Louis XVI of France: The King Who Could Not Decide
On the night of 20 June 1791 the King of France fled his own capital in disguise and was recognised at Varennes because a postmaster compared his face to the portrait printed on a fifty-livre note. His own currency betrayed him. It is the perfect emblem of a reign in which Louis XVI was undone, again and again, not by cruelty or tyranny but by an inability to commit to any course before events chose one for him.
The Third Son, and a Marriage That Would Not Begin
Louis-Auguste de France was born at Versailles on 23 August 1754, the dauphin's third son and nobody's expected king. His elder brother Louis-Joseph died in 1761, making him heir; his father died in 1765, and he became dauphin at eleven. He was a capable student, strong in mathematics, history and languages, and he took up locksmithing, a hobby then regarded as a suitably useful occupation for a boy. His tutor, the Duke de La Vauguyon, drilled him in religion and morality and taught him that timidity was a virtue and that a prince should keep his opinions to himself. Historians have traced his later paralysis directly to that instruction.
On 16 May 1770 he married the fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette. For seven years the marriage went unconsummated, a failure conducted in front of the entire court and, eventually, the entire country. He was not impotent; the likeliest explanation is psychological, a fear of being managed as his grandfather had been. Her brother Joseph II came to Versailles in 1777 to investigate and produced the most quoted verdict ever passed on Louis: rather weak, he wrote, but no imbecile, with something apathetic in both his body and his mind. After Joseph's intervention a daughter arrived in 1778.
The portrait that survives is unflattering and consistent. Louis was withdrawn, solitary and charmless, plump, slow-moving and short-sighted, and he ate enormously. His private journals read like ledgers; one historian observed that the diary never betrays the slightest hint of emotion, suggesting a soul without strong feelings and a mind sluggish for lack of exercise.
King at Nineteen
Louis XV died on 10 May 1774 and his nineteen-year-old grandson inherited a colossal debt and a society already straining. The coronation of June 1775 was preceded by the Flour War, bread riots that read in hindsight as a rehearsal. He wanted, badly, to be liked. He restored the powers of the parlements that his grandfather's chancellor Maupeou had stripped away, on the principle, as he put it, that public opinion is never wrong. It was a generous instinct and a catastrophic decision: he handed back to the law courts precisely the veto they would use to block every attempt at fiscal reform for the next fifteen years.
There were genuinely enlightened acts. The Edict of Versailles in 1787 extended a measure of religious toleration to non-Catholics, at real political cost to a monarch whose legitimacy was explicitly Catholic.
The American War and the Bill
In March 1778, urged on by advisers who romanticised the American cause and by a court still humiliated by the Seven Years' War, Louis declared war on Britain. Militarily it worked; France helped birth the United States and embarrassed London. Financially it was ruinous, adding enormously to a debt the crown had no mechanism to service. France had funded a republican revolution abroad and would shortly be unable to pay for it at home.
The moral capital drained too. The Diamond Necklace Affair of 1786, in which Marie Antoinette was in fact innocent, convinced the public otherwise; Louis defended her consistently and damaged his own credibility doing it. By the late 1780s the crisis could no longer be denied. The Assembly of Notables convened in 1787 refused to help, and the Revolt of the Notables in 1788 fused the financial emergency with open social unrest.
1789
The Estates-General met in 1789 and immediately deadlocked over voting procedure, the Third Estate refusing an arrangement that would let the other two orders outvote it. At the critical moment Louis was absent in every sense, absorbed in the death of his seven-year-old son Louis-Joseph on 4 June. In that vacuum the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and pronounced existing taxes illegal.
What followed was the characteristic pattern of his reign: resist, then concede too late for the concession to earn any credit. Assembly members swore the Tennis Court Oath, refusing to disperse until France had a constitution. Louis massed 30,000 soldiers near Paris and dismissed his popular finance minister Jacques Necker on 11 July. Three days later, on 14 July, Parisians stormed the Bastille. He immediately reinstated Necker and appeared on a balcony to signal his conversion to the revolution. His brother Artois left the country on 16 July.
In October, when he balked at the August Decrees abolishing feudalism and at the Declaration of the Rights of Man, thousands of Parisian market women and National Guardsmen marched on Versailles and brought the royal family back to the Tuileries, where they lived as prisoners in all but name.
Varennes and After
The flight of June 1791 destroyed what remained. Recognised and escorted back, Louis left behind a manifesto denouncing the revolution's aims, which proved beyond argument that his public acceptance had been a performance. Republicanism, until then a fringe position, became mainstream. In September 1791 he accepted the constitution and became King of the French rather than King of France and Navarre, while privately seeking rescue from his emigre brothers and from Marie Antoinette's brother, Emperor Leopold II.
France declared war on Austria and Prussia in April 1792. On 10 August crowds stormed the Tuileries; Louis was arrested three days later and imprisoned in the Temple. Then came the armoire de fer, an iron chest concealed in a palace wall containing his private correspondence, which documented his dealings with foreign powers. On 21 September 1792 France was declared a republic and the king became Citizen Louis Capet. He was tried for high treason in December and condemned in January 1793, the sentence carried by a margin of a single vote.
Why Louis Is Called a Genius
He was not one, and pretending otherwise would be an insult to the evidence. This entry exists because history filed him among the consequential, not among the brilliant, and the honest task is to say what he actually possessed.
He had real capacities. He was academically strong in mathematics, history and languages, and he was a genuinely skilled locksmith, which in an age of mechanical fascination was serious craft rather than eccentricity. He read widely and had an authentic interest in geography and exploration. In 1787 he extended religious toleration to French Protestants at a moment when doing so served no political advantage, which suggests convictions rather than mere drift. There is a case, made by sympathetic historians, that he was a decent man with reformist instincts trapped in a structure that could not be reformed from within.
But the contemporary verdicts are damning and they agree with each other. Joseph II found him apathetic in body and mind. His own diaries record the hunt and the weather and not a flicker of interior life. The single quality a monarch in a collapsing system most needed, the capacity to choose a course and hold it, was the one he conspicuously lacked, and his education had specifically trained it out of him. Every disaster of his reign, Necker's dismissal, the flight to Varennes, the secret letters, follows the same shape: a decision taken too slowly, reversed too quickly, and discovered too late. If there is genius anywhere near Louis XVI, it belongs to the revolution that removed him.
Legacy
On 21 January 1793 he mounted the scaffold at the Place de la Revolution before twenty thousand people and tried to speak. "I die innocent of all crimes of which I have been charged," he said; he asked pardon for those who had brought about his death and prayed that royal blood might never again be required of France. A drum roll cut off the rest. He was thirty-eight, the only King of France ever executed, and his death ended a thousand years of uninterrupted monarchy. His actual legacy is paradoxical and enormous: the well-meaning, indecisive man who bankrupted his kingdom helping create the first modern republic abroad, and whose failure created the second one at home.
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