November 19, 2008 • 26 mins
Several factors contributed to the French Revolution. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn how an incompetent monarchy, the age of Enlightenment and widespread famine created the perfect storm for a country-wide revolution.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandis Kip synjoined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
Like canis Jane this morning, and I was having a
bagel for breakfast, and I got to thinking about how,
(00:23):
you know, it's a treat for me. It's sort of
a luxury. Every now and then on the way to work,
I'll stop at Einstein's and I'll grab a bagel, and
I don't really question where my bread is going to
come from. I have a loaf at home. Maybe I'll
stop by the Veigel shop. But for the people of
France back around seventeen eighty seventeen eighty nine really took
off bread was a huge point of contention because they
(00:46):
didn't really have much. That's true, they were suffering from
some really bad harvest and economic depression in general, and
this was a problem. It means kind of a perfect
storm sort of situation where um, not only were the
people having the food issues, but the government was having
any issues as well. And we don't typically think of
the plague and other massive diseases as a good thing,
(01:07):
but they kind of were in the sense that they
kept France's population in check. But during this point in time,
everyone was really healthy, they were living longer, and all
of a sudden there wasn't enough to go around. And
there's been a couple of kings in the House of
Bourbon who screwed a lot of things up. We had
Louis the fourteenth, who was really excessive and had a
(01:27):
lot of superfluous luxuries, and he didn't even like being
in the middle of the dirty knts and squalor of Paris.
So he built a castle called Versa. I'm sure you've
all heard of it about um what was that twelve
thirteen miles away from the city, so that you could
have a retreat. And then Louis the fifteenth came in
and he was more interested in being the boss at
(01:48):
the bedroom than the boss of his subjects. And then
Larie's sixteen, who we now married Marie Antoinette. He was
the one who famously said, you know, help us God,
we are too young to reign. And it's true, you know,
if you look at our country today, we have a
new presidental lect who's going to be taking on a
massive financial deficit, and a couple of wars, and you know,
(02:09):
he's coming into a really hard position. And we could
say that the same was pretty comparable for living sixteen.
That's a financial debt unhappy subjects, that's true. And um,
you can see the contrast from then to now. Is
that back then, the way they had it in France anyway,
was that the nobles and the upper people in the
clergy didn't even have to pay taxes and uh and
this is sort of contrary to our sensibilities now where
(02:31):
where the if the more money you have, the more
money you owe to the country. Basically, and this was
part of the financial problems is that the more um
money problems they had, the more they wanted to tax
people to raise money. But they could only tax the
people who were suffering at this time when important tax
I think it's called the gabelle um if I'm pronouncing
all right, um, But it was a tax on salt actually,
(02:53):
which not only was you know, an edit thing for food,
but it was also very important for preserving food, you know,
back then before they head refrigerators. Yeah, and so people
at this time, if they didn't have the salt to
preserve their food, they didn't have enough flower for bread.
They were foraging as best they could, but you know,
in urban areas like Paris that wasn't working too well
because there wasn't enough land of forage in and then
(03:14):
the outlying provinces there was, you know, such severe winters
and hot summers that nothing was really working in anyone's favor.
And so we see, like Jane said, the perfect storm
at the beginnings of an uprising that would eventually blossom
into the French revelation. That's right. And another element of
the perfect storm is basically the ideas that were becoming
(03:37):
more and more popular even among nobility. They were discussing
these ideas brought up by Rousseau and Voltair of equality
and liberty, and basically when all these things came together,
a revolution bubbled up. And what's funny about these ideas
and these Enlightenment thinkers is that these were very popular
subjects and salons especially. People would get together and the
(03:57):
people who at the time to really sit around it
contemplate the universe and really to start thinking that aspects
of their life weren't fair. But the poor people really
didn't have the time and luxuries for this. But I
think there were people in the middle class, in the
upper middle class, and maybe even parts of the upper
class who were looking out for them. And there were
certain members who really started to contemplate the idea of
(04:21):
equality and that it should be available to everyone. And
one thing that was really sort of strange was um
this idea of equality and death. And we have to
remember that during this time a lot of middle age
ideas still permeated the justice system in Europe, and so
when people of a lower class war sentenced to death,
(04:41):
it was done by scary things like quartering or being
burned or be it wasn't browned. Yeah, and now it
hurt that it hurt a lot. I'm sure we can't
speak from personal experience. But whereas the nobles, on the
other hand, they deserved a more humane death and less painful, yeah,
a gentleman's death. They were usually beheaded, which again we're
(05:01):
not saying that doesn't hurt. We really imagined that it does.
But it was seen as more humane and faster death
at least. Yeah. And something really interesting came out of
this whole debate about being equal in death, and that
was the creation of a death device by a member
of the Constitutional Assembly named Joseph Gillotan, that's right, and
(05:24):
he Um there were other machines similar to it in
other European countries at the time that he Um kind
of perfected it being introduced it to France, and it
became synonymous with the French Revolution because of the ideas
of equality bubbling up there and because of the eventually,
although he didn't quite foresee this, the massive killings, and
they would end up using this death machine basically a
(05:46):
lot during the following years. And so it's ironic is
that what was intended to be a humanitarian device was
eventually repurposed into a death machine. And that's the crazy
thing about the guillotine. And Um we were joking earlier,
can you can you really say if if it hurts
or if it doesn't because it is so quick And
(06:07):
doctors today have done some research into the guillotine and
they look at how it actually kills someone, and you know,
they talk about, you know, the severing of the skin
and then the bone and then the spinal cord and
then the brain death that results. And people today look
at it and say, I better it hurts a lot.
It's considered hitarian as it was back then. No, not
(06:28):
at all. And a really interesting rumor that sort of
sprung up around the guillotine and the concept of decapitation
is that after someone's decapitated, they're still sort of alive,
at least for a couple of seconds, for a little while.
