Louis XVI’s Last Will and Testament is one of the most overlooked exhortations of the Christian faith – and of the possible graces afforded by kingship, says George Young.
On The Genius of Christianity (1802), François-René de Chateaubriand wrote that “when God placed man in this region of tempests, he impressed on him a mark of royalty” – sometimes literally. On Christmas Day 1792, Louis XVI, King of France, “The Last”, “being for more than four months imprisoned with my family in the tower of the Temple at Paris”, preemptively wrote his Last Will and Testament. It was under a month before it was required, when the guillotine blade dropped in the Place de la Révolution, formerly the Place Louis XV – a square then a little over a decade old whose bronze centrepiece of Louis XV cast as a Roman general had been smelted and swapped for a lance-wielding, red-capped “Liberty”. This death-march to January 21, 1793, charts the extinction of the “Capetian Miracle” and the butchered end of the last meaningfully sustained monarchy in France; Mother Liberty was in labour.
But why Louis XVI’s Last Will and Testament has been so overlooked by Catholics – as an abutment to the possible graces of Christian monarchy, and a personal testament to the importance of the Last Rites – is a mystery. It shows, first, a King contrary to the historical perception of a sybaritic, suburban despot, in the light of a true Christian martyr – filled with forgiveness for his persecutors, dying in the knowledge of his own innocence with an unquestioning faith in Divine justice. As a portrait of the man, it is more illuminating than the famous oval Deplussis painting – now daily assaulted by camera lenses at Versailles – that shows a fat, disdainful face glazed with all the ennui Baroque Europe’s grandest court could afford. This was, perhaps, not a misrepresentation and if so, charges his final writ with all the more tragedy; that being found in a belated though intense Christian conviction denied its fullest possible expression in the world.
Amidst those successive convulsions of upturned altars and bloodshed – all expressing as Chateaubriand put it, “a profound antipathy to the theory and practice of religion” – the King wrote a spiritual testament that defied them. It was as a Catholic foremost that he wrote: “I die in communion with our Holy Mother, the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church, which holds authority by an uninterrupted succession…” Second to this, he writes as King of France. Napoleon, expired of brilliance and mulling suicide on St Helena (“this miserable rock”), took leave of the martyred King in this regard: “I die in the Apostolic and Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born over 50 years ago.” “Napoleon and Louis XVI making the same profession of faith!” Chateaubriand wrote; “Do you wish to know the value of the Cross? Then search the whole world for what best suits … the man of genius in his death-agony.” A “nominal Catholic in life”, according to his biographer, the Emperor died receiving the Extreme Unction and with crucifix on chest – the Church of his father. It is a marked change of intention from the Emperor who denied having any “chimerical fears of Hell”: “Death is nothing but a sleep without dreams” and “my body, it will become carrots or turnips” he once said.
Louis XVI’s Last Will, in contrast, reads as an unintended sermon on the application of grace in strife. He refers to “enemies” only in a detached, biblical sense; those to whom one might otherwise assume he terms, are exclusively his “brothers” who “may be in error”: “I do not love them less in Christ.” The Last Will is disarmingly self-admonishing considering the circumstances; he writes that “I have sought scrupulously to know [my sins], to detest them and to humiliate myself in His presence”. But it is the obvious religious sincerity in “not being able to obtain the ministration of a Catholic priest … which might be contrary to the discipline and belief of the Catholic Church” that is perhaps most inspiring: “I pray God to receive this firm resolution … to receive the Sacrament of Penance.” His prayer was answered.
L’Abbé Henry Essex Edgeworth of Firmont, originally County Longford, Ireland, had trained for ministry in Toulouse – an asylum sought by his Anglo-Irish father, then a converted former Protestant rector, under the unbearable penal laws of mid-18th century Ireland. After he was ordained Vicar-General of Paris in 1791 and then made Confessor to Louis XVI’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, he received offers to leave France. His response? “I am the priest whom he [the king] intends to prepare for death … Could my life save him I would willingly lay it down,” he wrote to a fellow priest in London. Priest and king: united to their people by a bond of solidarity with a common and ancient spiritual order.
On the day “Louis Capet”, a desacralised citizen of the First Republic, was sentenced to death on the next, the Abbot was permitted to celebrate Mass in the gaol by the Executive Council where he spent the night next to his King. Beside the accused atop scaffolding in the morning, he reportedly declared “Fils de St Louis montez au ciel” – an apostrophe he could later neither confirm nor recall. After “the nation” had committed “this last act of cruelty”, as the Abbot suspected they would, he remained in Paris – bound by the duties of his tumultuous diocese and thus earning him the begrudged respect of the sans-culottes. He was later rewarded in his career – as Chaplain to the exiled Louis XVIII with whom he travelled to Germany, Russia and finally present-day Latvia where in 1807, at the height of Napoleon’s fatal Russian campaign and surrounded by members of the family in whose service he had remained, he died. His final employer, questing for asylum in Europe, wrote the Latin epitaph for the tomb at Mitau; it concludes with the attribute, “consoler to the afflicted”.
“Rien” was the entry Louis XVI recorded in his game book on the morning of July 14, 1789 – hours before the Bastille was stormed to the tune of Te Deums. Providential in the least: quarry, hunted, finds it difficult to hunt. The forests at Versailles, at one time abundant, had left him as “by my former subjects”, with nothing. What is striking is the absence of self-pity throughout his Last Will; with no mention of a desire for the Abolition to be undone, it shows his understanding that providence must be allowed its place, and an affectionate foreknowledge that the course of French history was no exception. What remains is a deeply-felt account of the perceived injustice committed against his country and his family; he writes with the desires of any dying Christian father, beseeching his wife – deluded to the end though she was – “above all make [their children] good Christians and honest individuals; to make them view the grandeurs of this world (if they are condemned to experience them) as very dangerous and transient goods”. He finishes “by declaring before God, and ready to appear before Him, that I do not reproach myself with any of the crimes with which I am charged”, but to be so reproached for those which he – and his heroic Confessor – knew he had committed. These are echoes launched across the millennia from Calvary – of the unconditional forgiveness for Brother Man and a total acceptance that with this grotesque arc of inversion and rejection now complete, as John recounted, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30).
George Young is an iconography researcher.
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