[8] Louis Stanislas's education was quite religious in nature; several of his teachers were priests, such as Jean-Gilles du Coëtlosquet, Bishop of Limoges; the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet; and the Jesuit Guillaume-François Berthier.

The most common theories propose Louis Stanislas' alleged impotence (according to biographer Antonia Fraser) or his unwillingness to sleep with his wife due to her poor personal hygiene.

[15] Despite the fact that Louis Stanislas was not infatuated with his wife, he boasted that the two enjoyed vigorous conjugal relations – but such declarations were held in low esteem by courtiers at Versailles.

[24] On 19 December 1778, the Queen gave birth to a daughter, who was named Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France and given the honorific title Madame Royale.

That the baby was a girl came as a relief to the Count of Provence, who kept his position as heir to Louis XVI, since Salic Law excluded women from acceding to the throne of France.

[33] An Assembly of Notables (the members consisted of magistrates, mayors, nobles and clergy) was convened in February 1787 to ratify the financial reforms sought by the Controller-General of Finance Charles Alexandre de Calonne.

Artois secured a castle for the court in exile in the Electorate of Trier (or "Treves"), where their maternal uncle, Clemens Wenceslaus of Saxony, was the Archbishop-Elector.

Desperate to display to the world a united family, Louis XVIII ordered his wife Queen Marie Joséphine, who at the time was living apart from her husband in Schleswig-Holstein, to attend the wedding.

[69] After an arduous journey from Jelgava,[70] he and his family took up residence in the years 1801–1804 at the Łazienki Palace in Warsaw, which after the partitions of Poland became part of the province of South Prussia.

Artois had an allowance from King George III of Great Britain and he sent some money to Louis, whose court-in-exile was not only being spied on by Napoleonic agents[71] but was also being forced to make significant economies, financed as it was mainly from interest owed by the Emperor Francis II on valuables his aunt, Marie Antoinette, had removed from France.

This repudiated his Declaration of Verona, promised to abolish conscription, retain the Napoleonic administrative and judicial system, reduce taxes, eliminate political prisons, and guarantee amnesty to everyone who did not oppose a Bourbon Restoration.

[86] Napoleon's senate called Louis XVIII to the throne on the condition that he would accept a constitution that entailed recognition of the Republic and the Empire, a bicameral parliament elected every year, and the tri-colour flag of the aforementioned regimes.

He and his Comptroller-General of Finance Baron Louis were determined not to let the exchequer fall into deficit (there was a 75 million franc debt inherited from Napoleon I), and took fiscal measures to ensure this.

Louis XVIII assured the French that the unpopular taxes on tobacco, wine and salt would be abolished when he was restored, but he failed to do so, which led to rioting in Bordeaux.

[96] Louis also protested at the Allies' inaction in Naples, where he wanted the Napoleonic usurper Joachim Murat removed in favour of the Neapolitan Bourbons.

In fact, Murat never did actually write to Napoleon, but Louis, intent on restoring the Neapolitan Bourbons at any cost, had taken care to have such a correspondence forged, and subsidised the Austrian expedition with 25 million francs.

[100] That same day, Louis XVIII quit the capital with a small escort at midnight, first travelling to Lille, and then crossing the border into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, halting in Ghent.

[101] Other leaders, most prominently Tsar Alexander I, debated whether in the case of a second victory over the French Empire, the Duke of Orleans should be proclaimed king instead of Louis XVIII.

[102] However, Napoleon did not rule France again for very long, suffering a decisive defeat at the hands of the armies of the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June.

[109] Although the Ultra faction of returning exiles wanted revenge and were eager to punish the usurpers and restore the old regime, the new king rejected that advice.

The ministry hoped for moderate deputies, but the electorate voted almost exclusively for ultra-royalists, resulting in what King Louis called the Chambre introuvable.

[116][117] Anti-Napoleonic sentiment was high in Southern France, and this was prominently displayed in the White Terror, which saw the purge of all important Napoleonic officials from government, along with the execution or assassination of others.

[citation needed] The King was reluctant to shed blood, and this greatly irritated the ultra-reactionary Chamber of Deputies, who felt that Louis was not executing enough.

In October of the same year, Louis's foreign minister, the Duke of Richelieu, succeeded in convincing the Allied Powers to withdraw their armies early in exchange for a sum of over 200 million francs.

[126] Louis always dreaded the day he would die, believing that his brother, and heir, Artois, would abandon the centrist government for an ultra-royalist autocracy, which would not bring favourable results.

The royal family was grief-stricken[129] and Louis broke an ancient tradition by attending his nephew's funeral, whereas previous kings of France could not have any association with death.

His wife gave birth to a posthumous son in September, Henry, Duke of Bordeaux,[129] nicknamed Dieudonné (God-given) by the Bourbons because he was thought to have secured the future of the dynasty.

[137] As a historical footnote, the young science of disinfection had advanced in the early 1820s to the point where it was recognized that chlorides of lime could be used to both eliminate smells and slow decomposition.

The body of Louis XVIII was washed with chlorides by a French scientist, Antoine Germain Labarraque, permitting his corpse to be "presented to the public without any odour" (emphasis in the original) in 1824.

British actor Sebastian Armesto played Comte Louis de Provence prior to his accession in the 2006 motion picture Marie Antoinette directed by Sofia Coppola.