Their legends surrounding one of the famous people who were killed,
Charlotte Corday. Um legend is that the executioner actually picked
(06:50):
up her head afterwards and it actually looked at him,
I think, indignantly and look like, hey, come on. And
Charlotte where Dave was famous because she was from one
of the outlying provinces in France. She was she wasn't
a revolutionary, or she was to a certain extent, but
she was essentially, um, a provincial girl who had been
(07:11):
hearing about all of the riots in Paris, and she
was blaming everything on this one journalist name Murat. That's true,
and he was quite I mean, you could say he
was responsible for a lot of the violence. He intentionally
instigated all all this violence through his propaganda and his writing, definitely,
and she knew exactly where to find him. He had
a really bad skin condition that required him to soak
in a tub for a couple of hours a day,
(07:33):
and she came to Paris with the intent of finding
him and killing him. It's kind of ironic trying to
prevent the violence fight killing this guy. Yeah, but I
was I was thinking, clearly, and it kind of backfired
on her, right because he ended up being the martyr
out of the situation, and people were celebrating when she
was guillotined exactly. And that's how the French Revolution was.
You know, a hero one day, a martyr the next,
(07:55):
absolutely hated the next day. It was. It was crazy,
these these turning hides. But you know, we could go
on and on about some of these. The motley crew
of the French revolutions, I like to call them that,
just to get down to basics. I mean, we know
who the main players are. We've got Louis and we've
got his wife, Marie Antoinette. And there was so much
(08:16):
ire directed toward her. She was a total spendthrift and
she was expected to produce an air to the throne.
She hadn't done that yet, and um, the people of
France were just furious with both of them, and there
were scandals surrounding everything that she did, right, Like, um,
you wrote about these sort of scandals that that happened
around her, and one of the articles on the site,
(08:37):
uh where she would say let them eat cake and
she was having supposedly affairs as well and having just
in general just this extravagant lifestyle. Yeah, and some of
the rumors surrounding her, like the hold at the meat
cake thing. We know today that she didn't actually say that,
but she did project an air of, you know, carelessness.
Thomas Jefferson, who you know obviously have to referred to
(08:59):
him and every single podcast we do, he apparently said
about heard that if someone had shut that lady up
in a convent, the French Revolution would never have happened.
And that's a good point. And he was he was
a relative sympathizer with the French Revolution, Is that right? Yeah,
because the French Revolution used as its model the American Revolution.
And I think that when we look at the Declaration
(09:22):
of Independence and the ideals of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, and then we look for the parallels
and the French Revolution, you know, the sort of rallying
cry there was um liberty, equality and brotherhood or brute
galate and fraternity, I don't profess to be a native
French speakers, and the acast him from the south. That
um that that was the general governing idea, and it
(09:46):
was important because no one had ever thought to go
up against the king, and people in general wanted to
love the king. You know, he was sort of the
father of the country, and he was supposed to be
looking out for everyone, and and there they kind of
kept him around for a little while. Even after yeah, yeah,
and there was affection for him, and even when their children,
Marie Antoinete and Louie's children were born, there was genuine
(10:06):
affection and celebration for the birth of the new king.
But when things again things started going poorly, they tried
to get the king on board with this idea of
a new sort of constitution which therapy power more evenly
divided among the classes. Jane was saying that the clergy
and the upper classes, the airs doctor state, they had
(10:28):
all the voting power. Essentially, they were maybe three percent
of the population. They were making the laws that governed
everyone else. And Louis was basically pigeonhouled into hiring a
finance minister to sort everything out because things had gotten
so financially messy, and he hired a man named Jacques Necker,
and this guy became pretty important for doing something that
hadn't been done in a hundred and seventy five years,
(10:49):
and that was calling together, uh, these States General UM.
And this was this group. Obviously the first and second
Estates were the clergy and the nobles who had the
most power, and the eard Estate UM at these meetings
began to rise up and demanding, uh, just making demands
of the king that he wouldn't give into. And one
(11:10):
of the most important members of the third Estate was
a lawyer named Maximilian robes Pierre, and he became a
very outspoken advocate of the lower classes, and people really
respected ropes Pierre. He had a lot of really silient
things to say, and he was actually called the incorruptible
because he seemed so ethical and so wise and everything
(11:30):
that he did and then ended up not being quite true.
And you know, at least at the beginning, it seemed
like his heart was in the right place. And so
the Estates General continued on with their work and they
were you know, they actually included members of the upper
class to come and meet with them because they weren't,
you know, aren't supporters of the group, because obviously they
saw their power being slowly cut off. But some would calm,
(11:53):
they'd all meet and have their assemblies. And then one
day they went to the palace to meet as usual,
and the doors were shut and reality what was going
on is that someone in the palace was preparing the
room for an address that the king would give later.
So they weren't shutting them them out. No, not exactly.
I think that this has been interpreted in many ways
throughout history, but I think the general of court is
(12:14):
they were not being bolted out. It was just an
unfortunate timing either way, though, they believed that they were
being bolted out and that's all they needed to build.
So they went to the closest room they could find,
which was an indoor tennis court, and they made it
that they would not rest until France had a new constitution.
That's right, and this seems to be a very good
step um in the people's um pursuit of more power.
(12:38):
But actually um, by like the next month, the people
were getting so frustrated they didn't think that peaceful reform
was quite possible, and so they ended up storming the
best deal, and they went there to get guns and
gunpowder and essentially show Louis that they were not playing
around anymore. And I think a really famous anecdoubt from
the French Revolution is that Louis was out hunting the
(12:58):
day that that happened, and when he got back in,
one of his advisers told him what had happened, and
he asked, is it a revolt? And his adviser said, no, sire,
it's a revolution. Like it was a big deal, and
I don't think Louis comprehended the gravity of the situation.
