The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination

By Susan Dunn and Connor Cruise O'Brien

The public beheading of Louis XVI was a unique and troubling event that scarred French collective memory for two centuries. To Jacobins, the king's decapitation was the people's coronation. To royalists, it was deicide. Nineteenth-century historians considered it an alarming miscalculation, a symbol of the Terror and the moral bankruptcy of the Revolution. By the twentieth century, Camus judged that the killing stood at the "crux of our contemporary history." In this book, Susan Dunn investigates the regicide's pivotal role in French intellectual history and political mythology. She examines how thinkers on the right and left repudiated regicide and terror, while articulating a compassionate, humanitarian vision, which became the moral basis for the modern French nation.


Their credo of fraternity and unity, however, strangely depoliticized this supremely political act of regicide. Using theoretical insights from Tocqueville, Arendt, Rawls, Walzer, and others, Dunn explores the transformation of violent regicidal politics into an apolitical cult of ethical purity and an antidemocratic nationalist religion. Her book focuses on the fluidity of political myths. The figure of Louis XVI was transmuted into a Joan of Arc and a deified nation, and the notion of his sacrifice contributed to the disquieting myth of a mystical community of self- sacrificing citizens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691224916

Susan Dunn

Susan Dunn is a professor of literature at Williams College and is the author of many books, including The Three Roosevelts (with James MacGregor Burns). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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INTRODUCTION

LOUIS XVI was not a great king. Among nineteenth-century historians of the Revolution, none considered him an effective leader, and few had anything very positive to say about his reign. For royalists, he was too liberal; for republicans, too conservative. At best, he was well-meaning, at worst, treasonous. For most, he was weak and ineffective, not the stuff out of which national fathers are made. It was the death of Louis XVI, not his life, that would scar the collective memory of France for two hundred years.

The execution was a solemn and extraordinary event. Under leaden January skies, a procession of sixty drummers and hundreds of guards, soldiers, and cavalry escorted Louis from the Temple prison across Paris to the Place de la Révolution. Guards brandishing bayonets and lances lined the way, forming walls of steel. Behind them, silent crowds watched. The king prayed with his priest as his carriage slowly made its way through the subdued streets. The silence that shrouded the city was broken only by the noise of horses and drums and by a few lone calls for mercy. Awaiting them at the Place de la Révolution (formerly Place Louis XV, today Place de la Concorde) stood the guillotine.

Since the dawn, an immense crowd had been gathering around the hideous machine. People were crammed everywhere: on the bridges, along the riverbanks, even hanging from the branches of trees. A sea of a hundred thousand heads was waiting to witness one head of state fall.

When the king arrived at the scaffold, three executioners attempted to undress him, but he angrily pushed them away, insisting on taking off his own jacket. Indignant that the executioners demanded to bind his hands, he vigorously protested. A struggle was about to ensue when Louis’s priest advised him to submit to this last humiliation, which, he said, would draw him closer to Christ. Leaning on the priest for support, Louis arduously mounted the steep steps of the scaffold. At the top, he suddenly broke free, ran to the other side of the platform, and, making a gesture to silence the steady beat of the drums, cried out to the crowd:

People! I die innocent! I forgive my enemies, and I pray God that the blood you spill will never fall on France . . .

He wanted to continue, but General Santerre ordered a roll of the drums, and the king’s speech was cut off, seconds before his head. His body was strapped to a board and then thrust horizontally into the inexorable apparatus. The board tipped down, the blade fell. Moments later, one of the executioners held the dripping head aloft for the crowd to behold. Many people shouted, Vive la république! A few drowned themselves or cut their own throats; for these people, a once finely ordered universe had been destroyed.¹

Thus began—in the shadow of the guillotine—the long clash over the meaning of this singular event. Indeed, the specter of the decapitated monarch stood at the crossroads of the old world and the new—on the one hand, signifying the audacious repudiation of magical political authority, and, on the other, evoking for decades to come a profound sense of nostalgia and loss. Along with Louis, the organizing principle of an entire society had disappeared, leaving in its wake political chaos, moral confusion, and deep and disorienting historical discontinuity.

How different from England, where the execution of Charles I has never been considered an event fraught with meaning. Perhaps this is because in England regicide was a political act, whereas in France it was the object of elaborate theological and ideological explanations. Although the public execution of Louis XVI was part of a calculated strategy for setting the Revolution on the path of no return, the Jacobins also bestowed upon it potent symbolic value. They portrayed it as the ritualistic founding act of a new social order, attributing to Louis the unusual sacred status of a sacrificial victim who possesses the supernatural ability to purify and regenerate the nation through his own death.

