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…
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…
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…
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." Thus, on 21 January 1793, Louis Capet, formerly King of France was…
In 1789, with the collapse of old regime censorship as well as a sense of liberation from traditional moral constraints, printed libels against the Queen became both more common and more intense. An example of this greater intensity is this light…
A common theme in libels was to compare the royal family to animals. This pamphlet parodies the Queen and her entourage as animals in a zoo, emphasizing how the courtly way of life at Versailles seemed bizarre to the rest of the French people. (The…
This article appeared in the newspaper Revolutions of France and Brabant, under the headline: "Horrible maneuvers of the Austrians at the Tuileries Palace to bring civil war to France . . ." and discusses various rumors making the rounds that the…
Fears about Marie Antoinette’s intentions and actions were not baseless. Although inexperienced in the new style of politics, Marie Antoinette did see a need for help from abroad if the monarchy was to stop or reverse the course of the Revolution,…
Since the seventeenth century, French monarchs had been great patrons of the theater and opera, which they regularly attended in Versailles and Paris. Such performances had been occasions to appear before their subjects, aristocratic and common, and…
