PDA

View Full Version : The French Revolution: The Reign Of Terror



Frances
3rd October 2015, 11:05
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/45538979-8C44-4042-94C6-4FCB84749D2B.png_zpsoj1o3xjl.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/45538979-8C44-4042-94C6-4FCB84749D2B.png_zpsoj1o3xjl.jpeg.html)

Source:- http://freemasonrywatch.org/frenchrevolution.html

Masonic Traitors, Treason, and Treachery: The French Revolution, Jacobins and Jacobites.

The French Revolution by Jim Marrs.

If one desires to point to a major world event proven to have been inspired by secret society machinations, one need look no further than the French Revolution, which devastated that nation between 1787 and 1799. Revolutionary leaders, in seeking to overthrow the decadent monarchy of King Louis XVI, launched the first national revolution of modern times.

Although popularly believed to have begun due to a public uprising over lack of food and government representation, the record is quite clear that the revolution was instigated by cells of French Masonry and the German Illuminati.

The New Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that in France there arose a political system and a philosophical outlook that no longer took Christianity for granted, that in fact explicitly opposed it... The brotherhood taught by such groups as the Freemasons, members of secret fraternal societies, and the Illuminati, a rationalist secret society, provided a rival to the Catholic sense of community."

Secret society researcher and author Nesta H. Webster was even more pointed, writing in 1924, "[The Masonic book A Ritual and Illustrations of Freemasonry] contains the following passage, 'The Masons... originated the Revolution with the infamous Duke of Orleans at their head.'"

Author Bramley wrote, "During the first French Revolution, a key rebel leader was the Duke of Orleans, who was grand master of French Masonry before his resignation at the height of the Revolution. Marquis de Lafayette, the man who had been initiated into the Masonic fraternity by George Washington, also played an important role in the French revolutionary cause. The Jacobin Club, which was the radical nucleus of the French revolutionary movement, was founded by prominent Freemasons."

It was the Duke of Orleans, grand master of the Grand Orient Lodge of Freemasons, who reportedly bought all the grain in 1789 and either sold it abroad or hid it away, thus creating near starvation among commoners. Galart de Montjoie, a contemporary, blamed the Revolution almost solely on the Duke of Orleans, adding that he "was moved by that invisible hand which seems to have created all the events of our revolution in order to lead us towards a goal that we do not see at present..."

Drawing on an impressive number of contemporary writings, Webster added, "If, then, it is said that the [French] Revolution was prepared in the lodges of Freemasons - and many French Masons have boasted of the fact - let it always be added that it was Illuminized Freemasonry that made the Revolution, and that the Masons who acclaim it are Illuminized Masons, inheritors of the same tradition introduced into the lodges of France in 1787 by the disciples of Weishaupt, 'patriarch of the Jacobins.'"

Guiseppe Balsamo, a student of the Jewish Cabala, a Freemason, and a Rosicrucian, became known as Louis XVI's court magician Caliostro. He wrote how the German Illuminati had infiltrated the French Freemason lodges for years and added, "By March 1789, the 266 lodges controlled by the Grand Orient were all 'illuminized' without knowing it, for the Freemasons in general, were not told the name of the sect that brought them these mysteries, and only a very small number were really inititated into the secret."

Jacobins and Jacobites

Pro-revolutionary members of France's National Constituent Assembly had formed a group which became known as the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. After the Assembly moved to Paris, this group met there in a hall leased from the Jacobins' convent of Catholic Dominican Friars. These revolutionaries, sworn to protect the revolution from the aristocrats, soon were known as the Jacobin Club. Since that time, all revolutionaries have been called Jacobins.

At least that is the official story of the Jacobins. As usual, the Jacobins are tied to earlier secret societies, in this case a movement to restore a kingship in Britain.

In 1688 England's unpopular and pro-Catholic Stuart king, James II, was deposed by his Dutch son-in-law, the Protestant William of Orange. James - whose name in Latin was Jacobus, hence the name Jacobites - fled to France. There he continued to be supported by Freemasons in Scotland and Wales who sought to restore him to the English throne. They were accused by French Freemasons of converting Masonic rituals and titles into political support for this restoration.

According to some versions of Masonic history, James was ensconced in the Chateau of Saint-Germain by his friend, French King Louis XIV where he established a system of Masonry that became known as the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

After a series of failed rebellions, the Jacobites in Scotland were finally crushed at the battle of Culloden Moor near Inverness in 1746. Their leader, Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie, the young pretender," escaped to France, taking with him Jacobites imbued with "Freemasonic ideals". A year later in Arras, France, Charles chartered a Masonic Sovereign Primordial Chapter of Rose Croix known as "Scottish Jacobite"...

French Masons too were heavily involved in the political events of that day. Webster noted, "All the revolutionaries of the Constituent Assembly were initiated into the third degree" of Illuminized Masonry, including revolutionary leaders such as the Duke of Orleans, Valance, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Garat, Marat, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins.

Honre-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, a leading revolutionary, indeed espoused ideals which were identical with Adam Weishaupt, founder of Bavarian Illuminized Masonry. In personal papers Mirabeau called for the overthrow of all order, all laws, and all power to "leave the people in anarchy." He said the public must be promised "power to the people" and lower taxes but never given real power "for the people as legislators are very dangerous as they only establish laws which coincide with their passions." He said the clergy should be destroyed by "ridiculing religion."

Mirabeau ended his tirade by proclaiming "What matter the means as long as one arrives at the end?" - the same end-justifies-the-means philosophy preached from Weishaupt to Lenin to Hitler.

Contrary to popular history the storming of the Bastille was not the spontaneous action of a downtrodden mob. "That brigands from the South were deliberately enticed to Paris in 1789, employed and paid by the revolutionary leaders, is a fact confirmed by authorities too numerous to quote at length... In other words, the importation of the contingent of hired brigands conclusively refutes the theory that the Revolution was an irrepressible rising of the people," wrote Webster.

We see in the French Revolution the first time where grievences were systematically created in order to exploit them," wrote author still.

