THE FRENCH REVOLUTION-BEGINNINGS

TANGIBLE FACTS-ABSTRACT LESSONS

I have just finished “Marie Antoinette” by Antonia Fraser and have come a long way in my understanding of exactly what the situation was at that time in France. The volume is very thoroughly researched and this saves us a lot of time because Ms Fraser has performed the labor for us. I now can actually visualize some of those events, such as the march of the market-women on Versailles, 5 October 1789, when the royalty was forced back to Paris for a make-shift imprisonment and a tragic demise that has not been duplicated in the pages of history. There was a bread shortage, so these women wanted to go for the storage silos of Versailles, and that is just what they did. There was some violence at the palace and surely this must have been an awakening of the problems to come for the royals. As their carriage bumped along the road, peasants carried pikes with their servants heads before their eyes. Marie had a great amount of courage and scowled a bit on her ride to the guillotine. Jacques Louis David captured her cleverly in this sketch as she passed him by on the 16th of October 1793. One fact that I learned is that Madam Tussauds waxed Marie`s head at her grave. Okay, it is a benefit for us to have her living visage to still gaze at. The book was so fact filled that I felt as if I was truly there, with details of the court, letters, paintings, and the careful record of those days preserved for us today. So much romanticism has been spun around The French Revolution, such as in this painting by Delacroix (towards bottom); this is a symbolic and dramatized image of the Revolution, imflammatory even. Nonetheless, these events evoke raging passion if nothing else! I have been going back and reading excerpts from the vast body of literature on the Revolution, and have carved out a mere fraction of its corpus. The Marxist historian Georges Lefebvre spent his whole life in archives pouring over the details of the years 1789-1799. We can benefit immensely by reviewing his work, that is still saturated with his toil of purpose. I do not believe that anyone else has ever touched this hallowed ground so carefully, or visited these moments of democracy so vividly. Not just the facts were culled over though, but a synthesis of the lessons were exacted through dedication and struggle for the lessons of these days. Alexis De Tocqueville did this too in “The Old Regime and the French Revolution”; this is a series of maxims that tell how the Ancien Régime came unwound. The writing was done some fifty years after the events, so it is within proximity to the actual time. What it comes down to basically for me, is the destruction of the feudal system that had been into affect since the time Charlemagne. The aristocracy was systematically exterminated and the royalty was snuffed out too (though it reared its head again), or the idea of the divine right of the king. The bourgeoisie came into its own. This is what Lefebvre looks at under a microscope.The unraveling of social classes, the particulars of how this was brought about are the subject of his words. The Terror and the many visits to the guillotine; this is the price paid to soften the class barriers of France. An other change was the elimination of the clergy and the confiscation of their land. They never recovered after that. I have read The Results of The Revolution In France a number times already; this is the last chapter of book two of “The French Revolution” by Georges Lefebvre. It is dense and shows a lot of synthesis and requires concentration and meditation. Over taxing of the rural peasant with the tithe, bread shortages, the debt of the crown and Necker, the confiscation of weapons at the Bastille, the foreign wars as crowns of Europe looked on with horror, left-wing-the sans-culottes-rising lower class that aided Robespierre, the Intendants were the corrupt tax agents of the crown, the influence of the philosophs…What is actually said in The Declaration of the Rights of Men? I am linking it to you so that you can study it! I will do so also! I am beginning to believe that The French Revolution is the most important event in history, so far. The feudal system had to go. The Enlightened Despots such as Louis XIV were a thing of the past. The influence of the American Revolution on the French one was enormous too! Both authors touch on this. Marat was the Thomas Paine of France, I gleaned the other night. It was a proletariat revolution too. That is brought out by Lefebvre, so the Russian Revolution of 1917 had its roots in the eighteenth century. The guild system in the city of Paris was completely destroyed. It was both the upper bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie that experienced victories, until the Thermodor and Napoleon had a right reaction. One must study these issues daily in order to live in the current world!