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On the 14th of July 1789, a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille prison in the French capital, a seismic moment in the early stages of the French Revolution. At the Palace of Versailles outside the city, King Louis XVI wrote a single word in his journal that day: rien, 'nothing'. It was a reference to the day's hunting: the king had failed to catch anything that day. Louis was seemingly so oblivious to the crisis erupting in his dominions that the attack on the Bastille did not warrant an entry. Was Louis really an uncaring monarch who hunted while his kingdom burned or is he a misunderstood individual? This is the story of King Louis XVI and the French Revolution.
The man known to history as King Louis XVI of France was born on the 23rd of August 1754 at the Palace of Versailles outside the city of Paris. He was christened as Louis Auguste. Louis was the third son of Louis Ferdinand, the Dauphin or heir to the French throne, whose own father, King Louis XV, had ruled France since 1715. Louis Auguste's mother was Marie Josephe of Saxony. The young prince grew up with the title of Duke de Berry and most would have assumed in his earliest years that he would remain a junior prince with no obvious route to
the throne. What changed matters was the death of his older brothers and his father. For instance, the Duke de Bourgogne, Louis' eldest brother, passed away in 1761, pushing the overlooked third son a step further up the succession ladder. Then, when Louis was eleven years old, his father died from tuberculosis in December 1765, catapulting the young prince to become the heir to the throne. Louis' life was shaped from long before he was born by the political system that prevailed in France and which had been evolving since the early seventeenth century. In the late medieval period, France had been one of the most decentralised
kingdoms in all of Europe and had experienced a significant crisis in the first half of the fifteenth century as a result, at which time England had nearly won the Hundred Years' War against it. A resurgence of French royal power followed under rulers like King Francis I, only for the arrival of the Protestant Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century to divide the country again. The French Wars of Religion ensued between 1562 and 1598. At the end of this hugely destructive set of civil wars, a new royal dynasty, the House of Bourbon, was established under Louis' ancestor, King Henry IV. Henry and his son and grandson, Louis XIII and
Louis XIV, under powerful ministers like Cardinal Richelieu, began creating a new political system, one which sought to avoid the mistakes of the past by centralising government to an inordinate degree in the hands of the reigning monarch and a small coterie of officials, nobles and the church. The Estates General, the French parliament, for instance, had not convened in 140 years when Louis was born, the last meeting being in 1614. This system of highly centralised and dictatorial government was known as royal absolutism. From the 1660s onwards it even kept itself aloof from the
people of Paris after Louis XIV moved the court to a vast new palace that he had ordered the construction of outside Paris on the grounds of a royal hunting lodge at Versailles. It was here, in the course of the eighteenth century, that the French monarchy, nobles and political elite became more and more aloof from the realities of life for ordinary French people. Louis had no idea as he was growing up, but this system was becoming more and more strained for a range of reasons. It would buckle and break after he became King of France.
After the death of his father, and his own unexpected emergence as the heir to the throne, Louis' education was entrusted to the Duke de La Vauguyon. Under his wing, Louis learned Latin, Italian and Spanish, which was typical for a young French royal or aristocrat in the eighteenth century. More unusually, he also learned some German, his mother's native tongue, and English, the language of France's great rival. He was interested in history and read the works of contemporary Enlightenment writers like the Scottish historian and philosopher,
David Hume. There was an irony to this, as France was a bastion of royal censorship of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the middle of the eighteenth century. As he grew up, it was clear that he was nothing like his illustrious forbear, his great-great-great-grandfather, King Louis XIV, whose reign hung like a shadow over eighteenth-century France. Instead, the young prince was shy and reserved, preferring hunting over the pageantry of court events. He also shared a pursuit with his contemporary and fellow
monarch, King George III of Great Britain, who became monarch on the other side of the English Channel in 1760. Both men enjoyed tinkering with mechanical items like clocks and locks and were hobbyist craftsmen. Where contemporaries would soon decide that George was mad on account of his declining psychological state from the late 1780s onwards, the general view of Louis as he grew up was that he was something of a simpleton. In reality, he was merely reserved, and was actually possessed of an understated intelligence in other respects.
