Louis XVI of France

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Louis XVI
King of France and Navarre
Reign	10 May 1774 – 21 September 1792
Coronation	11 June 1775, Reims
Full name	Louis-Auguste; known as Louis the Last
Titles	Duke of Berry (1754 – 1765) Dauphin de Viennois (1765 – 1774) King of France (1774–1791) King of the French (1791–1792) 'Citizen Louis Capet'
Born	23 August 1754
	Palace of Versailles, France
Died	21 January 1793 (aged 38)
	Paris, France
Buried	Eventually Saint Denis Basilica, France
Predecessor	Louis XV
Successor	De jure Louis XVII De facto Napoleon I, Emperor of the French
Consort	Maria Antonia of Austria (1755 – 1793)
Issue	Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Dauphine of France (1778 – 1851 Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François, Dauphin of France (1781 – 1789) Louis XVII (1785 – 1795 Sophie Hélène Béatrix of France (1786 – 1787)
Royal House	House of Bourbon
Father	Louis-Ferdinand, Dauphin of France (1729 – 1765)
Mother	Marie-Josèphe of Saxony (1731 – 1767)

Louis XVI of France (Louis-Auguste de France) (23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) ruled as King of France and Navarre from 1774 until 1791, and then as 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 absolute monarchy in France and would eventually bring about the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Although he was beloved at first, his indecisiveness and conservatism led some elements of the people of France to eventually hate him as a symbol of the perceived tyranny of the Ancien Régime. After the abolition of the monarchy in 1792, the new republican government gave him the surname Capet (a reference to the nickname of Hugh Capet, founder of the Capetian dynasty, which the Revolutionaries wrongly interpreted as a family name), and forced him to be 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, who is seen 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.

[edit] Early life

The future king Louis XVI was born Louis-Auguste de France at the Palace of Versailles on August 23, 1754 to the heir to the French throne, the dauphin Louis-Ferdinand (1729-1765), who was the only son of the King Louis XV and his consort, Queen Maria Leszczyńska. Louis-Auguste's father died at the age of thirty-five and never ascended the French throne. Louis-Auguste's mother was Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, the Dauphin's second wife, and the daughter of Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.

Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, mother of Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X

French Monarchy-
Capetian Dynasty,
House of Bourbon

Henry IV Sister    Catherine of Navarre, Duchess of Lorraine Children    Louis XIII    Elisabeth, Queen of Spain    Christine Marie, Duchess of Savoy    Nicholas Henry    Gaston, Duke of Orléans    Henriette-Marie, Queen of England and Scotland Louis XIII Children    Louis XIV    Philippe, Duke of Orléans Louis XIV Children    Louis, Dauphin    Marie-Anne    Marie-Therese    Philippe-Charles, Duc d'Anjou    Louis-François, Duc d'Anjou Grandchildren    Louis, Dauphin    King Philip V of Spain    Charles, Duke of Berry Great Grandchildren    Louis, Dauphin    Louis XV Louis XV Children    Louise-Elisabeth, Duchess of Parma    Madame Henriette    Louis, Dauphin    Madame Marie Adélaïde    Madame Victoire    Madame Sophie    Madame Louise Grandchildren    Clotilde, Queen of Sardinia    Louis XVI    Louis XVIII    Charles X    Madame Élisabeth Louis XVI Children    Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Duchess of Angouleme    Louis-Joseph, Dauphin    Louis (XVII)    Sophie-Beatrix Louis (XVII) Louis XVIII Charles X Children    Louis (XIX), Duke of Angoulême    Charles, Duke of Berry Grandchildren    Henry (V), comte de Chambord    Louise, Duchess of Parma

Louis-Auguste was the oldest living son out of eight children, three of whom died young. He had a difficult childhood because his parents for the most part ignored him, favoring his older brother Louis, Duc de Bourgogne, who died young at the age of ten in 1761. This caused his parents to turn their back on Louis-Auguste even more. A strong and healthy boy, despite being very shy, Louis-Auguste excelled in the school room and had a strong taste for English history and astronomy. He enjoyed working on locks and hunting with his grandfather King Louis XV and playing with his younger brothers Louis-Stanislas, Comte de Provence (the future King Louis XVIII) and Charles-Philip, Comte d'Artois (the future King Charles X). The boys' father died on December 20, 1765, which dealt their mother, Marie-Josèphe, a devastating blow from which she never recovered, sinking into a deep depression for the rest of her life. With his father dead, eleven year old Louis-Auguste was now the Dauphin of France and next in line to the French throne, which at the time was known as the "Finest" kingdom in Europe; but it was a job his grandfather, Louis XV, failed to prepare him for, a job which he himself did not feel capable of doing. Louis Auguste's mother died two years after his father on March 13, 1767, leaving young Louis-Auguste and his younger siblings orphans. For the first year after the death of his mother he was cared for by his grandmother, Queen Maria Leszczyńska, who died the next year, in 1768; and after that he was taken into the care of his spinster aunts Adélaïde, Victoire, Sophie, and Louise-Marie, known collectively as Mesdames Tantes.

[edit] Family life

Queen Marie Antoinette of Austria with her three oldest children, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Charles and Louis-Joseph

On 16 May 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis-Auguste married the fourteen year old Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria (better known by the French form of her name, Marie Antoinette), the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and his wife, the formidable Empress Maria Theresa. The young couple was not able to have children for several years, apparently due to the fact that Louis-Auguste suffered from a sexual dysfunction.^[1]. Some have speculated that this dysfunction was due to phimosis, a physical condition which was later relieved by a circumcision operation seven years after the marriage ^[2].

