Louis XV (1715-1774)
After Louis XVI’s sons, the “Grand Dauphin” and Louis Duke of Burgundy, both died while their father was still alive, along several other members of the royal family, when the old king finally shed his own mortal coil, the crown of France was passed down to Louis’s great-grandson, a two-year-old who narrowly managed to survive the smallpox epidemic. Three years later, he was crowned King Louis XV at the age of five. The young king was given the regency of Philip II of Orleans (Duke of Bourbon-Orleans), the nephew of Louis XIV, son of the “Monsieur,” and also the son-in-law of Louis XIV, having married Louis’s youngest legitimized daughter, Francoise (she bore Philip eight children but he still called her “Madame Lucifer”). He drastically reduced court expenses and relocated the court away from Versailles, he also detested censorship having reinstated publication of all the books his uncle had removed from circulation. He was a talented painter and performer in the plays of Moliere and Racine. Internationally, he formed alliances with Britain, Austria, and the Netherlands, and fought a successful war against Spain. It was he who first opened France to a relationship with Russia, resulting in a state visit from Peter the Great. In short, he left his country in a far better state than he found by the time the king came of age on February 15, 1723 and the regency ended. Philip died later that year and the young king, influenced by his tutor (the future Cardinal Fleury), placed the government in the hands of his “hopelessly incompetent” cousin, the Duke of Bourbon.
The first decision facing the Duke of Bourbon was in securing a queen for the king. At first, the selection was the Infanta Mariana Victoria of Spain, a three-year-old who was immediately shipped off to Paris for her crown, however the king was critically in need of an heir and with the Infanta still more than a decade away from child-bearing age, she was swiftly sent back to Spain and the Duke of Bourbon had to revisit his list of eligible princesses. The final decision seems to have come from the king’s mistress, the Marquise de Prie, who persuaded the king to select the poorest (and reportedly the ugliest) of the group – Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of the uncrowned and later dethroned King of Poland. The Marquise’s reason being that she could totally dominate the young queen who would still owe her everything for the selection. It was a remarkably calculated move. Louis XV then met his wife for the first time on their wedding night and, despite her reported appearance, he quickly fell in love. He remained faithful to his queen for at least the first eight years of marriage before embarking on his legendary career as a womanizer. However, the king’s court somewhat resented her for not bringing a dowry, and she was often critiqued when she made even the slightest social faux pas. Still, she persisted with all kindness and courtesy, always appearing by her husband’s side when the situation deemed it.
“The king, at the time of his marriage, was distinctly unimpressive: handsome enough with a faintly girlish face, but listless, unfeeling and inclined to gloom. Louis XIV had been toughened by the fronde; Louis XV had known nothing but adulation and flatter” (177).
Against his minister’s better judgment, the king decided to intervene in Poland after the death of the King of Poland (and Elector of Saxony) Augustus II “The Strong” in 1733 –Louis intervened on behalf of his father-in-law, Stanislaus Leszczyńska, who had been dethroned by Augustus near a quarter century prior. He was snuck back into Poland in disguise and re-appointed king with the overwhelming support of the Sejm (Polish parliament), but he was quickly deposed again, this time by a joint invading force of Austrians and Russians (who feared a Franco-Polish alliance). Stanislaus was later taken prisoner by the Russians in the Peace of Vienna.
The War of the Austrian Succession
“But the Peace of Vienna did not last long. It must be accounted a misfortune for readers –and indeed for writers—of European history in the eighteenth century that the struggle for the throne of Spain should have been followed after only twenty-seven years by another, this time for the throne of Austria” (178). With the Hapsburgs reeling from a severe shortage of male heirs, they decided to allow for their daughters to enter the line of succession, such was the case with Emperor Charles VI’s “Pragmatic Sanction” which decreed that his daughter Maria Theresa should succeed him (denying his own brother the kingship) but all of this was upended when Fredick II “The Great” (King of Prussia) invaded Austria with a force of 30,000. The War of the Austrian Succession had begun. It was to be a vast world war, perhaps the first of its kind.
