King Louis XVI Execution

5 Key excerpts on "King Louis XVI Execution"

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  Visualizing the Revolution

  Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France

  • Hubertus Kohle, Rolf Reichardt(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  This implicitly signified the secularization of the 185 145 Jean-Baptiste Louvion, The True Ordi-nary Guillotine, etching, 32 . 9 X 16 . 8 cm, 1793 . proceedings: eschatological significance had been exchanged for the ‘humanity’ of the current procedure. Although the guillotine was introduced in 1791 , it only became the symbol of the radical Revolution with the execution of the King and his wife. Much of its symbolic commemoration is focused on this event – how could it be otherwise, since no other event during the Revolution impressed itself so forcefully on the minds and emotions of France and Europe? If, as Hegel and many others are supposed to have later claimed, a new age began with the Revolution of 1789 , the death of the successor of the illustrious Louis was its most significant expression. 10 It is not mere chance that so many attempts at visualiza-tion portray this groundbreaking event as the new emerging from the ashes of the old. When considering portrayals of the execution of the king, we must clearly free ourselves of the misconception that there was even any attempt at objective reproduction of the actual event. First, most artists were not present when Louis and later his wife were executed, so they had to rely on reports, which varied considerably. Second, they had an interest, as did those on whose reports they had to rely, in viewing the event filtered through a particular ideology, or else they were dependent on commissioners, who likewise had interests of their own. The print engraved by Helman (illus. 146 ) after a painting by Monnet appears to be relatively objective. It was later included with fourteen other prints in a series titled The French Revolution from the Opening of the Estates General up to 9 Brumaire. 11 In any case its viewpoint was far from critical of the Revolution, as can be ascer-tained from a reference in the legend to ‘Louis Capet’, this being the civilian name for the king chosen by the new ‘Monarchomachs’.

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  The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon

  Toward a Political History of Madness

  • Laure Murat, Deke Dusinberre(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  The Tragic End of Louis XVI, Executed on January 21, 1793, on Place Louis XV . This highly popular color print depicts a critical moment in the ritual of the guillotine: exhibiting the decapitated head to the public like a trophy. Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photograph: Agence Bulloz. Photograph © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

  The death of Louis XVI also confirmed and consecrated another obvious fact: the theater of political power, once restricted to Versailles, had shifted to Paris. The revolution was a drama being performed outdoors, in public. Right from the early days of 1789, François-René de Chateaubriand noted the effervescence of salons, cafés, and streets where everything became part of the spectacle of this “celebration of destruction.”6 From 1792 onward, the scaffold became a leading stage. “The theater of the guillotine,” added contemporary commentator Louis Sébastien Mercier, “was always ringed by an audience.”7 The executioner Sanson was the great coordinator of these “red masses” that drew daily crowds curious to see “the new play that could never have more than one performance,” as Camille Desmoulins ferociously quipped only months before his own head fell.8 Artists took up their places at the foot of the scaffold to capture the expressions on faces faced with death, whose public staging offered the hope that skilled pencils might decipher its mystery. A plethora of engravings were published, endlessly showing the executioner brandishing a bloody head by the hair. Final words were noted down, poses were recorded.

  Those sentenced to death, meanwhile, prepared to perform their final role. Imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie, monarchist actress Louise Contat promised to sing a song of her own composing when she climbed the scaffold—a fate she was ultimately spared—which began with the lines, “On the scaffold shall I appear / for ’tis just another stage.”9 The distance between street and stage vanished. Révolutions de Paris indicated as much in a strikingly metaphorical comment designed to suggest that life was returning to normal the very afternoon of that most exceptional January 21, 1793. “The show carried on without interruption; everyone joined in, people danced on the edge of the former Louis XVI Bridge.”10

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  The French Revolution

  • Linda S. Frey, Marsha L. Frey(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION nation"), that the French intended to export their revolution. Burke and others also worried about the fate of the king. Those who wanted the establishment of a republic, such as Louis- Antoine de Saint-Just, argued that the king should not be tried, that he should be executed because kingship itself was a crime. "One cannot reign innocently," Saint-Just contended. 12 The discovery of a hidden cache of the king's letters denouncing the Revolution and requesting foreign aid decided the king's fate. Although the well-respected lawyer Chretien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes and two others came forward courageously to defend the king, the issue was never in doubt. By a wide margin, the king was found guilty of treason and con- demned to death. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. His wife's execution followed within less than a year. Of the regicides, those who voted for the death of the king, 34 died under the "national razor" (the guillotine), 21 died by violence, 28 expired naturally, and 127 later served under Napoleon. 13 The execution of the king combined with the issuance of the propaganda decrees and the increased violations of international law provoked Britain, the United Provinces, and Spain to join Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia in the War of the First Coalition (1792-95) against France. As the allies drove the French from the Austrian Netherlands and the Rhineland and prepared to invade France, and yet another cele- brated French general, Charles-Frangois du Perier Dumouriez, defected to the allies (April 1793), the French government responded to the cri- sis by conscripting men into the army, provoking resistance and shortly thereafter counterrevolution in an area called the Vendee. France found herself at war within and without her borders. The assignat plunged in value and scarcities of critical items increased.