Louis came of age during a tumultuous period for France on the international stage. Since the late seventeenth century the country had been locked in an increasingly bitter rivalry with Britain, as the two countries sought not only to become the foremost power in Europe, but also to expand across North America, the Caribbean, parts of Africa and even east to India and Southeast Asia. This Second Hundred Years War, as it is sometimes described, saw the two nations at war for around half of the period between 1689 and 1815. The bloodiest bout of fighting in the middle of
the eighteenth century occurred between 1754 and 1763. This started as the French and Indian Wars in North America, as the French sought to expand their colonies in Quebec in Canada as well as Louisiana by establishing a chain of forts up the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the Great Lakes, with the goal of hemming the English in to the Thirteen Colonies along the East Coast. That strategy collapsed utterly in the course of the conflict, which morphed into the wider Seven Years War in Europe in 1756. After defeat in Europe, North America and India, the Treaty
of Paris in 1763 stripped France of the Canadian colonies, while the English East India Company also emerged as the dominant colonial power in India, albeit the French still retained enclaves there and in the Americas which kept the colonial rivalry alive. The Seven Years War in Europe also reorientated Europe's diplomatic alignments, as Britain, after more than half a century as a firm ally of Austria, shifted towards an alignment with Austria's north German political rival, Prussia, in the 1750s, a move which in turn led the Austrians into the arms of the French.
The Austrian alliance, and the desire for revenge for the loss of the Canadian colonies, would determine Louis XVI's foreign policy when he became king himself. In Louis' earlier years the Austrian alliance was already shaping his life. The dominant minister of the French government during the 1760s was the Duke de Choiseul. He was one of the key architects of the Austrian alliance and favoured the idea that young Louis would marry an Austrian princess to cement the diplomatic realignment. However, Louis' father, Louis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, was opposed to the match and instead wanted his son to marry one of his
Saxon cousins on Louis' mother's side of the family. Louis Ferdinand's premature death in 1765 from tuberculosis at 36 years of age did two things. Firstly, it meant that Louis became the new heir to his grandfather. Secondly, it removed the opposition to an Austrian marriage which his father had offered. Thus, negotiations between the governments at Versailles and in Vienna proceeded in the late 1760s and on the 16th of May 1770, fifteen-year old Louis married fourteen-year old Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, known to the world today by her Francophone name,
Marie Antoinette. As the youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, their union cemented the Franco-Austrian alliance for a generation. The marriage was an awkward one initially and by all accounts Louis took some time to consummate it. As a result, their first child did not arrive until 1778, yet once one child came, several more followed. The first child, Marie-Therese, was followed by the dauphin, Louis Joseph, in 1781, then a second son, Louis Charles, in 1785, and another daughter, Sophie, in 1786, who died the following year. Court gossip insinuated,
without any real evidence, that the children's father was not Louis, but the Swedish military officer and diplomat, Axel von Fersen. While he knew Marie, von Fersen could not possibly have fathered all four children. Instead, it was simply the case that after initial tensions, Louis and Marie had become a happily married couple as the 1770s went on. King Louis XV died at Versailles on the 10th of May 1774, killed during one of the last catastrophic waves of smallpox spreading across Europe prior to the invention of the first
vaccines. Louis' case left his face so badly scarred that his body could not lie in state, while the traditional royal ceremonial mourning was foregone for fear of contagion. Indeed, Louis was affected enough by his grandfather's passing in this way that he agreed to be inoculated against smallpox six weeks after his death. With his grandfather's passing, Louis succeeded as King Louis XVI at nineteen years of age. He was only the fifth Bourbon King of France, in the 185 years since Henry IV had secured the throne back in 1589. Hence, the succession of a new king was
perceived as a once-in-a-lifetime event at the French court. The royal coronation was planned over the space of a year and was finally held on the 11th of June 1775 in the cathedral of Reims, the traditional medieval coronation site of the monarchs of France. The sumptuousness of the event contrasted sharply with the wider sentiment around the kingdom. April and May 1775 had seen the so-called 'Flour War' across France as dozens of riots broke out around the country in opposition to the rising cost of flour for bread and the perceived hoarding of flour supplies by the
government. This was an ominous sign of things to come in Louis' reign, the sharp difference between the poverty of the common people and the decadence of the court, crown, church and aristocracy. Very few monarchs ran their governments on a day-to-day basis in eighteenth-century Europe when Louis came to the throne. Instead, they spent their time presiding over the social and ceremonial elements of court life and delegated a lot of the basic work of government to skilled ministers and administrators. Some, like Louis' contemporary, King Charles IV of Spain,
