigues into two wars over the succession to foreign thrones (see SUCCESSION WARS). The war of the Austrian Succession was not finished when he died, 29th January 1743, in the ninetieth year of his age, leaving the king thenceforth to the unchecked guidance of his mistresses. Fleury was an academician, and the friend and patron of learning; he sent out two expeditions to measure arcs of the meridian, gathered rare MSS. from Egypt and Greece, and completed the Bibliothèque Royale (now Nationale). See Verlaque, Histoire du Cardinal Fleury (Paris, 1879).