The Last Days of King Louis XVI and the French Revolution

The sun had barely risen over Paris on August 10, 1792, when the bells of revolution tolled once again. The Tuileries Palace, once a regal symbol of monarchical presence, was transformed into a battleground. Armed revolutionaries from the National Guard and radical fédérés stormed the palace, driven by rumors of betrayal, foreign plots, and the king's perceived duplicity.

Here, Preston Knowles looks at the final days of King Louis XVI of France during the French Revolution.

A portrait of King Louis XVI by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis.

Louis XVI, clad in plain attire, made a fateful decision: rather than resist the mob, he sought refuge with the Legislative Assembly. "I come to place myself under the protection of your laws," he declared, standing before a shocked assembly with Queen Marie Antoinette and their children in tow. But the gesture was too little, too late. The crowd's rage would not be placated. That same day, the monarchy was effectively suspended, and Louis and his family were taken into custody. Their new home? The ancient medieval fortress known as the temple, originally built by the Knights Templar. now repurposed as a prison for the king. The revolutionary press on September 21st, 1792 declared "The monarchy is abolished", The first French Republic had been declared.

By late 1792, the Temple had become the final royal residence, a prison stripped of comfort and ceremony. Surveillance was constant, and guards recorded even the most mundane details of the royal family's life. The man who once ruled by divine right now found himself counting his days, not in royal chambers but in cold stone walls lit by a single lamp.

The Temple prison was not built for royalty. Its stone walls were cold, its corridors narrow, and its air thick with the silence of humiliation. Here, the last King of France would live not as Louis XVI, but as Louis Capet, a dethroned monarch turned prisoner of the people he once served.

The royal family: Louis, Marie Antoinette, their children Louis-Charles and Marie-Thérèse, and the king's sister Madame Élisabeth were initially lodged together in cramped quarters. The first few weeks held onto a faint echo of domestic life. They dined together, read, prayed, and even tried to maintain lessons for the young dauphin. But as revolutionary suspicion deepened, their freedoms shrank. "He bore the deprivation with gentleness," one guard reportedly wrote, "and never once did he rage or complain."

 

A King's Routine, Reduced

Louis rose early, often before dawn. He read religious texts and from the few history books permitted to him. When allowed, he took brief walks in the small enclosed courtyard, pacing in silence or whispering lessons to his son. The king had long valued knowledge and order and in prison, this became his anchor. He taught geography and Latin to the young Louis-Charles, while Marie Antoinette helped with arithmetic. They created makeshift lessons using scraps of paper and whispered exercises.

Breakfast was modest: coffee, milk, and bread. Dinners, while still multiple courses at first, slowly became more austere. Champagne was replaced with table wine. Meat became scarce. And the guard's initially deferential grew colder. Marie-Thérèse later recalled in her memoir: "We were watched night and day. Every word, every sigh was noted down."

Over time, the measures imposed became increasingly petty and cruel. Louis was denied razors, allegedly for fear of suicide or assassination attempts by others. His once-meticulous grooming gave way to a growing beard and unkempt hair, physical symbols of his eroding dignity.

The family's contact with the outside world was severed. Even embroidery, once permitted as a quiet pastime, was forbidden when officials feared they might stitch hidden messages. The king, who once addressed ministers and monarchs, now whispered bedtime stories to his son through a wooden wall.

One particularly painful moment came in December 1792, during his trial, when Louis was forcibly separated from his family. Marie-Thérèse turned 14 that month and instead of a celebration she received only a silent token: a calendar for 1793 from her father, smuggled in with trembling hands.

The longer Louis remained in the Temple, the more time seemed to lose its meaning. The world outside raged on.  Mobs, pamphlets, speeches in the National Convention  but inside, the days blurred into quiet suffering. The walls were thick, but not enough to keep out the muffled sound of distant chants: "La République ou la mort!"

