LOUVOIS, François Michel leTellier, Marquis de (1641-1691), the great war minister of Louis XIV., was born at Paris on January 18, 1641. His father, Michel le Tellier, sprung from a bourgeois family of Paris, but had attached himself to the parlement of Paris, and married the niece of the chancellor Aligre. He won the favour of De Bullion, the superintendent of finances, and through him obtained the intendancy of Piedmont, where he made the acquaintance of Mazarin. He was Mazarin’s right hand through the troublous times of the Fronde, and was the medium of communication between him and the queen, when the cardinal was in nominal disgrace at Brühl. He had been made secretary of state in 1643, andon the death of Mazarin was continued in his office. Like Colbert and unlike Fouquet he recognized the fact that Louis intended to govern, and by humouring his master’s passion for knowing every detail of personnel and administration he gained great favour with him. He married his son to a rich heiress, the Marquise de Courtenvaux, and soon began to instruct him in the management of state business. The young man speedily won the king’s confidence, and in 1666 was made secretary of state for war in his father’s room. His talents were perceived by the great Turenne in the short war of the Devolution (1667-68), who gave him instruction not so much in the art of war as in the art of providing armies. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle signed, Louvois devoted himself to the great work of organizing the French army. The years between 1668 and 1672, says Camille Rousset, “were years of preparation, when Lionne was labouring with all his might to find allies, Colbert to find money, and Louvois soldiers for Louis.” Louvois’s work was not the least important of the three. Till ...then armies were either bodies of free lances collected round a particular general and looking to him for pay, or a sort of armed militia, who looked on soldiering as an interlude, not a profession. Louvois understood the new condition of things, and organized a national standing army. In his organization, which lasted almost without a change till the period of the French Revolution, the leading points must be noted. First among them was the almost forcible enrolment of the nobility and gentry of France, which St Simon so bitterly complains of, and in which Louvois carried out part of Louis’s measures for curbing the spirit of independence by service in the army or at court. Then must be mentioned his elaborate hierarchy of officers, the grades of which with their respective duties he established for the first time, and his new system of drill, perfected by Martinet. Besides the army itself, he organized for its support a system of payment and commissariat, and a hospital system, which made it more like a machine, less dependent on the weather, and far superior to the old German system. Further, with the help of Vauban he formed a corps of engineers, and lastly, to provide the deserving with suitable reward, and encourage the daring, he reorganized the military orders of merit, and founded the Hôtel des Invalides at Paris. The success of his measures is to be seen in the victories of the great war of 1672- 1678, in which his old instructor Turenne was killed. After the peace of Nimeguen in 1678, Louvois was high in favour, his father Michel le Tellier had been made chancellor, and his only opponent Colbert was in growing disfavour. The ten years of peace between 1G78 and 1688 were distinguished in French history by the rise of Madame de Maintenon, the capture of Strasburg, and the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in all of which Louvois bore a prominent part. The surprise of Strasburg in 1681 in time of peace, in pursuance of an order of the chamber of reunion, was not only planned but executed by Louvois and Monclar, and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes he claims the credit of inventing the dragonnades. Colbert died in 1683, and had been replaced by Le Pelletier, an adherent of Louvois, in the controller-generalship of finances, and by Louvois himself in his ministry for public buildings, which he took that he might be the minister able to gratify the king’s two favourite pastimes, war and buildings. Louvois was able to superintend the successes of the first years of the war of 1688, but died suddenly of apoplexy after leaving the king’s cabinet on July 16, 1691. His sudden death caused a suspicion of poison, and struck everybody with surprise. “He is dead,” writes Madame de Sevigné, “that great minister, that important man, who held so grand a position, and whose Moi spread so far, who was the centre of so much.” “Tell the king of England,” said Louis the next day, “that I have lost a good minister, but that his affairs and mine will go none the worse for that.” He was very wrong; with Louvois the organizer of victory was gone. Great war ministers are far rarer than great generals. French history can only point to Carnot as his equal, English history only to the elder Pitt. The comparison with Carnot is an instructive one: both had to organize armies out of old material on a new system, both had to reform the principle of appointing officers, both •were admirable contrivers of campaigns, and both devoted themselves to the material well-being of the soldiers. But in private life the comparison will not hold; Carnot was a good husband, an upright man, and a broad minded thinker and politician, while Louvois married for money and lived openly with various mistresses, most notoriously with the beautiful Madame de Courcelles, used all means to overthrow his rivals, and boasted of having revived persecution in his horrible system of the dragonnades.
The principal authority for Louvois’s life and times is Camille Rousset’s Histoire de Louvois, 4 vols., 1862-63, a gr at work founded on the 900 volumes of his despatches at the Depot de la Guerre. Saint Simon from his class prejudices is hardly to be trusted, but Madame de Sevigné throws many bright side-lights on his times. Testament Politique de Louvois (1695) is spurious.
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