French Revolution: A Bloody Event That Changed The Course Of History
1789 is one of the most significant dates in history — famous for the revolution in France with its cries of ‘Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!’, the revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and reached its first climax there in 1789. Hence the conventional term “Revolution of 1789,” denoting the end of the Ancien Régime (Old Regime) in France and serving also to distinguish that event from the later French revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
Causes
Historians have pointed to many events and factors within the Ancien Régime that led to the Revolution. Rising social and economic inequality, new political ideas emerging from the Enlightenment, economic mismanagement, environmental factors leading to agricultural failure, unmanageable national debt, and political mismanagement by King Louis XVI have all been cited as laying the groundwork for the Revolution.
Over the 18th century, there emerged what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the “public sphere” in France and elsewhere in Europe. Habermas argued that the dominant cultural model in 17th-century France was a “representational” culture, which was based on a one-sided need to “represent” power with one side active and the other passive. A perfect example would be the Palace of Versailles, which overwhelmed the senses of the visitor and convince one of the greatness of the French state and Louis XIV. Starting in the early 18th century the “public sphere” emerged which was “critical” in that both sides were active. Examples of the public sphere included newspapers, journals, masonic lodges, coffee houses and reading clubs where people either in person or virtually via the printed word debated and discussed issues. In France, the emergence of the public sphere outside of the control of the state led to the shift from Versailles to Paris as the cultural capital of France. Likewise, while in the 17th century the court had decided what was culturally good and what was not, in the 18th century the opinion of the court mattered less and consumers became the arbiters of cultural taste. In the 1750s, during the “Querelle des Bouffons” over the question of the quality of Italian vs. French music, the partisans of both sides appealed to the French public “because it may alone decide whether a work will be preserved for posterity or will be used by grocers as a wrapping-paper”. In 1782, Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote: “The word court no longer inspires awe amongst us as in the time of Louis XIV. Reigning opinions are no longer received from the court; it no longer decides on reputations of any sort… The court’s judgments are countermanded; one says openly that it understands nothing; it has no ideas on the subject and could have none.” Inevitably, the belief that public opinion had the right to decide cultural questions instead of deferring to the court transformed itself into the demand that the public also has a say on political questions.
The economy in the Ancien Régime during the years preceding the Revolution suffered from instability. The sequence of events leading to the Revolution included the national government’s fiscal troubles caused by an unjust, inefficient and deeply hated tax system — the ferme générale — and by expenditure on many large wars. The attempt to challenge British naval and commercial power in the Seven Years’ War was a costly disaster, with the loss of France’s colonial possessions in continental North America and the destruction of the French Navy. French forces were rebuilt and feeling bitter about having lost many of France’s overseas colonies to the British Empire during the Seven Years’ War, Louis XVI was eager to give the American rebels financial and military support. After the British surrender at the Battle of Saratoga, the French sent 10,000 troops and millions of dollars to the rebels. Despite gaining independence for the Thirteen Colonies, France was severely indebted by the American Revolutionary War. France’s inefficient and antiquated financial system could not finance this debt. Faced with a financial crisis, the king called an Estates-General, recommended by the Assembly of Notables in 1787 for the first time in over a century.
France was experiencing such a severe economic depression that there wasn’t enough food to go around. Poor harvests lasting several years and an inadequate transportation system, both contributed to making food more expensive. As with most monarchies, the upper class was always ensured a stable living, so while the rich remained very wealthy, most of the French population was starving. Many were so destitute that they couldn’t even feed their families and resorted to theft or prostitution to stay alive. Meanwhile, the royal court at Versailles was isolated from and indifferent to the escalating crisis. While in theory, King Louis XVI was an absolute monarch, in practice he was often indecisive and known to back down when faced with strong opposition. While he reduced government expenditures, opponents in the parlements (in the Ancien Régime of France, was a provincial appellate court) successfully thwarted his attempts at enacting much-needed reforms. The Enlightenment had produced many writers, pamphleteers, and publishers who could inform or inflame public opinion. The opposition used this resource to mobilize public opinion against the monarchy, which tried to repress the underground literature.