Louis spent his time clinging to ritual and religion. When allowed, he heard Mass and prayed from the breviary. His confessor was not always permitted to visit, so he turned inward, journaling his thoughts and quietly preparing his soul. One jailer observed, "He read the Psalms more than anything. Often he would rest his hand on the page, eyes closed, lips moving." Despite the growing surveillance, he made an effort to be a father and teacher. He called the dauphin "my son" and tried to preserve the boy's innocence. But behind closed doors, even a father's strength began to crack. Marie Antoinette confided that Louis would sometimes sit in silence for hours, gazing at nothing.

By late November 1792, the question of the king's fate reached a boiling point. The monarchy had been abolished. Now, Louis wasn't just a prisoner. He was a defendant in the eyes of the Republic. The National Convention summoned him on December 11, 1792, to answer for a long list of charges: colluding with foreign enemies, conspiring against the liberty of the French people, and betraying the Constitution he had sworn to uphold.

In a chilling moment during the trial, a deputy asked Louis:

 "You knew of the massacres and the bloodshed. Why did you not denounce them?"

Louis, composed, replied:

 "I did not think it proper to interfere in the decisions of the Assembly."

Innocence

He maintained his innocence, calm, polite, and deliberate.  But the verdict was already sealed in the hearts of many. His fate became a moral test for the Revolution itself.

Back in the Temple, after each session, he returned not to applause or royal favor, but to a narrow cot in a room guarded by men with muskets. His son asked what it all meant. Louis simply said, "There are men who believe I have done wrong. I must answer them."

The verdict was delivered on January 20, 1793: Louis Capet was to be executed by guillotine the following morning. He received the news with remarkable calm. His only request? To see his family one last time. After hours of negotiation, the Convention relented.

That evening, the door to the king's chamber creaked open, and in stepped Marie Antoinette, Madame Élisabeth, Marie-Thérèse, and the young dauphin. The guards recorded the time: 8:15 p.m. What followed was nearly two hours of raw, unfiltered sorrow. A private agony unfolding in the dim light of a prison room.

Marie-Thérèse would later write: "My father took each of us in his arms… he held my brother a long time, pressing his face to the child's hair. He said little. He wept. We all did."

Louis tried to maintain composure, speaking softly to each of them. He encouraged Marie Antoinette to be strong, to protect the children. He kissed Élisabeth's hands and whispered prayers to her. To his daughter, he gave a few final words of love and courage  and to the dauphin, perhaps the most devastating of all, he gave instruction.

"Never seek revenge for my death, my son," he told the child. They talked quietly of faith, of forgiveness, of the life to come. He assured them he would die a Christian, faithful to the end. And then, the moment arrived. A knock on the door. Time was up.

The family clung to each other, unwilling to let go. Marie Antoinette, once queen of France, was described by one guard as "bent and pale, with no voice left to cry." The dauphin sobbed uncontrollably. Marie-Thérèse fainted. And Louis stood quietly, having already absorbed the pain of each goodbye.

A witness later wrote: "It was not the dignity of a king, but the strength of a father, that filled the room that night."

Never again

His family would never see him again.

It was still dark when the knock came. Louis Capet, once Louis XVI, rose from his prison bed for the last time. Paris was hushed, cloaked in winter's gray breath and revolutionary tension. Snow had fallen the night before. His valet, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, lit the fire and helped dress him. Louis wore a plain white vest, gray breeches, and a black coat. No finery, no royal insignia. The quiet was broken only by the murmur of prayers and the soft rustle of fabric. When offered a pair of scissors to trim his hair, he simply nodded. It would be easier for the blade.

He heard Mass in a whisper, assisted by Abbé Edgeworth, the Irish priest who had come to offer last rites. As he took communion, Louis bowed his head and whispered "May this sacrifice be pleasing to God". By 8 a.m., the sound of drums loudly filled the streets. Thousands of National Guards lined the path from the former Place Louis XV, now known as the Temple to the Place de la Révolution,  the square that now awaited his execution.

The ride in the carriage was long and silent. Soldiers flanked the wheels. The streets were packed with a hushed crowd. Louis, holding a prayer book, gazed steadily ahead. Some said he mouthed psalms. Others noticed that he appeared calm. "more like a man going to face judgment than to death," one witness remarked.