Such exploitation began with the Freemasons as early as 1772 when the Grand Orient Lodge was firmly established in France, counting 104 lodges. This number grew to 2,000 lodges by the time of the Revolution, with 447 lodge members participating in the 605 member Estates-General. One of their primary goals was the Nationalization of all Church property to help pay off the large debts Revolutionary France incurred in assisting their Jacobite Masonic brethrens plans during the American revolution.

Meanwhile, buoyed by the situation in France, Masonic-based revolutionary clubs sprang up in other countries, including England, Ireland, the German states, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. Tensions between outside nations and France rose until 1792 when France declared war on Austria and Prussia.

Confronted with both a war and a revolution, France degenerated into the Reign of Terror, during which time King Lous XVI, Marie Antoinette, and many thousands, chiefly aristocrats, were executed.

In a move similar to Hitler's action 150 years later, the Jacobins closed down all Masonic lodges in 1791, ironically fearful that Freemasonry's organizing power might be turned against them.

"Behind the Conventions, behind the clubs, behind the Revolutionary Tribunal, there existed... that most secret convention which directed everything... an occult and terrible power of which the other Convention became the slave and which was composed of the prime initiates of Illuminanism" noted Webster.

Author Epperson, after an exhaustive study of the subject, agreed. He wrote, "The invisible hand that guided the entire French Revolution was the Illuminati, only 13 years in existance, yet powerful enough to cause a revolution in one of the major countries of the world."

Wars, riots, and coups continued in France until a young General Napoleon Bonaparte finally seized complete control in 1799. Although he carried on his own brand of terror in Europe for years, Napoleon proclaimed an end to the revolution. France was in shambles. Hundreds of thousands had died of starvation, war, violence, and the guillotine. The power of both the monarchy and the monolithic church had been largely destroyed.

"So in the 'great shipwreck of civilization,' as a contemporary has described it, the projects of the Cabalists, the Gnostics, and the Secret Societies which for nearly eighteen centuries had sapped the foundation of Christianity found their fulfillment," commented Webster.

Rule by Secrecy, by Jim Marrs.
Page 221
Jim Marrs
Harper Collins, 2000

Further Reading

Freemasonry in France, Belgium (E.U.), Monaco and French Africa.
Frances.

bsbray
3rd October 2015, 17:36
I guess there are two sides to every story, and I'm not sure which side of the fence Marrs is on here. But in both the case of the United States and France, I think it was better in the long run to be separated from both the monarchy and a state-sponsored religion.

Frances
6th October 2015, 10:28
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/BD36E1CA-1CF5-4920-8935-2F3151BE56FE_zps852lkrxp.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/BD36E1CA-1CF5-4920-8935-2F3151BE56FE_zps852lkrxp.jpg.html)

21st of January 1793: execution of Louis XVI « Versailles and More...

Source:- http://blog.catherinedelors.com/21st-of-january-1793-execution-of-louis-xvi/

Long article so go to the above link to read more.

By Catherine Delors.

As usual on this blog, I will strive to recount this dramatic event through the testimony of eyewitnesses.

Let us simply remember that, following the storming of the royal palace of the Tuileries on the 10th of August 1792, Louis XVI and his family (Marie-Antoinette, their two children, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte and Louis-Charles, and his sister Madame Elisabeth) were jailed in the medieval tower of the Temple.

Then, in December of 1792, the trial of the deposed King had commenced before the National Convention, the newly elected legislative body. The votes were tallied, counted and recounted for days, and it seemed that, though the guilty verdict on the counts of treason was a foregone conclusion, the King might receive a stay of the death sentence. Yet in the end by an extremely narrow margin (some say one single ballot) the Convention voted in favor of the immediate execution of Louis XVI. What happened next?

First we will listen to Madame Royale, the King’s daughter, then fourteen:

About seven in the evening [of the 20th] we learned of the sentence by the newspapermen, who came shouting it under our windows: a decree of the Convention allowed us to see the King. We ran to his apartment, and found him much altered; he wept for us, not for fear of death; he related his trial to my mother, apologizing for the wretches who had condemned him; he told her that it was proposed to attempt to save him by appealing to the people, but that he would not consent, lest it should excite unrest in the country. He then gave my brother some religious advice, and desired him, above all, to forgive those who caused his death and he gave him his blessing, as well as to me. My mother was very desirous that the whole family should pass the night with my father; but he opposed this, observing to her how much he needed a few hours of repose and quiet. She asked at least to be allowed to see him next morning, to which he consented.
Frances.

Frances
6th October 2015, 17:50
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/959199C4-C3B8-4287-97F9-3C114AF23959_zpswj2viruz.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/959199C4-C3B8-4287-97F9-3C114AF23959_zpswj2viruz.jpg.html)

Source:- http://blog.catherinedelors.com/16th-of-october-1793-execution-of-marie-antoinette-2/

Link to the full articles & web site.

16th of October 1793: execution of Marie-Antoinette by Catherine Delors.

Marie Antoinette by Prieur
After the fall of the monarchy on the 10th of August 1792, the dethroned Queen was imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, along with her husband, Louis XVI, their children and Madame Elisabeth, the King’s younger sister.

The following December, Louis XVI stands trial before the National Convention, the elected body that now governs France. Louis is executed on the 21st of January 1793. Then, the following August, Marie-Antoinette is transferred, alone, without her children or sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth, to the jail of La Conciergerie. It is located within the premises of the main Courthouse of Paris, next to the Revolutionary Tribunal. For an ordinary prisoner that would mean that trial is imminent.

But Marie-Antoinette is no ordinary prisoner. She may have some value as a hostage in war negotiations with the Austrians, and the National Convention sends emissaries to that effect to the enemy. But Marie-Antoinette’s brothers, Joseph II and Leopold II, no longer reign over Austria. The new Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, her nephew, has never met her. He is not ready to compromise the hopes of a victory against the French armies for the sake of an aunt he does not know.

This is the context of her transfer to La Conciergerie: the National Convention hopes to step up the pressure and show Francis II that a trial is a real possibility. To no avail: the Emperor is content to express his indignation. For the National Convention, there is political advantage in executing a hated public figure, and none in keeping her alive.

Furthermore, several escape plans, including one that took her only yards from freedom, have been hatched while Marie-Antoinette was jailed at La Conciergerie. The National Convention does not want to lose face if she managed to flee. The case is therefore set for trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and a preliminary hearing is held at the beginning of October.

