Execution of Louis XVI (1793): Trial and Death of the French King

The execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 was the moment when the French Revolution put a king to death. Tried by the National Convention as “Citizen Louis Capet”, the former monarch was found guilty of conspiring against the nation and guillotined on the Place de la Révolution in Paris. His death turned France into a regicide republic, deepened the war with Europe’s monarchies and helped open the way to the Terror.

Background: from constitutional king to prisoner

When the French Revolution began in 1789, few people imagined a France without a king. The Constitution of 1791 kept Louis XVI as a constitutional monarch with a suspensive veto. Trust in him, however, had been badly damaged by the Flight to Varennes in June 1791, when the royal family tried to escape from Paris in disguise and was stopped near the frontier.

War with Austria and Prussia from April 1792 made the King’s position impossible. Many Parisians believed that Louis and Marie Antoinette hoped for a foreign victory, and the King’s vetoes of decrees against refractory priests and for a camp of volunteers near Paris looked like obstruction. On 10 August 1792 armed Parisians and provincial volunteers stormed the Tuileries Palace. The Legislative Assembly suspended the King, and the royal family was imprisoned in the Temple, a medieval tower in the Marais district.

A new assembly elected by much wider male suffrage, the National Convention, met on 21 September 1792, a day after the French victory at the Battle of Valmy. Its first act was to abolish the monarchy. The question of what to do with the former king followed immediately.

Should the King be tried?

The deputies were divided. The Girondins, a loose group of deputies associated with the Gironde department, were uneasy about a trial and later sought ways to spare Louis’s life. The Montagnards, who sat on the high benches of the hall and were close to the Paris Jacobin club, wanted swift judgement.

Some radicals argued that no trial was needed at all. On 13 November 1792 the young deputy Louis Antoine de Saint-Just told the Convention that monarchy itself was a crime and that a king should be treated as an enemy, not a citizen; he insisted that one could not reign innocently. On 3 December Maximilien Robespierre went further, arguing that a trial would itself call the Revolution into question and declaring that Louis must die so that the nation might live.

Legal objections were also raised. The Constitution of 1791 had declared the King’s person inviolable and allowed only abdication as a penalty. Supporters of a trial replied that the Constitution had been overturned by events and that the nation, as sovereign, could judge the man who had betrayed it.

The iron cabinet

The balance shifted on 20 November 1792, when a hidden safe, the armoire de fer or “iron cabinet”, was found in a wall of the Tuileries. It contained papers showing Louis’s secret correspondence with émigrés and foreign courts and his payments to politicians, including the late revolutionary leader Mirabeau. Although the documents did not prove every charge, they destroyed the image of a well-meaning king misled by bad advisers.

The Convention decided that it would judge Louis itself, acting as both accuser and court. An indictment was drawn up listing his actions since 1789, from the calling of troops to Paris in July 1789 to the events of 10 August 1792.

The trial before the Convention

Louis appeared before the Convention on 11 December 1792. Addressed as Louis Capet, after the founder of the dynasty, he answered each charge calmly, denying some, blaming ministers for others and claiming not to recognise documents shown to him. He was then allowed to choose defence counsel.

His lawyers were the elderly former minister Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the jurist François Denis Tronchet and the younger advocate Raymond de Sèze. On 26 December de Sèze delivered the defence speech. He argued that the Constitution protected the King, that the Convention could not be both accuser and judge, and that Louis had always sought the good of his people.

During his captivity Louis wrote a testament, dated 25 December 1792, in which he forgave his enemies and asked his son never to seek revenge if he should ever reign. The text circulated widely after his death and became a key document for royalists.

The votes of January 1793

The Convention voted by roll call, each deputy rising to state his vote aloud at the tribune. The votes took several days and nights:

• Guilt (15 January): an overwhelming majority, 693 deputies by the usual count, found Louis guilty; no one voted for acquittal, though some abstained.
• Appeal to the people (15 January): a Girondin proposal to submit any sentence to a national referendum was rejected by a clear majority.
• Sentence (16–17 January): 387 of 721 deputies voted for death and 334 for imprisonment, banishment or death with conditions. Because some of the 387 had attached a non-binding request for delay, the majority for immediate, unconditional death was much narrower, at around 361.
• Reprieve (19–20 January): a motion to postpone the execution was rejected by 380 votes to 310.

Among those voting for death was the King’s own cousin, the duc d’Orléans, who had taken the name Philippe Égalité. His vote caused shock in the hall and would not save him: he was himself guillotined in November 1793.

The last day

On the evening of 20 January Louis was allowed to see his family in the Temple for the last time: his wife Marie Antoinette, his son Louis-Charles, his daughter Marie-Thérèse and his sister Madame Élisabeth. He promised to see them again in the morning but did not.