Implicit in the Jacobins’ political and mythological argument in favor of regicide was a theory of social change and renewal: this theory made political murder the necessary means for social progress, and it made the elimination of dissent and the death of the enemies of the patrie the condition for national unity and fraternity. Not only was this doctrine used a few months later to justify the Terror, it would be used in the twentieth century to justify the violence and repression of totalitarian regimes.

Since 1793, French historians, writers, and intellectuals have been wrestling with the political consequences and moral implications of the regicide. In the guillotining of the king, royalists perceived an act of unspeakable transgression; for them, regicide was tantamount to deicide, the decapitation of God’s representative on earth. They were easily convinced that Louis was a Christ-like martyr who sacrificed himself for the redemption of France. Had he not submitted to his terrifying fate with courage and piety acknowledged and admired by all? Had he not, moments before his death, pardoned the French and expressed love for them? Throughout the turbulent succession of postrevolutionary governments—empires, restorations, and republics—the memory of his death would recall for pro-royalists the loss of the legitimacy and stability of an eight-hundred-year-old monarchy.

For nineteenth-century liberal and republican writers, the king’s disquieting death posed even more complex problems of paramount significance. Although they praised the trial for serving the cause of revolutionary justice, virtually all considered the execution politically inept and morally troubling. But unlike the royalists, who could denounce the regicide while remaining within the parameters of counterrevolutionary thought, republican historians and writers had to find ways of voicing their doubts and reservations without calling into question the fundamental value of the Revolution. Especially as they traced the short and violent path from the regicide to the Terror, it was difficult for them not to sec Louis’s death as inextricably linked to the moral failure of a pitiless Revolution, powerless to rise above violence and devote itself to the creation of lasting democratic institutions. The task of liberal historians was thus dual: first to describe, explain, and meditate on the significance and consequences of the regicide, and second, to rehabilitate republican ideology, to dissociate it from violence and Terror and restore to it the political ideals of 1789 and the compassion that the Jacobins had ultimately banished from politics.

The thinkers whose meditations on revolution and regicide are the subject of this book—the liberal, pro-royalist Ballanche, republican historians Michelet, Lamartine, and Quinet, the great French poet, Victor Hugo, and the twentieth-century writer Albert Camus—stand among the principal creators and followers of the humanitarian credo that, for all its contradictions and unresolved tensions, is ours still today. Whether on the right or the left of the liberal political spectrum, these were idealists dedicated to the creation of a just society, historians and politicians committed to uniting politics and morality. Their goal was to create an agenda for French society founded on the ideals of the Revolution and on the ethical concepts inherited from the Enlightenment. (The English translations of their enduring words are, unless otherwise noted, my own.)

As they plumbed the Revolution for its great message, they inevitably had to tackle the problem of the execution of the king. They found that they could not confront the regicide without also confronting basic questions of political violence, revolutionary justice, idealistic ends and merciless means. From those reflections, it was but a short step to the expression of fresh visions of progress, justice, and fraternity. The historically specific and individual case of Louis XVI provided them with a concrete means for repudiating the vengeance, violence, and expediency that were associated with 1793, for reformulating the idealistic legacy of 1789, and for transforming royalist and Jacobin political mythologies into democratic and humanitarian ones.

The issue of kingship may have become politically marginal, but the problem of regicide remained ethically central. The quintessentially political act of regicide was translated, even by historians and politicians, into timeless and universal dramas about punishment, charity, compassion, pardon, and amnesty.

The regicide was like a screen onto which writers projected their own attitudes toward history, progress, revolution, violence, the death penalty, and the role of morality in politics. Through the lens of regicide they viewed many of the critical problems of their own societies. Against the background of regicide, Ballanche condemned capital punishment, Lamartine articulated the moral failures of the Restoration, Michelet meditated on social justice and citizenship, Victor Hugo viewed the tragedy of the Commune, and Camus denounced totalitarianism and the reign of the new god, History.