barely paid any attention to what was going on and essentially devolved all the responsibilities of government to a powerful chief minister. Others, like George III in Britain or Catherine the Great in Russia, played a substantial role in affairs, while there were still rulers like Frederick the Great of Prussia who closely managed everything that happened in their kingdom. Louis favoured a light-touch form of kingship. He gave power to his ministers and let them manage France's political and economic affairs on his behalf, albeit with some intermittent consultation. These included
men like the Count de Maurepas, Jacques Necker and Charles Alexandre de Calonne, while he also brought Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, an advocate of free trade who was France's answer to Adam Smith, into the government as the Controller-General of Finances between 1774 and 1776. Turgot, though, set a pattern whereby fiscal reformers came and went regularly throughout the reign. Conversely, there was much more continuity when it came to foreign affairs, a brief that was dominated by the Count de Vergennes from Louis' accession down to Vergennes' death in
1787. Many of these men were skilled politicians with ideas on how to reform and develop France, but they all struggled against the backdrop of the royal court, a Machiavellian place where different factions battled with each other for influence over the king and policy formation, as while Louis did not manage affairs on a day-to-day basis, he always had final say over major policy decisions. This would become an unfortunate element of the reign, as while Louis was intelligent in his own way, he had a dreadful tendency to change his mind on serious policy matters and could be easily led
towards a different path by those around him. The enterprise which would come to be the greatest success of Louis' reign was already underway when he came to the throne. Five months before Louis became king, the good people of Boston in Massachusetts had thrown a large consignment of tea into the harbour of their city. The Boston Tea Party was a major moment in the gradual descent into rebellion in the British Thirteen Colonies in North America. The American Revolutionary War broke out in April 1775 and then came the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of
July 1776. The French were humbled after the experience of the French and Indian Wars not much more than a decade earlier and did not immediately offer aid to the American rebels. The tipping point came on the 4th of December 1777 when word reached Versailles that a British army of approximately 5,000 men, a huge force in North American terms, had capitulated to the Continental Army of the rebels at Saratoga in the Hudson River Valley in early October. With this victory, the French became convinced that the American rebels could actually defeat the British.
Louis decided to throw his support fully behind them and in February 1778, a formal treaty of alliance was agreed. Benjamin Franklin came to court to become the first de-facto American ambassador to France, with Louis famously taking his hand when they met and stating "I hope that this will be for the good of the two nations." What the French provided the Continental Army of George Washington with over the next four years was crucial naval support and also supplies of weapons, gunpowder and financing. The peace treaty whereby the British acknowledged the independence of the new United States of America in 1783 was signed in Paris,
a fitting piece of French revenge for the humiliation of losing Canada in 1763. It generally receives less attention, but the French under Louis were also attempting to rejuvenate their colonial presence in Asia. The events of the Seven Years War had seen the English East India Company outflank the French in India, yet the French were not completely expelled from the subcontinent and they had additional interests in Southeast Asia which stretched back to the seventeenth century when they had attempted to establish colonies in Thailand and Burma.
Frenchmen like the formidable naval commander, Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, the Bailli de Suffren, were sent out eastwards to spearhead the rejuvenation of French colonial interests in Asia. In the early 1780s his forces fought several battles against the British and their allies in an unofficial conflict in the Indian Ocean and on land, securing a slightly enlarged enclave around Pondicherry in India. Further east, in late November 1787, Louis signed the Treaty of Versailles with Nguyen Anh, a Vietnamese prince of Cochinchina,
which was negotiated through the French missionary, Pierre Pigneau de Béhaine, Bishop of Adran. In exchange for the provision of modern European ships and armaments, the prince provided the French with the island of Poulo Condore and a concession at Tourane, modern-day Da Nang. This was the first step on the way to the creation of French Indochina in the nineteenth century, a vast colony spanning Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. More broadly it constituted a stepping stone for the increase in French involvement in places like China, Japan and Korea in the 1840s and 1850s and the extension of French ambitions to Oceania.