Early on 21 January he heard Mass from his confessor, Henry Essex Edgeworth, an Irish-born Catholic priest who had agreed to accompany him. He was driven across Paris in a closed carriage through streets lined with National Guardsmen and troops. Paris was tense: the city authorities feared a royalist rescue attempt, and a small group of conspirators led by the baron de Batz did indeed try, and fail, to rouse the crowd.

The carriage reached the Place de la Révolution, formerly Place Louis XV, at around 10 am. The square was surrounded by soldiers and a large crowd. Louis protested when the executioners moved to tie his hands, but accepted after Edgeworth urged him to submit. At the edge of the scaffold he began to address the people, saying that he died innocent of the crimes charged against him and forgave those responsible for his death. The commander of the National Guard ordered a drum roll, and his words were lost.

The blade fell at about 10.20 am. The executioner Charles-Henri Sanson’s assistant held up the head to the crowd, some of whom shouted “Vive la République!” Several witnesses later recorded that people dipped handkerchiefs or pieces of paper in the blood.

Key people

• Louis XVI (1754–1793) reigned from 1774. He was 38 when he died, remembered as conscientious and pious but indecisive in the crisis of his reign.
• Maximilien Robespierre led the argument that the King must die without delay.
• Louis Antoine de Saint-Just made the most radical case that kingship itself was a crime.
• Raymond de Sèze, Malesherbes and Tronchet defended Louis. Malesherbes was guillotined during the Terror in April 1794.
• Henry Essex Edgeworth stayed with the King to the end and later served the exiled Bourbons.
• Charles-Henri Sanson, the hereditary executioner of Paris, carried out the sentence.

Consequences

The execution made compromise between revolutionary France and Europe’s monarchies far harder. Britain expelled the French envoy, and on 1 February 1793 the Convention declared war on Britain and the Dutch Republic; war with Spain followed in March. These states joined Austria and Prussia in what became the First Coalition.

Inside France, the regicide divided the nation. It was one of the grievances behind the revolt in the west that became the War in the Vendée, which broke out in March 1793. In the Convention, the Montagnards accused the Girondins of having tried to save the King, a charge that contributed to the Girondins’ expulsion in June 1793 and, in many cases, to their execution.

The trial also set a pattern. Within months the Convention created the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the logic that enemies of the Revolution could be judged by political criteria fed into the Reign of Terror. Marie Antoinette was tried and executed in October 1793. The King’s son, recognised by royalists as Louis XVII, died in captivity in the Temple in June 1795.

Myths and facts

• “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven.” These words are traditionally attributed to Edgeworth on the scaffold, but he later said he did not remember saying them. They may be an early embellishment.
• The vote was decided by one voice. This is misleading. The “majority of one” counts only the votes for immediate, unconditional death, about 361 of 721, which was just enough for an absolute majority. Counting every vote for death, the result was 387 to 334.
• Louis faced the guillotine with a slanting blade he had suggested himself. A popular story says Louis advised that the blade be angled. There is no reliable evidence for it.

Legacy

Louis XVI was not the first European king to be tried and executed by his subjects: Charles I of England had been beheaded in 1649. But the French case was presented in the language of universal rights, and it echoed far beyond France. For revolutionaries it showed that sovereignty belonged to the nation; for counter-revolutionaries Louis became a martyr king.

After the restoration of the monarchy, Louis XVIII had remains believed to be those of his brother and sister-in-law exhumed in 1815 and reburied at Saint-Denis. The Chapelle expiatoire, an expiatory chapel built on the site of the former Madeleine cemetery, was completed in 1826. In France, 21 January is still marked by memorial masses held by royalists.

Deputies who had voted for death, known as regicides, were exiled from France in 1816 under the restored Bourbons. The French Revolution as a whole, and the question of whether the King’s death was justice or murder, has remained a dividing line in French memory ever since.

Timeline

• 1792, 10 August: The Tuileries is stormed and Louis XVI is suspended.
• 1792, 21 September: The National Convention meets and abolishes the monarchy.
• 1792, 20 November: The iron cabinet is discovered in the Tuileries.
• 1792, 11 December: Louis appears before the Convention to hear the charges.
• 1792, 26 December: Raymond de Sèze delivers the defence.
• 1793, 15 January: The Convention finds Louis guilty and rejects an appeal to the people.
• 1793, 16–17 January: A majority votes for the death penalty.
• 1793, 20 January: A reprieve is rejected; Louis sees his family for the last time.
• 1793, 21 January: Louis XVI is guillotined on the Place de la Révolution.
• 1793, 1 February: France declares war on Britain and the Dutch Republic.

Why it matters

The execution of Louis XVI broke the link between the French state and a thousand years of monarchy. It bound the Republic’s leaders to the Revolution’s survival, widened the European war and set a precedent for political justice that shaped the Terror and later debates about how revolutions should treat fallen rulers.