Many other factors involved resentments and aspirations given focus by the rise of Enlightenment ideals. These included resentment of royal absolutism; resentment by peasants, labourers and the bourgeoisie towards the traditional seigneurial privileges possessed by the nobility; resentment of the Catholic Church’s influence over public policy and institutions; aspirations for freedom of religion; resentment of aristocratic bishops by the poorer rural clergy; aspirations for social, political and economic equality, and (especially as the Revolution progressed) republicanism; hatred of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who was falsely accused of being a spendthrift and an Austrian spy; and anger towards the King for dismissing ministers, including finance minister Jacques Necker, who were popularly seen as representatives of the people.
Ancien Régime
In 1774 Louis XVI ascended to the throne in the middle of a financial crisis in which the state faced a budget deficit and was nearing bankruptcy. This was due in part to France’s costly involvements in the Seven Years’ War and later the American Revolutionary War. In May 1776, finance minister Turgot was dismissed, after failing to enact reforms. The next year, Jacques Necker, a foreigner, was appointed Comptroller-General of Finance. He could not be made an official minister because he was a Protestant.
Necker realized that the country’s regressive tax system subjected the lower classes to a heavy burden, while many exemptions existed for the nobility and clergy. He argued that the country could not be taxed higher; that tax exemptions for the nobility and clergy must be reduced; and proposed that borrowing more money would solve the country’s fiscal shortages. Necker published a report to support this claim that underestimated the deficit by roughly 36 million livres and proposed restricting the power of the parlements.
This was not received well by the King’s ministers, and Necker, hoping to bolster his position, argued to be made a minister. The King refused, Necker was dismissed, and Charles Alexandre de Calonne was appointed to the Comptrollership. Calonne initially spent liberally, but he quickly realized the critical financial situation and proposed a new tax code.
The proposal included a consistent land tax, which would include taxation of the nobility and clergy. Faced with opposition from the parlements, Calonne organized the summoning of the Assembly of Notables. But the Assembly did not endorse Calonne’s proposals and instead weakened his position through its criticism. In response, the King announced the calling of the Estates-General for May 1789, the first time the body had been summoned since 1614. This was a signal that the Bourbon monarchy was in a weakened state and subject to the demands of its people.
Estates-General of 1789
The Estates-General was organized into three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the rest of France. It had last met in 1614. Elections were held in the spring of 1789; suffrage requirements for the Third Estate were for French-born or naturalized males, aged 25 years or more, who lived where the vote was to take place and who paid taxes. Strong turnout produced 1,201 delegates, including 303 clergies, 291 nobles and 610 members of the Third Estate. The First Estate represented 100,000 Catholic clergies; the Church owned about 10% of the land and collected its taxes (the tithe) on peasants. The lands were controlled by bishops and abbots of monasteries, but two-thirds of the 303 delegates from the First Estate were ordinary parish priests; only 51 were bishops. The Second Estate represented the nobility, about 400,000 men and women who owned about 25% of the land and collected seigneurial dues and rents from their peasant tenants. About a third of these deputies were nobles, mostly with minor holdings. The Third Estate representation was doubled to 610 men, representing 95% of the population. Half were well educated lawyers or local officials. Nearly a third were in trades or industry; 51 were wealthy landowners.
To assist delegates, “Books of grievances” (Cahiers de doléances) were compiled to list problems. The books articulated ideas which would have seemed radical only months before; however, most supported the monarchical system. Many assumed the Estates-General would approve future taxes, and Enlightenment ideals were relatively rare.
Pamphlets by liberal nobles and clergy became widespread after the lifting of press censorship. The Abbé Sieyès, a theorist and Catholic clergyman, argued the paramount importance of the Third Estate in the pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (What is the Third Estate?) published on January 1789. He asserted: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.”
