The “Trial” and Martyrdom of Louis XVI

An American Memorial

The French and British fleets at the Battle of the Capes (1781). The French victory was decisive for the course of the American Revolution.

On this day in 1793, Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde, in Paris. The United States might well never have come into existence without the massive aid, military and financial, provided by Louis’ government; and the budgetary strains incurred by that aid contributed rather directly to the calling of the Estates-General in 1789 and thus to the Revolution itself. Hence it is fitting for Americans to honor Louis’ end. What follows is a bibliographic essay in memoriam, presenting a set of sources, written in or translated into English, on the pseudo-trial of the King and his subsequent martyrdom.

Louis’ eloquent last will and testament is helpfully provided by Andrew Cusack. The King forgives his enemies (while rejecting the legitimacy of their actions), asks for the forgiveness of anyone he has offended, professes his Catholic faith, and exhorts his son that “should he have the misfortune of becoming king, to remember he owes himself wholly to the happiness of his fellow citizens.” It reveals a monarch sincerely devoted to his family, to the welfare of his realm, and to the Church.

That the trial of Louis was indeed a sham — a proceeding for which “one can find neither pretext nor means in any existing law,” as Louis put it in his testament — is not seriously contestable. David P. Jordan’s book on the trial, probably the best treatment available in English, details the copious violations of law by the revolutionary republican assembly, the National Convention. Those violations occurred at several levels. Even putting aside the ancien regime view that the King could not be tried and judged by any human power and is accountable only to God, the trial violated both the post-revolutionary Constitution of 1791 and the new Criminal Code enacted in 1791. The Constitution had made “the person of the King … sacred and inviolable” and specified that he could only be prosecuted as a citizen for acts posterior to his abdication, whereas Louis was charged with treason for acts taken when he was still the constitutional monarch. To be sure, the Constitution of 1791 had been de facto abrogated by the fall of the constitutional monarchy and proclamation of a republic in August-September of 1792. Yet the Constitution had not yet been replaced, and there was a serious legal argument that it still governed Louis’ acts at issue, which had occurred while it was in effect — an argument made by a number of the Girondin deputies at the trial.

As to the Criminal Code, it was still in effect at the time of the trial and was violated in countless ways. It required, for example, that the jury of accusation or grand jury should be different than the trial jury, and composed of different members, whereas the National Convention took on both functions, appointing itself judge and jury as well as lawmaker. Louis was also denied access to evidence before the trial (evidence whose provenance was not proven in valid form anyway); given no notice of the charges against him before he was interrogated; and given a hopelessly inadequate span of time to prepare such defense as he could. The Jacobins were in a sense more candid, or at least more logically consistent in their lawlessness, than the Girondins. They opposed holding any trial in the first place, arguing, as Louis Antoine de Saint-Just put it, that Louis was an enemy alien outside the revolutionary body politic, with whom the revolutionary state was at war, and who should be executed without any process at all, as one would shoot an enemy on the battlefield.

Saint-Just’s (in)famous speech is translated in a book by Michael Walzer that is quite prominent in the English-speaking world, and that gives a number of the leading speeches of both regicide and non-regicide deputies. Walzer’s agenda, however, is quite explicitly to justify Louis’ trial and execution as a revolutionary necessity, the only way to condemn and kill the King’s body politic along with his natural body. This mars the book, making it an unreliable guide to the events and legal arguments. Walzer, for instance, omits on some trifling pretext the speech for the defense (!), crafted by the great ancien regime lawyer Malesherbes (although delivered at the trial by another of Louis’ attorneys, de Sèze). A contemporaneous translation of the speech was provided in 1793 by a London publisher and is available here. Walzer, it may be added, preserves a discreet, ambiguous and doubtless tactical silence about whether revolutionary justice also required the later deaths of Marie-Antoinette by guillotine, and of the King’s eight year old son Louis-Charles by criminal neglect and starvation while in prison. On Walzer’s logic, it seems that they too had to die so that the Revolution might live, as Robespierre had said of the King; in a monarchy, the Queen and the King’s heir are also part of the King’s body politic, of one flesh with the crown.

