The End of the Great French Monarchy: A Document Signed by the Final Three Crowned Kings of France: Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X, as well as Marie Antoinette

Since 1589, with the fall of the Valois Dynasty, the Bourbons ruled France, and there was a golden age for the French monarchy, and a consolidation of power in the hands of the monarch.  King Henry IV gave way to King Louis XIII.  From then on the Bourbons ruled France, with each king a son or grandson of the previous monarch, through the time of Charles X.  This would take the Bourbons from the enlightened Louis XIV, the Sun King, through Louis XVI in the French Revolution, and up to the latter’s death. Louis XVII never really ruled.  When his father, Louis XVI, was executed on January 21, 1793, he became (nominally) King of France and Navarre in the eyes of the royalists. However, since France was then a republic, and Louis XVII had been imprisoned from August 1792 until his death from illness in 1795 at the age of 10, he was never actually king. His title, bestowed by his royalist supporters, was acknowledged implicitly by his uncle’s later adoption of the regnal name Louis XVIII rather than Louis XVII, upon the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814.  After Louis XVIII came Charles X; however Charles’s successor, Louis Phillipe, was not part of the Bourbon dynasty, and, in the new age of the Republic, opted not to have a coronation. He was proclaimed King by the Republic and therefore the old world of the Bourbon Kings ended with his assumption.  The French government broke up the monarchy in 1870 and sold off most of the French Crown Jewels after 1875, in hopes of avoiding any further royalist agitation against the newly restored republic.

Document Signed, June 15, 1783, the original manuscript of the marriage contract between Anne Michel Louis, Vicomte de Roncherolles, captain of cavalry and chamberlain to Louis XVI’s cousin the Duc d’Orleans, and Sophie Elizabeth D’Aine, daughter of Marius D’Aine who is described as “ Conseiller du Roi en ses conseils.”   Of the nine witnesses three reigned as Kings of France, two as nominal Queens of France, and three (Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and Madame Elizabeth) went to the guillotine.

Among the signatories:

– Louis XVI was King of France from 1774 until his deposition in 1792. He was guillotined on January 21, 1793. His father, Louis, Dauphin of France, was the son and heir apparent of Louis XV of France, but his father died in 1765, and Louis succeeded his grandfather as king in 1774.

– Louis XVIII, in 1783 called Louis Stanislas Xavier, ruled as King of France from 1814 to 1824 except for a period in 1815 known as the Hundred Days. Louis XVIII spent twenty-three years in exile, from 1791 to 1814, during the French Revolution and the First French Empire, and again in 1815, during the period of the Hundred Days, upon the return of Napoleon I from Elba.

– Marie Antoinette became, in April 1770, upon her marriage (at the age of 14 years) to Louis-Auguste (Louis XVI), heir to the throne of France, Dauphine of France. In 1774, when her husband ascended the throne as Louis XVI, she became Queen of France and Navarre, a title she held until September 1791, when, at that time of the French Revolution, she became Queen of the French, a less noble title she held until 1792.  On September 21, 1792, the monarchy was abolished. After a two-day trial begun on October 14, 1793, Marie Antoinette was convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal of high treason, and executed by guillotine.

– Charles X (in 1783 Charles Philippe) was King of France from 1824 until 1830.  An uncle of the uncrowned King Louis XVII, and younger brother to reigning Kings Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, he supported the latter in exile and eventually succeeded him.  His rule of almost six years ended in the July Revolution of 1830, which resulted in his abdication and the election of Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, as King of the French. Exiled once again, Charles died in 1836 in Gorizia, then part of the Austrian Empire. He was the last of the French rulers from the senior branch of the House of Bourbon.

– Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France was the eldest child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. After her marriage to her cousin, Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, the eldest son of the future Charles X, she was known as the Duchess of Angoulême. She became the Dauphine of France upon the accession of her father-in-law to the throne of France in 1824. Technically she was Queen of France for twenty minutes, on August 2, 1830, between the time her father-in-law signed the instrument of abdication and the time her husband, reluctantly, signed the same document.

– Marie Joséphine Louise of Savoy was the wife of the future King Louis XVIII of France. She was a princess of Savoy by birth, became Countess of Provence upon her marriage in 1771, and then titular Queen of the French when her husband’s nephew, the titular King Louis XVII of France, died in 1795.

– Elisabeth of France, known as Madame Elisabeth, was a French princess and the youngest sibling of King Louis XVI. During the French Revolution, she remained beside the King and his family and was executed at Place de la Révolution in Paris during the Reign of Terror.