Abstract
At first, the king of France seemed inclined to work with the revolution and to try to solve the problems created by it. But the influence of the queen and of the courtiers was too strong. He was pressured by them to disregard all promises he had made and to flee from France, in order to obtain aid from Austria against the revolution in France. This led to the storming of the royal palace of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. The king and his family escaped before the mob arrived, and took refuge in the Legislative Assembly hall. The Assembly declared that the king was suspended from office and ordered that he and his family should be imprisoned. They then called a new assembly, the Convention, to decide whether France should continue to be a monarchy. On 20 and 21 September, during the Abbé Grégoire's motion, the Conventionnels steeled themselves to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic. By December, even advocating the restoration of the monarchy was punishable by death. Then one of the Assembly's most pressing task was to decide what should be the fate of the ex-ruler, Louis "Capet". So a debate started in the Convention, opposing the Jacobins and the Girondins, about whether the ruler should be judged. Firstly, it was not easy to clothe the revolt of the country against the king in the forms of law, for the country as a body had no legal standing under the old regime. There were no conventionally specifiable legal rules or moral principles by which a king could be judged, and there was no one who could judge him, that is to say exercise authority over him . Moreover, it was a legal maxim in both England and France that the king could not do wrong. The revolutionaries denied this principle, and their denial was a large part of the revolution they made.
