The Presses Universitaires de France and Frémeaux & Associés offer this biography of Louis XVI, analyzed and explained by Aurore Chéry, modernist historian and researcher associated with LARHRA. A specialist in representations of Louis XV and Louis XVI, she is interested in the role played by Louis XVI, the last monarch of the Ancien Régime, and in the political upheavals experienced in the last quarter of the 18th century in France but also beyond. Long underestimated by historians who represented the King of France as an absolutist monarch overwhelmed by events and incapable of taking the measure of them, Louis XVI is presented by Aurore Chéry as a monarch adept at republican ideas and also determined to fight against the aristocracy. Throughout the historian's innovative thesis, we discover a Louis XVI close to the ideas of American patriots, eager to break away from the influence of the court and, in this, projected into our political modernity.