More Important Topics of Cylinder

The French Revolution was a social and political process that developed in France between 1789 and 1799 which principal consecuencies were the end of the absolute monarchy and the beginning of the Republic, eliminating the economical and social bases of the Ancient Regime. Although the political organization of France oscillated

between republic, empire and monarchy during 75 years after the First Republic falls after the coup d'état of Napoleon, the truth is the revolution marked the end of the absolutism and gave birth to a new regime where the citizens, and some ocasions the popular classes, became the dominating political strenght in the country.

To a certain extent the monarchical system succumbed to its own rigidity in a changeable world; also influded the rising of a bourgeois class (which was more and more

relevant), te dissatisfaction of the lower classes and, no less important, the expansion of the new liberal ideas that appeared in this time and are knew as "The Enlightenment".

Precedents

Many interrelated political and socioeconomic factors contributed to the French Revolution. To some extent, the old order succumbed to its own rigidity in the face of a changing world. It fell to the ambitions of a rising bourgeoisie, allied with aggrieved peasants, wage-earners, and individuals of all classes who had come under the influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment.

As the revolution proceeded, and as power devolved from the monarchy to legislative bodies, the conflicting interests of these two once-allied groups would become the source of conflict and bloodshed.

Causes of the French Revolution include the following:

A poor economic situation and an unmanageable national debt were both caused and exacerbated by the burden of a grossly inequitable system of taxation and France's funding of the American Revolution;

A resentment of royal absolutism;

An aspiration for liberty and republicanism;

A resentment of Manorialism (seigneurialism) by peasants, wage-earners, and, to a lesser extent, the bourgeoisie;

The rise of enlightenment ideals;

Food scarcity in the months immediately before the revolution;

High unemployment and high bread prices resulting in the inability to purchase food;

A resentment of noble privilege and dominance in public life by the ambitious professional classes;

A resentment of religious intolerance;

The failure of Louis XVI to deal effectively with these phenomena.

Proto-revolutionary activity started when the French king Louis XVI (reigned 1774-1792) faced a crisis in the royal finances. The French crown, which fiscally equated the French state, owed considerable debt. During the régimes of Louis XV (ruled 1715-1774) and Louis XVI, several different ministers, including Turgot (Controller-General of Finances 1774-1776), and Jacques Necker (Director-General of Finances 1777-1781),

unsuccessfully proposed to revise the French tax system to a more uniform system. Such measures encountered consistent resistance from the parlements (law courts), dominated by the "Robe Nobility", which saw themselves as the nation's guardians against despotism, as well as from court factions, and both ministers were ultimately dismissed.

Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who became Controller-General of the Finances in 1783, pursued a strategy of conspicuous spending as a means of convincing potential creditors of the confidence and stability of France's finances.

However, Calonne, having conducted a lengthy review of France's financial situation, determined that it was not sustainable, and proposed a uniform land tax as a means of setting France's finances in order in the long term.

In the short-term, he hoped that a show of support from a hand-picked Assembly of Notables would restore confidence in French finances, and allow further borrowing until the land tax began to make up the difference and allow the beginning of repayment of the debt.

Although Calonne convinced the king of the necessity of his reforms, the Assembly of Notables refused to endorse his measures, insisting that only a truly representative body, preferably the Estates-General of the Kingdom, could approve new taxes. The King, seeing that Calonne himself was now a liability, dismissed him and replaced him with Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse, who had been a leader of the opposition in the Assembly.

Brienne now adopted a thorough-going reform position, granting various civil rights (including freedom of worship to Protestants), and promising the convocation of the Estates-General within five years, but also attempted in the meantime to go ahead with Calonne's plans. When the measures were opposed in the Parlement of Paris (due in part to the King's tactlessness), Brienne went on the attack, attempting to disband the parlements entirely and collect the new taxes in spite of them.

This led to massive resistance across many parts of France, including the famous "Day of the Tiles" in Grenoble. Even more importantly, the chaos across France convinced the short-term creditors on whom the French treasury depended to maintain its day-to-day operations to withdraw their loans, leading to a near-default, which forced Louis and Brienne to surrender to the enemies.

The king agreed on August 8, 1788 to convene the Estates-General in May 1789, for the first time since 1614. Brienne resigned on August 25, 1788, and Necker again took charge of the nation's finances. He used his position not to propose new reforms, but only to prepare for the meeting of the nation's representatives.

lower classes and, no less important, the expansion of the new liberal ideas that appeared in this time and are knew as "The Enlightenment".

Precedents

Many interrelated political and socioeconomic factors contributed to the French Revolution. To some extent, the old order succumbed to its own rigidity in the face of a changing world. It fell to the ambitions of a rising bourgeoisie, allied with aggrieved peasants, wage-earners, and individuals of all classes who had come under the influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment.

As the revolution proceeded, and as power devolved from the monarchy to legislative bodies, the conflicting interests of these two once-allied groups would become the source of conflict and bloodshed.

Causes of the French Revolution include the following:

A poor economic situation and an unmanageable national debt were both caused and exacerbated by the burden of a grossly inequitable system of taxation and France's funding of the American Revolution;

A resentment of royal absolutism;

An aspiration for liberty and republicanism;

A resentment of Manorialism (seigneurialism) by peasants, wage-earners, and, to a lesser extent, the bourgeoisie;

The rise of enlightenment ideals;

Food scarcity in the months immediately before the revolution;

High unemployment and high bread prices resulting in the inability to purchase food;

A resentment of noble privilege and dominance in public life by the ambitious professional classes;

A resentment of religious intolerance;

The failure of Louis XVI to deal effectively with these phenomena.

Proto-revolutionary activity started when the French king Louis XVI (reigned 1774-1792) faced a crisis in the royal finances. The French crown, which fiscally equated the French state, owed considerable debt.

During the régimes of Louis XV (ruled 1715-1774) and Louis XVI, several different ministers, including Turgot (Controller-General of Finances 1774-1776), and Jacques Necker (Director-General of Finances 1777-1781), unsuccessfully proposed to revise the French tax system to a more uniform system.

Such measures encountered consistent resistance from the parlements (law courts), dominated by the "Robe Nobility", which saw themselves as the nation's guardians against despotism, as well as from court factions, and both ministers were ultimately dismissed. Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who became Controller-General of the Finances in 1783, pursued a strategy of conspicuous spending as a means of convincing potential creditors of the confidence and stability of France's finances.

However, Calonne, having conducted a lengthy review of France's financial situation, determined that it was not sustainable, and proposed a uniform land tax as a means of setting France's finances in order in the long term.

In the short-term, he hoped that a show of support from a hand-picked Assembly of Notables would restore confidence in French finances, and allow further borrowing until the land tax began to make up the difference and allow the beginning of repayment of the debt.

Although Calonne convinced the king of the necessity of his reforms, the Assembly of Notables refused to endorse his measures, insisting that only a truly representative body, preferably the Estates-General of the Kingdom, could approve new taxes. The King, seeing that Calonne himself was now a liability, dismissed him and replaced him with Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the Archbishop of Toulouse, who had been a leader of the opposition in the Assembly.

Brienne now adopted a thorough-going reform position, granting various civil rights (including freedom of worship to Protestants), and promising the convocation of the Estates-General within five years, but also attempted in the meantime to go ahead with Calonne's plans.

When the measures were opposed in the Parlement of Paris (due in part to the King's tactlessness), Brienne went on the attack, attempting to disband the parlements entirely and collect the new taxes in spite of them.

This led to massive resistance across many parts of France, including the famous "Day of the Tiles" in Grenoble.

Even more importantly, the chaos across France convinced the short-term creditors on whom the French treasury depended to maintain its day-to-day operations to withdraw their loans, leading to a near-default, which forced Louis and Brienne to surrender to the enemies.

The king agreed on August 8, 1788 to convene the Estates-General in May 1789, for the first time since 1614. Brienne resigned on August 25, 1788, and Necker again took charge of the nation's finances. He used his position not to propose new reforms, but only to prepare for the meeting of the nation's representatives.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (January 18, 1689 – February 10, 1755), more commonly known as Montesquieu, was a French political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment.

He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions all over the world. He was largely responsible for the popularization of the terms "feudalism" and "Byzantine Empire".

In 1715, at twenty-six years of age, he married Jeanne de Latrigue, a Calvinist who brought him a substantial dowry. At the age of twenty-seven, upon the death of his uncle, he

inherited a fortune, the title Baron de Montesquieu and Président à Mortier in the Parliament of Bordeaux.

By that time, the United Kingdom had declared itself a constitutional monarchy after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, a radical reform by the standards of the time, and the long-reigning Sun King died in France, which experienced mostly weak successors in the following years.

These two events affected Montesquieu, who stressed them in his work. Soon afterwards he achieved literary success with the publication of his Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721), a satire based on the imaginary correspondence of an Oriental visitor to Paris, pointing out the absurdities of contemporary society. After publishing this book, he started on another book, The Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of

the Romans [1734] which is considered a transition from The Persian Letters to his main work, De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748), which was originally published anonymously and was enormously influential.

However, in France, this book met with an unfriendly reception from both the supporters and the opponents of the regime. But, for the rest of Europe (and especially in England), it received the highest praise, albeit not without repercussions from the Catholic Church, which banned his book-- along with many of his other works-- in 1751 and included it on the Index.

Montesquieu is believed to have been a powerful influence on many of the American Founders, most notably James Madison, and English translations of his books remain in print to this day (Cambridge University Press edition: ISBN 0521369746).

Besides writing books and debating about politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and then eighteen months in England before settling back in France. He was troubled by poor eyesight, and was completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He was buried in L'église Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France.

Political views

Montesquieu's most radical work divided French society into three classes (or trias politica, a term he coined): the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons. Montesquieu saw two types of power existing: the sovereign and the administrative. The administrative powers were the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.

These should be divided up so that each power would have a power over the other. This was radical because it completely eliminated the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the aristocracy, and third estate, from the estates, and erased any last vestige of a feudalistic structure.

Likewise, there were three main forms of government. These were monarchies (governments run by a king or queen or emperor), which relied on the principle of honor; republics (governments run by elected leaders), which relied on the principle of virtue; and despotisms (governments run by dictators), which relied on fear. He believed that the best form of government was a monarchy, and he upheld the British constitution as ideal.

Like many of his generation, Montesquieu held a number of views that might today be judged controversial. While he endorsed the idea that a woman could run a government, he held that she could not be effective as the head of a family.

He firmly accepted the role of a hereditary aristocracy and the value of primogeniture. His views have also been abused by modern revisionists; for instance, even though Montesquieu was ahead of his time as an ardent opponent of slavery, he has been quoted out of context in attempts to show he supported it.[citation needed]

One of his more exotic ideas, outlined in The Spirit of the Laws and hinted at in Persian Letters, is the climate theory, which holds that climate should substantially influence the nature of man and his society. He even goes so far as to assert that certain climates are superior to others, the temperate climate of France being the best of possible climates.

His view is that people living in hot countries are "too hot-tempered," while those in northern countries are "icy" or "stiff." The climate in middle Europe thus breeds the best people. (This view is possibly influenced by similar statements in Germania by Tacitus, one of Montesquieu's favourite authors.)

It was Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" that prompted the creators of the Constitution to divide the U.S. government into three separate branches.

François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire (also called The Dictator of Letters), was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher.

Voltaire is well-known for his sharp wit, philosophical writings, promotion of the rights of man, and defense of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial.

He was an outspoken supporter of social reform despite strict censorship laws in France and harsh penalties for those who broke them. A satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize

Church dogma and the French institutions of his day.

Voltaire is considered one of the most influential figures of his time.

Early years

Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694, the son of a notary, François Arouet, and his wife, Marie Marguerite D'Aumard. Most of Voltaire's early life revolved around Paris until his exile.

He studied for eight years at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where his education in the arts began. Although he claimed not to have learned anything there other than "Latin and the Stupidities," it allowed for the development of his literary talents, especially in theater.

After graduating, Voltaire set out on a career in literature. His father, however, intended his son to be educated in the law. Voltaire, pretending to work in Paris as assistant to a lawyer, spent much of his time writing satirical poetry. When his father found him out, he again sent Voltaire to study law, this time in the provinces.

Nevertheless, he continued to write, producing essays and historical studies not always noted for accuracy. Voltaire's wit made him popular among aristocratic families. One of his writings, about Louis XV's regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, led to his being imprisoned in the Bastille. While there, he wrote his debut play, Oedipe, and adopted the name Voltaire. Oedipe's success began Voltaire's influence and brought him into the French Enlightenment.

Exile to England

Voltaire's repartee continued to bring him trouble, however. After offending a young nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan, the Rohan family had a lettre de cachet issued, a secret warrant that allowed for the punishment of people who had committed no crimes or who possibly posed a risk to the royal family, and used it to exile Voltaire without a trial. The incident marked the beginning of Voltaire's attempt to ameliorate the French judiciary system.

Voltaire's exile to England greatly influenced him through ideas and experiences. The young man was impressed by England's monarchy, as well as the country's support of the freedoms of speech and religion. He was influenced by several people, including such writers as Shakespeare.

In his younger years, he saw Shakespeare as an example French writers should look to, though later Voltaire saw himself as the superior writer. Many of his later works were influenced by this stay. After three years in exile, Voltaire returned to Paris and published his ideas in a fictional document about the English government entitled the Lettres philosophiques (Philosophical letters on the English).

Due to the fact that he regarded the English monarchy as more developed and more respectful of human rights (particularly religious tolerance) than its French counterpart, these letters met great controversy in France, to the point where copies of the document were burned and Voltaire was forced to leave Paris.

The Château de Cirey

Voltaire then set out to the Château de Cirey, located on the borders of Champagne, France and Lorraine. The building was renovated with his money, and here he began a relationship with the Marquise du Châtelet, Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil. Their relationship, which lasted for fifteen years, led to much intellectual development.

Voltaire and the Marquise collected over 21,000 books, an enormous number for their time. Together, Voltaire and the Marquise also studied these books and performed experiments. Both worked on experimenting with the "natural sciences", the term used in that epoch for physics, in his laboratory. Voltaire performed many experiments, including one that attempted to determine the properties of fire.

The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica comments that, "If the English visit may be regarded as having finished Voltaire's education, the Cirey residence was the first stage of his literary manhood." Having learned from his previous brushes with the authorities, Voltaire began his future habit of keeping out of personal harm's way, and denying any awkward responsibility.

He continued to write, publishing plays such as Mérope and some short stories. Again, a main source of inspiration for Voltaire were the years he spent exiled in England. During his time there, Voltaire had been strongly influenced by the works of Sir Isaac Newton, a leading philosopher and scientist of the epoch.

Voltaire strongly believed in Newton's theories, especially concerning optics (Newton’s discovery that white light is comprised of all the colors in the spectrum led to many experiments on his and the Marquise's part), and gravity (the story of Newton and the apple falling from the tree is mentioned in his Essai sur la poésie épique (Essay on Epic Poetry)).

Although both Voltaire and the Marquise were also curious about the philosophies of Gottfried Leibniz, a contemporary and rival of Newton, Voltaire and the Marquise remained "Newtonians" and based their theories on Newton’s works and ideas.

Though it has been stated that the Marquise may have been more "Leibnizian", which may have caused tension between the two, this is probably an exaggeration; the Marquise even wrote "je newtonise," which, translated, means "I am 'newtoning'". Voltaire wrote a book on Newton's philosophies: the Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (The Elements of Newton's Philosophies).

The Elements was probably written with the Marquise, and describes the other branches of Newton's ideas that fascinated him: it spoke of optics and the theory of attraction (gravity).

Voltaire and the Marquise also studied history - particularly the people who had contributed to civilization up to that point. Voltaire had worked with history since his time in England; his second essay in English had the title Essay upon the Civil Wars in France.

When he returned to France, he wrote a biographical essay of King Charles XII. This essay was the beginning of Voltaire's rejection of religion; he wrote that human life is not destined or controlled by greater beings.

The essay won him the position of historian in the king's court. Voltaire and the Marquise also worked with philosophy, particularly with metaphysics, the branch of philosophy dealing with the distant, and what cannot be directly proven: why and what life is, whether or not there is a God, and so on.

Voltaire and the Marquise analyzed the Bible, trying to find its validity in the world. Voltaire renounced religion; he believed in the separation of church and state and in religious freedom, ideas he formed after his stay in England. Voltaire even claimed that "One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker."

After the death of the Marquise, Voltaire moved to Berlin to join Frederick the Great, a close friend and admirer of his. The king had repeatedly invited him to his palace, and now gave him a salary of 20,000 francs a year. Though life went well at first, he began to encounter difficulties. Faced with a lawsuit and an argument with the president of the Berlin Academy of science, Voltaire wrote the Diatribe du docteur Akakia (Diatribe of Doctor Akakia) which derided the president.

This greatly angered Frederick, who had all copies of the document burned and arrested Voltaire at an inn where he was staying along his journey home. Voltaire headed toward Paris, but Louis XV banned him from the city, so instead he turned to Geneva, where he bought a large estate.

Though he was received openly at first, the law in Geneva which banned theatrical performances and the publication of La pucelle d'Orléans against his will led to Voltaire's writing of Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism) in 1759 and his eventual leave. Candide, a satire on the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, remains the work for which Voltaire is perhaps best known.

Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static force only useful as a counterbalance since its "religious tax", or the tithe, helped to create a strong backing for revolutionaries

Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. To Voltaire only an enlightened monarch, or an Enlightened absolutist, advised by philosophers like himself, could bring about change as it was in the king's rational interest to improve the power and wealth of France in the world.

Voltaire is quoted as saying that he "would rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of (his own) species". Voltaire essentially believed monarchy to be the key to progress and change. He also believed that Africans were a separate, inferior species to Europeans and that Jews were "an ignorant and barbarous people".

He is best known today for his novel, Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759), which satirizes the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz. Candide was subject to censorship and Voltaire did not openly claim it as his own work [1].

Voltaire is also known for many memorable aphorisms, like Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a verse epistle from 1768, addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work, The Three Impostors.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, not to be confused with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sent a copy of his "Ode to Posterity" to Voltaire. Voltaire read it through and said, "I do not think this poem will reach its destination."

Voltaire is remembered and honoured in France as a courageous polemicist, who indefatigably fought for civil rights — the right to a fair trial and freedom of religion — and who denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of the ancien régime.

The ancien régime involved an unfair balance of power and taxes between the 1st estate (clergy), 2nd estate (nobles), and everyone else (commoners/middle class who were burdened with most of the taxes).

Some of his critics, like Thomas Carlyle, do argue that while he was unsurpassed in literary form, not even the most elaborate of his works was of much value for matter, and that he has never uttered any significant idea of his own.

Contemporary Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul lays the blame for the failures of Western, technocratic society with Voltaire in his book Voltaire's Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West.

The town of Ferney (France) where he lived his last 20 years of life, is now named Ferney-Voltaire. His Château is now a museum (L'Auberge de l'Europe). Voltaire's library is preserved intact in the Russian National Library, St Petersburg.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Franco-Swiss philosopher of the Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism. His legacy as a radical and revolutionary is perhaps best demonstrated by his most famous line in The Social Contract: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Biography

Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and throughout his life described himself as a citizen of Geneva. His

mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, died a week later due to complications from childbirth,

and his father Isaac, a failed watchmaker, abandoned him in 1722 to avoid imprisonment for fighting a duel. His childhood education consisted solely of reading Plutarch's Lives and Calvinist sermons.

Rousseau was beaten and abused by the pastor's sister who had taken responsibility of Rousseau after his father's abscondment. Rousseau left Geneva on March 14, 1728, after several years of apprenticeship to a notary and then an engraver. He then met Françoise-Louise de Warens, a French Catholic baroness who would later became Rousseau's lover, even though she was twelve years his elder.

Under the protection of de Warens, he converted to Catholicism. Rousseau spent a few weeks in a seminary and beginning in 1729, six months at the Annecy Cathedral choir school.

He also spent much time travelling and engaging in a variety of professions; for instance, in the early 1730s he worked as a music teacher in Chambéry. In 1736 he enjoyed a last stay with de Warens near Chambéry, which he found idyllic, but by 1740 he had departed again, this time to Lyon to tutor the young children of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably.

In 1742 Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of musical notation he had invented, based on a single line displaying numbers that represented intervals between notes and dots and commas that indicated rhythmic values. The system was intended to be compatible with typography. The Academy rejected it as useless and unoriginal.

From 1743 to 1744, he was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, whose republican government Rousseau would refer to often in his later political work. After this, he returned to Paris, where he befriended and lived with Thérèse Lavasseur, an illiterate seamstress who bore him five children.

As a result of his theories on education and child-rearing, Rousseau has often been criticized by Voltaire and modern commentators for putting his children in an orphanage as soon as they were weaned.

In his defense, Rousseau explained that he would have been a poor father, and that the children would have a better life at the foundling home. Such eccentricities were later used by critics to vilify Rousseau as socially dysfunctional in an attempt to discredit his theoretical work.

The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthéon, ParisWhile in Paris, he became friends with Diderot and beginning in 1749 contributed several articles to his Encyclopédie, beginning with some articles on music. His most important contribution was an article on political economy, written in 1755. Soon after, his friendship with Diderot and the Encyclopedists would become strained.

In 1749, on his way to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, Rousseau heard of an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon, asking the question whether the development of the arts and sciences has been morally beneficial. Rousseau's response to this prompt, answering in the negative, was his 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences", which won him first prize in the contest and gained him significant fame.

Rousseau claimed that during the carriage ride to visit Diderot, he had experienced a sudden inspiration on which all his later philosophical works were based. This inspiration, however, did not cease his interest in music and in 1752 his opera Le Devin du village was performed for King Louis XV.

In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva where he reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755 Rousseau completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Beginning with this piece, Rousseau's work found him increasingly in disfavor with the French government.

Rousseau, in 1761 published the successful romantic novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (The New Heloise). In 1762 he published two major books, first The Social Contract (Du Contrat Social) in April and then Émile, or On Education in May. Both books criticized religion and were banned in both France and Geneva. Rousseau was forced to flee arrest and made stops in both Bern and Motiers in Switzerland. While in Motiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la Corse).

Facing criticism in Switzerland – his house in Motiers was stoned in 1765 – he took refuge with the philosopher David Hume in Great Britain, but after 18 months he left because he believed Hume was plotting against him[1].

Rousseau returned to France under the name "Renou," although officially he was not allowed back in until 1770. In 1768 he married Thérèse, and in 1770 he returned to Paris. As a condition of his return, he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began private readings. In 1771 he was forced to stop this, and this book, along with all subsequent ones, was not published until 1782, four years after his death.

Rousseau continued to write until his death. In 1772, he was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for Poland, resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was to be his last major political work. In 1776 he completed Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker.

In order to support himself through this time, he returned to copying music. Because of his prudential suspicion, he did not seek attention or the company of others. While taking a morning walk on the estate of the Marquis de Giradin at Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died on July 2, 1778.

Rousseau was initially buried on the Ile des Peupliers. His remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1794, sixteen years after his death. The tomb was designed to resemble a rustic temple, to recall Rousseau's theories of nature. In 1834, the Genevan government reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the tiny Ile Rousseau in Lake Geneva. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace.

Philosophy

Nature vs. society

Rousseau saw a fundamental divide between society and human nature. Rousseau contended that man was good by nature, a "noble savage" when in the state of nature (the state of all the "other animals", and the condition humankind was in before the creation of civilization and society), but is corrupted by society.

He viewed society as artificial and held that the development of society, especially the growth of social interdependence, has been inimical to the well-being of human beings.

Society's negative influence on otherwise virtuous men centers, in Rousseau's philosophy, on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi represents the instinctive human desire for self preservation, combined with the human power of reason.

In contrast, amour-propre is not natural but artificial and forces man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others. Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction; it had been invoked by, among others, Vauvenargues.

In "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" Rousseau argued that the arts and sciences had not been beneficial to humankind, because they were advanced not in response to human needs but as the result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they created for idleness and luxury contributed to the corruption of man.

He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty. He concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of sincere friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear and suspicion.

His subsequent Discourse on Inequality tracked the progress and degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature to modern society. He suggested that the earliest human beings were isolated semi-apes who were differentiated from animals by their capacity for free will and their perfectibility. He also argued that these primitive humans were possessed of a basic drive to care for themselves and a natural disposition to compassion or pity.

As humans were forced to associate together more closely, by the pressure of population growth, they underwent a psychological transformation and came to value the good opinion of others as an essential component of their own well being.

Rousseau associated this new self-awareness with a golden age of human flourishing. However, the development of agriculture and metallurgy, private property and the division of labour led to increased interdependence and inequality.

The resulting state of conflict led Rousseau to suggest that the first state was invented as a kind of social contract made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful. This original contract was deeply flawed as the wealthiest and most powerful members of society tricked the general population, and thus instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of human society.

Rousseau's own conception of the social contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others, which originated in the golden age, comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, hierarchy, and inequality.

Political theory

A 1766 portrait of Rousseau by Allan Ramsay

The Social Contract

Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order. Published in 1762 it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article Economie Politique, featured in Diderot's Encyclopédie.

Rousseau claimed that the state of nature eventually degenerates into a brutish condition without law or morality, at which point the human race must adopt institutions of law or perish. In the degenerate phase of the state of nature, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them.

This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free.

This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.

While Rousseau argues that sovereignty should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and government. The government is charged with implementing and enforcing the general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, known as magistrates.

Rousseau was bitterly opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly. Rather, they should make the laws directly. It has been argued that this would prevent Rousseau's ideal state being realized in a large society, though in modern times, communication may have advanced to the point where this is no longer the case.

Much of the subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free.

Education

Rousseau set out his views on education in Émile, a semi-fictitious work detailing the growth of a young boy of that name, presided over by Rousseau himself. He brings him up in the countryside, where, he believes, humans are most naturally suited, rather than in a city, where we only learn bad habits, both physical and intellectual. The aim of education, Rousseau says, is to learn how to live, and this is accomplished by following a guardian who can point the way to good living.

The growth of a child is divided into three sections, first to the age of about 12, when calculating and complex thinking is not possible, and children, according to his deepest conviction, live like animals. Second, from 12 to about 15, when reason starts to develop, and finally from the age of 15 onwards, when the child develops into an adult. At this point, Emile finds a young woman to complement him.

The book is based on Rousseau's ideals of healthy living. The boy must work out how to follow his social instincts and be protected from the vices of urban individualism and self-consciousness.

Religion

Rousseau was most controversial in his own time for his views on religion. His view that man is good by nature conflicts with the doctrine of original sin and his theology of nature expounded by the Savoyard Vicar in Émile led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris.