The trial itself begins on the 14th. The accused states her name: “Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine d’Autriche.” In itself this is a very bold move: she reminds the jurors of her French paternal ancestry (Lorraine) but also, less diplomatically, of the phrase The Austrian Woman. And France is at war with Austria… For a full transcript (in French) of the trial, I direct you to the irreplaceable Royet site. I will not enter into the details of the trial, which would require its separate – and very long – post. The Tribunal remained in session 15 hours on October 14, and almost 24 hours on October 15 and 16. The transcript notes that “Antoinette almost always kept a calm and assured demeanor; during the first hours of her questioning, she was seen running her fingers on the arm of her chair, as though she were playing the pianoforte.”

In my first novel, Mistress of the Revolution, one of the main characters is Pierre-André Coffinhal, a judge of the Revolutionary Tribunal. I have him relate the trial (it was eerie to write, because I had always thought of it from Marie-Antoinette’s standpoint.)

Her main line of defense was that she was not responsible for any of her actions! She claimed she had obeyed her husband’s orders when she prepared the flight to Varennes, or when she sent the French war plans to her brother, the tyrant of Austria. Her argument might have succeeded had she been any other woman. In her case, it was common knowledge that Capet [Louis XVI] had fallen entirely under her influence, that he was a hapless imbecile without any will of his own... Of course, that jackass Hébert [representative of the Municipality of Paris] had to disgrace himself by testifying that she had taught her son to pleasure himself. You may trust that scoundrel to bring up something lewd at every opportunity. [The presiding judge] Herman, who is no fool, let it pass without questioning Antoinette on it. The rest of us judges also ignored it, but one of the jurors insisted that she respond. That gave her an opportunity to feign outrage and appeal to the public.

This is of course her famous response to the incest accusation: “I appeal to all mothers!” Throughout the trial, Marie-Antoinette, very pale, physically exhausted, but as imposing as ever in her patched-up black dress, defends herself with energy and dignity.

She is assisted by two famous attorneys: Chauveau-Lagarde and Tronçon-Ducoudray. When the case goes to the jury in the early hours of the 16th, the outrageous incest accusation has been dropped. Only remain the counts of treason, conspiracy and collusion with domestic and foreign enemies.

The jury retires for over one hour. This is a very long by Revolutionary Tribunal standards. Then the verdict is read: guilty on all four counts. The sentencing is immediate, and there is no appeal from the jugements of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Had Marie-Antoinette harbored any hope of a different outcome? One of her attorneys, Chauveau-Lagarde, notes that “she was like annihilated by surprise.” She silently shakes her head when the presiding judge asks her whether she has anything to add. She leaves the courtroom without a word, her head held high.

From then on, we will simply follow a timeline.

4:30 AM: Marie-Antoinette is taken back to her cell, within the Courthouse building. She feels very faint now. One of the gendarmes, Lieutenant de Busne, offers her a glass of water and his arm to go down the steep corkscrew stairs. He holds his hat in his hand as a sign of respect. Once in her cell, she is given a candle, ink and paper. She writes her famous last letter to her sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth, a translation of which is provided by Elena at Tea at Trianon.

She also writes a few words in her prayer book:

This 16th of Oct. at 4:30 in the morning
My God, have mercy on me!
My eyes have no more tears
to weep for you my poor
children; farewell, farewell!

7:00 AM: Rosalie Lamorlière, a young servant who has been attending to the former Queen, offers to bring her some food. “I do not need anything anymore,” responds Marie-Antoinette. “All is over for me.” Upon Rosalie’s insistence, Marie-Antoinette accepts a bowl of bouillon, but she can only swallow a few spoonfulls.

She is informed that she is not to wear her black dress to her execution. She puts on her only other remaining garment: a white cotton dress, with a black petticoat, and a white cap adorned with black ribbon. She has been bleeding profusely (she is apparently suffering from a uterine fibroma, or possibly some more serious condition) and wishes to change her shirt. She must do so, only shielded by Rosalie, in the presence of the gendarme officer who has replaced Lieutenant de Busne (the latter has been briefly arrested for showing her too much respect.) Rosalie also cuts Marie-Antoinette’s hair short on the neck. In this fashion the executioner does not have to do it himself to facilitate the operation of the guillotine.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/B0A3844F-9152-4AD8-BFFD-F177111752B1_zpsymxtnptq.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/B0A3844F-9152-4AD8-BFFD-F177111752B1_zpsymxtnptq.jpg.html)

MARIE ANTOINETTE EXECUTION

10:00 AM: The prison concierge and the turnkey find Marie-Antoinette kneeling by her bed, in prayers. She rises. Soon arrive the Court clerk and the judges, who read her the sentence, as required by law. She replies that she knows it all to well, but is told that she must listen to it again.

Then enters Henri Sanson, the executioner, who ties her hands behind her back. Again she protests. Louis XVI’s hands were not tied until he reached the foot of the guillotine, but the deposed Queen will receive far less consideration than her late husband. She is taken to the clerk’s office for the last formalities.

11:00 AM: She leaves La Conciergerie and reaches the Cour du Mai, in front of the Courthouse. There an open cart, drawn by two large white horses, is waiting for her. Louis XVI had been taken to the guillotine in the enclosed carriage of the Mayor of Paris, but again she will be treated like any other convict. However, the security is out of the ordinary: 30,000 men have been called to prevent any escape.

A sworn priest (meaning a cleric who had pledged allegiance to the Constitution) accompanies her to the cart, but she politely declines his services. Again this is a stark contrast with the execution of Louis XVI, who had been granted the assistance of an unsworn priest of his own choosing.

The executioner and his helper, their hats in hand in sign of respect, also climb onto the cart. It slowly makes its way through the streets of Paris, in the midst of a jeering crowd assembled to see one last time the Queen in her capital. Marie-Antoinette sits very straight in the cart, proud and calm in the face of this display of hate, contempt and anger.

12:00 PM: At last the cart reaches Place de la Révolution, where she can see both her former Palace of Les Tuileries and the guillotine. She shows a strong emotion, but soon regains her composure. She steps off the cart promptly, lightly. Without requiring any help, she climbs the steps to the scaffold. She does not oppose any resistance and even apologizes for stepping on the executioner’s foot.

