Acceptance of the French Constitution of 1791 (1791)

In September 1791, after very long negotiations, King Louis XVI reluctantly accepted the final version of the French Constitution of 1791, the first written constitution in France. The legacy discovery record dates the acceptance to 13 September 1791 and places it in Paris, but the supplied passages confirm only the month.

Episodes

Background and detail

Background. After the Tennis Court Oath, the National Assembly made drafting a constitution its primary objective, and a twelve-member Constitutional Committee was convened on 14 July 1789. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August 1789, eventually became the preamble of the constitution adopted on 3 September 1791.

The King's Acceptance. Following very long negotiations, the constitution was reluctantly accepted by King Louis XVI in September 1791. The legacy record specifies the date as 13 September 1791 and places the acceptance in Paris, though the supplied passages date only the month and do not name the location of the act.

Aftermath. Radical deputies such as Maximilien Robespierre could never be reconciled to the Constitution of 1791. When Louis XVI later used his veto powers to protect non-juring priests and refused to raise militias, the constitutional monarchy proved unworkable and was effectively ended by the 10 August insurrection.

People involved

Sources

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.