Nicholas Stark’s Weblog

I simply could not see a Constitutional Monarchy being established in France. Largely, it has to do with the specific people of the time. First, King Louis XVI. He was not a wholly evil monster as some people paint him to be, but he was incompetent and corrupt. He was responsible for much of the worsening of the prices of bread, through his failed attempt to manipulate the market. He insisted on only the most flamboyant of ceremonies for his coronation and for every public appearance. His assistants were all chosen by him, much to the displeasure of the people. He was absolutely opposed to change, which would not work in a constitutional monarchy. In time, he would probably attempt to re-establish himself as the absolute ruler, an attempt that would probably result in failure and the break out of another revolution or at least a revolt. If he did not do it, his corrupt minister would probably soon make the mistake of convincing Louis to execute some of the heads of the revolution, such as Marat, Robespierre, or Danton, which would have reinitiated the decline of the monarchy. If Louis didn’t make an error on his own, his wife would have. She was largely despised, and was herself contemptuous towards common people. Although she never said, “Let them eat cake,” she did make many other miserable comments. When Louis accepted a tricolour cockade from Bailly, the first mayor of Paris, Antoinette commented scornfully, “I never thought I married a commoner.” She did not sympathize with the people, the great majority of whom were greatly suffering. Her public faux pas and outright blunders would have only worsened the delicate peace that a Constitutional Monarchy might bring. Her opulent lifestyle, on top of that, would have been impossible, in which case her boredom might possibly lead to her meddling in politics where she did not belong and could only be as troublesome as her husband’s attempts to control the national market. Ultimately, the king and queen’s incompetence would have been too hard to cope with.

After the flight of the king, even a tentative Monarchy would have been out of the question. Interestingly, the general public and many politicians initially refused to believe that he had fled rather than being kidnapped. But in about a week’s time, that illusion was shattered, and that meant that the monarchy was shattered as well. Simply put, he was exposed as the traitor he was. Whether or not the people truly realized that the king and queen had been traitors through beseeching a foreign armed invasion of France and revealing French military operations to the opposing tyrants of Europe, they [the people] now saw a public display of duplicity, abandoning their people for their own wholly selfish interests. They were not simply planning on leaving France, but rather they were going to do something far worse: meet up with a trusted general, Bouille, and storm Paris, forcibly retaking the throne. The people did not trust the monarchy, and at least as importantly, the major revolutionary politicians no longer trusted them. Although Robespierre had long been an enemy of the king, the extremists Marat and Hebert had both, surprisingly to many, previously been allies of the king and had both proclaimed that the king was “a friend of the people.” Now Louis was politically isolated, which would make the establishment of a Republic naive at best, unless under different sovereigns, which would be just as problematic.