Louis the guillotined was the grandson
The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined.
The antithesis compresses two reigns and gets the family relationship wrong. The ‘well-beloved’ is Louis XV; the king executed on 21 January 1793 is Louis XVI, his grandson. Versailles’ account identifies Louis XVI’s accession in 1774 and describes the financial crisis, failed reforms, Estates General of 1789, flight to Varennes and abolition of the monarchy that preceded his execution. Its account of Louis XV explicitly says that he left his grandson a weakened and divided kingdom. These details qualify the suggestion of a monarchy adored until almost the moment it became intolerable: the inherited crisis already had a history. Louis XV, opening and final paragraph; Louis XVI, opening biographical discussion and ‘The French Revolution, the final years of Louis XVI.’
The correction does not remove Chesterton’s larger warning that a trusted institution can become oppressive. It does mean that his epigram is an illustration of that warning, not a reliable chronology demonstrating the preceding claim about tyrannies arising from liberties within twenty years. The witnesses inspected here are the Palace of Versailles’ current historical profiles; the passage is from Orthodoxy (first published 1908), inspected in Project Gutenberg ebook 130.
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