12:15 PM: The blade of the guillotine falls. So dies Marie-Antoinette, two weeks before her 38th birthday.
Frances.

Frances
7th October 2015, 15:07
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/D6C964D1-BB7F-47BE-AAAB-B6DDAC79F682_zpscpxcdsqe.gif (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/D6C964D1-BB7F-47BE-AAAB-B6DDAC79F682_zpscpxcdsqe.gif.html)

Duke Of Orleans At His Execution 1793.

Source:- http://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=academy&s=char-dir&f=orleans

Louis Philippe Joseph d'Orléans was the cousin of King Louis XVI of France, and a central player in the turbulent times of the French Revolution. Despite his position as a member of the royal family, he held anti-royalist sympathies for much of his life, and as a member of the National Convention, voted for the execution of King Louis XVI. Despite his political views, his Bourbon connections caused him to fall under suspicion, and he was ultimately executed by the same Convention he had helped place in power.
The Duke of Orleans’ early life and career were hardly sterling. Although he married (at the age of twenty), a rich heiress, he was a known womanizer, and his decidedly anti-royalist sympathies had him on bad terms with the court, especially the Queen, Marie Antoinette. Despite this, he and his wife Marie-Adelaide had five children, the eldest of whom would later become Louis-Philippe I, King of France.

From the start of the Revolution, d'Orleans' sympathies were quite clear. He was one of the first to abandon the Estates-General and join with the National Assembly, after the famed Tennis Court Oath. His money and position enabled him to monetarily and politically further many of the Revolution’s goals, although his connection to the crown caused some to wonder if he was simply attempting to depose his cousin and claim the throne for himself. After the King’s aborted flight to Varennes, the Duke changed his name to ‘Philippe Egalite’ (in English, ‘Philip Equality’) in order to further prove his support of the Revolution and its ideals.

Despite the name change, and his vote in support of the execution of Louis XVI, the defection of Philippe Egalite’s sons along with Charles Dumouriez caused him to be arrested, along with all the remaining members of the House of Bourbon left in France. He was tried and executed in November of 1793, a victim of the Revolution he had helped create.
Frances.

Frances
7th October 2015, 20:07
http://youtu.be/88Y7in-04Ng

The Song Of The French Revolution from Les Miserables 2012.

bsbray
7th October 2015, 22:04
This is the real song of the French Revolution:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIxOl1EraXA

Your articles above discuss the Masons being responsible for the movement of militarized peasants to Paris. They arrived in Paris from as far as Marseilles, and the story is that the French arriving from Marseilles were singing this stirring call for bloodshed in the defense of this new idea of a country, rather than a king. This new and inspiring idea of nationalism led France to muster an unheard-of million-man army against foreign invaders, just as radicalized nationalism would also be very effective in leading to massive conflict during WW1 and WW2.


English translation of la Marseillaise:




Arise children of the fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived.
Against us tyranny's
Bloody standard is raised.
Do you hear the sound in the fields,
The howling of these fearsome soldiers?
They are coming into our arms
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts

[Chorus]
To arms, citizens
Form your battalions
(Let us) March, march
Let impure blood
Water our furrows

What do they want this horde of slaves
Of traitors and conspiratorial kings?
For whom these vile chains
These long-prepared irons?
Frenchmen, for us, ah! What outrage
What methods must be taken?
It is us they dare plan
To return to the old slavery!

What! These foreign cohorts!
They would make laws in our courts!
What! These mercenary phalanxes
Would cut down our warrior sons
Good Lord! By chained hands
Our brow would yield under the yoke
The vile despots would have themselves be
The masters of destiny

Tremble, tyrants and traitors
The shame of all good men
Tremble! Your parricidal schemes
Will receive their just reward
Against you we are all soldiers
If they fall, our young heros
France will bear new ones
Ready to join the fight against you

Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors
Bear or hold back your blows
Spare these sad victims
That they regret taking up arms against us
But not these bloody despots
These accomplices of Bouillé
All these tigers who pitilessly
Ripped out their mothers' wombs

We too shall enlist
When our elders' time has come
To add to the list of deeds
Inscribed upon their tombs
We are much less jealous of surviving them
Than of sharing their coffins
We shall have the sublime pride
Of avenging or joining them

Drive on sacred patriotism
Support our avenging arms
Liberty, cherished liberty
Join the struggle with your defenders
Under our flags, let victory
Hurry to your manly tone
So that in death your enemies
See your triumph and our glory!

Frances
7th October 2015, 22:45
Thank you bsbray, your educated input adds a great deal to my little walk through "The French Revolution".
I kook forward to more.

A wonderful inspiring song. It will get many plays.
Frances.

bsbray
8th October 2015, 00:11
I'm enjoying the articles you're posting a lot. I had heard before that there was a large Masonic aspect to the French Revolution but I had never looked into it, but now this makes a lot of sense to me. Also the Jacobin club discussed above, and the Scottish masons who founded it in France. Those Scots included the Fraser Clan from Scotland, and Simon "the Fox" Fraser who was a leader of the revolt in Britain and a wanted man. I'm descended from the Fraser Clan, and even though I'm probably not a direct descendent of that man, I'm sure we share direct ancestors from not many generations before that. The Frasers in Scotland go back to William the Conqueror, who was from Normandy himself, so it all comes full circle as far as that Scottish/French connection goes.

Thanks for posting all of this info Frances.

Elen
8th October 2015, 13:22
Thank you from me too, Frances. You've given me and a lot of others, a great insight into that window of time.

Elen

Frances
13th October 2015, 16:08
Source:- http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/multicultural/multiculturalhistory/french.html

A little article I came across. History linking The Duke Of Orleans to the U.S.

French History in New Orleans

Because the French founded and settled New Orleans, the city developed a unique outlook from its inception. Even after the city’s close relationship with France had ceased, the French attitude at the heart of the city’s culture was the framework upon which New Orleans built its own traditions.

