Louis XVI

Born August 23, 1754
Versailles Palace, France
Died January 21, 1792
Paris, France

King of France during the American and French revolutions

France's King Louis XVI started life in the majesty of the French royal court and ended it with a horrible death among the jeering crowds of Paris. History has often portrayed Louis XVI as simple-minded and cowardly. But some historians con tend that Louis XVI was a dynamic, dedicated leader who tried to act in the interests of the French people during very turbu lent times, and was an unfortunate victim of circumstances.

Louis-Auguste (pronounced lew-EE oh-GOOST), who later became King Louis XVI, was born in 1754 to the French royal family known as Bourbon. Their ancestors had ruled France since 897. Louis-Auguste's father was the son of King

Louis XV. His mother, Marie-Joseph, was the second wife of Louis XV and a daughter of the King of Poland. Louis-Auguste had three brothers and two sisters who lived beyond infancy. Louis-Auguste's older brother, the self-confident young Duc de Bourgogne (pronounced DOOK duh-ber-GOYNE), was his parents' favorite. When the ten-year-old heir to the throne got ill and died of a respiratory disease in the spring of 1761, the family was devastated.

Louis-Auguste, next in line to become king, was a fair-skinned, rather awkward boy with blue eyes and heavy eyebrows. He was encouraged by his tutors to be reserved and restrained, because those were considered good traits for a future king. All his life, Louis-Auguste enjoyed riding and hunting, and worked for hours making keys and locks and drawing maps. He does not seem to have been overly proud, despite his royal upbringing. In his biography, Louis and Antoinette, Vincent Cronin called Louis-Auguste "that rare creature, a prince with a poor opinion of himself."

Louis-Auguste's parents died of respiratory disease in the mid-1760s. On April 27, 1774, after his grandfather's death from smallpox, nineteen-year-old Louis-Auguste became the King of France. He was henceforth known as Louis XVI.

Marriage and children

In 1770, then sixteen-year-old Louis Auguste married the Archduchess Marie-Antoinette (pronounced an-twah-NET), youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa of Bohemia and Hungary. (The Holy Roman Empire dissolved in 1806.) The slim, blue-eyed, blonde Marie-Antoinette, a bride at sixteen, was mostly interested in fashion, the theater, and court gossip. The French people distrusted her devotion to her native land, Austria, and blamed France's financial problems on her free-spending ways.

The couple had three children. They were Marie-Therese, born in 1778; Louis-Joseph, a much-loved oldest son who was born in 1781 and died in 1789; and Louis-Charles, who was born in 1785.

Common people get angry over finances

A French king was called an absolute monarch, but his powers were really rather limited. He directed and paid for adventures in foreign lands and declared war if necessary to preserve the country. He made decisions together with a State Council. His ability to impose taxes was limited by the group of thirteen courts known as the parlements (pronounced PARL-mahns). The parlements were made up of nobles, who opposed any of Louis's efforts to take away their tax-free status. As a result, the tax burden fell on the people who were least able to pay.

When Louis XVI became king, France's treasury was empty and the country was hugely in debt. Heavy taxes on the common people had caused widespread misery. Gradually the peasants (the common people) became angry with the ruling class, the cause of their unhappiness.

Taxation problems, reforms

Between 1774 and 1789, Louis XVI had several finance directors who tried to manage the treasury of France. Each in his turn proposed various financial reforms, but finally concluded that France's privileged classes must be taxed in order to prevent the country from going bankrupt. The privileged classes included members of the royal court, the nobles, members of parlements, and Roman Catholic clergymen. Louis XVI repeatedly bowed to pressure from those people and rejected any talk of taxing them. After the king rejected his proposals, each finance minister was forced to resign.

During this period of revolving finance directors, Louis XVI approved limited reform measures. For example, he approved the taxing of rich people for road repairs, rather than forcing the common people to repair them for free in their spare time. The reforms led to a brief period of popularity for Louis. But the common people continued to simmer with resentment. They lived lives of grinding poverty, and they resented being forced to send their sons to serve in the military.