In the war, Louis decided to side with “liberal” Prussia, hoping it would be a strike against Austria’s powerful ally England, but this was to prove an utterly disastrous decision that would soon grant England full control of the seas and Prussia full control of Germany. The war saw the battles of Dettingen in 1743 (where George II became the last English king to see action on the battlefield) and Fontenoy two years later, which was a great triumph for Maurice de Saxe (the first of the illegitimate sons of Augustus II “The Strong” of Poland, whose offspring number at least 356). When the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed in 1748, Prussia emerged as the principal beneficiary of the war. Frederick the Great kept Silesia (a major humiliation for Austria), and oddly enough, Louis XV voluntarily returned all of his conquered territories arguing that he was “King of France, not a merchant.” Public opinion quickly turned against the king for apparently getting steamrolled by Frederick the Great with no apparent gain for France. In this era, there was constant jockeying among the major colonizing powers of Europe, “it sometimes seemed as if the principal purpose of one war was to rearrange the scenery for the next” (180).
Louis XV’s popularity only continued to decline as the commons gradually became aware of his outrageous sexual conquests –sleeping with four sisters, which became a public scandal after the king was forced to confess during a serious illness—and later taking a lower class but highly educated woman, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (“Madame de Pampadour”), as his primary mistress. She was an erudite, cultured lady who hosted lavish parties, ever remaining by the side of the king, and even holding her own with the philosophes of the day (like Voltaire). She vigorously, and successfully, lobbied for Denis Diderot’s publication of the Encyclopedia, even after the Parlement of Paris and the city’s archbishop sought to have it suppressed. It was a great tragedy to the king when she died of consumption in 1764. In her later years, she provided young women as mistresses for her king when he sought out physical pleasure elsewhere. Next was Jeanne Bécu, Madame du Barry, whose great enemy at court was the Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette, who had married the future Louix XVI at the age of fourteen in 1770 (though the future king refused to speak to her for two years).
In foreign affairs, France survived another conflict –the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763)—where French colonies in Illinois, Louisiana, and Canada had nearly surrounded British colonies dotting the east coast. In Europe, France and Britain switched alliances, spurred largely by Prussia’s rise under Frederick the Great. In humiliating defeat, France was invaded by Prussia and lost Hanover and Saxony while also suffering a string of naval defeats (preventing Louis’s desired invasion of England). A conclusion was finally achieved in the Peace of Paris of 1763 which saw France cede its control of Canada along with its Caribbean islands and the eastern half of the Louisiana territory (extending from Mississippi to the Appalachians).
Then on the evening of January 5, 1757, King Louis was strolling through his courtyard when an assailant suddenly leapt out of the bushes and stabbed the king. Luckily, it was a cold night and Louis was wearing multiple layers (this likely saved is life). His attacker was tried, tortured, and executed, but the king was left very much shaken. ‘Why try to kill me?’ he asked, ‘I have done no one harm.’ John Julius Norwich writes: “But he had – the people of France. He may have been unconscious of the fact, but he had let them down badly. He was weak – perhaps the weakest of the Bourbons – and easily led, by his mistresses and others. He was moreover incurably lazy, and all too ready to leave affairs of state to frequently incompetent ministers while he hunted or womanized. The result was lost wars, continual clashes with the Parlement, and, thanks to the incessant fighting, economic stagnation. His later reign was sad, as he faced constant intrigues by his rather unpleasant children, particularly the dauphin who fortunately died of consumption at the age of thirty-six, nine years before his father – and his eldest surviving daughter, Adelaide. Madame du Barry doubtless gave him consolation of a kind, but he was growing old and she was no substitute for the Pompadour. When in the spring of 1774 he succumbed for the second tie to smallpox he hastily dismissed her from his bed, both to avoid infection and also to obtain absolution for both of them – the poor girl had a good deal absolve. He died on 10 May at Versailles, at the age of sixty-four” (184).
