41 Facts About Louis XVI

Louis XVI, sometimes known as The Last, was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution.

The son of Louis, Dauphin of France, and Maria Josepha of Saxony, Louis became the new Dauphin when his father died in 1765.

The first part of Louis XVI's reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas.

Louis XVI implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices.

From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

Louis XVI's credibility was deeply undermined, and the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic became an ever-increasing possibility.

Louis XVI was the only king of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy.

Louis XVI enjoyed physical activities such as hunting with his grandfather and rough play with his younger brothers, Louis-Stanislas, Comte de Provence, and Charles-Philippe, Comte d'Artois.

Madame Campan states that Louis XVI spent an entire morning consoling his wife at her bedside, and swore to secrecy everyone who knew of the occurrence.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were the parents of four live-born children:.

When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in 1774, he was nineteen years old.

Louis XVI had an enormous responsibility, as the government was deeply in debt, and resentment of despotic monarchy was on the rise.

Louis XVI himself felt woefully unqualified to resolve the situation.

Louis XVI attempted to gain public favor in 1781 by publishing the first ever accounting of the French Crown's expenses and accounts, the Compte-rendu au Roi.

When this policy of hiding and ignoring the kingdom's financial woes failed miserably, Louis XVI dismissed and replaced him in 1783 with Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who increased public spending to "buy" the country's way out of debt.

Again this failed, so Louis XVI convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne.

Now unpopular with both the commoners and the aristocracy, Louis XVI was therefore only very briefly able to impose his decisions and reforms, for periods ranging from 2 to 4 months, before having to revoke them.

Louis XVI seemed to regard the deputies of the Estates-General with respect: in a wave of self-important patriotism, members of the Estates refused to remove their hats in the King's presence, so Louis removed his to them.

Louis XVI was wholly disappointed in his aims of recovering Canada, India, and other islands in the West Indies from Britain, as they were too well defended and the Royal Navy made any attempted invasion of mainland Britain impossible.

Vergennes, supported by King Louis XVI, refused to go to War to support Austria in the Bavarian Succession crisis in 1778, when Austrian Holy Roman Emperor Joseph tried to control parts of Bavaria.

Louis XVI hoped to use the American Revolutionary War as an opportunity to expel the British from India.

The reason as to why many biographers have not elaborated extensively on this time in the king's life is due to the uncertainty surrounding his actions during this period, as Louis XVI's declaration that was left behind in the Tuileries stated that he regarded his actions during constitutional reign provisional; he reflected that his "palace was a prison".

In effect, he headed a secret council of advisers to Louis XVI, which tried to preserve the monarchy; these schemes proved unsuccessful, and were exposed later when the armoire de fer was discovered.

On one hand, Louis XVI was nowhere near as reactionary as his brothers, the comte de Provence and the comte d'Artois, and he repeatedly sent messages to them requesting a halt to their attempts to launch counter-coups.

Louis XVI was particularly irked by being kept essentially as a prisoner in the Tuileries, and by the refusal of the new regime to allow him to have confessors and priests of his choice rather than 'constitutional priests' pledged to the state and not the Roman Catholic Church.

Louis XVI had appointed Breteuil to act as plenipotentiary, dealing with other foreign heads of state in an attempt to bring about a counter-revolution.

Louis XVI left behind a 16-page written manifesto, Declaration du roi, adressee a tous les Francois, a sa sortie de Paris, traditionally known as the Testament politique de Louis XVI, explaining his rejection of the constitutional system as illegitimate; it was printed in the newspapers.

Louis XVI thought only a small number of radicals in Paris were promoting a revolution that the people as a whole rejected.

Louis XVI thought, mistakenly, that he was beloved by his subjects.

Louis XVI was stripped of all of his titles and honors, and from this date was known as Citoyen Louis XVI Capet.

Louis XVI was resigned to and accepted his fate before the verdict was determined, but he was willing to fight to be remembered as a good king for his people.

Louis XVI was condemned to death by a majority of one vote.

The last thing Louis XVI said to him was that he needed to control his tears because all eyes would be upon him.

Louis XVI then declared himself innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, praying that his blood would not fall back on France.

Some accounts of Louis XVI's beheading indicate that the blade did not sever his neck entirely the first time.

Immediately after his execution, Louis XVI's corpse was transported in a cart to the nearby Madeleine cemetery, located rue d'Anjou, where those guillotined at the Place de la Revolution were buried in mass graves.

In 1820 a memorandum of the Congregation of Rites in Rome, declaring the impossibility of proving that Louis XVI had been executed for religious rather than political reasons, put an end to hopes of canonization.

In Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'etait conte, Louis XVI was portrayed by one of the film's producers, Gilbert Bokanowski, using the alias Gilbert Boka.

In Start the Revolution Without Me, Louis XVI is portrayed by Hugh Griffith as a laughable cuckold.

Louis XVI has been the subject of novels as well, including two of the alternate histories anthologized in If It Had Happened Otherwise : "If Drouet's Cart Had Stuck" by Hilaire Belloc and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness" by Andre Maurois, which tell very different stories but both imagine Louis surviving and still reigning in the early 19th century.

Louis XVI appears in the children's book Ben and Me by Robert Lawson but does not appear in the 1953 animated short film based on the same book.