“Louis Must Die, Because the Nation Must Live”: Blood, National Regeneration, and the Execution of Louis XVI

Abstract

When Louis XVI was executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793, he became the central figure in two competing narratives of national regeneration. For revolutionaries, his death established and baptized the new republic in the king’s blood. For royalists, Louis became a Christ-like martyr whose sacrifice would eventually save France from the sin of the Revolution. This article argues that narratives of the execution of Louis XVI provided symmetrically opposite interpretations of the events of 1793. Blood figured importantly in the rhetoric of both groups in almost exactly the same kinds of ways and relied heavily in both cases on the traditions of the pre-revolutionary era. Ultimately, the article seeks to use the symbolic power of Louis’s blood to trace important lines of continuity between the ancien régime, the Revolution, and the Bourbon Restoration. Paying attention to this continuity has two important effects. First, bringing the Revolution and the Restoration into conversation reveals the existence of a common emotional framework. In both cases, political culture operated in part along an interplay of vengeance and sacrifice, symbolized in the form of Louis’s blood. This emotional framework reveals the ways in which Revolutionary narratives about Louis XVI were transpositions of royal mythologies, rather than rejections of them. The continuity of this framework in ultra-royalist attempts to re-establish the legitimacy of the Bourbon regime points to the hybridity of the monarchy after the Revolution and to how the trauma of Revolution was key in narratives of Bourbon authority. Second, exploring the symbolic value of Louis’s blood points to the underlying tensions during this period produced from the coexistence, rather than the replacement, of spectacular, visual notions of sovereignty in the body of the king or of the people, with the emerging authority of legislative bodies and the written word of the law.