Louis XVI (1774-1792)
Since the only son of Louis XV, Louis Ferdinand, died before his father, once again the crown of France passed to the late king’s grandson, the bungling, tragic Louis XVI. He was twenty years old, not in need of a regency, short in stature (not more than five feet, six inches tall), flabby-faced, overweight, awkward and curt, and often found gorging himself on food. He was disagreeable, indecisive, and lacked charm, and –naturally– he was also deeply pious and chaste. He was married to the second youngest of the sixteen children of the Empress Maria Theresa, “Maria Antonia,” or better known to us by her French name: Marie Antoinette. She was far more intelligent than her husband (albeit poorly educated), but she was Austrian –called “L’Autrichienne”by the people. She was deeply unpopular with the general public. Louis, in turn, seemed to want nothing to do with her. He was terrified of women, having taken to heart the teaching of his gloomy, excessively pious father who was dismayed by his own father’s overt womanizing. This left the poor boy deeply torn –he wanted to preserve old conservative traditions of the Church and the monarchy, while also embracing the new ideas of the philosophes. He seemed to lack all common sense and confidence. In a deep embarrassment that became widely known during his reign, when Marie Antoinette was brought to France for their wedding, on the night of their wedding, Louis actually fell asleep in his marriage bed. A successful consummation of their marriage didn’t occur until some seven years later. In that time, obscene pamphlets circulated that Marie Antoinette had sought sexual satisfaction elsewhere with both men and women. Her popularity only continued to decline. But offspring for the royal couple finally came –a dauphin– in 1781.
The most important minister in the king’s cabinet was Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot who became controller general of finance, wherein he instituted a new policy of debt reduction and belt tightening. He was a wise and competent administrator who might have helped France avoid a revolution had the king heeded his advice, but Turgot earned his own enemies –bankers and tax collectors who worried their profits were diminishing, the nobility, Parlement (which the king had recalled), and the farmers hated him for his free trade plans for commodities like grain. Other ministers soon came with their knives out and on May 12, 1776, Turgot was ordered to resign his office. “He lived to see all his work undone, all the abuses against which he had fought deliberately restored, and France set firmly on the road to the greatest catastrophe that she had ever known” (187).
That same year, across the Atlantic, after the French losses in the Seven Years’ War, France decided to support the American Revolution against Britain (France had already been secretly sending armaments and supplies to the rebels). Benjamin Franklin was welcomed with rapturous applause in Paris as the fist American ambassador to France (he was immediately given a membership to the Academy of Sciences and was warmly embraced by Voltaire). After the surrender of British general John Burgoyne following the two battles at Saratoga, Louis signed a treaty of alliance recognizing American independence. An army of 7,000 was dispatched from France to America, led by general Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau and assisted by twenty-three-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, while a French fleet successfully prevented the rescue of Lord Cornwallis who was forced to surrender after the siege of Yorktown. France now appeared on the world stage as master of the seas, defeating its old nemesis at its own game, gaining its revenge for the Seven Years’ War, but the revolution also found France deeply indebted, moreso than it ever had been before. The nation’s finances cycled through several unprincipled ministers who failed to address the growing dilemma. Something was clearly rotten in the state of France.
John Julius Norwich writes:
“France was still the most powerful nation in Europe, with a population of 26 million (England could boast only 12 million). It had recently contributed in large measure to the victory of the United States in the War of Independence. Its reputation had never been higher, and its cultural influence was rapidly spreading across the continent. Why then was the whole country so seething with dissatisfaction? First, because it felt that the monarchy had let it down. This is not to say that the French were anti-monarchist; they were nothing of the kind. But they expected the king to be on their side and to protect them, both from grasping tax-collectors and from groping noblemen. Instead, by deciding to live at Versailles, he had cut himself off from his people; and by gathering the nobility around him he had estranged them from the lands they owned and the peasants for whom they should have been caring. Then there was the Church. Out of a total population of some 26 million, the clergy numbered fewer than 100,000 but owned more than a tenth of the land. It was, in short, a bastion of fabulous wealth – very little of which, however, came down to the parishes. It levied tithes on the harvest – payable by the peasantry – but was itself, like nobility, largely immune from taxation. There was a voluntary grant to the state every five years, but as the size of this grant was decided by the assemblies of the Church itself it seldom amounted to very much. The cardinals and bishops lived like fighting-cocks and frequently scandalized the faithful, especially the lower clergy; they did not seem to realize that this was the age of Enlightenment, and that they now had to contend with the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopedistes. And meanwhile, in many parts of France, the peasants were cripplingly poor, barefoot and in rags, cripples by taxes from which the nobility were excused, and looking, according to Tobias Smollett, like ‘ravenous scarecrows’” (189-190).
