"He forbade the use of torture in the examination of witnesses or criminals. He proposed to abolish the dungeons at Vincennes and to raze the Bastille as items in a program of prison reform.
Despite his piety and orthodoxy he allowed a considerable degree of religious liberty to Protestants and Jews.
He refused to punish free thought, and allowed the ruthless pamphleteers of Paris to lampoon him as a cuckold, his wife as a harlot, and his children as bastards.
He forbade his government to spy into the private correspondence of the citizens.
With the enthusiastic support of Beaumarchais and the philosophes, and over the objections of Necker (who predicted that such a venture would complete the bankruptcy of France), Louis sent material and financial aid, amounting to 240,000,000, to the American colonies in their struggle for independence; it was a French fleet, and the battalions of Lafayette and Rochambeau, that helped Washington to bottle up Cornwallis in Yorktown, compelling him to surrender and so bring the war to a close."
(from “The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI” by Will Durant, Ariel Durant)
Fascinating! I had never thought of reading a biography of Louis XVI.
It seems it is always when repression is lifted that uprisings occur. Liberality opens the door to them.
I am reading the great Andrew Roberts’s magnificent “The Last King of America”, a huge biography of George III. He was a very good man and a liberal (in the real meaning of the word) king. Much concerned for his American subjects. Not the tyrant he is popularly considered to have been.
Roberts has an entire appendix devoted to examining the “evidence” for George’s porphyria, and finds it - using expert opinion - all wrong, amounting to a total misdiagnosis.
It seems pretty certain that though the poor old King had much wrong with him - he went blind and deaf eventually - he did not have porphyria.
I think you might enjoy the book, though it is so heavy - 680 large pages of dense (but easily readable) text, with massive notes etc. to follow - that I need to keep it on a table and read it without even trying to hold it in my hands. So far, I have found every sentence lively, entertaining, informative.
No. Do you think I’d enjoy it? Learn a lot from it? I’m not a Hugo fan.
I found Les Miserables (in English) fairly miserable, and the musical intolerable (except for those delightfully insolent wicked innkeepers who get away with continual law-breaking while others are condemned to years chained to oars, rowing ships - how did they manage their natural functions? - for stealing a loaf of bread.)