In the Social Contract he claims that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens. This was one of the reasons for the book's condemnation in Geneva. Rousseau attempted to defend himself against critics of his religious views in his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris.

Legacy

Although the French Revolution started as liberal, in 1793 Maximilien Robespierre, a follower of Rousseau took power and executed the liberal revolution leaders and anybody whose popularity threatened his position.

Writers such as Benjamin Constant and Hegel blamed this Reign of Terror and Robespierre's totalitarianism on Rousseau, because Rousseau's ideology could be seen to justify a totalitarian regime without civil rights, such as the protection of the body and the property of the individual from the decisions of the government.

However, Rousseau argued for direct democracy instead of representative democracy, and some people believe that such terrible decisions would not have been made in direct democracy and hence civil rights would not be needed. Robespierre also shared Rousseau's (proto)socialist thoughts.

Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is sometimes considered a forebearer of modern socialism and communism (see Karl Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings).

Rousseau also questioned the assumption that majority will is always correct. He argued that the goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the state, regardless of the will of the majority (see democracy).

One of the primary principles of Rousseau's political philosophy is that politics and morality should not be separated. When a state fails to act in a moral fashion, it ceases to function in the proper manner and ceases to exert genuine authority over the individual. The second important principle is freedom, which the state is created to preserve.

Rousseau's ideas about education have profoundly influenced modern educational theory. In Émile he differentiates between healthy and "useless" crippled children. Only a healthy child can be the rewarding object of any educational work. He minimizes the importance of book-learning, and recommends that a child's emotions should be educated before his reason.

He placed a special emphasis on learning by experience. John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centred Education and its Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau.

In his main writings Rousseau identifies nature with the primitive state of savage man. Later he took nature to mean the spontaneity of the process by which man builds his egocentric, instinct based character and his little world. Nature thus signifies interiority and integrity, as opposed to that imprisonment and enslavement which society imposes in the name of progressive emancipation from coldhearted brutality.

Hence, to go back to nature means to restore to man the forces of this natural process, to place him outside every oppressing bond of society and the prejudices of civilization. It is this idea that made his thought particularly important in Romanticism, though Rousseau himself is sometimes regarded as a figure of The Enlightenment.

Almost all other Enlightenment philosophers argued for reason over mysticism; liberalism, free markets, individual freedom; human rights including the freedom of speech and press; progress, science and arts, while Rousseau obtained enormous fame by arguing for the contrary, mysticism, socialism, no hindrances for the power of the sovereign over the body and the property of an individual.

He said that science originated in vices, that man had been better in the Stone Age and that censorship should be execised to prevent people from being mislead.

Notes

"Interestingly, though all scholars of note consider this to be Rousseau's epigrammatic statement, there is less than universal agreement as to its translation. Because of a particular ambiguity in French, the line "L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers." can just as accurately be translated into English as "Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains."

Though subtle, the change in translation can yield an immense difference in the significance of Rousseau's basic thesis. Is he positing that each individual who comes into the world every day is born free, but then society enslaves him?

Or is he rather saying that Man was once a free creature who--as a body politic and social--has been enslaved by a corrupting society? Many scholars argue that the latter better reflects the analysis that follows later in the book.

Yet a third perspective is that Rousseau, who was certainly aware of the ambiguity of the usage, did so intentionally. It was simply an application of the concept of double-entendre, one which would be seen by any educated reader of French. If this interpretation is correct, then, some linguists note, English translations would be better served by printing this line as "Man is/was born free but everywhere he is in chains."

The calling of the Estates-General led to growing concern on the part of the opposition that the government would attempt to gerrymander an assembly to its liking.

In order to avoid this, the Parlement of Paris, having returned in triumph to the city, proclaimed that the Estates-General would have to meet according to the forms observed at its last meeting.

Although it would appear that the magistrates were not

specifically aware of the "forms of 1614" when they made this decision, this provoked an uproar. The 1614 Estates had consisted of equal numbers of representatives of each estate, and voting had been by order, with the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobility), and the Third Estate (middle class and peasants) each receiving one vote.

Almost immediately the "Committee of Thirty", a body of liberal Parisians, began to agitate against this, arguing for a doubling of the Third Estate and voting by head (as had already been done in various provincial assemblies).

Necker, speaking for the government, conceded further that the third estate should be doubled, but the question of voting by head was left for the meeting of the Estates themselves.

However, the resentments brought forward by the dispute remained powerful, and pamphlets, like Abbé Sieyès's What is the Third Estate? which argued that the privileged orders were parasites and the Third Estate was the nation itself, kept these resentments alive. He wrote in this pamphlet, "What is the third Estate? Everything. What has it been up to now in the political order? Nothing. What does it demand? To become something herein."

When the Estates-General convened in Versailles on May 5, 1789, lengthy speeches by Necker and Lamoignon, the keeper of the seals, did little to give guidance to the deputies, who were remanded to separate meeting places to credential their members.

The question of whether voting was ultimately to be by head or by order was again put aside for the moment, but the Third Estate now demanded that credentialing itself should take place as a group. Negotiations with the other estates to achieve this, however, were unsuccessful, as a bare majority of the clergy and a large majority of the nobility continued to support voting by order.

On May 28 1789, the Abbé Sieyès moved that the Third Estate, now meeting as the Communes (English: "Commons"), proceed with verification of its own powers and invite the other two estates to take part, but not to wait for them.

They proceeded to do so, completing the process on June 17. 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.

Louis XVI shut the Salle des États where the Assembly met. The Assembly moved their deliberations to the king's handball court, where they proceeded to swear the Tennis Court Oath (June 20, 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 forty-seven members of the nobility. By June 27 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. On July 9, the Assembly reconstituted itself as the National Constituent Assembly, which was to last until its dissolution in September 30 1791.

The Storming of the Bastille

On July 11 1789, King Louis, acting under the influence of the conservative nobles of his privy council, as well as his wife, Marie Antoinette, and brother, the Comte d'Artois, banished the reformist minister Necker and completely reconstructed the ministry.

Much of Paris, presuming this to be the start of a royal coup, moved into open rebellion. Some of the military joined the mob; others remained neutral.

On July 14 1789, after four hours of combat, the insurgents seized the Bastille prison, killing the governor, Marquis Bernard de Launay, and several of his guards.

Although the Parisians released only seven prisoners; four forgers, two lunatics, and a sexual offender, 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; his assassination took place en route to an ostensible trial at the Palais Royal.

The king and his military supporters backed down, at least for the time being. Lafayette took up command of the National Guard at Paris. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, president of the National 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 27, he accepted a tricolore cockade, as cries of vive la Nation "Long live the Nation" changed to vive le Roi "Long live the King".

Nonetheless, after this violence, nobles, little assured by the apparent and, as it proved, temporary reconciliation of king and people, started to flee the country as émigrés, some of whom began plotting civil war within the kingdom and agitating for a European coalition against France.

Necker, recalled to power, experienced but a short-lived triumph. An astute financier but a less astute politician, he overplayed his hand by demanding and obtaining a general amnesty, losing much of the people's favour in his moment of apparent triumph.

By late July insurrection and the spirit of popular sovereignty spread throughout France. In rural areas, many went beyond this: some burned title-deeds and no small number of châteaux, as part of a general agrarian insurrection known as "la Grande Peur" (the Great Fear).

In addition, plotting and agitation by the émigrés led to wild rumours and paranoia (particularly in the rural areas) that caused widespread unrest and civil disturbances and contributed to the Great Fear (Hibbert at 93).

The Abolition of Feudalism

For a more detailed discussion, see The Abolition of Feudalism.

On August 4, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly abolished feudalism, sweeping away both the seigneurial rights of the Second Estate and the tithes gathered by the First Estate. In the course of a few hours, nobles, clergy, towns, provinces, companies, and cities lost their special privileges.

Dechristianisation

For a more detailed discussion, see Dechristianisation of France during the French Revolution.

The revolution brought about a massive shifting of powers from the Roman Catholic Church to the state.

Although, under the ancien régime, the Church had been the largest landowner in the country, legislation enacted in 1790 abolished the Church's authority to levy a tax on crops known as the dîme, cancelled special privileges for the clergy, and confiscated Church property. Subsequent legislation attempted to subordinate the clergy to the state, making them state employees.

The ensuing years saw violent repression of the clergy, including the imprisonment and massacre of priests throughout France.

The Concordat of 1801 between Napoleon and the Church ended the dechristianisation 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.

Factions within the Assembly began to become clearer. The aristocrat Jacques Antoine Marie Cazalès and the abbé Jean-Sifrein Maury led what would become known as the right wing, the opposition to revolution. The "Royalist democrats" or monarchiens, allied with Necker, inclined toward organising France along lines similar to the British

constitutional model: they included Jean Joseph Mounier, the Comte de Lally-Tollendal, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, and Pierre Victor Malouet, Comte de Virieu.

The "National Party", representing the centre or centre-left of the assembly, included Honoré Mirabeau, Lafayette, and Bailly; while Adrien Duport, Barnave and Alexander Lameth represented somewhat more extreme views. Almost alone in his radicalism on the left was the Arras lawyer Maximilien Robespierre.

The abbé Sieyès led in proposing legislation in this period and successfully forged consensus for some time between the political centre and the left.

In Paris, various committees, the mayor, the assembly of representatives, and the individual districts each claimed authority independent of the others. The increasingly middle-class National Guard under Lafayette also slowly emerged as a power in its own right, as did other self-generated assemblies.

Looking to the United States Declaration of Independence for a model, on August 26, 1789, the Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Like the U.S. Declaration, it comprised a statement of principles rather than a constitution with legal effect.

For a more detailed discussion, see Toward a Constitution.

The National Constituent Assembly functioned not only as a legislature, but also as a body to draft a new constitution.

Necker, Mounier, Lally-Tollendal and others argued unsuccessfully for a senate, with members appointed by the crown on the nomination of the people. The bulk of the nobles argued for an aristocratic upper house elected by the nobles.

The popular party carried the day: France would have a single, unicameral assembly. The king retained only a "suspensive veto": he could delay the implementation of a law, but not block it absolutely.

The people of Paris thwarted Royalist efforts to block this new order: they marched on Versailles on October 5 1789. This event has been termed the 'march of the women' as it was mostly women who marched to Versailles. These were followed by 20,000 National Guards. After various scuffles and incidents, the king and the royal family allowed themselves to be brought back from Versailles to Paris.

The Assembly replaced the historic provinces with eighty-three départements, uniformly administered and approximately equal to one another in extent and population.

Originally summoned to deal with a financial crisis, to date the Assembly had focused on other matters and only worsened the deficit. Mirabeau now led the move to address this matter, with the Assembly giving Necker complete financial dictatorship.

To no small extent, the Assembly addressed the financial crisis by having the nation take over the property of the Church (while taking on the Church's expenses), through the law of December 2, 1789. In order to rapidly monetize such an enormous amount of property, the government

introduced a new paper currency, assignats, backed by the confiscated church lands.

Further legislation on February 13, 1790, abolished monastic vows. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed on July 12, 1790 (although not signed by king David until December 26, 1790), turned the remaining clergy into employees of the State and required that they take an oath of loyalty to the constitution. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy also made the Catholic church an arm of the secular state.

In response to this legislation, the archbishop of Aix and the bishop of Clermont led a walkout of clergy from the National Constituent Assembly. The pope never accepted the new arrangement, and it led to a schism between those clergy who swore the required oath and accepted the new arrangement ("jurors" or "constitutional clergy") and the "non-jurors" or "refractory priests" who refused to do so.

With most of the Assembly still favouring a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic, the various groupings reached a compromise which left Louis XVI little more than a figurehead: he had perforce to swear an oath to the

constitution, and a decree declared that retracting the oath, heading an army for the purpose of making war upon the nation, or permitting anyone to do so in his name would amount to de facto abdication.

Jacques Pierre Brissot drafted a petition, insisting that in the eyes of the nation Louis XVI was deposed since his flight. An immense crowd gathered in the Champ-de-Mars to sign the petition. Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins gave fiery speeches. The Assembly called for the municipal authorities to "preserve public order".

The National Guard under Lafayette's command confronted the crowd. The soldiers first responded to a barrage of stones by firing in the air; the crowd did not back down, and Lafayette ordered his men to fire into the crowd, resulting in the killing of as many as fifty people.

In the wake of this massacre the authorities closed many of the patriotic clubs, as well as radical newspapers such as Jean-Paul Marat's L'Ami du Peuple. Danton fled to England; Desmoulins and Marat went into hiding.

Meanwhile, a renewed threat from abroad arose: Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick William II of Prussia, and the king's brother Charles-Phillipe, comte d'Artois issued the Declaration of Pilnitz which considered the cause of Louis XVI as their own, demanded his total liberty and the dissolution of the Assembly, and promised an invasion of France on his behalf if the revolutionary authorities refused its conditions.

If anything, the declaration further imperiled Louis. The French people expressed no respect for the dictates of foreign monarchs, and the threat of force merely resulted in the militarisation of the frontiers.

Even before his the "Flight to Varennes," the Assembly members had determined to debar themselves from the legislature that would succeed them, the Legislative Assembly.

They now gathered the various constitutional laws they had passed into a single constitution, showed remarkable fortitude in choosing not to use this as an occasion for major revisions, and submitted it to the recently restored Louis XVI, who accepted it, writing "I engage to maintain it at home, to defend it from all attacks from abroad, and to cause its execution by all the means it places at my disposal".

The king addressed the Assembly and received enthusiastic applause from members and spectators. The Assembly set the end of its term for September 29, 1791.

Mignet has written, "The constitution of 1791... was the work of the middle class, then the strongest; for, as is well known, the predominant force ever takes possession of institutions... In this constitution the people was the source of all powers, but it exercised none."

The Legislative Assembly and the fall of the Monarchy

For a more detailed description of the events of October 1, 1791–September 19, 1792, see main article The Legislative Assembly and the fall of the French monarchy.

The Legislative Assembly

Under the Constitution of 1791, France would function as a constitutional monarchy. The king had to share power with the elected Legislative Assembly, but he still retained his royal veto and the ability to select ministers.

The Legislative Assembly first met on October 1, 1791, and degenerated into chaos less than a year later. In the words of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: "In the attempt to govern, the Assembly failed altogether.

It left behind an empty treasury, an undisciplined army and navy, and a people debauched by safe and successful riot." The Legislative Assembly consisted of about 165 Feuillants (constitutional monarchists) on the right, about 330 Girondists (liberal republicans) and Jacobins (radical revolutionaries) on the left, and about 250 deputies unaffiliated with either faction.

Early on, the king vetoed legislation that threatened the émigrés with death and that decreed that every non-juring clergyman must take within eight days the civic oath mandated by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Over the course of a year, disagreements like this would lead to a constitutional crisis, leading the Revolution to higher levels!

The politics of the period inevitably drove France towards war with Austria and its allies. The King, the Feuillants and the Girondins specifically wanted to wage war.

The King (and many Feuillants with him) expected war would increase his personal popularity; he also foresaw an opportunity to exploit any defeat: either result would make him stronger. The Girondins wanted to export the

Revolution throughout Europe. Only some of the radical Jacobins opposed war, preferring to consolidate and expand the revolution at home. The Austrian emperor Leopold II, brother of Marie Antoinette, may have wished to avoid war, but he died on March 1, 1792.

France declared war on Austria (April 20, 1792) and Prussia joined on the Austrian side a few weeks later. The French Revolutionary Wars had begun. After early skirmishes went badly for France, the first significant military engagement of the war occurred with the Franco-Prussian Battle of Valmy (September 20 1792). Although heavy rain prevented a conclusive resolution, the French artillery proved its superiority. However, by this time, France stood in turmoil and the monarchy had effectively become a thing of the past.

Constitutional crisis

On the night of August 10 1792, insurgents, supported by a new revolutionary Paris Commune, assailed the Tuileries. The king and queen ended up prisoners and the Legislative Assembly suspended the monarchy: little more than a third of the deputies were present, almost all of them Jacobins.

What remained of a national government depended on the support of the insurrectionary Commune. When the Commune sent gangs of assassins into the prisons to butcher 1400 victims, and addressed a circular letter to the

other cities of France inviting them to follow this example, the Assembly could offer only feeble resistance. This situation persisted until the Convention, 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. This date was later retroactively adopted as the beginning of Year One of the French Revolutionary Calendar.

The Convention

The legislative power in the new republic fell to a National Convention, while the executive power came to rest in the Committee of Public Safety. The Girondins became the most influential party in the Convention and on the Committee.

In the Brunswick Manifesto, the Imperial and Prussian armies threatened retaliation on the French population should it resist their advance or the reinstatement of the monarchy. As a consequence, King Louis was seen as conspiring with the enemies of France.

January 17, 1793 saw King Louis condemned to death for "conspiracy against the public liberty and the general safety" by a weak majority in Convention. The January 21 execution led to more wars with other European countries. Louis' Austrian-born queen, Marie Antoinette, would follow him to the guillotine on October 16.

When war went badly, prices rose and the sans-culottes (poor labourers and radical Jacobins) rioted; counter-revolutionary activities began in some regions. This encouraged the Jacobins to seize power through a parliamentary coup, backed up by force effected by mobilising public support against the Girondist faction, and by utilising the mob power of the Parisian sans-culottes. An alliance of Jacobin and sans-culottes elements thus became the effective centre of the new government. Policy became considerably more radical.

The Committee of Public Safety came under the control of Maximilien Robespierre, and the Jacobins unleashed the Reign of Terror (1793-1794). At least 1200 people met their deaths under the guillotine or otherwise; after accusations of counter-revolutionary activities. The slightest hint of counter-revolutionary thoughts or activities (or, as in the case of Jacques Hébert, revolutionary zeal exceeding that of those in power) could place one under suspicion, and the trials did not proceed scrupulously.

In 1794 Robespierre had ultra-radicals and moderate Jacobins executed; in consequence, however, his own popular support eroded markedly. On July 27, 1794, the French people revolted against the excesses of the Reign of Terror in what became known as the Thermidorian Reaction.

It resulted in moderate Convention members deposing and executing Robespierre and several other leading members of the Committee of Public Safety.

The new government was predominantly made up of Girondists who had survived the Terror, and after taking power, they took revenge as well by persecuting even those Jacobins who had helped to overthrow Robespierre, banning the Jacobin Club, and executing many of its former members in what was known as the White Terror.

The Convention approved the new "Constitution of the Year III" on August 17, 1795; a plebiscite ratified it in September; and it took effect on September 26, 1795.

The original White Terror took place in 1794, during the turbulent times surrounding the French Revolution.

It was organized by reactionary "Chouan" royalist forces in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror, and was targeted at the radical Jacobins and anyone suspected of supporting them. Throughout France, both real and suspected Jacobins were attacked and often murdered. Just like

during the Reign of Terror, trials were held with little regard for due process. In other cases, gangs of youths who had aristocratic connections roamed the streets beating known Jacobins. These "bands of Jesus" dragged suspected terrorists from prisons and murdered them much as alleged royalists had been murdered during the September Massacres of 1792.

Again, in 1815, following the return of King Louis XVIII of France to power, people suspected of having ties with the governments of the French Revolution or of Napoleon suffered arrest and execution.

Hébert's influence was mainly due to his articles in his journal Le Père Duchesne, which appeared from 1790 to 1794. These articles, while not lacking in a certain cleverness, were violent and abusive, and purposely

couched in foul language in order to appeal to the sans culottes. Born 1757 at Alençon, Orne, where his father, who kept a goldsmith's shop, had held some municipal office.

His family was ruined, however, by a lawsuit while he was still young, and Hébert came to Paris, where in his struggle against poverty he endured great hardships; the accusations of theft directed against him later by Camille Desmoulins were, however, without foundation.

In 1790 he attracted attention by some pamphlets, and became a prominent member of the club of the Cordeliers in 1791. During the insurrection of August 10, 1792 he was a member of the revolutionary Commune of Paris, and became second substitute of the procureur of the Commune on December 2, 1792.

His violent attacks on the Girondists led to his arrest on May 24, 1793, but he was released owing to the threatening attitude of the mob.

Henceforth very popular, Hébert organized with Pierre Gaspard Chaumette the worship of Reason, in opposition to the theistic cult of the Supreme Being inaugurated by Robespierre, against whom he tried to excite a popular movement. The failure of this brought about the arrest of the Hébertists, or enragés, as his partisans were called.

Hébert and his immediate followers, though certainly not all his sympathizers, were guillotined March 24, 1794, among the few to fall afoul of the Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety for an excess of zeal rather than for any accusations of counter-revolutionary activity. His wife, who had been a nun, was executed twenty days later.

Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (6 May 1758 – 28 July 1794) is one of the best-known leaders of the French Revolution. He was known by his supporters as "the Incorruptible" because of his austere moral devotion to the Revolution.

He was an influential member of the Committee of Public Safety, and was an instrumental figure in the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror.

His arrest and execution in 1794 put an end to the Terror. Politically he was a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among other Enlightenment philosophes, and a capable articulator of the beliefs of the left-wing bourgeoisie. He was described as physically unimposing, immaculate in

dress and personal manners. He was born in Arras, France. His family was of Irish descent, having emigrated from Ireland at the time of the Protestant Reformation for religious reasons, and his direct ancestors in the male line had been notaries in the little village of Carvin near Arras from the beginning of the 17th century. However, several genealogists have traced his family back to the Middle Ages in Northern France.

His paternal grandfather established himself in Arras as a lawyer. His father, who followed the same profession, married Jacqueline Marguerite Carraut, daughter of a brewer, in 1757. Robespierre was the eldest of four children. In 1767 Madame Derobespierre, as the name was then spelled, died, and her husband left Arras and wandered about Europe until his death in Munich in 1777. The children were raised by their maternal grandfather and aunts. Robespierre also had to take care of his siblings. Maximilien was sent to the college of Arras.

In 1770, on the recommendation of the bishop, he obtained a scholarship at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Here his learning was steeped in admiration of the idealized Roman Republic and in the rhetoric of Cicero, Cato, and other classic figures; his fellow pupils included Camille Desmoulins and Stanislas Fréron.

He completed his law studies with distinction and was admitted as a lawyer in 1781. He returned to Arras to seek practice and to struggle against poverty. His reputation had preceded him. The Bishop of Arras, M. de Conzié, appointed him criminal judge in the diocese of Arras in March 1782.

This appointment, which he soon resigned to avoid pronouncing a sentence of death, did not prevent his practicing at the bar. He quickly became a successful advocate. He then turned to literature and society and came to be regarded as one of the best writers – as well as one of the most popular dandies – of Arras.

In December 1783 he was elected a member of the academy of Arras, the meetings of which he attended regularly. In 1784 he obtained a medal from the academy of Metz for his essay on the question of whether the relatives of a condemned criminal should share his disgrace. He and Pierre Louis de Lacretelle, an advocate and journalist in Paris, divided the prize.

Many of his subsequent essays were less successful, but Robespierre was compensated for these failures by his popularity in the literary and musical society at Arras, known as the "Rosati," of which Carnot was also a member. In 1788 he took part in the discussion of the way that the Estates-General should be elected, showing clearly and forcibly in his Adresse à la nation artésienne that if the former mode of election by the members of the provincial estates were again adopted, the new States-General would not represent the people of France.

Although the leading members of the corporation were elected, Robespierre, their chief opponent, succeeded in getting elected with them. In the assembly of the bailliage rivalry ran still higher, but Robespierre had begun to make his mark in politics with the Avis aux habitants de la campagne (Arras, 1789). With this he secured the support of the country electors, and although only 30, comparatively poor and lacking patronage, he was elected fifth deputy of the tiers état of Artois to the States-General.

When the States-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789, Robespierre's fanatical mindset was already apparent. As Honoré Mirabeau is reported to have said: "That young man believes what he says; he will go far". Robespierre, a fervent supporter of the doctrines of Rousseau, had begun already to shape them into a vision of his own.

While the Constituent Assembly occupied itself with drawing up a constitution, Robespierre turned from the assembly of provincial lawyers and wealthy bourgeois to the people of Paris.

He was a frequent speaker in the Constituent Assembly (over 150 speeches up to 1791); often with great success – although his voice is noted as being "high-pitched [and] metallic". He was eventually recognized as second only to Pétion de Villeneuve – if second he was – as a leader of the small body of the extreme left; "the thirty voices" as Mirabeau contemptuously called them.

When his instinct told him that his ideas would have no success in the Assembly, he turned to the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, known as the Jacobin Club. This had consisted originally of the Breton deputies only. After the Assembly moved to Paris the Club began to admit various leaders of the Parisian bourgeoisie to its membership. As time went on, many of the more intelligent artisans and small shopkeepers became members of the club.

Among such men Robespierre found his audience. They did more than listen to him. They idolized him. The fanatical leader had found followers. As the wealthier bourgeois of Paris and deputies of a more moderate type seceded to the Club of '89, the influence of the old leaders of the Jacobins (Barnave, Duport, Alexandre de Lameth) diminished. When they, alarmed at the progress of the Revolution, founded the club of the Feuillants in 1791, the followers of Robespierre dominated the Jacobin Club.

The death of Mirabeau significantly strengthened Robespierre's hand in the Assembly. On May 15, 1791 (some accounts placing this on May 16) he proposed and carried the motion that no deputies who sat in the Constituent could sit in the succeeding Assembly. This has been construed by some as indicative of Robespierre's lack of political insight and his politically suspicious nature.

The flight of Louis XVI and his family on June 20 and his subsequent arrest at Varennes resulted in Robespierre declaring himself at the Jacobin Club to be ni monarchiste ni républicain ("neither monarchist nor republican").

After the massacre of the Champ de Mars (on July 17, 1791), in order to be nearer to the Assembly and the Jacobins, he moved to live in the house of Maurice Duplay, a cabinetmaker residing in the Rue Saint-Honoré and an ardent admirer of Robespierre's. Robespierre lived there (with two short intervals excepted) until his death. In fact, according to some sources, including his doctor, Souberbielle, Vilate, a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal, and his host's youngest daughter (who would later marry Philippe Le Bas of the Committee of General Security), he became engaged to the eldest daughter of his host, Éléonore Duplay.

On September 30, on the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the people of Paris crowned Pétion and Robespierre as the two incorruptible patriots.

With the dissolution of the Assembly he returned for a short visit to Arras, where he met with a triumphant reception. In November he returned to Paris.

On December 18, 1791, Robespierre made a speech that marked a new epoch in his life. Brissot de Warville, the dame politique of the Girondist party which had been formed in the Legislative Assembly, urged that war should be declared against Austria. Marie Antoinette, the queen, was equally urgent, in the hope that victorious foreign armies might restore the old absolutism of the Bourbons. In opposition stood Marat and Robespierre.