Background

The French were Catholic, not Protestant like the founders of most other New World settlements which eventually became American cities. The French Catholic did not share the unremittingly severe, sober view of life with the New England Puritans, for one. While religious, the French Catholics also enjoyed good food and sensual pleasures. Mardi Gras, the most famous and raucous of New Orleans festivals, is a Catholic holiday after all. And in French, Mardi Gras means “Fat Tuesday” – a time of indulgence before the self-imposed austerity of Lent. The tension between the sacred and profane, the joyous and the mournful (as with jazz funerals, for example), has long formed an essential part of the Crescent City’s character.

French Catholic Influence

Early in New Orleans history, a coterie of Ursuline nuns were invited to establish a convent to give the colony spiritual guidance and instruction. They inducted people of all races, enslaved and free, into Catholicism and solidified New Orleans’ Catholic character. (In addition, they started a Catholic girl’s school in 1727, the oldest one in America still operating.) The Catholic nature of New Orleans helped attract future populations of immigrants that shaped the city, from Italians who for a while turned the French Quarter into “Little Italy” to the Irish who built a canal important for New Orleans’ growth, from the Haitians who introduced voodoo in the early 19th century to the Vietnamese who arrived after the Vietnam War.

The Founding French Fathers

Louisiana was claimed for France in 1682, and two brothers of the surname Le Moyne, formally known as Sieur d’Iberville and Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans seventeen years later. La Nouvelle Orléans was named in honor of the Duke of Orleans, France’s ruling regent until the young Louis XV could take the throne, but the French name was also chosen to encourage French settlers who would have balked at coming to a place with an Indian name like Biloxi or Natchitoches. Two French engineers laid out the first 66 squares of a walled village, what later would be known as the French Quarter or the Vieux Carré (Old City). Streets were named after lesser royalty in the Duke’s court. Indian hunters, German farmers, and trappers traded their goods in a clearing where the French Market stands today.

Forever French

Even during forty years of Spanish rule, New Orleans remained unequivocally French. Schools taught lessons in French, newspapers published in French, and New Orleanians looked to France for culture and fashions. In 1803 when New Orleans permanently passed into American governance, the French Creoles found themselves at odds in many ways with the Americans moving in. Since then, New Orleans has become an American city, but its French heart is still beating.
Frances.

Frances
13th October 2015, 20:17
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/E7108610-8DC2-4597-AD7C-B75F4B1A4C7F_zpsv9sigt5u.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/E7108610-8DC2-4597-AD7C-B75F4B1A4C7F_zpsv9sigt5u.jpg.html)

Fashion a la Victim & The French Kiss.

The revolution had brought an end to the excessively ornate fashions of the early to mid-1700s. Gone were the tall powdered wigs and hairdos and brilliant jewelry. Fashionable men and women cut their hair short and ragged, high on their neck in the back with curls falling over their foreheads in the front. This à la victime cut imitated the way the executioner sheared off the hair of those who approached the guillotine, so that the blade could cut cleanly through the neck.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/FAA08944-C71E-4054-A95B-A21149C32868.png_zpsxlcukvor.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/FAA08944-C71E-4054-A95B-A21149C32868.png_zpsxlcukvor.jpeg.html)

Women's gowns became simple loose dresses, like the nightgowns and underclothes worn by those who were herded from prison cells into carts bound for the public square and death. Red ribbons became stylish, worn around the neck to indicate the bloodline where the head was cut, or wrapped in an "X" across the breasts and around the arms to represent flowing blood.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/EE138A40-6A72-43DB-8481-99BE2AD502C8_zpsydrxs84g.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/EE138A40-6A72-43DB-8481-99BE2AD502C8_zpsydrxs84g.jpg.html)

Both women and men wore small reproductions of the guillotine as jewelry. Ladies' hats were designed to look like the Bastille, a prison that had symbolized the cruelty of the old government. For supporters of the new government, these fashions symbolized the demise of the oppressive old rulers.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/09426F7A-5B65-43C3-B3F1-63610422D271.png_zpslwtqgdoj.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/09426F7A-5B65-43C3-B3F1-63610422D271.png_zpslwtqgdoj.jpeg.html)

Though fashion à la victime was mainly for those who wanted to show support for the new government, there were also bals à la victime, or "dances of the victim." These were large parties to which only those whose relatives had been guillotined were invited. Guests wore black neckbands and armbands and danced together to mourn their dead by celebrating life. The simple styles of the fashion à la victime transformed into the Greek-inspired styles of the late eighteenth century such as the robe en chemise.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/8AF47B4D-12DD-48A6-96C4-94C4746A3238_zpsfnu6q2ah.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/8AF47B4D-12DD-48A6-96C4-94C4746A3238_zpsfnu6q2ah.jpg.html)

The celebratory atmosphere following the "Reign of Terror" gave way to a number of frivolous yet gruesome fashions and pastimes, one of which was the Victim's Ball. In order to qualify for admittance in one of these sought after soirees one had to to be a close relative or spouse of one who had lost their life to the guillotine. Invitations were so coveted that papers proving your right to attend had to be shown at the door, and some were even known to forge this certificate in their eagerness. All the rage at these grand balls was to have the hair cut high up off the neck, in imitation of "le toilette du condamne" where the victim's hair is cut so as not to impede the efficiency of the blade.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/0D60FD69-511F-4642-BCA2-8F645E5ACB3C_zpssrzejhhh.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/0D60FD69-511F-4642-BCA2-8F645E5ACB3C_zpssrzejhhh.jpg.html)

There were several popular hairstyles including cheveux à la titus or à la victime for both women and men, where the hair is given very short and choppy cut, and the "dog ears" worn by Muscadins, where long flops of hair are left on either side of the face, but cut right up to the hairline on the back of the neck. And for the ladies, a thin red velvet ribbon worn round the neck, or red ribbons worn croisures à la victime, a kind of reverse fichu, or ceinture croisée, across the back of the bodice forming a symbolic "x marks the spot" across the upper back.

Will posterity believe that persons whose relatives died on the scaffold did not institute days of solemn and common affliction during which, assembled in mourning clothing, they would attest to their grief over such cruel, such recent losses, but instead [instituted] days of dancing where the point was to waltz, drink and eat to one's heart's content.
—Mercier
Frances.

