This Day in World History

January 21, 1793 – In a point of no return for the infant republic, King Louis XVI of France was executed through a recent invention, the guillotine—embraced by revolutionaries as a more humane means of death than previous methods.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood argued cogently for the transformative nature of that conflict and its implications for the world. Nevertheless, the prototype for later revolutions, especially those that convulsed the 20th century, was the one that occurred in France. Its pattern has become all too familiar: the overturning not only of a governing official but also a social order and religious institutions; powerful reactionary forces; and a dictatorship meant to quell rising disorder.

Over a year and a half before the execution, the King, increasingly chafing at his superfluous status as a constitutional monarch, had made an ill-advised secret dash with the royal family for the Austrian border before being apprehended. The move marked him as an enemy of the republic, and war with Austria—the native country of his queen, Marie Antoinette—led all outsiders such as himself to be marked for death. (It didn’t help that Marie had been charged with writing letters giving away to Austria the troop movements of the Revolutionary Army.)

Nevertheless, the decision of the Convention, the republic’s new governing body, represented a reversal of their own ideals. A number of the radical Jacobins—including the rising advocate for repressive tactics against enemies of the republic, Robespierre – had once bitterly denounced capital punishment and its multiple and capricious manifestations under the ancient regime. Now, they had called for its use to stamp out internal enemies.

The dethroned king had endured four separate votes before coming to this pass, with the Convention deciding whether he was guilty of treason; whether the sentence should be final, or ratified by the people; what the nature of the punishment should be; and whether the punishment should be delayed.

Thomas Paine, the British-born radical pamphleteer who had championed the American Revolution in Common Sense before advocating for the French against British conservative Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man, had argued unsuccessfully that Louis should be deported to the United States, where he would have the opportunity for “rehabilitation.”

Paine’s plea (through an interpreter) for mercy and friendship with the more moderate Girondin faction in the Convention later led to his own imprisonment by the revolutionaries.

Louis (now, shorn of his title, known as Louis Capet rather than Louis XVI) was allowed only 24 hours, not the three days he had requested, to say goodbye to his family and make peace with God. After a nearly two-hour final parting with his family, Louis huddled with his confessor, Henry Essex Edgeworth, a native of County Longford, Ireland better known as “L’Abbe Edgeworth de Firmont.”

In high school and college, while taking a couple of courses on world history that touched on the French Revolution, I was never required to read the history that was once the major analysis of the conflict: The French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle.

While understandable in certain ways, given a style that would now be considered florid and references that might seem obscure to modern readers (Carlyle’s book was published only some 60 years after the events), there are far worse histories of the period. My particular edition— from Heritage Press, with an introduction by Cecil Brown and illustrations by Bernard Lamotte—offers a particularly attractive way of perusing this demonstration of the definition of “classic” as a book that people no longer read.

At his best, Carlyle offers all the drama such a cataclysmic epoch deserves, as in his narration of Louis’ dreary processional to the scaffold, once the site of a statue to his predecessor, Louis XVI:

“At the Temple Gate were some faint cries, perhaps from voices of pitiful women: “Grace! Grace! Grace!” Through the rest of the streets there is silence as of the grave. No man not armed is allowed to be there; the armed, did any pity, dare not express it, each man overawed by his neighbors. All windows are down, none seen looking through them. All shops are shut. No wheel-carriage rolls, this morning, in these streets but one only. Eighty-thousand armed men stand ranked, like armed statues of men; cannons bristle, cannoneers with match burning, but no word or movement; it is as a city enchanted into silence and stone: one carriage with its escort, slowly rumbling, is the only sound. Louis reads, in his Book of Devotion, the Prayers of the Dying; clattering of this death-march falls sharp on the ear, in the great silence; but the thought would fain struggle heavenward, and forget the Earth.”

On the scaffold, Louis’ final words—his proclamation of innocence and forgiveness of his enemies—were quickly muffled by the drumroll of the guards. He was struck down by the guillotine at shortly after 10 am, 38 years old.

“At home this Killing of a King has divided all friends; and abroad it has united all enemies,” noted Carlyle. Shocked at the execution, England and Spain declared war. The resulting conflict would last, off and on, for more than 20 years, producing a strongman for the young republic, the Emperor Napoleon.

Moreover, it would lead to the concept of a nation in arms—not only mass conscription, but also the enlistment of the entire populace behind the war effort, in the form of sacrifices on the homefront that blurred the former distinction between soldier and civilian that underlay traditional concepts of the Christian “just war.” This is the necessary precondition for the idea of total war, which begins to take shape in the American Civil War but evolves to its present shape in World Wars I and II.