Louis XVI

Louis XVI was the last king of France before the French Revolution, reigning from 1774 until the monarchy was abolished in 1792. Well-meaning but indecisive, he inherited a state burdened by debt and a tax system that his ministers could not reform against the resistance of the privileged. His attempts to manage the Revolution failed, and he was tried by the National Convention and guillotined in Paris in January 1793.

Louis-Auguste was born on 23 August 1754 at the Palace of Versailles, the grandson of King Louis XV, the great-grandson of Louis XIV. He became heir, the dauphin, in 1765 after the deaths of his father and an elder brother. Shy and studious, he had a serious interest in geography, history, languages and locksmithing, and enjoyed hunting. On 16 May 1770, aged fifteen, he married the Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette, daughter of the empress Maria Theresa, to seal an alliance between France and the Habsburg Monarchy. The marriage was not consummated for seven years, a subject of gossip at court, and their first child was born in 1778.

Louis XV died on 10 May 1774, and Louis became king at nineteen. He restored the parlements, the high courts that his grandfather had suppressed, a popular move that strengthened the bodies that would later block reform. His first leading minister of finance, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, tried to free the grain trade and abolish guild privileges and forced labour on roads, but faced opposition from the nobility, the parlements and the court, and Louis dismissed him in 1776.

Louis's main foreign success was the war against Britain. From 1778 France openly supported the rebels of the American Revolution, and French troops and ships helped bring about the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 recognised American independence. The war, financed largely by loans arranged by the Genevan banker Jacques Necker rather than by new taxes, left the French state deeply in debt. Within the kingdom, Louis granted civil rights to Protestants in 1787 and abolished the use of torture to extract confessions.

By 1786 Louis's finance minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne warned that the state was close to bankruptcy, as interest on the debt consumed a large share of revenue. He proposed a land tax that would fall on nobles and clergy as well as commoners. To win support, Louis summoned an Assembly of Notables in 1787, but the notables refused, and so did the parlements, which insisted that only the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614, could approve new taxes. In 1788 Louis gave way and called the Estates-General, recalling Necker to office.

The Estates-General met at Versailles in May 1789. In June, the representatives of the Third Estate declared themselves a National Assembly and swore not to separate until France had a constitution. Louis hesitated between concession and force. His dismissal of Necker and the gathering of troops around Paris helped provoke the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. In October a crowd, many of them women protesting about the price of bread, marched to Versailles and forced the royal family to move to the Tuileries Palace in Paris.

For two years Louis formally accepted the Revolution's reforms while privately opposing many of them, above all the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which placed the Catholic Church under state control. On the night of 20 June 1791 the family fled Paris in disguise, hoping to reach loyal troops near the eastern border, but they were recognised and stopped at Varennes and brought back. The flight destroyed much of the trust that remained in him. He accepted the new constitution in September 1791, becoming king of the French under a constitutional monarchy, but used his veto against laws aimed at émigré nobles and priests who refused the oath to the constitution.

France declared war on Austria in April 1792, and many suspected the king and queen of hoping for an Austrian victory. On 10 August 1792 armed crowds and National Guards stormed the Tuileries; the royal family took refuge with the Legislative Assembly, which suspended the king. They were imprisoned in the Temple tower. On 21 September 1792 the new National Convention abolished the monarchy, and France became the French First Republic. Louis, now referred to as Citizen Louis Capet, was tried by the Convention in December for treason, after documents found in a hidden safe in the Tuileries showed his contacts with counter-revolutionaries. He was found guilty almost unanimously; 361 of 721 deputies voted for death without conditions, a bare majority, and a proposal for a reprieve was then defeated by 380 votes to 310. Louis was guillotined on the Place de la Révolution, today's Place de la Concorde, on 21 January 1793, aged 38.

The execution shocked monarchs across Europe and helped widen the war against the Revolution. Marie Antoinette was executed in October 1793, and their son, recognised by royalists as Louis XVII, died in prison in 1795. After the restoration of the monarchy, Louis's remains were moved in 1815 to the basilica of Saint-Denis. Historians long portrayed him as weak and dull; more recent studies stress his intelligence, interest in science and exploration, and genuine wish to reform, while agreeing that his indecision and his inability to accept a reduced role made a compromise with the Revolution impossible. For the wider story, see the History of France and the Kingdom of France.