Thus, although it was dwarfed by English expansion in India, France did achieve some slight successes in Asia in Louis' reign. The drive to rejuvenate France's international position might have borne fruit during Louis' reign, however it came at a cost, one that compounded the already difficult position France was in. Unlike Britain, which was an economically dynamic nation of merchants and businesspeople who were about to launch the Industrial Revolution, France was economically backwards and was reliant to a large extent on a number of very specific
sources of revenue like the hated tax on salt, the gabelle, in order to finance its overseas forays and expanding navy. Debts were piling up and had been long before Louis came to the throne. The provision of financial and military aid to the American rebels added an extra 1.3 billion livres to the crown's debt, a sum which equated to over 100 million livres a year in interest payments alone. The total debt by the 1780s was over 4 billion, a staggering sum equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in today's money, and which, in an age when the tax
base was limited and international credit markets were unsophisticated, there was no realistic way of paying back or borrowing to offset the debt endlessly. The situation was made much worse by the court culture of reckless spending and a government that was in denial. In 1781, Louis' finance minister, Jacques Necker, had published the Compte rendu au Roi, a public statement of the royal finances. This was pure fantasy in which the scale of the debt crisis was covered up and it was even claimed that France had run a surplus of 10.2 million livres in 1780, where in reality the
crown had spent 70 million livres more than it had brought in. Louis understood finances and how they worked quite well and knew how dire the situation was. In 1787, as he and Calonne prepared to ask the aristocracy for money to plug the gap, he stated of the kingdom's broken finances that, "I will keep my fears to myself: one must not show fear lest one inspire it." The perilous state of France's finances was already negatively impacting on the country as a whole by the early 1780s. Then, into this mix, there occurred an event which Louis and his
ministers were powerless to do anything about. In June 1783, a volcanic fissure in Iceland, the Laki or Lakagigar volcano, began spewing out lava, debris and vast clouds of sulphur dioxide. The sulphur quickly started drifting south as a thick grey fog spread across Western Europe in mid-June. When it reached Paris on the 20th of June 1783, the Sun appeared blood red from the volcanic pollution in the capital. While the apocalyptic colour of the Sun and sky was the basic result of the volcanic pollution, people in France soon began to view it as a sign of divine disfavour,
as famine conditions soon set in, as the volcanic winter led to a poor harvest and famine conditions in parts of Europe. In Iceland itself, approximately 70% of the island's livestock died. Modern climate studies debate the degree to which the eruption of the Laki volcano impacted on France. Regardless, the mere knock-on impacts on food production, trade, livestock numbers and food prices, mixed with a very poor winter in 1783, was enough to worsen an already difficult economic situation in a country where large parts of the population survived through subsistence farming.
Additionally, while it is hard to draw a direct line between the volcanic eruption and weather patterns in the mid-1780s as a whole, the eruption was the first event in a series of bad weather and poor harvests that characterised French agriculture for the rest of the decade. As bread prices rose, tensions grew. The final element in the escalating resentment that was felt towards Louis' government in the 1780s was more personal and concerned public opinion surrounding the conduct of the king, his wife and the wider court at Versailles.
Marie was an especial object of scorn for the people of Paris, a resentment towards the Austrian queen which reached a peak during what became known as 'the affair of the necklace' or 'the diamond necklace affair'. This was a scandal that played out in 1785 and 1786. The necklace in question was centred on a large diamond with 647 smaller stones, all with a combined 2,800 carats. It had been fashioned by Boehmer and Bassenge, the court jewellers, who had been unable to sell the necklace after making it, obviously enough because almost nobody could afford to buy it.