And on that day the guards were slaughtered, prisoners were
set free. And what's more, the best deal was this fortress,
(13:20):
this medieval fortress, and it was a symbol to the
people of the king's corruptibility because there were prisoners kept
there who were convicted of crimes sort of outside the
balance of common law, and no one knew what happened
inside this prison, but there were awful tales that people
were tortured and maimed and terrible things went on. So
(13:40):
the people of Paris just started knocking it down, brick
by brick by brick, and they certainly made their point
with the storming of the best deal that it was
a very dramatic episode. And so it seemed that the
people of Paris had united, Louie was going to be
forced into going along with the new constitution. Things were
going pretty well until they were rumors swirling around town. Uh,
(14:02):
courtesy of Mraz crazy newspaper. Well, I shouldn't say crazy,
that's not fair. Uh, courtesy of his newspaper in which
he broadcasts all this propaganda that the king and his
courtiers had stomped on the treat Caluur, which was a flag.
It's still the flag of France to day. It's the
red and blue of France, separated by the white of
the House of Bourbon, which represented the royalty. Anyway, rumors
(14:25):
that they had stomped on the flag, they had desecrated
the simpole of the the symbol of the revolution, certainly
incented the people, and at this time the women of
parish really took action, and they stormed first side. This
time they went for bread, and they went for Marie
Antoinette's head, that's right, and they just barely missed her.
She had just fled from her room when they when
(14:47):
they stormed in and but they eventually got what they wanted.
They got what the this king to to sign away
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and which basically,
you know, took power away from him significantly and actually
moved the royal family to toiletries as in the heart
of Paris, so they were under lock and key. And
(15:10):
then there were rumors again that Marie Antoinette was plotting
with her relatives in Austria to take control of Paris,
and they thought, well, you know, there's still a chance
that the royal family can reclaim power. And Marie Antoinette's lover,
han Zaxolovon first and actually orchestrated an escaped for the
royal family, and they nearly made it to Austria. They
(15:30):
were captured in Varenne, which was just miles from the
Austrian border. So Louis was brought back. He just made
him look worse, I'm sure, as trying to escape. Obviously,
he didn't look like he was going to cooperate, no,
and so any ire toward him always magnified a million times,
and he was put on trial, and at this point
he wasn't even referred to as King Louis anymore. He
(15:50):
was called by his surname Cape, which actually wasn't even
his surname. He was a Bourbon, so they got his
name wrong too, you know, to add insult to injury.
And this is when we see the National Assembly which
a draft at the Declaration of the Rights Man, they
had drafted this constitution. They seem unified until this point.
And then when you have a monarch on trial and
(16:12):
you have the extremists they want to put him to
death like a common person, and you have some people
who still have some loyalty to the crown, it was
split and there was frustrations at this time as well.
Keeping the king alive obviously might encourage um other countries
with that were monarchies at the time, to go in
and restore power, because the king was obviously uh he
(16:33):
when he was writing to other powers trying to get help,
he was saying like, look, what's happening here, The same
thing could happen in your country, and so if you
help me out, you know, we can we can stop
this sort of revolutionary fever going on. And that's certainly
was a factor. And I believe it was the Duke
of Prussia who wrote the Revolutionaries the letter later published,
and one of the newspapers, maybe Courtisy Murra, that if
(16:54):
anything happened to Louis, they would come in and burn
Paris to the ground. And that was all that a
lot of people needed to hear. And so Louis was convicted,
put to death, and that was the end of him.
So Louie's dad, the National Convention is a split. We
now over his death and now we see a new uprising.
And we should mention that these different factions did have
(17:15):
specific names. The moderates for the Giron downs, and then
the radical members were the Jacobins, and that's where Robespierre was.
So who was the leader of that? Do you remember
robes Pierre? You're about to see him get really corrupt.
A side note anyway, So then the other group we
see emerges a song coo lot and that translates into
those who do not wear breeches or those without breeches.
(17:36):
And these were the artisans of Paris, and they weren't
they weren't walking around without pants. They were walking around
without the little knee shorts. And they're actually wearing longer pants.
Wearing longer pants, yeah, because the custom was to wear breeches.
And you know, cute little tights and the danky little
buckle shoes and all the other things that sweet little
pre revolutionary frands people wore. And these were people who
(17:58):
were ruling the local areas. Was yes, yes, So we
start to see power again shifting contracting, and the ideals
of the revolution in the first place, or the ideals
of the reform that people originally wanted, they start to
get really muddied and confused because we know that at
first the people had wanted sort of a constitutional monarchy. Well,
(18:22):
obviously that wasn't gonna happen now because the monarch is dead,
So who was going to rule? There was a really
important question. And this is when Robespierre really gained in power.
And uh he obviously he sort of filled the void
of power at this time, and um, he was able
to solidify it by killing a lot of his political
(18:43):
enemies at the time, and he would eventually go on
to condone these killings publicly. At first, like the events
of the September massacre, he sort of turned his head
away and he thought, you know, well, these are the
people of Paris. They're the ones who are acting like
like beasts and and killing their fellow countrymen. I'm not
(19:03):
really a part of this, but later on, like during
the Great Terror and the Great Fear, he himself would
compose the lists of counter revolutionaries who would be put
to death. And it's important to remember at this time
that there was really not a lot of peace and France.
You know, people were fearing every day that they would
be accused of counter revolutionary activity. It was like a
witch hunt, really was right, and they did have some
(19:26):
semblance of justice when we tried to institute the revolutionary
tribunals to try these people who were accused of anti
revolutionary activity. But if you look at the stats, I
think about nine out of ten people who were tried
were found guilty and killed, and one of those was
Marie Antoinette. She wasn't going to be around for too
much longer. She continued to be suspected of plotting with
(19:47):
Austria to overthrow the revolutionaries, and she was put on
trial and one of the most poignant charges that came
against her was molestation of her own son. And Marie Antoinette,
as we now, she had been you know, sort of
a twit. No one really she but no, and that
was absolutely not true. At all. It was a horrible,
(20:08):
salacious rumor started and she sort of hung her head
when all the other charges against her were red. But
when that one was read, that was when she spoke
up and said no. And she implored the other women
in the room to sympathize with her and to really
think about how they would feel if they were charged
with such a terrible thing I can't image. And she
won their sympathy for an instant and then like that
(20:29):
it was gone. Yeah. And when Louis was put to
death at the guillotine, he at least was driven up
to the stand in an closed cart, but she was
driven in an open cart, a common criminals cart, so
people could throw things at her and spit and jeer,
and so it seemed like the people hated her even
more than they hated the king. And they did, they did.
