Execution of Louis XVI
Execution of Louis XVI in Paris
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The famous one-vote majority hides 26 further deputies who also chose death — but wanted it postponed.
21 January 1793, 10:22 a.m.
On 21 January 1793 Louis XVI was taken from his imprisonment in the Temple to the Place de la Révolution in Paris, now the Place de la Concorde. He was executed there by guillotine at 10:22 a.m.
Charles-Henri Sanson, the Paris executioner, supervised and performed it; Antoine-Joseph Santerre, commanding the Paris National Guard, was responsible for the armed escort and the security around the scaffold. A delegation had formally communicated the sentence to Louis at the Temple the previous day.
The arithmetic behind the sentence
The Convention had convicted him of conspiracy against public liberty and attacks on the general security of the state. "Treason" is a convenient shorthand, not the wording of the charge.
In the decisive count on punishment, 361 of the 721 deputies present voted for unconditional death. Another 26 voted for death coupled with postponement under the Mailhe proposal, and 380 voted against a stay of execution.
What the guillotine did not settle
Accounts differ over Louis's exact final words, over who ordered the drums to beat, and over whether the words attributed to his confessor were spoken at all.
The monarchy had already been abolished in September 1792, so the execution did not itself create the Republic. Revolutionaries tried and killed him as Louis Capet — a designation they applied to him, not his Bourbon family surname.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- The famous “one-vote majority” refers to 361 unconditional-death votes among 721 deputies present. The arithmetic is politically evocative but incomplete because another 26 deputies voted for death coupled with postponement.
- Accounts differ over Louis’s exact final words, who ordered the drums to beat and whether the words attributed to his confessor were spoken. Those contested details are excluded from the verified narrative.