Historians perceived a need, indeed an obligation, to inject their own ethical values into their commentaries on the king’s death. They permitted themselves to empathize with the king and announced their own moral stance in regard to his death. Some even projected onto Louis their personal feelings for their own fathers Paul Veyne, writing about the art and science of historiography, remains firmly opposed to such personal statements of ethical judgment. History, he asserts, consists in saying what happened. The historian should not ponder if what happened was good or bad, and he should never utter value judgments in his own name.² Another historian with pretensions to scientific objectivity, Marc Bloch, similarly condemned the satanic enemy of true history: the obsession with making judgments. . . . Robespierristes, anti-robespierristes, for God’s sake, enough! We beg you, just tell us plainly who Robespierre was.³

Nineteenth-century historians of the Revolution, however, would not have been moved by admonitions against the inclusion of their personal opinions in historiography. On the contrary, they considered it precisely their duty to make such assessments. They expressed moral opinions that stated or implied what should have been because they were using history in a new way, as a means of formulating ethical and political values for postrevolutionary French society. Implicit in their bold breaches of the historian’s putative objectivity was not only a judgment of the past but also a prescription for the future. Edgar Quinet passionately explained the historian’s personal and moral responsibility to judge and condemn the violence of the past and to articulate political and ethical values for future generations:

The contribution that the historian can make to the future is to deliver free men, for all time, from the temptation to kill one another. . . . This is what I have done, this is what I had to do. . . .1 would willingly give up my life for democracy, but do not expect me to give up justice and reason too. . . . The principles contained in my work will enter the public conscience. . . . Justice, pity, liberty, humanity: this is what will survive us.⁴

Michael Walzer observed that the shared understandings of a people are often expressed in its historical ideals and its foundational texts: It is not only what people do but how they explain and justify what they do, the stories they tell, the principles they invoke, that constitute a moral culture.⁵ Many nineteenth-century histories of the French Revolution were exactly such foundational texts. In postrevolutionary France, where there was no consensus as to the national identity, commentaries on the Revolution, the Terror, and the regicide began to formulate the shared understandings of the French people: the political principles they admired and those they deplored, the ethical values they believed in, the heroes they invoked, and the events they mythologized. In this enterprise, historians and poets conducted themselves alternately as laic priests shaping the morality of the public conscience, prophets announcing their vision of a just and nonviolent future, and mythmakers fashioning exemplary figures to incarnate new concepts of nationhood and civic virtue.

Before stepping into this world of the resonances of regicide, it will be useful to lay out briefly the facts of the trial and execution of Louis XVI, facts that would be presented and interpreted in a variety of lights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶

In 1789, it had not been the intention of France’s revolutionary leaders to abolish the monarchy, much less to execute the monarch. During the first years of the Revolution, France was a constitutional monarchy and remained so even after the king’s flight to Varennes in June 1791. At that point, Robespierre and most of the members of the Constituent Assembly were reluctant to call for a republic and forced an obviously unwilling king back on the throne. It was only after the bloody fighting at the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 that the Legislative Assembly suspended the king from his functions and only after the discovery of the king’s armoire defer, containing his secret correspondence with Austria, that a public trial became inevitable. However, the Constitution, which Louis had duly accepted, contained the provision that should the king betray the Constitution, he would be deposed. Were he guilty of any crime, were he to go so far as to place himself at the head of an enemy army, abdication would be his one and only punishment. He could be prosecuted to the full extent of the law only for crimes committed after his abdication.

The Convention asked Jean-Baptiste Mailhe to examine the legal questions implicit in a trial, the king’s inviolability, constitutional immunity from prosecution, and the makeup of the judicial body that would try him. Mailhe concluded that the immunity clauses did not absolve the king of responsibility for his actions; he was justiciable, and the entire Convention should judge him, since the delegates constituted a democratic and therefore perfect representation of the French nation. The legal procedures of the trial, according to Mailhe, should depend upon the will of the nation and not on legal precedent.

Mailhe’s report provoked two radically different responses, both in opposition to a trial. The deputy Morisson, urging the uncompromised rule of law, argued that no statute applied to the king, since the Constitution had granted him immunity. He proposed that the people, possessing no legal right to try the monarch, should banish him instead. Saint-Just, on the other hand, speaking for the Jacobins, declared that Louis XVI was neither citizen nor king; he was an alien who had no role in the social contract or in the legal system. He should thus not be tried at all but simply and summarily executed. Monarchy, after all, was an eternal crime. Robespierre pushed the point one step further: if the king were tried, he might be judged innocent, and if he were innocent, the revolution would be guilty—a situation he considered intolerable. Submission to the yoke of law, moreover, in times of revolution revealed counterrevolutionary weakness and lack of courage and energy: We invoke forms because we lack principles.