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 titular King Louis XVII of France) (27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795);
• Sophie-Hélène-Béatrix (9 July 1786 – 19 June 1787)

[edit] Ancestors

[edit] Politics

Louis XVI, age twenty

When Louis XVI succeeded to the throne in 1774, the government was deeply in debt. The radical financial reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes disaffected the nobles and were blocked by the parlements who insisted that the King did not have the legal right to levy new taxes. Turgot was dismissed in 1776 and Malesherbes resigned in 1776 to be replaced by Jacques Necker. He supported the American Revolution. In 1789, Louis ordered the first election of the Estates-General since 1614 in order to have the monetary reforms approved. The election was one of the events that transformed the general economic and political malaise of the country into the French Revolution, which began in June 1789. Soon after the convocation of the Estates-General, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly; Louis' attempts to control it resulted in the Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume, June 20), the declaration of the National Constituent Assembly on July 9, and the storming of the Bastille on July 14.

On October 5, 1789, an angry mob of women from the Parisian underclass who had been incited by revolutionaries marched on the Palace of Versailles, where the royal family lived. During the night, they infiltrated the palace and attempted to kill the Queen, who with her frivolous lifestyle symbolised much that was despised about the Ancien Regime. After the situation had been diffused, the King and his family were brought back by the crowd to Paris to live in the Tuileries Palace.

Louis himself was very popular and not unobliging to the social, political, and economic reforms of the Revolution.^{[citation needed]} 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 constitutional 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 de Provence and the Comte d'Artois, 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 democratic government both by its negative reaction to the traditional role of the monarch and in its treatment of him and his family. He was particularly irked by being kept essentially as a 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.

[edit] End of reign

On June 21, 1791, Louis attempted to flee secretly with his family from Paris to the royalist fortress town of Montmédy on the northeastern border of France 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 the royal refugees to be recognised and captured along the way at Varennes. Supposedly Louis was captured while trying to make a purchase at a store, where the clerk recognized 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.

The return of the royal family to Paris on June 25th, 1791, colored copperplate after a drawing of Jean-Louis Prieur

The other monarchies of Europe looked with concern at the developments in France, and considered whether they should intervene, either in support of Louis or to take advantage of the chaos in France. The key figure was Marie Antoinette's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, who had initially looked on the Revolution with equanimity, but became more and more disturbed as the Revolution became more radical, although he still hoped to avoid war. On August 27, Leopold and King Frederick William II of Prussia, in consultation with émigré French nobles, issued the Declaration of Pilnitz, which declared the interest of the monarchs of Europe in the well-being of Louis and his family, and threatened vague but severe consequences if anything should befall them. Although Leopold saw the Pillnitz Declaration as a way of taking action that would enable him to avoid actually doing anything about France, at least for the moment, it was seen in France as a serious threat and was denounced by the revolutionary leaders.

In addition to the ideological differences between France and the monarchical powers of Europe, there were continuing disputes over the status of Austrian estates in Alsace, and the concern of members of the National Constituent Assembly about the agitation of emigré nobles abroad, especially in the Austrian Netherlands and the minor states of Germany.

In the end, the Legislative Assembly, supported by Louis, declared war on the Holy Roman Empire first, voting for war on April 20, 1792, after a long list of grievances were presented to it by the foreign minister, Charles François Dumouriez. Dumouriez prepared an immediate invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, where he expected the local population to rise against Austrian rule. However, the Revolution had thoroughly disorganized the army, and the forces raised were insufficient for the invasion. The soldiers fled at the first sign of battle, deserting en masse and in one case, murdering their general.

August 10, 1792 The Storming of the Tuileries Palace

While the revolutionary government frantically raised fresh troops and reorganized its armies, a mostly Prussian allied army under Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick assembled at Koblenz on the Rhine. In July, the invasion commenced, with Brunswick's army easily taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun. Brunswick then issued on July 25 a proclamation, written by Louis' émigré cousin, the Prince of Condé, declaring the intent of the Austrians and Prussians to restore the King to his full powers and to treat any person or town who opposed them as rebels to be condemned to death by martial-law.

Contrary to its intended purpose of strengthening the position of the King against the revolutionaries, the Brunswick Manifesto had the opposite effect of greatly undermining Louis' already highly tenuous position in Paris. It was taken by many to be the final proof of a collusion between Louis and foreign powers in a conspiracy against his own country. The anger of the populace boiled over on August 10 when a mob — with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the "insurrectionary" Paris Commune — besieged the Tuileries Palace. The King and the royal family took shelter with the Legislative Assembly.

[edit] Arrest and Execution

Execution of Louis XVI

Louis was officially arrested on August 13 and sent to the Temple, an ancient Paris fortress used as a prison. On September 21, the Legislative Assembly declared France to be a republic.

Louis was tried (from December 11, 1792) and convicted of high treason before the National Convention. He was sentenced to death (January 21, 1793) by guillotine by a vote of 361 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 January 21, 1793. Executioner Charles Henri Sanson testified that the former King had bravely met his fate.

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.

[edit] References

1. ^ Francine du Plessix Gray (2000-08-07). The New Yorker From the Archive Books. The Child Queen. Retrieved on October 17, 2006.
2. ^ "Dictionary of World Biography". Author: Barry Jones. Published in 1994

[edit] External Links

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Louis XVI - full access article