France abolished its monarchy in 1792, then brought it back

France abolished its monarchy on 21 September 1792, when the newly elected National Convention voted unanimously at its first sitting that “royalty is abolished in France”. The Republic was proclaimed the next day, 22 September, and declared “one and indivisible” on the 25th.

Was it really decided in one afternoon?

Yes. The deputies had met to organise themselves, but Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois insisted the question could not wait “until the morrow, or even until this evening”. The priest Henri Grégoire moved the motion, and the deputies rose to pass it by acclamation. One deputy, Claude Bazire, warned that it would be “a frightful example” to vote in a moment of enthusiasm, and asked for a proper debate. Grégoire replied with the line the debate is remembered for:

“Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical.” (Abbé Henri Grégoire, 21 September 1792) After what the record calls “a profound silence”, the motion passed to loud applause. The decree is one sentence long and does not use the word “republic”. Louis XVI had been suspended since crowds stormed the Tuileries Palace on 10 August and was now a prisoner. The day before the vote, French troops had stopped the Prussian invasion at Valmy. It had been three years since the Declaration of the Rights of Man had declared sovereignty to belong to the nation.

Did France stay a republic?

No. The 1792 vote ended one monarchy, not the institution. Louis XVI was tried and guillotined in January 1793, but Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor in 1804. The Bourbons returned in 1814, Louis-Philippe ruled as “King of the French” from 1830 to 1848, and Napoleon III’s Second Empire lasted from 1852 to 1870. France’s lasting republic dates from 4 September 1870, when news of Napoleon III’s capture at Sedan brought the fall of the Second Empire and the proclamation of the Third Republic; only the wartime Vichy regime of 1940 to 1944 broke the line. In all, emperors and kings ruled France for more than 60 of the 78 years after the vote that was meant to abolish them.