Robespierre feared a development of militarism, which might then be turned to the advantage of the forces of reaction. This opposition from those whom they had expected to aid them irritated the Girondins greatly, and from that moment began the struggle which ended in the coups d'état on May 31 and June 2, 1793.

Robespierre persisted in his opposition to the war. The Girondists, especially Brissot, attacked him violently. In April 1792, Robespierre resigned the post of public prosecutor at the tribunal of Paris, which he had held since February, and started a journal, Le Defenseur de la Constitution, in his own defence.

During the summer of 1792, when the fate of the Bourbons was being sealed, neither the Girondins in the Legislative Assembly nor Robespierre took any active part in overthrowing it. Stronger characters, like Georges Danton and Billaud Varenne, were the men who made the insurrection of August 10 and took the Tuileries. The Girondists, however, were quite ready to take advantage of the fait accompli; and Robespierre took his seat on the Commune of Paris, which had overthrown Louis XVI, as a means to check the political ambitions of the Girondins.

The strong men of the Commune were glad to have Robespierre's assistance, not because they cared for him or believed in him, but because of his popularity, his reputation for virtue (which had won for him the surname of "The Incorruptible"), and his influence over the Jacobin Club and its branches ubiquitous throughout France. It was he who presented the petition of the Commune of Paris on August 16 to the Legislative Assembly, demanding the establishment of a revolutionary tribunal and the summoning of a Convention.

The massacres of September a wave of mob violence which took place in Paris in late summer, which Robespierre unsuccessfully attempted to suppress, showed that the Commune had more confidence in Billaud than in him. Yet, as a proof of his personal popularity, he was a few days later elected first deputy for Paris to the National Convention. Robespierre and his allies took the benches high at he back of the hall, giving the faction the label 'the Mountain' (Montagnards); below them was the Manège of the Girondins and then 'the Plain' of the independents.

On the meeting of the Convention the Girondins immediately attacked Robespierre; they were jealous of his influence in Paris, and knew that his single-hearted fanaticism would never forgive their intrigues with the king at the end of July.

As early as September 26 the Girondists Marc-David Lasource accused him of aiming at the dictatorship; afterwards he was informed that Marat, Danton and himself were plotting to become triumvirs; and eventually on October 29 Louvet de Couvrai attacked him in a studied and declamatory harangue, abounding in ridiculous falsehoods and obviously concocted in Madame Roland's boudoir. Robespierre had no difficulty in rebutting this attack (November 5), while he denounced the federalist plans of the Girondists.

The great question regarding the execution of Louis XVI

All personal disputes, however, gave way by the month of December 1792 before the great question of the king's trial, and here Robespierre took up a position which is easily understood. These are his words spoken on December 3:

This is no trial; Louis is not a prisoner at the bar; you are not judges; you are—you cannot but be—statesmen, and the representatives of the nation. You have not to pass sentence for or against a single man, but you have to take a resolution on a question of the public safety, and to decide a question of national foresight. It is with regret that I pronounce, the fatal truth: Louis ought to perish rather than a hundred thousand virtuous citizens; Louis must die, that the country may live.

Robespierre argued that the King, having "betrayed" the people by attempt to flee the country (or indeed, in Robespierre's opinion, in having been a King at all) was not just a criminal but a danger to the state- a threat through the unifying symbol he presented to the enemies of the newborn Republic.

In this debate (which took place throughout January of 1793), he, along with other extreme 'Left' members like Jean Paul Marat, Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Antoine de St. Just, opposed the Girondins and the few remaining Royalists. The Royalists, of course, objected to any trial or punishment of the King whatsoever, but were too few to make any significant difference.

The Girondins believed that the King, having been dethroned, was now a citizen with the right to trial. Because of the exceptional nature of the defendant, the Girondins also believed that the National Convention was the competent body to judge Louis. A rather heated debate— with the Left on one side, and with Marie de Condorcet and Pierre Vergniaud on the other—helped to widen the increasing rift and personal animosity between the Left and the more moderate elements of the Convention, and played no small part towards the later purge of the Girondins.

The Girondin arguments, though, ended up convincing the convention that there should indeed be a trial. By a vote of 721-0 (with 29 deputies absent for the vote), the King was found guilty. This, however, only contributed more fuel for debate. The Girondins felt uneasy about executing the King and proposed that his verdict and sentence be submitted to a popular referendum.

The response of Robespierre and his associates was to hint that requests for such a referendum betrayed sympathy for the King, and further were blatant attempts to delay the execution of the Convention's sentence. The condemnatory rhetoric of Robespierre began to sway the Convention, and it voted 424-283 against submitting the verdict to the people. Last minute attempts to delay (at least) the execution of the King failed. A motion on January 19 was defeated by a single vote, 361-360; the following day, January 20, the margin widened to 380-310. Thus Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793.

Destruction of the Girondins

With the great question settled by the king's execution, the struggle between Robespierre and the Girondins entered upon a more acute stage, and the want of statesmanship among the latter threw upon the side of the fanatical Robespierre, Danton, and the pragmatic politicians who sought success for France in her struggle with Europe.

The Girondins had little influence in many areas; there was open royalist revolt in the Vendée, and federalist insurrection was rife in the South of France. Spurred on by Madame Roland, the Girondins refused to have anything to do with Danton. Government became increasingly difficult, tending towards the schismatic federalist idea, which would have broken France to pieces in the face of a largely hostile Europe.

In the month of May 1793 Camille Desmoulins, at the behest of Robespierre and Danton, published his Histoire des Brissotins and Brissol demasqué. Maximin Isnard declared that Paris must be destroyed if it pronounced itself against the provincial deputies. Robespierre preached a moral "insurrection against the corrupt deputies" at the Jacobin Club. On June 2, with great numbers of armed men from the Commune of Paris filling the Convention, thirty-one Girondin deputies were accused of counter-revolutionary activities and placed under arrest.

Foundation of the Committee of Public Safety

The royalist insurrections in Lyon and counter-revolutionary support elsewhere, coupled with the military reverses and increasing financial problems, angered and frightened the new Republic. The state was strengthened and more coherent leadership structures were developed. On March 11 a Revolutionary Tribunal was established in Paris and on April 6 the nine-member Committee of Public Safety replaced the larger Committee of General Defense. On July 27, 1793, the Convention elected Robespierre to the Committee, a position he had not sought.

The Convention, pleased with its efficiency in suppressing the Norman insurrection, was swift in strengthening its powers. The Committee of General Security which sat beside it was strengthened and given the management of the internal police of the country.

The Committee was not finally constituted until the September 13, when the last two of the twelve who held office until July 1794 were elected. Of these twelve at least seven—Lazare Carnot, Billaud-Varenne, Collot d'Herbois, Prieur Duvernois (of the Marne), Prieur (of the Côte d'Or), Jean Bon Saint-André and Robert Lindet—were essentially men of action.

Of the other four, Hérault de Séchelles was a Dantonist, Barère de Vieuzac was an eloquent Provençal, who was ready to be the spokesman to the Convention of any view which the majority of the Committee might adopt. Only Georges Couthon and Saint-Just, devoted to Robespierre, sustained his policy.

The Terror

Terror is only justice that is prompt, severe and inflexible.

Terror without virtue is disastrous; virtue without terror is powerless. (also sometimes quoted as …virtue without terror is impossible.) ("La vertu, sans laquelle la terreur est funeste; la terreur, sans laquelle la vertu est impuissante")

– Maximilien Robespierre

Some have argued that Robespierre's role in the Terror was but minor, and that he was a subordinate player within the Committee of Public Safety, whose contribution was ideological rather than practical. Other apologists such as Babeuf and Buonarroti have sought more reasonably to exculpate him on the grounds of practical expediency. However, as the leader, mouthpiece and articulator of the Terror, his role cannot be denied.

The Terror was initially based on Danton's idea that it was necessary to resort to extreme measures to keep France united and strong at home in order to successfully meet her enemies upon the frontier.

This idea was systematized by the Committee of Public Safety. However, Robespierre is still often regarded as the committee's dominant spirit, though this is perhaps largely because after his death many of his colleagues sought to save themselves by blaming him for most of the Committee's activities.

He was one of the most popular orators in the Convention, on which his carefully prepared addresses often made a deep impression. His panegyrics on the system of revolutionary government and his praise of virtue illustrated his belief that the system of the Terror was entirely necessary, laudable and inevitable. His moral standing and undeniable incorruptibility threw a lustre on the Committee of which he was a member.

In the winter of 1793–1794 it became obvious to the Committee that the Hébertist party must perish, or its opposition within the Committee would become overwhelming due to its significant influence in the Commune of Paris. Robespierre shared his colleagues' fear of the Hébertist opinions, and he had personal reasons for intensely disliking that party of not only "atheism" (reflecting his belief in the necessity of religious faith), but excessive bloodthirst.

His position towards the Dantonist party was of a different character. It has been suggested that he privately was in some sympathy with George Danton,Camille Desmoulins and their growing desire to end the revolution. However his position was complicated by his dislike of the 'corruption' and venality of Danton and his friends, which offended Robespierre's precise and possiblly somewhat zealous sense of honor and 'virtue'.

After having seen established the strong executive he had laboured for, and having moved the resolutions which finally consolidated the power of the Committee of Public Safety in September 1793, Danton retired to his country house.

Danton did not believe that this continuous series of sacrifices under the guillotine was necessary, especially since he believed the danger to the country had passed away with the victories of the revolutionary army. Thus, at his behest, Camille Desmoulins protested against the Terror in his third issue of Le Vieux Cordelier (Robespierre had read and approved of the first two issues):

Where is this system of terror to end? What is the good of a tyranny comparable only to that of the Roman emperors as described by Tacitus?

Such were the questions which Camille Desmoulins asked under Danton's influence. This wish for what many saw as premature cessation of the Terror, was objectionable to many on the Committee of Public Safety. It appeared to them that both parties had to be crushed.

Before the blows at the leaders of those two parties were struck, Robespierre retired for a month (from February 13 to March 13, 1794) from active business in the Convention and the Committee, due to illness; but he came to the conclusion that the cessation of the Terror would mean the loss of that supremacy by which he hoped to establish the ideal of the Republic of Virtue.

Danton, he knew, was essentially a politician willing to negotiate for a premature peace with traitors, and that he laughed at his ideas and especially his politico-religious projects. He must have considered too that the result of his siding with Danton would probably have been fatal to himself.

The result of his deliberations was that he broke with Danton and co-operated in the attacks of the Committee on the two parties. On the March 15 he reappeared in the Convention; on March 19 Hébert and nineteen of his friends were arrested; and on March 24 they were guillotined.

On the March 30 Danton, Camille Desmoulins and their friends were arrested, they were tried on April 2, and on the 5th of April they too were guillotined. In formulating charges against both parties, Robespierre alleged complicity with foreign powers. The extensive charge sheet against Danton was, "even by the standards of the Revolutionary Tribunal, an incredibly feeble document."[citation needed]

It was not until after the execution of Danton that Robespierre began to develop a policy distinct from that of his colleagues in the Committee, an opposition which ended in his downfall. He began by using his influence over the Jacobin Club to dominate the Commune of Paris through his devoted adherents, two of whom, Fleuriot-Lescot and CF de Payan, were elected respectively mayor and procureur of the Commune.

He also attempted to usurp the influence of the other members of the Committee over the armies by getting his young adherent, Saint-Just, sent on a mission to the frontier.

In Paris Robespierre determined to increase the pressure of the Terror: no one should accuse him of moderantism. Through the increased efficiency of the revolutionary tribunal Paris should tremble before him as the chief member of the Committee. The Convention should pass whatever measures he might dictate.

To secure his aims, Couthon, his other ally in the Committee, proposed and carried on 10 June the drastic Law of 22 Prairial, by which even the appearance of justice was taken from the tribunal, which, as no witnesses were allowed, became a simple court of condemnation.

The result of this law was that between 12 June and the 28 July, the day of Robespierre's death, no fewer than 1,285 victims perished by the guillotine in Paris. It was the bloodiest and the least justifiable period of the Terror. But before this there had taken place in Robespierre's life an episode of supreme importance, as illustrating his character and his political aims:

On May 7 he secured a decree from the Convention recognizing the existence of the Supreme Being. This worship of the Supreme Being was based upon the ideas of Rousseau in The Social Contract, and was opposed by Robespierre to Catholicism on the one hand and the Hébertist atheism on the other.

In honour of the Supreme Being a great fête was held on 8 June; Robespierre, as president of the Convention, walked first and delivered his harangue, and as he looked around him he may well have believed that his position was secured and that he was at last within reach of a supreme power which should enable him to impose his belief on all France, and so ensure its happiness.

The majority of the Committee found his popularity—or rather his ascendancy, for as that increased his personal popularity diminished—useful to them, since by increasing the stringency of the Terror he strengthened the position of the Committee, whilst attracting to himself, as occupying the most prominent position in it, any latent feeling of dissatisfaction at such stringency.

Of the issue of a struggle between themselves and Robespierre they had little fear: they controlled the Committee of General Security through their alliance with its leaders, André Amar and Marc Guillaume Alexis Vadier; they were hopeful of obtaining a majority in the Convention; for they knew that the chief deputies on the left, or the Mountain, were Dantonists, who burned to avenge Danton's death;

while they felt sure also that the mass of the deputies of the centre, or the Marsh, could be hounded on against Robespierre if they were to accuse him of aiming at the dictatorship and pour on him the obloquy of having increased the Terror when victory on the frontier rendered it less necessary; and they knew finally that his actual adherents, though devoted to him, were few in number.

The devotion of these admirers had been further excited by the news that a half-witted girl, named Cécile Renault, had been found wandering near his house, with a knife in her possession, intending to play the part of Charlotte Corday. She was executed on June 17, on the very day that Vadier raised a laugh at Robespierre's expense in the Convention by his report on the conspiracy of Catherine Théot, a mad woman, who had asserted that Robespierre was a divinity.

Robespierre felt that he must strike his blow now or never. Yet he was not sufficiently audacious to strike at once, as Payan and Jean Baptiste Coffinhal, the ablest of his adherents, would have had him do.

He retired from the Convention for some weeks, as he had done before the overthrow of the Hébertists and the Dantonists, to prepare his plan of action. This retirement seemed ominous to the majority of the Committee, and they too prepared for the struggle by communicating with the deputies of the Mountain, who were either friends of Danton or men of proved energy like Barras, Fréron and Tallien.

At last, on July 26, Robespierre appeared, for the first time for more than four weeks, in the Convention and delivered a harangue, lasting more than two hours. He warned of a conspiracy that threatened the Republic, that certain deputies who had acted unjustly and exceeded their powers ought to be punished, and that the Committees of Public Safety and General Security should be renewed.

This raised great excitement in the Convention. Robespierre had not mentioned any names and all wondered who were the deputies destined to be punished. All were surprised that the Terror should be imputed as a fault to the very Committee of which Robespierre had been a member.

The majority of the Committee of Public Safety determined to act promptly. The Convention, moved by Robespierre's eloquence, at first passed his motions; but he was replied to by Joseph Cambon the financier, Billaud-Varenne, Amar and Vadier, and the Convention rescinded their decrees and referred Robespierre's question to their committees.

On the following day, July 27, or in the revolutionary calendar 9 Thermidor, Saint-Just began to speak on behalf of the motions of Robespierre, when violent interruptions showed the temper of the Convention.

Jean Lambert, Tallien, Billaud-Varenne and Vadier again attacked Robespierre; cries of "Down with the tyrant!" were raised; and, when Robespierre hesitated in his speech in answer to these attacks, the words "C'est le sang de Danton qui t'étouffe" ("The blood of Danton chokes you") showed what was uppermost in the minds of the Montagnards.

Robespierre tried in vain to get a hearing, the excitement increased and at five in the afternoon Robespierre, Couthon and Saint-Just, with two young deputies, Augustin Robespierre (younger brother of Maximilien) and Philippe François Joseph Lebas, the only men in all the Convention who supported them, were ordered to be arrested.

He was rescued from his prison, with the other deputies, by the troops of the Commune and brought to the Hôtel de Ville. There he was surrounded by his faithful adherents, led by Payan and Coffinhal.

But the days were long gone when the Commune could overawe the Convention. There was marked hostility on the part of the prime movers to the Commune. On the news of the release of Robespierre, the Convention again met, and declared the members of the Commune and the released deputies outlaws.

The national guards under the command of Barras had little difficulty in making their way to the Hôtel de Ville. Lebas shot himself, Augustin Robespierre jumped from a high window, Couthon was found with broken limbs on a stair,

and Robespierre was taken away with his jaw broken by a bullet – a young gendarme named Merda claimed to have shot him while Robespierre was signing an appeal to one of the sections of Paris to take up arms for him, though Thomas Carlyle and other historians discredit the story, believing the wound to have been a failed suicide attempt– and all the released deputies were once again arrested.

Robespierre was the next day taken before the tribunal, and without trial he was guillotined, face up and screaming in pain from his injured jaw according to reports, with Couthon and Saint-Just and nineteen others of his adherents on the Place de la Révolution on the 10th Thermidor An II (July 28, 1794).

His corpse and head both are buried in the common cemetery of Errancis, today Place de Goubeaux, and the spot is covered by an unmarked gravestone.

Jean-Paul Marat

Jean-Paul Marat (May 24, 1743 – July 13, 1793), was a Swiss-born French scientist and physician who made much of his career in the United Kingdom, but is best known as an activist in the French Revolution.

A fiery journalist, an advocate of such violent measures as the September 1792 massacres of jailed "enemies of the Revolution", and a member of the radical Jacobin faction[citation needed] during the French Revolution, he helped launch the Reign of Terror and compiled "death lists". He was stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday in 1793.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Marat placed his career as a scientist and philosopher entirely behind him. From the time in 1788 that the Parlement of Paris and other Notables advised the assembling of the Estates-General for the first time in over 150 years, Marat devoted himself entirely to politics.

His pamphlet Offrande à la patrie ("Offering to the Fatherland") dwelt on much the same points as the the Abbé Sieyès' famous "Qu'est-ce que le Tiers État?" ("What is the Third Estate?") When the Estates-General met, he published June 1789 supplement to his Offrande, followed in July by La constitution ("The Constitution") and in September by the Tableau des vices de la constitution d'Angleterre ("Tableau of the vices of the English constitution") intended to influence the structure of a constitution for France.

The latter work was presented to the National Constituent Assembly and was an anti-oligarchic dissent from the anglomania that was gripping that body.

In September 1789, Marat began his own paper, which was at first called Moniteur patriote ("Patriotic Monitor"), changed four days later to Publiciste parisien ("Parisian Publicity Agent"), and finally named L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People"). From this position, he expressed suspicion of all those in power, and dubbed them "enemies of the people".

Although Marat never joined a specific faction during the Revolution, he condemned several sides in his L'Ami du peuple, and reported their alleged disloyalties (until he was proven wrong or they were proven guilty). Such declarations earned him the title Wrath of the People.

Marat often attacked the most influential and powerful groups in France, including the Corps Municipal, the Constituent Assembly, the ministers, and the Court of the Chatelet. This resulted in his imprisonment from October 8 to November 5, 1789.

In January 1790, he was again nearly arrested for his aggressive campaign against the Marquis de La Fayette, and escaped by fleeing to London, where he wrote Denonciation contre Necker ("Denunciation of Jacques Necker", an attack against the minister of Louis XVI).

In May he returned to Paris to continue the publication of L'Ami du peuple, and attacked many of France´s most powerful citizens. Fearing reprisal, Marat was forced to hide in the Catacombs, where he contracted a debilitating chronic skin disease; among his few allies at this time was Simone Évrard.

Marat, long a supporter of the abolition of the Bourbon Monarchy, and subsequently attacked more moderate revolutionary leaders. In July 1790, he wrote:

Five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom and happiness. A false humanity has held your arms and suspended your blows; because of this millions of your brothers will lose their lives.

Marat placed his hopes in the end of the Constituent Assembly, but lost faith in the actions of the Legislative Assembly. In December 1791, he again fled to London and wrote another book École du citoyen ("School of the Citizen"). In April 1792, he returned to Paris after being summoned by the Cordeliers Club, which provided a political base for him to work.

During this time, Marat was frequently criticized, and went into hiding until The August 10 Insurrection, when the Tuileries Palace was besieged and the Royal Family sheltered with the Legislative Assembly. This provoked the Duke of Brunswick Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand to issue a proclamation which called for the crushing of the Revolution, and served to inflame sentiments in Paris.

Subsequently, Marat took his seat at the Paris Commune, and demanded a trial be held to judge the royalists in prison. When no trial was convened, he advocated the September Massacres in which thousands of political prisoners were murdered, and established the Committee of Surveillance, whose declared role was to root out counter-Revolutionaries (Marat composed the death lists from which those suspected of political crimes). One of his victims may have been the chemist Antoine Lavoisier.

Alhough still without party affiliation, Marat was elected to the National Convention in September 1792 to represent the people of France. When France was declared a Republic on September 22, Marat stopped printing L'Ami du peuple, and, three days later, began the Journal de la république française ("Journal of the French Republic").

Much like L’Ami du peuple, it criticized many of France´s political figures, and made Marat almost uniquely unpopular with his fellow members of the Convention.

His stance during the trial of the deposed king Louis XVI was also unique. He declared it unfair to accuse Louis for anything anterior to his acceptance of the constitution, and though implacably committed to the proposition that this one man who must die for the people's good, he would not allow Malesherbes, the king's counsel, to be attacked in his paper, and spoke of him as a "sage et respectable vieillard" ("wise and respectable old man").

On January 21, 1793, King Louis was guillotined, an episode which created political turmoil; from January to May, Marat fought bitterly with the moderate Girondins, whom he believed to be covert enemies of republicanism, and led his public in a violent confrontation with them.

The Girondins won the first round: the Convention ordered that Marat should be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal; the plan was overturned when Marat was acquitted and returned to the Convention with enhanced popular support.

The fall of the Girondins on May 31, provoked by the actions of François Hanriot, became one of Marat's last achievements. His skin disease was having negative effects on his life, and his last resort in order to alleviate the discomfort was from soaking in a hot bath.

Marat was in his bath on July 13, 1793, when a woman claiming to be a messenger from Caen (where escaped Girondins were trying to gain a Normandy base) begged to be admitted to his quarters.

He ordered her in, asked her the names of the offending deputies, and after recording their names said "They shall all be guillotined". The young woman, Charlotte Corday, then drew a knife and stabbed him in the chest. He called out, "A moi, ma chère amie!" ("To me, my dear friend"), and died. Corday was a Girondin, and her action provoked reprisals in which thousands of the Jacobins' adversaries – both royalists and Girondins – were executed on supposed charges of treason.

She herself was guillotined on July 17, 1793 for the murder of Marat. During her four-day trial, she had testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000".

The entire National Convention attended his funeral, and his ashes were placed in the Hall of Spectacles, where the sessions took place. When the Jacobins started their Deist Dechristianisation campaigns (as the competing Cult of Reason and Maximilien Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being), Marat was made a quasi-saint, and his bust often replaced crucifixes in the former churches of Paris.

Charlotte Corday

Charlotte Corday (July 27, 1768 – July 17, 1793), more fully Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d'Armont, killed Jean-Paul Marat in 1793.

Born in Saint Saturnin, Normandy, France, Corday was a member of an aristocratic but poor family. She was educated at the Abbaye aux Dames, a convent in Caen, Normandy. She approved of the French revolution, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Girondists.

Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) was a member of the radical Jacobin faction that initiated the mass atrocities and beheadings known as the Reign of Terror, which followed the early stages of the Revolution. He was a journalist, exerting power through his newspaper, The Friend of the People (L'Ami du peuple).

In 1789, when Marat had 22 Girondists arrested, Charlotte Corday began to consider killing him. The execution of King Louis XVI (21 January 1793) and the denunciation of Marat by Jacques Pierre Brissot, a leading Girondist, helped her finally decide to do so.

Carrying a copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives under her arm, she travelled from Caen to Paris on July 9, and stayed at the Hotel de Providence. She bought a dinner knife at the Palais-Royal, and wrote her Speech to the French who are Friends of Law and Peace, explaining her actions.

She went to Marat offering to inform him about a planned Girondist uprising in Caen. She was initially turned away, but on a second attempt on 13 July Marat admitted her into his presence (he conducted most of his affairs from a bathtub because of a debilitating skin condition).

Marat copied down the names of the Girondists as Corday dictated them to him. She pulled the knife from her scarf and plunged it into his chest, piercing his lung, aorta and left ventricle. He called out, A moi, ma chère amie! ("To me, my dear friend"), and died.

This is the moment memorialized by Jacques-Louis David's painting The Death of Marat.

A political cover-up was attempted prior to the trial; Chaveau-Lagarde, who previously had represented Marie Antoinette, was appointed as defence for Charlotte Corday. The president of the Tribunal ordered him to enter a plea of insanity on his client's behalf, in order to remove any notion of patriotic idealism from the act.

Chaveau-Lagarde, who more than understood Corday's actions, although unable to disobey the Tribunal made a mockery of it with a well-honed piece of equivocal verbiage.

At trial, Corday testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000." It was likely a reference to Maximilien Robespierre's words before the execution of King Louis XVI. Four days after Marat was killed, she died under the guillotine.

The assassination did not stop the Jacobins or the Terror: Marat became a martyr, and busts of Marat replaced crucifixes and religious statues that were no longer welcome under the new regime. The anti-female stance of many revolutionary leaders was increased by Corday's actions. The Revolution now turned with full force on Marie Antoinette, the king's imprisoned widow.

The enthusiasm for Marat lasted about two years, by which time his actions had been popularly reassessed, and Charlotte reevaluated as someone who had given her life to rid her country of a monster.

Camille Desmoulins

Lucie Simplice Camille Benoist Desmoulins (March 2, 1760 – April 5, 1794) was a French journalist and politician who played an important part in the French Revolution. He was closely associated with Georges Danton.Desmoulins was born at Guise, in Picardy. His father was lieutenant-general of the bailliage of Guise, and through the efforts of a friend obtained a scholarship for his son, who at the age of fourteen left home for Paris, and entered the Collège Louis-le-Grand.

In this school, which Maximilien Robespierre and Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron also attended at the time, Desmoulins was an accomplished student. Destined by his father for the law, at the completion of his legal studies he was admitted a lawyer of the parlement of Paris in 1785.

However, he had little success, as his approach was judged violent, and his speech was impaired by a serious stammer. This prompted him to turn towards writing and his interest for public affairs, and he gradually prepared himself to become a political orator.