(20:49):
And when she went up to the stand, I think
people really wanted to see her cry and prostrate herself,
and that didn't happen at all. She was very dignified
until the moment that she died. Pretty pressive. I couldn't
do that, I know. But as much as the people
wanted marantoin Net dead, and as much as her death
symbolized for the people of France and for the revolution,
it's off it. It wasn't enough. The revolution still was
(21:11):
not over, that's right. And as you said, Rospierre was
coming up with with lists of people that that he
felt needed executed, and eventually he ended up executing one
who used to be his ally, D'Anton um. And he
was a leader of the opposing party with different ideas
for where the revolution should be taken. And that's what
was so crazy about the splits and the factions of
(21:34):
the National Convention is that they kept splitting in factions
that had split off, you know, split and enough themselves.
And one of the biggest things that was really upsetting
the people here in this assembly was that they feared
so much that outside countries would attack France that they
went to war to keep their borders clear. And that
meant that there weren't enough people in the city to
(21:55):
quell any violent uprisings that occurred. So people were either
for the French revolute snary wars, they were for you know,
fighting in the cities. No one knew where their affiliations
really were. And danton and robes Pierre had been I
to eye all along, but then ribes Pierre one day
said nope, that's enough, Danton must die. And when he
went to the guillotine, I think he famously said, um,
(22:17):
I regret that I go before that rat Robespierre. So
he knew that Robespierre would would come soon. Yeah, And
you can see the public opinion is starting to get
um a little against Robespierre at the time, because Rospierre
started looking a little crazy. Um. He actually a few
months after he executed Danton, he uh, he started this
festival of the Supreme Being and he had this paper
(22:40):
mache mountain um that he paraded on through the streets
of Paris, and he looked like he was making himself
a god. Really. He had this sort of cult that
he started was sort of he was a Daist cult,
and he just wanted um morality um. As much as
he wanted to get rid of Christianity in France, he
thought that morality was pretty essential to to a civil society. Um.
(23:03):
So he's tried to unite the people with the Supreme
Being festival, when really it backfired on him and people
are like, he's crazy, We've got to get him out
of here. And he had done some other extremist things too.
He tried, after the death of Luie and toward the
shift away from the monarchy, to really really rid France
of any feelings at all that it may have had
(23:23):
towards the monarchy, or towards Christianity, or even toward time.
That's right, and what was I found fascinating. I didn't
know this until I started researching for this podcast, actually
was the idea of UM changing the concept of time
through what they called the Revolutionary Calendar, and they basically
reconstructed the days in the hours and basically what they
(23:44):
did UM they still had twelve months in a year,
but they ended up renaming everything and they ended up
taking out the seven day week and instead each month
would have three decades decades. I don't know how it's pronounced,
but UM three periods of ten days. And so this,
if you think about it, UM is no longer seven
day week. It would be a nine day week with
(24:04):
one or sorry at ten day week with one day
of rest in UM nine days of work. And so
this was sort of an attempt to get rid of
the the Christianity in the country, so they no longer
have the sense of Sundays with the Catholic church or
in these other sort of Catholic or a Christian sex. Yeah,
so Sunday being the proverbial day of worship. Unrest was
(24:27):
based out completely with the hope that people wouldn't even
recognize that this day was meant to be Sunday. That's right,
And they actually they tried to constitute a new clock. However,
I'm not really sure how this would work because they
put extra seconds in the day from what we have UM.
But at least what I read is that they each
day had ten hours UM. Each hour had ten minutes
or a hundred minutes, and each minute had a hundred seconds,
(24:49):
which you can see how this dramatically the revolution, the
whole sense of is trying to dramatically change how people
thought about everything, and the people who had the masterminds
behind these really radical change is are beginning to lose
sight of what's going on in the streets. And meanwhile
the people in the streets are harping on the bread again.
You know, where's our bread? We're still going hungry. Nothing
(25:10):
has changed. The only thing that really has is that
we don't hate literally, we just live in a constant
state of fear that we're going to be called a
counter revolutionary. That could be something like you know, bad
nothing gropes Pierre, or it could be something like plotting
against the revolution, or even just calling someone madame or
monsieur instead of citoyan, which meant citizen. So really it
was time for a revelation to come to an end.
(25:32):
I hadn't accomplished what it set out to accomplish. And
there was a quick and sustinct way to do this,
and that was to kill Ropes Pierre and all of
his allies. And that didn't quite ended. They ended up
setting up a directory after after that, right, and um,
that didn't quite satisfy anybody's needs. Like there were two
opposing views and this sort of tried to um straddle
the middle, and it ended up satisfying no one. And
(25:54):
so they called in one of the biggest war heroes
at the French Revolutionary wars, and that was good, only
appall lyambent apart. So he came in and he was
supposed to reunite friends, and he did restore religions. That
was something that he did accomplish with people of friends,
and he did restore you know, a semblance of order
and and there was food and there were resources for them.
