Doomed King's Speech On The Block

A copy of a speech by King Louis XVI on the eve of the French revolution is expected to sell for as much as $370,000 next week, the Dominic Winter auction house said Thursday.

The handwritten manuscript is believed to be the first of three drafts of the 1789 speech, in which the king exhorted the Estates-General in vain, it turned out, to obey him.

After the king delivered the speech on June 23, 1789, the Third Estate, representing the emerging middle class, refused to leave the hall, signaling the start of a revolution in which some 40,000 French aristocrats and their sympathizers were executed. Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793.

Document expert Richard Westwood-Brookes said the speech represented "the very last act of the ancient regime, and the very first act in the drama of the French Revolution."

He said the manuscript "is unquestionably one of the most important French historical documents to be offered for public sale in recent times."

The speech is being sold by Dominic Winter Book Auctions on June 26 by an unnamed English collector who bought it in 1958.