The Estates-General convened in the Grands Salles des Menus-Plaisirs in Versailles on 5 May 1789 and opened with a three-hour speech by Necker. The Third Estate demanded that the credentials of deputies should be verified by all deputies, rather than each estate verifying the credentials of its members, but negotiations with the other estates did to achieve this. The commoners appealed to the clergy who asked for more time. Necker then stated that each estate should verify its own members’ credentials and that the king should act as an arbitrator.
National Assembly
On 10 June 1789 Abbé Sieyès moved that the Third Estate, now meeting as the Communes (English: “Commons”) proceed with verifying its powers and invite the other two estates to take part, but not to wait for them. They proceeded to do so two days later, completing the process on 17 June. Then they voted a measure far more radical, declaring themselves the National Assembly, an assembly not of the Estates but of “the People”. They invited the other orders to join them but made it clear they intended to conduct the nation’s affairs with or without them.
In an attempt to keep control of the process and prevent the Assembly from convening, Louis XVI ordered the closure of the Salle des États where the Assembly met, making an excuse that the carpenters needed to prepare the hall for a royal speech in two days. The weather did not allow an outdoor meeting, and fearing an attack ordered by Louis XVI, they met in a tennis court just outside Versailles, where they proceeded to swear the Tennis Court Oath (20 June 1789) under which they agreed not to separate until they had given France a constitution. A majority of the representatives of the clergy soon joined them, as did 47 members of the nobility. By 27 June, the royal party had overtly given in, although the military began to arrive in large numbers around Paris and Versailles. Messages of support for the Assembly poured in from Paris and other French cities.
The storming of the Bastille
By this time, Necker had earned the enmity of many members of the French court for his overt manipulation of public opinion. Marie Antoinette, the King’s younger brother the Comte d’Artois, and other conservative members of the King’s privy council urged him to dismiss Necker as financial advisor. On July 11, 1789, after Necker published an inaccurate account of the government’s debts and made it available to the public, the King fired him and completely restructured the finance ministry at the same time.
Many Parisians presumed Louis’ actions to be aimed against the Assembly and began an open rebellion when they heard the news the next day. They were also afraid that arriving soldiers — mostly foreign mercenaries — had been summoned to shut down the National Constituent Assembly. The Assembly, meeting at Versailles, went into nonstop session to prevent another eviction from their meeting place. Paris was soon consumed by riots, chaos, and widespread looting. The mobs soon had the support of some French Guards, who were armed and trained soldiers.
On July 14, the insurgents set their eyes on the large weapons and ammunition cache inside the Bastille fortress, which was also perceived to be a symbol of royal power. After several hours of combat, the prison fell that afternoon. Despite ordering a ceasefire which prevented a mutual massacre, Governor Marquis Bernard-René de Launay was beaten, stabbed and decapitated; his head was placed on a pike and paraded about the city. Although the fortress had held only seven prisoners (four forgers, two noblemen kept for immoral behavior, and a murder suspect) the Bastille served as a potent symbol of everything hated under the Ancien Régime. Returning to the Hôtel de Ville (city hall), the mob accused the prévôt des marchands (roughly, mayor) Jacques de Flesselles of treachery and butchered him.
The King, alarmed by the violence, backed down, at least for the time being. The Marquis de Lafayette took up command of the National Guard at Paris. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, president of the Assembly at the time of the Tennis Court Oath, became the city’s mayor under a new governmental structure known as the commune. The King visited Paris, where, on July 17, he accepted a tricolor cockade, to cries of Vive la Nation (“Long live the Nation”) and Vive le Roi (“Long live the King”).
Necker was recalled to power, but his triumph was short-lived. An astute financier but a less astute politician, Necker overplayed his hand by demanding and getting a general amnesty, losing much of the people’s favor.
As civil authority rapidly deteriorated, with random acts of violence and theft breaking out across the country, members of the nobility, fearing for their safety, fled to neighboring countries; many of these émigrés, as they were called, funded counter-revolutionary causes within France and urged foreign monarchs to offer military support to a counter-revolution.
