This article was originally published on WHerMoments
When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, it was a new dawn for the common people of France. There was an end to the oppressive rule of Louis XVI, the clergy, and the aristocracy. So far, so good. But sadly things soon went off the rails: an era of brutal cruelty, public executions, and massacres blighted France in the 1790s. Read on for some shocking tales from the French Revolution that you probably didn’t hear about at school.
A cook cooked
In his 2007 book You Wouldn't Want to Be an Aristocrat in the French Revolution! — A Horrible Time in Paris You'd Rather Avoid author Jim Pipe related an extraordinary tale.
According to Pipe, a certain assistant cook publicly proclaimed his support for the French queen, Marie Antoinette, in the midst of the revolution. This was a mistake: a mob seized the unfortunate man and tortured him with hot butter. Things then took a turn for the worse when the victim was actually burnt to death.
Gruesome souvenirs
After King Louis XVI’s appointment with the guillotine in 1793 some of the more ghoulish among the spectators took the opportunity to grab souvenirs. Some clipped locks of hair from the monarch’s head, while others dipped handkerchiefs into his blood.
In 2013 a cloth that had allegedly been stained with Louis’ blood came up for auction in Paris and sold for $24,400.
Famous last words
As Marie Antoinette stepped on to the scaffold supporting the guillotine which was about to be used on her, she trod on her executioner’s toes. Given that she must have been rather nervous to say the least, this gaffe is surely forgivable.
Even so the Queen, courteous to the last, said, “Pardon, monsieur. I did not do it on purpose.” And those were the last words she spoke before losing her head.
Fall of The Bastille
When the French Revolution erupted, angry citizens targeted the Bastille, the infamous Parisian jail where Kings had imprisoned their enemies. Unfortunately when an enraged mob reached the walls of the Bastille, it turned out that nobody had remembered to bring any explosives to blow the place up.
Undeterred, the revolutionary citizens tore down the walls with their bare hands.
Libelles
One way that discontented French citizens expressed their anger with the royal family was to print salacious pamphlets, which made all kinds of defamatory allegations. These publications were known as libelles.
One choice example was printed in the year of the revolution, 1789. According to this libelle, Marie Antoinette was having an affair with her brother-in-law, the Count of Artois. The pamphlet went as far as to claim that the count, not her husband the King, was the father of her children.
Expensive wars
The country’s dire financial position was a major factor in sparking the anger that fueled the French Revolution: it was not far from bankruptcy in 1789. A prime reason for the nation’s financial woes was that France was involved in not one, but two wars before the revolution.
Firstly, it provided funds and resources to the cause of revolutionary America. Secondly, it had been involved in an intense European conflict, the Seven Years War.
Reign of Terror
Maximilien Robespierre, a leading figure in the French Revolution, ran the Committee of Public Safety. This was the body that sentenced so many French citizens to death.
In the years 1793 and 1794, almost 17,000 people were executed at the behest of Robespierre’s committee during what became known as the Reign of Terror. And if that wasn't bloody enough, thousands of other innocents died in prison, where they were often locked up without a trial.
We’ll have no budget here!
Presumably with an eye to the fact that the nation’s treasury was becoming increasingly threadbare, French finance minister Jacques Necker made a radical suggestion. He proposed that Louis and his family should set themselves a budget and try to stick to it.
This did not appeal to the King or the Queen one little bit, so they fired Necker for his impudence.
The Cult of the Supreme Being
While Robespierre was one of the French Revolution’s most prominent leaders, helping to radically change the political landscape of 18th-century France apparently was not enough to satisfy him. For he also created an entirely new religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being.
The Alpha History website describes the creed as “an artificial religion based on national and Enlightenment values.” It petered out after 1794 — we’ll address exactly why a little later.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
In 1789 a French Revolution politician called Joseph-Ignace Guillotin conceived the principle of a machine which would efficiently execute felons — and so the guillotine was born. Its frequent use during the Revolution’s Reign of Terror is well known.
But less familiar is the fact that the dreadful machine was in use in France as late as 1977. The last person to be guillotined was Hamida Djandoubi, a convicted murderer.
Decimal time
During the heady early days of the French Revolution, there seemed to be no aspect of daily life that couldn’t be improved. That included time itself.
The old system of 60 seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the hour and 24 hours in a day was jettisoned in 1794. Henceforth, there were 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour and 20 hours in a day: time was decimalized. This reform proved to be less than practical and was abandoned after 17 months.
A humane form of capital punishment for all
Perhaps strangely to our modern sensibilities, one reason for the introduction of the guillotine was to give equal rights to all of the French population. Before the guillotine, only aristocrats were entitled to execution by decapitation.
But with the introduction of this highly efficient machine, any French felon could enjoy the benefits of beheading. Not only that, but they would lose their heads in the most effective and painless way possible.
Freedom for slaves
France’s governing body after the revolution was the National Assembly; it was soon faced with lobbying from pro- and anti-slavery factions. Perhaps the key factor that made the assembly decide to abolish slavery in 1794 was the uprising in Saint-Domingue, modern Haiti.
