LOUIS XVI, King of France. - B. at Versailles on 23 Aug. 1754 to Louis, dauphin of France (son of Louis XV) and to Maria Josepha of Saxony, d. at Paris on 21 Jan. 1793. He married in 1770 Marie Antoinette, archduchess of Austria; he ascended the throne on 10 May 1774. His simple and honest life, his gentle character, his having reduced personal expenses almost in order to set an example to his people of what needed to be done to reorganize France, won him broad popular sympathy and made people believe that the era of favorites, of the court's prodigality and of financial disorder was closed. Harmful to L. was his irresolute character, wavering between traditions and reforms, between the desire for innovations and the fear of offending the privileged classes. More straightforward and constant was his foreign policy, for which he tenaciously supported the minister Vergennes, who had raised France again from the depression and the shame of the Treaty of Paris, resisting his adversaries and the repeated attempts at interference by the Queen. Also at the wish of Louis XVI, France helped the rebels of the British colonies in America; this benefited not only the cause of liberty, but also the obtaining of favorable commercial agreements with that country.
But as the squandering of the public treasury persisted, in which the Queen, the court, and the princes had free rein, it stirred up clouds, harbingers of storm, and, despairing of other remedies, the convocation of the Estates General appeared as the only means of salvation, a decision that raised confidence in the King and optimism in the nation. When on 5 May 1789 the Estates General assembled at Versailles, Louis XVI was in fact surrounded by popular sympathy, since almost the whole of public opinion favored a constitutional monarchy of the English type, one that would give greater place to democratic interests.
Louis XVI's decision to support the nobility and clergy against the bourgeoisie produced keen irritation in the third estate: in 1789 with a lit de justice he wished to impose on it, after it had proclaimed itself a National Assembly, voting by orders, but when the deputies rebelled, he did not dare to dissolve the Assembly; repenting of having yielded, he wanted to take revenge; but in the face of the immediate revolutionary reaction after the storming of the Bastille, humiliating the monarchy still further, he granted the mairie and the national guard. Thus the opinion could gain credit that the ills of the State derived from the fact that Louis XVI, singularly good and mindful of the destinies of France, was kept in the dark about everything by those with an interest in doing so. From this conviction derived the Assembly's measures for a bodyguard that would follow the King everywhere, the attempts to "liberate the King" from intrigues, the declaration of devotion for "the best of fathers and the greatest of monarchs" (speech of the president Beaumetz), the invitation to the King to fix the civil list himself, at his own discretion. The Festival of the Federation of 14 July 1790 was a national and Parisian day, no less than a monarchical day. Nevertheless the King was thinking of flight. He planned to go to St-Cloud for Easter, where a refractory priest would have officiated, but had to renounce it (18 Apr. 1791), prevented by the rioting crowd and the national guard; he tried again on 11 June; then on 20 June, when, on the road to Montmédy, he was arrested at Varennes, not far from the frontier, and brought back to Paris. Declared suspended until he should have sworn the Constitution, he swore it on 13 Sept. 1791, and it seemed that he wished loyally to apply it. But the veto placed on the rigorous laws against émigrés and refractory priests offered the awaited pretext to some tens of thousands of people, among them very many workers of the popular quarter of St. Anthony, excited by the inflammatory words of Robespierre, of Pétion and of other Jacobins, to invade (20 June 1792) the Tuileries.
The supreme attempt of La Fayette, to save the monarchy by marching against the Jacobins, was thwarted by the court; even the proposal that the King take refuge at Compiègne, safer and closer to the frontier, was let drop by the Queen, who was waiting for the duke of Brunswick, at the head of the victorious German troops, to enter Paris to free them. It then appeared clear that the coalition army was acting in the interest of Louis XVI; the French people felt betrayed: 47 out of 48 sections of Paris were for the dethronement of the monarchy; a battalion of 516 Marseillais, having crossed France, entered Paris on 30 July, with the intention of freeing France from the tyrant. The clash of the Marseillais and the national guards against the King's grenadiers, in which there were dead and wounded, marked the beginning of the civil war. The court believed that this would facilitate the arrival of the duke of Brunswick; but after the insurrection of 10 Aug. 1792, victorious for the Paris Commune, which installed itself at the Hôtel de Ville, under the impulse of the energetic and eloquent Danton, and the occupation and looting of the Tuileries, Louis XVI saw himself lost. Relegated with his family first to the Luxembourg, then to the fortress of the Temple under strict surveillance, he could no longer communicate with the outside. Suspended for the second time after Valmy (10 Aug.), he was on 21 Sept. declared dethroned by the Convention. The next day, 22 Sept., the Republic was proclaimed.
From the documents removed, on 10 Aug., from the iron cabinet of the Tuileries, the Convention was able to convince itself (20 Nov.) that the Queen since 16 Aug. 1790 had, also in the name of the King, written that both counted only on foreign forces, and had negotiated with Prussia and Austria, so that their troops might join with those of the King, and that the latter had undertaken to reimburse the allies for the war expenses. The Convention, on the proposal of Robespierre, on 10 Dec. 1792, summoned the King to clear himself of the accusations, granting him a defense counsel. Louis XVI replied by denying some facts, attributing the blame for others to the ministers, and for others invoking the Constitution of 1791; and as for the documents of the iron cabinet, whose contents he perhaps did not know exactly, he made a mendacious, useless and clumsy exposition. Nothing availed against the intransigence of the Constituent Assembly, which seemed to many to be composed of accusers rather than judges. The question of "unconditional condemnation to death" (16 Jan. 1793) obtained 387 votes, against 334 for detention or conditional death. On the evening of 20 Jan. Louis XVI saw his family for the last time; the next morning, at 10:22, furnished with the religious comforts, after having heard holy Mass kneeling on the ground, assisted by a priest until the last moments, he laid his head on the scaffold, saying: "I die innocent: may my blood not fall back upon France." Even in his testament (25 Dec. 1792) he forgave his own enemies and enjoined his children to forget, as he did, every resentment. Only one thing did he have to reproach himself for: having signed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. - See pl. CXV.
Bibliography21 works
Raffaele Ciasca