In March 1789 Desmoulins began his political career. Having been nominated deputy from the bailliage of Guise, he arrived in Laon as one of the commissioners for the election of deputies to the States-General summoned by royal edict of January 24. Camille heralded its meeting by his Ode to the States-General.

It is, moreover, highly probable that he was the author of a radical pamphlet entitled La Philosophie au peuple français, published in 1788, the text of which is not known.

July 1789

His chances for professional success were by then minimal, and he was living in Paris in extreme poverty; however, he showed enthusiasm for the political changes announced by the meeting of the States-General.

As appears from his letters to his father, he watched with excitement the procession of deputies at the Palace of Versailles, and with indignation the events of the latter part of June which followed the closing of the Salle des Menus to the deputies who had named themselves the National Assembly - leading to the Tennis Court Oath. The episode shows the first signs of Desmoulins' siding with the sans-culottes.

The sudden dismissal of Jacques Necker by King Louis XVI was the event which brought Desmoulins to fame. On July 12, 1789 he leapt on a table outside one of the cafés in the garden of the Palais Royal, and announced to the crowd the dismissal of the reformer. Apparently losing his stammer due to the excitement, he addressed the passions of the public, calling "To arms!" and adding:

"This dismissal is the tocsin of the St. Bartholomew of the patriots" (meaning that a massacre of the partisans of reform was under preparation).

Finally, Desmoulins drew two pistols from under his coat, he declared that he would not fall alive into the hands of the police who were watching his movements. He descended embraced by the crowd.

This scene was the beginning of the actual events of the Revolution. Following Desmoulins, the started rioting throughout Paris, proccurring arms by force, and, on July 13, it was partly organized as the Parisian militia - which was afterwards to be the National Guard. On July 14, the major event remembered as the storming of the Bastille occurred.

The following day, Desmoulins begun the most publicised phase of his writing career. In May and June 1789 he had written La France libre, which his publisher had refused to print. The taking of the Bastille, however, and the events preceding it, were a sign of changing times, and, on July 18, Desmoulins's work was issued.

Considerably in advance of public opinion, it already pronounced in favour of a republic, and—through its elaborate examination of the rights of king, of nobles, of Roman Catholic clergy and of people—it became instantly popular, securing Desmoulins a partnership with Honoré Mirabeau, as well as a slander campaign carried out by Royalist pamphleteers.

Journalism

Arguably exhilarated, he appealed to the lower orders by printing his Discours de ici lanterne aux Parisiens which he headed by a quotation from the Gospel, Qui male agit odit lucem ("he that doth evil hateth light" John 3:20), used to argue that violence was justified; consequently, Desmoulins was dubbed "Procureur-général de la lanterne" ("The Lanterne Prosecutor").

In November 1789, he began his career as a journalist by the issue of the first number of a weekly publication, Histoire des Révolutions de France et de Brabant, which ceased to appear at the end of July 1791.

The publication was extremely popular from its first to its last number - Camille became famous and was no longer poor. The Histoire des Révolutions is a measure of what ideas were in circulation in the revolutionary milieu of Paris, but it has since drawn criticism for its extremely violent tone.

Desmoulins was influenced by the theorists of the Revolution - for some time before the death of Mirabeau, in April 1791, he had begun his collaboration with Georges Danton (his associate for the rest of their lives).

In July 1791, he appeared before the Parisian Commune as head of a deputation of petitioners for the deposition of the monarch, at the moment when such a request was dangerous; the gesture enhanced agitation in the city, and the frequent assaults attacks to which Desmoulins had often been subject were followed by a warrant for the arrest of himself and Danton.

Danton briefly left Paris, while Desmoulins chose to remain, and even made occasional appearances at the Jacobin Club. Upon the failure of this attempt of his opponents, Desmoulins published a pamphlet, Jean Pierre Brissot démasqué, which contained violent attacks. It had its origins in a conflict between the two, and was followed in 1793 by a Fragment de l'histoire secrète de la Révolution (or Histoire des Brissotins), in which the party of the Gironde, and especially Brissot, were subject to a populist attack.

National Convention and clash with Robespierre

Desmoulins took an active part on insurrection of the 10th of August that marked the attack of Parisians on the Tuileries Palace, and became secretary to Danton when the latter became Justice Minister. On September 8 he was elected one of the deputies for Paris to the National Convention - where he nonetheless was much less successful than as a journalist, and never occupied the foreground.

He affiliated with The Mountain, and voted for the Republic and the execution of the king. Camille Desmoulins became close to Robespierre, and the Fragment de l'histoire secrète de la Révolution was very likely inspired by the latter. The success of the pamphlet—which did a lot to help install the Reign of Terror and condemn the Gironde leaders to the guillotine—proved alarming for both Danton and its author.

In December 1793 was issued the first number of the Vieux Cordelier, which was at first directed against the Hébertists (and approved of by Robespierre), but which soon formulated Danton's idea of a Committee of clemency.

This caused Robespierre to turn against Desmoulins, and to take advantage of the popular indignation roused against the Hébertists to send them to death. He and Louis de Saint-Just then turned their attention to both the Enragés (Jacques Roux's faction) and the Indulgents (—the name given by Robespierre to the Cordeliers).

On January 7, 1794, Robespierre, who on a former occasion had defended Camille when in danger at the hands of the National Convention, in addressing the Jacobin Club did not recommend the expulsion of Desmoulins, but the burning of certain numbers of the Vieux Cordelier.

Desmoulins replied using a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was widely perceived as the intellectual authority for all revolutionary gestures): "burning is not answering". The implied insult led to a bitter conflict. By the end of March, the Hébertists had been guillotined, while the other side - Danton, Desmoulins and other leaders of the moderates - were placed under arrest.

Trial and execution

On March 31, the warrant of arrest was signed and executed, and on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of April the trial took place before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and was marked by impressive scenes. On being asked his age, Desmoulins replied:

"I am thirty-three, the age of the "sans-culotte" Jesus, a critical age for every patriot" (this was false; he was in fact thirty-four).

The accused were prevented from defending themselves; a decree of the Convention denied them the right of speech. This, together with the false report of a spy (who charged Desmoulins' wife with conspiring for the escape of her husband and the "ruin of the Republic"), Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville obtained a death sentence after threatening the jury. The verdict was passed in absence of the accused, and their execution was appointed for the same day.

Desmoulins struggled before his death, allegedly tearing his clothes to shreds. Of the group of fifteen guillotined together (also including Marie Jean Hérault de Séchelles, François Joseph Westermann, and Pierre Philippeaux), Desmoulins died third, and Danton last.

Family

On December 29, 1790 Camille had married Lucile Duplessis, and among the witnesses of the ceremony are observed the names of Brissot, Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve and Robespierre. The only child of the marriage, Horace Camille, was born on July 6, 1792. Two days afterwards Desmoulins brought it into notice by appearing with it before the Commune to demand "the formal statement of the civil estate of his son". Horace was pensioned by the French government, and died in Haiti in 1825.

Lucile was arrested a few days after her husband, and condemned to the guillotine on the basis of false charges. She displayed calmness and courage on the day of her death (April 13, 1794).

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (February 2, 1754 – May 17, 1838) was a French diplomat. He worked successfully from the regime of Louis XVI, through the French Revolution and then under Napoleon I, Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe. Known since the turn of the 19th century simply by the name Talleyrand, he is widely regarded as one of the most versatile and influential diplomats in European history.

Talleyrand was born into an aristocratic family in Paris. By his own account, a foot injury in childhood left him unable to enter the anticipated military career. Deprived of his rights of primogeniture by a family council, which judged his physical condition incompatible with the traditional military careers of the Talleyrand dukes, he was instead directed to an ecclesiastic career.

This was considerably assisted and encouraged by his uncle, then Archbishop of Reims. It would appear that the family, while prestigious and ancient, was not particularly prosperous, and saw church positions as a way to gain wealth. He attended the Collège d'Harcourt and Saint-Sulpice College until the age of 21.

He was ordained in 1779. In 1780, he became a Church representative to the French Crown, as the Agent-General of the Clergy. In this position, he was instrumental in drafting a general inventory of church properties in France as of 1785, along with a defence of "inalienable rights of church", a stance he was to deny later. In 1789, due to the influence of his father and family, the already notably non-believing Talleyrand was appointed Bishop of Autun, a bishopric that was something of a family possession.

French Revolution

In the Estates-General of 1789, he represented the clergy, the First Estate. During the French Revolution, Talleyrand supported the revolutionary cause. He assisted Mirabeau in the secularization of ecclesiastical properties.

He participated in the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and proposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that nationalized the Church, and swore in the first two constitutional bishops, even though he had himself resigned as Bishop following his excommunication by Pope Pius VI. Notably, he promoted the public education in full spirit of Enlightenment. He celebrated the mass during the Fête de la Fédération on the 14 July 1790.

In 1792, he was sent twice, though not officially, to Britain to avert war. Besides an initial declaration of neutrality during the first campaigns of 1792, it ultimately failed. In September 1792, he left Paris for England just at the beginning of September Massacres, yet declined the émigré status.

Because of his aristocratic background, the National Convention issued a warrant for his arrest in December 1792. His stay in England was not uneventful either; in March 1794, he was forced to leave the country by Pitt's expulsion order. He then arrived at the United States where he stayed until his return to France in 1796. During his stay, he subsidized himself by working as a bank agent, involving in commodity trading and real-estate speculation.

After 9 Thermidor and the demise of Robespierre, he mobilized his friends (most notably the abbé Desrenaudes and Germaine de Staël) to lobby in the National Convention and newly established Directoire for his return. His name was then suppressed from the émigré list and he returned to France in September 25, 1796. In 1797, he became Foreign Minister. Talleyrand saw a possible political career for Napoleon during the Italian campaigns of 1796/1797.

He wrote many letters to Napoleon and the two became close allies. Talleyrand was against the destruction of the Republic of Venice, but he complimented Napoleon when peace with Austria was concluded and Venice was finished, probably because he wanted to reinforce his alliance with Napoleon.

Together with Napoleon's younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte, he was instrumental in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire, 1799 and soon after he was made Foreign Minister by Napoleon, although he rarely agreed with Napoleon's foreign policy. The Pope also released him from the ban of excommuncation.

French Empire

In March 1804, he may have been involved in the kidnapping and execution of the Duke of Enghien, a cause celebre in Europe, as a sort of echo of the execution of Louis XVI, which tended to delegitimize the Napoleonic regime, but whose specifics remain to this day something of a mystery.

Napoleon accused him of such involvement, a charge seconded much later by Chateaubriand, but such an act would have been out of character: Talleyrand consistently advocated against violence, most notably speaking out against the guillotine, and during the coup of 18 Brumaire he assured that Barras could leave Paris safely. For his part, Talleyrand said of the killing, "That was worse than a crime; it was a blunder."

In May 1804, Napoleon made him Grand Chamberlain and Vice-elector of the Empire. During this year, Talleyrand also bought the Chateau Valençay. In 1806, he was made Sovereign Prince of Benevento (or Bénévent). Talleyrand was against the crude treatment of Prussia in the Peace of Tilsit in 1807. The queen of Prussia wept and was consoled by Talleyrand. This gave him a good name among the elite of the European countries outside France.

He resigned as minister of foreign affairs in 1807 over his opposition to the Franco-Russian Alliance and, by 1809, he was even further from the Emperor, a break completed in 1812 with the attack on Russia. Talleyrand had no responsible position between 1807 and 1812, when Napoleon appointed him as representative of France at the Congress of Erfurt. Tsar Alexander I of Russia wanted his advice in dealing with Napoleon and they met regularly during the Congress.

It is said that Tsar Alexander changed his attitude towards Napoleon thanks to Talleyrand. Alexander was afraid of Napoleon, because the Russians had been defeated twice. He admired the modern institutions of France and wanted to reform his country. Talleyrand allegedly convinced him that Napoleon's France was a threat to European nation states and that Russia should resist the will of emperor Napoleon. Talleyrand became a Russian secret agent from 1812 onwards, but his political career was over until the fall of Napoleon.

While serving under Napoleon, Talleyrand began to accept bribes from hostile countries, particularly Austria and Russia, to betray Napoleon's secrets. Typically of Talleyrand, it is hard to determine where his principles met his pecuniary interests. Growing weary of Napoleon's endless ambitions, which he felt would ruin France, he became a paid agent of the opposing powers, most notably Austria and England.

His agitations against the Spanish campaign, which he considered unwise, produced a rapprochement with Joseph Fouche—and convinced Napoleon that he was plotting against him.

This perception caused the famous dressing down in front of his marshals, where Napoleon famously claimed that he could "break him like a glass, but it's not worth the trouble" and added with his usual scatologic tone that Talleyrand was "shit in a silk stocking," to which the minister coldly retorted, once Napoleon had left, "Pity that so great a man should have been so badly brought up!"

Restoration

When Napoleon was succeeded by Louis XVIII in April 1814, Talleyrand was one of the key creators of the restoration of the Bourbons while opposing the new legislation of Louis's rule. Tsar Alexander would probably not have leaned that way, but Talleyrand wanted the restoration of Louis XVIII. Talleyrand was the chief French negotiator at the Congress of Vienna, and, in that same year, he signed the Treaty of Paris.

It was due, in part, to his skills that the terms of the treaty were remarkably lenient towards France. At the start, only four countries made the decisions: Austria, the United Kingdom, Prussia, and Russia. France and other European countries were invited, but had no influence on the decision making.

Talleyrand became the champion of the small countries and demanded admission with the decision makers. The big four admitted France and Spain to the decision making back rooms of the conference after a good deal of diplomatic maneuvering by Talleyrand, who had the support of the Spanish representative, Pedro Gómez Labrador, Marquis of Labrador.

Spain was excluded after a while (a result of both the Marquis of Labrador's incompetence as well as the quixotic nature of Spain's agenda), but France (Talleyrand) was allowed to participate until the end. Russia and Prussia wanted to enlarge their territory during the Congress. Austria was afraid of losing territories to them and the United Kingdom was against their expansion as well.

Talleyrand managed to establish a middle position and received some favours from the other countries in exchange for his support.

France even returned to its 1792 boundaries with no reparations, with French control over papal Avignon and Salm, which had been independent at the start of the French Revolution in 1789. (Some historians, critical of Talleyrand, blame his diplomacy for establishing the faultlines of World War I, especially for allowing Prussia to engulf small German states west of Rhine.

This simultaneously placed Prussian armed forces at the French-German frontier—-which had never happened before; made Prussia the largest power in Germany in terms of territorial extent, population and the industry of the Ruhr and Rhineland; and eventually paved the way to German unification under Prussian throne.)

Napoleon's return to France in 1815 and his subsequent defeat, the Hundred Days, was a reverse for the diplomatic victories of Talleyrand; the second peace settlement was markedly less lenient and it was fortunate for France that the business of the Congress had been concluded. Talleyrand resigned in September of that year, either over the second treaty or under pressure from opponents in France.

He thereafter restricted himself to the role of 'elder statesman', criticising--and intriguing--from the sidelines. When King Louis-Philippe came to power in the July Revolution of 1830, Tallyrand was made ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1830-34. In this role he strived to reinforce the legitimacy of Louis-Philippe's regime, and he proposed a partition plan for the Netherlands.

Talleyrand had a reputation as a voluptuary and a womanizer. Leaving no legitimate children, four possible illegitimate children are discussed. Charles Joseph, comte de Flahaut is generally recognized to be an illegitimate son of Talleyrand; the painter Eugène Delacroix, was rumored to be Talleyrand's son, but historians who have examined the issue (for example, Leon Noel), doubt this. Two possible daughters survived him, "The Mysterious Charlotte"—possibly his daughter by his future wife, Catherine Worlée Grand; and Pauline, ostensibly the daughter of the Duc and Duchess Dino.

Aristrocratic women were very much part of his political tactics, both for their influence and their ability to cross borders unhindered. His presumed lover Germaine de Stael was a major influence on him, and he on her. Though their personal philosophies were most different (she a romantic, he very much a baroque sensibility) she assisted him greatly, most notably by lobbying Barras, to permit Talleyrand to return to France from his American exile, and then to have him made foreign minister.

He lived with Catherine Worlée, born in India and married there to Charles Grand. She had adventured about before settling in Paris as a notorious courtesan in the 1780s for several years before she divorced Grand and married Talleyrand in 1802.

Talleyrand's venality was celebrated; in the tradition of the ancien régime, he expected to be paid for the State duties he performed—whether these can properly be called "bribes" is open to debate. For instance, during the German Mediatization (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss), the mediatization or consolidation of the small German states, German rulers and elites paid him to save their possessions, or to enlarge their territories.

Less successfully, he solicited payments from the United States, precipitating a diplomatic disaster (the "XYZ Affair"). The difference between his effective diplomacy in Europe and the American faux pas illustrates his capacities and limitations as a diplomat—his manners, behaviors, and tactics made sense in the context of the Old World, but were perceived as antique and corrupt by the more modern.

Talleyrand was said to be vain: he kept on using his title, Prince of Benevento, after Napoleon was defeated, despite his principality being reincorporated into Italy. This irritated King Louis XVIII and his court.

Talleyrand was a great conversationalist, gourmand, and wine connoisseur. From 1801 to 1804, he owned Château Haut-Brion in Bordeaux. He employed the renowned French chef Carême, one of the first celebrity chefs known as the "chef of kings and king of chefs." His Paris residence on the Place de la Concorde, acquired in 1812 and sold to James Mayer de Rothschild in 1838, is now the Embassy of the United States.

Perhaps most remarkable, near the end of his life Talleyrand became interested in Catholicism again while teaching his young granddaughter simple prayers. The famed Abbe Dupanloup came to Talleyrand in his last hours, and Talleyrand made confession and received Extreme Unction.

When the abbe tried to anoint Talleyrand's palms, as prescribed by the rite, he turned his hands over to make the priest anoint him on the back of the hands, since he was a bishop. Though some doubted the sincerity of the conversion, given Talleyrand's history, the story of his last years at least makes the sincerity plausible. Talleyrand died on May 17, 1838 and was buried at his Château of Valençay.

Today, when speaking of the art of diplomacy, the phrase "he is a Talleyrand" denotes a statesman of great resource and skill.

Georges-Jacques Danton

Georges-Jacques Danton (Arcis-sur-Aube, 26 de octubre de 1759 - guillotinado en París, el 5 de abril de 1794) Político francés que desempeñó un papel determinante durante la Revolución francesa.

Su padre murió cuando él contaba con tres años de edad, dejando viuda a su madre y huérfanos a los seis hijos de la familia. Internado en un asilo, sufre un accidente que le deforma la nariz y los labios. Comenzó estudiando en un pequeño seminario de Troyes, y continuó sus estudios en los Oratorios de Troyes, aunque se niega a estudiar una carrera eclesiástica.

En 1780 se va a París y, según la tradición familiar, Georges se orienta hacia el estudio de Derecho y trabaja, como pasante, en un gabinete de abogados. que me

Revolución Francesa

Prosigue, durante seis meses, con los estudios de Derecho en la facultad de Reims, tras los cuales obtiene su licenciatura. Aunque inscrito en un despacho de abogados de París, no lo frecuenta con la misma asiduidad con la que visita los cafés, lo que le sirve para conocer a varios futuros revolucionarios: Camille Desmoulins y Marat, entre ellos, así como a la que será su futura esposa, Antoinette-Gabrielle Charpentier (1760-1793).

Antoinette es hija de un próspero propietario de un café, y su dote le permite, a Danton, comprar el cargo de abogado en el Consejo del Rey en 1787. El matrimonio se celebró el 14 de junio de 1787. Tuvieron cuatro hijos de los que sobrevivieron dos: Antoine Danton y François-Geroges Danton. Tras el fallecimiento de su esposa en 1793, se casa con Louise Gély.

La revolución

Republicano moderado fundó, en 1790, junto con Marat, Desmoulins y otros, La Sociedad de los Derechos del Hombre y del Ciudadano, conocida como el Club de los Cordeliers. Elegido presidente de los Cordeliers va ganando popularidad; pese a su deformación física y a su cínico discurso, Danton, poseía un carisma y una oratoria tan brillantes que conseguía simpatizar con todos.

Miembro de la Comuna, dirigió la agitación republicana que condujo a los fusilamientos de los manifestantes en el Campo de Marte el 17 de julio de 1791. Danton huye, y se refugia en Inglaterra.

A su retorno, en noviembre de 1791 es elegido sustituto del procurador de la Comuna de París y tras participar en la insurrección de agosto de 1792, fue nombrado Ministro de Justicia. Por su condición como miembro de la Comuna y, formando parte, a la vez, del Consejo del Gobierno, Danton se convierte en el hombre con más poder en Francia.

En enero de 1793, vota a favor de la ejecución de Luis XVI, pese a que, anteriormente, había propuesto el destierro. En marzo de 1793 participa en la creación del tribunal revolucionario que preside, desde julio, el propio Danton. En abril entra en el Comité de Salvación Pública, órgano ejecutivo de la primera República Francesa.

El 5 de setiembre es elegido diputado de París, y deja el ministerio, -conservando, no obstante, su gran influencia en los asuntos diplomáticos-, para ejercer este cargo en la Convención Nacional, donde entrará en franca oposición con Robespierre, no tanto por sus convicciones (que las tienen en común), cuanto por la forma.

Danton intenta pacificar el país y llegar a un entendimiento entre girondinos y jacobinos, se oponía a la continuidad del Terror, apoyando al grupo denominado de los "indulgentes"; defiende las reivindicaciones de los "sans-culottes", desaconseja la ejecución de Maria Antonieta y crea la "armada revolucionaria".

La ruptura entre los "dantonistas" y los jacobinos se consuma a últimos del año 1793, período en el que Robespierre intenta mantener el equilibrio político de su gobierno encarándose a los más radicales, así como a los más moderados.

Los jacobinos acusan a Danton de malversación de fondos y de haberse vendido a los monárquicos, y se ve comprometido, junto a su amigo y diputado Fabre d’Églantine, en el escándalo de la liquidación de la Compañía de las Indias. A causa de todo ello, Danton se encuentra en peligro y, una vez más, huye, refugiándose en Arcis-sur-Aube.

El 30 de marzo de 1794, quince días después de la ejecución de los "herbetistas" Danton, Desmoulins y Fabre son arrestados bajo la acusación de ser "enemigos de la República", según la denuncia llevada a cabo por Saint-Just.

Es condenado a muerte y guillotinado el 5 de abril de 1794. Sus últimas palabras fueron: No os olvidéis, sobre todo no os olvidéis de mostrar mi cabeza al pueblo: merece la pena.

Mirabeau

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (often referred to simply as Mirabeau; March 9, 1749 – April 2, 1791) was a French writer, popular orator and statesman. During the French Revolution, he was a moderate, favoring a constitutional monarchy built on the model of Great Britain. He unsuccessfully conducted secret negotiations with the French monarchy in an effort to reconcile it with the Revolution.

The family of Raquette (sometimes rendered Riquet), originally of the little town of Digne, became wealthy through merchant trading in Marseille. In 1570, Jean Riqueti bought the château and seigniory of Mirabeau, which had belonged to the great Provençal family of Barras. In 1685, Honoré Riqueti obtained the title marquis de Mirabeau.

His son Jean Antoine served with distinction through all the later campaigns of the reign of Louis XIV. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Cassano (1705), suffering a neck wound that was so severe he thereafter had to wear a silver stock. As he had the habit speaking unpleasant truths to his superiors, he never rose above the rank of colonel.

On retiring from the service, he married Françoise de Castellane with whom he had three sons: Victor marquis de Mirabeau, Jean Antoine, bailli de Mirabeau and Comte Louis Alexandre de Mirabeau. He died in 1737.

Early life

Honoré Mirabeau was born at Le Bignon, near Nemours, as the eldest surviving son of the economist Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau and his wife Marie-Geneviève de Vassan. When three years old, a virulent attack of smallpox left his face disfigured, and contributed to his father's dislike of him.

Destined for the army, he was entered at a pension militaire at Paris. Of this school, which had Joseph Louis Lagrange for its professor of mathematics, there is an amusing account in the life of Gilbert Elliot who met Mirabeau there. On leaving school in 1767 he received a commission in a cavalry regiment which his grandfather had commanded years before.

Mirabeau's love affairs form a well-known history, owing to the celebrity of the letters to "Sophie". In spite of his ugliness, he won the heart of the lady to whom his colonel was attached; this led to such scandal that his father obtained a lettre de cachet, and Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Ile de Ré.

On being released, the young count obtained leave to accompany as a volunteer the French expedition to Corsica. After his return, he tried to keep on good terms with his father, and in 1772 he married a rich heiress, Marie Emilie, daughter of the marquess de Marignane, an alliance arranged for him by his father.

His extravagance forced his father to send him into semi-exile in the country, where he wrote his earliest extant work, the Essai sur le despotisme.

His violent disposition led him to quarrel with a country gentleman who had insulted his sister, and his exile was changed by lettre de cachet into imprisonment in the Château d'If in 1774. In 1775 he was removed to the castle of Joux, where he was not closely confined, having full leave to enter the town of Pontarlier.

In a house of a friend he met Marie Thérèse de Monnier, his "Sophie", and the two fell in love. He escaped to Switzerland, where Sophie joined him; they then went to the United Provinces, where he lived by hack work for the booksellers; meanwhile Mirabeau had been condemned to death at Pontarlier for seduction and abduction, and in May 1777 he was seized by the French police, and imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the castle of Vincennes.

The early part of his confinement is marked by the indecent letters to Sophie (first published in 1793), and the obscene Erotica biblion and Ma conversion. In the dungeon of Vincennes he met the fellow prisoner, the Marquis de Sade, who was also writing erotic works; however the two disliked each other intensely. Later during his confinement, he wrote Des Lettres de Cachet et des prisons d'état, published after his liberation (1782).

It exhibits an accurate knowledge of French constitutional history skillfully applied in an attempt to show that the system of lettres de cachet was not only philosophically unjust but also constitutionally illegal. It shows, though in a rather diffuse and declamatory form, the application of wide historical knowledge, keen philosophical perception, and genuine eloquence to a practical purpose which was the great characteristic of Mirabeau, both as a political thinker and as a statesman.

Before the French Revolution

With his release from Vincennes (August 1782) begins the second period of Mirabeau's life. Mirabeau's not only succeeded in reversing the sentence of death against him, but also got M. de Monnier condemned in the costs of the whole law proceedings. Upon his release, he found that his Sophie had consoled herself with a young officer, after whose death she had committed suicide.

