A reminder to anyone bewailing Louis XVI's execution today - Louis absolutely did not have to end up on the scaffold. Republicanism was only the position of an extreme minority in 1789. Had he accepted the changes of 1789-91 with good grace, Louis would have kept his crown and his head. Had he followed through on the reformist spirit he showed at times in the late 1780s by enthusiastically backing the Third Estate and then the National Assembly's more progressive elements, he might even have gone down in History as one of its best and most astute rulers.
But he didn't.
What he tried to do instead was to play the Assembly along, while surreptitiously courting counter-revolutionary elements at home and liaising with foreign powers to forcibly restore the status quo ante. He intended, in that event, to subject those who had dared oppose and limit his power to 'the full rigour of the law' - in other words, to capital punishment. Would he also have gone back on his pre-revolutionary abolition of torture, now considering reformism a 'weakness'? Would he have completely restored the horrific punishments of the Ancien Régime? Could anyone at the time have said with confidence that he wouldn't? And what would foreign invasion have meant for ordinary people - no doubt, what it usually meant - death, atrocities, requisitions, destruction of the necessities of life...
Louis XVI, like Charles I before him, double-dealt to the point it was impossible to trust him. In other words, like Charles, he fucked about. So in the end, also like Charles, he found out.
