The Regicide of Louis XVI

The Tyrannicide of Louis XVI

Jay Eisenberg

12/11/2007

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The Tyrannicide of Louis XVI

The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified…. Given the living man, there will be found clothes for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that it is both clothes and man! Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do—why then, there must befound a man to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie!

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution1

It was necessary to expose to the light that ridiculous mystery which barbaric humanity had for so long turned into a religion, the mystery of royal incarnation, that bizarre fiction which imagines that the wisdom of a great people is concentrated in an imbecile. Royalty had to be dragged into the daylight, exposed before and behind, opened up, so that the inside of this worm-eaten idol could be clearly seen, full of insects and worms, giving the lie to its beautiful gilded head.

Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution2

It was Louis XVI’s bad fortune that from the start he was

not matched to the needs of the French monarchy, and in his

twilight, the French monarchy wasn’t matched to the needs of

France. By all accounts, he was a diffident and ineffectual

1 Quoted in Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum 1972), vii.2 Quoted in François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, Antonia Nevill, trans., (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992), 122.

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monarch, ill-suited to the role, happiest when alone in his

locksmithing foundry, out on the hunt or even chasing stray

cats in the attics of Versailles. Frustrating his ministers,

he was typically unresponsive and inscrutable in situations

demanding leadership or decisiveness. When moved to a

decision, he would follow it with vacillation and

uncertainty. His lack of confidence perhaps stemmed from the

disregard he suffered from both his father, the dauphin, and

his predecessor, Louis XV, both of whom felt the boy clumsy

and graceless, particularly compared to his outgoing and

athletic younger brothers. With the untimely death of his

father, this family outcast became the new dauphin, thrust

into immediate dependence on tutors who fed him a strict

diet of patriarchal traditionalism and Catholic dogma. He

apparently swallowed it whole. His notebooks betray not the

slightest curiosity or critical imagination, and diaries

written during his reign, replete with minutiae about his

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hunting expeditions, provide no record of his inner thoughts

on France’s condition or his hopes for its people.3

Inapposite as he was to respond effectively to the

crisis of the ancien régime, let alone lead a constitutional

monarchy, this stolid and banal man nonetheless retained the

loyalty and good will of his ministers, the revolutionary

leadership, and France as a whole through 1791. Jacques

Necker, Louis’s finance minister on the eve of the

Revolution, and a man who had every reason to be frustrated

by him, would nonetheless say:

I have never seen, I have never discovered in this monarch, so cruelly treated, a single spontaneous movement, a single thought deriving from him alone without outside influence, springing immediately from his soul, which would not manifest to careful observers his desire for good, his compassion for the people and his naturally soft and moderate character.4

Lafayette, Mirabeau and other early leaders of the

Revolution, eager to establish the stability of a

3 François Furet, “Louis XVI,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1989), 236-7. See also Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2003), 29-30.4 Quoted in David Jordan, The King’s Trial (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1979), 84.

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constitutional monarchy, sought to present Louis as a

beneficent and devoted leader of his people. The ancient

notion that the king was the nation’s sacred patriarch,

though diminished by crisis, remained powerful. Following

Louis’s speech to the National Assembly in February 1790,

the citizens of the western village of Ernée wrote of “this

happy and blessed day, forever memorable, when the best of

kings, the restorer of French liberty, the gentle father of

the nation, honored our Assembly with his presence and gave

his approval to all its labors.” Similarly, the leaders of

Troyes depicted themselves as the “children of a common

father, listen[ing] to the king’s words and unit[ing] behind

him as he desires.”5 When Louis was arrested in Varennes on

June 21, 1791, his captors treated him with deference and

respect, and, explaining why they were not going to allow

him to continue his journey, spoke of “their tender but

anxious feelings, as members of a great family who had just

found their father, but who now feared they might lose him

again,” and continued with the assurance that 5 Quoted in Timothy Tackett, op. cit., 183.

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he was adored by his people, that the strength of his thronewas in everyone’s heart and his name on everyone’s lips; butthat his residence was in Paris, and that even those living in the provinces eagerly and anxiously called him to return there.6

With encouragement from the Assembly’s leadership, desperate

to explain why the king had left his own people, the common

assumption immediately after the news of his arrest in

Varennes was that he must have been abducted. Even the

Jacobins of Arras, the city which elected Robespierre as its

deputy, lamented that “they have taken him away from us,

this king who seemed only to live for his people… and whose

patriotic actions were imbued with such candor and truth.”7

Such was the power of the myth of the patriarchal Bourbon

monarchy that even after two years of the Revolution,

letters to the National Assembly would express fear that

France would be “left an orphan” by Louis’s supposed

kidnappers.

