Louis XVI and His Executioners (1987)

Louis XVI and His Executioners Susan Dunn J OSEPH DE MAISTRE, Chateaubriand, Ballanehe, and Balzac were among the many nineteenth-century writers and historians haunted by the death of Louis XVI, one of the most complex and disturbing problems to come out of the Revolution. They wrote about this traumatic event as having grave political and moral repercussions for France. But one unusual and intriguing aspect of their meditations on Louis’ death is the appearance of a new quasi-mythological character, the king’s executioner. Virtually all of the thematic elements that nineteenth-century writers and historians associated with the king’s death were already present in Joseph de Maistre’s strange writings about Louis’ death. Among the pro­ royalists, Joseph de Maistre was the most fanatic believer in divine right —divine right not only of kings but also of executioners. De Maistre developed his ideas about the executioner as the foundation of society in his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, published in 1820. A believer in original sin, de Maistre accepted the inevitability of crime and therefore the necessity of punishment. Only the executioner stood between anarchy and order. But not only was he a necessary and salutary social institu­ tion, the executioner was also a sacred being whose existence, like that of the king, was decreed by God. The principles of monarchy and punish­ ment were inseparable: the king could not rule without the executioner. The agent of punishment guaranteed the throne and the survival of society. In his mystical cult of the executioner, Joseph de Maistre also associated the executioner with the son of God. Since Christianity emphasizes pardon rather than punishment, de Maistre turned to Indian mythology instead to postulate the divinity of the executioner. He cited the tale of Brahma, who, at the beginning of time, created for the use of kings the god of punishment whom he considered his son. “ When this dark god of punishment came forward to destroy crime, the people was saved.” 1In a strange reversal, de Maistre imagined a son of God who saved by punishing and by inflicting violence—hardly a prince of peace. The existence of de Maistre’s savior-executioner leaves no doubt that crime, punishment, and violence were part of the sacred order of things. The spilling of blood resulted in purification and redemption; violence 42 S u m m e r 1987 D u n n was the path to salvation. Joseph de Maistre’s Christianity shunned for­ giveness, pardon, and grace, and glorified violence and expiation of crime through human sacrifice. In the story of Christ’s passion, de Maistre exalted the act of self-sacrifice and self-immolation at the expense of more intimate feelings of loss, suffering, and tragedy. Although he often repeated that in ancient, pre-Christian societies, human sacrifice was a horrible mistake, he nevertheless maintained that the spilling of a sacrificial victim’s blood had expiatory powers. Louis XVI, like the executioner, also participated in a religion of expiation through violence and punishment. For de Maistre, the king had been a perfectly innocent man who voluntarily sacrificed himself and accepted a violent, horrible death in order to expiate the crimes of his nation. Joseph de Maistre’s reactionary vision of the Revolution (as punish­ ment for the crimes of the Enlightenment) and of the king’s fate (as expiation for that crime) contains two key elements that recurred in dif­ ferent forms in other interpretations of the king’s death: first, the quasisacred personage of the executioner and, second, the resemblance and even affinity between the executioner and the king. Both rule by God’s will; both participate in a cult of violent punishment and expiation, and both are likened to saviors. And, on January 21, 1793, one sacred being executed the other, intimately joined together, through blood, in an act of punishment and salvation. In his Essai sur les révolutions, published in 1797, Chateaubriand also dealt with the question of the king’s execution and the personage of the executioner. In a long footnote in this rambling history of ancient and modern revolutions, Chateaubriand sought to discredit the descrip­ tion of the king’s death traditionally...