ERK
13th October 2015, 20:47
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/E7108610-8DC2-4597-AD7C-B75F4B1A4C7F_zpsv9sigt5u.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/E7108610-8DC2-4597-AD7C-B75F4B1A4C7F_zpsv9sigt5u.jpg.html)

Fashion a la Victim & The French Kiss.

The revolution had brought an end to the excessively ornate fashions of the early to mid-1700s. Gone were the tall powdered wigs and hairdos and brilliant jewelry. Fashionable men and women cut their hair short and ragged, high on their neck in the back with curls falling over their foreheads in the front. This à la victime cut imitated the way the executioner sheared off the hair of those who approached the guillotine, so that the blade could cut cleanly through the neck.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/FAA08944-C71E-4054-A95B-A21149C32868.png_zpsxlcukvor.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/FAA08944-C71E-4054-A95B-A21149C32868.png_zpsxlcukvor.jpeg.html)

Women's gowns became simple loose dresses, like the nightgowns and underclothes worn by those who were herded from prison cells into carts bound for the public square and death. Red ribbons became stylish, worn around the neck to indicate the bloodline where the head was cut, or wrapped in an "X" across the breasts and around the arms to represent flowing blood.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/EE138A40-6A72-43DB-8481-99BE2AD502C8_zpsydrxs84g.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/EE138A40-6A72-43DB-8481-99BE2AD502C8_zpsydrxs84g.jpg.html)

Both women and men wore small reproductions of the guillotine as jewelry. Ladies' hats were designed to look like the Bastille, a prison that had symbolized the cruelty of the old government. For supporters of the new government, these fashions symbolized the demise of the oppressive old rulers.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/09426F7A-5B65-43C3-B3F1-63610422D271.png_zpslwtqgdoj.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/09426F7A-5B65-43C3-B3F1-63610422D271.png_zpslwtqgdoj.jpeg.html)

Though fashion à la victime was mainly for those who wanted to show support for the new government, there were also bals à la victime, or "dances of the victim." These were large parties to which only those whose relatives had been guillotined were invited. Guests wore black neckbands and armbands and danced together to mourn their dead by celebrating life. The simple styles of the fashion à la victime transformed into the Greek-inspired styles of the late eighteenth century such as the robe en chemise.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/8AF47B4D-12DD-48A6-96C4-94C4746A3238_zpsfnu6q2ah.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/8AF47B4D-12DD-48A6-96C4-94C4746A3238_zpsfnu6q2ah.jpg.html)

The celebratory atmosphere following the "Reign of Terror" gave way to a number of frivolous yet gruesome fashions and pastimes, one of which was the Victim's Ball. In order to qualify for admittance in one of these sought after soirees one had to to be a close relative or spouse of one who had lost their life to the guillotine. Invitations were so coveted that papers proving your right to attend had to be shown at the door, and some were even known to forge this certificate in their eagerness. All the rage at these grand balls was to have the hair cut high up off the neck, in imitation of "le toilette du condamne" where the victim's hair is cut so as not to impede the efficiency of the blade.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/0D60FD69-511F-4642-BCA2-8F645E5ACB3C_zpssrzejhhh.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/0D60FD69-511F-4642-BCA2-8F645E5ACB3C_zpssrzejhhh.jpg.html)

There were several popular hairstyles including cheveux à la titus or à la victime for both women and men, where the hair is given very short and choppy cut, and the "dog ears" worn by Muscadins, where long flops of hair are left on either side of the face, but cut right up to the hairline on the back of the neck. And for the ladies, a thin red velvet ribbon worn round the neck, or red ribbons worn croisures à la victime, a kind of reverse fichu, or ceinture croisée, across the back of the bodice forming a symbolic "x marks the spot" across the upper back.

Will posterity believe that persons whose relatives died on the scaffold did not institute days of solemn and common affliction during which, assembled in mourning clothing, they would attest to their grief over such cruel, such recent losses, but instead [instituted] days of dancing where the point was to waltz, drink and eat to one's heart's content.
—Mercier
Frances.



My favorite fashion period lol. I have commissioned many miniature dolls over the past 25 years in that period (I am a collector of 1:12th scale miniatures) and a very talented German artist just finished up a replica of Hortense de Beauharnais (Napolean's stepdaughter and Queen of Holland) for me.

Frances
13th October 2015, 21:01
Hello ERK, it would be nice to see some of those dolls if you wish to post some photographs.
Frances.

ERK
13th October 2015, 21:15
http://s27.postimg.org/maxculrn3/12140893_538495869642684_151134329396342154_o.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/maxculrn3/)



http://s15.postimg.org/v02nbnad3/1c69e1e64c4cb72c7d440b2f13d7a4e8.jpg (http://postimg.org/image/v02nbnad3/)




Hortense de Beauharnais~ she's en route to me from Germany. I have a bunch (lost count) commissioned from this exhibit as well: http://napoleon-fashion.com/

Frances
13th October 2015, 21:54
The costumes in the collection are exquisite ERK.
That's also a very beautiful miniature replica doll with very accurate detail, right down to the tiny slippers.
Frances.

ERK
13th October 2015, 22:02
The costumes in the collection are exquisite ERK.
That's also a very beautiful miniature replica doll with very accurate detail, right down to the tiny slippers.
Frances.



Thank you Frances, I also collect English (Regency) dolls of the same era. The miniature dolls in my avatar with the bird heads are funny too (I don't own them, they reside in a museum in Asia).

Frances
14th October 2015, 22:21
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/8C5E86F4-AEB5-4A31-A1AC-7C5E85F02C87.png_zps4ruurdkw.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/8C5E86F4-AEB5-4A31-A1AC-7C5E85F02C87.png_zps4ruurdkw.jpeg.html)

1680's French Coin. Front.

Source:- http://www.ufocasebook.com/ufocoin.html

17th century French coin shows UFO image, UFO Casebook Files

Centuries Old UFO coin remains mystery.

An unidentified flying object on a 17th century French coin continues to mystify rare coin experts. Colorado Springs, CO (PRWEB) January 28, 2005 -- After decades of seeking possible answers about a mysterious UFO-like design on a 17th century French copper coin, a prominent numismatic expert says it remains just that: an unidentified flying object. After a half-century of research, the design has defied positive identification by the numismatic community.