Meeting of the Estates General proposed

Chaos erupted in France in 1788. Bad weather had ruined the harvest and people were starving. The peasants were forced to pay higher and higher taxes and make large payments to the Roman Catholic Church. Punishment for crimes was very harsh. For example, if a man were caught killing a gamebird to feed his starving family, he was executed.

In 1788 some people who were interested in solving France's financial crisis pressured Louis XVI to call a meeting of the Estates General to discuss the country's problems. France had three social classes, known as estates. The First Estate was the clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church, the Second Estate consisted of noblemen, and the Third Estate was made up of the common people. A meeting of all three classes had not taken place for 175 years.

The king at first refused to call such a meeting, but public pressure forced him to do so. He ordered the meeting for May 1789. The man who was then finance director, Brienne (pronounced bree-EN), publicly asked all Frenchmen to send him suggestions on how best to conduct the Estates General meeting. This kind of free speech had never been allowed in France before. Instead of offering useful suggestions, though, people took the opportunity to insult Brienne and the royal family. The king was angry about this and dismissed Brienne in August 1788. But it was too late to stop France's peasants from expressing their displeasure with their lives.

National Assembly formed

In May 1789 the Estates General met at the Palace of Versailles (pronounced ver-SIGH), which was located in the town of Versailles, twelve miles west of Paris. It was a huge, magnificent structure where the French royal family lived in great luxury, surrounded by ten thousand relatives, nobleman, and an enormous staff of servants. There the Third Estate (commoners) formed itself into a National Assembly.

In June 1789 the National Assembly vowed to stay together until it produced a new constitution and saw it firmly established in France. But Louis XVI resisted the assembly's demands for political independence, equal rights, and freedom for all French citizens. On June 23 he threatened to dismiss the Assembly at once if it did not take back its claims to national power.

The assembly then rose up and declared that the king no longer could dismiss them, because they now held the power in France. They vowed to leave "only at the point of a bayonet." The king responded by ordering troops to force the assembly to disband. But Louis's troops refused to attack their countrymen. A few days later the king, fearing bloodshed, backed down and ordered all three estates to work together to draw up a new constitution.

Storming of the Bastille

On July 11, 1789, Louis XVI dismissed finance minister Jacques Neckar, who had urged him to make many reforms that would help the peasants. By that time, the king had surrounded Paris and the Palace of Versailles with 25,000 Swiss and German mercenaries (pronounced MER-sa-naireez; soldiers for hire) to protect him in case of an uprising.

The uprising began early on July 14, 1789, when Parisian peasants armed themselves with pitchforks and shovels to defend against a rumored assault on them by French and foreign soldiers. Soon realizing that these weapons were inadequate, the revolutionaries set out to find guns of their own. They seized 30,000 muskets from an old military hospital, but they still needed gunpowder. Word got out that a large quantity of gunpowder was being stored at the Bastille (pronounced bah-STEEL) in Paris.

The Bastille was Paris's ancient prison, a gray stone structure with nine-foot-thick walls and high gun towers that stood as a symbol of France's oppressive government. For centuries, people had been sent to serve time in the prison, whether or not they were convicted of any crimes. On July 14, an angry crowd forced its way into the Bastille, demanding gunpowder. Arguments between the people and Bastille officials continued throughout the day, and tensions mounted.

Finally, in the afternoon, soldiers inside the Bastille fired their cannons and hundreds of peasants were killed or wounded. The crowd went wild. Hungry for revenge, they rampaged through the Bastille, destroying whatever they could find and killing some of the soldiers. The building was torn apart, stone by stone. Today, French people throughout the world commemorate the July 14 anniversary of the storming of the Bastille as Bastille Day, a celebration of French independence.

