Michelet and Lamartine

During the winter of 1792-1793, no one could hide from the sad spectacle of the royal prisoners Louis XVI, his wife, sister, and two young children. If people had ambivalent or negative feelings for the amateur locksmith, myopic bungler, inept monarch, or perfidious traitor, they were moved by the defeated and dispossessed human being, the distraught father and husband. Sensitivity to the human bond that united Louis's family with every other French family moved Lamartine, the nineteenth-century poet, politician, and historian, to compose a touching portrait of the king's family after Varennes, when Louis XVI still ruled as constitutional monarch. He described the royal family's visit to the Theatre Italien. It was the family, not the play, that produced sur les spectateurs de ces impressions oui la pitie se mele au respect.... Tout cela faisait monter des larmes a toutes les paupieres: le roi lui-meme en versa.1 Jules Michelet, the most important nineteenth-century historian of the French Revolution, described the king, a month before his death, as a besieged man, alone, isolated, une image de pitie', un objet pitoyable 'a voir.2 The problem of pity for Louis XVI had consequences that went beyond the feelings of those who were affected by the sight of the fallen king. Michelet and Lamartine interpreted the outpouring of pity following the king's death as having a profound effect on French history in the nineteenth century. Michelet, in his Histoire de la RevolutionfranVaise, and Lamartine, in the Histoire des Girondins, each wrote that, by killing the defenseless monarch, the Jacobins had awakened and unleashed tremendous sympathy that purified the monarchy in the public imagination, laying the psychological and moral groundwork for the Restoration. Michelet and Lamartine attributed the Restoration to Jacobin pitilessness; however they also traced what was for them the real failure the moral failure of the Revolution to the Terror and to the Terror's initial crime and founding act, the regicide. Politically, Jacobin mercilessness served the royalist cause; morally, it destroyed the Revolution and discredited republican ideology for de

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