Marguerite, after the Commissioners of the Municipality, the Security Department and the Criminal Court had drawn up the minutes. His son, the former Dauphin, in an access of childish simplicity, which attracted much sympathy, had in his last conversation with his father urgently begged to be allowed to go with him to the scaffold to ask the people to pardon him.
Description After voting unanimously to find the King guilty, the deputies held a separate vote on his punishment. By a single vote, Louis was sentenced to death, "within twenty—four hours. For the first time in a thousand years, the French people were not ruled by a monarch. Date January 21, While Louis XVI wanted to be a good king and help his subjects, he faced enormous debt and rising resentment towards a despotic monarchy.
His failure to successfully address serious fiscal problems would dog him for most of his reign. Louis lacked sufficient strength of character and decisiveness to combat the influence of court factions or give support to reformers in their efforts to improve France's government. By the mids the country was near bankruptcy, which forced the king to support radical fiscal reforms not favorable with the nobles or the people. When the pressure mounted, Louis XVI reverted to his earlier teaching of being austere and uncommunicative, posing no solution to the problem and not responding to others who offered help.
By , the situation was deteriorating rapidly. In May , Louis XVI convened the Estates General to address the fiscal crisis, an advisory assembly of different estates or socio-economic classes the clergy, the nobility and the commoners.
The meeting did not go well. By June, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, aligned with the bourgeoisie and set out to develop a constitution. Initially, Louis XVI resisted, declared the Assembly null and void and called out the army to restore order. Public dissension grew, and a National Guard formed to resist the King's actions. By July , he was forced to acknowledge the National Assembly's authority. On July 14, riots broke out in Paris and crowds stormed the Bastille prison in a show of defiance toward the King.
The day is now commemorated in France as a national holiday and the start of the French Revolution. For a time, it seemed that Louis XVI could mollify the masses by saying that he would acquiesce to their demands. However, he accepted bad advice from the nobility's hard-line conservatives and his wife, Marie Antoinette.
The crowd began to sing la Marseillaise , the song the soldiers of the Federated National Guard had brought with them to Paris the previous year. Some of those gathered pressed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of the king, which they kept as grisly souvenirs.
All efforts were made to ensure that there would be nothing left of the king. How had the French Revolution arrived at this moment? How did it become possible for the French to try and then to execute their beloved father, their king? After all, when the Revolution began just a few years before in , no one could imagine a France without the king.
The deputies of the National Assembly had advocated a constitutional monarchy, which they instituted in Critiques of Louis under the Old Regime and in the early years of the Revolution tended to portray Louis as a good king poorly advised. Events in the early years of the Revolution aligned with this view. Historians generally agree that Louis XVI was reform-minded and earnestly wanted the best for his people. But the king had grown dissatisfied with the constraints of Constitutional Monarchy.
In June , he tried to escape Paris and flee to the Austrian Netherlands, where he could mount a resistance to the Revolution. Louis and his family very nearly made it, but they were recognized and arrested in the town of Varennes and escorted back to Paris by six thousand national guardsmen.
As they made their way back to Paris, entire villages of armed men and women and children came out to meet the procession, to cheer the nation and harangue the king.
Colorized version of Jean-Louis Prieur's drawing depicting the return of the royal family from Varennes to Paris, following their attempt to flee to the Austrian Netherlands in June The flight to Varennes marked a turning point. The king had tried to abandon his people. Worse yet, Louis had left behind a letter in which he renounced the Revolution and claimed that all of his previous support for revolutionary legislation had been made under duress.
Carl Dean Switzer, the actor who as a child played Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedy film series, dies at age 31 in a fight, allegedly about money, in a Mission Hills, California, home. Alfalfa, the freckle-faced boy with a warbling singing voice and a cowlick protruding from the In the conclusion to one of the most spectacular trials in U.
He was convicted of having perjured himself in regards to testimony about his alleged involvement in a Soviet spy ring before and during Instead, Ethan, the Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Sign Up.
0コメント