The first two estates –the nobility and the clergy—continued onward, much as they always had. But the third, the Estates General, had changed radically over the past century. It had largely been disbanded as a political entity and was ignored. By May 5, 1789, Louis XVI was forced to convoke the Estates General again for the first time since 1614. By now, the people wanted radical change. Their model was America with its constitution based on philosophical principles. Had Louis XVI possessed an ounce of understanding for his fellow countrymen, he might have sympathized with the Estates General and saved the monarchy. Instead he sided with the privileged elite. When the Estates General finally met, the king was off hunting while no one in the court deemed it worthwhile to find accommodations for nearly a thousand arriving deputies at Versailles. When the proceedings got underway, the king gave a “turgid and spiritless” speech for over three hours instead of announcing an exciting new economic policy. In turn, the third estate responded by electing the provocative orater Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau and calling themselves the “National Assembly,” an assembly of the people.
Persuaded by a horrified Marie Antionette, King Louis XVI then quickly declared the Estates General meeting illegal. The deputies of the Estates General were then barred from further participation in the proceedings and, after finding the doors locked, at the suggestion of a certain Dr. Joseph Ignace-Guillotin, they moved to the jeu de paume, a large indoor tennis court located nearby, and vowed on June 20, 1789 “not to separate and to reassemble wherever necessary until the constitution of the kingdom is established.” The resulting proceedings were a complete disaster. The king continued to deny the Estates General its power, at one point storming out of the gathering along with the clergy and the nobility, but the Estates General refused to join them and openly defied the king. The stock market plunged and rioting broke out in Paris. By now very much alarmed, the king ordered sixteen regiments of the army in to quell the violence, but the soldiers (mostly foreign mercenaries) were pelted and attacked by the people. Outside the Palais-Royale, a young attorney named Camille Desmoulins twisted a chestnut leaf into a rough cockade (or round knot of ribbons) and stuck it in his hat, which soon became a symbol and a fashion statement for citizens wishing not to be spit on while walking the streets. The rising tide of the mob broke into the gunsmith shops and stripped them bare, stealing at least ten cannons and 28,000 muskets before heading for the Bastille on July 14, 1789. The Bastille had been constructed in the fourteenth century as a stronghold to protect Paris during the Hundred Years’ War before it was declared a state prison in 1417. Louis XIV used it to incarcerate members of the upper-class who could not otherwise be punished by common law. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes it was filled with Huguenots. By 1789, “Conditions within it were not particularly hard; the dreaded dungeons had not been used for years, and those inmates who could afford it might live in considerable comfort, being allotted pleasant rooms with tapestries and carpets and allowed to wear their own clothes. There was even a library. The food was good too, and for the favoured ones there was always the chance of being invited to dinner with the governor. But it remained the Bastille, looming darkly over the center of Paris like a great thundercloud, a constant reminder of the power and majesty of the king and an awful warning to those who dared to displease him” (195).
Mid-morning, some 900 people had gathered outside the Bastille. The governor, Marquis de Launay, was well aware that he had only two days’ worth of food supplies and no domestic source of water; he knew he could not resist a siege for long. He made several attempts to negotiate with the mob, but by the early afternoon, the crowd had infiltrated the outer courtyard and soon dropped the drawbridge. De Launay was quickly seized and viciously stabbed in the stomach before later being beheaded, his head stuck on a pike and paraded around Paris. The king, meanwhile, had spent the day lazily hunting before returning to the palace for bed. The next morning the famous interchange took place when the king asking Duc de la Rochefoucald: ‘Is this a rebellion?’ to which the duke responded, ‘No sire, it is a revolution.’ The king quickly realized the spiraling situation. He hastily ordered the withdrawal of troops from Paris and Versailles, hoping to cool the temperature of the mob. The king was briefly cheered. General de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution, read out the order outside the Hotel de Ville after which he was appointed commander of the citizens militia, soon to be the National Guard. Its members wore cockades of red and blue (the colors of Paris) which were also joined with a band of white, the color of the king. The tricolor scheme symbolized the old and the new France –these colors still remain on the French flag to this day. The king soon reinstated the controversial minister, the Swiss banker Jacques Necker (acquiescing to the demands of the third estate), and then he donned a tricolor cockade in his own hat amidst much celebration among the crowds. However, keen observers noted that he was now more a captive than a king. All across the country, the conditions of the peasants continued to deteriorate and anarchy was rising. Riots were breaking out everywhere –at Troyes, they murdered the mayor, the royal garrison at Rennes deserted en masse, the garrison at Marseilles was forcibly disbanded by an armed mob. One of Louis’s ministers was rumored to have remarked that if the people were hungry, they should simply eat hay. He was then seized and treated like an animal, hay was stuffed into his mouth before he was hanged from a lamppost. It was then immediately proposed in the Assembly that the feudal rights should be revoked (by a gaggle of deeply fearful aristocrats), but a few days later, some six thousand irate working men and women (fishwives, cleaners, prostitutes, market stall-holders and so on) marched on Versailles demanding bread and screaming about a rumor that the tricolor cockades had been trampled. In the night, the slightly drunken mob invaded the palace at Versailles calling for the death of the queen. Luckily, Lafayette was able to restore a modicum of order and the crowd subsided when the king and queen appeared on a balcony (risked their live to do so), pledging to return to Paris. They then left that same afternoon for the Tuileries, never to see Versailles again.