From Pontarlier he went to Aix-en-Provence, where he claimed the court's order that his wife should return to him. She naturally objected, and he lost the case. He then intervened in the suit pending between his father and mother before the parlement of Paris, and attacked the ruling powers so violently that he had to leave France and again go to Holland, and try to live by literary work.

About this time he met Mme de Nehra, the daughter of Zwier van Haren, a Dutch statesman and political writer, an educated, refined woman, capable of appreciating Mirabeau's good points. His life was strengthened by the love of Mme de Nehra, his adopted son, Lucas de Montigny, and his little dog Chico.

After a period of work in Holland he went to England, where his treatise on lettres de cachet had been much admired, being translated into English in 1787, and where he was soon admitted into the best Whig literary and political society of London, through his old schoolfellow Gilbert Elliot, who had become a leading Whig member of parliament. Of all his English friends none seem to have been so intimate with him as Lord Shelburne, and Sir Samuel Romilly.

Romilly was introduced to Mirabeau by Sir Francis D'Ivernois (1757-1842), and readily undertook to translate into English the Considérations sur l'ordre de7 Cincinnatus, which Mirabeau had written.

It was the only important work Mirabeau wrote in the year 1785, and it is a good specimen of his method. He had read a pamphlet published in America attacking the proposed order, which was to form a bond of association between the officers who had fought in the American War of Independence against England; the arguments struck him as true and valuable, so he re-arranged them in his own fashion, and rewrote them in his own oratorical style.

He soon found such work not sufficiently remunerative to keep his petite horde in comfort, and then turned his thoughts to employment from the French foreign office, either in writing or in diplomacy.

He first sent Mme de Nehra to Paris to make peace with the authorities, and then returned himself, hoping to get employment through an old literary collaborateur of his, Durival, who was at this time director of the finances of the department of foreign affairs. One of the functions of this official was to subsidize political pamphleteers, and Mirabeau had hoped to be so employed, but he ruined his chances by a series of writings on financial questions.

On his return to Paris he had become acquainted with Étienne Clavière, the Genevese exile, and a banker named Panchaud. From them he heard plenty of abuse of stock-jobbing, and seizing their ideas he began to regard stock-jobbing, or agiotage, as the source of all evil, and to attack in his usual vehement style the Banque de St Charles and the Compagnie des Eaux.

This last pamphlet brought him into a controversy with Caron de Beaumarchais, who certainly did not get the best of it, but it lost him any chance of literary employment from the government.

However, his ability was too great to be neglected by a great minister such as Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes undoubtedly was, and after a preliminary tour to Berlin at the beginning of 1786 he was despatched in July 1786 on a secret mission to the court of Prussia, from which he returned in January 1787, and of which he gave a full account in his Histoire secrete de la cour de Berlin (1789).

The months he spent at Berlin were important in the history of Prussia, for while he was there Frederick the Great died. The letters just mentioned show clearly what Mirabeau did and what he saw, and equally clearly how unfit he was to be a diplomat. He certainly failed to conciliate the new king Frederick William II, and thus ended Mirabeau's one attempt at diplomacy.

During his journey he had made the acquaintance of Jakob Mauvillon (1743-1794), whom he found possessed of a great number of facts and statistics with regard to Prussia; these he made use of in a great work on Prussia published in 1788. But, though his De la monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand (London, 1788) gave him a general reputation for historical learning, he had in the same year lost a chance of political employment.

He had offered himself as a candidate for the office of secretary to the Assembly of Notables which the King Louis XVI had just convened, and to bring his name before the public published another financial work, the Dénonciation de l'agiotage, which abounded in such violent diatribes that he not only lost his election but also was obliged to retire to Tongeren, and he further injured his prospects by publishing the reports he had sent in during his secret mission at Berlin. 1789 was at hand; the states-general was summoned; Mirabeau's period of probation was over.

During the Revolution

On hearing of the king's determination to summon the Estates-General, Mirabeau started for Provence, and offered to assist at the preliminary conference of the noblesse of his district. They rejected him; he appealed to the tiers état, and was returned both for Aix and for Marseille. He elected to sit for the former city, and was present at the opening of the states-general on May 4, 1789.

From this time the record of Mirabeau's life forms the best history of the first two years of the National Constituent Assembly, for at every important crisis his voice is to be heard, though his advice was not always followed. He possessed at the same time great logical acuteness and the most passionate enthusiasm.

From the beginning he recognized that government exists in order that the bulk of the population may pursue their daily work in peace and quiet, and that for a government to be successful it must be strong.

At the same time he thoroughly comprehended that for a government to be strong it must be in harmony with the wishes of the majority of the people. He had carefully studied the English constitution in England, and he hoped to establish in France a system similar in principle but without any slavish imitation of the details of the English constitution.

In the first stage of the history of the States-General Mirabeau's part was very great. He was soon recognized as a leader, to the chagrin of Jean Joseph Mounier, because he always knew his own mind, and was prompt in emergencies. To him is to be attributed the successful consolidation of the National Assembly.

When the storming of the Bastille had assured the success of the French Revolution, he warned the Assembly of the futility of passing fine-sounding decrees and urged the necessity for acting. He declared that the famous night of August 4 was but an orgy, giving the people an immense theoretical liberty while not assisting them to practical freedom, and overthrowing the old régime before a new one could be constituted.

His failure to control the theorizers showed Mirabeau, after the removal of the king and the Assembly to Paris, that his eloquence would not enable him to guide the Assembly by himself, and that he must therefore try to get some support.

He wished to establish a strong ministry, which should be responsible like an English ministry, but to an assembly chosen to represent the people of France better than the English House of Commons at that time represented England.

He first thought of becoming a minister at a very early date, if we may believe a story contained in the Mémoires of the duchesse d'Abrantes, to the effect that in May 1789 Queen Marie Antoinette tried to bribe him, but that he refused this and expressed his wish to be a minister.

The indignation with which the queen repelled the idea may have made him think of the Louis Philippe Joseph, duc d'Orléans as a possible constitutional king, because his title would of necessity be parliamentary. But the weakness of Orleans was too palpable, and in a famous remark Mirabeau expressed his utter contempt for him.

He also attempted to form an alliance with Lafayette, but the general was as vain and as obstinate as Mirabeau himself, and had his own theories about a new French constitution. Mirabeau tried for a time, too, to act with Necker, and obtained the sanction of the Assembly to Necker's financial scheme, not because it was good, but because, as he said, "no other plan was before them, and something must be done."

The Comte de la Marck was a Flemish nobleman, a close friend of the queen, and had been elected a member of the states-general. His acquaintance with Mirabeau, begun in 1788, ripened during the following year into a friendship, which La Marck hoped to turn to the advantage of the court.

After the events of the 5th and 6th of October he consulted Mirabeau as to what measures the king ought to take, and Mirabeau, delighted at the opportunity, drew up an admirable state paper, which was presented to the king by Monsieur, afterwards Louis XVIII. The whole of this Mémoire should be read to get an adequate idea of Mirabeau's genius for politics; here it must be summarized.

The main position is that the king is not free in Paris; he must therefore leave Paris towards the interior of France to a provincial capital, best of all to Rouen, and there he must appeal to the people and summon a great convention. It would be ruin to appeal to the noblesse, as the queen advised.

When this great convention met the king must show himself ready to recognize that great changes have taken place, that feudalism and absolutism have for ever disappeared, and that a new relation between king and people has arisen, which must be loyally observed on both sides for the future.

To establish this new constitutional position between king and people would not be difficult, because the indivisibility of the monarch and his people is anchored in the heart of the French people.

Such was Mirabeau's programme, from which he never diverged, but which was far too statesmanlike to be understood by the poor king, and far too positive regarding the altered condition of the monarchy to be palatable to the queen.

Mirabeau followed up his Mémoire by a scheme of a great ministry to contain all men of mark; Necker as prime minister, "to render him as powerless as he is incapable, and yet preserve his popularity for the king," the duc de Liancourt, the duc de La Rochefoucauld, La Marck, Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, at the finances, Mirabeau without portfolio, GJB Target, mayor of Paris, Lafayette generalissimo to reform the army, Louis Philippe, comte de Ségur (foreign affairs), Mounier and IRG le Chapelier.

This scheme got noised abroad, and was ruined by a decree of the Assembly of November 7, 1789, that no member of the Assembly could become a minister; this decree destroyed any chance of that necessary harmony between the ministry and the majority of the representatives of the nation which existed in England, and so at once overthrew Mirabeau's hopes.

The queen utterly refused to take Mirabeau's counsel, and La Marck left Paris. However, in April 1790 he was suddenly recalled by the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador at Paris, and the queen's most trusted political adviser, and from this time to Mirabeau's death he became the medium of almost daily communications between the latter and the queen.

Mirabeau at first attempted again to make an alliance with Lafayette, but it was useless, for Lafayette was not a strong man himself and did not appreciate "la force" in others.

From the month of May 1790 to his death in April 1791 Mirabeau remained in close connection with the court, and drew up many admirable state papers for it.

In return the court paid his debts; but it ought never to be said that he was bribed, for the gold of the court never made him swerve from his political principles; never, for instance, made him a royalist. He regarded himself as a minister, though an unavowed one, and believed himself worthy of his hire.

On the great question of the veto he took a practical view, and seeing that the royal power was already sufficiently weakened, declared for the king's absolute veto and against the compromise of the suspensive veto. He knew from his English experiences that such a veto would be hardly ever used unless the king felt the people were on his side, and that if it were used unjustifiably the power of the purse possessed by the representatives of the people would bring about a bloodless revolution, as in England in 1688.

He saw also that much of the inefficiency of the Assembly arose from the inexperience of the members and their incurable verbosity; so, to establish some system of rules, he got his friend Romilly to draw up a detailed account of the rules and customs of the English House of Commons, which he translated into French, but which the Assembly, puffed up by a belief in its own merits, refused to use.

On the great subject of peace and war he supported the king's authority, and with some success. Again Mirabeau almost alone of the Assembly held that the soldier ceased to be a citizen when he became a soldier; he must submit to be deprived of his liberty to think and act, and must recognize that a soldier's first duty is obedience.

With such sentiments, it is no wonder that he approved of the vigorous conduct of Francois Claude Amour, marquis de Bouillé, at Nancy, which was the more to his credit as Bouillé was the one hope of the court influences opposed to him.

Lastly, in matters of finance he showed his wisdom: he attacked Necker's "caisse d'escompte," which was to have the whole control of the taxes, as absorbing the Assembly's power of the purse; and he heartily approved of the system of assignats, but with the reservation that they should not be issued to the extent of more than one-half the value of the lands to be sold.

Of Mirabeau's attitude with regard to foreign affairs it is necessary to speak in more detail. He held it to be just that the French people should conduct their Revolution as they would, and that no foreign nation had any right to interfere with them while they kept themselves strictly to their own affairs.

But he knew also that neighbouring nations looked with unquiet eyes on the progress of affairs in France, that they feared the influence of the Revolution on their own peoples, and that foreign monarchs were being prayed by the French emigres to interfere on behalf of the French monarchy. To prevent this interference, or rather to give no pretext for it, was his guiding thought as to foreign policy.

He had been elected a member of the comité diplomatique of the Assembly in July 1790, and became its reporter at once, and in this capacity he was able to prevent the Assembly from doing much harm in regard to foreign affairs.

He had long known Armand Marc, comte de Montmorin, the foreign secretary, and, as matters became more strained from the complications with the princes and counts of the empire, he entered into daily communication with the minister, advised him on every point, and, while dictating his policy, defended it in the Assembly.

Mirabeau's exertions in this respect are not his smallest title to the name of statesman; and how great a work he did is best proved by the confusion which ensued in this department after his death.

Death

Mirabeau's health had been greatly compromised by the excesses of his youth and his recent strenuous efforts as a politician. Although he had been only recently elected to serve as president of the National Assembly, despite the continuous medical attention paid to him by his friend and physician, Cabanis, Mirabeau would survive to perform his duties until his death on 2nd April 1791. As he lay on his death bed, weak and unable to speak, Mirabeau's last action before passing was to write one word: "dormir" (to sleep).

He received a grand burial, and it was for him that The Panthéon in Paris was created as a burial place for great Frenchmen. In 1792, his secret dealings with the king were uncovered, and his remains were removed from the Pantheon in 1794.

At the time of his death Mirabeau greatly feared for the future of any constitutional Monarchy in France, as he recognised that many powerful and radically inclined interests would not give such arrangements their support.

Collaborators

His first literary work, except the bombastic but eloquent Essai sur le despotisme (Neufchâtel, 1775), was a translation of Robert Watson's Philip II, done in Holland with the help of Durival; his Considerations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus (London, 1788) was based on a pamphlet by Aedanus Burke (1743-1802), of South Carolina, who opposed the aristocratic tendencies of the Society of the Cincinnati, and the notes to it were by Target; his financial writings were suggested by the Genevese exile, Clavière.

During the Revolution he received yet more help; men were proud to labour for him, and did not murmur because he absorbed all the credit and fame. Étienne Dumont, Clavière, Antoine Adrien Lamourette and Étienne Salonion Reybaz were but a few of the most distinguished of his collaborators.

Dumont was a Genevese exile, and an old friend of Romilly's, who willingly prepared for him those famous addresses which Mirabeau used to make the Assembly, pass by sudden bursts of eloquent declamation; Clavière helped him in finance, and not only worked out his figures but also even wrote his financial discourses; Lamourette wrote the speeches, on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy;

Reybaz not only wrote for him his famous speeches on the assignats, the organization of the national guard, and others, which Mirabeau read word for word at the tribune, but also even the posthumous speech on succession to the estates of intestates, which Talleyrand read in the Assembly as the last work of his dead friend.

As an orator his eloquence has been likened to that of both Bossuet and Vergniaud, but it had neither the polish of the old 17th century bishop nor the flashes of genius of the young Girondin.

It was rather parliamentary oratory in which he excelled, and his true compeers are Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox rather than any French speakers. Personally he had that which is the truest mark of nobility of mind, a power of attracting love and winning faithful friends.

Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lorraine (usually known as Marie Antoinette; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was Queen of France and Archduchess of Austria.

She was the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and his wife Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria; wife of Louis XVI of France; and mother of "lost dauphin" Louis XVII. As Louis XVI's wife, she was guillotined at the height of the French Revolution in 1793 and subsequently interred with her husband in the royal crypt at the Saint Denis Basilica in Paris.Born at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Maria Antonia was the fifteenth child of Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa.

Of the names given at her christening, Maria honoured the Virgin Mary; Antonia honoured Saint Anthony of Padua; Josepha honoured her elder brother, Archduke Josef; and Johanna honoured Saint John the Evangelist[citation needed]. The court official described the new baby as "a small, but completely healthy Archduchess." She was brought up in the company of her similarly-aged siblings Maria Carolina (two years older) and Max (one year younger); her other brothers,

Joseph, Leopold and Ferdinand Karl, were already involved in the Habsburg Empire.Legend states that Maria Antonia and the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart met as children, when Mozart gave a short musical concert for the Imperial Family.

After the concert, Empress Maria Theresa asked the young Mozart what he would like as a reward. Much to the Empress' amusement, Mozart is said to have asked for the hand of Maria Antonia, her youngest daughter, in marriage.

Maria Antonia's sisters were soon married to European royalty; the eldest, Maria Christina, to the Regent of the Netherlands; Maria Amalia to the Prince of Parma; and Maria Antonia's favourite sister, Maria Carolina, to King Ferdinand of Naples. When her sister Johanna Gabriella died of smallpox in

1762, Maria Antonia was next in line to be married.

A peace treaty had recently been signed which it was hoped would end over a century and a half of intermittent fighting between Austria and France. In an attempt to seal the peace, it was proposed that Louis XV of France's heir, his grandson Louis-Auguste, marry one of Empress Maria Theresa's daughters.

After Johanna Gabriella's death, she agreed to send Maria Antonia to France to marry him. Aged fourteen, Maria Antonia left Vienna in April 1770 to her mother's parting words "Farewell, my dearest child. Do so much good to the French people that they can say that I have sent them an angel."[citation needed]

Two and half weeks later, Maria Antonia was received by messengers from the French court. Her Austrian attire was switched for French and she was then taken to Strasbourg for a Thanksgiving Mass in her honour.

The streets of the city were covered in flowers, which Marie Antoinette (as she was now known) gently picked up like "the goddess Flora". The entire city was illuminated in her honour and a few days later, she began the journey to Versailles.

Marie Antoinette was conveyed to the royal palace at Versailles, where she met her future grandfather-in-law Louis XV and the other members of the royal family. Her future husband, the Dauphin Louis-Auguste was very shy. He was only a year older than she was and had no sexual or romantic relationships to prepare him for dealing with his fiancée. Their marriage was conducted within hours of Marie Antoinette arriving at Versailles.

The Wedding Mass was celebrated with great pomp in the Chapel Royal on 16 May 1770. Just before the wedding, Marie Antoinette was presented with the magnificent jewels that traditionally belonged to a French dauphine.

This collection included an elaborate diamond necklace which had belonged to Anne of Austria and pieces which had also belonged to Mary Queen of Scots and Catherine de Medici. The large collection of gems was valued at approximately 2 million livres. Marie Antoinette then received King Louis's own personal wedding gift. It was a fan, encrusted with diamonds.

The Dauphin and Marie Antoinette were then married in front of the court, with Marie Antoinette wearing a magnificent dress with huge white hoops covered in diamonds and pearls. There was then a formal dinner, which was also held in front of the crowd. Louis-Auguste ate an enormous amount.

When the king told him to eat less, the Dauphin replied "Why? I always sleep better when I have a full stomach!" The court then conducted the young couple to their bed, which had just been blessed by the Archbishop of Rheims.

However, the marriage was not consummated that night. Rumours would later circulate that Louis-Auguste was impotent, but this was not the case. Nor was it true that he suffered from phimosis.

Rather, it seems that no one had explained to either Louis or Marie Antoinette what they were supposed to do on their wedding night. They had only a very vague idea of sex and this increased the awkwardness between them. Within days, gossips at Versailles were already whispering that the Royal marriage was a sham.

Life as Dauphine

Since they were not having sexual intercourse, Louis and Marie Antoinette remained childless for the first 7 years of their marriage. Spiteful gossips blamed Marie Antoinette for her childlessness and some people even asserted that she should be divorced and sent back to Austria.

The young dauphine's position was not helped by the fact that she had earned the enmity of the King's mistress, Madame du Barry. Du Barry had begun life as Jeanne Bécu, a commoner who as courtesan gained the notice of nobility and eventually became Louis XV's paramour.

Marie Antoinette felt it was beneath her dignity as a Habsburg princess to talk to a lady with such a past. Du Barry therefore set about to make Marie Antoinette's life as miserable as possible. She began turning the king against his granddaughter-in-law and once tipped a bucket of dirty water on Antoinette's head as she walked underneath her window.

Marie Antoinette's daily routine was even more depressing. When she awoke in the morning, she was assisted out of bed and dressed by the various high-ranking noblewomen who were her ladies-in-waiting. Her dinner was also in public, which she ate with her husband.

Anyone who was decently dressed was permitted to come and watch the royals eating their dinner. Louis-Auguste ate enormous amounts of food, whilst Marie Antoinette ate almost nothing when she was in public. Marie Antoinette loathed this spectacle and she complained bitterly to her mother, "I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of the whole world!"

Homesick and melancholy, Marie Antoinette especially missed the companionship she had enjoyed with her sister, Maria Carolina. She found a substitute for this with the gentle Princesse Thérèse de Lamballe.

The Princesse de Lamballe was wealthy and kind-natured; she was also absolutely devoted to Marie Antoinette. Not long after meeting Thérèse, Marie Antoinette formed a deep attachment to the beautiful aristocrat, Gabrielle, Comtesse de Polignac. She was also on excellent terms with her husband's youngest brother Charles, the Comte d'Artois.

Marie Antoinette refused to involve herself in politics, possibly because she lacked any real knowledge or interest in it. She was being spied upon by her mother's ambassador, Comte Mercy d'Argenteau, who reported with great frustration that she was doing nothing to further Austria's influence in France.

Louis-Auguste and Marie Antoinette's life changed suddenly at 3 o'clock in the afternoon of 10th May 1774 when King Louis XV died of smallpox. The courtiers rushed over to Marie Antoinette's apartments to swear allegiance to their new king, Louis XVI, and his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette.

The new king and queen fell on their knees in prayer, with Louis saying "Dear God, guide and protect us. We are too young to reign." Marie Antoinette wiped away her tears and stood with her husband to greet the courtiers who had come to pledge their loyalty to the new king and queen.

Coronation and reign

Louis XVI's coronation took place at Rheims during the height of a bread shortage in Paris. This is the context in which she is incorrectly quoted as joking, "If they have no bread, then let them eat cake!" ("Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.") Cake at this time being the common tongue for a type of French bread, using less flour.

However, there is no evidence that this phrase was ever uttered by Marie Antoinette. When Marie Antoinette actually heard about the bread shortage she wrote, "It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness.

The king seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget the day of the coronation."

The royals had been greeted with an outpouring of national joy and the young queen was especially adored, despite the cost of the coronation (almost 7000 livres were spent on a new crown for Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette's magnificent gown was ordered from the fashion house of Paris's most exclusive designer, Rose Bertin).

Shortly after the coronation, Marie Antoinette attempted to bring Étienne François, duc de Choiseul back to court. He had been banished by Madame du Barry because of his loyalty to Marie Antoinette and the alliance with Austria. However, the new queen did not have much success.

Although King Louis did meet with Choiseul, he did not bring him back to court permanently. Later, when she tried to have her friend, the duc de Guines, appointed ambassador to England, Louis XVI said, "I have made it quite clear to the queen that he cannot serve in England or in any other Embassy." It was obvious that Marie Antoinette enjoyed no political influence with her husband whatsoever.

When Marie Antoinette's sister-in-law, Marie Thérèse, the wife of the Comte d'Artois, gave birth to her first child in August 1775, Marie Antoinette was subjected to cat-calls from market women asking why she had not produced a son, too. She spent the next day weeping in her rooms, much to the distress of her ladies-in-waiting, who felt she was "extremely affecting when in misfortune."

Fulfilling Marie Antoinette's determination to avoid boredom, conversation in her circle shied away from the mundane or intellectual. According to Madame Campan, one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, "The newest songs from the Comédie, the most timely joke or pun or quip, the bon mot of the day, the latest and choicest titbit of scandal or gossip – these comprised the sole topics of conversation in the intimate group about the queen; discussion on a serious plane was banished from her court."

The queen's circle of friends was very exclusive. This caused resentment in Versailles, where the courtiers thought the queen was deliberately excluding them. Soon, she became the target of the vicious gossip of Versailles. She, however, remained oblivious.

Under the influence of d'Artois, Marie Antoinette began visiting the Paris Opéra balls in disguise. It was not long before gossips began whispering that the queen was orchestrating such events to meet with various secret lovers.

She also began spending more and more money, since she had no real idea of its value. She had three major weaknesses: clothes, gambling and diamonds. For her twenty-first birthday, she participated in a three-day long gambling party, in which huge amounts of money changed hands.

Marie Antoinette had already caused enough anger at Versailles before she started appointing her friends to places that were traditionally held by others. She made Thérèse de Lamballe the Superintendent of the Queen's Household, despite the fact that there were some aristocratic ladies with a superior claim to that job.

She then began spending less time living at the palace and more time at Le Petit Trianon, which was a small château in the palace grounds. The château was renovated for her and the costs soon spiralled out of control, especially whenever the gardens were re-designed to suit the queen's new tastes.

Vindictive rumours began that Marie Antoinette was sleeping with her brother-in-law. Illegal presses in Paris soon began printing pamphlets showing the queen and Artois as adulterous lovers.

The first pamphlet was called Les Amours de Charlot et Antoinette. L'Autrichienne en Goguette showed Artois and the Queen having anal sex in a palace salon. Le Godmiché Royal (the Royal dildo) showed Marie Antoinette masturbating, and later pamphlets would suggest that she had indulged in bestiality and lesbianism. None of these charges were true, but they began to chip away at the queen's popularity with the people.

There were also wider problems affecting France at the time, for the entire country was standing on the edge of bankruptcy.

The long series of wars fought by Louis XIV and Louis XV had left France with the highest national debt in Europe. French society was under-taxed and what little money was collected failed to save the economy. An anti-British clique at court persuaded Louis XVI to support the American revolutionaries in their fight for independence from George III. This decision was a disaster for France, for the cost was enormous.

Marie Antoinette's brother, Emperor Joseph II, visited her in April 1777. He had come to inquire about the state of her marriage, since the Austrians were concerned about her failure to produce a son.

They went for a long walk in the grounds of Le Petit Trianon, during which Joseph criticised her gambling and her taste in friends. He also had a deep conversation with Louis XVI, in which they discussed his sexual problems. Whatever Joseph II said to Louis XVI, it obviously worked, for the marriage was soon consummated and by April 1778, the queen could happily announce that she was pregnant.

Marie Antoinette's first child was born at Versailles 19th December 1778. She was forced to endure the humiliation of a public birth in her bedchamber, in front of hundreds of courtiers. The queen actually passed out through a combination of embarrassment and pain. It was the last time such a ritual was permitted as Marie Antoinette refused to give birth in public ever again.

The baby was a girl and she was christened Marie Thérèse Charlotte. She was created "Princess Royal" or Madame Royale, since she was the oldest daughter of the king of France. Despite the fact that the country had desired a boy, Marie Antoinette was delighted with a girl. "A son would have belonged to the state," she said, "but you shall be mine, and have all my care; you shall share my happiness and soften my sorrows."

Madame Royale was followed by three other children – Louis Joseph born in 1781, Louis Charles in 1785 and Sophie Béatrix in 1786.

As she grew older, Marie Antoinette became much less extravagant. She was devoted to her children and she was very involved in taking care of them. Speaking of her youngest son, Louis Charles, she said, "Mon chou d'amour ("My cabbage of love", "cabbage" being a popular term of endearment even into modern times in Europe), is charming, and I love him madly.

He loves me very much too, in his own way, without embarrassment." She was also much more involved in charity work, although she had always been very generous.

After she turned thirty in 1785, Marie Antoinette also began to dress with more restraint. She abandoned the more elaborate wigs which had been festooned with jewels and feathers and she refused to buy any more jewels for her personal collection. She was, however, fiercely criticised for building a small mock-village for herself in the grounds of Versailles in 1786.

The building of these kinds of artificial villages was very popular among French aristocratic ladies, who were keen to experience a rural idyll in the comfort of their own estates. This tradition had begun with Louis XIV's greatest mistress, the beautiful Athénaïs de Montespan in the 1680s. Marie Antoinette's defenders did not think she deserved so much criticism for building the Hameau (as it was known.)