By late July, the spirit of popular sovereignty had spread throughout France. In rural areas, many commoners began to form militias and arm themselves against a foreign invasion: some attacked the châteaux of the nobility as part of a general agrarian insurrection known as “la Grande Peur” (“the Great Fear”). Also, wild rumors and paranoia caused widespread unrest and civil disturbances that contributed to the collapse of law and order.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen
On 4 and 11 August 1789, the National Constituent Assembly abolished privileges and feudalism (many peasant revolts had almost brought feudalism to an end) in the August Decrees, sweeping away personal serfdom, exclusive hunting rights and other seigneurial rights of the Second Estate (nobility).
Also, the tithe (a 10% tax for the Church, gathered by the First Estate, clergy), which had been the main source of income for many clergymen, was abolished. During a few hours nobles, clergy, towns, provinces, companies, and cities lost their special privileges.
Originally the peasants were supposed to pay for the release of seigneurial dues; these dues affected more than a fourth of the farmland in France and provided most of the income of the large landowners. The majority refused to pay and in 1793 the obligation was canceled. Thus the peasants got their land free, and also no longer paid the tithe to the church.
The old judicial system, based on the 13 regional parlements, was suspended in November 1789, and officially abolished in September 1790. The main institutional pillars of the old regime had vanished overnight.
On August 26, 1789, the Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which comprised a statement of principles rather than a constitution with legal effect. The Declaration was directly influenced by Thomas Jefferson working with General Lafayette, who introduced it.
The National Constituent Assembly functioned not only as a legislature but also as a body to draft a new constitution.
Women’s March on Versailles
Fuelled by rumors of a reception for the King’s bodyguards on October 1, 1789, at which the national cockade had been trampled upon, on October 5th1789, crowds of women began to assemble at Parisian markets. The women first marched to the Hôtel de Ville, demanding that city officials address their concerns. The women were responding to the harsh economic situations they faced, especially bread shortages. They also demanded an end to royal efforts to block the National Assembly, and for the King and his administration to move to Paris as a sign of good faith in addressing the widespread poverty.
Getting unsatisfactory responses from city officials, 7,000 women joined the march to Versailles, bringing with them cannons and a variety of smaller weapons. Twenty thousand National Guardsmen under the command of Lafayette responded to keep order, and members of the mob stormed the palace, killing several guards. Lafayette ultimately persuaded the king to agree to the demand of the crowd that the monarchy moves to Paris.
On October 6, 1789, the King and the royal family moved from Versailles to Paris under the “protection” of the National Guards, thus legitimizing the National Assembly.
Revolution and the Church
The Revolution caused a massive shift of power from the Roman Catholic Church to the state. Under the Ancien Régime, the Church had been the largest single landowner in the country, owning about 10% of the land in the kingdom. The Church was exempt from paying taxes to the government, while it levied a tithe — a 10% tax on income, often collected in the form of crops — on the general population, only a fraction of which is then redistributed to the poor.
Resentment towards the Church weakened its power during the opening of the Estates-General in May 1789. The Church composed the First Estate with 130,000 members of the clergy. When the National Assembly was later created in June 1789 by the Third Estate, the clergy voted to join them, which perpetuated the destruction of the Estates-General as a governing body. The National Assembly began to enact social and economic reform. Legislation sanctioned on August 4, 1789, abolished the Church’s authority to impose the tithe. To address the financial crisis, the Assembly declared, on November 2, 1789, that the property of the Church was “at the disposal of the nation”. They used this property to back a new currency, the assignats. Thus, the nation had now also taken on the responsibility of the Church, which included paying the clergy and caring for the poor, the sick and the orphaned. In December, the Assembly began to sell the lands to the highest bidder to raise revenue, effectively decreasing the value of the assignats by 25% in two years. In autumn 1789, legislation abolished monastic vows and on 13 February 1790, all religious orders were dissolved. Monks and nuns were encouraged to return to private life and a small percentage did eventually marry.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy passed on July 12, 1790, turned the remaining clergy into employees of the state. This established an election system for parish priests and bishops and set a pay rate for the clergy. Many Catholics objected to the election system because it denied the authority of the Pope in Rome over the French Church. In October a group of 30 bishops wrote a declaration saying they could not accept that law, and this protest fueled also civilian opposition against that law. Eventually, in November 1790, the National Assembly began to require an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution from all the members of the clergy. This led to a schism between those clergies who swore the required oath and accepted the new arrangement and those who remained loyal to the Pope. Priests swearing the oath were showed as ‘constitutional’, those not taking the oath as ‘non-juring’ or ‘refractory’ clergy. Overall, 24% of the clergy nationwide took the oath. This decree stiffened the resistance against the state’s interference with the church, especially in the west of France like in Normandy, Brittany, and the Vendée, where only a few priests took the oath and the civilian population turned against the revolution.
