L’Opinion de Condorcet sur le jugement de Louis XVI

Being called, as all the other Conventionalists, to give his opinion on the judgement of Louis XVI, Condorcet wrote, in November 1792, a text of great interest where he sustained the idea of the duality of the monarch’s person, as well as that of the necessity of a regular trial before a national court. If he considered that the king should not be above the rules, he did that for the purpose of offering him all the guarantees of the penal code, but he inferred from the same logic of the members of the Constituent that the loss of sovereign power could not be the only penalty against the king. Anyway he discarded the hypothesis that the death sentence, alien to all his principles, could be applied. If he pretended the observation of the conventions which he hoped to be more rigorous if coming from a court wholly made up of elected citizens, anyway he did not exclude that the execution of the sentence was going to be suspended for political reasons and that the king was going to be detained for public security reasons. Being a matter of a big public trial, which went beyond Louis XVI, the same idea of monarchy was put at its core by Condorcet and together with it the idea of the republic he wanted to constitute, without any act of injustice. His thought was not lacking contradictions, the least of which was not to pick on all the kings, facing a man accused of precise facts. This improbable concept of the trial of the king in a country at war greatly contributed to politically isolate Condorcet during the winter 1792-93.