Louis XVI
Louis XVI asked one last question on the morning of his execution: "Any news of La Pérouse?" The explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, had been sent on a voyage around the world in 1785 at Louis's personal direction, and had not been heard from since leaving Botany Bay in March 1788. That a man standing hours from death still wondered about a sailing expedition says something about who Louis XVI was: a curious, well-read, profoundly distracted ruler who found it far easier to think about cartography and locksmithing than to command a kingdom on the edge of collapse.
He was born on the 23rd of August 1754 in the Palace of Versailles, and he died on the guillotine on the 21st of January 1793 at the age of 38. In the four decades between those two dates, he became the last king of France before the monarchy fell, supported the American Revolution, signed a landmark edict of religious tolerance, stumbled through an attempted flight from Paris that destroyed his credibility, and finally stood trial before the body that had once served him. He was condemned to death by a majority of a single vote.
How did a shy boy who excelled in mathematics and Latin become the man whose execution, according to the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, was the starting point of all French thought? And how did his genuine desire to be loved by his people lead him so completely to ruin?
Louis-Auguste de France was given the title Duke of Berry at birth and was born into a family that did not particularly want him. His parents favored his older brother, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, who was regarded as bright and handsome. That brother died at nine years old in 1761, and the quieter, shyer Louis-Auguste became the family's surviving hope.
He turned out to be a capable student. His mathematics instructor Le Blonde wrote that the prince's studies were "proofs of his intelligence and the excellence of his judgement," though, as the source notes, flattery was to be expected when addressing a prince. Still, his love of cartography, which required a real understanding of scale and projections, lends some credit to those assessments. He was also fluent in Italian and English, and his tutors in physics praised his work alongside his mathematics.
When his father died of tuberculosis on the 20th of December 1765, the eleven-year-old Louis-Auguste became the new Dauphin. His mother, Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, never recovered from the loss, and she too died of tuberculosis on the 13th of March 1767. Two parents dead within two years, and the boy was now heir to the throne of France.
The education that followed shaped him poorly for what lay ahead. Paul François de Quelen de la Vauguyon served as his governor from 1760 until Louis's marriage in 1770, and the instruction was strict and conservative. His instructor Abbé Berthier taught him that timidity was a virtue in strong monarchs. His confessor, Abbé Soldini, instructed him not to let people read his mind. Both lessons, taken together, produced a man who hesitated when he should have acted and concealed his intentions when he should have communicated them.
On the 19th of April 1770, the fifteen-year-old Louis-Auguste married the fourteen-year-old Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, who became Marie Antoinette. They had met only two days before their wedding. She was his second cousin once removed and the youngest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa.
The French public received the marriage badly. France's alliance with Austria had pulled the country into the Seven Years' War, a disaster in which France was beaten by Britain and Prussia both in Europe and in North America. Marie Antoinette arrived in France already marked as an unwelcome foreigner, and the young Louis was afraid that she would manipulate him for Austrian purposes, which made him cold toward her in public.
The couple failed to consummate their marriage for years. Correspondence between Marie Antoinette's mother and Austria's French ambassador Florimond Claude, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau showed that Vienna wanted Marie Antoinette to exert more influence over Louis, but the princess showed little interest in what the letters called "serious affairs." Obscene pamphlets, called libelles, mocked the royal couple's apparent infertility, with one asking bluntly: "Can the King do it? Can't the King do it?"
Historians have long debated the cause. The suggestion that Louis suffered from phimosis and eventually underwent surgery gained some currency, traceable largely to Stefan Zweig's 1932 biography of Marie Antoinette. Most modern historians doubt it. The Prussian envoy Baron Goltz reported in 1777 that Louis had declined any operation, and Louis's own journals show him hunting almost every day during the period he was supposedly recovering from surgery. Marie Antoinette's brother Joseph II visited Versailles in 1777 and described the couple frankly to one of his brothers. He called them "complete fumblers." With Joseph's guidance, Louis applied himself more effectively, and in the third week of March 1778, Marie Antoinette became pregnant.
The couple eventually had four children, and Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan, the queen's lady-in-waiting, recorded that Marie Antoinette also suffered two miscarriages. When the first occurred in 1779, Louis spent an entire morning at his wife's bedside and swore everyone to secrecy. Beyond his biological children, Louis also adopted six children, including Jean Amilcar, a Senegalese boy given to the queen by Stanislas de Boufflers in 1787, freed, baptized, and placed in a pension. After the revolution stripped the queen of her resources, Amilcar was reportedly evicted from his boarding school and starved to death on the street.
