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The king took his coat off himself and stands there in his shirt, arms out. He has turned back to Henry Edgeworth, the Irish priest who rode the whole route with him.

The Republic tried him under the name it had issued him, Citizen Louis Capet. The monarchy was abolished by then, so there was no king in the dock, only a man. The evidence was real enough, an iron chest of secret correspondence with the powers preparing to invade, and the verdict was never in doubt. The drama was the sentence. For 36 hours in January the deputies of the Convention walked one at a time to the rostrum and voted aloud on the king's life, with the galleries keeping score. His cousin the duke of Orléans, restyled Philippe Égalité, voted for death, and Paris never stopped discussing it. Of 721 deputies, 361 voted for death with no conditions attached. That was one more than the majority needed. A majority of one was enough. It always is. On the morning of 21 January 1793 the king rode for over an hour through streets lined with 80,000 armed men and closed shutters, attended by an Irish-born priest named Henry Essex Edgeworth. The square had been the Place Louis XV and was now the Place de la Révolution. There he took his coat off himself, argued about having his hands tied, and lost the argument. Then he began to speak to the crowd: that he died innocent, that he pardoned the men who had brought him there. Santerre, commanding the guard, ordered the drums, and the rest of the sentence belongs to the drummers. Legend gives Edgeworth the parting line, son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven. Asked about it later, Edgeworth could not remember saying it. Spectators dipped handkerchiefs in the blood, some as relic, some as souvenir, the two not yet being different things. Within two weeks France was at war with Britain and the Dutch Republic as well as Austria and Prussia. Spain joined them in March. The Revolutionary Tribunal opened that same month, and the official death sentences across France would reach 16,594 before the Terror ended. The queen followed in October. The boy the royalists called Louis XVII died in a locked room at 10 years old. The dead king's brother dated his own reign from that room, and treated the 19 years before he got the throne as a clerical error. Benazech, an Englishman trained in Paris, painted the last minutes and not the blade. The king stands in white at the foot of the steps, turned back toward his confessor. The mounted officer's sword already points the way up. The guillotine's posts run off the top edge of the canvas, so the blade is never in the picture. Luigi Schiavonetti engraved the series and the prints sold across Europe: grief had a market too. Benazech died in London in 1794, at 27, and the canvas is now in the Musée Carnavalet.