"It was made in the 1680s in France and the design on one side certainly looks like it could be a flying saucer in the clouds over the countryside," said Kenneth E. Bressett of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a former President of the 32,000-member American Numismatic Association and owner of the curious coin.

"Is it supposed to be a UFO of some sort, or a symbolic representation of the Biblical Ezekiel's wheel? After 50 years of searching, I've heard of only one other example of it, and nothing to explain the unusual design."

Bressett said the mysterious piece is not really a coin, but a "jeton," a coin-like educational tool that was commonly used to help people count money, or sometimes used as a money substitute for playing games. It is about the size of a U.S. quarter-dollar and similar to thousands of other jetons with different religious and educational designs that were produced and used in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

"The design on this particular piece could be interpreted as showing either a UFO or Ezekiel's wheel, but little else. Some people think the Old Testament reference to Ezekiel's wheel may actually be a description of a long-ago UFO," he explained.

"The legend written in Latin around the rim is also mystifying. 'OPPORTUNUS ADEST' translates as 'It is here at an opportune time.' Is the object in the sky symbolic of needed rainfall, or a Biblical reference or visitors from beyond? We probably will never know for certain," said Bressett.

"It is part of the lure of numismatics that makes coin collecting so intriguing."
Frances.

Frances
15th October 2015, 13:49
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/BA1D0B1D-C891-4209-B06F-352169C60EF2_zps2e1mjyta.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/BA1D0B1D-C891-4209-B06F-352169C60EF2_zps2e1mjyta.jpg.html)

The Deaths Of Jean Paul Marat & Charlotte Corday.

On this date in 1793, Jean Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer.

Originally a doctor, Marat founded the journal L'Ami du Peuple in 1789, and its fiery criticism of those in power was a contributing factor to the bloody turn of the Revolution in 1792. With the arrest of the king in August of that year, Marat was elected as a deputy of Paris to the Convention. In France's revolutionary legislature, Marat opposed the Girondists--a faction made up of moderate republicans who advocated a constitutional government and continental war.

Attacks on the aristocracy.

Beginning in September 1789, as editor of the newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Marat became an influential voice in favour of the most radical and democratic measures, particularly in October, when the royal family was forcibly brought from Versailles to Paris by a mob. He particularly advocated preventive measures against aristocrats, whom he claimed were plotting to destroy the Revolution. Early in 1790 he was forced to flee to England after publishing attacks on Jacques Necker, the king’s finance minister; three months later he was back, his fame now sufficient to give him some protection against reprisal. He did not relent but directed his criticism against such moderate Revolutionary leaders as the marquis de Lafayette, the comte de Mirabeau, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris (a member of the Academy of Sciences); he continued to warn against the émigrés, royalist exiles who were organizing counterrevolutionary activities and urging the other European monarchs to intervene in France and restore the full power of Louis XVI.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4E9C431D-3207-4223-A6D5-4AE9F8D7A32D_zpsuojos61h.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4E9C431D-3207-4223-A6D5-4AE9F8D7A32D_zpsuojos61h.jpg.html)

La Morte de Marat.
Artist Jacques-Louis David.

By 1793, Charlotte Corday, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and an ally of the Girondists in Normandy, came to regard Marat as the unholy enemy of France and plotted his assassination. Leaving her native Caen for Paris, she had planned to kill Marat at the Bastille Day parade on July 14 but was forced to seek him out in his home when the festivities were canceled. On July 13, she gained an audience with Marat by promising to betray the Caen Girondists. Marat, who had a persistent skin disease, was working as usual in his bath when Corday pulled a knife from her bodice and stabbed him in his chest. He died almost immediately, and Corday waited calmly for the police to come and arrest her.
Charlotte was executed 4 days later.

Source:- http://madameguillotine.org.uk/2011/07/17/charlotte-corday-17th-july-1793/

Link to the article below.

In the early hours of the morning of 14th July, after her arrest at 30 Rue des Cordeliers for the assassination of Marat, Charlotte Corday was taken a short distance to the Abbaye prison at the end of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite – a fearsome place with high grey walls topped by small turrets that overlooked the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

A screaming, jeering crowd followed the carriage that took Charlotte there, shaking their fists at her and making occasional attempts to grab hold of her that were swiftly deflected by the guardsmen who escorted the vehicle. Charlotte appeared to notice none of this as she sat, proudly erect and gazing serenely straight ahead, not even looking at the dark Paris streets as they rumbled slowly past.

At the Abbaye, she was greeted by a crowd of surly gaolers and their ferocious dogs, who growled and snapped at her now sadly stained muslin skirts as she went by. Despite her protestations that she had acted alone and not as the tool of the disgraced Girondin party, the authorities were still determined to sniff out evidence of a conspiracy and so it was decreed that she must be imprisoned ‘en secrete‘, in absolute solitude both there and at the Conciergerie, where she was transferred just before her trial a few days later, cut off from prison life and allowed contact only with gaolers and the lawyer who had been appointed to defend her after the one that she had herself requested failed to turn up due to having been arrested himself thanks to his Girondin sympathies.

This probably suited Charlotte very well – she was a serious minded young woman who furthermore appears to have mentally already slipped out of reach to the other side of existence. The hectic, desperately pleasure seeking life in the Terror’s prisons would have held no allure for her.

We don’t know precisely what Charlotte’s state of mind was as she paced the terracotta tiled floor of her damp, gloomy cell but it’s clear that not only had she embraced death but she was also thinking ahead to the judgement of posterity.

‘Ce 15 juillet 1793, an II de la République.
To the citizens of the Committee of General Safety.

Since I have only a few moments left to live, might I hope, citizens, that you will allow me to have my portrait painted. I would like to leave this token of my memory to my friends. Indeed, just as one cherishes the image of good citizens, curiosity sometimes seeks out those of great criminals, which serves to perpetuate horror at their crimes. If you deign to attend to my request, I would ask you to send me tomorrow a painter of miniatures. I would also repeat my request to be allowed to sleep alone. Believe, I beg you, in my sincere gratitude.
Marie Corday.‘

We can only imagine the reactions of Robespierre, Saint-Just and the other members of the Committee when this peculiar request was transmitted to them. However, their imagined bemusement aside, they complied and an artist, Hauër was sent to the Conciergerie during her trial to commence work on a portrait.

