Execution of Louis XVI in the context of "Guillotine"

Louis XVIII (Louis Stanislas Xavier; 17 November 1755 – 16 September 1824), known as the Desired (French: le Désiré), was King of France from 1814 to 1824, except for a brief interruption during the Hundred Days in 1815. Before his reign, he spent 23 years in exile from France beginning in 1791, during the French Revolution and the First French Empire.

Until his accession to the throne of France, he held the title of Count of Provence as brother of King Louis XVI, the last king of the Ancien Régime. On 21 September 1792, the National Convention abolished the monarchy and deposed Louis XVI, who was later executed by guillotine. When his young nephew Louis XVII died in prison in June 1795, the Count of Provence claimed the throne as Louis XVIII.

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, full title Chevalier Charles-Henri Sanson de Longval (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl ɑ̃ʁi sɑ̃sɔ̃]; 15 February 1739 – 4 July 1806), was the royal executioner of France during the reign of King Louis XVI, as well as high executioner of the First French Republic. He administered capital punishment in Paris for over 40 years. By his own hand he executed nearly 3,000 people, including Robert-François Damiens who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV. Sanson was the executioner of Louis XVI.

Louis XVII (born Louis Charles, Duke of Normandy; 27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795) was the younger son of King Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie Antoinette. His older brother, Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, died in June 1789, a little over a month before the start of the French Revolution. At his brother's death he became the new Dauphin (heir apparent to the throne), a title he held until 1791, when the new constitution accorded the heir apparent the title of Prince Royal.

When his father was executed on 21 January 1793, during the middle period of the French Revolution, he automatically succeeded as King of France, Louis XVII, in the eyes of the royalists. France was by then a republic, and since Louis-Charles was imprisoned and died in captivity in June 1795, he never actually ruled. Nevertheless, in 1814 after the Bourbon Restoration, his uncle acceded to the throne and was proclaimed Louis XVIII.

During the French Revolution (1789–1799), multiple differing political groups, clubs, organizations, and militias arose, which could often be further subdivided into rival factions. Every group had its own ideas about what the goals of the Revolution were and which course France (and surrounding countries) should follow. They struggled to carry out these plans at the cost of other groups. Various groups played an important role, such as citizens' clubs, parliamentarians, governmental institutions, and paramilitary movements.

• Royalists: the term most commonly given to a wide range of supporters of the Ancien Régime who sought to reverse most changes of the Revolution and restore the royal House of Bourbon and the Catholic Church to its pre-1789 authority. Some armed themselves and formed rebel armies, especially in Western France, under the name of Catholic and Royal Army (also called Chouans, see also the Chouannerie), the most important battleground being the War in the Vendée (1793–1796). Others fled France as émigrés, some of whom would also arm themselves and form the Armée des Émigrés (1792–1814), who together with the troops of the First Coalition and Second Coalition sought to bring down the French Republic and restore the Bourbon monarchy.

• Jacobins (originally the Society of Friends of the Constitution, but better known by their home base in the old Dominican convent of Saint Jacques, hence the name Jacobins; since 1792 officially Society of Jacobins): revolutionary club originally consisting of Breton delegates to the National Constituent Assembly founded in June 1789, which soon grew and branched out across France and welcomed non-parliamentarians as members starting in October. Due to the high membership fee, the club remained elitist, initially shifting to the right. In Spring 1790, the radical leftist Cordeliers seceded, and in July 1791, the right-wing Feuillants also split themselves off. Together with the Cordeliers, the Jacobin left-wing would eventually come to be known as The Mountain while the right-wing of the Jacobins would become known as the Girondins. From 1790 onwards, Maximilien Robespierre would become increasingly dominant within the Jacobin Club and from July 1793 until July 1794 use it as his powerbase for the Reign of Terror, arresting and executing the leaders of both Cordelier factions, namely the radical leftist Hébertists (March 1794) as well as the centre-left Dantonists (April 1794). After the Fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the National Convention closed the Jacobin Club on 12 November 1794.

• Girondins (named after the Gironde department, where many of its prominent members came from; initially they were also called Brissotins after their leader Jacques Pierre Brissot): faction of liberal republicans who were primarily supported by the wealthy bourgeoisie from southern and western France. They consisted of the right-wing of the Jacobins and were staunch defenders of the rights of man and popular sovereignty against a centralized state governed from Paris. The Girondins desired to export the Revolution to the rest of Europe and therefore urged on war with Austria and Prussia (20 April 1792). They played a central role in the fall of the monarchy (21 September 1792) and the execution of the deposed king, Louis XVI (21 January 1793). Faced with the rise of The Mountain, the Girondins showed increasingly royalist tendencies in the spring of 1793. They were overthrown by the Montagnard insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793 and their leaders were guillotined.