The last day and actual execution of the King are described in Jordan’s book, in Simon Schama’s well-known book Citizens, and in a narrative history by Warren Carroll; the latter two are also good introductions to the whole of the Revolution. We will draw a shroud of respect over the affecting details, except to note that just as Walzer refuses to let the King’s defense speak for itself, so too the Commune of Paris refused to let the King finish speaking his last words from the scaffold to the Parisian crowds. The King managed to state that “I die innocent. I pardon my enemies and I hope that my blood will be useful to the French, that it will appease God’s anger …,” but was then drowned out by a drumroll and hustled into the guillotine. The enduring principle of revolutionary justice, it seems, is not only to murder its enemies, but to silence them while doing so. But when the King was silenced by force, the Church spoke on his behalf. Also present on the scaffold was the Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont, an Irish priest who, as a foreigner, was not subject to the revolutionary Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and who had thus been able to administer valid sacraments to the King in his last hours. As the blade fell, bystanders heard Edgeworth proclaim in a resonant voice “Fils de Saint Louis, montez au Ciel!” (Son of Saint Louis, rise to Heaven!), although in later years he curiously had no memory of doing so.

That Louis’ sham trial and execution was indeed a martyrdom is the thrust of Pius VI’s Quare Lacrymae (1793), helpfully translated by The Josias. Pius VI determines that Louis was murdered not merely as a king but as a Catholic and because of his faith, in odium fidei. Quare Lacrymae raises a very large question: even if, as the Church taught throughout the 19th century and teaches today, there is no single best form of political regime, and republicanism is legitimate so long as it is ordered to the common good and respects the rights of the Church, might it nonetheless be the case that a given strain or tradition of republicanism in a given nation is inherently anti-Catholic? That question was much discussed when Leo XIII announced the ralliement, the reconciliation of the Church to the political order of the Third Republic, in Au Milieu des Sollicitudes (“In the Midst of Cares”) (1892), which most of the French bishops vehemently opposed. And it was given fuel by persistent strains of radical republicanism in France, hostile to the Church. Consider a recent description of Clemenceau’s republicanism: “Son crédo ne variera pas: les droits de l'Homme et la loi républicaine doivent l'emporter sur le dogme religieux et les droits de Dieu” (His credo will not waver: the Rights of Man and the law of the Republic must prevail over religious dogma and the rights of God). In the end, Pius X acknowledged the partial failure of ralliement in Vehementer Nos (1906), which denounced the famous French law of 1905 that abrogated the Church’s concordat with the French state and established laïcité.

The aftermath of Louis’ martyrdom in a sense implicates the whole subsequent history of the Revolution, of France, of the Church, and indeed of modernity, as Christopher Dawson suggests. Suffice it to say here that Louis’ final beneficent wish for his realm was disappointed: the divine wrath was not appeased by his blood. Although Louis blessed his enemies at the last, an avenging Providence was severe in its justice, and the restored Bourbons were unforgiving in victory. Already, as of 1797, Joseph De Maistre observed in his surpassingly brilliant Considerations on France that no less than 60 of the regicide deputies had died by violence, many suffering that fate at the hands of the sham tribunals of the very Revolution they themselves had helped to create. In later years, in the turbulence of the Directory and the Napoleonic era, many other regicides would meet either violent death or, in the Bourbon Restoration, suffer exile from France and die in foreign lands. A few survived, however, and indeed flourished, like the vile Joseph Fouché, who became Napoleon’s minister of police and spymaster. (Another great work of De Maistre, the St. Petersburg Dialogues, is a meditation on the question why the temporal government of Providence punishes in this life many, but not all, of the wicked).

The final words may perhaps be left to Chateaubriand, who writes of his memory of being presented to Louis in 1787: “The vanity of human destinies: this sovereign whom I saw for the first time, this powerful monarch was Louis XVI, but six years removed from the scaffold! … Louis XVI might have answered his judges as Christ answered the Jews: ‘Many good works I have showed you ... for which of those works do you stone me?’"

As for the regicides of the National Convention, no sentence of any tribunal could equal the dry condemnation that Chateaubriand pronounced upon them for posterity:

“The members of the National Convention made believe they were the most benign men on earth: good fathers, good sons, good husbands, they took their small children on walks around the city; they hired nurses for them; they wept tenderly at the sight of their simple games; gently, they took these little lambs in their arms and showed them the horsie that led the cart which carried victims to their punishment. They sang of nature, peace, pity, beneficence, candor, and domestic virtues, and meanwhile these blessed philanthropists sent their neighbors to have their necks sliced, with extreme sensibility, for the greater happiness of the human race.”