On January 20, 1793, following the votes cast on the 16th and 17th of January, Louis XVI received the decrees that condemned him. He took the judgment, placed it in his pocket, and requested a delay of three days to prepare for death, the assistance of a priest, a final interview with his family, and permission for his kin to quit France. The reprieve was refused; the domestic interview and the spiritual aid of a confessor were granted, but the departure of his family was never permitted to take place.
The trial had occupied several weeks. When Louis XVI appeared before the Convention, Desèze undertook his defense. He recalled the inviolability of the royal person, adding thereafter that if the accused could not be judged as a king, he must at the very least enjoy the rights of a citizen. He then endeavored to answer the charges brought against him, particularly the accusation of having shed French blood on August 10. His pleading concluded with a solemn warning addressed to the deputies: history would sit in judgment upon their decision.
After the King was returned to the Temple, the deputies resumed their debate. Lanjuinais contested the very right of the Convention to sit in judgment over him. The Girondins proposed an appeal to the people; the Mountain opposed it. On January 14, the Convention determined the questions to be put to the vote. Out of the 749 members enumerated by Champagnac, 683 pronounced Louis guilty of conspiracy against public liberty and of an assault upon the security of the State. The roll-call vote upon the sentence endured through the night of the 16th and the entire day of the 17th. Of the 721 deputies present, 361 voted unconditionally for death, constituting an absolute majority. Vergniaud, who presided, pronounced the sentence.
Louis had by then awaited his defense counsel for four days, entreating to see them. When the emissaries of the Executive Council arrived, he stood composedly at the entrance of his chamber. Garat delivered the decrees into his hands: guilt, condemnation to death, the rejection of the appeal to the people, and execution within four-and-twenty hours. The King then read aloud a letter wherein he claimed a delay of three days, the solace of a confessor, a final interview with his family, and their departure from France. Having delivered his petition, he withdrew into his apartment and called for his dinner.
The knives had been removed. When the attendants refused him one, he declared that they could hardly deem him so craven as to lay violent hands upon his own life, and that he knew how to die without fear. He dined without a knife. The Convention rejected the reprieve. The domestic meeting and the presence of a priest were conceded, but the petition to permit his family to leave France came to naught. Garat sent for the Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont. When the minister returned to communicate the refusal, Champagnac depicts an unruffled prince confronting the visible agitation of the bearer of the tidings.
It was eight o’clock in the evening when Edgeworth was introduced. Louis spoke to him of the French clergy, charging him to convey to the Archbishop of Paris his steadfast devotion to the Church. He then stepped forth to rejoin his kin. The municipal officers had appointed a dining hall separated by a glass door: through this partition they could observe the interview without overhearing the words exchanged. Louis had caused a carafe of water to be set upon the table, should any of the women swoon.
At half-past eight, the Queen entered, leading the Dauphin by the hand. Madame Élisabeth and Madame Royale followed. They threw themselves into the King’s arms. The opening moments, the chronicle recounts, were an outpouring of embraces and weeping; thereafter, speech was resumed in hushed tones, broken by long silences. The King gave his word to see them once more on the morrow at dawn. The princesses besought him to confirm his promise. Madame Royale, who still clung to him, collapsed in a swoon as he arose to take his leave. She was carried away. Louis returned to the priest, recovering his composure only after several moments had passed.
He retired to bed towards midnight, directing Cléry to awaken him at five o'clock. Upon his rising, the valet kindled the fire and arranged a chest of drawers to serve as an altar. Edgeworth celebrated mass; Louis attended on his knees and received communion. He requested scissors that he might cut his own hair, desiring to spare himself that indignity at the hands of the executioners. The Commune refused. He entrusted Cléry with his farewells for the Queen, his sister, and his children, as well as a signet ring, a lock of hair, and sundry jewels. He likewise charged a municipal guard to deliver his last will and testament to the Commune. The officer answered him brutally that his mission was to lead him to the scaffold, not to run his errands. The King saw his family no more before his departure; the passage from Thiers, cited by Champagnac, explains that he wished to spare them a fresh scene of anguish.
In the account of the journey and the execution, which Champagnac borrows explicitly from Thiers, an armed multitude lines the way, yet no hostile demonstration occurs between the Temple and the Place de la Révolution. In the carriage, Louis reads the prayers for the dying from Edgeworth’s breviary. At the place of execution, he alights, repulses the executioners as they draw near, and unclothes himself. When they advance to bind his hands, he protests and seems on the verge of resistance. Edgeworth reminds him that this final indignity will be his ultimate resemblance to Christ; Louis thereupon consents to let himself be pinioned.
He sought to address the populace. He cried out that he died innocent of the crimes laid to his charge, that he pardoned the authors of his death, and prayed that his blood might never fall back upon France. The roll of the drums drowned his voice. Edgeworth spoke his final words to him as he was conducted to the scaffold. In this narrative borrowed from Thiers, the execution took place at ten minutes past ten. Once the King was dead, men dipped their pikes and handkerchiefs in the blood and departed, shouting their allegiance to the Republic. The capital, the chronicle adds, remained thereafter wrapped in silence, under roving patrols and behind shuttered casements.
Marie-Antoinette remained confined in the Temple for several months before being transferred to the Conciergerie. In October 1793, she appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal. The president accused her of having instructed Louis in the art of dissimulation and of having sought to restore the monarchy at the cost of the blood of patriots. She answered that she and her husband had desired nothing but the happiness of France. When a juror pressed the basest imputations, she turned towards the mothers present in the hall, appealing to their own hearts for judgment. Bailly, summoned as a witness, declared that he had known Madame and knew nothing to her detriment. The tribunal condemned her unanimously; she was executed on October 16.
Élisabeth, the sister of Louis, was executed on May 10, 1794. Champagnac’s narrative portrays her as entirely foreign to political intrigue and depicts her death as a fresh blow dealt against the family. The Dauphin was never brought to trial. Following the departure of Simon, who had been appointed his tutor, members of the Commune kept watch over the boy in his cell in the Temple. The chronicle records that they would awaken him in the dead of night, compel him to rise, and then order him back to his pallet. His linen went unchanged, and his chamber remained perpetually sealed.
The child died in June 1795. Champagnac imputes his demise chiefly to the squalor and rigors of the confinement he describes. Citing an author whom he leaves unnamed, he relates that towards the close the boy had lost much of his faculties, showing gratitude only to those who refrained from doing him harm. Thus was scattered the family once gathered behind the glass door of the Temple: the King perished following a narrow vote; the Queen, after a trial commingling political charges and infamous imputations; Élisabeth, swept away in the flood of executions; and the child, in a solitary confinement whose privations the chronicle lays bare.