But as we know, he went on to become a dictator,
(26:17):
that's right, and you wouldn't call himself king. Obviously they
didn't have good idea stores as a king, but he
did end up being what was called the first Console,
and I think eventually the Emperor. So obviously France had
a long way to go before it really reached the
ideals of the revolution, if it ever did. And that's
something that you can pursue more for yourself when you
read How the French Revolution worked on how stuff works
(26:37):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandis Kip synjoined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
Like canis Jane this morning, and I was having a
bagel for breakfast, and I got to thinking about how,
(00:23):
you know, it's a treat for me. It's sort of
a luxury. Every now and then on the way to work,
I'll stop at Einstein's and I'll grab a bagel, and
I don't really question where my bread is going to
come from. I have a loaf at home. Maybe I'll
stop by the Veigel shop. But for the people of
France back around seventeen eighty seventeen eighty nine really took
off bread was a huge point of contention because they
(00:46):
didn't really have much. That's true, they were suffering from
some really bad harvest and economic depression in general, and
this was a problem. It means kind of a perfect
storm sort of situation where um, not only were the
people having the food issues, but the government was having
any issues as well. And we don't typically think of
the plague and other massive diseases as a good thing,
(01:07):
but they kind of were in the sense that they
kept France's population in check. But during this point in time,
everyone was really healthy, they were living longer, and all
of a sudden there wasn't enough to go around. And
there's been a couple of kings in the House of
Bourbon who screwed a lot of things up. We had
Louis the fourteenth, who was really excessive and had a
(01:27):
lot of superfluous luxuries, and he didn't even like being
in the middle of the dirty knts and squalor of Paris.
So he built a castle called Versa. I'm sure you've
all heard of it about um what was that twelve
thirteen miles away from the city, so that you could
have a retreat. And then Louis the fifteenth came in
and he was more interested in being the boss at
(01:48):
the bedroom than the boss of his subjects. And then
Larie's sixteen, who we now married Marie Antoinette. He was
the one who famously said, you know, help us God,
we are too young to reign. And it's true, you know,
if you look at our country today, we have a
new presidental lect who's going to be taking on a
massive financial deficit, and a couple of wars, and you know,
(02:09):
he's coming into a really hard position. And we could
say that the same was pretty comparable for living sixteen.
That's a financial debt unhappy subjects, that's true. And um,
you can see the contrast from then to now. Is
that back then, the way they had it in France anyway,
was that the nobles and the upper people in the
clergy didn't even have to pay taxes and uh and
this is sort of contrary to our sensibilities now where
(02:31):
where the if the more money you have, the more
money you owe to the country. Basically, and this was
part of the financial problems is that the more um
money problems they had, the more they wanted to tax
people to raise money. But they could only tax the
people who were suffering at this time when important tax
I think it's called the gabelle um if I'm pronouncing
all right, um, But it was a tax on salt actually,
(02:53):
which not only was you know, an edit thing for food,
but it was also very important for preserving food, you know,
back then before they head refrigerators. Yeah, and so people
at this time, if they didn't have the salt to
preserve their food, they didn't have enough flower for bread.
They were foraging as best they could, but you know,
in urban areas like Paris that wasn't working too well
because there wasn't enough land of forage in and then
(03:14):
the outlying provinces there was, you know, such severe winters
and hot summers that nothing was really working in anyone's favor.
And so we see, like Jane said, the perfect storm
at the beginnings of an uprising that would eventually blossom
into the French revelation. That's right. And another element of
the perfect storm is basically the ideas that were becoming
(03:37):
more and more popular even among nobility. They were discussing
these ideas brought up by Rousseau and Voltair of equality
and liberty, and basically when all these things came together,
a revolution bubbled up. And what's funny about these ideas
and these Enlightenment thinkers is that these were very popular
subjects and salons especially. People would get together and the
(03:57):
people who at the time to really sit around it
contemplate the universe and really to start thinking that aspects
of their life weren't fair. But the poor people really
didn't have the time and luxuries for this. But I
think there were people in the middle class, in the
upper middle class, and maybe even parts of the upper
class who were looking out for them. And there were
certain members who really started to contemplate the idea of
(04:21):
equality and that it should be available to everyone. And
one thing that was really sort of strange was um
this idea of equality and death. And we have to
remember that during this time a lot of middle age
ideas still permeated the justice system in Europe, and so
when people of a lower class war sentenced to death,
(04:41):
it was done by scary things like quartering or being
burned or be it wasn't browned. Yeah, and now it
hurt that it hurt a lot. I'm sure we can't
speak from personal experience. But whereas the nobles, on the
other hand, they deserved a more humane death and less painful, yeah,
a gentleman's death. They were usually beheaded, which again we're
(05:01):
not saying that doesn't hurt. We really imagined that it does.
But it was seen as more humane and faster death
at least. Yeah. And something really interesting came out of
this whole debate about being equal in death, and that
was the creation of a death device by a member
of the Constitutional Assembly named Joseph Gillotan, that's right, and
(05:24):
he Um there were other machines similar to it in
other European countries at the time that he Um kind
of perfected it being introduced it to France, and it
became synonymous with the French Revolution because of the ideas
of equality bubbling up there and because of the eventually,
although he didn't quite foresee this, the massive killings, and
they would end up using this death machine basically a
(05:46):
lot during the following years. And so it's ironic is
that what was intended to be a humanitarian device was
eventually repurposed into a death machine. And that's the crazy
thing about the guillotine. And Um we were joking earlier,
can you can you really say if if it hurts
or if it doesn't because it is so quick And
(06:07):
doctors today have done some research into the guillotine and
they look at how it actually kills someone, and you know,
they talk about, you know, the severing of the skin
and then the bone and then the spinal cord and
then the brain death that results. And people today look
at it and say, I better it hurts a lot.
It's considered hitarian as it was back then. No, not
(06:28):
at all. And a really interesting rumor that sort of
sprung up around the guillotine and the concept of decapitation
is that after someone's decapitated, they're still sort of alive,
at least for a couple of seconds, for a little while.