• The Plain (La Plaine), also pejoratively known as The Marsh (Le Marais) or Maraisards (Marsh-dwellers), was a container term for a large group of parliamentarians who held middle-ground views and inside the National Convention were seated on the lowest benches. Ideologically, they were most closely affiliated with the Girondins, but they barely dared to speak out against the radical Montagnards.

• The Mountain (La Montagne, also called the Montagnards, literally Mountain-dwellers, because they were seated on the highest benches in Parliament): grouping of radical and leftist politicians in the Legislative Assembly and National Convention (1792–1795). Their members came from the clubs of the Cordeliers and the left-wing of the Jacobins and sought to establish a radical-democratic republic centrally governed from Paris. From June 1793 until July 1794, the Montagnards dominated French politics and the Reign of Terror was conducted under the leadership of Robespierre. Notably after their takeover in June 1793, The Mountain can be thought of as consisting of three rival factions that vied for control, namely the Hébertists (radical leftist Cordeliers), the Dantonists (moderate and more right-wing Cordeliers) and in between them Robespierre and his Jacobin followers (who together are sometimes called Robespierrists).

  

• Society of 1789 (also known as the Patriotic Society of 1789): club of moderate conservative constitutional monarchists founded in May 1790. They merged with the Feuillants in 1791.

• Thermidorians: a group of Montagnards who conspired against Robespierre's regime and staged a coup d'état on 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor Year II), known as the Thermidorian Reaction, which overthrew Robespierre and saw him and his associates executed two days later. As moderate republicans, the Thermidorians tried to calm down the Revolution and closed most Jacobin clubs across France. These events triggered the right-wing royalist and anti-revolutionary First White Terror, especially aimed against Montagnards and Jacobins in the Rhône valley and southern Brittany. However, a royalist coup d'état on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795) was crushed by general Napoleon Bonaparte. With the Constitution of the Year III, the Thermidorians established the Directory as the executive power (replacing Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety) and replaced the National Convention by the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients, as the bicameral legislative power.

• Dantonists: right-wing of The Mountain. They are named after their leader Georges Danton, a cofounder of the Cordeliers Club and from April until July 1793 the de facto head of the French government. After Robespierre seized power, Danton (who reconciled with Catholicism) and his allies tried to moderate and stabilize the Revolution. However, this brought them into conflict with the radical leftist Hébertists who wished to push the Revolution even further. Robespierre had the Dantonist leaders (including Danton himself and Camille Desmoulins) arrested on 30 March 1794 and executed on 5 April 1794.

• Monarchiens (officially the Friends of the Monarchial Constitution, also Monarchial Club): club of center-right revolutionary monarchists founded in December 1789 by Jean Joseph Mounier. They merged with the Feuillants in 1791.

• Cordeliers (officially the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but better known by their home base in the old Franciscan Cordeliers Convent, hence Cordeliers): a radical-leftist club which split from the Jacobins in the spring of 1790 under the leadership of Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Together with the radical left Jacobins, they constituted The Mountain in Parliament. Until his assassination on 13 July 1793, radical demagogue Jean-Paul Marat played an important role as well. Thereafter, the club was taken over by the Hébertists of Jacques Hébert. Shortly after the execution of the Hébertists leaders by Robespierre on 24 March 1794, the Cordeliers Club was closed down.

• Feuillants (official the Society of the Friends of the Constitution): club of centre-right constitutional monarchists who held the majority in parliament during the Legislative Assembly era (October 1791–September 1792). They split from the Jacobins on 16 July 1791 and disappeared after the Storming of the Tuileries (10 August 1792). Although enemies of the Ancien Régime, they also opposed democracy. They maintained that the establishment of the constitutional monarchy on 3 September 1791 had meant the French Revolution had achieved its goal and should be finished.

• Hébertists: radical left-wing of The Mountain primarily composed of Cordeliers. They are named for their leader Jacques Hébert and were outspoken atheists, anti-Christians, and republicans. They invented the Cult of Reason as an alternative Enlightened worldview to replace all religions. On 13 March 1794, the Hébertist leaders were arrested and they were executed on 24 March by the order of Robespierre.

• Enragés: radical left-wing of the Jacobin Club, which supported the demands of the radical sans-culottes and advocated for an early form of socialism, guided by direct democracy. Its leaders were arrested during the Reign of Terror and Jacques Roux committed suicide before trial, while the rest were banned from political activity.

• Equals: Former members of the Jacobin Club that agitated for the overthrow of the Directory in the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction. They advocated for an egalitarian and socialist republic, denouncing the new wealthy elites of France. Their conspiracy was uncovered and their members arrested, with the leader François-Noël Babeuf being executed.