This national credulity did not survive very long.

Despite the Assembly’s efforts at suppression, details about

6 Quoted in ibid., 22.7 Quoted in ibid., 185.

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Louis’s flight and his letter repudiating the Revolution

were in wide circulation within weeks, both in Paris and the

provinces. Timothy Tackett suggests that “a veritable crisis

of conscience began to sweep across France” as its populace

assessed the king and the role of the monarchy.8 Yet, within

four months, despite this national anxiety and in full

knowledge of Louis’s effort to join a royalist French army

just across the border from where his Austrian in-laws were

already mobilized, the Constituent Assembly nonetheless

persisted in installing Louis as king in a constitutional

monarchy, so unthinkable was it among the Assembly’s leaders

that France could achieve political stability without the

monarch serving as executive. The recalcitrant king signed

the Constitution of 1791, and within a year, this

predictably disastrous effort came to an end. The monarchy

was toppled by the journée of August 10, and Louis was soon

after imprisoned as a treasonous despot. On January 21,

1793, he would be executed in a public spectacle before tens

of thousands of cheering Parisians in the Place de la 8 Tackett, op. cit., 186.

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Révolution. Carlyle vividly describes the moments after the

guillotine fell:

Executioner Samson shows the Head: fierce shout of Vive la République rises, and swells; caps raised on bayonets, hats waving: students of the College of Four Nations take it up, on the far Quais; fling it over Paris. D’Orléans drives off in his cabriolet; the Townhall Councillors rub their hands, saying, "It is done, It is done." There is dipping of handkerchiefs, of pike-points in the blood. Headsman Samson,though he afterwards denied it, sells locks of the hair: fractions of the puce coat are long after worn in rings. — And so, in some half-hour it is done; and the multitude has all departed. Pastrycooks, coffee-sellers, milkmen sing out their trivial quotidian cries: the world wags on, as if thiswere a common day. In the coffeehouses that evening, says Prudhomme, Patriot shook hands with Patriot in a more cordial manner than usual. Not till some days after, according to Mercier, did public men see what a grave thing it was.9

In a mere eighteen months, Louis’s reputation took a lethal

journey from beloved pére de son peuple to despised and

vilified tyrant whose blood became a souvenir. He was

perhaps the only Frenchman who still believed that he was

king by the grace of God and that he was the vessel of

divine Providence.

Though his flaws were many, Louis was no more a tyrant

than he was a sacred patriarch, and his transition from one

9 Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, in Selected Writings, Alan Shelston, ed.(Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1971), 147.

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to the other in the public consciousness during 1792, a

transition that culminated in regicide, leads one to ask how

and why this occurred. It is not an inconsequential

question, since France as a whole, in what has occasionally

been called the Second Revolution, moved in the same period

from a failed effort at constitutional monarchy to the

attempt to establish a republic, which itself

catastrophically devolved into state terror. One might think

that focusing on the dénouement of Louis’s reign would lend

some insight into this critical period of the Revolution as

a whole. Nonetheless, though Louis’s personal drama

parallels France’s trajectory and was a centerpiece of

nineteenth century historical narratives—as Michelet put it,

“The French Revolution is the judgment of kings”10—the

importance of his trial and execution was diminished by the

so-called “social interpretation” advanced mainly by

twentieth century French neo-Marxists. In the historiography

starting with Albert Mathiez, and continuing through to

10 Quoted in Mona Ozouf, “The King’s Trial,” in A Critical Dictionary, op. cit., 96.

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Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, the run-up to the king’s

execution was considered entirely within the context of the

competition between the Girondins and the Montagnards, and

was, in any case, a secondary event compared to the struggle

for control between the sans-culottes and the bourgeoisie.

The king’s execution was epiphenomenal to the social and

political struggles of rival classes.11

As the social interpretation has lost ground to the

revisionists led by François Furet, the fate of Louis the

Last has gained renewed interest and attention. David Jordan

and Timothy Tackett have written excellent narratives of the

period between the flight to Varennes and Louis’s trial, but

they do not stray far beyond elucidation of the events.