Their legends surrounding one of the famous people who were killed,
Charlotte Corday. Um legend is that the executioner actually picked
(06:50):
up her head afterwards and it actually looked at him,
I think, indignantly and look like, hey, come on. And
Charlotte where Dave was famous because she was from one
of the outlying provinces in France. She was she wasn't
a revolutionary, or she was to a certain extent, but
she was essentially, um, a provincial girl who had been
(07:11):
hearing about all of the riots in Paris, and she
was blaming everything on this one journalist name Murat. That's true,
and he was quite I mean, you could say he
was responsible for a lot of the violence. He intentionally
instigated all all this violence through his propaganda and his writing, definitely,
and she knew exactly where to find him. He had
a really bad skin condition that required him to soak
in a tub for a couple of hours a day,
(07:33):
and she came to Paris with the intent of finding
him and killing him. It's kind of ironic trying to
prevent the violence fight killing this guy. Yeah, but I
was I was thinking, clearly, and it kind of backfired
on her, right because he ended up being the martyr
out of the situation, and people were celebrating when she
was guillotined exactly. And that's how the French Revolution was.
You know, a hero one day, a martyr the next,
(07:55):
absolutely hated the next day. It was. It was crazy,
these these turning hides. But you know, we could go
on and on about some of these. The motley crew
of the French revolutions, I like to call them that,
just to get down to basics. I mean, we know
who the main players are. We've got Louis and we've
got his wife, Marie Antoinette. And there was so much
(08:16):
ire directed toward her. She was a total spendthrift and
she was expected to produce an air to the throne.
She hadn't done that yet, and um, the people of
France were just furious with both of them, and there
were scandals surrounding everything that she did, right, Like, um,
you wrote about these sort of scandals that that happened
around her, and one of the articles on the site,
(08:37):
uh where she would say let them eat cake and
she was having supposedly affairs as well and having just
in general just this extravagant lifestyle. Yeah, and some of
the rumors surrounding her, like the hold at the meat
cake thing. We know today that she didn't actually say that,
but she did project an air of, you know, carelessness.
Thomas Jefferson, who you know obviously have to referred to
(08:59):
him and every single podcast we do, he apparently said
about heard that if someone had shut that lady up
in a convent, the French Revolution would never have happened.
And that's a good point. And he was he was
a relative sympathizer with the French Revolution, Is that right? Yeah,
because the French Revolution used as its model the American Revolution.
And I think that when we look at the Declaration
(09:22):
of Independence and the ideals of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, and then we look for the parallels
and the French Revolution, you know, the sort of rallying
cry there was um liberty, equality and brotherhood or brute
galate and fraternity, I don't profess to be a native
French speakers, and the acast him from the south. That
um that that was the general governing idea, and it
(09:46):
was important because no one had ever thought to go
up against the king, and people in general wanted to
love the king. You know, he was sort of the
father of the country, and he was supposed to be
looking out for everyone, and and there they kind of
kept him around for a little while. Even after yeah, yeah,
and there was affection for him, and even when their children,
Marie Antoinete and Louie's children were born, there was genuine
(10:06):
affection and celebration for the birth of the new king.
But when things again things started going poorly, they tried
to get the king on board with this idea of
a new sort of constitution which therapy power more evenly
divided among the classes. Jane was saying that the clergy
and the upper classes, the airs doctor state, they had
(10:28):
all the voting power. Essentially, they were maybe three percent
of the population. They were making the laws that governed
everyone else. And Louis was basically pigeonhouled into hiring a
finance minister to sort everything out because things had gotten
so financially messy, and he hired a man named Jacques Necker,
and this guy became pretty important for doing something that
hadn't been done in a hundred and seventy five years,
(10:49):
and that was calling together, uh, these States General UM.
And this was this group. Obviously the first and second
Estates were the clergy and the nobles who had the
most power, and the eard Estate UM at these meetings
began to rise up and demanding, uh, just making demands
of the king that he wouldn't give into. And one
(11:10):
of the most important members of the third Estate was
a lawyer named Maximilian robes Pierre, and he became a
very outspoken advocate of the lower classes, and people really
respected ropes Pierre. He had a lot of really silient
things to say, and he was actually called the incorruptible
because he seemed so ethical and so wise and everything
(11:30):
that he did and then ended up not being quite true.
And you know, at least at the beginning, it seemed
like his heart was in the right place. And so
the Estates General continued on with their work and they
were you know, they actually included members of the upper
class to come and meet with them because they weren't,
you know, aren't supporters of the group, because obviously they
saw their power being slowly cut off. But some would calm,
(11:53):
they'd all meet and have their assemblies. And then one
day they went to the palace to meet as usual,
and the doors were shut and reality what was going
on is that someone in the palace was preparing the
room for an address that the king would give later.
So they weren't shutting them them out. No, not exactly.
I think that this has been interpreted in many ways
throughout history, but I think the general of court is
(12:14):
they were not being bolted out. It was just an
unfortunate timing either way, though, they believed that they were
being bolted out and that's all they needed to build.
So they went to the closest room they could find,
which was an indoor tennis court, and they made it
that they would not rest until France had a new constitution.
That's right, and this seems to be a very good
step um in the people's um pursuit of more power.
(12:38):
But actually um, by like the next month, the people
were getting so frustrated they didn't think that peaceful reform
was quite possible, and so they ended up storming the
best deal, and they went there to get guns and
gunpowder and essentially show Louis that they were not playing
around anymore. And I think a really famous anecdoubt from
the French Revolution is that Louis was out hunting the
(12:58):
day that that happened, and when he got back in,
one of his advisers told him what had happened, and
he asked, is it a revolt? And his adviser said, no, sire,
it's a revolution. Like it was a big deal, and
I don't think Louis comprehended the gravity of the situation.
