Reasons for Wishing to Preserve the Life of Louis Capet

French money and French soldiers, sent by Louis XVI, had helped the United States win its independence, and in January 1793 Thomas Paine asked France to remember it. The National Convention, the assembly elected to govern France once the monarchy fell, had tried Louis for conspiring against the nation, and in mid-January it voted first on his guilt and then on what to do with him. On 15 January a speech by Paine, one of its deputies, was read to the chamber in French translation. Paine began by restating his hatred of monarchy and then argued for sparing the man. Louis's vices, he said, belonged to the system that had raised him; the Constituent Assembly, the first revolutionary parliament, deserved more blame than Louis for handing him back his powers after his attempted flight in 1791. And whatever else he had done, the aid to America was a good act done through him. Paine proposed that the Convention sentence Louis and his family to banishment, hold him in prison until the war was over, and then let America take him in. Behind the plan sits a wider claim: France had been the first nation in Europe to abolish royalty, and it should be the first to abolish the death penalty, a punishment monarchies had trained their subjects to use. He reminded the deputies that Robespierre, now among the loudest voices for execution, had once spoken against capital punishment in the Constituent Assembly. The plea earned Paine the lasting enmity of the Jacobins, and it did not move the Convention. Of 721 deputies who voted on the sentence, 361 chose death without conditions, and Louis was guillotined on 21 January 1793.