Louis XVIII., STANISLAS XAVIER, the next younger brother of Louis XVI., born at Versailles, 17th November 1755, received the title of Count de Provence. In 1771 he married Maria Josephine Louisa, daughter of Victor Amadeus III. of Sardinia. After the accession of Louis XVI. to the throne he assumed the designation of Monsieur, and became an opponent of every salutary measure of the government. He fled from Paris on the same night as the king, and was more fortunate, for, taking the road by Lille, he reached the Belgian frontier in safety. With his brother, the Count d'Artois, he now issued declarations against the revolutionary cause in France, which had a very unfavourable effect on the situation of the king. The two brothers for some time held a sort of court at Coblenz. Louis joined the body of 6000 émigrés who accompanied the Prussians across the Rhine in July 1792, and issued a manifesto even more foolish and extravagant than that of the Duke of Brunswick. After the death of his brother, Louis XVI., he proclaimed the latter's son king of France, as Louis XVII., and in 1795 himself assumed the title of king. The victories of the republic and Napoleon's enmity to the Bourbon family compelled him frequently to change his place of abode, removing from one country of Europe to another, till at last, in 1807, he found a refuge in England, and purchased a residence, Hartwell, in Buckinghamshire, where his wife died in 1810, and where he remained till the fall of Napoleon opened the way for him to the French throne. On 26th April 1814 'le Désiré,' as the royalists style him, landed at Calais, after twenty-four years' exile. His return, under the protection of the allied armies, had been prepared for by Talleyrand. Then began the ascendancy of the 'legitimist' party. The powerless empress-regent was superseded by a provisional government, the Napoleonic constitution was set aside, and, in keeping with the doctrine of the 'divine right of kings,' all power was claimed by Louis XVIII. Using his discretionary rights, he granted to the nation a constitutional charter, establishing a House of Peers and a Chamber of Deputies, and vouchsafing a few elementary citizen-rights, but in every essential respect he resumed the baneful traditions of the ancient monarchy. See FRANCE.
The nobles and priests exercised an influence over the weak king which led to severe treatment of the Imperialists, the Republicans, and the Protestants. This opened the way for Napoleon's return from Elba, when the king and his family fled from Paris, remained at Ghent till after the battle of
Waterloo, and returned to France under the protection of the Duke of Wellington. He issued from Cambrai a proclamation in which he acknowledged his former errors, and promised a general amnesty to all except traitors. But the Chamber of Deputies, elected with many irregularities, was so fanatically royalist and reactionary that the king, by advice of the Emperor Alexander of Russia, dissolved it; whereupon arose royalist plots for his dethronement and the abolition of the charter. Bands of assassins were collected by nobles and priests in the provinces, who slew hundreds of adherents of the Revolution and of Protestants, and years elapsed ere peace and good order were in any measure restored. Driven by royalistic fanatics, the king dismissed his too moderate prime-minister Decazes, and could not prevent an army from passing into Spain to maintain there the right of absolute kingship. He died 16th September 1824. See Petit's Louis XVIII. (1885).