547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
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Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Frenchman, where now are those qualities which once distinguished you? Where now is that national character of greatness and loyalty? Would you show your powers in overwhelming with misfortunes the man who had the noble resolution to repose such confidence in you? Have you no more respect for the sacred duties of hospitality? is no commiseration due to such unparalleled misfortunes. Do you not think that a king who ceases to be one is not a victim sufficiently striking without its being necessary to add such accumulated miseries to his fate? Frenchman, this revolution which regenerates you develops great qualities. but fear, lest it should at the same time efface humanity from your heart, without which every other virtue is lost.
So that was the somewhat florid concluding statement of a fellow called Romain de Cez, who was a lawyer from Bordeaux. Tom writes here that he was celebrated for his sonorous eloquence. As I think you can tell. As you can tell. There he was standing on the 26th of December 1792 before the National Convention in Paris. And of course, the man he was defending. who was on trial for his life, was the erstwhile King Louis XVI. And this, Tom, is one of those speeches that defines the French Revolution. The French Revolution is a great rhetorical event. And we've done a lot of great orations. We had Saint-Just last time saying that you can't reign innocently and the king must die. And here we have Romain de Cez saying that
You should fear, lest you efface humanity from your heart, and you should find the compassion for this man who has suffered enough. And basically, nobody listens.
Well, I think some people do listen, as we will see, but they, from Louis' point of view, don't listen hard enough, I think you could say. And that translation that you read... It was issued, published only a few weeks after it was delivered. So it was rush translated into English. And I guess it's a reminder of just how seismic an event the trial of the King of France is. I mean, it completely transfixes France, obviously, but Britain, all of Europe. I In Britain and in the other monarchies of Europe, public opinion by and large is appalled, even though obviously in England, the English had actually set a precedent because they had tried and executed a king themselves in the form of Charles I. Not uncontroversial, right? Right.
But it's not just in foreign monarchies that public opinion is appalled because there are also deep reservoirs of royalism in France. And the assumption that a king is inviolate, down to the most basic level, that people shouldn't touch him, without strict protections of ritual and so on. This is deeply, deeply ingrained. It's been a theme of French history for a millennium and more. That sense that a king's actions are inviolate, it had been so hardwired that it had been written into the constitution that had been issued in 1791 and which Louis had accepted. And in that, it had specified that only if a king had set himself at the head of a hostile army could he be reckoned to have abdicated the throne.
But otherwise, and this is something that Louis himself points out at his trial, the king's person is inviolable and sacred. That is what the constitution had said. But we've been talking about this second revolution that has overwhelmed Paris and France over the course of 1792. And it is precisely that sense of inviolability, precisely the sense that the king's very body is somehow sacred, that the deputies in the National Convention, that is what they're trying to destroy. They're not just trying to destroy the person of Louis. They're trying to destroy the figure of the king and everything, all the sacrality that is associated with him. And that's why they're bringing him to trial. That's the whole point of it. And of course, they know that the eyes of the world are upon them. The international situation for this is incredibly important. We were talking yesterday about these amazing successes that French arms have been having. They've been going into Switzerland and into Nice and into...
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