However, Lynn Hunt’s The Family Romance of the French Revolution has

a much wider scope and interpretative ambition; indeed, her

approach deliberately tries to draw out the wider cultural

implications of Louis’s execution which she restores to its

11 In their general histories, few pages were devoted to the king’s trial and execution. See Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793, Elizabeth Evanson, trans. (Columbia University Press: New York, 1962), 267-73; and Albert Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1799, AlanForrest and Colin Jones, trans. (Vintage Books: New York, 1975), 282-6.

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place as “the most important political act of the

Revolution” as well as “the central drama of the

revolutionary family romance.”12 Hunt explains that she

borrows the term “family romance” from Freud, who used it to

refer to the child’s fantasy of escaping from parents of

whom he has a low opinion, and replacing them with others of

a higher social standing. While for Freud, the family

romance was a way for the individual psyche to imagine one’s

place in the wider social order, Hunt seeks to apply it as

the term of art for the “collective, unconscious images of

the familial order that underlie revolutionary politics.”13

In selecting the politics of the French Revolution, Hunt is

clearly plowing into very fertile ground, what with the

self-defined paternalism of the monarchy and the elevating

of fraternité by the revolutionaries to be on a par with liberté

and egalité. Hunt avoids the typical methodological conceits

that make psychohistory so annoying. By insisting that she

does not claim that the family romance paradigm has wider 12 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1992), 2.13 Ibid., xiii.

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application, or that it in any way replaces more traditional

methods of historical explanation, there is no suggestion of

predeterminism or a deeper level of causality; indeed, she

seems to steer clear of any direct claims of causality.

Despite the modest claims for her approach, Hunt

brilliantly shows through myriad sources how French culture

prepared itself for the monarchy’s downfall. I have already

provided several citations in which Louis was referred to in

affectionate paternal terms by his subjects, but Hunt seeks

out the cultural underpinnings and reflections of this

affection as the century played out. Her essay, “The Rise

and Fall of the Good Father,” examines popular novels and

plays, and traces an anti-patriarchal trajectory from the

decline of the oppressive father through the brief

appearance of benevolent fathers at mid-century, most

prominently in novels by Diderot and Rousseau, to the near-

disappearance of fathers altogether: “Whatever the father’s

status in any particular novel, in almost all cases fathers

were ambivalent and ambiguous figures, not unlike Louis XVI

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himself on the eve of 1789.”14 Hunt claims that the absence

of fathers in the worlds of fiction and fantasy paralleled

and presaged the decline and fall of the monarchy, as

political actors became comfortable with the diminished

presence of a national father and replaced his authority

with the notion of a sovereign general will generated by a

fraternity of equal citizens. However, in order for the

“band of brothers” to achieve dominance, the father had to

be eliminated, and to justify the slaying, the “king had to

be transformed into a kind of sacred monster, whose

expulsion will return the community to itself.”15 Thus the

regicide became a ritual sacrifice traceable to the

archetype described by Freud in Totem and Taboo. The guilt

following this act and the on-going suspicion and anxiety

attached to anyone who would seek to replace the father led

to a period of instability as Mirabeau, LaFayette and even

Danton, Marat and Robespierre “passed from the scene without

establishing an enduring cult of their own person.”16 It was14 Ibid., 23.15 Ibid., 11.16 Ibid., 71.

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only with the ascendance of Bonaparte that France was able

to “reconsecrate paternal powers” and rehabilitate the

family as the model structure of political authority.

Hunt’s evidence and arguments are often subtle and

fascinating, and, as noted, she disarms the critic by

steering clear of causal models from the Freudian

theoretical armament. But by applying these self-imposed

limitations, she vitiates the interest that her analysis

might otherwise generate, and deprives herself of the

ability to make explanatory claims that are substantially

different from what might be produced by conventional

historical methodologies. Despite references to a

“collective unconscious,” she merely demonstrates parallels

between the forms of cultural production and the ideas and

events that shaped French politics, all of which are out in

the open without much deconstruction. The Bourbon monarchy

hardly attempted to hide its paternalistic intent; it was

very much at the level of consciousness, for both the king

and his subjects. Moreover, even as she soft-peddles the

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notion of a “collective unconscious,” she nonetheless raises

issues about causality that are difficult to grasp: who

precisely among the French people shared in this “collective

unconscious,” and to what extent is it really useful in

illuminating particular events like a regicide, as opposed

to exile, imprisonment or simple removal from office, any

one of which might have led the Revolution in a different

direction.