And on that day the guards were slaughtered, prisoners were
set free. And what's more, the best deal was this fortress,
(13:20):
this medieval fortress, and it was a symbol to the
people of the king's corruptibility because there were prisoners kept
there who were convicted of crimes sort of outside the
balance of common law, and no one knew what happened
inside this prison, but there were awful tales that people
were tortured and maimed and terrible things went on. So
(13:40):
the people of Paris just started knocking it down, brick
by brick by brick, and they certainly made their point
with the storming of the best deal that it was
a very dramatic episode. And so it seemed that the
people of Paris had united, Louie was going to be
forced into going along with the new constitution. Things were
going pretty well until they were rumors swirling around town. Uh,
(14:02):
courtesy of Mraz crazy newspaper. Well, I shouldn't say crazy,
that's not fair. Uh, courtesy of his newspaper in which
he broadcasts all this propaganda that the king and his
courtiers had stomped on the treat Caluur, which was a flag.
It's still the flag of France to day. It's the
red and blue of France, separated by the white of
the House of Bourbon, which represented the royalty. Anyway, rumors
(14:25):
that they had stomped on the flag, they had desecrated
the simpole of the the symbol of the revolution, certainly
incented the people, and at this time the women of
parish really took action, and they stormed first side. This
time they went for bread, and they went for Marie
Antoinette's head, that's right, and they just barely missed her.
She had just fled from her room when they when
(14:47):
they stormed in and but they eventually got what they wanted.
They got what the this king to to sign away
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and which basically,
you know, took power away from him significantly and actually
moved the royal family to toiletries as in the heart
of Paris, so they were under lock and key. And
(15:10):
then there were rumors again that Marie Antoinette was plotting
with her relatives in Austria to take control of Paris,
and they thought, well, you know, there's still a chance
that the royal family can reclaim power. And Marie Antoinette's lover,
han Zaxolovon first and actually orchestrated an escaped for the
royal family, and they nearly made it to Austria. They
(15:30):
were captured in Varenne, which was just miles from the
Austrian border. So Louis was brought back. He just made
him look worse, I'm sure, as trying to escape. Obviously,
he didn't look like he was going to cooperate, no,
and so any ire toward him always magnified a million times,
and he was put on trial, and at this point
he wasn't even referred to as King Louis anymore. He
(15:50):
was called by his surname Cape, which actually wasn't even
his surname. He was a Bourbon, so they got his
name wrong too, you know, to add insult to injury.
And this is when we see the National Assembly which
a draft at the Declaration of the Rights Man, they
had drafted this constitution. They seem unified until this point.
And then when you have a monarch on trial and
(16:12):
you have the extremists they want to put him to
death like a common person, and you have some people
who still have some loyalty to the crown, it was
split and there was frustrations at this time as well.
Keeping the king alive obviously might encourage um other countries
with that were monarchies at the time, to go in
and restore power, because the king was obviously uh he
(16:33):
when he was writing to other powers trying to get help,
he was saying like, look, what's happening here, The same
thing could happen in your country, and so if you
help me out, you know, we can we can stop
this sort of revolutionary fever going on. And that's certainly
was a factor. And I believe it was the Duke
of Prussia who wrote the Revolutionaries the letter later published,
and one of the newspapers, maybe Courtisy Murra, that if
(16:54):
anything happened to Louis, they would come in and burn
Paris to the ground. And that was all that a
lot of people needed to hear. And so Louis was convicted,
put to death, and that was the end of him.
So Louie's dad, the National Convention is a split. We
now over his death and now we see a new uprising.
And we should mention that these different factions did have
(17:15):
specific names. The moderates for the Giron downs, and then
the radical members were the Jacobins, and that's where Robespierre was.
So who was the leader of that? Do you remember
robes Pierre? You're about to see him get really corrupt.
A side note anyway, So then the other group we
see emerges a song coo lot and that translates into
those who do not wear breeches or those without breeches.
(17:36):
And these were the artisans of Paris, and they weren't
they weren't walking around without pants. They were walking around
without the little knee shorts. And they're actually wearing longer pants.
Wearing longer pants, yeah, because the custom was to wear breeches.
And you know, cute little tights and the danky little
buckle shoes and all the other things that sweet little
pre revolutionary frands people wore. And these were people who
(17:58):
were ruling the local areas. Was yes, yes, So we
start to see power again shifting contracting, and the ideals
of the revolution in the first place, or the ideals
of the reform that people originally wanted, they start to
get really muddied and confused because we know that at
first the people had wanted sort of a constitutional monarchy. Well,
(18:22):
obviously that wasn't gonna happen now because the monarch is dead,
So who was going to rule? There was a really
important question. And this is when Robespierre really gained in power.
And uh he obviously he sort of filled the void
of power at this time, and um, he was able
to solidify it by killing a lot of his political
(18:43):
enemies at the time, and he would eventually go on
to condone these killings publicly. At first, like the events
of the September massacre, he sort of turned his head
away and he thought, you know, well, these are the
people of Paris. They're the ones who are acting like
like beasts and and killing their fellow countrymen. I'm not
(19:03):
really a part of this, but later on, like during
the Great Terror and the Great Fear, he himself would
compose the lists of counter revolutionaries who would be put
to death. And it's important to remember at this time
that there was really not a lot of peace and France.
You know, people were fearing every day that they would
be accused of counter revolutionary activity. It was like a
witch hunt, really was right, and they did have some
(19:26):
semblance of justice when we tried to institute the revolutionary
tribunals to try these people who were accused of anti
revolutionary activity. But if you look at the stats, I
think about nine out of ten people who were tried
were found guilty and killed, and one of those was
Marie Antoinette. She wasn't going to be around for too
much longer. She continued to be suspected of plotting with
(19:47):
Austria to overthrow the revolutionaries, and she was put on
trial and one of the most poignant charges that came
against her was molestation of her own son. And Marie Antoinette,
as we now, she had been you know, sort of
a twit. No one really she but no, and that
was absolutely not true. At all. It was a horrible,
(20:08):
salacious rumor started and she sort of hung her head
when all the other charges against her were red. But
when that one was read, that was when she spoke
up and said no. And she implored the other women
in the room to sympathize with her and to really
think about how they would feel if they were charged
with such a terrible thing I can't image. And she
won their sympathy for an instant and then like that
(20:29):
it was gone. Yeah. And when Louis was put to
death at the guillotine, he at least was driven up
to the stand in an closed cart, but she was
driven in an open cart, a common criminals cart, so
people could throw things at her and spit and jeer,
and so it seemed like the people hated her even
more than they hated the king. And they did, they did.
