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For sale: Blood of beheaded French king

A piece of cloth smeared with the blood of Louis XVI, the French king who was beheaded after the 1789 revolution, will go on sale next month in Paris, an auction house said on Friday.

Published: 9 March 2013 10:53 CET

For sale: Blood of beheaded French king

Anonymous engraving of the guillotining of Louis XVI on 21st January 1793 on Place de la Révolution, now Place de la Concorde

The cloth, measuring 9 cm by 13 cm (3.5 by 4.7 inches), comes in a miniature coffin.

It is accompanied by a handwritten piece of paper that says: "The precious blood of Louis XVI, 21 January 1793" – the day he was guillotined in the heart of Paris.

The sale will take place on April 3 at Hotel Drouot, said Coutau Begarie, another auction house which is putting a range of historic items under the hammer.

Parisians had jostled to take souvenirs after the execution including snippets of the monarch's hair. They also dipped their garments or cloth in the pool of blood left near the guillotine.

But expert Cyrille Boulay told AFP that only a DNA test on the sample up for sale could prove if the cloth really contained Louis XVI's blood.

Another item up on sale is a silver buckle from the king's shoe, Coutau Begarie said.

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France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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