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As part of his defense, Louis’s lawyers had suggested the King should be judged not by the representatives of the people in the Convention but by the people themselves through a referendum. The Jacobins opposed this idea, fearing it would undermine…

By late December, the Convention was in the process of trying the King. Louis agreed to testify in his own defense. He justified the decisions of 1789–91 by pointing out that he had still been King and that he had consistently tried to rule within…

Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson on Benjamin Franklin, was a supporter of Jefferson’s Republican Party. His sympathetically summarized the situation in France during the period when Louis XVI was put on trial and executed. He defended the actions of…

The passage below, excerpted from the newspaper the French Patriot of 6 December 1792, is hostile to Robespierre. It suggests Robespierre’s appreciation for the importance of political symbolism, in calling for the smashing of Mirabeau’s bust, and it…

Jean–Antoine Nicolas Condorcet, formerly a marquis, circulated a pamphlet that was a Girondin response to Saint–Just. Although he too endorsed a trial of the King, he emphasized the necessity of following constitutional procedures, meaning that any…

As a journalist, Marat had for the first few years of the Revolution supported the monarchy as an institution. Yet he opposed Louis personally; in this text, published in his newspaper, Journal of the Republic (but not delivered before the…

Maximillien Robespierre, a leading Jacobin deputy in the Convention, had originally opposed the trial, believing that to try the King was to imply the possibility of his innocence. Nevertheless, once it was under way, Robespierre took the lead in…