The widespread refusal led to legislation against the clergy, “forcing them into exile, deporting them forcibly, or executing them as traitors”. Pope Pius VI never accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, further isolating the Church in France.
A new Republican Calendar was established in 1793, with 10-day weeks that made it very difficult for Catholics to remember Sundays and saints’ days. Workers complained it reduced the number of first-day-of-the-week holidays from 52 to 37.
During the Reign of Terror, extreme efforts of de-Christianisation ensued, including the imprisonment and massacre of priests and destruction of churches and religious images throughout France. An effort was made to replace the Catholic Church altogether, with civic festivals replacing religious ones. The establishment of the Cult of Reason was the final step of radical de-Christianisation. These events led to widespread disillusionment with the Revolution and counter-rebellions across France. Locals often resisted de-Christianisation by attacking revolutionary agents and hiding members of the clergy who were being hunted. Eventually, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety were forced to denounce the campaign, replacing the Cult of Reason with the deist but still non-Christian Cult of the Supreme Being. The Concordat of 1801 between Napoleon and the Church ended the de-Christianisation period and established the rules for a relationship between the Catholic Church and the French State that lasted until it was abrogated by the Third Republic via the separation of church and state on December 11, 1905. The persecution of the Church led to a counter-revolution known as the Revolt in the Vendée.
Historians Lynn Hunt and Jack Censer argue that some French Protestants, the Huguenots, wanted an anti-Catholic regime and that Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire helped fuel this resentment. The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, had told French citizens that it was “manifestly contrary to the law of nature… that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities.” Historian John McManners writes, “In eighteenth-century France throne and altar were commonly spoken of as in close alliance; their simultaneous collapse … would one day provide the final proof of their interdependence.”
Festival of the Federation
The Fête de la Fédération (Festival of the Federation) was a massive holiday festival held throughout France in honor of the French Revolution. It is the precursor of the Bastille Day which is celebrated every year in France on July 14, celebrating the Revolution itself, and National Unity.
First celebrated in 1790, it commemorated the revolution and events of 1789 which had culminated in a new form of a national government, a constitutional monarchy led by a representative Assembly.
The inaugural fête of 1790 was set for July 14, so it would also coincide with the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille although that is not what was itself celebrated. At this relatively calm stage of the Revolution, many people considered the country’s period of political struggle to be over. This thinking was encouraged by counter-revolutionary monarchiens, and the first fête was designed with a role for King Louis XVI that would respect and maintain his royal status. The occasion passed peacefully and provided a powerful, but illusory, an image of celebrating national unity after the divisive events of 1789–1790.
The event took place on the Champ de Mars, which was at the time far outside Paris. The vast stadium had been financed by the National Assembly and completed in time only with the help of thousands of volunteer laborers from the Paris region. During these “Wheelbarrow Days”(journée des brouettes), the festival workers popularised a new song that would become an enduring anthem of France, Ah! ça ira.
Enormous earthen stands for spectators were built on each side of the field, with a seating capacity estimated at 100,000. The Seine was crossed by a bridge of boats leading to an altar where oaths were to be sworn. The new military school was used to harbor members of the National Assembly and their families. At one end of the field, a huge tent was the king’s step, and at the other end, a triumphal arch was built. At the center of the field was an altar for the mass.