The affair began in 1785 when a pair of confidence tricksters, Jeanne de la Motte, and her husband, persuaded the Cardinal de Rohan, a senior cleric from the venerable House of Rohan, a Breton aristocratic line, to buy the necklace and present it to the queen as a gift. The cardinal had fallen from grace at the royal court and wished to reclaim his position. Their plan was elaborate and even involved a prostitute pretending to be Marie Antoinette, all with the end goal of the de la Mottes obtaining the necklace and breaking it up to sell the stones individually. Marie had
nothing whatsoever to do with the plan, but when news of it became public, the rumour soon spread that she was involved, cementing the idea for many French men and women that their queen was a vain, grasping foreigner capable of spending a vast sum of money on a necklace at a time when France's common people were suffering through escalating food prices. In order to stop the attacks on his wife, Louis ordered the arrest and trial of Rohan, who was acquitted in May 1786 and then banished by the king anyway. The entire episode stained the reputation of the royal couple far more than the
spurious legend about Marie saying that the people of Paris should eat cake when told that they had no bread. The scandal demonstrated how protective Louis was of his wife as France's problems escalated and attacks on the monarchy mounted. The French polycrisis of the 1780s came to a head in 1789, but the real descent towards the French Revolution began in 1787 when Louis was persuaded by Calonne to call a meeting of the Assembly of Notables, a kind of French equivalent of the House of Lords. The goal was to acquire a financial subsidy to ease the economic crisis,
as Calonne had concluded that an injection of money from the aristocracy and church was the only way to gain breathing room to tackle the wider deficit and debt problems. However, in an ominous precursor to what would happen in the summer of 1789, the Assembly of Notables refused to grant the subsidy without being given concessions by the crown. This was how parliaments worked in early modern Europe. They met infrequently and involved the crown or government reforming certain elements of society or government in return for money. In 1787 the Assembly of Notables
demanded that Calonne be replaced as finance minister as the price for their financing. Still, the subsidy did not solve the problem and in 1788 and 1789 Calonne's successors continued to run into the same problem, ultimately leading to the recall of Jacques Necker. Concurrently new taxes which were deeply unpopular were introduced. These provoked such opposition that they were quickly rescinded and new loans were acquired to keep the government ship afloat. By the end of 1788 Louis had run out of options. In January 1789, against the advice of his younger
brothers, he reluctantly agreed to summon the Estates General, the wider French parliament that included the Third Estate of the lower orders. It would gather that summer for the first time since 1614, a span of 175 years going all the way back to the reign of King Louis XIII. Hence did the royal absolutism that had characterised virtually the entire era of the Bourbon monarchs in France begin to buckle. It would collapse without much resistance at all in the months that followed. The process began on the 5th of May when the Estates General convened for the first time at Versailles.
Almost at once they became deadlocked over the issue of whether the three orders would vote as three bodies, or as distinct members. The latter scenario would give the Third Estate control, but the former would allow the aristocracy and the church to combine to block anything which the Third Estate attempted to introduce. Six weeks of stalemate ensued on this issue, leading to the Third Estate being locked out of the assembly hall on the 20th of June, an act which led them to form a separate National Assembly and to swear an oath on the tennis court that they would
not disband until a new constitution was created for France. Louis responded by dismissing Necker and mobilising extra troops around Paris, events which led to the infamous storming of the Bastille Prison in Paris on the 14th of July. The French Revolution had begun. At least initially, Louis and the royal establishment could stand somewhat aloof from events, residing at Versailles and attempting not to bow to the demands of the Assembly. This only lasted until the 5th of October 1789. On that day, a crowd of hungry Parisians, led by the
women of the city's markets who were embittered about ongoing prices for flour and other staple goods in the capital, marched out to Versailles and demanded that the royal family be moved to Paris. Beneath the confrontational face of this there was an amiability, at least initially, that is usually overlooked. Louis, who had something of a common touch in certain respects, received a small deputation of five women who represented the crowd and had them served with wine as they talked. Despite his cordiality, late that night an element amongst the crowd
