Commemoration of the execution of France’s King Louis XVI, January 21, 2021
Photographer: Florence Gallez
Exhibit Title: Commemoration of the execution of France’s King Louis XVI, January 21, 2021
Location: France
Royalists paid tribute to French King Louis XVI on January 21 at the site where he was guillotined 228 years ago, at Place de la Concorde in Paris. Royalist sympathizers and descendant of King Louis XIV, Prince Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon-Parme, laid down flowers, listened to a reading of the late king’s will, and prayed in his honor.
A Requiem Mass was then held in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the final resting place of France’s kings and queens. A few hundred believers and royalists, including Prince Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon-Parme, his wife Baroness Constance de Ravinel, and their children, praised the former king’s life and deeds and took communion; after which they went down to the Bourbon crypt, where the royal remains are buried.
Louis XVI was beheaded in the French capital on January 21, 1793, after being convicted of high treason by the parliament of the First French Republic. He is the only King of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy.
Florence Gallez is an independent documentary photojournalist and black and white photographer from Brussels, Belgium, currently based in Paris. Gallez received a BA degree in English and Russian from the University of London in 1996, an MSc in journalism from Boston University in 1999, and a digital media focused MSc from MIT in 2012. She spent eight years as a Moscow-based journalist covering Russian politics, economics, society, and culture for The Moscow Times, the U.S. publisher Bureau of National Affairs (Bloomberg BNA), and most recently CNN’s Moscow Bureau. As a photographer of social documentaries, she seeks to bring more visibility to people who are in challenging situations and often not cared for by society, especially women and children. In Paris, she is also contributing local and international news and social documentaries to the French photo agency Wostok Press and Russian news agency Sputnik/Rossiya Segodnya.
Florence Gallez
Photojournalist
fgallez@alum.mit.edu
http://florencegallez.com
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