Baroness d'Oberkirch complained, "Other people spent more on their gardens!" Even so, the queen was already unpopular and she could not possibly understand how much the Hameau would further damage her reputation. Many people began to see her as a clueless spendthrift who liked to play at being a shepherdess, whilst some of the real peasants lived in very hard conditions.

Louis, Cardinal de Rohan, a member of one of France's most prominent aristocratic houses, was not in the queen's favour. He had been the Envoy to Austria: personal letters of his had been intercepted, in which he bragged to friends back home that he had "bedded half the Austrian court" and that Marie Antoinette's own mother the Empress had "begged" him for her turn.

He had also jested to friends in Vienna by showing them some of the pamphlets insulting Marie Antoinette's honour. His ambitions to follow in the footsteps of Cardinal Richelieu and become Prime Minister of France meant that he was desperate to return to her favour, as the position was by royal appointment, and Marie Antoinette blocked his progress at every turn.

When an impoverished aristocrat named Jeanne Saint-Rémy de Valois, Comtesse de la Motte, became aware of Rohan's desire to befriend the queen, she first became his mistress and then set about hatching an ingenious plan to make a small fortune for herself in the process.

Marie Antoinette had refused to buy a magnificent diamond necklace from the Royal Jewellers (she said the cost was too high and that the royal family preferred now to spend their money on the Navy).

She became impatient with the jeweller and snapped, "Not only have I never commissioned you to make a jewel … but, what is more, I have told you repeatedly that I would never add so much as another carat to my present collection of diamonds. I refused to buy your necklace for myself; the king offered to buy it for me, and I refused it as a gift. Never mention it again."

The Comtesse de la Motte then pretended to be an intimate friend of the queen's, whilst persuading the cardinal that the queen secretly desired the necklace. He paid the 2 million livres to her (thinking she would then give it to the queen) and the Comtesse collected the necklace from the jewellers (who also thought she would give it to the queen, who would then pay them.) The Comtesse de la Motte, however, disappeared with both the jewels and the money.

When the Comtesse and the cardinal were brought to trial, the monarchy's enemies seized upon the chance to attack the queen through the scandal. They implied that it was Marie Antoinette's poor reputation which had made the whole débâcle possible. The cardinal was acquitted and Marie Antoinette was suspected of having masterminded the whole plot. Naturally, the pamphleteers delighted in suggesting that she was having affairs with both the cardinal and the Comtesse.

Popular hatred against the queen accelerated rapidly after the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. The Comtesse later escaped to England, where she continued to insult the queen and protest her own innocence.

The countdown to revolution

Coupled with the political disaster of the Affair of the Necklace, the royal family also suffered some terrible personal tragedies. In 1787, Marie Antoinette's youngest daughter, Sophie-Béatrix, died shortly before her first birthday. The queen was devastated and spent hours weeping over the baby's body.

Not long after, the Royal Physicians informed her that her eldest son, the Dauphin Louis-Joséph, was terminally ill with consumption. The child's condition deteriorated and Marie Antoinette spent most of her time nursing him during his last agonising months.

The French government was now seriously in debt, thanks to inefficient taxation and costly foreign wars. The king summoned a council of nobles to discuss the situation. The Assembly of Notables, as it was called, could find no solution to the government's financial crisis. So Louis XVI was left with no alternative other than to call a meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789. The Estates-General was the main representative body of the French population, but it had not been called since the reign of Louis XIII in 1614.

Within days of meeting, the Estates-General was clamouring for reforms and criticising the monarchy and its policies. However, the royal family's attentions were on other things. On 4 June, the Dauphin died at the age of seven. The king sank into sporadic bouts of clinical depression and the queen was heartbroken. Immediately, some of her enemies began to spread rumours that she had poisoned her own son.

The ultra-royalist circles at Versailles feared and resented the Estates-General. Marie Antoinette was coming to suspect that the reformists in the Estates-General were secretly working to overthrow the monarchy. On 11 July, Marie Antoinette and her brother-in-law the Comte d'Artois persuaded Louis XVI to dismiss the liberal prime minister, Jacques Necker. Marie Antoinette's ally, Baron de Breteuil was made prime minister instead.

Breteuil was a devout Roman Catholic and a committed royalist. The monarchy's enemies painted him as a ruthless tyrant, even though he did have a reputation for being very humanitarian in his treatment of opponents. Even so, the propaganda worked and Paris was gripped by fear that the royalists were planning a military attack on the city in order to force it into submission.

A large mob marched on the symbol of royal authority in Paris, the Bastille Prison and seized control of it on 14 July 1789. The Governor of the Prison was lynched and so were two ultra-right politicians. News did not reach the palace until very late that evening. When Louis XVI heard of it he asked, "This is a revolt?" to which the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt replied, "No, sire. It is a revolution."

Panic seized the palace and many courtiers fled for their lives. The Comte d'Artois fled abroad, in part due to fears he would be assassinated. Marie Antoinette's friend Duchesse de Polignac, the governess of her children, fled to Switzerland, where she continued writing to the queen. Marie Antoinette appointed the devout and disciplined Marquise de Tourzel as governess to the two surviving royal children – Princess Marie Thérèse and the new dauphin, Louis Charles.

Marie Antoinette hoped to flee also. She felt it was unwise to remain so close to Paris during the current troubles. She hoped that the king would give orders for them to move to their château at Saint-Cloud or even to another royal home at Compiègne. The queen's things were already packed, and so were her children's, however Louis decided that they would stay at Versailles. The queen could not disobey her husband and she refused to leave him.

Later, Louis XVI would realise what a mistake he had made in not leaving the Palace of Versailles when he had the chance. His decision to remain at the palace would condemn his entire family to intense suffering and trauma in the years ahead.

It was a few months before news arrived that a mob from Paris had taken the decision to march on Versailles. Rumours had spread in the city that the royals were hoarding all the grain. News reached the Palace on October 5th, with Marie Antoinette once again repeating her plea that they flee. The king refused.

Since she was aware that she was the most unpopular member of the royal family, Marie Antoinette chose to sleep on her own that evening. She left strict instructions with the Marquise de Tourzel that she was to take the children straight to the king if there were any disturbances.

In the early hours of the morning, the mob broke into the palace. The queen's guards were massacred. She and her ladies-in-waiting only narrowly escaped with their lives before the crowd burst in and ransacked her chambers. They made it to the centre of the palace; the king's bedchamber. The king's younger sister, Princess Elisabeth, was already there. The two children arrived and the doors were locked.

By this time, a large crowd had gathered in the palace's courtyard and were demanding that the queen come to the balcony. She appeared in her night-robe, accompanied by her two children. The crowd demanded that the two children be sent back inside. So the queen stood alone for almost ten minutes, whilst many in the crowd pointed muskets at her. She then bowed her head and returned inside. Some in the mob were so impressed by her bravery that they cried "Vive la Reine!" ("Long live the Queen!")

The Royals were forced to return with the mob to Paris. They were taken to the dilapidated Tuileries Palace, which had last been used during the reign of Louis XIV. The Marquis de la Fayette, a liberal aristocrat who had embraced many American ideas when he fought for George Washington, was placed in charge of the royal family's security. When he met the queen he bluntly told her, "Your Majesty is a prisoner.

Yes, it's true. Since Her Majesty no longer has her Guard of Honour, she is a prisoner." Other royal "prisoners" included Louis XVI's sister, Elisabeth, and his other brother – the Comte de Provence. The Princesse de Lamballe had refused to abandon Marie Antoinette, as had the Marquise de Tourzel and several other royal servants.

Desperate to reassure her friends, Marie Antoinette sent a short note to the Austrian ambassador saying, "I'm fine, don't worry." When she appeared in public she appeared calm, serene and dignified.

A republican monarchy?

From the beginning of the Revolution, Marie Antoinette remained skeptical about the chances of a compromise. However, she was not yet prepared to give up all hope of a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Certain republicans, like Antoine Barnave, were moved by her plight and many more were thoroughly impressed by her dignity. The Comte de Mirabeau, whom she despised, told many people how impressed he was with the queen's courage and "manly" strength of character.

Trying to re-establish normality, Marie Antoinette began inviting charitable commissions to the Tuileries and continued her generous patronage and desire to alleviate the suffering of the poor children of Paris. She also spent as much time as possible with her children, particularly the Dauphin, whom she affectionately nicknamed mon chou d'amour.

Public hatred against the queen was so intense that she had to attend her daughter's first Communion in disguise. The traditional gift for a Princess upon her first Communion was a set of magnificent diamonds, but both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette decided it would be better that Marie Thérèse go without the diamonds than the people go without bread.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly was drawing up a new constitution which would turn France into a constitutional monarchy. Marie Antoinette opened secret communications with the comte de Mirabeau, a prominent member of the National Assembly who hoped to restore the authority of the crown. Nevertheless, her mistrust of Mirabeau prevented the king from following his advice.

Catherine the Great wrote to Marie Antoinette from Russia, telling her that the royals should ignore the complaints of their people "as the moon goes on its course without being stopped by the cries of dogs." Louis's sister, Elisabeth, was even more vocal in her hatred of the new system. Elisabeth, like her exiled brother the Comte d'Artois, was so horrified with the French Revolution, that she believed a civil war was inevitable.

On 14 July 1790, the royal family had to attend festivities to celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The queen dutifully attended, even though she described the celebrations as symbolising "everything that is most cruel and sorrowful". The king's liberal cousin, Philippe, duc d'Orléans returned from England and publicly proclaimed his support for the revolutionaries.

His hatred for Marie Antoinette was extreme and she believed that he was fomenting the Revolution in order to seize the crown for himself. Ultra-royalists even whispered that the duc d'Orléans had orchestrated the siege of Versailles in the hope of having Marie Antoinette assassinated.

The duke enjoyed enormous popular support amongst the people of Paris, although his Scottish mistress Grace Elliott was a secret royalist, who later admitted to having gone to Belgium on a secret mission for the queen. She carried messages to baron de Breteuil, who was now acting as Louis and Antoinette's secret Prime Minister-in-exile.

With Louis now suffering from periodic depression and chronic lethargy, Marie Antoinette had taken it upon herself to appointing Breteuil. It is generally believed that she forged the official document appointing Breteuil and passed it off as the king's own handwriting.

Hope of compromise between the royals and the revolutionaries dimmed with the creation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790. This was a republican attack on the privileges and ancient practises of the Roman Catholic Church. When news was delivered to the royal family, Marie Antoinette whispered to the Marquise de Tourzel, "The Church. The Church... we're next."

By 1791, both the king and the queen had now come to the conclusion that the Revolution was going to destroy France. They came to the decision to flee to Montmédy, a royalist stronghold in the east of France.

There they would gather their supporters and any foreign assistance they could (Marie Antoinette's brother Emperor Leopold II, the Russian empress, the King of Sweden and the King of Prussia had all promised military aid.) They hoped that once they had escaped they would be able to negotiate with the revolutionaries, but they were now quite prepared to use force to stop them.

The royals' escape was foiled at the town of Varennes, when the King's face was recognized on a coin as the horses drawing the carriage were being replaced, and they were forced back to Paris by local republicans. They were returned to the Tuileries Palace, but from now on it was clear that the King and the entire royal family were enemies of the Revolution.

Marie Antoinette then tried to preserve the crown's rapidly deteriorating position by secretly negotiating with Antoine Barnave, leader of the constitutional monarchist faction in the Assembly. Barnave persuaded Louis to openly accept the new constitution in September 1791, but the queen undermined Barnave by privately urging her brother, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, to conduct a counterrevolutionary crusade against France.

Louis's attempt, encouraged by the Queen, to regain his authority by making war with her relations in Austria, hoping that a quick defeat of France would cause the Austrians to restore the monarchy, proved disastrous.

When the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Austro-Prussian army invading France, issued a manifesto threatening Paris with destruction if the royal family were harmed, reaction in Paris was swift and brutal. Rather than heeding the Manifesto, the revolutionaries were enraged by it and they attacked the Tuileries on August 10th 1792.

Marie Antoinette's initial decision was to stand and face the mob, even if it meant doing it on her own. However, her ladies-in-waiting begged her to think of her children and she reluctantly agreed to accompany the king and his entourage when they fled the palace for the National Assembly.

The Palace was invaded in their absence and the Swiss Guard were massacred. The Governor of the Tuileries, the Marquis de Champcenetz, managed to escape the mob despite incurring heavy wounds. He was sentenced to death by the revolutionaries but managed to escape Paris with the help of Mrs. Elliott.

Louis XVI was arrested by the republicans on 13th August, and just over a month later, on September 21st, the National Convention abolished the monarchy. The royal family were then moved to the forbidding Temple Fortress and imprisoned. The king, queen, their two children and Louis's sister Elisabeth were heavily guarded, lest they be rescued by royalists.

After they had been imprisoned, Paris erupted into violence. The mob invaded the prisons and massacred anyone suspected of royalist leanings. Marie Antoinette's dearest friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, was captured and told to repudiate her oath of loyalty to the queen.

When she refused, she was murdered by repeated hammer-blows to the head. Her body was then torn apart and her head placed on a pike. It was taken to Marie Antoinette's window and displayed outside it. When the queen saw this horrific sight, she collapsed to the ground in a dead faint.

Louis was tried for treason on December 11th. He was condemned to death on January 17th. The duc d'Orléans voted for Louis's death. He was allowed one last farewell supper with his family and he urged his young son not to seek vengeance for his death.

The queen spent the next few hours huddled against her husband, clutching their son. Marie Thérèse sobbed hysterically, whilst Elisabeth clung to her brother. Louis was taken to the guillotine the next day. When she heard the crowds cheer her husband's death, Marie Antoinette collapsed to the ground, unable to speak.

Imprisonment

Marie Antoinette did not ever truly recover from her husband's death. According to her daughter, "She no longer had any hope left in her heart or distinguished between life and death." She began to suffer from convulsions and fainting fits. She also lost her appetite and lost an enormous amount of weight.

On the night of July 3, 1793, commissioners arrived in the royal family's cell with instructions to separate Marie Antoinette's son from the rest of his family. He had been proclaimed Louis XVII by exiled royalists after his father's death. The republican government had therefore decided to imprison the eight-year-old child in solitary confinement.

Louis flung himself into his mother's arms crying hysterically and Marie Antoinette shielded him with her body, refusing to give him up.

When the commissioners threatened to kill her if she did not hand the child over, she still refused to move. It was only when they threatened to kill Marie Thérèse that she came to realise how hopeless the situation was. Two hours after the commissioners had entered her room, Marie Antoinette had to say goodbye to her beloved son.

She would never see him again.

At two o'clock in the morning of 2nd August 1793, Marie Antoinette was awoken by guards and told to get dressed. She was taken away from her daughter and sister-in-law and transferred across Paris to the Conciergerie Prison.

She was re-named "the Widow Capet," after Hugh Capet, founder of the Capetian Dynasty. She was no longer to be referred to as "Marie Antoinette" but simply "Antoinette Capet" or "Prisoner No. 280." A young peasant girl, Rosalie Lamorlière, was entrusted to take care of Marie Antoinette's needs, but these were few since the queen did not ask for much.

On 2nd September, the republican journalist and politician, Jacques Hébert, told the Committee of Public Safety, "I have promised [my readers] the head of Antoinette. I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me." Most republicans now felt an intense hatred for her and they were determined to see her dead.

She was brought to trial on October 14th. When she entered the courtroom, most people were shocked at her appearance. She was emaciated, prematurely aged, exhausted and care-worn. Forty witnesses were called by the prosecution. They returned to the Affair of the Necklace or alleged that the queen had plied the Swiss Guard with alcohol during the siege of the palace.

The most horrific charges came whenever Hébert accused her of having sexually abused her own son. When the queen was pressed to answer this charge she replied, "If I have not replied it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother."

The following questions were actually put to the jury: Is it established that manoeuvres and communications have existed with foreign powers and either external enemies of the republic, the said manoeuvres, &c., tending to furnish them with assistance in money, give them an entry into French territory, and facilitate the progress of their armies?

Is Marie Antoinette of Austria, the widow Capet, convicted of having co-operated in these maneuvres and maintained these communications? Is it established that a plot and conspiracy has existed tending to kindle civil war within the republic, by arming the citizens against one another? Is Marie Antoinette, the widow Capet, convicted of having participated in this plot and conspiracy?

The jury decided unanimously in the affirmative, and she was condemned to death for treason on October 15th and escorted back to the Conciergerie. She wrote her final letter known as her "Testament", to her sister-in-law Elisabeth. She expressed her love for her friends and family and begged that her children would not seek to avenge her murder.

On the morning of October 16th, a guard arrived to cut her hair and bind her hands behind her back. She was forced into a common, slow-moving cart and paraded through the streets of Paris for over an hour before reaching the Place de la Révolution where the guillotine stood. She stepped lightly down from the cart and stared up at the guillotine.

The priest who had accompanied her whispered, "This is the moment, Madame, to arm yourself with courage." Marie Antoinette turned to look at him and smiled, "Courage? The moment when my troubles are going to end is not the moment when my courage is going to fail me." Legend states that her last words were "Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose," spoken after she had stepped on the executioner's foot.

At 12:15 on Wednesday October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was executed. Her head was exhibited to a cheering crowd. Her body was then taken and dumped in an unmarked mass grave in the Rue d'Anjou.

Marie Antoinette went down in history as a shallow, weak, self-indulgent and stupid person. Only royalists, who saw her as a martyr, viewed her any differently. They later recovered her body and reburied it in the Bourbon dynasty crypt in Paris, and they also retrieved the bodies of Louis XVI and Princess Elisabeth (who was executed in 1794).

In recent years, however, this has somewhat changed. In 1933, Stefan Zweig wrote a biography of her "Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Ordinary Woman," in which he argued the queen achieved greatness during the final years of her life thanks to her extraordinary courage. His biography was later made into a hugely successful movie starring Norma Shearer (see below.)

French historians, like André Castelot and Évelyne Lever, have generally been more critical in their biographies of Marie Antoinette; although neither has attacked her with the venom that she received during her lifetime.

The trend in recent years, however, has been to focus on Marie Antoinette's strengths rather than her weaknesses. Deborah Cadbury, in her biography of Louis XVII, praised Marie Antoinette's devotion to her family and Munro Price, in his political study on the fall of the French monarchy, wrote "Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette have often been portrayed as weak and vacillating. Far from it; their policy between 1789 and 1792 was entirely consistent, and highly conservative. They were prepared to die for their beliefs, and ultimately did so."

The most thorough biography of Marie Antoinette has come from British historian, Lady Antonia Fraser. Marie Antoinette: The Journey was first published in 2001 and became an instant bestseller. Plans are now afoot to turn it into a Hollywood movie (see below.) After reading Fraser's book, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore concluded that Marie Antoinette was "a woman more sinned against than sinning."

Marie Antoinette's life provided inspiration for the novel Trianon (first published in 1997) by author and historian, Elena Maria Vidal. Based on Vidal's painstaking research, this novel depicts pre-Revolution life at Versailles and the characters of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI with authenticity, in an attempt to dispel previous misconceptions about the royal couple. Trianon is the prequel to Madame Royale which is inspired by the life of Princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, daughter of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI

The only major disagreement amongst modern historians is the role she played by the Swedish aristocrat, Count Axel von Fersen. There were unsubstantiated rumours at court that the dashing Fersen was at one time Marie Antoinette's lover. It is true that the two were very close and that Fersen risked his life many times to try and free her from prison.

Some historians, like Evelyn Farr and Antonia Fraser, seem convinced that at one point the two did enjoy a physical relationship based on Fersen's famous line "Resté là" in his diary entry whenever he spent time with his other lovers.

Others remain skeptical, arguing that there is no concrete evidence to support the idea that the two were lovers in the physical sense. Some even have claimed that Louis-Charles, later dauphin of France, was the biological child of Marie Antoinette and Fersen - this suggestion has however been rejected by Louis-Charles's most recent biographer, Deborah Cadbury.

The Château de Versailles —or simply Versailles— is a royal château, outside the gates of which the village of Versailles, France, has grown to become a full-fledged city.

From 1682, when King Louis XIV moved from Paris, until the royal family was forced to return to the capital in 1789, the court of Versailles was the centre of power under the Ancien Régime. In 1660, Louis XIV, who was approaching

majority and the assumption of full royal powers from the advisors who had governed France during his minority, was casting about for a site near Paris but away from the tumults and diseases of the crowded city.

He had grown up in the disorders of the civil war between rival factions of aristocrats called the Frondes and wanted a site where he could organize and completely control a government of France by absolute personal rule. He settled on the royal hunting lodge at Versailles and decided to convert it into a palace.

In 1661 Louis Le Vau made some additions which he developed further in 1668. In 1678 Mansart took over the work, the Galerie des Glaces, the chapel and the two wings being due to him. On May 6, 1682 Louis XIV took up residence in the château. Furnishings had been plundered from Louis' disgraced finance minister's Nicolas Fouquet splendid house at Vaux-le-Vicomte, whose grand success there was his undoing.

After Louis XIV, several smaller buildings were added to the park of Versailles by Louis XV and Louis XVI including the Grand Trianon, the Petit Trianon, and the Hamlet of Marie Antoinette known as the Petit hameau, which, in a way, is one of the world's first open air museums.

Louis XVI (born August 23, 1754 in Versailles; died January 21, 1793 in Paris) was King of France and Navarre from 1774 until 1791, and then King of the French from 1791 to 1792.

Suspended and arrested during the Insurrection of the 10th of August 1792, he was tried by the National Convention, found guilty of treason, and executed on January 21, 1793. His execution signaled the end of the absolutist monarchy in France and would eventually bring about the rise of Napoleon.

Beloved by the people at first, his indecisiveness and conservatism led the people to reject him and hate in him the perceived tyranny of the former kings of France. During the French Revolution, he was given the family name Capet (a faulty reference to Hugh Capet, the founder of the dynasty), and was called Louis Capet in an attempt to desecrate his status as king. He was also informally nicknamed Louis le Dernier ("Louis the Last"), a derisive use of the traditional nicknaming of French kings. Today, historians and Frenchmen in general

have a more nuanced view of Louis XVI, who is seen as an honest man with good intentions but who was probably unfit for the Herculean task of reforming the monarchy, and who was used as a scapegoat by the Revolutionaries.

Louis was preceded as king by his grandfather, Louis XV. Louis' father was the king's only son, the Dauphin de France (1729-1765), who died young and never ascended the throne. Louis' mother was Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, second wife of the Dauphin, and the daughter of Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.

On May 16, 1770, he married Marie Antoinette, daughter of Francis I of Austria and Empress Maria Theresa, a Habsburg. They had four children:

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte (December 20, 1778 – October 19, 1851);

Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François (October 22, 1781 – June 4, 1789);

Louis-Charles (March 27, 1785 – June 8, 1795);

Sophie-Beatrix (July 9, 1786 – June 19, 1787)

Politics

The government was deeply in debt. The radical reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes disaffected the nobles (parlements), and Turgot was dismissed and Malesherbes resigned in 1776 to be replaced by Jacques Necker. Louis supported the American Revolution in 1778, but in the Treaty of Paris (1783), the French gained little except an addition to the country's enormous debt. Necker had resigned in 1781 to be replaced by Calonne and Brienne, before being restored in 1788.

In 1789, Louis ordered the first election of the Estates-General (National Assembly) since 1614 in order to have the monetary reforms approved. The election was one of the events that transformed the general malaise into the French Revolution, which began in June 1789.

The Third Estate had declared itself the National Assembly; Louis' attempts to control it resulted in the Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume, June 20), the declaration of the National Constituent Assembly on July 9, and the storming of the Bastille on July 14. In October, the royal family was forced to move from the Palace of Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris.

Louis himself was very popular and not unobliging to the social, political, and economic reforms of the Revolution. Recent scholarship has concluded that Louis suffered from clinical depression, which left him prone to bouts of severe indecisiveness, during which times his wife, the unpopular Queen Marie Antoinette, assumed effective responsibility for acting for the Crown.

The revolution's principles of popular sovereignty, though central to democratic principles of later eras, marked a decisive break from the absolute monarchical principle of throne and altar that was at the heart of contemporary governance. As a result, the revolution was opposed by almost all of the previous governing elite in France and by practically all the governments of Europe.

Leading figures in the initial revolutionary movement themselves were questioning the principles of popular control of government. Some, notably Honoré Mirabeau, secretly plotted to restore the power of the Crown in a new form.

However, Mirabeau's sudden death, and Louis's depression, fatally weakened developments in that area. Louis was nowhere near as reactionary as his right-wing brothers, the comte d'Artois and the comte de Provence, and he sent repeated messages publicly and privately calling on them to halt their attempts to launch counter-coups (often through his secretly nominated regent, former minister de Brienne).

However, he was alienated from the new government both by its challenging of the traditional role of the monarch and in its treatment of him and his family.

He was particularly irked by being kept effective prisoner in the Tuileries, where his wife was forced humiliatingly to have revolutionary soldiers in her private bedroom watching her as she slept, and by the refusal of the new regime to allow him to have Catholic confessors and priests of his choice rather than 'constitutional priests' created by the revolution.

He hired a secret banker named Miles Hughes, who was secretly working for the revolution, and gave top secret information to rebels.

End of reign

On June 21, 1791, Louis attempted to flee secretly from Paris to modern-day Belgium (then part of the Austrian Empire) with his family in the hope of forcing a more moderate swing in the revolution than was deemed possible in radical Paris.

However, flaws in the escape plan caused sufficient delays to enable them to be recognized and captured at Varennes. Supposedly Louis was captured while trying to make a purchase at a store, where the clerk recognized his face on the coinage. He was returned to Paris, where he remained nominally as constitutional king, though under effective house-arrest until 1792.

On July 25, 1792, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, commander of the Prussian forces, issued a manifesto (the so-called Brunswick Manifesto) threatening the inhabitants of Paris with exemplary vengeance if the Royal family was harmed and threatening the French public with exemplary punishment if they resisted the Imperial and Prussian armies or the forced reinstatement of the monarchy.

The manifesto was taken to be the final proof of a collusion between Louis and foreign powers in a conspiracy against his own country. Louis was officially arrested on August 13, 1792. On September 21, 1792, the National Assembly declared France to be a republic.

Louis was tried (from December 11, 1792) and convicted of high treason before the Legislative Assembly. He was sentenced to death (January 21, 1793) by guillotine by 361 votes to 288, with 72 effective abstentions.

Stripped of all titles and honorifics by the egalitarian, Republican government, Citizen Louis Capet was guillotined in front of a cheering crowd on January 21, 1793. On his death, his eight-year-old son, Louis-Charles, automatically became to royalists and some international states the de jure King Louis XVII of France, despite France having been declared a Republic.

