Revolutionaries abolish French Monarchy

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21 September, 1792: Revolutionaries abolish French Monarchy

In Revolutionary France, the Legislative Assembly votes to abolish the monarchy and establish the First Republic. The measure came one year after King Louis XVI reluctantly approved a new constitution that stripped him of much of his power.

Louis ascended to the French throne in 1774 and from the start was unsuited to deal with the severe...
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In Revolutionary France, the Legislative Assembly votes to abolish the monarchy and establish the First Republic. The measure came one year after King Louis XVI reluctantly approved a new constitution that stripped him of much of his power.

Louis ascended to the French throne in 1774 and from the start was unsuited to deal with the severe financial problems that he inherited from his predecessors. In 1789, food shortages and economic crises led to the outbreak of the French Revolution. King Louis and his queen, Mary-Antoinette, were imprisoned in August 1792, and in September the monarchy was abolished. Soon after, evidence of Louis' counterrevolutionary intrigues with foreign nations was discovered, and he was put on trial for treason. In January 1793, Louis was convicted and condemned to death by a narrow majority. On 21 January, he walked steadfastly to the guillotine and was executed. Marie-Antoinette followed him to the guillotine nine months later


(born Aug. 23, 1754, Versailles, France—died Jan. 21, 1793, Paris) Last king of France (1774–92) in the Bourbon line preceding the French Revolution. In 1770 he married Marie-Antoinette, and in 1774 he succeeded to the throne on the death of his grandfather, Louis XV. Lacking in power and strength of character, he was unable to give the necessary support to his ministers, including Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and Jacques Necker, in their efforts to stabilize France's tottering finances. In 1774 he boosted the aristocracy by restoring the powers of the parlements. Aristocratic opposition to the radical economic reforms of Charles-Alexandre de Calonne forced the king to summon the Estates-General in 1788, setting the Revolution in motion. Influenced by the reactionary court faction, he defended the privileges of the clergy and nobility. He dismissed Necker in 1789 and refused to sanction the achievements of the National Assembly. His resistance to popular demands was one cause for the royal family's forcible transfer from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. He lost credibility further when he attempted to escape the capital in 1791 and was caught at Varennes and returned to Paris. Thereafter he was dominated by the queen, who encouraged him to a policy of subterfuge instead of implementing the constitution of 1791, which he had sworn to maintain. In 1792 the Tuileries was captured by the people and militia, and the First French Republic was proclaimed. When proof of his counterrevolutionary intrigues with foreigners was found, he was tried for treason. Condemned to death, he went to the guillotine in 1793. His dignity during his trial and execution only somewhat redeemed his reputation.

 

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orn: 02-11-1755 | Died: 16-10-1793
(born November 2, 1755, Vienna, Austria—died October 16, 1793, Paris, France) queen consort of King Louis XVI of France (1774–93). Imprudent and an enemy of reform, she helped provoke the popular unrest that led to the French Revolution and to the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1792.

The 11th daughter of the Holy Roman emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa, Marie-Antoinette was married in 1770 to the dauphin Louis, grandson of France's King Louis XV. The timid, uninspiring Louis proved to be an inattentive husband; by the time he ascended the throne in 1774, Marie-Antoinette had withdrawn into the companionship of a small circle of court favourites.

Her extravagant court expenditures contributed—though to a minor degree—to the huge debt incurred by the French state in the 1770s and '80s. Louis XVI's inability to consummate their marriage and the queen's resultant childlessness in the 1770s inspired rivals—including the king's own brothers, who stood to inherit the throne if she did not produce a legitimate heir—to circulate slanderous reports of her alleged extramarital affairs. These vilifications culminated in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace (1785–86), in which the queen was unjustly accused of having formed an immoral relationship with a cardinal. The scandal discredited the monarchy and encouraged the nobles to oppose vigorously (1787–88) all the financial reforms advocated by the king's ministers.

During these crises, as in those to come, Marie-Antoinette proved to be stronger and more decisive than her husband. After a crowd stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the queen failed to convince Louis to take refuge with his army at Metz. In August–September, however, she successfully prodded him to resist the attempts of the Revolutionary National Assembly to abolish feudalism and restrict the royal prerogative. As a result, she became the main target of the popular agitators, who attributed to her the celebrated and callous remark on being told that the people had no bread: “Let them eat cake!” (“Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!”). In October 1789 popular pressure compelled the royal family to return from Versailles to Paris, where they became hostages of the Revolutionary movement.

Six months later Marie-Antoinette opened secret communications with the comte de Mirabeau, a prominent member of the National Assembly who hoped to restore the authority of the crown. Nevertheless, her mistrust of Mirabeau prevented the king from following his advice. After Mirabeau died in April 1791, she turned for assistance to a group of émigrés. They arranged for the king and queen to escape from Paris on the night of June 20, but Revolutionary forces apprehended the royal couple at Varennes (June 25) and escorted them back to Paris.

Marie-Antoinette then attempted to shore up the rapidly deteriorating position of the crown by opening secret negotiations with Antoine Barnave, leader of the constitutional monarchist faction in the Assembly. Barnave persuaded the king to accept publicly the new constitution (September 1791), but the queen undermined Barnave's position by privately urging her brother, the Holy Roman emperor Leopold II, to conduct a counterrevolutionary crusade against France. Leopold avoided acceding to her demands. After France declared war on Austria in April 1792, Marie-Antoinette's continuing intrigues with the Austrians further enraged the French. Popular hatred of the queen provided impetus to the insurrection that overthrew the monarchy on August 10, 1792.

Marie-Antoinette spent the remainder of her life in Parisian prisons. Louis XVI was executed on orders from the National Convention in January 1793, and in August the queen was put in solitary confinement in the Conciergerie. She was brought before the Revolutionary tribunal on October 14, 1793, and was guillotined two days later.
Instrument for inflicting capital punishment by decapitation. A minimal wooden structure, it supported a heavy blade that, when released, slid down in vertical guides to sever the victim's head. It was introduced in France in 1792 in the French Revolution, though similar devices had been used in Scotland, England, and other European countries, often for executing criminals of noble birth. The name derived from a French physician and member of the National Assembly, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738–1814), who was instrumental in passing a law requiring all sentences of death to be carried out “by means of a machine,” so that execution by decapitation would no longer be confined to nobles and executions would be as painless as possible. The last execution by guillotine in France took place in 1977.