Louis XVI was schooled to hide his thoughts and prize timidity
The last king of France before the Revolution was a studious, shy boy who loved maps, astronomy and locksmithing. One tutor taught him that timidity suited a strong monarch; his confessor told him never to let people read his mind. Those lessons fit poorly with the crisis he inherited.
Louis-Auguste was born at Versailles in 1754, a younger son his parents largely overlooked in favour of his bright elder brother, who died aged nine in 1761. He did well at Latin, history and geography, became fluent in Italian and English, and impressed his mathematics tutor. When his father died of tuberculosis in 1765, the eleven-year-old became heir to the throne; his mother died of the same disease two years later.
In 1770, at fifteen, he married the fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette, whom he had met just two days earlier. The French public resented the match because the Austrian alliance had dragged France into the ruinous Seven Years' War. The couple remained childless for years, and pamphleteers openly mocked them. They eventually had four children, and Louis also adopted several, among them a poor orphan and a Senegalese boy who had been given to the queen as a slave and was freed.
Crowned in 1774 after his grandfather Louis XV died, he began with Enlightenment reforms, such as greater tolerance for non-Catholics and ending the death penalty for deserters, but the nobility blocked many of them. Freeing the grain trade on the advice of his minister Turgot pushed up bread prices, and a poor harvest in 1775 set off unrest. From 1776 France backed the American colonists against Britain, and the debt this piled up deepened a financial crisis that forced him to summon the Estates General in 1789.
Rioting, including the storming of the Bastille, compelled him to accept the National Assembly's authority. His failed flight to Varennes in June 1791 convinced many that he was counting on foreign armies to restore him. He was arrested in August 1792, the monarchy was abolished that September, and, tried as Citizen Louis Capet, he was convicted of high treason and guillotined on 21 January 1793. Both his sons died young; his daughter Marie Thérèse, the only child to reach adulthood, lived until 1851.
Source: Louis XVI
