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Louis XVI (Louis-Auguste; French: [lwi sɛːz]; 23 August 1754 – 21 January 1793) was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. The son of Louis, Dauphin of France (son and heir-apparent of King Louis XV), and Maria Josepha of Saxony, Louis became the new Dauphin when his father died in 1765.
Louis XVI and his family being transferred to the Temple Prison on 13 August 1792. Engraving by Jacques François Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines, 1792.. Following the attack on the Tuileries Palace during the insurrection of 10 August 1792, King Louis XVI was imprisoned at the Temple Prison in Paris, along with his wife Marie Antoinette, their two children and his younger sister Élisabeth.
Two days before, the National Constituent Assembly issued a decree that King Louis XVI would retain his throne under a constitutional monarchy. This decision came after Louis and his family had unsuccessfully tried to flee France in the Flight to Varennes the month before. Later that day, leaders of the republicans in France rallied against ...
The trial of Louis XVI—officially called "Citizen Louis Capet" since being dethroned—before the National Convention in December 1792 was a key event of the French Revolution. He was convicted of high treason and other crimes, resulting in his execution .
Charles-Henri Sanson performed 2,918 executions, including that of Louis XVI. Even though he was not a supporter of the monarchy, Sanson was initially reluctant to execute the king but in the end performed the execution. As David Jordan notes, "No Monsieur de Paris had ever had the honor of executing a king, and Sanson wanted precise instructions."
Overtly, the king (despite his earlier attempt to escape Paris during the flight to Varennes) had embraced the newly codified constitution. It seems unlikely that he could have been satisfied with losing his previous absolute power, but he may well have been sincerely trying to make the best of what, from his point of view, was a bad situation.
Though mostly ignored, Louis XVI was later able to find support in Leopold II of Austria (brother of Marie Antoinette) and Frederick William II of Prussia. On 27 August 1791, these foreign leaders made the Pillnitz Declaration , saying they would restore the French monarch if other European rulers joined.
The convention's first act was to establish the French First Republic and officially strip the king of all political powers. Louis XVI, by then a private citizen bearing his family name of Capet, was subsequently put on trial for crimes of high treason starting in December 1792. On 16 January 1793 he was convicted, and on 21 January, he was ...