How the Convention tried its king and voted his death, one deputy at a time
The trial of the former king before the National Convention, from his first appearance on 11 December 1792 to the vote that refused him a reprieve on 20 January 1793. The deputies were at once his accusers and his judges. They found him guilty without a single vote against, refused to put the verdict to the people, and sentenced him to death by 387 votes of 721. He was guillotined the next morning.
There was no prosecutor: the deputies who debated the charges also voted the verdict. The king’s cousin, Philippe Égalité, formerly Duke of Orléans, voted for death; he was guillotined himself in November 1793.
After the storming of the TuileriesEvent: Storming of the Tuileries. The day Paris overthrew its king on 10 August 1792, Louis XVIFigure: Louis XVI. The king who called a meeting and lost a monarchy and his family were held in the Temple, and on 21 September the newly met National Convention abolished the monarchy. That left a question no French assembly had faced: what to do with a deposed king. The constitution of 1791 had declared the king’s person inviolable, and the worst it foresaw for a king who betrayed the nation was that he would be deemed to have abdicated. Louis had already lost his throne; could he be punished further? Only one king had been tried by his own subjects before, Charles I of England in 1649, and the deputies knew it well.
On 7 November Jean-Baptiste Mailhe, reporting for the Convention’s legislation committee, answered that he could: inviolability had been granted by the nation and could not shield him from the nation, and his judge should be the Convention itself, which represented it. Some deputies went further. On 13 November Louis-Antoine de Saint-JustFigure: Louis Antoine de Saint-Just. The Convention's youngest deputy, who spoke for the Terror and died beside Robespierre, at 25 the youngest member of the Convention, gave his first speech and argued that the king should not be tried as a citizen at all but fought as an enemy, a usurper outside the social contract.
“No one can reign innocently.”
RobespierreFigure: Maximilien Robespierre. The Incorruptible who defended the Terror and died by it took the same line on 3 December: “Louis is not a defendant; you are not judges.” A trial, he warned, assumed that the king might be innocent, and so put the Revolution itself in the dock. The GirondinsGroup: Girondins. The deputies who took France to war and lost Paris to the Mountain, wary of the Paris crowds and of the Montagnards, held to the forms of law. The Convention chose a trial and, that same day, decided that it would judge the king itself.
Before the argument was settled, a discovery hardened it. On 20 November the locksmith François Gamain, who some months before had helped the king fit a hidden iron cupboard into a wall of the Tuileries, revealed it to Jean-Marie Roland, the minister of the interior. Roland opened the armoire de fer himself, with no deputies present, and carried its papers to the Convention.
They laid bare the court’s secret dealings with men who had passed for patriots, above all MirabeauFigure: Comte de Mirabeau. The Revolution's great orator, and the court's secret adviser, who had advised the king and taken his money until his death in 1791. The papers did not decide the case, but they made the king’s denials harder to believe. And because Roland had opened the chest alone, the Montagnards suspected him of removing papers that compromised his Girondin friends.
On 11 December Louis was brought from the Temple to the Convention’s hall, the Manège beside the Tuileries gardens. The president, Bertrand Barère, put the charges to him one by one, gathered in an act that ran from his conduct in 1789 to 10 August: that he had plotted against liberty and against the safety of the state. Louis answered each briefly and calmly. He blamed his ministers, pleaded the constitution for some acts and flatly denied others, including any knowledge of the iron chest.
He asked for counsel. The first lawyer he named, Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target, declined; François Denis Tronchet accepted; and Malesherbes, a former minister of 71, wrote to the Convention offering to defend the man he had once served. A younger lawyer, Raymond de Sèze, joined them to draft and deliver the defence. On 26 December de Sèze argued that the constitution had made the king inviolable, that the loss of his throne was the only penalty it allowed, and that the Convention could not be both his accuser and his judge.
“I look among you for judges, and I see only accusers.”
Louis added a few words of his own, protesting above all against the charge that he had wanted to shed his people’s blood on 10 August, and was taken back to the Temple.
Each deputy at the tribune, giving his vote aloud
The Girondins’ way out was an appeal to the people: whatever the Convention decided would be sent to the primary assemblies across France for ratification. Vergniaud and others argued for it at length in the last days of December; the Montagnards answered that it would carry civil war into the departments. On 14 January 1793 the Convention fixed the order of the questions, and from the next day each deputy went up to the tribune and gave his vote aloud, often with his reasons.
Each question was put to the deputies one by one, by roll call.
On 15 January, asked whether Louis was guilty of conspiring against public liberty and of attempts against the safety of the state, 693 deputies said yes and none said no. The appeal to the people was rejected the same day by a clear majority. The vote on the sentence began on the evening of 16 January and went on through the night and all the next day; among those who voted for death was the king’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans, now Philippe Égalité. When the count was done, Vergniaud, presiding, announced the result: 387 of the 721 deputies who voted had chosen death.
721 deputies voted. The 361 votes for death without conditions were on their own an absolute majority, by the narrowest margin.
Louis’s defenders asked to appeal the sentence to the nation; the request was refused. A last roll call, on whether to suspend the execution, ended in the early hours of 20 January: the reprieve was refused by 380 votes to 310. The next morning Louis was guillotined on the Place de la RévolutionPlace: Place de la Révolution. The square built for a king, where a king lost his head; his last hours are told under the execution of Louis XVIEvent: Execution of Louis XVI. The morning the Republic beheaded its king.
The trial settled the fate of the monarchy and split the Convention. The deputies who had voted for the appeal to the people, most of them Girondins, were accused by the Montagnards and the Paris sections of trying to save the tyrant, and the charge followed them to their expulsion from the Convention in June 1793. Those who voted for death were remembered by royalists as the regicides; after the BourbonsHouse: House of Bourbon. The family that ruled France for two centuries, lost the throne and won it back returned, 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 in 1816. Malesherbes, who had defended the king, was guillotined in April 1794.