When Louis XVI ascended to the throne on the 10th of May 1774, he was nineteen years old and the government was deeply in debt. His own assessment was that he felt woefully unqualified to resolve the situation. He said of himself that he "must always consult public opinion; it is never wrong" and appointed Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Count of Maurepas, an experienced adviser who took charge of many ministerial functions until his death in 1781.
Louis's reforming instincts were real but repeatedly defeated. He deregulated the grain market on the advice of his minister Turgot, but bread prices rose as a result. A particularly bad harvest in 1775 caused food scarcity that pushed the population into revolt. Turgot was dismissed in 1776, and the replacement minister Jacques Necker tried a different approach: borrowing heavily on international markets instead of raising taxes, then publishing a misleading account of royal finances, the Compte-rendu au Roi, in 1781, that led the public to believe the kingdom ran a surplus when it did not.
On the 7th of November 1787, Louis signed the Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance. This measure granted non-Roman Catholics, including Huguenots, Lutherans, and Jews, civil and legal status and the right to practice their faiths in France. It effectively ended an edict that had been law for 102 years. Two more years and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 were needed before France legally proclaimed freedom of religion, but the 1787 edict was a meaningful step along that road.
Fiscal reform proved impossible. Calonne, appointed in 1783, increased public spending to try to borrow the kingdom's way out of debt. When that failed, Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to hear a proposed fiscal overhaul. When the nobles learned the true scale of the debt, they rejected the plan. Louis then tried forcing the Parlement of Paris to register his reforms through a series of measures: enforcing registration by lit de justice on the 6th of August 1787, the 19th of November 1787, and the 8th of May 1788; exiling all Parlement magistrates to Troyes on the 15th of August 1787; and dissolving the Parlement entirely on the 8th of May 1788. None of it held. Each imposed reform could survive only two to four months before it had to be revoked. The Estates General, which had not met since 1614, was convoked on the 8th of August 1788.
France's involvement in the Seven Years' War had cost the country most of its colonial territories. Britain kept nearly all of New France. When Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, saw the American Revolution begin in 1776, he recognized it as a chance to humiliate Britain and recover what had been lost. In the same year, Louis was persuaded by Pierre Beaumarchais to secretly send supplies, ammunition, and guns to the American rebels.
Early in 1778, Louis signed a formal Treaty of Alliance, and France went to war with Britain. Spain and the Netherlands joined the coalition. France and Spain planned an invasion of the British Isles with the Armada of 1779, but the operation was never launched. French forces suffered early setbacks at Rhode Island and Savannah. In 1780, France sent Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau and François Joseph Paul de Grasse to North America with large land and naval forces. The French naval blockade proved decisive in October 1781, when it forced a British army under Cornwallis to surrender at the Siege of Yorktown. News reached London in March 1782, the North ministry fell, and Britain sued for peace.
Louis delayed the end of the war until September 1783, hoping to seize more British colonies in India and the West Indies. The effort largely failed. Britain defeated the main French fleet at the Battle of the Saintes in 1782 and successfully defended Jamaica and Gibraltar. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 returned only the colonies of Tobago and Senegal to France. The war cost 1,066 million livres, financed entirely through high-interest loans with no new taxes. Necker had kept the scale of this debt hidden from the public.
In Asia, Louis sealed an alliance with the Peshwa Madhavrao II in 1782, and Pierre André de Suffren fought alongside Hyder Ali in the Second Anglo-Mysore War from 1782 to 1783. Louis also signed the Treaty of Versailles of 1787 with Prince Nguyễn Ánh, establishing a France-Cochinchina alliance. The city of Louisville, Kentucky, takes its name from Louis XVI. In 1780, the Virginia General Assembly named it in honor of the French king whose soldiers were aiding the American cause; at the time, Kentucky was still part of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
On the 21st of June 1791, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their children slipped out of the Tuileries Palace in disguise and headed northeast toward the royalist fortress town of Montmédy, near the Austrian border. The escape was planned by the Swedish nobleman Axel von Fersen. Louis left behind on his bed a 16-page written manifesto, the Déclaration du roi, adressée à tous les François, in which he explained his feelings about the Revolution and criticized some of its consequences, though he did not reject its major reforms such as the abolition of the orders and civil equality. The document was rediscovered in the United States in 2009.
Within 24 hours, the plan unraveled. Jean-Baptiste Drouet recognized the king from his profile on a 50 livres assignat, a form of paper money, and raised the alarm. The royal family was arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne and brought back to Paris, arriving on the 25th of June under tight house arrest.
