Women's March on Versailles - Oct. 5, 1789

Women marched on Versailles on this day in 1789. There's more to the story in the February 8, 2017 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's October.
Five women marched on Versailles on this day in This

(00:27):
was mostly in response to a food shortage. France had
deregulated its grain market in the seventeen seventies, and this
was all part of a big economic plan that was
devised by Anne Robert Jacques Trejeaux, who was Minister of Finance,
Trade and Public Works under King Louis Trisoa's philosophy was
no bankruptcy, no tax increases, no borrowing. This deregulation of

(00:49):
the green market, though, was followed by several years in
a row of poor harvests, and at the same time,
the population of France was growing really quickly while the
size of the agricult trill industry was staying the same.
So there were more people but at best the same
amount of food to feed them. In reality, less food
to feed them because of these poor harvests, grain prices

(01:12):
and consequently bread prices skyrocketed in the face of this shortage,
and by seventeen eighty nine, French laborers were spending about
eighty per cent of their wages just on bread. Then
on October one of nine, in the middle of this
ongoing bread shortage and massive economic problems and the early

(01:33):
months of the French Revolution, there was a massive and
pretty rowdy party at Versailles, at the Opera house there,
and it got all kinds of publicity. Printmakers and other
media covered this whole party in a really overblown way,
but there was a neggeti of truth to what they
were saying. There had really been a big, rowdy party
at Versailles while the common people were going hungry, and

(01:54):
guests at Versailles had been bad mouthing the ongoing revolution
to make things worse. This was at the time of
year when bread should have been available because the grain
harvest happened in September, but people were still facing breadlines
that stretched for blocks. So people started protesting in the
streets on October four, and then on the fifth, between

(02:17):
five thousand and ten thousand people, most of them women,
gathered outside the Hotel de Villa in Paris, which was
the seat of the city council. A lot of them
had participated in the storming of the Best Deal a
few months earlier. They were demanding that grain be released
to the people, and they just didn't get a response,
so they started marching, and they marched the whole twelve

(02:40):
miles or so, approximately twenty kilometers to Versailles. They were
armed with things like clubs and muskets and pikes, and
the crowd swelled on the way there. By the time
they got to Versailles there were as many thirty thousand people.
They had also developed some goals. They wanted the monarchy
to address this food shortage. They wanted the king to
locate to Paris and to reign from a position where

(03:02):
he was actually with his people, not off on his
own in Versailles, mostly being influenced by the aristocracy. Some
of them also wanted to harm the king or to
harm Marie Antoinette. This crowd was at Versailles for about
twenty four hours, and the tensions were really high at
various points. At one point, a group of protesters got
into Versailles to try to search for the Queen and

(03:24):
the guard opened fire and killed two of them. The
protesters turned on the guards and killed two of them
and dismembered them. Eventually, the military was able to remove
the protesters from inside of Versailles, and the king spoke
to them while they were out on the grounds. He
was saying that he loved his people, and he promised
to go to Paris. He even put on a tricolor cockade,

(03:45):
which had become an emblem of the revolution. Louis the sixteenth,
Marie Antoinette and their children left Versailles and went to
Paris the next day, and this was the first time
in a century that France was ruled from Paris instead
of from Versailles. So while the protest did achieve some
of its goals, we should note that this is a
very very early piece of the French Revolution, and a

(04:08):
whole lot more happened after that. You can learn more
about all this in the February episode of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. Thanks to Tari Harrison for oliver
audio work on this show, and you could subscribe to
the Stay in History Class and Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts
and where else you get your podcasts. Can tune In tomorrow,
we're going to rob a train.