While Hunt eschews any claims of determinism, the very

nature of her approach tends to dismiss the role of the

accidental and the contingent. How might the Revolution have

developed had Louis made it across the French border to take

refuge with the Austrian army? Tackett points out that

during the two days when it was assumed that Louis had left

and war was imminent, there was “an extraordinary surge of

unity in the Assembly, in Paris and throughout the nation”17

which might well have led to the formation of a republic in

which there was less rancor and division, and perhaps less

subsequent terror. Alternatively, what if Louis had decided 17 Tackett, op. cit., 219.

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to be a willing participant in a new constitutional

monarchy? Indeed, in light of Hunt’s own evidence of the

attenuated power of the patriarchal model of kingship (and

of the family itself), such a role for Louis might have

suited the period quite well, thus forestalling the ritual

slaying of the father by the fraternity of his sons.18

France might then have evolved toward the British model that

the early revolutionaries had so ardently desired. Indeed,

the very urgency of that desire does not square well with

Hunt’s argument. While the role of the father may have

declined to the vanishing point in novels and plays, the

French people continued to view Louis in paternal terms

right up to the flight to Varennes and immediately after,

and the leaders of the Assembly also continued to hold that

18 It might be noted that Hunt’s notion of a “ritual” sacrifice or slaying was, in fact, a trial, however makeshift it might have been. In Political Justice, Otto Kirchheimer quotes Tocqueville on the ritual of a trial in maintaining the appearance of justice: “It is a strange thing what authority the opinion of mankind generally grants to the intervention of courts. It clings even to the mere appearance of justicelong after the substance has evaporated; it lends bodily form to the shadow of the law.” Quoted in Kirchheimer, Political Justice, (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1961), 3.

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view in conjunction with their need for the monarchy to

assume the executive power in the new constitution. Even

after it was obvious that Louis wanted no part of a

government on their terms, the Assembly’s leaders persisted

in including him in the Constitution of 1791. Hunt, in the

end, fails to explain how the weakened and reluctant king,

the king who was stilled beloved up to mid-1791, would

suddenly became the “sacred monster” that was sent to the

scaffold.

I would like to offer an alternative explanation for

the intense rage that consumed France in the eighteen months

between Varennes and Louis’s execution. I would argue that

this rage derives from the intellectual climate created by

Rousseau’s attack on social artifice and the suppression of

the individual’s integrity. Whereas Hunt looks to Rousseau’s

La Nouvelle Hèloïse as a turning point in the image of the role

of the father, I would argue the more relevant texts are his

two Discourses for their attack on the social order’s

corruptive warping of moral character. In the Discourses,

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Rousseau threw a pair of bombs into the Enlightenment’s

confidence in human progress based on reason. He argued that

civilization was fraught with a paradox, namely that

progress in the arts and sciences had created a correlative

decline in human happiness because it had created a

disharmonious social environment in which individuals are

driven by artifice, conflict and oppression. Rousseau’s

argument was a devastating attack on ancien régime hypocrisy

and complacency, and his impact was enormous, not only among

his contemporaries, but most particularly on the leaders of

the Revolution. Rousseau did not just criticize the politics

of the ancien régime, but, more broadly, he attacked its

morality, and did so from standpoint of advocating personal

authenticity. As such, he anticipated and influenced the

developing romantic yearning for personal wholeness and

harmony. Carol Blum has demonstrated that Rousseau’s ethical

vocabulary permeated, indeed became, “the language of

politics in the French Revolution,” as virtue was defined as

an undivided, unconflicted soul in which acting according to

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duty is natural.19 Ruth Grant has elaborated on this theme,

arguing that one can see:

both the citizen and the natural man as a fulfillment of a Rousseauian ideal if that ideal is defined in terms of integrity. Integrity includes morality and wholeness or unity, and opposes corruption and conflict or alienation. The citizen is a man of integrity because he combines unity and moral virtue.20