But the Tuileries was situated right beside the riding school where the National Assembly was now constantly in session, led by a fierce young lawyer from Arras named Maximilien Robespierre who attracted the undivided attention of the revolutionary left-wing, while the right-wing was still dominated by Mirabeau. With only six months left to live, Mirabeau quickly warned the king that he must flee the radicalism of Paris for the relative safety of the provinces while the revolutionary storm passes. He feared for the king’s life. Meanwhile –somewhat shockingly– upper-class life in Paris continued as heedlessly and hedonistically as it ever had: the political and literary salons stayed popular, and the cafes were as crowded as ever, even if the theatres no longer played Moliere (he was considered too aristocratic) or Beaumarchis (whose “Marriage of Figaro” was too anti-social). On the streets, women wore liberty hats and constitution jewelry, while the Assembly abolished all titles, armorial bearings, and orders of knighthood as symbols of the ancien régime. The first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1790 was met with a huge celebration, the Fete de la Federation.
But this cause célèbre was not to last as the Assembly began issuing new decrees against the Church, confiscating the Church’s vast lands (a decree which threatened to devalue land all across the country and spark hyper-inflation), the monastic vows were abolished, and all clergy were forced to agree to an oath, pledging loyalty to the state and agreeing to local elections within their parishes. The king was in a state of indecisive agony over this development, ultimately siding against the oath after initially signing it (the king dithered while Pope Pius VI did not immediately respond to his request for guidance on this matter). Anti-clericalism once again swept the nation –the pope was burned in effigy in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, convents were broken into and nuns were violently assaulted, a severed head was tossed through the window of the coach of the Papal Nuncio, a mob smashed through the doors of Saint-Sulpice forcing the organist to play the revolution song “Ça Ira.” The king was left trapped, barricaded inside the Tuileries, his kingship was permitted to come and go only by whims of the mob.
“By now Louis XVI knew that he could never accept the Revolution, nor would the Revolution ever accept him” (201). He remembered the words of Mirabeau and sought a secret plan to escape to the provinces whereby he might persuade his brother-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, to mount an invasion of France on his behalf, or even appeal to the King of Spain who would perhaps come to France’s aid. The king and his family escaped in the middle of the night in disguise (for fear some of their attendants might be secret informants) thanks to Frederik Axel von Fersen, a Swedish aristocrat (who may have also been Marie Antionette’s lover). When the king and his family were found absent in the morning, an alarm was raised and the painfully slow carriage was intercepted by commoners, notably a postmaster and a local grocer near Varennes who happened to recognize the king. The next day, two officers dispatched from the National Assembly ordered the king to return to Paris immediately. The escape attempt had failed miserably. They returned to Paris on a hot day, unable to stop the carriage even to use the bathroom as huge bands of commoners banged on the carriage walls and spat at the king as it passed through the streets.