Royal Flight to Varennes
Louis XVI was increasingly dismayed by the direction of the revolution. His brother, the Comte d’Artois and his queen, Marie Antoinette, urged a stronger stance against the revolution and support for the émigrés, while he was resistant to any course that would see him openly side with foreign powers against the Assembly. Eventually, fearing for his safety and that of his family, he fled Paris to the Austrian border, having been assured of the loyalty of the border garrisons.
Louis cast his lot with General Bouillé, who condemned both the emigration and the Assembly and promised him refuge and support in his camp at Montmédy. On the night of June 20, 1791, the royal family fled the Tuileries Palace dressed as servants, while their servants dressed as nobles.
However late the next day, the King was recognized and arrested at Varennes and returned to Paris. The Assembly provisionally suspended the King. He and Queen Marie Antoinette remained held under guard. The King’s flight had a profound impact on public opinion, turning popular sentiment further against the clergy and nobility, and built momentum for the institution of a constitutional monarchy.
The insurrection of August 10, 1792
In the summer of 1792, all of Paris was against the king and hoped that the Assembly would depose the king, but the Assembly hesitated. At the dawn of August 10, 1792, a large, angry crowd of Parisians and soldiers from all over France, insurgents and popular militias, supported by the revolutionary Paris Commune, marched on the Tuileries Palace where the king lived, assailed the Palace and killed the Swiss Guards who were assigned for protecting the king.
Around 8:00 am the king left his palace and sought safety with his wife and children in the Assembly that was gathered in permanent session in Salle du Manège opposite to the Tuileries. The royal family became prisoners. After 11:00 am, a rump session of the Legislative Assembly ‘temporarily relieved the king from his task’ and thus suspended the monarchy; little more than a third of the deputies were present, almost all of them Jacobins. In reaction, on August 19, the Prussian general Duke of Brunswick invaded France and besieged Longwy.
On August 26, the Assembly decreed the deportation of refractory priests in the west of France, as “causes of danger to the fatherland”, to destinations like French Guiana. In reaction, peasants in the Vendée took over a town, in another step toward civil war. What remained of a national government depended on the support of the insurrectionary Commune. With enemy troops advancing, the Commune looked for potential traitors in Paris.
On 2, 3 and 4 September 1792, hundreds of Parisians, supporters of the revolution, infuriated by Verdun being captured by the Prussian enemy, the uprisings in the west of France, and rumours that the incarcerated prisoners in Paris were conspiring with the foreign enemy, raided the Parisian prisons and murdered between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners, many of them Catholic priests but also common criminals. Jean-Paul Marat, a political ally of Robespierre, in an open letter on September 3, incited the rest of France to follow the Parisian example; Robespierre kept a low profile regarding the murder orgy. The Assembly and the city council of Paris (la Commune) seemed inept and hardly motivated to call a halt to the unleashed bloodshed.
The Commune sent gangs of National Guardsmen and fédérés into the prisons, and they killed 10 or more victims, mostly ‘non-juring’ priests. The Commune then sent a circular letter to the other cities of France inviting them to follow this example, and many cities launched their massacres of prisoners and priests in the “September massacres”. The Assembly could offer only feeble resistance. In October, however, there was a counterattack accusing the instigators, especially Marat, of being terrorists. This led to a political contest between the more moderate Girondists and the more radical Montagnards inside the Convention, with rumor used as a weapon by both sides. The Girondists lost ground when they seemed too conciliatory. But the pendulum swung again and after Thermidor (the eleventh month of the French Republican calendar (1793–1805), originally running from July 19 to August 17), the men who had endorsed the massacres were denounced as terrorists.
Chaos persisted until the Convention, elected by universal male suffrage and charged with writing a new constitution, met on September 20, 1792, and became the new de facto government of France. The next day it abolished the monarchy and declared a republic. The following day — September 22, 1792, the first morning of the new Republic — was later retroactively adopted as the beginning of Year One of the French Republican Calendar.