of Parisians broke into Versailles and nearly reached Marie's chambers before she fled down the corridors to Louis' chambers. Troops had to intervene and wider violence was only avoided when Louis and Marie agreed to relocate to the city. Thus, after over a century at Versailles, the royal family returned to Paris to live in the old royal residences there such as the Tuileries Palace. The king was now a hostage in all but name in his own capital, living closely under the eye of the Paris crowd, while the centre of political gravity in France had shifted
decisively from the court to the city and from the monarchy to the revolutionaries. Louis was still the King of France. There was a radical wing in the National Constituent Assembly that was in existence between July 1789 and September 1791 that wanted a French republic, but they were, at least for the present moment, still in the minority. Instead for two years between its inception and the summer of 1791, the French Revolution was primarily oriented towards establishing a constitutional monarchy similar to the one that had emerged in Britain after the
English Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth century. As a constitutional monarch, Louis rubber stamped a staggering array of reforms that the Assembly decided upon in this two-year period, including everything from the abolition of feudalism to the issuance of paper currency. A major source of tension concerned reform of the church. On the other side, there were moments of genuine reconciliation between king and nation, notably the Fête de la Fédération on the Champ de Mars on the 14th of July 1790 to mark the first anniversary of the
storming of the Bastille, an event which Louis and Marie attended and actively participated in. Yet, in other respects, the ground was shifting under the king, as the radicals gained ground in the face of growing counter-revolution and the shadow of possible war with Europe's great powers, many of whom were ruled by absolute monarchs who viewed the Revolution with horror, particularly Austria. In Vienna, Marie's family perceived that she was a prisoner in Paris. Unfortunately, Louis and Marie played into the hands of the radicals when, on the night of the 20th of June 1791,
they left the Tuileries in disguise and climbed into a carriage bound for the Austrian territories to the northeast in what is now Belgium. They never made it there. At Sainte-Menehould, the local postmaster recognised Louis from the portrait on some coins that bore the king's image, and they were then apprehended at Varennes less than fifty miles from Austrian soil. The royal family was escorted back to Paris under armed guard, a statement, if any were now needed, that Louis and his family were prisoners and the monarchy's days were numbered.
The Flight to Varennes fatally damaged relations between Louis and the public. He continued as king through the promulgation of the new constitution in September 1791 and the formation of the Legislative Assembly. However, now the Girondins, a more radical political element, were in the ascendant and were pressing the case for war against nations like Britain and Austria that were conspicuously supporting the counter-revolutionaries within parts of France where rebellions were beginning to break out. Louis was actually not entirely opposed
to war himself, perceiving that defeat for the revolutionary government might lead to a rapid political shift once again that would improve his strategic position. This was not the case. When the French Revolutionary Wars broke out in April 1792, the initial fighting was primarily against Austria and Prussia in the northeast of France. With the Revolution now primarily threatened by an army controlled by Marie's own family, the stock of the royal family plummeted to fresh lows. It did not help when, on the 25th of July 1792, the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Prussian
forces that threatened to advance on Paris, issued a manifesto in which he threatened to level the city to the ground if the royal family were not treated with the gravest of respect. This ill-judged intervention did nothing except fuel the growing hatred of the monarchy. The French monarchy effectively fell on the night of the 10th of August 1792 as armed parts of the Parisian crowd of revolutionaries and sans-culottes descended on the Tuileries in fury about the military emergency that was now engulfing wartime France. The large contingent
of Swiss Guards who were there to protect the royal family attempted to defend the palace, yet they were overcome and the king and queen were taken away to be imprisoned in the Temple prison in the city. Six weeks of rapidly shifting political and military fortunes came then, culminating in defeat of the Prussian at Valmy in north-eastern France on the 20th of September. The victory emboldened the revolutionaries to formally bring an end to the monarchy the next day. Meanwhile, when the Tuileries was stormed, letters between Louis and several foreign governments and