• Society of the Friends of the Blacks: an abolitionist pressure group founded in 1788 by Jacques Pierre Brissot (later also the leader of the Girondins) just before the Revolution broke out. Although early revolutionaries would officially denounce slavery, this declaration was initially of little practical consequence. Not until the Haitian Revolution broke out in August 1791 did French politicians begin to seriously consider the factual abolition of slavery, which was eventually legislated on 4 February 1794. The gens de couleur libres (manumitted slaves) had already been granted civil rights on 4 April 1792.

The Low Countries theatre of the War of the First Coalition, also known as the Flanders campaign, was a series of campaigns in the Low Countries conducted from 20 April 1792 to 7 June 1795 during the first years of the War of the First Coalition. As the French Revolution radicalised, the revolutionary National Convention and its predecessors broke the Catholic Church's power (1790), abolished the monarchy (1792) and even executed the deposed king Louis XVI (1793), vying to spread the Revolution beyond the new French Republic's borders, by violent means if necessary. The First Coalition, an alliance of reactionary states representing the Ancien Régime in Central and Western Europe – Habsburg Austria (including the Southern Netherlands), Prussia, Great Britain, the Dutch Republic (the Northern Netherlands), Hanover and Hesse-Kassel – mobilised military forces along all the French frontiers, threatening to invade Revolutionary France and violently restore the monarchy. The subsequent combat operations along the French borders with the Low Countries and Germany became the primary theatre of the War of the First Coalition until March 1796, when Napoleon took over French command on the Italian front.

The April–June 1792 French incursions into the Austrian Netherlands were a disaster, eventually leading frustrated radical revolutionaries to depose the king in August. An unexpected French success in the Battle of Jemappes in November 1792 was followed by a major Coalition victory at Neerwinden in March 1793. After this initial stage, the largest of these forces assembled on the Franco-Flemish border. In this theatre a combined army of Anglo-Hanoverian, Dutch, Hessian, Imperial Austrian and (south of the river Sambre) Prussian troops faced the republican Armée du Nord, and (further to the south) two smaller forces, the Armée des Ardennes and the Armée de la Moselle. The Allies enjoyed several early victories, but were unable to advance beyond the French border fortresses. Coalition forces were eventually forced to withdraw by a series of French counter-offensives, and the May 1794 Austrian decision to redeploy any troops in Poland.

The Demonstration of 20 June 1792 (French: Journée du 20 juin 1792) was the last bloodless attempt made by the revolutionaries of Paris to persuade King Louis XVI of France to abandon his current policy and adopt a more compliant role in the escalating frenzy of the French Revolution. The demonstrators' stated aims were to persuade the king to enforce the Legislative Assembly's rulings, defend France against foreign invasion, and conform to the French Constitution of 1791. In particular, the demonstrators hoped that the king would withdraw his veto and recall the Girondin ministers.

The Demonstration was the last phase of the unsuccessful attempt to establish a constitutional monarchy in France. After the Insurrection of 10 August 1792, the monarchy was deposed. Soon after, Louis XVI was beheaded by guillotine.

The Flight to Varennes (French: Fuite de Varennes) during the night of 20–21 June 1791 was a significant event in the French Revolution in which the French royal family—comprising Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin Louis Charles, Marie-Thérèse, Madame Royale, and Madame Élisabeth—unsuccessfully attempted to leave Paris for Montmédy, along with loyal members of their retinue. The King hoped to regain his freedom there, with the protection of royalist troops, as the Revolution was intensifying and the threat to the royal family's safety grew. They reached the small town of Varennes-en-Argonne, where they were stopped and arrested after being recognised at their earlier stop in Sainte-Menehould.

This incident was a turning point after which Parisian hostility towards the monarchy, as well as towards the King and Queen as individuals, became much more pronounced. The King's attempted flight provoked charges of treason that ultimately led to his execution in 1793. The flight failed due to a series of misadventures, delays, misinterpretations, and poor judgements. The King's decisions and indecision on a number of matters, including the means and timing of the journey, allowed seemingly small matters to escalate.

A public execution is a form of capital punishment which "members of the general public may voluntarily attend". This definition excludes the presence of only a small number of witnesses called upon to assure executive accountability. The purpose of such displays has historically been to deter individuals from defying laws or authorities. Attendance at such events was historically encouraged and sometimes even mandatory.

Most countries have abolished the death penalty entirely, either in law or in practice. While today most countries regard public executions with distaste, they have been practiced at some point in history nearly everywhere. At many points in the past, public executions were preferred to executions behind closed doors because of their capacity for deterrence. However, the actual efficacy of this form of terror is disputed. They also allowed the convicted the opportunity to make a final speech, gave the state the chance to display its power in front of those who fell under its jurisdiction, and granted the public what was considered to be a great spectacle. Public executions also permitted the state to project its superiority over political opponents. People were publicly executed so that the public could see the consequences of committing a crime.