It was an execution that defined an era. On January 21, , four days after he had been convicted of high treason and crimes against the state by of the deputies of the National Convention, King Louis XVI was guillotined. The primary sentiment many throughout Europe felt was fear that this act of violence was a prelude to others.
Within a few days, another Cruikshank cartoon was published in which Louis is depicted as a martyr standing beside the guillotine, whose newfangled workings the beheading machine had only been invented the year before, in are explained. This double horror often took straightforward form, especially in English prints of the s:. Massacre of the French king! View of la guillotine; or the modern beheading machine, at Paris.
By which the unfortunate Louis XVI Massacre of the unfortunate French King, with a view of la guillotine, or the modern French beheading machine , English artist unknown, — Source. Dialogue , artist and date unknown — Source. The view of Louis as a martyr was shored up by many French engravings — and by the English painter Charles Bezanech, whose images of Louis on his way to the scaffold quickly became iconic for the royalist cause.
While Louis is portrayed as a Christian family man bathed in celestial light, his executioners are shown in rigid poses with eyes averted from the viewer. He was tutored by French noblemen and studied religion, morality and humanities. He excelled in Latin, history, geography and astronomy and achieved fluency in Italian and English. With his good health, Louis enjoyed physical activities including hunting and wrestling.
From an early age, he enjoyed locksmithing, which became a lifelong hobby. Louis' parents paid little attention to him, instead focusing on his older brother, the heir apparent, Louis duc de Bourgogne, who died at age nine in Then, on December 20, , his father died of tuberculosis, and Louis Auguste became Dauphin at age His mother never recovered from the family tragedies and also succumbed to tuberculosis on March 13, Louis Auguste was ill-prepared for the throne he was soon to inherit.
Following the death of his parents, Louis' tutors provided him with poor interpersonal skills. They exacerbated his shyness by teaching him that austerity was a sign of a strong character in monarchs. As a result, he presented himself as being very indecisive. Only 20 years old at the time, Louis XVI was immature and lacked self-confidence.
While Louis XVI wanted to be a good king and help his subjects, he faced enormous debt and rising resentment towards a despotic monarchy. His failure to successfully address serious fiscal problems would dog him for most of his reign. Louis lacked sufficient strength of character and decisiveness to combat the influence of court factions or give support to reformers in their efforts to improve France's government.
By the mids the country was near bankruptcy, which forced the king to support radical fiscal reforms not favorable with the nobles or the people.
When the pressure mounted, Louis XVI reverted to his earlier teaching of being austere and uncommunicative, posing no solution to the problem and not responding to others who offered help. By , the situation was deteriorating rapidly. In May , Louis XVI convened the Estates General to address the fiscal crisis, an advisory assembly of different estates or socio-economic classes the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. The meeting did not go well. By June, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, aligned with the bourgeoisie and set out to develop a constitution.
Initially, Louis XVI resisted, declared the Assembly null and void and called out the army to restore order. Over the next 30 years, an estimated , Chinese and 70, Japanese are processed through the station. Following a rapid spread from its origin in Wuhan, China, the first U. The virus, which would spark a pandemic, was first reported in China on December Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the Bolshevik Revolution and the first leader of the Soviet Union, dies of a brain hemorrhage at the age of In the early s, Lenin abandoned his law career to devote himself to Marxist study and the provocation of revolutionary activity Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
On January 21, , U. President Jimmy Carter grants an unconditional pardon to hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. In total, some , young Americans went abroad in the late s and early '70s to avoid serving in the war. One of the most publicized and controversial battles of the Vietnam War begins at Khe Sanh, 14 miles below the DMZ and six miles from the Laotian border.
Seized and activated by the U. Marines a year earlier, the base, which had been an old French outpost, was used as a staging
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