Once the assembly had prohibited the practice, thousands of people of African heritage in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere in the French colonies became free. Unfortunately, after gaining control of France, Napoleon Bonaparte reintroduced slavery in 1802.
Death of Marat
Jean-Paul Marat was a political philosopher who played an important part in the French Revolution. He belonged to a radical faction, the Montagnards.
They were bitterly opposed by a separate republican group, the more conservative Girondins. Although they were all revolutionaries, the animosity between the factions ran deep. So deep, in fact, that in 1793 Charlotte Corday, a Girondin supporter, stabbed Marat to death while he was in his bath. She was guillotined a few days later.
Death by drowning
Death by guillotine was not the only horror that many French citizens had to face during the Reign of Terror that ran from 1793 to 1794. There was also drowning, in particular in a macabre series of incidents in the French city of Nantes.
People accused of being counter-revolutionaries were taken by boat into the middle of the Loire River and cast overboard to drown. As many as 4,800 met their end in this way.
Punishing the dead
Many deceased members of the French royal family were buried at a necropolis in the city of Saint-Denis, just to the north of Paris. The revolutionary government ordered that those dead royals should be disinterred.
This macabre episode was intended to allow revolutionary France to make a complete break with its royal past. The desecrated bodies were reburied in anonymous trenches and covered in quicklime.
Religion
Although the French Revolution greatly weakened the power of the Catholic Church over the lives of citizens, it also gave religious freedom to non-Catholics. Before the revolution, Protestants were barely tolerated, but that changed along with so much in French society.
Jews, too, benefited from the uprising, since they could for the first time become full French citizens. The constitution of 1791 stated that every citizen could “worship according to his beliefs.”
A day out at the guillotine
During the Reign of Terror, guillotine executions were a regular event. In Paris the main location for executions was the aptly named Place de la Revolution.
Large crowds of spectators would assemble on the days that aristocrats and counter-revolutionaries were due to meet their fate. For the best views, early attendance was recommended, and spectators could even get a bite to eat at the nearby eaterie, Cabaret de la Guillotine.
“Let them eat cake!”
Perhaps one of the most famous quotes from the French Revolution era came from Queen Marie Antoinette. When told that the common people of France had no bread to eat, her callous retort was reportedly, “Let them eat cake.”
Except she almost certainly didn’t say those words: the quote falls into the category of what we might now call fake news. There is no concrete evidence that the monarch ever uttered the sentence attributed to her.
Pricey bread
One key cause of the French Revolution was the price of a basic necessity: bread. The poorer classes of French society depended on bread as their staple diet, but during the 1780s the price of a loaf went higher and higher.
At one point in the lead-up to the revolution, bread was taking up as much as 80 percent of an average household budget. By 1789 a hungry populace was ready to overthrow the established order.
Anyone for tennis?
A tennis court played an important part in the French Revolution, but there wasn’t a racquet or ball to be seen. In the summer of 1789 the National Assembly, a gathering of ordinary citizens bent on overthrowing the monarchy, needed somewhere to meet.
Normally they’d have convened in the Salle des États but the King had forbidden access to that venue. So the meeting took place in an indoor tennis court. This gathering resulted in Louis agreeing that France should have a written constitution — a key step on the road to revolution.
Storming of the Bastille
Perhaps the best-known single event of the French Revolution was the storming of the Bastille fortress by the Parisian citizenry on July 14, 1789. As already noted, the ancient fortress was also a prison which French monarchs used to lock up political dissidents and enemies.
But the affair wasn’t quite as dramatic as it might have been, since on that July day the Bastille held only seven prisoners. You might have heard of one of them: the Marquis de Sade.
Foiled escape
In the days before everyone had access to newspapers and magazines, and of course before photography was a thing, few French people would have had a clear idea of what Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette looked like. So when they tried to escape from house arrest in Paris, they might have got clean away.
But unfortunately Louis’s face was on French coinage, so he was recognized and recaptured with Marie Antoinette within 24 hours.
The first public zoo
Of course the French Revolution had wide-ranging impacts that went far beyond the nation’s own borders. But there was one innovation that sprung from the revolution that seems rather unlikely on the face of it: the public zoo.
In 1793 the National Assembly ordered that all exotic animals in private hands must be surrendered to the Palace of Versailles menagerie. That became the foundation of the world’s first public zoo — and it was free.
Unpaid labor
Louis XVI did actually make efforts to improve the lot of the French peasantry during his reign. One example was the abolition of unpaid labor.
Peasants were required to spend two weeks in each year on road-building work, which they were forced to do without pay. The King abolished this obligation, obviously a popular move among the common people. Yet it wasn’t enough to subdue the discontent that led to the French Revolution and the execution of Louis.
Just desserts for Robespierre
Robespierre is remembered for the leading part he played in the most brutal years of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror. Eventually, in 1794 he himself became a victim of his own cruel system.
His enemies, worried he would have them executed, plotted against him, and he was arrested along with 12 of his supporters. One of the very laws created by Robespierre was used to impose the death sentence on him and his followers.
Food shortages
Not long before the French revolution broke out, bad weather — including a devastating hail storm — had a terrible impact on the grain harvest. That caused food shortages and high prices, contributing to popular discontent.