(20:49):
And when she went up to the stand, I think
people really wanted to see her cry and prostrate herself,
and that didn't happen at all. She was very dignified
until the moment that she died. Pretty pressive. I couldn't
do that, I know. But as much as the people
wanted marantoin Net dead, and as much as her death
symbolized for the people of France and for the revolution,
it's off it. It wasn't enough. The revolution still was
(21:11):
not over, that's right. And as you said, Rospierre was
coming up with with lists of people that that he
felt needed executed, and eventually he ended up executing one
who used to be his ally, D'Anton um. And he
was a leader of the opposing party with different ideas
for where the revolution should be taken. And that's what
was so crazy about the splits and the factions of
(21:34):
the National Convention is that they kept splitting in factions
that had split off, you know, split and enough themselves.
And one of the biggest things that was really upsetting
the people here in this assembly was that they feared
so much that outside countries would attack France that they
went to war to keep their borders clear. And that
meant that there weren't enough people in the city to
(21:55):
quell any violent uprisings that occurred. So people were either
for the French revolute snary wars, they were for you know,
fighting in the cities. No one knew where their affiliations
really were. And danton and robes Pierre had been I
to eye all along, but then ribes Pierre one day
said nope, that's enough, Danton must die. And when he
went to the guillotine, I think he famously said, um,
(22:17):
I regret that I go before that rat Robespierre. So
he knew that Robespierre would would come soon. Yeah, And
you can see the public opinion is starting to get
um a little against Robespierre at the time, because Rospierre
started looking a little crazy. Um. He actually a few
months after he executed Danton, he uh, he started this
festival of the Supreme Being and he had this paper
(22:40):
mache mountain um that he paraded on through the streets
of Paris, and he looked like he was making himself
a god. Really. He had this sort of cult that
he started was sort of he was a Daist cult,
and he just wanted um morality um. As much as
he wanted to get rid of Christianity in France, he
thought that morality was pretty essential to to a civil society. Um.
(23:03):
So he's tried to unite the people with the Supreme
Being festival, when really it backfired on him and people
are like, he's crazy, We've got to get him out
of here. And he had done some other extremist things too.
He tried, after the death of Luie and toward the
shift away from the monarchy, to really really rid France
of any feelings at all that it may have had
(23:23):
towards the monarchy, or towards Christianity, or even toward time.
That's right, and what was I found fascinating. I didn't
know this until I started researching for this podcast, actually
was the idea of UM changing the concept of time
through what they called the Revolutionary Calendar, and they basically
reconstructed the days in the hours and basically what they
(23:44):
did UM they still had twelve months in a year,
but they ended up renaming everything and they ended up
taking out the seven day week and instead each month
would have three decades decades. I don't know how it's pronounced,
but UM three periods of ten days. And so this,
if you think about it, UM is no longer seven
day week. It would be a nine day week with
(24:04):
one or sorry at ten day week with one day
of rest in UM nine days of work. And so
this was sort of an attempt to get rid of
the the Christianity in the country, so they no longer
have the sense of Sundays with the Catholic church or
in these other sort of Catholic or a Christian sex. Yeah,
so Sunday being the proverbial day of worship. Unrest was
(24:27):
based out completely with the hope that people wouldn't even
recognize that this day was meant to be Sunday. That's right,
And they actually they tried to constitute a new clock. However,
I'm not really sure how this would work because they
put extra seconds in the day from what we have UM.
But at least what I read is that they each
day had ten hours UM. Each hour had ten minutes
or a hundred minutes, and each minute had a hundred seconds,
(24:49):
which you can see how this dramatically the revolution, the
whole sense of is trying to dramatically change how people
thought about everything, and the people who had the masterminds
behind these really radical change is are beginning to lose
sight of what's going on in the streets. And meanwhile
the people in the streets are harping on the bread again.
You know, where's our bread? We're still going hungry. Nothing
(25:10):
has changed. The only thing that really has is that
we don't hate literally, we just live in a constant
state of fear that we're going to be called a
counter revolutionary. That could be something like you know, bad
nothing gropes Pierre, or it could be something like plotting
against the revolution, or even just calling someone madame or
monsieur instead of citoyan, which meant citizen. So really it
was time for a revelation to come to an end.
(25:32):
I hadn't accomplished what it set out to accomplish. And
there was a quick and sustinct way to do this,
and that was to kill Ropes Pierre and all of
his allies. And that didn't quite ended. They ended up
setting up a directory after after that, right, and um,
that didn't quite satisfy anybody's needs. Like there were two
opposing views and this sort of tried to um straddle
the middle, and it ended up satisfying no one. And
(25:54):
so they called in one of the biggest war heroes
at the French Revolutionary wars, and that was good, only
appall lyambent apart. So he came in and he was
supposed to reunite friends, and he did restore religions. That
was something that he did accomplish with people of friends,
and he did restore you know, a semblance of order
and and there was food and there were resources for them.
But as we know, he went on to become a dictator,
(26:17):
that's right, and you wouldn't call himself king. Obviously they
didn't have good idea stores as a king, but he
did end up being what was called the first Console,
and I think eventually the Emperor. So obviously France had
a long way to go before it really reached the
ideals of the revolution, if it ever did. And that's
something that you can pursue more for yourself when you
read How the French Revolution worked on how stuff works
(26:37):
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