Three of the most important historical figures have a connection with this date. Both breathed their last, one had his first. In different years of course.
On January 21, 1793, in the fourth year of the French Revolution, King Louis XVI was executed on the guillotine - at the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
30 years earlier, in 1763, one of his greatest opponents and warmest supporters of his death sentence, Maximilian Robespierre, was born.
Both have a completely different effect on another huge figure, Lenin, who dies on January 21, 1924.
The first became king rather accidentally, without ever really getting into the skin of his role - and it is one of the reasons he had this ending -, the second from a simple provincial lawyer became the soul of the French Revolution and the third, a lawyer he, too, left a certainly brilliant career - like the second - to become the greatest revolutionary of the 20th century.
Louis was to be the last king of the "old regime" (but not the last of France, since after Napoleon, in Palinorthos, from 1815 to 1848 kings were again in power).
Robespierre fell victim to his own policy (of terror – la terreur) that he instituted in the last year of the revolution and was executed the following year, in 1794, in the same way, on the guillotine. A year and a half earlier, at the trial of Louis, he had declared:
"(...) Louis must die because the country must live"
He would never have imagined that he would have the same fate, in the same part of Paris.
Lenin was very interested in the ideas, political positions of the Jacobins and the revolutionary practice of Robespierre. He saw as a logical consequence the execution of the monarch-oppressor, a natural outcome of a successful revolution.
He applied in his own way the theory of Marx, who considered Robespierre a great revolutionary.
Both Marx and Robespierre were influenced, among other things, by the same philosopher, Rousseau and his "social contract".
Of course, Lenin's death was less impressive, one might say inglorious. Sick and infirm for the last two years of his life from successive strokes (the official Soviet version), with his would-be replacements butchered over his living corpse, he died of syphilis contracted before '17 while living in Switzerland. It was of course a very shameful cause to be officially accepted for a symbol like Lenin, it is known that someone "gets" syphilis.
I will dwell further on the personality and execution of Louis; it was an event that shook the whole world of the time.
He was a rather misunderstood and unfortunate king. He was neither the worst nor the most authoritarian, on the contrary I would say, and he could have saved his head and his throne since at the beginning of the revolution no one had in mind to touch the institution of the kingdom and of course not even him the king. What was primary for the revolutionaries was the abolition of the privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy and the acquiescence of the king in this, with a gradual transition to a constitutional monarchy, but not its abolition.
Even when he had been forced by the people of Paris to leave the palace of Versailles and settle in Paris in the palaces of Kerameikos, and had gradually lost absolute power, and just after his unsuccessful attempt to escape to Austria - two years after beginning of the revolution - the phrase of General Lafayette, head of the National Guard in June 1791, is typical:
"He who applauds the king will be beaten, he who curses him will be hanged"
He received an excellent education from his childhood. But he did not prepare to be king. Life brought them so that in a short time his two older brothers died and his father who was the son and natural heir of Louis XV.
So, at just 11 years old, he finds himself to be the heir. At the age of 16, he married Marie Antoinette, a marriage whose aim was to strengthen Franco-Austrian relations. Only twenty years old, he ascended the throne, in 1770. Realistic about the responsibilities that await him, he declares:
"Oh my god. Drive me. Protect me. I reign so young"
Exercising power was never of much interest to him, preferring to hunt or stay locked in his library or machine room (he had a passion for locks). He did not participate in the intrigues of the palace, nor in the endless daily feasts of the courtiers. While he was the protagonist, events more often than not passed him by. He decided to send an expeditionary force to the United States led by the nineteen-year-old Lafayette, who won the decisive battle of Yorktown for independence.
Americans owe much of their independence in 1776 to Louis XVI (this French campaign was very expensive, it was one of the reasons they brought the economy to the brink of bankruptcy shortly before the revolution began).
When on the night of July 14 the Duke of Rosfoucault wakes him up to announce the fall of the Bastille, Louis asks him:
"So there was a riot?"
and the Duke answers him
"No rebellion my king, revolution!"
In June 1791 Ludovikos commits the great error. He tries to sneak out of France with his whole family. He is caught at the last moment before crossing the French border, in the small town of Varennes. A few kilometers further, Austrian forces with whom he had reached an understanding were waiting for him. He is arrested at the last minute thanks to a guard who recognizes him because he has seen his picture on a banknote. They take him to Paris and the countdown begins for him. He is locked up in the Temple prison in Paris.
The people lose their trust in him and consider him a traitor, as does the national assembly. In September 1992 the monarchy is abolished, he is tried and sentenced to death on the charge of "conspiracy against public freedom and the general security of the state" and on the proposal of the court for "unconditional death" by the 721 present deputies vote in favor 366 (five extra votes for an absolute majority).
The last words he addressed to his executioner moments before he died were:
“Sir, I am innocent of all that I am accused of. May my blood help to establish the happiness of the French."