Fictional Account by Louis Sixteenth

I, Louis, sixteenth of that name, His Most Christian Majesty, annointed King of France, am writing these words upon the evening of January 20, 1793. Unless a miracle should intervene--a miracle which I by no means expect--this shall be my last night on Earth. For tomorrow I have an appointment with Mme. Guillotine, as some wits refer to the ingenious machine which Dr. Guillotin invented for the furtherance of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. It is well-suited to this goal, as M. de Robespierre and the other gentlemen of the Committee for Public Safety interpret it, for it frees all who encounter it of their troubles, renders them equal, and joins them in a great brotherhood (and, alas, sisterhood!) of the victims of this Revolution. And so, though tonight I fear for my children, my dear foolish Marie Antoinette, and for my dear foolish France, by this time tomorrow these worries shall no longer be mine.

But for now I feel I must reflect upon the circumstances which brought me to this place and tomorrow's appointment. As I am King--not "Citizen Bourbon," as I foolishly tried to be for a time--I accept the full responsibility for the sad fate of my kingdom, in which my own fate, and that of so many of my subjects, is but one small part. I mismanaged my marriage, I mismanaged the business in America, I mismanaged finance, and when it came I mismanaged the Revolution. For all of these errors I must pay the price, and regret only that so many others must pay as well.

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ore fitting than that British insolence should be corrected by the loss of America? And for the most part, the American war went well. Britain did indeed lose America, and until near the end of the war we even held our own at sea, which I fear we shall never do again. But the price of victory! First, the financial cost. After the American war, the Crown of France was virtually bankrupt, and was never able to recover. I was forced to accept M. Necker as finance minister, but for all his reputation, his schemes succeeded only in alienating much of the nobility--the natural allies of the Crown--while failing to satisfy the bourgouisie or restore the credit of the government. Had it not been for this financial situation, I doubt that poor Marie Antoinette's naive extravagances would have aroused the degree of resentment among the people that they did. Much worse than the material cost of the American war, however, was something that neither I nor anyone else, I believe, anticipated: the influence of the ideas by which the American colonials chose to justify their rebellion. These ideas had nothing to do with our decision to support the colonials, of course. Had they fought instead to establish a Protestant New Jerusalem, a

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