Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1661-1683)

Being of a merchant family he had a natural interest in business and industry and used state resources to encourage the development of French industry and commerce--such as in the building of new roads and canals.

Serving also as the Secretary of the Navy, he built up the French Navy as protection for expanded French mercantilism across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean.  He also encouraged French immigration into the colonies of New France in Canada.

Only 5 years old when his great grandfather Louis XIV died, and being the heir apparent, a Regency was established for Louis XV:  first (1715-1723) under a cousin, Philippe d’Orléans, then (1723-1726) under the incompetent Duke of Bourbon.  Also from an early age Louis came under the personal tutoring of Cardinal Fleury.

The financial state of the French Royal treasury was a critical trouble-spot during the entire reign of Louis XV.  Cardinal Fleury, who took over from the Duke of Bourbon in 1726, attempted to continue the frugal economic policies of Colbert. But with Fleury's death in 1743, Louis decided that he would try to rule on his own.  Sadly however, Louis was a person of relatively weak will and was easily influenced in his policies by some of his strong-willed mistresses, notably Madame de Pompadour (after 1745) and Madame du Barry after the death of Mme de Pompadour in 1764 .  Such counsel served only to detach the king from the practical political and economic realities facing France.

The expenses of trying to maintain the courtly reign established under Louis XIV--and even more the cost of Louis XV's own diplomatic and military ventures created a constant drain on the royal treasury.  The War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) which drew France into an expensive military contest with other European powers resulted in a "victory" for the French side--but no tangible benefits.  It also came at a huge cost to the French royal treasury.

Eight years later Louis was back in war again (with the urging of Mme de Pompadour): the Seven Years War (1756-1763), aimed principally against France's arch-enemy nation, Great Britain.  The result of the war was the loss for France of most of its colonial holdings in America, most of its position in Asia, and the rise of Britain as the unchallenged master of the seas.

At home these disasters only served to make the opponents of the royal prerogatives all the more biting in their attacks.  Indeed in 1757 Louis was attacked by knife by a would-be assassin--only driving Louis further away from his critics.

Meanwhile the critical voices of the French philosophers of the Enlightenment grew all the more determined in the voicing of their opposition to the king's refusal to place the monarchy under constitutional restraints and his determination instead to hold all the more to the absolutist policies of Louis XIV.  At first supportive of the Enlightenment, in time Louis became increasingly reactive to the views of the major Enlightenment philosophers.  This too served to cut himself off all the more from the strong ideological trends sweeping France (and Western Europe for that matter) toward the end of his regime.

At age 16, four years before his coming to the throne, Louis married Marie Antoinette, daughter of Maria Theresa and sister of Joseph II of Austria.  Marie Antoinette would prove to be an endless source of poor counsel--a catastrophe for a person of such weak personal will as Louis XVI.

It was during his reign that the miserable state of royal finances were made even worse.  Chiefly responsible for this was the French involvement in the American Revolution or War of Independence.  Louis had no particular love of American liberties, but saw an opportunity in supporting the American rebellion of inflicting a demoralizing wound on France's long-standing enemy England.  He thus threw French resources into the conflict--which, with the final success of American independence  indeed proved to be something of a diplomatic victory for France.  But it proved also to be an enormous drain on what little was left of the royal treasury.  Further, apart from the opportunity to humiliate England, France herself gained no real benefits for her troubles.  In short, French involvement in the war of American independence, though of great benefit to the English colonies in North America, nonetheless was a disaster for France.

Louis sought help from a number of economic counselors, most notably Turgot (1774-1776) and Necker (1776-1781) to remedy the deteriorating situation of French royal finances.  But with the death of Necker his wife intervened more and more in the affairs of state to urge Louis to hold fast on the issue of  the absolute power of the monarch--and indeed to head off any real reforms.  Thus the situation grew from disastrous to unbelievably catastrophic.

The result was that Louis was going to have to do what his ancestors had refused to do:  call a meeting of the French Estates-General to vote the French monarchy new tax sources.  This was a dangerous thing to do--for the country was screaming for the king to hear its many grievances.  Calling the Estates-General would afford his opposition a platform from which they could more easily maneuver against him.

His indecisive nature in the face of opposition only made a tense situation all the more unmanageable.  He called the Estates-General into session in May of 1789, then he tried to shut it down.  Then he sent troops after the members of the Third Estate (representing middle class interests) to prevent it from meeting elsewhere.  Rumors of this and that started circulating through a tense Paris--at one point in July prompting a mob to move on the Bastille to free the political prisonsers supposedly being imprisoned there (actually there were none).  While soldiers no longer loyal to the king looked on, the mob tore the Bastille apart.  The king no longer commanded Paris.  The French Revolution was underway.

At first the Revolution had more the appearance of a thorough-going reform movment--and Louis' position seemed fairly secure.  Then in October rumors spread that Louis had been maneuvering a counter-move of his own against the revolution--and a Paris mob marched out to his palace at Versailles to bring him back to Paris.  But he was still quite popular with the French.  And he swore to uphold the new French constitution which was then in process of being written.

