
Deaths of Louis XVI
The public beheading of Louis XVI was a unique and troubling event that scarred French collective memory for two centuries. To Jacobins, the king''s decapitation was the people''s coronation. To royalists, it was deicide. Nineteenth-century historians considered it an alarming miscalculation, a symbol of the Terror and the moral bankruptcy of the Revolution. By the twentieth century, Camus judged ...
The public beheading of Louis XVI was a unique and troubling event that scarred French collective memory for two centuries. To Jacobins, the king''s decapitation was the people''s coronation. To royalists, it was deicide. Nineteenth-century historians considered it an alarming miscalculation, a symbol of the Terror and the moral bankruptcy of the Revolution. By the twentieth century, Camus judged ...