Ultimately, however, on the issue of whether or not to try Louis, it was the Girondins who carried the day. Conscious of public opinion at home and abroad, they insisted on the importance of judicial procedure and prevailed, although they failed to secure the special tribunal they had proposed. After two months of debate, the trial finally began on 5 December 1792.

Many people continued to harbor grave doubts about the legal procedures of the trial, doubts that still linger today. The jury that formulated the accusations against the king was constituted by the same men who eventually would hear and judge the case. The members of the Convention simultaneously played the roles of judge, jury, and, in some cases, attorneys for the prosecution. In addition, Louis was not informed of the accusations against him until he appeared at the bar, nor was he granted legal counsel until after his public interrogation. On the other hand, unlike the trials that took place during the height of the Terror, at the king’s trial specific charges were at least made and evidence was presented, which the king and his lawyers were permitted to refute. As for the accusations against Louis, he was essentially charged with treason—a novel crime that had been logically impossible under the ancien régime. Since the king had been believed to be the incarnation of the Body Politic, it was inconceivable for him to betray himself. In addition to treason, Louis was accused of the massacres of 10 August, of corruption, and more subtly, of the crime of kingship itself. The prosecution deemed him responsible for a multitude of misdeeds: suspending the meetings of the Estates General, ordering his troops to march on Paris, not embracing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, vetoing decrees, not supporting the clergy’s oath of loyalty to the Constitution.

Whereas the only other king in history to be publicly tried and executed, Charles I of England, grandly denied the authority of the court and remained silent throughout his trial, Louis proved to be a cooperative and dignified, if less than candid, defendant. He contested the charge of treason and denied knowledge of the armoire defer, refusing to recognize incriminating documents written in his own hand. The thirty-eight-ycar-old monarch insisted that his actions had all fallen within his constitutional prerogative, that he had relied on his ministers, and that the welfare of the French had always been foremost in his mind. Three lawyers helped him in his defense: Tronchet, Malesherbes, and de Séze. The defense argument, delivered by de Sézc, competently and dispassionately addressed the legal and constitutional issues, but few people were moved. Jacobin axioms, as cold and trenchant as the guillotine—No man can reign innocently, This man must reign or die, Louis must die because the nation must live—were more memorable than de Sèze’s soporific legal brief and more effective than the emotional pleas for mercy of Thomas Paine and Girondins like Vergniaud. Just two weeks before the execution, Paine, still hoping to save Louis’s life, eloquently advocated exiling him to America, whose Revolution the French king had generously supported; there Louis would be reeducated and learn firsthand about democracy, citizenship, and equality. Marat interrupted the speaker reading the translation of Paine’s address to charge that the translation was incorrect; such treasonous sentiments could not be those of Thomas Paine.⁷

During the trial, the king, a prisoner in the Temple, devoted himself to his family, his young son’s education, and his own defense. Humbled, dispossessed, he became for many of the delegates and citizens of France a sympathetic, courageous, and even tragic figure. His defenders among the Girondins, believing that a national referendum on his fate would surely save him, maneuvred for an appeal to the people, but, considered by the majority of delegates a threat to the authority of the Convention and possibly a pretext for civil war, this attempt at direct democracy was defeated by a vote of 424 to 287.

The vote on an appeal to the people and the subsequent votes on guilt and punishment were roll-call votes that permitted each delegate to deliver a speech along with his vote. The final vote on Louis’s fate shows a Convention deeply divided. On the first vote concerning his guilt, out of 718 members of the Convention who were present, 691 declared that the king was guilty. On the question of the death penalty, 721 voting members were present: 321 voted for punishments other than death, 361 for death, 13 for death with reprieve, and 26 for death but with a debate on reprieve. Historians interpret these figures differently; those well-disposed to the Revolution, such as Albert Soboul,⁸ place the final count at a relatively decisive 387 to 334. Those of more moderate inclinations, such as Alfred Cobban,⁹ R. R. Palmer,¹⁰ and Mona Ozouf,¹¹ place it at 361 to 360, a majority of one. However, a fourth and last roll-call vote rejected a stay of execution by 380 to 310.

It was the task of Louis’s lawyer, Malesherbes, to inform the king of the verdict. Malesherbes entered the king’s cell, crestfallen, unable to speak.