Foolishly he attempted to flee France in disguise in June of 1791, was spotted and brought back to Paris.  Suspicions were that he was conspiring with foreign powers (Austria?) to undo the Revolution.  Nonetheless, his popularity, though tarnished by the incident, seemed still intact at this point.  And in September he took the oath as a constitutional King of the French.

But on the sidelines he was becoming the symbolic trophy in a contest between various factions that were trying to control the direction of the Revolution.  The radicals wanted an end to the monarchy, period.  And they proposed to get it by goading Louis into some kind of treasonous act.  They forced him to declare war on Austria--which did not go well for the French.  French humiliation was then easily directed against the king by the radicals in an effort to pin the blame for failure on Louis and his lack of enthusiasm for the war.   The mobs were thus easily worked up against the king and his Austrian wife.

Louis was the second son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, given the title of Duke of Normandy.  He was only four years (1789) old when his older brother died and he thus became the Dauphin of France (heir to the throne).  This was also the year when the French Revolution broke out.

In 1792 he was arrested with all the royal family and placed in a tower in the Temple prison.  When his father was executed in January of 1793 Louis, not quite seven, became (in the eyes of the royalists) the Bourbon claimant to the French throne as Louis XVII--not a position to be particularly envied in revolutionary France.

The stories that were told of the whereabouts and the condition of Louis after that are hard to verifty.  Supposedly in the summer of 1793 he was turned over to the care of a rough couple:  Simon, a cobbler, and his wife.  That fall he was visited by a member of the revolutionary court who succeeded in getting the boy to accuse his mother of a number of crimes, evidence to be used against her in her trial.  Early the next year (1794) Louis was placed in darkened solitary confinement until the mid summer--when he was moved to more humane quarters.  He was visited only occasionally--at one point in December of that year by a delegation of the Committee of Public Security to investigate his conditions.

His conditions in fact by the late spring (1795) were growing bad--but his medical attention was itself subjected to politics and intrigue (one doctor attending him was very possibly poisoned).

In June of 1795 it was announced that Louis had died--though there was no way of verifying this.  There are some good grounds to the claim that the person who had died was a deaf-mute boy who had been substituted for Louis in captivity in the Temple.  A number of royalists claimed that in fact Louis had been secreted out of captivity in a coffin and was alive and well in their midst.

As late as 1814 a number of royalists claimed that Louis was indeed alive--but no Louis XVII came forward to announce himself.  Besides it served the interest of  Louis' uncle, who at that point headed up the royalitst party and who was claiming the French throne as Louis XVIII, to have the matter dropped.

Oliver Cromwell (1643-1658)

He came into public light rather later in life, at age 41 when in 1640 he was elected to Parliament from Cambridge.  Two years later (1642) he took up soldiering--and quickly proved to be very adept at this new vocation.  In 1650 he became head of the Parliamentary army (the "New Model Army").  In December of 1653 he became Lord Protector and Head of State over England, Scotland and Ireland.

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Richard Cromwell

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Charles II (1660-1685)

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James II (1685-1688)

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George I (George Lewis) (1714-1727)

Elector of Hanover, 1698-1727; King of England 1714-1727)

Robert Walpole (1715-1742) 1st Earl of Orford

George II (1727-1760)

William Pitt (1756-1768) 1st Earl of Chatham

George III (1760-1820)

Frederick North ("Lord North") (1770-1782) 2nd Earl of Guilford

William Pitt (the Younger) (1783-1806)

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King of Prussia (1701-1713)

Frederick II (the Great) (King of Prussia, 1740-1786)

Francis I ( -1765)

1717-1780.  Wife of Francis I

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Joseph II (1765-1790)

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Son of Richard Mather, prominent Puritan or Congregational clergyman in Massachussets.  Increase himself became a Puritan minister, Pastor of the Second Church of Boston (1664-1723) and President of Harvard College (1665-1701).  He became very active in the public life of the Massachussets Bay Colony and was in 1688 sent as an envoy to English King William III to secure for the Massachussets Bay Colony a number of political rights--including a new charter

As president of Harvard College he encouraged scientific study along with theology as part of the preparation of a Congregational minister.  Though accused by a growing welter of political enemies of encouraging the witchcraft trials (late 1600s)--he in fact was a dedicated opponent of the trials and was key to getting the executions stopped.

Robert Cavelier de la Salle (1669-1687)

1643-1687.

William Penn (1677-1712)

Cotton Mather (1680-1728)

Pastor (early with his father, Increase Mather) of the Second Church of Boston, 1680-1728.

An English army officer and member of Parliament (first elected in 1722) who in working on programs of prison reform beginning in 1729 demonstrated the philanthropist's heaert.  It also caused him to think about the possibilites of founding a colony in America which would welcome debtors and religious minorities.  He was granted a charter for such a colony in 1732, which was named "Georgia" after King George II.

In 1732 he sailed to his new colony with over a hundred colonists and established to town of Savannah on land he had purchased from the Indians.  Over the next ten years he developed a military force capable of fending off Spanish threats coming from the South--and in 1742 put it to good use at the Battle of Bloody Marsh.

George Washington (1789-1797)

Ben Franklin

John Adams (1789-1801)

Thomas Jefferson

Alexander Hamilton