The failure traced directly to Louis's habits of mind. He repeatedly postponed the escape schedule, allowing smaller problems to grow into serious ones. He believed, incorrectly, that only a small number of Paris radicals supported the Revolution and that the rest of France still regarded him with affection. The National Assembly chose publicly to claim the king had been kidnapped, which avoided a constitutional crisis, but La Fayette suppressed the manifesto that proved otherwise.
The political damage was irreparable. Citizens who had still thought of the king as governing under God's will now saw him as a man who had repudiated the Revolution and was heading for the Austrian border, where his wife's family sat with an army. Republicanism moved from coffee houses into the mainstream of French political life. Four months after Varennes, the constitutional monarchy was declared, but its days were already numbered. Mirabeau's death on the 7th of April had already fatally weakened the moderate faction trying to negotiate a workable settlement between the Crown and the Assembly.
Louis was officially arrested on the 13th of August 1792 and sent to the Temple, an ancient Parisian fortress used as a prison. On the 21st of September, France was declared a republic. Louis was stripped of all titles and addressed as Citoyen Louis Capet, a reference to his ancestor Hugh Capet.
The trial before the National Convention opened on the 11th of December 1792, when Louis was brought through crowded, silent streets to hear his indictment: high treason and crimes against the State. His counsel Raymond Desèze delivered his defense on the 26th of December, assisted by François Tronchet and Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes. Before the trial began, Louis told his lawyers that he knew he would be found guilty and killed, but asked them to proceed as if they could win. He wanted to be remembered as a good king.
On the 15th of January 1793, the convention's 721 deputies voted on the verdict. Of those who voted, 693 found him guilty; none voted for acquittal; 23 abstained. The roll-call vote on punishment took 36 hours. 361 deputies voted for immediate execution. 288 voted against death entirely. 72 voted for death with conditions. Louis was condemned by a majority of one vote. His cousin Philippe Égalité, formerly the Duke of Orléans, voted for his execution; Égalité was himself guillotined on the Place de la Révolution on the 6th of November 1793, on the same scaffold.
On the 21st of January 1793, Louis XVI was beheaded by guillotine on the Place de la Révolution. He appeared dignified and resigned. He pardoned, in his own words, "those who are the cause of my death" and declared himself innocent of the charges, praying his blood would not fall back on France. General Antoine Joseph Santerre cut the speech short with a drum roll. The executioner Charles-Henri Sanson testified that the former king had bravely met his fate.
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Common questions
Who was Louis XVI and why is he significant in French history?
Louis XVI was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He reigned from the 10th of May 1774 until the abolition of the monarchy on the 21st of September 1792, and his execution by guillotine on the 21st of January 1793 ended more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy.
Why was Louis XVI executed during the French Revolution?
Louis XVI was tried by the National Convention, found guilty of high treason, and condemned to death by a majority of one vote among 721 deputies. The key evidence against him included the discovery of the armoire de fer, a hidden safe in his bedroom containing compromising correspondence with foreign powers, and the Flight to Varennes, which confirmed suspicions that he was conspiring with Austria against France.
What was Louis XVI's role in the American Revolution?
Louis XVI actively supported the American colonists from 1776, first by secretly sending supplies, ammunition, and guns, then by signing a formal Treaty of Alliance early in 1778 and going to war with Britain. French forces were instrumental in the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781, and the war ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1783, though it cost France 1,066 million livres financed entirely through loans.
What was the Flight to Varennes and how did it affect Louis XVI's reign?
On the 21st of June 1791, Louis XVI attempted to flee secretly with his family to the royalist fortress town of Montmédy near the Austrian border. He was recognized from his profile on a 50 livres assignat by Jean-Baptiste Drouet and arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne within 24 hours. The failed flight destroyed his remaining legitimacy and drove mainstream French opinion toward republicanism.
What religious reforms did Louis XVI introduce?
Louis XVI signed the Edict of Versailles, also known as the Edict of Tolerance, on the 7th of November 1787. It granted non-Roman Catholics, including Huguenots, Lutherans, and Jews, civil and legal status and the right to practice their faiths in France, effectively ending an edict that had stood for 102 years.
What happened to Louis XVI's children after his execution?
Both of Louis XVI's sons died in childhood before the Bourbon Restoration. His daughter Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte was released to her Austrian relatives in exchange for French prisoners of war and eventually died childless in 1851. She later lobbied in Rome for her father's canonization as a saint, but a memorandum in 1820 declared it impossible to prove he had been executed for religious rather than political reasons.
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