The carriage reached the scaffold. Louis stepped down without assistance. The crowd watched, frozen. The executioner moved to bind his hands. Louis recoiled slightly, then, after a brief struggle,  He relented and turned to the people calling out, with a strong voice:  "I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge. I forgive those who have caused my death and pray to God that the blood you are about to shed may never fall upon France!" The drums began to roll. He knelt, placing his neck in the guillotine. Abbé Edgeworth stood nearby and cried out: "Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven!"

The blade fell. A single thud. Then silence. Then a roar.

The executioner held the severed head aloft for the crowd to see. Some cheered. Others stood in stunned silence. Blood pooled on the planks. Spectators in the crowd raced forward and dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood to keep as souvenirs. The former king had become a symbol to some as a martyr and to others a tyrant but undeniably his death would shake Europe for centuries to come.

 

Echoes of the Guillotine

The execution of Louis XVI sent tremors through every royal court in Europe. Monarchs recoiled in horror; revolutionaries doubled down with fervor. In France, the king's death did not bring peace. It marked the beginning of something far bloodier: the Reign of Terror.

Yet in the quiet corners of history, beyond the proclamations and pamphlets, one truth endures: Louis was not just a monarch undone by revolution, but a man who met death with surprising grace. a father, a husband, a flawed human being who walked steadily to the scaffold and vanished into the turning tide of a new age.

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Why was the French Monarchy so Overwhelmed by the French Revolution in 1789?

The French Revolution made huge impacts around the world, especially with it being not many years after the American Revolution. Here, Bilal Junejo considers how the long-standing French monarchy was deposed during the 1789 French Revolution.

1777 portrait of King Louis XVI of France.

The revolution which broke out in 1789 was against what the annals of mankind have confirmed to be the surest instigator of all revolutionary sentiment — a decrepit, effete, and increasingly invidious regime. Unlike England’s Glorious Revolution a century earlier, the entire ambition of which had lain in the overthrow of a particular monarch (rather than the monarchy per se), the French Revolution did not commence as a revolt against Louis XVI personally, but against the whole polity over which he presided, and which had been established by his forebear, Louis XIV, in the seventeenth century — the ancien régime, the hallmarks of which included outdated agricultural methods, feudal traditions of land tenure, and uncontrolled inflation. The abolition of the monarchy — which was eventually decreed in September 1792, and confirmed in January 1793 with the execution of Louis XVI — was in no way the inspiration behind the insurrection in 1789, but merely the inevitable outcome of it — much as had been the case in the English Civil War, when the intransigence of Charles I, anticipating that of Louis XVI, had eventuated in the decapitation of that proud but not hypocritical Stuart in 1649. Another similarity was the fact that both of them had married foreign princesses. Charles was the ominously faithful husband of France’s Henrietta Maria, an early Bourbon (as well as a Catholic) whose influence upon him endeared neither of them to a Protestant parliament. The pride of a Stuart, coupled with the advice of a Bourbon, did not make for the alleviation of domestic rancour, and proved not surprisingly to be Charles’s undoing. In a similar fashion, Louis XVI, who had been married to the equally perverse Marie Antoinette of Austria, was also in thrall to the peremptory politics of his unpopular wife. Every monarch is a human being, and all human beings have their faults. It was the fault of both Charles and Louis that they were endowed with absolute authority at what, in retrospect, was a critical time for their respective states, and that they exercised that authority under the not inconsiderable influence of the least desirable of advisors — their foreign spouses, who had by definition almost nothing to lose in the event of an upheaval. Myopic monarchs acting at the behest of individuals with no stake in the fate of the nation cannot but court disaster, and nothing settled Louis’s fate more decisively than his choice to side with the very status quo which was responsible for having created the problems that ushered in the Revolution.