Changes in the government

After this explosion of violence, many nobles and members of the royal family escaped from France. But the king was trapped at the Palace of Versailles and could not escape. On August 27, the National Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The document declared that "men are born and remain free and equal in rights." It announced the aims of the French Revolution and called on other countries to throw off their chains and demand liberty for themselves.

The assembly declared that King Louis must share his power with them and with the Parlements. No longer could he dictate laws and have them put in place unchallenged. Now laws could be made only through agreement with the other branches of government. Likewise, laws could not be enacted by the assembly without the king's approval.

Louis XVI claimed that he shared the assembly's belief in a republican form of government, but few people were convinced of his sincerity. (A republic is a government with a chief of state who is not a monarch. Supreme power rests in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote.)

King forced back to Paris

On October 15, 1789, a group of rowdy citizens from Paris broke into the Palace of Versailles to bring their complaints directly to the king. They were particularly angry about the widespread lack of food. They demanded that Louis XVI return to Paris, where he could keep himself informed about their plight and show his dedication to changing the situation. Louis XVI and his family made the journey to the dark old palace of the Tuileries (pronounced TWEE-ler-eez) in Paris. The Assembly moved there with him.

A period of peace

After the king's move to Paris, his subjects' hostility abated. The fall harvest turned out to be better than expected, and people felt empowered by what they had accomplished in demolishing the Bastille and bringing their king back to Paris. For a while they calmed down and peace descended on France.

The National Assembly prepared a constitution that called for power to be divided between the king and the Assembly. It contained a system of checks and balances, like that of the U.S. Constitution, to make sure one department of government did not exercise too much power over the others. The assembly introduced other measures such as freedom of speech and open trade. It also demanded that members of the clergy take oaths of loyalty to the Revolution.

During the years 1789 to 1791, the Assembly made adjustments to the new constitution. As for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, they were humiliated at their forced move to Paris. They felt like prisoners. They hated the gloomy Tuileries Palace, where commoners often pressed up against the windows to observe the royal family's activities. Marie-Antoinette urged Louis to go to her native Austria and bring back an army to destroy the revolutionaries and take back his monarchy.

King fails to escape France, signs constitution

In 1791, the king and queen tried to flee the country but were caught and forced to return to Paris. With his capture, the king's hopes of reestablishing his authority were dashed.

The members of the National Assembly publicly forgave the king for his attempt at escape. They had worked hard at coming up with a constitution, and that document said that they had to share power with the king. Some assembly members feared that without a king at their head, commoners might get out of hand and destroy the entire social system of France.

On September 14, 1791, the king signed the new constitution, and swore his allegiance to it. It appeared that the revolution was over and France could look forward to a bright future. But worse times were in store.

Legislative Assembly forms, war is declared

On October 1, 1791, the National Assembly was replaced by the Legislative Assembly, made up mostly of people hostile to the king. The Legislative Assembly faced many problems, including food shortages. When faced with problems at home, governments throughout history have often gone to war to divert the attention of their people from the problems. Members of the Legislative Assembly turned to this tactic. They warned French citizens of the very real possibility of France being invaded by Austria and Prussia.

King Louis favored a war too. He hoped it would result in his being restored to his throne. In April 1792, Louis XVI exercised one of his few remaining powers and declared war against Austria and Prussia.

King found guilty and executed

The war went badly for France, and the king was blamed. In August 1792, Louis XVI and his family were permanently confined in the Temple, a dark, damp, twelfth-century fortress that had long served as a prison.

In September 1792, the French government declared France a republic and abolished the monarchy. King Louis XVI and his wife were now considered commoners and were charged with various crimes. Imprisonment was hard on Louis, who became depressed, stopped exercising, and grew quite fat.

In December 1792, Louis XVI was placed on trial by the government. He was ordered to defend himself on charges of repeated acts of treason against the Republic of France. On January 20, 1793, the king was found guilty and was sentenced to death.