Judith Shklar also explores this theme, and notes that on

both the personal and political level, Rousseau was obsessed

with conspiracy, regarding it as the sine qua non enemy of the

kind of moral authenticity that he advocated.21

Rousseau’s impact was immense at every level of

literate French society. Joan McDonald refers to a “cult of

Rousseau” among the revolutionaries, who referred to him

with veneration regardless of whether they had actually read

him.22 Among the wider French public, Rousseau had also

achieved enormous popularity, not so much with his political

19 Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue, (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1986), 64-7.20 Ruth Grant, “Integrity and Politics: An Alternative Reading of Rousseau,” Political Theory, 22:3 (August, 1994), 415. See also Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity, (Atheneum: New York, 1972), section III.21 Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1969), 107.22 Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, (Athlone Press: London, 1965), 172-3.

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works as with the sentimental La Nouvelle Hèloïse, and his

quasi-fictional treatise on education, Émile. Hèloïse, in

particular, had a vast impact with its lachrymose exchange

of letters between lovers, but Rousseau’s effort was to

write something more than a tear-jerker: he was a moralist,

and his message resonated:

In trying to make contact with Rousseau by letter, many of his readers were driven to confess to him just as they took him to be confessing to them [as he would later do in his Confessions].… They wanted to tell him how they identified with his characters, how they, too, had loved, sinned, suffered, and resolved to be virtuous again in the midst of a wicked an uncomprehending world. They knew his novel was true because they had read its message in their lives.23

For Rousseau, as for the romantics after him, there was a

deep yearning to get at the real essence of things behind

the perceptible surface; that which was cloaked and

concealed was suspect. As Carlyle put it, “semblance” could

not be divorced from “reality” without creating a lie, and

as Michelet recognized, the monarchy of the ancien régime had

become an immense construct built on such lies.

23 Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, (Random House: New York, 1984), 246.Emphasis added.

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In a climate revolting against artifice and demanding

sincerity, the flight to Varennes and its aftermath dashed

any hope of saving the French monarchy. Following Varennes,

there was an outpouring of engravings portraying Louis and

the royal family as pigs, not only to reduce them to vile

creatures, but to suggest their wanton omnivorousness (not

to mention Louis’s notorious corpulence):

Yet the more prevalent theme, deriving from Louis’s effort

at flight and presumed abandonment, is betrayal. Louis, who

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had never had a sobriquet like Le roi soleil or Louis le bon was now

Louis le faux or Louis le perjure (faithless), a traitor, a liar, a

deceiver. The Cordeliers Club paraphrased a passage from

Voltaire’s Brutus:

Remember the day, at the altar augustLouis swore he’d be forever faithful and just.But such is the bond between people and throneThat he sundered our oaths, in betraying his own.24

From here, it was a short leap to branding Louis a

conspirator, particularly as it became widely assumed that

he intended to join the émigré nobility in Koblenz. In the

Rousseauian moral climate emphasizing sincerity, honesty and

(what would come to be called) authenticity as among the

highest values, the breach was irreparable.

This was the moral universe that Louis XVI had come to

inhabit, and it was against this moral universe that he

committed his crimes. Louis was well aware that Rousseau had

changed everything. When imprisoned in the Temple, he

pointed to a bookcase filled with the works of Rousseau and

Voltaire, whose skepticism and anti-clericalism would also

24 Quoted in Tackett, op. cit. 103.

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have been anathema, and stated, “These two men have

destroyed France.”25 Yet the results of that destruction

were undoubtedly a mystery to him, particularly as they were

expressed in the charges he faced before the Convention. The

bill of particulars in the acte énonciatif claimed that Louis’s

acts of resistance against the Revolution showed a pattern

of betrayal and duplicity. The papers discovered in the

armoire de fer contained correspondence with counter-

revolutionaries and documented Louis’s rejection of the

king’s role in the Constitution—“It is clear to every person

who walks on two feet that in my heart I cannot approve the

Revolution and the absurd and detestable constitution that

makes me less than the king of Poland”26—and his desire to

restore the Church to its pre-revolutionary status. To

Robert Lindet and the committee that drew up the charges,

Louis’s crimes amounted to treason. As François Furet puts

it, “Treason became the new name for his duplicity.”27 As

25 Quoted in Jordan, op. cit., 85.26 Quoted in Jordan, op. cit., 73.27 François Furet, “Louis XVI,” in Critical Dictionary, 242.