Necker was born in Geneva, Switzerland. His father was a native of Küstrin in Pomerania (now Kostrzyn nad Odra, Poland), and had, after the publication of some works on international law, been elected as professor of public law at Geneva, of which he became a citizen, Jacques Necker was sent to Paris in 1747 to become a clerk in the bank of a friend of his father.

He soon afterwards established, with another Genevese, the famous bank of Thellusson & Necker.

Thellusson superintended the bank in London (his grandson was made a peer as Lord Rendlesham), while Necker was managing partner in Paris. Both partners became very rich by loans to the treasury and speculations in grain.

In 1763 Necker fell in love with Madame de Verménou, the widow of a French officer. But while on a visit

to Geneva, Madame de Verménou met Suzanne Curchod, the daughter of a pastor near Lausanne, to whom Edward Gibbon had been engaged, and brought her back as her companion to Paris in 1764. There Necker, transferring his love from the widow to the poor Swiss girl, married Suzanne before the end of the year. On April 22, 1766 they had a daughter, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, who became a renowned author under the name of Madame de Staël.

Madame Necker encouraged her husband to try to find himself a public position. He accordingly became a syndic or director of the French East India Company, and, after showing his financial ability in its management, defended it in an able memoir against the attacks of André Morellet in 1769.

Meanwhile he had made loans to the French government, and was appointed resident at Paris by the republic of Geneva. Madame Necker entertained the leaders of the political, financial and literary worlds of Paris,

and her Fridays became as greatly frequented as the Mondays of Madame Geoffrin, or the Tuesdays of Madame Helvétius. In 1773 Necker won the prize of the Académie française for a eulogy on Colbert, and in 1775 published his Essai sur la législation et le commerce des grains, in which he attacked the free-trade policy of Turgot. His wife now believed he could get into office as a great financier, and made him give up his share in the bank, which he transferred to his brother Louis.

Finance Minister of France

In October 1776 Necker was made finance minister of France, though with the title only of director of the treasury, which, however, he changed in 1777 for that of director-general of the finances. He did great good in regulating the finances by attempting to divide the taille or poll tax more equally, by abolishing the vingtième d'industrie, and establishing monts de piété (establishments for loaning money on security).

But his greatest financial measures were his attempt to fund the French debt and his establishment of annuities under the guarantee of the state.

The operation of funding was too difficult to be suddenly accomplished, and Necker rather pointed out the right line to be followed than completed the operation. In all this he treated French finance rather as a banker than as a profound political economist, and thus fell far short of Turgot, who was the very greatest economist of his day.

Politically he did not do much to stave off the coming French Revolution, and his establishment of provincial assemblies was only a timid application of Turgot's great scheme for the administrative reorganization of France.

In 1781 he published his famous Compte rendu(full name compte rendu du roi), in which he drew the balance sheet of France, and was dismissed from his office. Yet his dismissal was not really due to his book, but to the influence of Marie Antoinette, whose schemes for benefiting the duc de Guines he had thwarted.

In retirement he occupied himself with literature, and with his only child, his daughter, who in 1786 married the ambassador of Sweden and became Madame de Staël. But neither Necker nor his wife cared to remain out of office, and in 1787 Necker was banished by lettre de cachet 40 leagues from Paris for attacking Calonne.

In 1788 the country, which had at the bidding of the literary guests of Madame Necker come to believe that Necker was the only minister who could "stop the deficit," as they said, demanded Necker's recall, and he became once more director-general of finance.

Throughout the momentous months which followed, the biography of Necker is part of the history of the French Revolution. Necker put a stop to the rebellion in Dauphiné by legalizing its assembly, and then set to work to arrange for the summons of the Estates-General of 1789. He was regarded as the saviour of France, but his conduct at the meeting of the states general showed that he regarded it as an assembly which should merely grant money, not organize reforms.

But as he had advised the calling of the states general and the double representation of the third estate, and then permitted the orders to deliberate and vote in common, he was regarded as the cause of the Revolution by the court, and on July 11 was ordered to leave France at once. He had earned the enmity of many members of the royal circle - including the king's youngest brother the Comte d'Artois and a well-connected diplomat, baron de Breteuil (who replaced him as minister.)

Necker's dismissal on July 11, 1789 brought about the storming of the Bastille, which induced the king to recall him. He was received with joy in every city he traversed, but at Paris he again proved to be no statesman. Believing that he could save France alone, he refused to act with Mirabeau or Lafayette.

He caused the king's acceptance of the suspensive veto, by which he sacrificed his chief prerogative in September, and destroyed all chance of a strong executive by contriving the decree of November 7, by which the ministry might not be chosen from the assembly. Financially he proved equally incapable for a time of crisis, and could not understand the need of such extreme measures as the establishment of assignats in order to keep the country quiet.

His popularity vanished when his only idea was to ask the assembly for new loans, and in September 1790 he resigned his office, unregretted by a single Frenchman.

Retirement

Not without difficulty he reached Coppet, near Geneva, an estate he had bought in 1784. Here he occupied himself with literature, but Madame Necker pined for her Paris salon and died soon after. He continued to live on at Coppet, under the care of his daughter, Madame de Staël, and his niece, Madame Necker de Saussure, but his time was past, and his books had no political influence.

A momentary excitement was caused by the advance of the French armies in 1798, when he burnt most of his political papers. He died at Coppet on April 9, 1804.

The Bastille was a prison in Paris, known formally as Bastille Saint-Antoine—Number 232, Rue Saint-Antoine. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 marked the beginning of the French Revolution. The event was commemorated one year later by the Fête de la Fédération. The French national holiday, celebrated

annually on July 14 is officially the Fête Nationale, and officially commemorates the Fête de la

Fédération, but it is commonly known in English as Bastille Day. Bastille is a French word meaning "castle" or "stronghold"; used as a single word ("la Bastille" in French), it refers to the prison.

Built from 1370 to 1383 as part of the defences of Paris, the structure was converted into a prison in the 15th century by Charles VI. At that time it primarily housed political prisoners, but also religious prisoners, "seditious" writers, and young rakes held at the request of their families.

It began to acquire a poor reputation when it became the main prison for those taken under lettres de cachet issued by the Bourbon kings.By the late 18th century, the building was made up of eight close-packed towers, around 24 m (80 feet) high, surrounding two courtyards and the armoury. The prisoners were held within the five- to seven-story towers, each having a room around 4.6 m (15 feet) across and containing various articles of furniture.

The infamous cachots—the oozing, vermin-infested subterranean cells—were no longer in use. The governor of the prison was given a daily allowance per prisoner, the amount depending on their status—from nineteen livres per diem for scientists and academics down to three for commoners.

In terms of standards, there were many worse prisons in France, including the dreaded Bicêtre, also in Paris. However, in terms of popular literary accounts, the Bastille was a place of horror and oppression—a symbol of autocratic cruelty.

The confrontation between the commoners and the ancien régime ultimately led to the people of Paris storming the Bastille on July 14, 1789, following several days of disturbances.

At this point, the jail was nearly empty, with only seven inmates: four counterfeiters, two madmen, and a young aristocrat who had displeased his father. The regular garrison consisted of about 80 invalides (veteran soldiers no longer capable of service in the field) under Governor Bernard-René de Launay. They had however been reinforced by a detachment of 32 grenadiers from one of the Swiss mercenary regiments summoned to Paris by the Monarchy shortly before 14 July.

A crowd of around 1,000 people gathered outside around mid-morning, calling for the surrender of the prison, the removal of the guns and the release of the arms and gunpowder. Two people chosen to represent those gathered were invited into the fortress and slow negotiations began.

In the early afternoon, the crowd broke into the undefended outer courtyard and the chains on the drawbridge to the inner courtyard were cut. A spasmodic exchange of gunfire began; in mid-afternoon the crowd was reinforced by mutinous gardes françaises of the Royal Army and two cannons. De Launay ordered a ceasefire; despite his surrender demands being refused, he capitulated and the vainqueurs swept in to liberate the fortress at around 5:30.

Ninety-eight attackers and one defender had died. De Launay was seized and dragged towards the Hôtel de Ville, but was stabbed to death by the mob in the street outside the Hôtel. Several of De Launay's officers were also killed.

The gardes francais intervened to protect the Swiss soldiers and invalides of the garrison, though two of the latter were reported to have been lynched. The officer commanding the Swiss detachment later prepared a detailed account of the fall of the fortress which, perhaps unfairly, laid blame on De Launay for indecisive behavior.

Many historians believe that the storming of the Bastille was more important as a rallying point and symbolic act of rebellion than any practical act of defiance. No less important in the history of France, it was not the image typically conjured up of courageous French patriots storming a towering fortress and freeing hundreds of oppressed peasants.

The act of telling this false version of the events began on July 17, 1789 with the publication of the Révolutions de Paris. This publication contained a colourful description of the attack and an entirely false description of the many prisoners freed.

The Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789

10:30 Due to the pressure of the crowd, the voters of Paris came together outside the town hall and sent a delegation to Bernard-Rene Jordan de Launay. They attempted to make him distribute powder and balls to the Parisians who were trying to form a middle-class militia. The delegation was received pleasantly, but no supplies were received.

11:30 A second delegation led by the knight Jacques Alexis Thuriot and Louis Ethis de Corny, is sent to the Bastille without result. The crowd armed with stolen rifles piled up with the invalids in front of the Bastille.

13:30 The defenders of the Bastille (82 invalids and 32 detached Swiss soldiers of the regiment of Salis-Samade) opened fire on order from the governor.

14:00 A third delegation is sent to the Bastille.

15:30 A detachment of 61 French guards commanded by Pierre Hulin, former sergeant of the Swiss guards, arrives in front of the Bastille with five canons. These guns are put in position against the doors and drawbridge of the Bastille. The Bastille capitulates.

17:00 The crowd invades the Bastille, delivers the seven prisoners of common right who were locked up there, seizes the powder and of the balls, takes along to the Town hall, the garrison of the Bastille. On the way, the governor, Bernard-Rene Jordan de Launay is massacred and several invalids are put to death.

The attackers had had a hundred killed and 73 wounded. The importance of the storming of the Bastille was strongly exaggerated by the romantic historians, who wanted to make of it a symbol founder of the Republic. Thousand people at most made a band of rioters, which wanted to invade the building to acquire weapons there.

Remarkable Prisoners

The Man in The Iron Mask

Fouquet

Voltaire

Marquis de Sade

Claude de Bourdeille, comte de Montrésor

René Auguste Constantin de Renneville

Charles de Valois, Duke of Angoulême

Hugues Aubriot

Comte de Rochefort (fictional)

Louis François Armand du Plessis, duc de Richelieu

Pierre François de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal

Marguerite De Launay, Baronne Staal

Giuseppe Marco Fieschi

James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton

Louis Pierre Manuel

François Henri de Montmorency-Bouteville, duc de Luxembourg

Antoine Nompar de Caumont

François de La Rochefoucauld

François de Bassompierre

André Morellet

Jacques Pierre Brissot

Charles François Dumouriez

Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy

John Vanbrugh

During the French Revolution, the young Louis-Charles was imprisoned with his parents.

As the eldest living son of King Louis XVI, he was proclaimed King of France on January 28, 1793 by his uncle, Monsieur Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, the Comte de Provence, in a declaration issued from exile in the city of Hamm, near Dortmund, Westphalia. At the time, the declaration was

without authority, as France was a republic; however, when France and the other European powers later accepted Louis-Stanislas-Xavier as King

Louis XVIII of France, his numbering tacitly recognized Louis XVII's right to the throne.

In 1793, while the royal family was being held at the Temple prison in Paris, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and sister in order to dissuade any monarchist bids to free him. He remained imprisoned alone, a floor below his sister Marie-Thérèse, until his death in June 1795. His captors referred to him by the family name "Capet", after Hugh Capet, the original founder of the royal dynasty. This use of a surname was a deliberate insult, since royalty do not normally use surnames.

Louis-Charles was set to work as a cobbler's assistant and taught to curse his parents. He was officially reported to have died in the prison from what is

today recognized as tuberculosis. Reportedly, his body was ravaged by tumors and scabies. An autopsy was carried out at the prison and, following a tradition of preserving royal hearts, his heart was smuggled out and preserved by the examining physician, Philippe-Jean Pelletan. Louis-Charles' body was buried in a mass grave.

"Lost Dauphin" claimants

Rumours quickly spread, however, that the body buried was not that of Louis-Charles and that he had been spirited away alive by sympathizers. Thus born the legend of the "Lost Dauphin". When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, hundreds of claimants came forward. Would-be royal heirs continued to appear across Europe for decades afterward and some of their descendants still have small but loyal retinues of followers today.

Popular candidates for the Lost Dauphin included John James Audubon, the naturalist; Eleazer Williams, a missionary from Wisconsin of Mohawk Native American descent; and Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker. Mark Twain satirized the host of claimants in the characters of the Duke and the Dauphin, the con men in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Testing the heart

Louis-Charles' heart changed hands many times. First it was stolen by one of Pelletan's students, who confessed to the theft on his deathbed and asked his wife to return the heart to Pelletan. Instead, she sent it to the Archbishop of Paris, where it stayed until the Revolution of 1830. It also spent some time in Spain.

By 1975, it was being kept in a crystal vase at the royal crypt in the Saint Denis Basilica outside Paris, the burial place of Louis-Charles' parents and of many other members of France's royal families.

In the 1990s, Philippe Delorme, the contemporary authority on the subject, arranged for DNA testing of the heart. Ernst Brinkmann of Germany's Muenster University and a Belgian genetics professor, Jean-Jacques Cassiman of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, conducted the two independent tests. In 2000, comparison with DNA reclaimed from the hair of Marie Antoinette confirmed the heart as royal and it was finally buried in the Basilica on June 8, 2004.

It should be noted, however, that the DNA tested was mitochondrial DNA. This DNA is inherited only from the mother and allows tracing of a direct maternal genetic line. Assuming there was no tampering with the test's samples, therefore, the comparison only proved that the two samples shared the same maternal ancestry.

It does not prove that the heart belonged to a particular individual. Since there was this tradition of removing royal hearts after death, it is possible that the heart may have been that of another young royal, for instance that of Louis XVI's first son, Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François, who died in 1789.

Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a general of the French Revolution; the ruler of France as First Consul (Premier Consul) of the French Republic from 11 November 1799 to 18 May 1804;

then Emperor of the French (Empereur des Français) and King of Italy under the name Napoleon I from 18 May 1804 to 6 April 1814; and briefly restored as Emperor from March 20 to June 22 of 1815.

Although Napoleon himself developed few military innovations, apart from the divisional squares employed in Egypt and the placement of artillery into batteries,

he used the best tactics from a variety of sources, and the modernized French army, as reformed under the various revolutionary governments, to score some major victories.

His campaigns are studied at military academies all over the world and he is generally regarded as one of the greatest commanders to have ever lived.

Over the course of little more than a decade, he fought virtually every European power and acquired control of most of the western and central mainland of Europe by conquest or alliance until his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, followed by defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, which led to his abdication several months later and his exile to the island of Elba.

He staged a comeback known as the Hundred Days (les Cent Jours), but was again defeated decisively at the Battle of Waterloo in present day Belgium on June 18, 1815, followed shortly afterwards by his surrender to the British and his exile to the island of Saint Helena, where he died six years later.

Aside from his military achievements, Napoleon is also remembered for the establishment of the Napoleonic Code. He is considered by some to have been one of the "enlightened despots".

Napoleon appointed several members of the Bonaparte family and close friends of his as monarchs of countries he conquered and as important government figures (his brother Lucien became France's Minister of Finance). Although their reigns did not survive his downfall, a nephew, Napoleon III, ruled France later in the nineteenth century.

He was born Napoleone de Buonaparte (in Corsican, Nabolione or Nabulione) in the town of Ajaccio on Corsica on 15 August 1769, only one year after the island was transferred to France by the Republic of Genoa. He later adopted the more French-sounding Napoléon Bonaparte.

His family were minor Italian nobility living in Corsica. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, an attorney, was named Corsica's representative to the court of Louis XVI of France in 1778, where he remained for a number of years. The dominant influence of Napoleon's childhood was his mother, Maria Letizia Ramolino. Her firm discipline helped restrain the rambunctious Napoleon as a boy, nicknamed Rabullione (the "meddler" or "disrupter"). He despised these names.

Napoleon's noble, moderately affluent background and family connections afforded him greater opportunities to study than were available to a typical Corsican of the time. At the age of five he attended preschool. At age nine, Napoleon was admitted to a French military school at Brienne-le-Château, a small town near Troyes, on 15 May 1779.

He had to learn to speak French before entering the school, but he spoke with a marked Italian accent throughout his life and never learned to spell properly. He earned high marks in mathematics and geography, and passable grades in other subjects. Upon graduation from Brienne in 1784, Bonaparte was admitted to the elite École Royale Militaire in Paris, where he completed the two year course of study in only one year.

Although he had initially sought a naval assignment, he studied artillery at the École Militaire. Upon graduation in September, 1785, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant of artillery, and took up his new duties in January 1786, at the age of 16.[1]

Napoleon served on garrison duty in Valence and Auxonne until after the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 (although he took nearly two years of leave in Corsica and Paris during this period). He spent most of the next several years on Corsica, where a complex three-way struggle was played out among royalists, revolutionaries, and Corsican nationalists.

Bonaparte supported the Jacobin faction, and gained the position of lieutenant-colonel of a regiment of volunteers. After coming into conflict with the increasingly conservative nationalist leader, Pasquale Paoli, Bonaparte and his family were forced to flee to France in June 1793.

Through the help of fellow Corsican Saliceti, he was appointed as artillery commander in the French forces besieging Toulon, which had risen in revolt against the Reign of Terror and was occupied by British troops.

He formulated a successful plan: he placed guns at Point l'Eguillete, threatening the British ships in the harbour with destruction, thereby forcing them to evacuate. A successful assault of the position, during which Bonaparte was wounded in the thigh, led to the recapture of the city and a promotion to brigadier-general.

His actions brought him to the attention of the Committee of Public Safety, and he became a close associate of Augustin Robespierre, younger brother

of the Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. As a result, he was briefly imprisoned following the fall of the elder Robespierre in 1794, but was released within two weeks.

The victorious general

The "whiff of grapeshot"

For more details on this topic, see 13 Vendémiaire.

In 1795, Bonaparte was serving in Paris when royalists and counter-revolutionaries organized an armed protest against the National Convention on 3 October. Bonaparte was given command of the improvised forces defending the Convention in the Tuileries Palace.

He seized artillery pieces with the aid of a young cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, who later became his brother-in-law. He utilized the artillery the following day to repel the attackers. He later boasted that he had cleared the streets with a "whiff of grapeshot" (small pellets fired out of a cannon), although the fighting had been vicious throughout Paris.

This triumph earned him sudden fame, wealth, and the patronage of the new Directory, particularly that of its leader, Barras. Within weeks he was romantically attached to Barras's former mistress, Josephine de Beauharnais, whom he married on March 9, 1796.

Days after his marriage, Bonaparte took command of the French "Army of Italy", leading it on a successful invasion of Italy. At the Lodi, he gained the nickname of "The Little Corporal" (le petit caporal), a term reflecting his camaraderie with his soldiers, all of whom he knew by name. He drove the Austrians out of Lombardy and defeated the army of the Papal States.

Because Pope Pius VI had protested the execution of Louis XVI, France retaliated by annexing two small papal territories. Bonaparte ignored the Directory's order to march on Rome and dethrone the Pope. It was not until the next year that General Berthier captured Rome and took Pius VI prisoner on February 20.

The pope died of illness while in captivity. In early 1797, Bonaparte led his army into Austria and forced that power to sue for peace. The resulting Treaty of Campo Formio gave France control of most of northern Italy, along with the Low Countries and Rhineland, but a secret clause promised Venice to Austria.

Bonaparte then marched on Venice and forced its surrender, ending over 1,000 years of independence. Later in 1797, Bonaparte organized many of the French dominated territories in Italy into the Cisalpine Republic.

His remarkable series of military triumphs were a result of his ability to apply his encyclopedic knowledge of conventional military thought to real-world situations, as demonstrated by his creative use of artillery tactics, using it as a mobile force to support his infantry.

As he described it: "I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning." Contemporary paintings of his headquarters during the Italian campaign depict his use of the world's first telecommunications system, the Chappe semaphore line, first implemented in 1792. He was also a master of both intelligence and deception and had an uncanny sense of when to strike.

He often won battles by concentrating his forces on an unsuspecting enemy by using spies to gather information about opposing forces and by concealing his own troop deployments. In this campaign, often considered his greatest, Napoleon's army captured 160,000 prisoners, 2,000 cannon, and 170 standards. A year of campaigning had witnessed major breaks with the traditional norms of 18th century warfare and marked a new era in military history.

While campaigning in Italy, General Bonaparte became increasingly influential in French politics. He published two newspapers, ostensibly for the troops in his army, but widely circulated within France as well. In May 1797 he founded a third newspaper, published in Paris, entitled Le Journal de Bonaparte et des hommes vertueux.

Elections in mid-1797 gave the royalist party increased power, alarming Barras and his allies on the Directory. The royalists, in turn, began attacking Bonaparte for looting Italy and overstepping his authority in dealings with the Austrians. Bonaparte sent General Augereau to Paris to lead a coup d'etat and purge the royalists on 4 September (18 Fructidor).

This left Barras and his Republican allies in firm control again, but dependent on Bonaparte's military command to stay there. Bonaparte himself proceeded to the peace negotiations with Austria, then returned to Paris in December as the conquering hero and the dominant force in government, far more popular than any of the Directors.

In March 1798, Bonaparte proposed an expedition to seize Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, seeking to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain's access to India. The Directory, although troubled by the scope and cost of the enterprise, readily agreed to the plan in order to remove the popular general from the center of power.

An unusual aspect of the Egyptian expedition was the inclusion of a large group of scientists assigned to the invading French force: among the other discoveries that resulted, the Rosetta Stone was found.

This deployment of intellectual resources is considered by some an indication of Bonaparte's devotion to the principles of the Enlightenment, and by others as a masterstroke of propaganda obfuscating the true imperialist motives of the invasion. In a largely unsuccessful effort to gain the support of the Egyptian populace, Bonaparte also issued proclamations casting himself as a liberator of the people from Ottoman oppression, and praising the precepts of Islam.

Bonaparte's expedition seized Malta from the Knights of Saint John on June 9 and then landed successfully at Alexandria on July 1, eluding (temporarily) pursuit by the Royal Navy.

After landing on the coast of Egypt, the first battle to take place was against the Mamelukes, an old power in the Middle East, approximately 4 miles from the pyramids. This battle would wipe out their power altogether. Napoleon's forces were greatly outnumbered by the advanced cavalry, about 25,000 to 100,000, and the battle was quick. Napoleon came out on top, mainly due to his strategy; men formed hollow squares, each side facing out.

This made it possible to keep cannons and supplies safely on the inside, while the soldiers could fire in every direction on the outside. This made a very strong defense, but left it possible for many soldiers to escape to fight again. In all only 300 French were killed, while approximately 6,000 native Egyptians were killed.

While the battle on land was a resounding victory for the French, the British navy managed to compensate at sea. The ships that had dropped off Napoleon and his army had sailed back to France, but a fleet of battleships that had come with them stayed and supported the army along the coast. On August 1, The British fleet found these battleships anchored in a strong defensive position in the bay of Abukir.

The French believed that they were open to attack only on one side, the other side being protected by the shore. However, the arriving British fleet under Horatio Nelson managed to slip half of their ships in between the land and the French line, thus attacking from both sides.

All but two of the French vessels were captured or destroyed. Only the Guillaume Tell with rear admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve and the Généreux escaped. The Guillaume Tell was caught not much later in the course of the British conquest of Malta. Many blame the French loss in this Battle of the Nile on the French admiral Francois-Paul Brueys, who came up with the failed defensive strategy.

However, the French ships were also undermanned and the troops were “young and insubordinate”. In all, about 250 British and 1,700 French were killed. Bonaparte became land-bound. His goal of strengthening the French position in the Mediterranean Sea was thus frustrated, but his army nonetheless succeeded in consolidating power in Egypt, although it faced repeated nationalist uprisings.

In early 1799 he led the army into the Ottoman province of Syria, now modern Israel, and defeated numerically superior Ottoman forces in several battles, but his army was weakened by disease and poor supplies. He was unable to reduce the fortress of Acre, and was forced to retreat to Egypt in May.

On 25 July, he defeated an Ottoman amphibious invasion at Abukir. Eventually Bonaparte was forced to withdraw from Egypt in 1799, leaving his troops behind, under constant British and Ottoman attacks. The remaining troops eventually surrendered to British forces but not before one out of every three men had died.

While in Egypt, Bonaparte tried to keep a close eye on European affairs, relying largely on newspapers and dispatches that arrived only irregularly. On 23 August 1799, he abruptly set sail for France, taking advantage of the temporary departure of British ships blockading French coastal ports.

Although he was later accused by political opponents of abandoning his troops, his departure actually had been ordered by the Directory, which had suffered a series of military defeats to the forces of the Second Coalition, and feared an invasion.

By the time he returned to Paris in October, the military situation had improved thanks to several French victories. The Republic was bankrupt, however, and the corrupt and inefficient Directory was more unpopular with the French public than ever.

Bonaparte was approached by one of the Directors, Sieyès, seeking his support for a coup to overthrow the constitution. The plot included Bonaparte's brother Lucien, then serving as speaker of the Council of Five Hundred, Roger Ducos, another Director, and Talleyrand. On 9 November (18 Brumaire), and the following day, troops led by Bonaparte seized control and dispersed the legislative councils, leaving a rump to name Bonaparte, Sieyès, and Ducos as provisional Consuls to administer the government.

Although Sieyès expected to dominate the new regime, he was outmaneuvered by Bonaparte, who drafted the Constitution of the Year VIII and secured his own election as First Consul. This made him the most powerful person in France, a power that was increased by the Constitution of the Year X, which made him First Consul for life.

Bonaparte instituted several lasting reforms including centralized administration of the départements, higher education, a tax system, a central bank, law codes, and road and sewer systems. He negotiated the Concordat of 1801 with the Catholic Church, seeking to reconcile the mostly Catholic population with his regime.

His set of civil laws, the Napoleonic Code or Civil Code, has importance to this day in many countries. The Code was prepared by committees of legal experts under the supervision of Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, who held the office Second Consul from 1799 to 1804; Bonaparte, however, participated actively in the sessions of the Council of State that revised the drafts.

