Louis XVI of France
Louis XVI (23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) was King of France and Navarre from 1774 until 1791, and then King of the French from 1791 to 1792. Suspended and arrested during the Insurrection of the 10th of August 1792, he was tried by the National Convention, found guilty of treason, and executed on 21 January 1793. His execution signaled the end of the absolutist monarchy in France and would eventually bring about the rise of Napoleon.
Although he was beloved at first, his indecisiveness and conservatism led the people to reject him and hate in him the perceived tyranny of the former kings of France. During the French Revolution, he was given the family name Capet (a faulty reference to Hugh Capet, the founder of the dynasty), and was called Louis Capet in an attempt to discredit his status as king. He was also informally nicknamed Louis le Dernier (Louis the Last), a derisive use of the traditional nicknaming of French kings. Today, historians and Frenchmen in general have a more nuanced view of Louis XVI, viewing him as an honest man with good intentions but who was probably unfit for the Herculean task of reforming the monarchy, and who was used as a scapegoat by the Revolutionaries.
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Family
Louis was preceded as king by his grandfather, Louis XV. Louis' father was the king's only son, the Dauphin de France (1729-1765), who died at the age of 35 and never ascended the throne. Louis' mother was Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, second wife of the Dauphin, and the daughter of Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.
On 16 May 1770, when he was 15 and she 14, he married Marie Antoinette, daughter of Francis I of Austria and Empress Maria Theresa, a Habsburg. They were not able to have children for several years, apparently due to the fact that Louis XVI suffered from a sexual dysfunction, reputedly phimosis.[1] Subsequently, they had four children:
- Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte (19 December 1778 – 19 October 1851);
- Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François (22 October 1781 – 4 June 1789);
- Louis-Charles the future Louis XVII of France (27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795);
- Sophie-Beatrix (9 July 1786 – 19 June 1787)
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Ancestors
| Louis XVI of France | Father: Louis, dauphin de France | Paternal Grandfather: Louis XV of France | Paternal Great-Grandfather: Louis, Duke of Burgundy |
| Paternal Great-grandmother: Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy | |||
| Paternal Grandmother: Maria Leszczyńska | Paternal Great-Grandfather: Stanisław Leszczyński | ||
| Paternal Great-Grandmother: Katarzyna Opalińska | |||
| Mother: Marie-Josèphe of Saxony | Maternal Grandfather: Augustus III of Poland | Maternal Great-Grandfather: Augustus II the Strong | |
| Maternal Great-Grandmother: Christiane Eberhardine, Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth | |||
| Maternal Grandmother: Maria Josepha of Austria | Maternal Great-grandfather: Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor | ||
| Maternal Great-Grandmother: Wilhelmina Amalia of Brunswick-Lüneburg |
Politics
The government was deeply in debt. The radical reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes disaffected the nobles (parlements), and Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned in 1776 to be replaced by Jacques Necker. He supported the American Revolution in 1778, but in the Treaty of Paris (1783), the French gained little except an addition to the country's enormous debt. Necker had resigned in 1781 to be replaced by Calonne and Brienne, before being restored in 1788.
In 1789, Louis ordered the first election of the Estates-General (National Assembly) since 1614 in order to have the monetary reforms approved. The election was one of the events that transformed the general malaise into the French Revolution, which began in June 1789. The Third Estate had declared itself the National Assembly; Louis' attempts to control it resulted in the Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume, 20 June), the declaration of the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and the storming of the Bastille on 14 July. In October, the royal family was forced to move from the Palace of Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris.
Louis himself was very popular and not unobliging to the social, political, and economic reforms of the Revolution. Recent scholarship has concluded that Louis suffered from clinical depression, which left him prone to bouts of severe indecisiveness, during which times his wife, the unpopular Queen Marie Antoinette, assumed effective responsibility for acting for the Crown. The revolution's principles of popular sovereignty, though central to democratic principles of later eras, marked a decisive break from the absolute monarchical principle of throne and altar that was at the heart of contemporary governance. As a result, the revolution was opposed by almost all of the previous governing elite in France and by practically all the governments of Europe. Leading figures in the initial revolutionary movement themselves were questioning the principles of popular control of government. Some, notably Honoré Mirabeau, secretly plotted to restore the power of the Crown in a new form.
However, Mirabeau's sudden death, and Louis's depression, fatally weakened developments in that area. Louis was nowhere near as reactionary as his right-wing brothers, the comte d'Artois and the comte de Provence, and he sent repeated messages publicly and privately calling on them to halt their attempts to launch counter-coups (often through his secretly nominated regent, former minister de Brienne). However, he was alienated from the new government both by its challenging of the traditional role of the monarch and in its treatment of him and his family. He was particularly irked by being kept effective prisoner in the Tuileries, where his wife was forced humiliatingly to have revolutionary soldiers in her private bedroom watching her as she slept, and by the refusal of the new regime to allow him to have Catholic confessors and priests of his choice rather than 'constitutional priests' created by the revolution.
He hired a secret banker named Miles Hughes, who was secretly working for the revolution, and gave top information to rebels.
End of reign
In October 1789, angry and hungry citizens of the Parisian under class marched to Versailles, the palace where the royal family lived, and brought them back to Paris to deal with a food shortage.
On 21 June 1791, Louis attempted to flee secretly from Paris to modern-day Belgium (then part of the Austrian Empire) with his family in the hope of forcing a more moderate swing in the revolution than was deemed possible in radical Paris. However, flaws in the escape plan caused sufficient delays to enable them to be recognised and captured at Varennes. Supposedly Louis was captured while trying to make a purchase at a store, where the clerk recognised him. According to the legend, Louis was recognized because the coin used as payment featured an accurate portrait of him. He was returned to Paris, where he remained indubitably as constitutional king, though under effective house-arrest until 1792.
On 25 July 1792 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, commander of the Prussian forces, issued a manifesto (the so-called Brunswick Manifesto) threatening the inhabitants of Paris with exemplary vengeance if the Royal family was harmed and threatening the French public with exemplary punishment if they resisted the Imperial and Prussian armies or the forced reinstatement of the monarchy. The manifesto was taken to be the final proof of a collusion between Louis and foreign powers in a conspiracy against his own country. Louis was officially arrested on 13 August 1792 and sent to Bastille, the jail of Paris. On 21 September 1792, the National Assembly declared France to be a republic.
Louis was tried (from 11 December 1792) and convicted of high treason before the National Convention. He was sentenced to death (21 January 1793) by guillotine by 361 votes to 288, with 72 effective abstentions.
Stripped of all titles and honorifics by the egalitarian, Republican government, Citizen Louis Capet was guillotined in front of a cheering crowd on 21 January 1793. It took two attempts to sever his head; his neck too thick to yield to one blow. [citation needed] On his death, his eight-year-old son, Louis-Charles, automatically became to royalists and some foreign states the de jure King Louis XVII of France, despite France having been declared a republic.
| Preceded by: Louis XV | King of France May 10, 1774–September 21, 1792 | Succeeded by: National Convention |
| Preceded by: himself as de facto and de jure King | Titular King of France September 21, 1792 - January 21, 1793 | Succeeded by: Louis XVII |
References
- ^ Francine du Plessix Gray (2000-08-07). The New Yorker From the Archive Books. The Child Queen. Retrieved on 2006-10-17.
Categories
Articles with unsourced statements | French monarchs | House of Bourbon | People executed by guillotine during the French Revolution | Executed royalty | Dukes of Berry | Knights of the Golden Fleece | 1754 births | 1793 deaths