On the following day, to the jeers of noisy crowds, King Louis XVI was guillotined (pronounced GILL-uh-teened; put to death by having his head cut off) in a public square in Paris. His head was displayed in a basket and his remains were carted off, thrown into a pit, and dissolved with a powerful chemical called quicklime. Years later a chapel was erected in the king's memory at the site of his final resting-place.

Fate of the king's family

Marie-Antoinette met her death on the guillotine on October 16, 1793. The couple's eight-year-old son, Louis-Charles, was kept in solitary confinement in a dark cell, where he developed a disease and died in June 1795. His sister, Marie-Therese, spent two years in prison but was then released in December 1795, in exchange for an Austrian prisoner. She later married a royal cousin.

Biographer Vincent Cronin recognized the noble aspects of the doomed king's character. Cronin wrote, Louis XVI "brought to [his reign as king] the principle of justice that had characterized the French monarchy at its best, and also something of his own: a respect for other people's opinions, symbolized in [a journey he once took through the French countryside] when the crowds shouted, 'Long live the King!' and Louis called back 'Long live my people!'"

For More Information

Boatner, Mark M. "Louis XVI." Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994, p. 660.

Bourgoin, Suzanne M. and Paula K. Byers, eds. "Louis XVI." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 1998, vol. 9, pp. 534-35.

Cronin, Vincent. Louis and Antoinette. New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1975.

Fay, Bernard. Louis XVI. Translated by Patrick O'Brien. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966.

Hardman, John. Louis XVI. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Purcell, L. Edward. Who Was Who in the American Revolution. New York: Facts on File, 1993, pp. 300-01.

Louis XVI and the American Revolution

When Louis XVI became King of France in 1774, the American Revolution (1775–83) was in its very early stages. As a king himself, Louis did not feel sympathetic toward the American rebels, who were rising up against their lawful king. So why did he agree to help the Americans? As long as the American cause seemed doomed to failure, he did not want to. For a time he refused to see Benjamin Franklin see entry, who had been sent to France to request its help. But in late 1777, Louis changed his mind.

Louis had a number of reasons for agreeing to help the Americans in their conflict with France's longtime enemy. One reason was economic. He knew that England wanted France's most valuable overseas possessions, some islands in the West Indies (an area in the Caribbean Sea between the United States and South America). A war with England over these possessions might be avoided if France helped American revolutionaries to achieve a quick victory. Another reason Louis agreed to help was pressure from French soldiers, who were eager to go to war against Great Britain to avenge earlier war losses and to gain glory for themselves.

For the first three years of the war, King Louis pretended to be neutral (noninvolved) while secretly helping the Americans. He okayed a large loan from his government and persuaded Spain to advance money as well. The money was used to supply the Americans with 200 cannon, 25,000 muskets, 200,000 pounds of gunpowder, 20 brass mortars (a type of cannon), and clothing and tents for 25,000 men.

When the Americans scored a stunning victory over the British at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777, Louis was finally moved to act openly. He now feared that if England lost to the Americans, the two countries might band together and attack France. In February 1778, France signed the French Alliance with Benjamin Franklin. Without this alliance, it is doubtful that America could have won the Revolutionary War.

France became engaged in a costly worldwide naval war with England, capturing from her islands in the West Indies and Africa. In April 1779, the king sent 5,500 French troops to help the American rebels. In October 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis, head of British troops in America, surrendered his 7,000 officers and men to the Americans, bringing an end to the fighting.

Louis XVI had gone to war mainly for the benefit of France, but many Americans hailed him as a selfless champion of freedom. Benjamin Franklin himself praised the king. In a letter to French Foreign Minister Vergennes in 1783, the American patriot wrote, "May I beg the favour of you, sir, to express respectfully for me to his Majesty, the deep sense I have of all the inestimable benefits his goodness has conferr'd on my country." It is ironic that the ideas of liberty championed by the American revolutionaries were taken up by French revolutionaries, which led to the loss of King Louis's head.