Bankruptcy

In 1789, France was upon the verge of bankruptcy. A century of wars waged without her borders had accumulated vast debts without corresponding victories with which to justify them. The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) had all humbled Bourbon pretensions — and bestowed a raft of burdens upon their treasury into the bargain, in the discharge of which the wealthiest classes of French society, the nobility and the clergy, were not obliged to assist. In return for this magnificent concession, these classes refrained from interfering in the monarch’s policies. France’s frivolous equivalent of the British Parliament, the Estates-General (which had not been summoned by the monarch since 1614), was dominated by these two Estates, to the detriment of the third — the bourgeoisie, which, along with the peasantry, had to fulfil all the fiscal demands of the state. The class which provided the money required for the execution of state policies had no say in the formulation of those policies, and one of the reasons for never summoning the Estates-General was to ensure that so sorry a state of affairs should continue without hindrance. But this was a century of the Enlightenment, some of whose greatest luminaries — Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Montesquieu — were French. Their increasingly popular writings helped to ensure that royal absolutism would no longer be accorded medieval deference. Worse still, French arms had only recently crowned with victory the struggle of George Washington against the perverse autocracy of George III and his ministers; and French soldiers returning across the Atlantic were imbued with the hope of rejuvenating their languishing country after the American fashion. It was not so much that Louis would not compromise with the Third Estate, as that his wife and the other two Estates would not allow him to even think of doing so.

Reforms

But necessity is the mother not only of invention, but also aberration. Ambitious financial reforms devised by the likes of Calonne, Necker and Turgot in 1787 and 1788 were at the court’s disposal. All that remained to be mustered was the courage to execute them, and the first step towards achieving that was the summoning of the Estates-General. This, the King eventually did in May 1789, his decision having been endorsed by the clergy and the nobility, who believed that they would be able to exact budgetary obedience from the commoners; but for the first time, the Third Estate’s opponents received more than they had bargained for. The commoners, elated by the unexpected reappearance of a crucial forum for concerted opposition, refused to grant money over the expenditure of which they would have no control, echoing the Short Parliament’s refusal to accede to Charles’s request for funds in 1629. But Charles, no less than his people, had yet to learn, in the succeeding decade, that kings could no longer govern on their own in an era of diminishing regard for the divine right of kings. Louis, on the other hand, was already aware of that unpalatable truth, at the behest of which he had summoned the Estates-General; and he could only yield when the Third Estate, led by the energetic Abbé Sieyès, declared itself a National Assembly and seceded from the Estates-General. Subsequent events like the fall of the Bastille and the advent of the Great Fear were significant not so much in themselves as in their indication of the King’s inability to prevent them. And when he could not resist even the form of revolution, there was no way in which he could deny the substance thereof. By August, feudalism had been formally abolished, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was promulgated to circumscribe the more self-serving aspects of royal policy. Inflation, however, remained an incubus; and when the persistently rising cost of bread refused to evince any sign of coming down, ensuing demonstrations in Paris culminated in the famous “Bread March of the Women” to Versailles in October to demand — most successfully, it should be noted — the royal family’s return to Paris. The young Assembly followed them soon after, and thenceforth Parisian control of the Revolution was never seriously contested.

The end

The inability of King Louis XVI to stave off the radical and speedy overhaul of the status quo within a matter of months was indicative of the unprecedented extent to which the monarchy, as the direct result of its own insolvency, had been overwhelmed by the people. As the next eighteen months were devoted to long constitutional debates and internal reform (principally through the promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, and the sale of royal and ecclesiastical lands to small shareholders for fiscal purposes), the only brake on the speed of the overhaul was the presence not of the King, but of the moderate constitutionalist, Mirabeau, whose death in April 1791 widened the breach between the Assembly and the court, and precipitated the Flight to Varennes but a few months later. The Flight signaled the King’s acceptance of his inability to reverse the tide, to undo anything that had been accomplished in the last two years. The monarchy had been fatally undermined — or, in other words, completely overwhelmed.

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Bibliography

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Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics (3rd edition, 2009).

Palmer, A. (1964) A Dictionary of Modern History 1789-1945. Penguin Reference Books.