One particular demonstration in October 1789 was known as the Women's March on Versailles. It involved thousands of women marching from Paris to the King’s palace. The ruler was forced to return to Paris; his authority as an absolute monarch was diminishing by the day.
From revolution to dictatorship
In its early days, the French Revolution was a movement to oust the absolute monarchy and to give more power to the ordinary people. But as the years went by the revolution took unexpected turns.
The Reign of Terror saw thousands executed and France seemed to be on the verge of anarchy. Then a dominant figure appeared on the political scene: Napoleon Bonaparte. So ultimately the revolution ended up with Napoleon as undisputed dictator of the nation from 1799.
Declaration of the Rights of Woman
Olympe de Gouges was a noted dramatist and an early proponent of women’s rights. She penned a political work titled Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791.
She called for women to have the same rights as men in revolutionary France. But Madame de Gouges supported the moderate revolutionary faction, the Girondins. Unfortunately for her, the radical Montagnards became dominant. She was tried by them on trumped up charges and guillotined in 1793.
Revolutionary fashion
One lesser-known fact about the French Revolution is that it sparked fashions in clothing. These fashions often had deliberate political connations.
For example, the revolutionaries liked to call themselves sans-culottes. That translates literally as “without knee breeches”: aristocrats wore silk breeches that came down to the knee. The revolutionaries pointedly wore baggy trousers, known as pantalons. They also wore red caps to signal their allegiance.
The French Estates
Up until the French Revolution, society was rigidly divided into three classes called estates. The First Estate’s members were the clergy, the Second’s were the aristocracy, and the Third Estate — by far the largest — comprised the common people.
The clergy and the aristocracy lived privileged lives and held political power in France. The Third Estate had no say in everyday affairs and were often impoverished, yet they paid the most tax. A sure recipe for a major social upheaval.
The American Revolution
Of course the Americans had their own revolution, which started some 15 years before the French version got going. It was a rather different affair from the French Revolution, since it was a people rising up against a despotic colonial power, the British.
Even so, many French people took encouragement from the fact that the American revolutionaries had successfully overthrown the rule of a monarch.
Salt tax
For the Third Estate — remember, that’s everyone who wasn’t a member of the clergy or the aristocracy — taxes were a particular bone of contention. One especially hated tax was the gabelle.
That was a levy on salt, an everyday necessity used by everyone. But it wasn’t a worry for the clergy or the aristocracy: they were exempt. This glaring inequality was a contributing factor to the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Destruction of Lyon
Once the revolution got under way, as previously noted the participants soon split into two factions: the Girondins, characterized as moderates and the Montagnards, who took a much more radical stance. The French city of Lyon became a stronghold of Girondin supporters.
But it was the Montagnards that emerged as the most powerful national force. So the Montagnards laid siege to Lyon; the conflict resulted in some 2,000 dead and the destruction of much of the city.
Law of 22 Prairial
Robespierre, leading light of the French Revolution and architect of the Reign of Terror, decided that the French justice system needed streamlining. He wanted to see shorter trials and some new offenses.
In 1794 Robespierre pushed the Law of 22 Prairial through the National Convention, the ruling body of the time. It made almost any kind of dissent illegal and required people to inform on their neighbors. Trials were to last three days and the only possible sentence for those found guilty was death.
The Vendée Massacre
In 1793 during the Reign of Terror, residents of the western France region of the Vendée rose up against the oppressive revolutionary rule of the National Convention. Many people in the Vendée were dismayed by the brutality that the revolution had brought to France.
The National Convention sent an army against the militias that had been formed in the Vendée. After crushing armed resistance, the revolutionary army went on to massacre as many as 6,000 Vendée citizens and laid waste to the region.
Law of the Maximum
As noted, one of the prime factors behind the eruption of the French Revolution was the fact that food prices were sky-high. Yet within a few years of the Revolution in 1793 the price of staples like bread had begun to rise again.
Radical protesters now claimed that wealthy merchants had taken the place of the vanquished aristocracy. In response, the revolutionary authorities passed the Law of the Maximum, which capped prices. This resulted in a collapse of food supplies and a thriving black market, as farmers refused to sell at the lower prices.
September Massacres
A few days in September 1792 saw one of the most brutal excesses of the French revolution: a mob broke into various prisons in Paris and killed all the inmates there. The mob apparently believed that political prisoners were plotting to overthrow the revolution.
A total of some 1,200 prisoners were killed during this massacre; it besmirched the reputation of the revolution both at home and abroad.
An end to serfdom
Perhaps Louis could see that the oppression of the peasantry in France would one day lead to disaster. Whatever his motivation, he did try to improve the lives of those at the bottom of the French social system.
Notable among those were the serfs, who were basically one step away from outright slavery. In 1779 Louis abolished serfdom on royal estates. But it was too little too late: the revolution started a decade later anyway.
A cheering crowd
When his enemies rose against him, Robespierre tried to escape his fate by committing suicide. Yet the author of much of the cruelty that blighted the French revolution, particularly during the Reign of Terror, only succeeded in shooting himself in the jaw.
He was duly sentenced to death and was guillotined in front of a cheering crowd.