Louis XVI - In Memoriam

Tea at Trianon today commemorates Louis XVI, who was guillotined on this day in 1793, here and here.

Edmund Burke had an accurate measure of the revolutionaries and in his “Reflections of the Revolution in France” predicted the death of the king and his queen, although not the order of their deaths:

In spite of their solemn declarations, their soothing addresses, and the multiple oaths which they have taken, and forced others to take, they will assassinate the king when his name will no longer be necessary to their designs; but not a moment sooner. They will probably first assassinate the queen, whenever the renewed menace of such assassination loses its effect on the anxious mind of an affectionate husband. At present, the advantage which they derive from the daily threats against her life, is her only security for preserving it. They keep their sovereign alive for the purpose of exhibiting him, like some wild beast at a fair, as if they had a Bajazet in a cage. They chose to make monarchy contemptible by exposing it to derision, in the person of the most benevolent of their kings.

January seems to have been a popular month for regicide. The Puritans judicially murdered Charles I of England on January 30.