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  The Deaths of Louis XVI

  Regicide and the French Political Imagination

  • Susan Dunn(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet, its implications and conse-quences will be surprisingly unsettling, for a vigorous democracy requires conflict not conciliation, and an equitable system of justice most often requires desert, not pardon. 65 The association of king and executioner left the domain of fiction for reality when Louis-Philippe acceded to the throne in 1830. His father, the duke of Orleans, cousin of the king, had taken the name Philippe-Egalite during the Revolution. As a member of the Convention, Philippe-Egalite voted for the execution of the king. No author of fiction dared to imagine that the son of a regicide would become king or that the two dynasties—of kings and of executioners—would thus become one. C. Montjoie, in his Eloge historique etfimebre de Louis XVI (Neufchatel: 1796), wrote of Philippe-Egalite thus: Imbecilic assassin! You succeeded in erecting between you and the throne an insurmountable barrier. The universal hatred in which you cloaked yourself after you voted for the death of your king, your cousin, makes you an object of execration even for your own followers (ibid., 292). Although Louis-Philippe was seen for the most part as unifying the monarchical tradition and the principles of the Revolu-tion, Chateaubriand stigmatized the new king with his father's guilt, branding him a reg-icide. Lamartine also displayed his antipathy for the regicidal Orleans dynasty: I never liked the House of Orleans. Its popularity during the Revolution seemed to me an unwarrantable reward for the aberrant involvement of the head of this House in the ingratitude of the French people toward the most innocent and most dedicated of kings, and in the murder of this king on the scaffold in 1793. What the people seem to admire today in the new duke of Or-leans . . . is the son of the 21st of January (Lamartine, Critique de I'Histoire des Girondins, 15:30). Chapter Five VICTOR HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI T HE POEMS of the young Victor Hugo glowed with royalism and Catholicism.

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  The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, V. 10

  • Werner Muensterberger, L. Bryce Boyer, Werner Muensterberger, L. Bryce Boyer, Simon A. Grolnick, Werner Muensterberger, L. Bryce Boyer, Simon A. Grolnick(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  “roi medecin,, was evident in the ritual “healing” by the mere touch of the king of thousands stricken with scrofula, a form of tuberculosis popularly called “the King’s Evil.” Louis XVI touched some twenty-four hundred scrofula victims on the day after his consecration in 1775 (Walzer, 1974, p. 20). Just as the king’s touch was imbued with the power to heal, the executioner’s touch had the reverse effect, namely spreading the contagion associated with his taboo status.

  The king was also Christ-like by virtue of his connections with the sun around which revolves the universe. This is a traditional association covered by a vast literature.6 Suffice it to say, in the Versailles of Louis XIV this connection was most splendidly celebrated. He called his throne room the Salon d’Apollon and his emblem of the sun darting its rays upon the world became a standard feature of the royal iconography (Voltaire, 1961, pp. 269-270; Blunt, 1953, p. 337). In a conscious imitation of the sun, the kings of France performed a daily ritual of rising and setting. Therefore, when Charles-Henri Sanson executed Louis XVI, he was not killing an ordinary criminal. He was killing an idea, a symbology, an entire set of political, religious, and psychological concepts that had prevailed for centuries. Unlike the aftermath of an assassination, there would be no heir to replace the dead king. “For all effects and purposes,” writes Walzer (1974, p. 26), “the revolution marks the end of political fatherhood.”

  In Charles-Henri’s prayer before the blade of the Guillotine, various levels of the psychological history of the Sanson family were condensed with certain universal historical fantasies about kings, gods, and fathers into a private, obsessional religion. As a historical postscript, the Restoration (1815-1830) created a martyr cult out of Louis XVI’s death. January 21 was declared a national day of mourning and Louis’s will was the sacred text read at the official ceremony (Jordan, 1979, ch. XIII).

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