Shortly thereafter, a document was drafted by Jacques Pierre Brissot in the assembly which announced that by fleeing, the king and effectively deposed himself. The resulting meeting went completely haywire as the fiery, pock-scarred Georges Danton egged on the mob while Lafayette’s army was brought in yet again to restore order –Lafayette eventually ordered his troops to fire into the crowd, killing fifty rioters. Desmoulins went into hiding and Danton fled to England for the remainder of the summer. As the great powers of Europe began to grow increasingly concerned about the situation unfolding in France, the left-wing group called the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, which met at the Convent of the Jacobins in the Rue de Saint-Honore (members were known as Jacobins) quickly took on the role of the nationalist, anti-monarchy party (much like the less organized Girondins). The Jacobins originated as anti-royalist deputies from Brittany. Among their members included the influential Jean Marie Roland and his wife Marie-Jeanne whose salon was to become their meeting place. They privately favored war, hoping a conflict with Austria or Prussia might spur on the revolution. The mood of war soon gripped the mob (encouraged by the radical publications of Jean-Paul Marat who demanded pre-emptive action against Prussia), even though the French army was hardly in any state to take on any of the great powers of Europe (some 3,000 soldiers had resigned amidst the chaos). Every new failure in the country was blamed on the king and his traitorous L’Autrichienne. The culmination of this anger reached a boiling point on June 20, 1792 when a vast mob, perhaps as many as eight thousand armed men and women, marched on the Tuileries and infiltrated the king’s chamber, finding him sullen and depressed, resigned to his fate. “Here I am,” he stated quietly. The queen and the children had been hurried out of the palace just moments before. Six weeks later, many of the king’s guards joined the protestors, and those remaining were fired upon (the king’s remarkably brave Swiss guard held up a strong final stand) but the mob was simply too great. It overwhelmed the palace and indiscriminately murdered attendants, maids, cooks, and other employees of the king. One lucky servant recorded finding the apartments and staircases strewn with dead bodies before he narrowly fled out the queen’s window onto a terrace. He then hid in a stable with a few Swiss guardsmen as they watched in horror –men filled with bloodlust slaughtered what remained of the king’s guard, decapitating the bodies, and the women mutilated the genitals of the corpses, carrying off trophies like animals. It was a hideous scene. These were the September Massacres of 1792. Some 1,500 prisoners were murdered, many of them were Catholic priests who refused to sign the oath –“Nor were these straight, clean killings; those responsible soon became no better than homicidal lunatics, torturing, amputating, eviscerating their victims in an orgy of bloodlust. Few of these unfortunates suffered more than the queen’s greatest friend, the Princesse de Lamballe. She was stripped, raped and savagely mutilated; her heart roasted and eaten; and her head, impaled on another pike, paraded beneath the queen’s window at the Temple” (210).
Indeed, the king and his whole family were carted off and imprisoned in the Temple (which was later demolished by Napoleon in 1808, but which had been originally constructed in the thirteenth century by the Knights Templar). The end of the monarchy was declared on September 22 along with the establishment of the First French Republic as the Jacobins quickly solidified their power through a campaign of terror. On December 11, Louis was summoned to the Convention to face his accusers, he was charged with high treason and crimes against the state. His defense was fervent, but this was to be no fair trial. On January 15, 1793, “Citizen Capet” (so named after his descendant Hugo Capet) was found guilty, with 693 deputies voting for a guilty verdict, none voting not guilty, and 23 abstaining. The following day a vote was cast for his fate –361 deputies voted for immediate execution rather than a period of imprisonment or exile. Among those who voted in favor of the king’s guilt was his own cousin, the Duke of Orleans, Louis Philippe II or “Philippe Egalite” as he preferred to be known –though he too would face the guillotine by the mob before the end of the year. But the king took it all with a sense of calm. While fast asleep on the 20th, he was awoken with the news that he was to be taken to the scaffold the following day. He was given a brief few moments with his family, he then ate his supper alone, and the following morning he awoke, heard mass, and received communion from his friend, the Irish-born priest Henry Essex Edgworth (who then accompanied the king to the guillotine in the Place de la Revolution, which is now called the Place de la Concorde). The guillotine owed its name to Dr. Joseph-Igance Guillotin who had suggested that citizens convicted of capital offenses should be given the option of a quick beheading through the same device used for the nobility. Before ascending the staircase, “Citizen Capet” gazed up at the towering structure before loosening his shirt, coat, and collar. He then reportedly stated: “I die innocent. I forgive those who are guilty of my death, and I pray God that the blood which you are about to shed may never be required of France.” He then laid himself down on the platform, accepting his fate. The priest Edgworth cried out: “Digne fils de Saint-Louis, montez au ciel!” (“Worthy son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!”) And with that the blade crashed down, ending the life and reign of Louis XVI.
House of Bourbon (1515-1589)
- Louis XV “The Beloved” (1715-1774)
- Louis XVI (1774-1792)
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death.