Your Honour and members of the jury, today the prosecution will prove that Citizen Louis Capet, formerly known as King Louis the 16th, is guilty of treason by betraying and being disloyal to France. To prove our case, we will demonstrate how Louis as leader of France failed to preserve the well-being and sovereignty of the French people. Furthermore, he rejected the legal authority of the National Assembly. Finally, he attempted to abandon his country and conspire with the Austrian Government against France.
Over the course of his leadership, Louis grossly mismanaged the State’s finances and failed to care for the people of France. This failure was not simply the case of a government not meeting its planned objectives; the mismanagement
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Louis was smarting after the British defeated his military in 1763 and was desperate to restore lustre to his reign: he put his own personal standing above the needs of the French people (History Shots, 2017 : Alpha History, 2018), as well as the lives of French sailors and soldiers. Approximately 100 million livres was spent to support America in its War for Independence. (Brisbane Girls Grammar School Humanities Faculty, 2018).
Louis understood the consequences of his actions – his Finance Ministers Turgot, Necker, Callone and Brienne informed him of the need for budgetary reform (History Shots,2017). Callone, made this crystal clear in a letter to Louis in 1778, “May one banish forever the false and murderous idea that the state can be helped by bankruptcy. . . . it would always be not only unjust, barbarous and dishonourable but ruinous rather than beneficial.” (Beherens, 1967). Louis was not ignorant of the consequences of his
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They will state that his actions were, by definition, the will of France. We know this statement to be false. We, in revolutionary France, know that power derives directly, and solely, from the will of the people.
Whatever his defence team says, Louis knew it too. In 1789, in response to the
Tennis Court Oath, he signed the Constitution which expressly shared political authority with the National Assembly. In making this agreement, Louis clearly and publicly demonstrated that he understood and agreed that the authority of France was shared by its people (Brisbane Girls Grammar School Humanities Department, 2018).
The defence will likely argue that Louis had come to believe in a political system where power was shared and where he was a monarch supported by the Constitution. The evidence available to us negates this argument. Even after this formal acknowledgment, he still acted and believed that the National Assembly and the Constitution were illegitimate. He indeed, he famously stated that “I have no intention of sharing my authority.” (The History Learning Site, 2018). Additionally, in a private letter, Louis revealed his genuine opinions when he wrote “The constitution is absurd and detestable” (Whittock,