Louis XVI (1754 - 1793) was King of France and Navarre from 1774 and King of the French from 1791 until the abolition of the monarchy in 1792. [1] His reign began amid mounting fiscal crisis and ended in revolution: after the fall of the Bastille and the collapse of royal authority, he was tried for treason by the National Convention and guillotined in Paris on 21 January 1793. [2] He was the last French monarch of the ancien régime.
Early life and accession
Louis-Auguste was born on 23 August 1754 at the Palace of Versailles, a grandson of Louis XV. [1] The deaths of his father and elder brother made him heir to the throne while still a boy. In 1770 he married Marie Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, a union intended to secure the recent alliance between the Bourbon and Habsburg courts but widely resented in France.
He succeeded his grandfather in May 1774 at the age of nineteen. Contemporaries described him as conscientious and studious, with interests in geography, hunting, and locksmithing, but hesitant and easily swayed in matters of government. [2]
Reign and financial crisis
Louis inherited a treasury strained by earlier wars. Successive ministers, among them Turgot, Necker, and Calonne, proposed reforms to taxation and administration, but each attempt foundered on resistance from the privileged orders and on the king's reluctance to sustain unpopular measures. [2]
French intervention on the side of the American colonies from 1778 secured a diplomatic victory over Britain but pushed royal finances towards insolvency. By the late 1780s, debt service consumed a large share of state revenue, and successive harvest failures raised bread prices for a population already under pressure. Unable to secure agreement on new taxes, Louis summoned the Estates-General in 1789 for the first time since 1614. [3]
Revolution
The Estates-General reconstituted itself as a National Assembly, and the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 signalled that royal authority could no longer be enforced in Paris. [3] In October the royal family was brought from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace, effectively under the supervision of the capital.
Louis publicly accepted the reforms of the Assembly while privately seeking foreign support. In June 1791 the royal family attempted to flee the country and was stopped at Varennes and returned to Paris, an episode that destroyed much of the remaining trust in the monarch. [1] He accepted the Constitution of 1791 as a constitutional king, but after France went to war in 1792 and the Tuileries was stormed on 10 August, the monarchy was suspended and the family imprisoned. The Convention abolished the monarchy in September 1792.
Trial and execution
Documents found in the Tuileries were used to charge the former king, tried as Citizen Louis Capet, with conspiring against the nation. The Convention convicted him and voted narrowly for death without reprieve. He was executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793 on the Place de la Révolution, today the Place de la Concorde. [4] Marie Antoinette was executed later the same year.
Legacy
The execution of Louis XVI marked a decisive break in European political history, ending more than eight centuries of Capetian monarchy in France and hardening the conflict between revolutionary France and the monarchies of Europe. [3] Historians continue to debate how far the collapse of his reign reflected personal indecision and how far it followed from structural fiscal and social crises he inherited. [2]
