In the countryside, as many historians have shown, it was directed against elite fief-holders, and the taxes and tolls they collected above all from well-off, entrepreneurial peasants. Even the dramatic popular violence that repeatedly drove the revolution forward was mostly carried out by men with more than a little to lose. (Not on the list, please note, is Victor Hugo’s Les Misrables, source of the popular musical, whose climactic scenes take place during the Parisian insurrection of 1832, not the events of 1789).īut the poorest of the poor played relatively little part in a revolution that began among wealthy nobles and professionals in meeting halls at Versailles, weeks before the fall of the Bastille. The French Revolution was an uprising of the downtrodden.Ĭharles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is only the best known of many novels that portray France’s wretched poor taking revenge on their aristocratic oppressors during the revolution. Found guilty, she died on the guillotine.
FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY CALENDAR 5 YEAR WALL TRIAL
In the autumn of 1793, less than a year after the execution of her husband, King Louis XVI, the revolutionary government put Marie-Antoinette on trial for crimes that included the alleged sexual abuse of her son. The purported callous remark about the poor was just icing, so to speak, on the brioche. Misogynistic journalists depicted her as a murderous, hedonistic person plotting to betray the country to France’s enemy, her native Austria. But after 1789, her opposition to the French Revolution made her one of the most hated figures in the country. Marie-Antoinette, while no paragon of humility or simplicity, had genuine charitable instincts towards poor people. It expressed the widespread popular conviction that luxury-besotted royals neither understood nor cared for the famine-prone poor. Versions of it, attributed to several earlier French rulers, circulated as early as the 1600s and appeared most famously in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which was written before Marie-Antoinette even married the future Louis XVI. In fact, the French word was not “gteau” (cake) but “brioche” (a breadlike pastry) and the queen never made the remark. Just three years ago, the New York Post not only repeated this myth, but claimed that it “reputedly sparked the French Revolution”.
When told that the starving poor had no bread to eat, Queen Marie-Antoinette replied: “Let them eat cake.” To mark this year’s remembrance, here are the real stories behind five other canards. France’s national holiday commemorates two separate events: The fall of the Bastille fortress in Paris to revolutionary crowds on July 14, 1789, but also - because 19th-century legislators wanted something less bloody to celebrate - the massive, peaceful “Festival of Federation” held throughout France on July 14, 1790, to express the French people’s commitment to liberty and unity. Even the name Bastille Day is something of a misnomer. But many of the myths surrounding the revolution have proved more difficult to extinguish. Two hundred and twenty-six years after the fall of the Bastille, the French Revolution stirs passions mostly among historians like myself.
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