August  23

Louis XVI's Birthday
 

The real tragedy of Louis XVI' s life was that he was basically a simple man with limited intelligence was better equipped to live out his life as blacksmith than as the King of France. He was impotent - sexually, intellectually, and politically.  His impotence which was due to phimosis (the inability of the foreskin to retract) was eventually surgically corrected several years after his marriage to Marie Antoinette when he was fifteen, although the surgery did not result in a rewarding sex life,

Unfortunately, his political impotency was also surgically corrected by the guillotine. Although sympathetic to many of the needed social reforms that precipitated the  the Revolution, he continually catered to the whims of Marie Antoinette and the court in permitting the outrageous excesses of the Versailles court that were the symbols of the insensitive monarchy of a  bankrupt nation.

Although he was generally loved by the French at the beginning of his reign, his indecisiveness and the excesses of Marie Antoinette caused many to eventually hate him. Louis XV (February 15) despised his grandson for his many limitations and resisted training him for his future responsibilities. Louis XVI' s impotence and boredom resulted in an abnormal preoccupation with food and he was extremely fat all of his adult life. A typical lunch consisted or at least three soups, several loaves of bread, several entrees,  several desserts, washed down by several carafes of wine followed by a bottle of charrpagne. His dinners were even more immense.

Louis' continual preoccupation with food may well have been a factor in his capture and execution after the ill-fated flight from Versailles to escape the mob, he had to stop at Eroge for a three-hour lunch, a meal that resulted in his capture at Vareenes and his eventual death. If France would have had a McDonalds on the escape route, the course of history might have been altered. On the way to the guillotine,  Louis  was, as always, famished. The King grabbed a hunk of bread from a peasant on his way to the guillotine and wolfed it down before placing his neck under the blade.

Louis XVI has been portrayed in 40 films including performances by  Robert Morley in Marie Antoinette (1938); Pierre Renoir in Pierre Renoir La Marseillaise (1938, Lee Kresel in Orson Welles's Black Magic (1949);  Hugh Griffith in Start the Revolution Without Me (1970); Mel Brooks in History of the World: Part I (1981); Urbain Cancelier in Ridicule (1996); Simon Shackleton in The Affair of the Necklace (2001; Buck O'Brian in The Exotic Time Machine (1997); and Jason Schwartzman in Marie Antoinette (2006). In all of the portrayals, Robert Morley had the strongest resemblance to the king and gave an exceptional performance (his film debut) which earned him his only (Supporting Actor) Oscar nomination.

Louis' obsession with food prompted the royal chefs to create elaborate dishes name after the monarch and most of these grande cuisine masterpieces are too impractical for most contemporary cooks. One exception is Saumon froid en Bayonnaise, Louis XVI (cold poached salmon in a shellfish mayonnaise).