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such, Louis’s crime was a moral crime, and his trial was to

be a political trial.

Unlike Charles I, who had refused to acknowledge the

authority of Cromwell’s court, Louis appeared before the

Convention to reply to the charges. The questions must have

baffled him as much as his answers frustrated and infuriated

his accusers:

Barère: Louis, the French people accuse you of having committed a multitude of crimes in order to establish yourtyranny by destroying its liberty. You suspended the meetings of the estates-General, dictated laws to the nation, and posted armed guards: What do you have to say?

Louis: There did not exist any laws concerning these things.…Barère: You spent public money for the purposes of

corruption.Louis: I had no greater pleasure than to give money to

those who needed it.…

Barère: On January 29, 1792, the Legislative Assembly issued a decree against factious priests, which you suspended.

Louis: The constitution left me the right of sanctioning decrees.28

The examples cited are typical: In each instance, Barère

accuses Louis of a political crime and insists on his having

counter-revolutionary intent—tyranny, corruption, supporting

28 Quoted in Jordan, op. cit, 109-10.

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refractory clergy—only to be confronted by Louis’s bland

reliance on the law.

In fact, Louis’s repeated references to the law were as

much a challenge to the Convention’s jurisdiction as Charles

I had posed with his defiance. Delegates to the Convention

were aware of the many legal irregularities in bringing

Louis to trial: How could the Convention both accuse,

prosecute and judge Louis? Should he not be charged as a

citizen and tried within the criminal courts? What are his

rights as a defendant? As serious as these issues were, the

most daunting was the legal inviolability that Louis had

been granted in the Constitution of 1791, which, having not

been replaced, remained the governing law: “The person of

the king is inviolable and sacred; his only title is ‘King

of the French’.” Louis had taken the oath “to be faithful to

the nation and the law… to maintain the constitution decreed

by the constituting national assembly… and to cause the laws

to be executed.” The constitution envisioned no

circumstances in which the king could be removed from

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office, and only three circumstances which could be adjudged

acts of abdication: failing to take the oath or retracting

it; putting himself at the head of an army and directing

forces against the nation, or not opposing such an

enterprise undertaken in his name; or emigrating from his

kingdom and not returning after being invited back by the

legislative body. Should the king abdicate under any of

these conditions, he would become a citizen and could only

be accused or brought to trial for acts “posterior to his

abdication.”29 The Committee on Legislation, which had been

asked to develop a procedure for a trial, struggled to find

a way to circumvent Louis’s inviolability; there were

delegates who believed the issue could not be breached,

leaving matters at an impasse. Indeed, the first speech

following the Committee’s report disputed its tortuous claim

that Louis could be tried. Charles-François-Gabriel

Morisson, a lawyer with closeted royalist sympathies (who

somehow survived the Terror and became a judge under

29 Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, Marian Rothstein, trans., (Columbia University Press: New York, 1992), 253-4.

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Bonaparte), insisted that the Convention had no legal right

to try Louis, and that, in any event, the Constitution

provided no punishment beyond the forfeit of the throne.

Nonetheless, Morisson suggested that Louis could be

considered sympathetic to France’s enemies during a time of

war and simply deported.

Following Morisson, a delegate who had not served in

either the Constituent or Legislative Assemblies mounted the

podium. Louis-Antoine-Léon Saint-Just would deliver his

maiden speech, demanding that Louis be found guilty and

executed; the speech was an electrifying statement of the

Jacobin position, and would ultimately propel Saint-Just to

the Committee of Public Safety as Robespierre’s closest

ally. Saint-Just opens with an acknowledgement of Louis’s

legal inviolability: “You seem to be looking for a law that

would allow us to punish the King; but in the form of government

we have just abandoned, if there ever was an inviolable man, he

was that man.” 30 What is of interest here, however, is that

30 All citations from Saint-Just’s speech of November 13, 1792 are in Walzer, op. cit., 120-27.

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Saint-Just transformed the terms of the debate from a strict

reading of French law to the more exalted plane of

Rousseauian morality and politics. His argument was that the

Constitution was irrelevant to considering Louis’s fate, and

that the Committee and Morisson “fell into forms without

principles”: The 1791 Constitution itself had no legal or

moral foundation because “nothing is legitimate that is not

sanctioned by ethics and nature.” Echoing the famous opening

sentence of the Social Contract, Saint-Just claims that to be

bound by the terms of the Constitution would be tantamount

to the “people, on the first day of its liberty, respecting

the memory of its chains!” The only valid social contract is

between citizens, not between citizens and their government,

which exists at the entire discretion of the sovereign

people. Any contract that would “bind the people and not the

king is of necessity void” because sovereignty is

inalienable and indivisible.31 Saint-Just observes the folly

31 Cf Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 1: “The first and most important deduction from the principles we have so far laid down is thatthe general will alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e., the common good: for if the clashing of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the