Other codes were commissioned by Bonaparte to codify criminal and commerce law. In 1808, a Code of Criminal Instruction was published, which enacted precise rules of judicial procedure. Although contemporary standards may consider these procedures as favoring the prosecution, when enacted they sought to preserve personal freedoms and to remedy the prosecutorial abuses commonplace in European courts.

In 1800, Bonaparte returned to Italy, which the Austrians had reconquered during his absence in Egypt. He and his troops crossed the Alps in spring (although he actually rode a mule, not the white charger on which David famously depicted him).

While the campaign began badly, the Austrians were eventually routed in June at Marengo, leading to an armistice. Napoleon's brother Joseph, who was leading the peace negotiations in Lunéville, reported that due to British backing for Austria, Austria would not recognize France's newly gained territory.

As negotiations became more and more fractious, Bonaparte gave orders to his general Moreau to strike Austria once more. Moreau led France to victory at Hohenlinden. As a result the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in February 1801, under which the French gains of the Treaty of Campo Formio were reaffirmed and increased; the British signed the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802, which set terms for peace, including the division of several colonial territories.

The peace between France and Britain was uneasy and short-lived. The "legitimate" monarchies of Europe were reluctant to recognize a republic, fearing that the ideas of the revolution might be exported to them. In Britain, the brother of Louis XVI was welcomed as a state guest although officially Britain recognized France as a republic.

Britain failed to evacuate Malta and Egypt as promised, and protested against France's annexation of Piedmont, and Napoleon's Act of Mediation in Switzerland (although neither of these areas was covered by the Treaty of Amiens).

In 1803, Bonaparte faced a major setback when an army he sent to reconquer Haiti and establish a base was destroyed by a combination of yellow fever and fierce resistance led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. Recognizing that the French possessions on the mainland of North America would now be indefensible, and facing imminent war with Britain, he sold them to the United States —the Louisiana Purchase—for less than three cents per acre ($7.40/km²). The dispute over Malta provided the pretext for Britain to declare war on France in 1803 to support French royalists.

In January 1804, Bonaparte's police uncovered an assassination plot against him, ostensibly sponsored by the Bourbons. In retaliation, Bonaparte ordered the arrest of the Duc d'Enghien, in a violation of the sovereignty of Baden. After a hurried secret trial, the Duke was executed on 21 March.

Bonaparte then used this incident to justify the re-creation of a hereditary monarchy in France, with himself as Emperor, on the theory that a Bourbon restoration would be impossible once the Bonapartist succession was entrenched in the constitution.

Napoleon crowned himself Emperor on 2 December 1804 at Notre-Dame Cathedral. Claims that he seized the crown out of the hands of Pope Pius VII during the ceremony in order to avoid subjecting himself to the authority of the pontiff are apocryphal; in fact, the coronation procedure had been agreed upon in advance.

After the Imperial regalia had been blessed by the Pope, Napoleon crowned himself before crowning his wife Joséphine as Empress (the moment depicted in David's famous painting, illustrated at right). Then at Milan's cathedral on 26 May 1805, Napoleon was crowned King of Italy with the Iron Crown of Lombardy.

By 1805 Britain instigated a Third Coalition against Napoleon. Napoleon knew the French fleet could not defeat the Royal Navy and therefore arranged to lure the British fleet away from the English Channel so that a joint Spanish and French fleet could regain control of the Channel for twenty-four hours, enough for French armies to cross to England. However, with Austria and Russia preparing an invasion of France and its allies, he had to change his plans and turn his attention to the continent.

The newly born Grande Armee secretly marched towards Germany. On 20 October 1805 it surprised the Austrians at Ulm. The next day, however, at the decisive Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805), Britain gained lasting control of the seas. A few weeks later, Napoleon secured a major victory against Austria and Russia at Austerlitz (2 December), forcing Austria yet again to sue for peace.

A Fourth Coalition was assembled the following year, and Napoleon defeated Prussia at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt (14 October 1806). He marched on against advancing Russian armies through Poland, and was attacked at the bloody Battle of Eylau on 6 February 1807.

After a decisive victory at Friedland he signed a treaty at Tilsit in East Prussia with Tsar Alexander I of Russia, dividing Europe between the two powers. He placed puppet rulers on the thrones of German states, including his brother Jerome as king of the new state of Westphalia. In the French-controlled part of Poland, he established the Duchy of Warsaw with King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony as ruler. Between 1809 and 1813 Napoleon also served as Regent of the Grand Duchy of Berg for his brother Louis Bonaparte.

Ludwig van Beethoven initially dedicated his third symphony, the Eroica (Italian for "heroic"), to Napoleon in the belief that the general would sustain the democratic and republican ideals of the French Revolution, but in 1804, as Napoleon's imperial ambitions became clear, renamed the symphony as the "Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il Sovvenire di un grand'Uomo", or in English, "composed to celebrate the memory of a great man".

The Peninsular War and the War of the Fifth Coalition

Main articles: Peninsular War, Fifth Coalition

In addition to military endeavors against Britain, Napoleon also waged economic war, attempting to enforce a Europe-wide commercial boycott of Britain called the "Continental System". Although this action hurt the British economy, it also damaged the French economy and was not a decisive factor.

Portugal did not comply with this Continental System and in 1807 Napoleon sought Spain's support for an invasion of Portugal. When Spain refused, Napoleon invaded Spain as well. After mixed results were produced by his generals, Napoleon himself took command and defeated the Spanish army, retook Madrid and then defeated a British army sent to support the Spanish, driving it to the coast and forcing withdrawal from Iberia (in which its commander, Sir John Moore, was killed). Napoleon installed one of his marshals and brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as the King of Naples, and his brother Joseph Bonaparte, as King of Spain.

The Spanish, inspired by nationalism and the Roman Catholic Church, and angry over atrocities committed by French troops, rose in revolt. At the same time, Austria unexpectedly broke its alliance with France and Napoleon was forced to assume command of forces on the Danube and German fronts.

A bloody draw ensued at Aspern-Essling (May 21–22, 1809) near Vienna, which was the closest Napoleon ever came to a defeat in a battle with more or less equal numbers on each side. After a two month interval, the principal French and Austrian armies engaged again near Vienna resulting in a French victory at Battle of Wagram (6 July).

Following this a new peace was signed between Austria and France and in the following year the Austrian Archduchess Marie-Louise married Napoleon, following his divorce of Josephine.

Although the Congress of Erfurt had sought to preserve the Russo-French alliance, by 1811 tensions were again increasing between the two nations. Although Alexander and Napoleon had a friendly personal relationship since their first meeting in 1807, Alexander had been under strong pressure from the Russian aristocracy to break off the alliance with France.

The first sign that the alliance was deteriorating was the easing of the application of the Continental System in Russia, angering Napoleon. By 1812, advisors to Alexander suggested the possibility of an invasion of the French Empire (and the recapture of Poland).

Large numbers of troops were deployed to the Polish borders (reaching over 300,000 out of the total Russian army strength of 410,000). After receiving the initial reports of Russian war preparations, Napoleon began expanding his Grande Armée to a massive force of over 450,000-600,000 men (despite already having over 300,000 men deployed in Iberia). Napoleon ignored repeated advice against an invasion of the vast Russian heartland, and prepared his forces for an offensive campaign.

On June 23, 1812, Napoleon's invasion of Russia commenced.

Napoleon, in an attempt to gain increased support from Polish nationalists and patriots, termed the war the "Second Polish War" (the first Polish war being the liberation of Poland from Russia, Prussia and Austria). Polish patriots wanted the Russian part of partitioned Poland to be incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and a new Kingdom of Poland created, although this was rejected by Napoleon, who feared it would bring Prussia and Austria into the war against France. Napoleon also rejected requests to free the Russian serfs, fearing this might provoke a conservative reaction in his rear.

The Russians under Mikhail Bogdanovich Barclay de Tolly ingeniously avoided a decisive engagement which Napoleon longed for, preferring to retreat ever deeper into the heart of Russia. A brief attempt at resistance was offered at Smolensk (August 16-17), but the Russians were defeated in a series of battles in the area and Napoleon resumed the advance. The Russians then repeatedly avoided battle with the Grande Armée, although in a few cases only because Napoleon uncharacteristically hesitated to attack when the opportunity presented itself.

The Russians during their strategic retreat, used the scorched earth tactic. They burned crops and slaughtered livestock so the French would have nothing to eat. Along with the hunger, the French also had to face the harsh Russian winter. An American military study has concluded that the winter only had an effect when Napoleon was already in full retreat. "However, in regard to the claims of "General Winter," it should be noted that the main body of Napoleon's Grande Armée diminished by half during the first eight weeks of his invasion before the major battle of the campaign.

This decrease was partly due to garrisoning supply centers, but disease, desertions, and casualties sustained in various minor actions caused thousands of losses. At Borodino on 7 September 1812 - the only major engagement fought in Russia-Napoleon could muster no more than 135,000 troops, and he lost at least 30,000 of them to gain a narrow and Pyrrhic victory almost 600 miles deep in hostile territory. The sequels were his uncontested and self-defeating occupation of Moscow and his humiliating retreat, which began on 19 October, before the first severe frosts later that month and the first snow on 5 November."

Criticized over his tentative strategy of continual retreat, Barclay was replaced by Kutuzov, although he continued Barclay's strategy. Kutuzov eventually offered battle outside Moscow on 7 September. Losses were nearly even for both armies, with slightly more casualties on the Russian side, after what may have been the bloodiest day of battle in history - the Battle of Borodino (see article for comparisons to the first day of the Battle of the Somme). Although Napoleon was far from defeated, the Russian army had accepted, and withstood, the major battle the French hoped would be decisive. After the battle, the Russian army withdrew, and retreated past Moscow.

The Russians retreated and Napoleon was able to enter Moscow, assuming that the fall of Moscow would end the war and that Alexander I would negotiate peace. However, on orders of the city's military governor and commander-in-chief, Fyodor Rostopchin, rather than capitulating, Moscow was ordered burned. Within the month, fearing loss of control back in France, Napoleon left Moscow.

The French suffered greatly in the course of a ruinous retreat; the Army had begun as over 650,000 frontline troops, but in the end fewer than 40,000 crossed the Berezina River (November 1812) to escape. In total French losses in the campaign were 570,000 against about 400,000 Russian casualties and several hundred thousand civilian deaths.

There was a lull in fighting over the winter of 1812–13 whilst both the Russians and the French recovered from their massive losses. A small Russian army harassed the French in Poland and eventually 30,000 French troops there withdrew to the German states to rejoin the expanding force there - numbering 130,000 with the reinforcements from Poland. This force continued to expand, with Napoleon aiming for a force of 400,000 French troops supported by a quarter of a million German troops.

Heartened by Napoleon's losses in Russia, Prussia soon rejoined the Coalition that now included Russia, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal. Napoleon assumed command in Germany and soon inflicted a series of defeats on the Allies culminating in the Battle of Dresden on August 26-27, 1813 causing almost 100,000 casualties to the Coalition forces (the French sustaining only around 30,000).

Despite these initial successes, however, the numbers continued to mount against Napoleon as Sweden and Austria joined the Coalition. Eventually the French army was pinned down by a force twice its size at the Battle of Nations (October 16-19) at Leipzig. Some of the German states switched sides in the midst of the battle, further undermining the French position. This was by far the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars and cost both sides a combined total of over 120,000 casualties.

After this Napoleon withdrew in an orderly fashion back into France, but his army was now reduced to less than 100,000 against more than half a million Allied troops. The French were now surrounded (with British armies pressing from the south in addition to the Coalition forces moving in from the German states) and vastly outnumbered. The French armies could only delay an inevitable defeat.

Paris was occupied on March 31, 1814. At the urging of his marshals, Napoleon abdicated on 6 April in favour of his son. The Allies, however, demanded unconditional surrender and Napoleon abdicated again, unconditionally, on 11 April. In the Treaty of Fontainebleau the victors exiled him to Elba, a small island in the Mediterranean 20 km off the coast of Italy.

In France, the royalists had taken over and restored King Louis XVIII to power. Separated from his wife and son (who had come under Austrian control), cut off from the allowance guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, and aware of rumours that he was about to be banished to a remote island in the Atlantic, Napoleon escaped from Elba on 26 February 1815 and returned to the mainland on 1 March 1815.

King Louis XVIII sent the Fifth Regiment, led by Marshal Michel Ney who had formerly served under Napoleon in Russia, to meet him at Grenoble on March 7, 1815. Napoleon approached the regiment alone, dismounted his horse and, when he was within earshot of Ney's forces, shouted "Soldiers of the Fifth, you recognize me. If any man would shoot his emperor, he may do so now". Following a brief silence, the soldiers shouted "Vive L'Empereur!" and marched with Napoleon to Paris. He arrived on 20 March, quickly raising a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000 and governed for a Hundred Days.

Napoléon's final defeat came at the hands of the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo in present-day Belgium on 18 June 1815.

Off the port of Rochefort, Napoléon made his formal surrender while on board HMS Bellerophon on 15 July 1815.

Napoleon was imprisoned and then exiled by the British to the island of Saint Helena (2,800 km off the Bight of Guinea) from 15 October 1815. Whilst there, with a small cadre of followers, he dictated his memoirs and criticized his captors. Sick for much of his time on Saint Helena, Napoleon died, on 5 May 1821. His last words were: "France, the Army, head of the Army, Josephine". His heritage was distributed to his close followers like the General Marbot, whom he asked to continue his writings on the "Grandeur de la France".

Napoleon had asked in his will to be buried on the banks of the Seine, but was buried on Saint Helena. In 1840, his remains were taken to France in the frigate Belle-Poule and entombed in Les Invalides, Paris. Hundreds of millions have visited his tomb since that date.

Cause of death

The cause of Napoleon's death has been disputed on numerous occasions, and the controversy remains to this day. Francesco Antommarchi, Napoleon's personal physician, gave stomach cancer as a reason for Napoleon's death in his death certificate.

In 1955, the diaries of Louis Marchand, Napoléon's valet, appeared in print. He describes Napoléon in the months leading up to his death, and led many, most notably Sten Forshufvud and Ben Weider, to conclude that he had been killed by arsenic poisoning. Arsenic was at the time sometimes used as a poison as it was undetectable when administered over a long period of time.

Arsenic was also used in some wallpaper, as a green pigment, and even in some patent medicines. It would also help to explain the reported preservation of his corpse. In 2001, Pascal Kintz, of the Strasbourg Forensic Institute in France, added credence to this claim with a study of arsenic levels found in a lock of Napoleon's hair preserved after his death: they were seven to thirty-eight times higher than normal.

Cutting up hairs into short segments and analysing each segment individually provides a histogram of arsenic concentration in the body. This analysis on hair from Napoléon suggests that large but non-lethal doses were absorbed at random intervals. The arsenic severely weakened Napoléon and remained in his system.

More recent analysis on behalf of the magazine Science et Vie showed that similar concentrations of arsenic can be found in Napoleon's hair in samples taken from 1805, 1814 and 1821.

The lead investigator, Ivan Ricordel (head of toxicology for the Paris Police), stated that if arsenic had been the cause, Napoléon would have died years earlier. The group suggested that the most likely source in this case was a hair tonic. Prior to the discovery of antibiotics, arsenic was also a widely used, but ineffective, treatment for syphilis. This has led to speculation that Napoleon might have suffered from that disease.

The medical regime imposed on Napoleon by his doctors included treatment with antimony potassium tartrate, regular enemas and a 600 milligram dose of mercuric chloride to purge his intestines in the days immediately prior to his death. A group of researchers from the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Department speculate that this treatment may have led to Napoleon's death by causing a serious potassium deficiency.

In May, 2005 a team of Swiss physicians claimed that the reason for Napoleon's death was stomach cancer, which was also the cause of his father's death. From a multitude of forensic reports they derive that Napoleon at his death weighed approx. 76 kg (168 lb) while a year earlier he weighed approx. 91 kg (200 lb), confirming the autopsy result reported by Antommarchi. A team of physicians from the University of Monterspertoli led by Professor Biondi recently confirmed this.

In October, 2005, a document was unearthed in Scotland that presented an account of the autopsy, which again seems to confirm Antommarchi's conclusion.

March 9, 1796 to Joséphine de Beauharnais. He formally adopted her son Eugène and cousin Stéphanie after assuming the throne to arrange "dynastic" marriages for them. He had her daughter Hortense marry his brother, Louis. Though their marriage was unconventional, and both were known to have many affairs, they were ultimately devoted to each other and when Joséphine agreed to divorce so he could remarry in the hopes of producing an heir, it was devastating for both. It was also the first under the Napoleonic Code.

March 11, 1810 by proxy to Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria to legitimize the impending birth of their child, then in a ceremony on April 1. They remained married until his death, although she did not join him in his exile.

Napoleon Francis Joseph Charles (March 20, 1811 – July 22, 1832), King of Rome. Known as Napoleon II of France although he never ruled. Was later known as the Duke of Reichstadt. Did not have issue.

Acknowledged two illegitimate children, both of whom had issue:

Charles, Count Léon, (1806 – 1881), by Louise Catherine Eléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne (1787 – 1868).

Alexandre Joseph Colonna, Count Walewski, (May 4, 1810 – October 27, 1868), by Marie, Countess Walewski (1789 – 1817).

May have had further illegitimate issue:

Émilie Louise Marie Françoise Joséphine Pellapra, by Françoise-Marie LeRoy.

Karl Eugin von Mühlfeld, by Victoria Kraus.

Hélène Napoleone Bonaparte, by Countess Montholon.

Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire (August 19, 1805 – November 24, 1895) whose mother remains unknown.

Legacy

Napoleon is credited with introducing the concept of the modern professional conscript army to Europe, an innovation which other states eventually followed. He did not introduce many new concepts into the French military system, borrowing mostly from previous theorists and the implementations of preceding French governments, but he did expand or develop much of what was already in place.

Corps replaced divisions as the largest army units, artillery was integrated into reserve batteries, the staff system became more fluid, and cavalry once again became a crucial formation in French military doctrine.

Napoleon's biggest influence in the military sphere was in the conduct of warfare. Weapons and technology remained largely static through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, but 18th century operational strategy underwent massive restructuring.

Sieges became infrequent to the point of near-irrelevance, a new emphasis towards the destruction, not just outmaneuvering, of enemy armies emerged, and invasions of enemy territory occurred over broader fronts, thus introducing a plethora of strategic opportunities that made wars costlier and, just as importantly, more decisive.

Defeat for a European power now meant much more than losing isolated enclaves; near-Carthaginian peaces intertwined whole national efforts, sociopolitical, economic, and militaristic, into gargantuan collisions that severely upset international conventions as understood at the time.

It can be argued that Napoleon's initial success sowed the seeds for his downfall. Not used to such catastrophic defeats in the rigid power system of 18th century Europe, many nations found existence under the French yoke difficult, sparking revolts, wars, and general instability that plagued the continent until 1815.

In France, Napoleon is seen by some as having ended lawlessness and disorder in France, and that the Napoleonic Wars also served to export the Revolution to the rest of Europe; the movements of national unification and the rise of the nation state, notably in Italy and Germany, may have been precipitated by the Napoleonic rule of those areas.

The Napoleonic Code was adopted throughout much of Europe and remained in force after Napoleon's defeat. Professor Dieter Langewiesche of the University of Tübingen describes the code as a "revolutionary project" which spurred the development of bourgeois society in Germany by expanding the right to own property and breaking the back of feudalism.

Langewiesche also credits Napoleon with reorganizing what had been the Holy Roman Empire made up of more than 1,000 entities into a more streamlined network of 40 states providing the basis for the German Confederation and the future unification of Germany under the German Empire in 1871.

In mathematics Napoleon is traditionally given credit for discovering and proving Napoleon's theorem, although there is no specific evidence that he did so. The theorem states that if equilateral triangles are constructed on the sides of any triangle (all outward or all inward), the centres of those equilateral triangles themselves form an equilateral triangle. There has been discussion about the significance of the theorem.[5]

Critics of Napoleon argue that his true legacy was a loss of status for France and many needless deaths:

After all, the military record is unquestioned—17 years of wars, perhaps six million Europeans dead, France bankrupt, her overseas colonies lost. And it was all such a great waste, for when the self-proclaimed tête d'armée was done, France's "losses were permanent" and she "began to slip from her position as the leading power in Europe to second-class status—that was Bonaparte's true legacy."[6]

Nevertheless, many in the international community still admire the many accomplishments of the emperor as evidenced by the International Napoleonic Congress held in Dinard, France in July 2005 that included participation by members of the French and American military, French politicians, scholars from as far away as Israel and Russia, and a parade recreating the Grand Army.

Moreover, many probably wish Napoleon would have achieved his unrealized goal

‘to make it a law that only those lawyers and attorneys should receive fees who had won their cases. How much litigation would have been prevented by such a measure! For it is quite obvious that there is not a lawyer who, after a first look at the case, would not turn it down if it seemed doubtful. It need not be feared that a man who earns his living from his work might take on a case for the simple pleasure of hearing himself talk; yet even if he did, he would harm no one but himself. . . . I am convinced to this day that the idea is brilliant.’

Contrary to popular belief (perpetuated by the above-mentioned caricatures), Napoleon was not especially short. After his death in 1821, the French emperor's height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet. This corresponds to 5 feet 6.5 inches in Imperial (British) feet, or 1.686 metres, making him slightly taller than an average Frenchman of the 19th century.

The metric system was introduced during his lifetime, so it was natural that he would be measured in feet and inches for much of his life. A French inch was 2.71 centimetres, an Imperial inch is 2.54 centimetres. In addition to this miscalculation, his nickname le petit caporal adds to the confusion, as non-francophones mistakenly take petit literally as meaning "small"; in fact, it is an affectionate term reflecting on his camaraderie with ordinary soldiers. He also surrounded himself with soldiers, his elite guard, who were always six feet tall or even taller.

The Louvre Museum: in Paris, France, is the largest and most famous museum in the world. The building, a former royal palace, lies in the centre of Paris, between the Seine river and the Rue de Rivoli.

Its central courtyard, now occupied by the Louvre Pyramid, lies in the axis of the Champs-Élysées, and thus forms the

nucleus from which the Axe historique springs. Part of the royal Palace of the Louvre was first opened to the public as a museum on November 8, 1793, during the French Revolution.

Louis-Stanislas-Xavier was born on November 18, 1755 in the Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France, the fourth son of Louis, dauphin de France and Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, and grandson of Louis XV of France and his Queen consort Maria Leszczynska.

At birth, he received the title of Comte de Provence, but after the death of his two elder brothers and the accession of his remaining elder brother as Louis XVI of France in 1774, he became heir presumptive and was generally known as "Monsieur," the standard title of the eldest

brother of the King. The birth of two sons to Louis XVI left him third in line to the throne of France.

During the events leading up to the French Revolution, Provence initially took a moderately liberal line opposing his brother, but the increasing radicalism of the Revolution very soon alienated him. He fled the country in 1791 at the same time as his brother's unsuccessful Flight to Varennes.

Louis, Comte de Provence, was living in exile in Westphalia when King Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793. On the king's death, Louis, Comte de Provence, declared himself Regent for his nephew, the new King Louis XVII, although the boy never actually reigned. On the 10-year-old king's death in prison on June 8, 1795, Provence proclaimed himself as King Louis XVIII, although he was often referred to as Pretender by the title of Comte de Lille.

In the Verona Declaration, the pretender announced his rejection of all the changes that had been made in France since 1789, which effectively destroyed the position of moderate constitutional monarchists in France, who hoped to restore the monarchy under a limited constitution which would codify most

of the changes since the Revolution began. This prompted the famous remark that the exiled Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

In the years that followed, Louis XVIII moved all over Europe, living for a time in Russia, before he settled in England. By this time, the conquests and success of Napoleon, who had established himself as Emperor of the French, made any Bourbon restoration seem unlikely.

Reign

However, in 1814, following the defeat of Napoleon, Louis XVIII was finally able to secure the French throne thanks to the support of the Allied Powers and, within France, Napoleon's old foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. Louis was forced by Talleyrand and the Napoleonic elites to grant a written constitution which would guarantee a bicameral legislature, the Charter of 1814.

The Charter created a hereditary/appointive Chamber of Peers and an elected Chamber of Deputies, although the franchise was extremely limited. Louis's regime also allowed much greater freedom of expression than the Napoleonic regime which had preceded it.

Louis's (largely symbolic) efforts to reverse the results of the French Revolution quickly made him unpopular. Within a year, he fled from Paris to Ghent on the news of the return of Napoleon, of whom held a modest opinion, from Elba, but returned after the Battle of Waterloo had ended Napoleon's rule of the Hundred Days.

This Second Restoration saw the atrocities of the White Terror, largely in the south, when supporters of the monarchy murdered many who had supported Napoleon's return. Although the King and his ministers opposed the violence, they were ineffectual in taking active steps to stop it.

King Louis' chief ministers were at first moderate, including Talleyrand, the Duc de Richelieu, and Élie Decazes, and Louis himself followed a cautious, moderate policy, hoping that moderation would ensure the continuation of the dynasty. The parliament elected in 1815, dominated by ultraroyalists, or Ultras, was dissolved by Richelieu as being impossible to work with, and electoral gerrymandering resulted in a more liberal chamber in 1816.

However, the liberals ultimately proved just as unmanageable, and by 1820 Decazes and the King were looking to revise the electoral laws again to ensure a more conservative majority.

However, the assassination of the Duc de Berry, the ultrareactionary son of Louis's ultrareactionary brother (and heir-presumptive) the Comte d'Artois, in February 1820, caused Decazes's fall from power and the Triumph of the Ultras. After an interval in which Richelieu returned to power from 1820 to 1821, a new Ultra ministry was formed, headed by the Comte de Villèle, a leading Ultra.

Soon, however, Villèle proved himself to be nearly as cautious as his master, and, so long as Louis lived, overtly reactionary policies were kept to a minimum. Louis XVIII died on September 16, 1824, and was interred in the Saint Denis Basilica. His brother, the Comte d'Artois, succeeded him as Charles X. It was to be the only fully regular transfer of power in France from one head of state to another of the entire 19th century.1

1Charles X, Louis Philippe, and Napoleon III were ousted by revolution, while the French Second Republic ended with a presidential coup d'état. No Third Republic President would serve out his whole term until Émile Loubet finished his term in 1906 and was succeeded by Armand Fallières.

Marriage

On May 14, 1771, Louis was married to Marie Josephine Louise of Sardinia (1753 - 1810). She was the third child and second daughter of Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia and Maria Antonietta of Bourbon. Her maternal grandparents were Philip V of Spain and Elizabeth Farnese. The marriage was childless.