counter-revolutionary leaders had been discovered, and these now became the basis for arraigning him to stand trial as a common citizen in December 1792. The verdict of the show trial was never in doubt, though the decision to execute the former king was decided by a thin margin of votes. So it was that on the 21st of January 1793, Louis XVI was led out to the Place de la Revolution to be guillotined there. His attempts to address the crowd were drowned out by drums and then he was beheaded. The story that parts of the crowd rushed forwards to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood
of the king is not a myth. It genuinely appears to have happened. Marie shared her husband's fate in October 1793. One of their sons, Louis Joseph, had died in the early days of the Revolution in June 1789. Their other son, Louis Charles, died in prison in 1795 after years of poor treatment. Only their eldest daughter, Marie Therese, outlived the chaos of the Revolution, eventually heading into exile at the end of 1795 after a shift to a more moderate Revolution provided a window in which she could depart from the country. The Revolution continued its descent into
radicalism after the death of Louis and Marie. The Terror, the name given to the year-long period in which the Committee of Public Safety, influenced and then, led by Maximilien Robespierre, controlled France, killing and imprisoning tens of thousands in the name of securing the Revolution against its foreign adversaries and counter-revolutionaries, occurred between the late spring of 1793 and the Thermidorian Reaction in late July 1794. Afterwards, with France's enlarged revolutionary armies now taking the fight to the Austrians and Prussians in the Rhineland and
northern Italy, the Revolution settled into a more stable, moderate window. Its generals were gaining growing powers as well and one of them, Napoleon Bonaparte, a Corsican of Italian heritage, seized control of the government in November 1799. Five years later he was crowned as Emperor of the French. Thus, fifteen years after the French had started to overthrow one monarch, they had willingly accepted another. The motives for doing so were clear: Napoleon was building a French empire that extended across Europe, eventually extending to Poland and Lithuania in the east and
to Lisbon in the west. It crumbled between 1812 and 1814. When it did, Louis' surviving brothers, who had lived in exile in Britain and Eastern Europe during the 1790s and 1800s, were waiting. The Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy brought the Count of Provence, Louis' younger brother, to the throne as King Louis XVIII in 1814. One of his first acts was to recover what could be found of his brother and sister-in-law's remains from the cemetery of the Madeleine and to reinter them, with a full ceremony, in the royal Basilica at Saint-Denis on the 21st of January 1815,
the twenty-second anniversary of Louis' execution. In 1824, his younger brother ascended as Charles X. Charles' own failures as a monarch led to his overthrow in 1830 and the rise of an adjacent branch of the Bourbons to the throne. In 1848 a fresh revolution brought about a short-lived republic and then a new empire ruled by Napoleon III. The Bourbon claim to the throne remained alive after 1848, but no Bourbon monarch has ever ruled France since. Louis XVI was not a malevolent man. In many ways he was a victim of a system that he was born into and which utterly shaped his world view. Versailles in the
middle of the eighteenth century was a bubble of royal and aristocratic privilege which was designed to insulate Louis and others from the reality of life in eighteenth-century France. Had the royal court still been resident in Paris, perhaps Louis might have had some greater insight into the difficulties his subjects faced. Nor was Louis wholly responsible for the crises that were facing France in the 1780s. Some of them had long-term systemic roots that were interconnected with excessive government spending during the long reign of his grandfather and going back
to the long reign of Louis XIV. Other parts of the crisis of the 1780s were beyond the control of any monarch or politician. Nobody could have stopped the eruption of the Laki volcano and the cascade of effects which it had in Western Europe. These caveats aside, though, Louis was not powerless. He could have reacted differently to events. Instead, he and his advisors only reluctantly agreed to convening the Estates General to deal with the financial crisis in 1789 and then attempted to make it a short gathering at which few concessions would be made. Events slipped out
of their control immediately and thereafter Louis was increasingly marginalised in his own kingdom. He and Marie made a series of mistakes thereafter, especially the attempted flight to the Austrian territories in the Low Countries in the summer of 1791. After that the growing radicalisation of the Revolution doomed them. He was not a malevolent ruler, but he was most certainly not the right man for the moment in 1789. What do you think of King Louis XVI? Was he unfortunate to have had multiple crises develop during his reign, or was he a terrible king who ignored the problems that were escalating all over France in the 1780s?
Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