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of worrying about the obligations of the people to the king,

when the king has “himself betrayed the only obligation that

he had undertaken toward us, that of our protection.” Saint-

Just continues:

Is this not the last act of a tyrant, to demand to be judgedin conformity with the laws that he destroyed? And, Citizens, were we to grant him such a trial, that is, in conformity with the laws, that is, as a citizen, by that means he would try us, he would try the people itself. For myself, I can see no mean: this man must reign or die.

Louis is not to be judged as a citizen, but as a rebel, an

enemy. By virtue of his being king, he has usurped the

sovereignty of the people, and “with whatever illusions,

whatever conventions, monarchy cloaks itself, it remains an

eternal crime against which every man has the right to rise

and to arm himself… No man can reign innocently.”

agreement of these very interests made it possible. The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie; and, were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist. Itis solely on the basis of this common interest that every society shouldbe governed. I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be representedexcept by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will.”

29

Saint-Just never specifies Louis’s crimes, and

apparently feels no need to: monarchy itself is a crime. For

those who have not yet abandoned monarchy, it is because

“they fear an example of virtue which would be a bond of

public spirit and unity in the republic.” Against this

“virtue,” Saint-Just repeatedly poses the moral failings of

‘betrayal,’ ‘pernicious designs,’ ‘conspiracy’ and

‘perfidious schemes,’ all of which suggest the very

duplicity of social and political life that Rousseau

denounced. But beyond the invocation of this moral

vocabulary, Saint-Just, by repeatedly insisting that Louis

is a rebel and an enemy, seems to echo Rousseau’s discussion

of the state’s power over life and death in Book II of the

Social Contract:

Again, every malefactor, by attacking social rights, becomeson forfeit a rebel and a traitor to his country; by violating its laws he ceases to be a member of it; he even makes war upon it. In such a case the preservation of the State is inconsistent with his own, and one or the other must perish; in putting the guilty to death, we slay not so much the citizen as an enemy. The trial and the judgment arethe proofs that he has broken the social treaty, and is in consequence no longer a member of the State. Since, then, hehas recognized himself to be such by living there, he must be removed by exile as a violator of the compact, or by

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death as a public enemy; for such an enemy is not a moral person, but merely a man; and in such a case the right of war is to kill the vanquished.

While it is very questionable whether Rousseau would have

approved Saint-Just’s and Robespierre’s adoption of his

political and moral philosophy—note in this passage his

insistence on the very “trial and judgment” that the

Jacobins would have been pleased to avoid—his influence was

clearly profound, and provided the moral and political

underpinnings to accuse the hapless Louis of tyranny.

In her essay On Revolution, Hannah Arendt offers a

provocative argument. She reminds the reader that the Reign

of Terror had

followed upon the period when all political developments hadfallen under the influence of Louis XVI’s ill-fated cabals and intrigues. The violence of terror, at least to a certainextent, was the reaction to a series of broken oaths and unkept promises that were the perfect political equivalent of the customary intrigues of court society.32

Robespierre had characterized the ancien régime, and

subsequently the Revolution as well, as requiring that “one

hides, one dissimulates, one misleads, thus one

32 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, (Viking Press: New York, 1965), 100-01.

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conspires.”33 Arendt suggests as a general principle that

revolutionary violence from the lower social strata is the

likely result whenever the “intrigues and perfidies of high

society” spill over into the wider social and political

realm creating a culture of hypocrisy. She goes further and

notes the commonality of a conspiratorial political style

among those who “rose to statesmanship out of the

revolutionary tradition.” Whether this is generally true is

questionable, but it does go far to explain the sad fate of

Louis XVI, as well as those who took him down.

33 Quoted in Marie-Hèlene Huet, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution, (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1997), 168.

32

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