LOUIS XVI

LOUIS XVI (1754–1793), ruled as king of France, 1774–1792.

Louis-Auguste, duc de Berry, the third son of the dauphin, Louis (1729–1765), and Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, was born at Versailles on 23 August 1754. He never expected to be king, but the high childhood mortality of the age that had bedeviled the Bourbon successions since the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) intervened. His two older brothers died before him, and his father died young in 1765. The following year the unexpected heir apparent, at the age of twelve, began his diary. It reveals a limited intelligence, a mind little exercised, and a young man ill at ease with the demands of a public, ceremonial life.

The education of the new dauphin was given over to the duc de La Vauguyon, who surrounded his pupil with priests noted for their learning (the Jesuit abbé Soldini and the abbé Nollet). The boy proved a diligent but unimaginative pupil. In 1770, Louis was married by arrangement of Étienne François, duc de Choiseul (1719–1785), who headed the Austrian party at court, to Marie-Antoinette (1755–1793), the daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis I (r. 1745–1765) and Marie-Thérèse (1717–1780).

The young couple were ill-matched. The Austrian princess had been wretchedly educated, wrote French slowly and with difficulty, and shared none of her husband's interests. Louis-Auguste was pedantic but well-read—his favorite Latin author was Tacitus, obviously not principally appreciated for his anti-imperial ideas—and even taught himself English. His taste ran to practical rather than imaginative or philosophical works. There were only two novels in his library, of which Robinson Crusoe was one. He was passionately interested in locksmithing, and had also had a telescope installed above his workroom at Versailles, where he enjoyed watching the comings and goings in the gardens of the great palace.

His marriage was celebrated in 1770 when Louis was sixteen and his bride fifteen. It was not consummated for seven years. Louis was not impotent, as was his brother the comte de Provence (the future Louis XVIII, r. 1814–1824), but he was unable to ejaculate until—and here there is some murkiness—an operation was performed at the urging of Marie-Antoinette's brother, Joseph. His affliction, in contrast to the libidinous excesses of his grandfather, Louis XV (r. 1715–1774), made the young heir a subject of private ridicule. The couple would eventually have four children. Only Marie-Thérèse Charlotte (called Madame Royale, who became the duchess d'Angoulême) survived the French Revolution.

In 1774, Louis XV died suddenly of smallpox and Louis-Auguste succeeded to the throne, a place where he was never comfortable. The young king made the seventy-four-year-old Count Jean-Frédéric Phelypeaux de Maurepas (1701–1781) his principal advisor. The count, earlier disgraced by Louis XV, now surrounded himself with capable men, most notably the philosophe Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) and Count Charles Gravier de Vergennes (1719–1797), and tried to shield his master from the poisonous court intrigue. But the reforming promise of the new monarchy soon evaporated and the king was overwhelmed by the accumulated structural ills of the kingdom, the ferocious and destructive factional fighting at court, the cynical legacy of his grandfather, all intensified by bankruptcy caused by the French backing the American rebels in their war for independence.

Despite his intellectual limitations, his indecisiveness, and his timidity that often took refuge in stubbornness, Louis had the good fortune to be served by ministers of talent; but he was incapable of pursuing a consistent policy of needed reform, and perhaps it was too late. The historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) asserts the monarchy was dead by the final years of Louis XV's reign; certainly Louis XVI was unable to revive it.

The first so-called budget of the kingdom, the Compte rendu prepared by the new finance minister Jacques Necker (1732–1804) in 1781, falsely suggested there was a surplus. But the nation continued to borrow until servicing the growing debt soon surpassed the original sums borrowed. Later that year, Maurepas died and Louis began his personal rule and spent extravagantly on Marie Antoinette—he purchased the château of Saint-Cloud for her in 1784, without consulting his ministers—and drew ever closer to the queen whose mostly harmful influence increased.

By late 1786, it was clear that without some fundamental reform in the tax system the kingdom could not pay its bills. Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734–1802), the comptroller general (1783–87), drew up an elaborate and radical proposal that Louis embraced. The king and his comptroller called to Versailles an Assembly of Notables (1787), drawn from the most distinguished nobility and church officials in the land. They were offered concessions in exchange for abandoning their privilege of exemption from the taille, the chief direct tax of the kingdom. The negotiations failed, Louis was depressed, took to more and more hunting and overeating, and increasingly relied on his politically inept wife. He was forced to dismiss Calonne and replace him with his rival, Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne (1727–1794), who called a second Assembly of Notables (1788). This group also rejected the king's proposed reforms and insisted the Estates-General be called. Louis governed briefly by decree and extracted forced loans, but he had no choice but to call the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614.