When he wept, Louis understood that he would die. The king embraced his friend and tried to console him; no one could have known then that Malesherbes too, the maternal grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville, would perish by the guillotine. The king wanted to know how certain members of the Convention had voted and was dismayed to learn that his cousin, the duke of Orléans, had cast his ballot for death. Then the revolutionary delegation arrived to inform him officially of his fate, and the king requested a three-day stay of execution as well as a priest and a last meeting with his family. Condorcet, Thomas Paine, and others sympathetic toward the king tried but failed to obtain this reprieve. Louis was granted a priest, to whom he made his last confession, and a few final hours with his family. On the evening of 20 January, he saw the queen, Marie-Antoinette, his sister Madame Elisabeth, his son, and his daughter, the only one of the family who would survive the Terror. When they could sob no longer, they spoke softly and made their last tearful farewells.

The public reactions after the execution included celebration, consternation, and bewilderment. Was the regicide a victory for freedom or an ill-omened error? Many people were uncertain.

The public guillotining of Louis XVI was a startling event that seemed to stand at the threshold of a democratic republic until it became clear that it stood instead at the threshold of the Terror. The reflections that Louis’s death would inspire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the focus of this book—suggest that the regicide has occupied a critical place in French intellectual history. And just as this event provided nineteenth-century historians with insight into their own societies, it continues to illuminate problems of our own times, for the issues facing us today are similar to the ones of a hundred and fifty years ago. Louis’s trial and execution shed a somber light of warning on such moments in history as the trial and execution of Ceausescu in Romania, exactly two hundred years after the birth of the French Revolution, and the reflections that the king’s death produced concerning not only the punishment of political foes but also amnesty and national reconciliation may illuminate some of the moral and political dimensions of such recent issues as pardon for Richard Nixon in 1973 and amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders in 1977. The grandeur attributed to the king’s sacrifice gives us insight into the prestige of contemporary national martyrs such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and, in recent calls for American citizens to make sacrifices for their nation, we can hear resounding echoes of the Romantic linkage of sacrifice and civic virtue.

The regicide of 1793 is indeed an exemplary case charged with a multiplicity of layers of meaning. It is located at the crossroads of many paths, the juncture where historical narrative joins myth, where political commentary incorporates ethical imperatives, where revolutionary ideals are transformed into a nationalist religion, where kingship merges with citizenship, and where powerful monarch and defenseless individual converge. It is this world that we will be exploring in the chapters that follow.

¹ Although nineteenth-century historians alternately criticized Louis as a paralyzed leader (Michelet, Quinet) and praised him as a farsighted reformer (Tocqueville), on one thing all agreed: he had died very well. To posterity his greatest gift was his death. For royalists, it was a martyr’s death; for liberals and republicans, an unfortunate and courageous death. Chateaubriand admired the Bourbon race that "knows how to die admirably well (Mort de Charles X," in his Mémoires d’outre tombe [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], 2:908, italics mine). Lamartine concurred: although the king did not know how to rule or fight, "he knows how to die" (Histoire des Girondins [1847; reprinted Paris: 1984], 1:111, italics mine). In his Histoire des Montagnards, Alphonse Esquiros admitted that Louis knew one single thing in his life, "he knew how to die" (Histoire des Montagnards [Paris: Lecou, 1847], 2:289, italics mine). For Quinet, Louis on the scaffold was nothing less than an exemplary being: "The lowliest man of the people could learn from this king how to die well" (La Revolution [1865; reprinted Paris: Belin, 1987], 353, italics mine). All translations of French texts in this book, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

² Paul Veyne, Writing History, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 183 and 186.

³ Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (1949), quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Les morales de l’histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 10.

⁴ Edgar Quinet, La Révolution, 57 and 59.

⁵ Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 29.

⁶ Albert Soboul discusses the trial in Le Procès de Louis XVI (Paris: Collection Archives, 1966). Mona Ozouf examines it in her essay, King’s Trial, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed., François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1989), 95—106. David Jordan also presents a detailed description in The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Michael Walzer discusses many of the historical and legal issues in his important introduction to Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Ferenc Feher analyzes questions of judicial procedure in the trial in The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Carol Blum places the trial in the context of

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Susan Dunn explores the implication and meaning of the death of Louis XVI in the French collective memory. This event may be roughly equivalent to the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the Assassination of Lincoln or a handful of other pivotal, defining moments. Such events grow and assume a life of their own. Dunn examines how the death of the King at the hands of his own subjects has shaped French politics, arguably to this day.