The morning the Republic beheaded its king
The beheading of the former king on the Place de la Révolution in Paris, on the morning of 21 January 1793, after a trial before the National Convention. No deputy voted him innocent, and 387 of the 721 who voted on the sentence chose death. The execution made the Revolution irreversible and, within two weeks, left France at war with Britain and the Dutch Republic.
His other defenders were François Tronchet and Raymond de Sèze. His valet, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, served him in the Temple until the last morning and later published an account of the captivity.
After the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 the royal family was held in the Temple, and on 21 September the new National Convention abolished the monarchy. What to do with the former king divided the deputies. On 20 November a hidden iron cupboard in a wall of the Tuileries, the armoire de fer, gave up the king's secret papers and hardened opinion against him. Saint-JustFigure: Louis Antoine de Saint-Just. The Convention's youngest deputy, who spoke for the Terror and died beside Robespierre and RobespierreFigure: Maximilien Robespierre. The Incorruptible who defended the Terror and died by it argued that a king could not be tried like a citizen at all, only struck down as an enemy.
“Louis must die, because the country must live.”
The Convention decided to try him all the same, and to try him itself. On 11 December Louis, now called Louis Capet, was brought before it to hear the charges: conspiring against public liberty and plotting against the safety of the state. He answered each point calmly, denying some and pleading the laws of the time for others. Three lawyers defended him: Tronchet, Raymond de Sèze and the 71-year-old Malesherbes, a former minister who had volunteered for the task. On 26 December de Sèze delivered the defence, arguing that the constitution of 1791 had made the king inviolable.
How 721 deputies decided a king's fate, one by one
From 15 January 1793 the Convention voted by roll call, each deputy going up to the tribune to state his vote aloud, often with his reasons. The first question, whether Louis was guilty, found no deputy to say no. The second, a Girondin proposal to put the verdict to the people for ratification, was rejected by a clear majority.
The third vote, on the sentence, began on the evening of 16 January and went on through the night and the next day. Among those who voted for death was the king's own cousin, the Duke of Orléans, who now sat as Philippe Égalité. When the count was announced, 387 of the 721 deputies who voted had chosen death; 334 had chosen detention, exile, or death with a delay.
721 deputies voted. 26 of the death votes asked for a debate on a delay; the other penalties were detention, exile or a delayed death.
A last vote, on whether to suspend the execution, ended in the early hours of 20 January: the reprieve was refused by 380 votes to 310. That evening a former royal guardsman stabbed Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, a deputy who had voted for death, in a restaurant at the Palais-Royal; he died of the wound and was honoured as a martyr of the Revolution.
From the Temple to the Place de la Révolution
On the afternoon of 20 January the decree was read to Louis in the Temple. He asked for three days to prepare himself and for a priest of his choosing. The delay was refused; the priest was granted. He was Henry Essex Edgeworth, an Irish-born abbé who had been confessor to the king's sister. That evening Louis said goodbye to his wife, his sister and his two children, and promised to see them again in the morning. He did not.
He rose before dawn on 21 January, heard Mass said by Edgeworth in his room in the tower, and left with his valet, Cléry, a ring and a seal for his family. Santerre, commander of the Paris National Guard, came for him, and around nine the carriage left the Temple. Louis rode in a closed carriage with Edgeworth and two gendarmes, reading psalms from the priest's breviary, while tens of thousands of armed men lined the streets. A royalist plan by the Baron de Batz to snatch him on the boulevards came to nothing.
A little after ten the carriage reached the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine stood near the empty pedestal of the statue of his grandfather, Louis XVFigure: Louis XV. The Well-Beloved who lost an empire and left his grandson the debts. Louis took off his coat, let his hands be tied only after Edgeworth persuaded him, and climbed the steps. He turned to the crowd and began to speak, but a roll of drums drowned out his words. At 10:22 am the blade fell. One of the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson's assistants held up the head to the crowd, and cries of “Vive la République!” went up.
“I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.”
The body was taken to the Madeleine cemetery and buried in a pit of quicklime. Paris stayed quiet. Royalists in France and abroad went into mourning, and in exile the king's brother, the Count of Provence, proclaimed the seven-year-old Dauphin king as Louis XVII.
Abroad, the execution confirmed every fear the monarchies had of the Revolution. Britain ordered the French envoy, Chauvelin, to leave the country on 24 January, and on 1 February 1793 the Convention declared war on Britain and the Dutch Republic; war with Spain followed in March. At home, the call-up of 300,000 men in February helped set off the rising in the Vendée, and on 10 March the Convention created the Revolutionary Tribunal. Marie AntoinetteFigure: Marie Antoinette. The queen France loved to hate followed her husband to the guillotine on 16 October 1793.
After the BourbonsHouse: House of Bourbon. The family that ruled France for two centuries, lost the throne and won it back returned, the remains believed to be the king's were exhumed and reburied in the basilica of Saint-Denis on 21 January 1815, and an Expiatory Chapel was later built over the old cemetery. The deputies who had voted for death were remembered as the regicides; in 1816 those who had also rallied to NapoleonFigure: Napoleon Bonaparte. The officer the Revolution made, and the ruler who ended it during the Hundred Days were banished from France.