As the election writs went out, censorship was lifted. France found a direct outlet for its political voice, long stifled. Thousands of pamphlets accompanied the electioneering, and cahiers de doléances, the grievances solicited by the king, were drawn up and submitted to Versailles. When the representatives of the three estates (clergy, nobility, and everyone else) met at Versailles on 5 May 1789, it turned out to be the official beginning of the French Revolution.

On 3 June 1789, Louis's oldest son, the dauphin, died. The king was inconsolable as the first dramatic events of the Revolution unfolded. In his grief and disappointments, he became increasingly dependent upon his wife. He addressed the Estates on 23 June in a séance royale, but seemed distracted as his dry, authoritarian speech was read out. Whatever energy he had, as he assembled troops at Versailles to disperse the National Assembly and perhaps attack Paris—at least this was widely believed in the capital—was quickly exhausted with news of the fall of the Bastille, whose significance he never grasped. The entry in his diary for 14 July was "Rien"—"nothing."

Through the summer the court intrigued until, on 5–6 October 1789, the king was forcibly taken to Paris by women of the city who had trudged through the rain to confront him about soaring bread prices. The Tuileries Palace, unoccupied by a French king since 1680 when Louis XIV moved to Versailles, was hastily cleaned to receive Louis XVI. After much dilatoriness and indecision, he took the advice of his wife that the royal family should flee Paris. (Apparently the epistolary advice of comte de Mirabeau [1749–1791] urging such action was never read by Louis.) Sometime after midnight on 21 June 1791, the king and queen, their two children, and the Marquise de Tourzel (the royal governess) and her daughter left the palace in disguise, carrying false passports, and set out for the eastern frontier. At the town of Varennes, long after their incognito had been exposed, their coach was stopped. The mournful procession back to Paris, which the royal family reentered on 25 June, has been called a coronation in reverse. The king's flight was his betrayal of the Revolution.

Under the new constitution Louis had spurned by fleeing, the king had a suspensive rather than an absolute veto. This he exercised on laws against those who had emigrated and priests who refused to swear an oath to the constitution. On 20 June 1792, a mob penetrated the Tuileries and tried to get him to rescind his vetoes. This proved the dress rehearsal for overthrowing the monarchy on 10 August 1792. Before the attack on the Tuileries began, Louis and his family walked across the gardens to take refuge in the riding academy (the Manège), where the rump of the National Assembly was meeting. On 13 August, the victorious Paris Commune claimed Louis as their prisoner and locked the royal family up in the tower of the Temple. He would leave only to appear at his trial and to go to the guillotine.

The king's trial, to be conducted by the 745 elected members of the new National Assembly (the Constituent Assembly) who had arrived in Paris, began on 13 November 1792. The trial was unprecedented. Louis was the first French king to be held accountable by the nation. More than 400 speeches were delivered and/or published before the voting began on 16 January 1793. There were four separate votes, all taken by roll call. Louis was found unanimously guilty; the Assembly voted not to send the decision to the primary assemblies of the country for ratification; 387 deputies voted for death (the absolute majority was 361); and on 20 January they voted overwhelmingly not to delay execution.

The following day, 21 January, at 10:20 a.m., the king was beheaded in the former Place Louis XV (renamed the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde). He was quickly buried in a common grave with other victims of the guillotine.

The supposed royal remains were exhumed by the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1816 and buried in the traditional crypt of French kings, in the Cathedral of St. Denis. The restored monarchy exiled all those they considered regicides and built an Expiatory Chapel in Paris to honor the martyred king. So long as the Bourbons sat on the throne, royalists marked 21 January as a solemn national day of mourning.

See alsoFrench Revolution; Marie-Antoinette.

bibliography

Furet, François. "Louis XVI." In Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, 234–243. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Hardman, John. Louis XVI. New Haven, Conn., 1993.

Jordan, David P. The King's Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI. Berkeley, Calif., 1979.

Vovelle, Michel. The Fall of the French Monarchy, 1787–1792. Translated by Susan Burke. Cambridge, U.K., 1984.

David P. Jordan