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Louis XVI

1754 – 1793 · Generation XVII · King of France (r. 1774–1792)

Portrait of Louis XVI

Louis XVI, the last king of France before the Revolution swept the monarchy away, was born at Versailles on 23 August 1754 and given the title Duke of Berry. He was a grandson of Louis XV, the son of the Dauphin Louis and Maria Josepha of Saxony. A shy, sturdy boy overshadowed by an elder brother who died young, he was good at Latin, history, geography and astronomy and liked hunting and the locksmith’s bench. His father’s death in 1765 made him heir at eleven, and his mother died two years later. In 1770, at fifteen, he was married to the fourteen-year-old Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, known to the French as Marie Antoinette, in a match meant to seal an alliance that many of his future subjects disliked.

He became king on 10 May 1774, three months short of his twentieth birthday, and inherited a state deep in debt. The palace of Versailles, in its own account of him, judges that his careful education had not prepared him for the practical business of ruling. He meant well and wanted to be loved. He dismissed his grandfather’s ministers and turned to reformers, first Turgot, whose freeing of the grain trade pushed up the price of bread and set off the riots of 1775 known as the Flour War, then the banker Necker, who paid for war by borrowing. The nobility and the law courts called parlements blocked attempts to tax the privileged, and Louis gave his ministers only wavering support. An edict of 1787 that granted civil status to Protestants and Jews was among the reforms that did succeed.

Abroad, his great venture was the American war. France allied with the rebel colonies in 1778, and a French naval blockade helped to force the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. The peace of 1783 secured American independence, but France itself came away with only Tobago and Senegal, and with debts that deepened its financial crisis. Louis was happier with science and the sea. He kept workshops for mechanics and lock-making near his private rooms, hosted the Montgolfier balloon flight at Versailles in 1783, and sent La Pérouse to sail round the world. After years of childlessness that fed cruel pamphlets, he and the queen had four children, of whom a daughter, Marie-Thérèse, and a son, Louis-Charles, were alive when the Revolution came.

With the state close to bankruptcy, Louis summoned the Estates General, which had not met since 1614. It opened at Versailles in May 1789, and within weeks the Third Estate had declared itself a National Assembly. The Bastille fell on 14 July. On 5 October a crowd marched from Paris to Versailles and the next day brought the royal family back to the Tuileries palace, which the king came to call a prison. In June 1791 the family fled secretly for the fortress of Montmédy on the north-eastern frontier. They were recognised and stopped at Varennes and taken back to Paris under guard. The flight destroyed what trust remained. He had left behind a manifesto justifying his escape and criticising much of what the Revolution had done.

He accepted the constitution of 1791 and reigned for another year as “king of the French”. War with Austria, declared in April 1792, went badly, and a manifesto from the invading commander, promising to restore the king to his full powers, convinced many that Louis was in league with the enemy. On 10 August 1792 an armed crowd stormed the Tuileries. The king was imprisoned in the Temple, and on 21 September the monarchy was abolished. The discovery that November of an iron chest hidden in the Tuileries, full of his secret papers, discredited him further. Tried by the Convention as Citizen Louis Capet, he was found guilty of treason without a single vote for acquittal, condemned to death by a far narrower margin, and refused a reprieve.

On 21 January 1793 he was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution, aged thirty-eight. He went to the scaffold calmly, forgave those responsible for his death and declared himself innocent before a drum roll cut him short. Marie Antoinette followed him to the guillotine later that year. In 1815 his brother Louis XVIII had his remains moved to the royal basilica of Saint-Denis.

Place in the family

  • Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette, a daughter of Maria Theresa.

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Life

  • 1754 — Born
  • 1770 — Married Marie Antoinette
  • 1793 — Died

Sources

  1. Louis XVI · Wikipedia
  2. Louis XVI · Château de Versailles
  3. Louis XVI of France · World History Encyclopedia

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