Colonial uprisings
Even though the French Revolution had a dramatic impact on many areas of Europe, the French colonies felt a particular influence. As the Martinican author Aimé Césaire put it, “there was in each French colony a specific revolution, that occurred on the occasion of the French Revolution, in tune with it.” The Haitian Revolution(Saint Domingue) became a central example of slave uprisings in French colonies.
Execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
In the Brunswick Manifesto, the Imperial and Prussian armies threatened retaliation on the French population if it were to resist their advance or the reinstatement of the monarchy. This made Louis appear to be conspiring with the enemies of France. On January 17, 1793, Louis was condemned to death for “conspiracy against the public liberty and the general safety” by a close majority in Convention: 361 voted to execute the king, 288 voted against, and another 72 voted to execute him subject to a variety of delaying conditions. The former Louis XVI, now just commonly named Citoyen Louis Capet (Citizen Louis Capet) was executed by the guillotine on January 21, 1793, on the Place de la Révolution, former Place Louis XV, now called the Place de la Concorde. Conservatives across Europe were horrified and monarchies called for war against revolutionary France.
Marie Antoinette was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal on October 14, 1793. Some historians believe the outcome of the trial had been decided in advance by the Committee of Public Safety around the time the Carnation Plot was uncovered. She and her lawyers were given less than one day to prepare her defense. Among the accusations, many previously published in the libelles, were: orchestrating orgies in Versailles, sending millions of livres of treasury money to Austria, planning the massacre of the gardes françaises (National Guards) in 1792, declaring her son to be the new king of France, and incest, a charge made by her son Louis Charles, pressured into doing so by the radical Jacques Hébert who controlled him. This last accusation drew an emotional response from Marie Antoinette, who refused to respond to this charge, appealing to all mothers present in the room instead; their reaction comforted her since these women were not otherwise sympathetic to her.
Early on October 16th, Marie Antoinette was declared guilty of the three main charges against her: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the State, and high treason because of her intelligence activities in the interest of the enemy; the latter charge alone was enough to condemn her to death. At worst, she and her lawyers had expected life imprisonment. In the hours left to her, she composed a letter to her sister-in-law, Madame Élisabeth, affirming her clear conscience, her Catholic faith, and her love and concern for her children. The letter did not reach Élisabeth. (Her will was part of the collection of papers of Robespierre found under his bed and were published by Edme-Bonaventure Courtois).
Preparing for her execution, she had to change clothes in front of her guards. She put on a plain white dress, white being the color worn by widowed queens of France. Her hair was shorn, her hands bound painfully behind her back and she was put on a rope leash. Unlike her husband, who had been taken to his execution in a carriage, she had to sit in an open cart for the hour it took to convey her from the Conciergerie via the rue Saint-Honoré thoroughfare to reach the guillotine erected in the Place de la Révolution, (the present-day Place de la Concorde). She maintained her composure, despite the insults of the jeering crowd. A constitutional priest was assigned to her to hear her final confession. He sat by her in the cart, but she ignored him all the way to the scaffold.
Marie Antoinette was guillotined at 12:15 p.m. on October 16, 1793. Her last words are recorded as, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès” or “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose”, after accidentally stepping on her executioner’s shoe. Her head was one of those that Marie Tussaud was contracted to make death masks of. Her body was thrown into an unmarked grave in the Madeleine cemetery located close by in rue d’Anjou. Because its capacity was exhausted, the cemetery was closed the following year, on March 25, 1794.
Both Marie Antoinette’s and Louis XVI’s bodies were exhumed on January 18, 1815, during the Bourbon Restoration, when the Comte de Provence ascended the newly reestablished throne as Louis XVIII, King of France and Navarre. Christian burial of the royal remains took place three days later, on January 21, in the necropolis of French kings at the Basilica of St Denis.
The French Revolution lasted roughly 10 years, beginning in 1789 and ending in 1799. The French Revolution ended in 1799 with a coup of the military by Napoleon Bonaparte, as he established himself as France’s first consul. The victory of Napoleon over the supposed conquerors re-established the military prowess of France.
This single event had a tremendous impact on world history influencing wars, political shifts of power, many countries’ independencies and other revolutions.
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