Louis XVI — an absolute monarchy bankrupted itself into revolution

Louis XVI ruled France for eighteen years, from his accession in May 1774 to the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792; four months later, on 21 January 1793, the deposed king — stripped of his titles and tried under the commoner’s name “Louis Capet” — was guillotined before a crowd of some twenty thousand in the Place de la Révolution in Paris. He was the first reigning European monarch executed by a revolutionary tribunal of his own subjects, and his death severed any path back to the Bourbon throne.

Louis had inherited not a tyranny but an insolvency. The French crown of the 1770s commanded perhaps twenty-eight million people and the most prestigious court in Europe, yet its finances were chronically broken: a tax system that exempted the nobility and clergy, debt swollen by French support for the American Revolution, and a monarch without the will to force reform through the privileged orders. When his ministers’ attempts to tax the elite failed, Louis was compelled in 1789 to summon the Estates-General, an assembly that had not met since 1614 — and in doing so he opened a door he could not close.

The Estates-General became the National Assembly, the Bastille fell on 14 July 1789, and within two years France had a constitution that reduced the king to a salaried executive. Louis never reconciled himself to it. His attempted flight to Varennes in June 1791, halted and dragged back to Paris, destroyed the fiction that he accepted the Revolution; thereafter he was a suspect monarch presiding over a war he was believed to want France to lose. On 10 August 1792 the Tuileries Palace was stormed, the monarchy suspended, and the king imprisoned.

What followed was a trial whose verdict was effectively settled in advance. The newly elected National Convention, having proclaimed the Republic, found Louis guilty of conspiracy against liberty by an essentially unanimous vote, then condemned him to death by the narrowest of margins — 361 of 721 deputies, the bare majority. The guillotine that killed him had been adopted as a humane and egalitarian instrument; it made the king’s death indistinguishable in method from a commoner’s, which was precisely the point.