Charlotte was still unaware that her lawyer had been arrested and when she stepped into the dank crowded courtroom of the Palais de Justice, next to the Conciergerie and saw another lawyer, Chauveau-Lagarde waiting for her, she felt inspired to write another furious note later when the trial, such as it was, was over:

‘Citizen Doulcet Pontécoulant is a coward for refusing to defend me when it was such an easy matter. The lawyer who did so acquitted himself with all possible dignity and I shall remain grateful to him to the end.‘

As Charlotte had boldly and repeatedly admitted to her guilt and was also adamant that she had acted alone, there was very little for her lawyer to do but he did his best for her anyway, telling the tribunal that her ‘calm, such composure, such serenity in the face of death in a way sublime, are abnormal; they can only come from an exaltation of spirit born of political fanaticism. That is what put the knife in her hand.‘

Corday herself said that: ‘Anything was justified for the security of the nation. I killed one man in order to save a thousand. I was a republican long before the Revolution and I have never lacked that resolution of people who can put aside personal interests and have no courage to sacrifice themselves for their country.‘

Even if the dread tribunal had wanted to save her, they were no match for her own avowed determination to sacrifice herself for the good of France and so it was no surprise to anyone when the terrifying, dark browed Fouquier-Tinville, stood up to deliver a guilty verdict, the gold ‘La Loi’ medallion at his breast swinging to and fro as he did so.

Charlotte bowed her head to the inevitable and slowly left the room, still ignoring the screams and shouts of the mob that had thronged the courtroom. She was taken back to her cell, where Hauër soon joined her to finish his portrait. Afterwards he commented on her ‘unimaginable tranquility and gaiety of spirit‘, while she in her turn commended his work as an excellent likeness.

After this there was nothing to do but sit staring at the bare, damp speckled walls until the gendarmes arrived to take her away to the small, whitewashed, somewhat ironically named salle de la toilette on the ground floor where the executioner’s assistants awaited her with the scissors they would use to roughly cut her chestnut hair short and a long red dyed shift, which she was obliged to wear on her way to her execution in order to proclaim that she had been found guilty of parricide.

Charlotte sat down on the rickety stool in front of them and stared straight ahead, flinching only when the cold steel of their scissors touched her neck, which made the gendarmes laugh coarsely and make remarks about the ‘national razor’. She looked down at the ground, where her hair, which she had once been so proud of lay in thick, long strands around her shoes and then had to quickly look away before fear overcame her.

Once her hair had been cut, the men turned their backs as she removed her own dress and pulled the rough red shift over her head, allowing herself a rueful look down at how it hung so shapelessly around her body. After this one of the assistants stepped forward and tied her hands behind her back then led her outside.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4D73C565-0BD1-43EB-9E50-CCD6DB617F9D_zpspxqc0kzi.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4D73C565-0BD1-43EB-9E50-CCD6DB617F9D_zpspxqc0kzi.jpg.html)

Like all other people who had been condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was taken out to the pale stone Cour de Mai, which actually seems quite beautiful in stark contrast to the medieval grimness of the Conciergerie. Here, an open wooden tumbril awaited them and without much ceremony she was bundled on to it. Charlotte, a girl from Normandy who had never been to Paris before, turned her head curiously to look at the beautiful Sainte Chapelle as the cart lurched forward and then slowly passed through the ornate iron gates.

The journey to the Place de de la Révolution took over an hour and she almost fell several times as the tumbril passed over the busy Pont au Change, turned on to the Quai de Mégisserie and then bounced alarmingly over the streets. Charlotte looked high above the heads of the curious, staring crowd that had lined the route to watch her pass and instead gazed about her at the city that she had never been to before and which she would never see again. The sky had been dark when she set off from the Conciergerie and now the threatened thunderstorm broke overhead, making many of the huge crowd that had gathered run for cover, their newspapers and aprons held over their heads as rain began to fall in a heavy downpour.

The tumbril rumbled down the long Rue Saint-Honoré past the gates of the Palais Royale where she had spent her last morning of freedom and which was as thronged and buzzing with life as ever. Charlotte, her teeth chattering in the freezing cold and her red chemise soaked through with rain, stared out across the colonnaded galleries and remembered how she had felt that day, full of nervous optimism, fear and excitement as she made her preparations for Marat’s assassination.

Unknown to her, Robespierre and his friends Desmoulins and Danton had gathered together at his window overlooking the execution route and were watching her as she went past. They were not the only ones to watch her in almost fearful admiration – more than one young man was struck by wholehearted infatuation for the brave, beautiful Charlotte as she stood alone in her cart, soaked through with rain, her lovely blue eyes already gazing mistily out into the next world.

They turned down the Rue Royale, at the end of which was the Place de la Révolution. Many of those condemned to death staggered and went pale as she caught their first glimpse of the guillotine, which rose, eerie and macabre in the distance but Charlotte gazed upon it impassively, even admiringly.

At around half past six in the evening, the tumbril came to a halt at the foot of the scaffold and gendarmes came forward to pull the young woman down to the ground. The executioner Sanson’s assistants then took her by the arms and led her to the scaffold steps. She ran lightly up the grimy, blood stained steps, turning at the top to look across to the Champs Elysées and then to the Tuileries. There was an invigorating, autumnal freshness in the air and she savoured every breath as they took hold of her again and led her to the guillotine.

Sanson, the executioner stepped in front of the machine, hoping to hide it from her eyes as she moved towards it. At this time, only a very few women had been guillotined and the men still behaved with careful courtesy, fearful of feminine panics and fainting fits, which would disorder the carefully constructed routine of execution, which was designed to be as smooth and fuss free as possible.

‘Please step aside, citizen,’ Charlotte said firmly. ‘I have never seen a guillotine before and am curious to know what it looks like.’

After the guillotine’s blade had ended Charlotte’s life, one of Sanson’s assistants, Legros who was not one of the permanent crew and had only been hired for the day, immediately snatched her head from inside the basket into which it had fallen and soundly slapped her cheeks. Sanson, who had done his best to treat Charlotte with courtesy and respect, was furious and immediately shouted at him to desist, while the crowd pressed closest to the scaffold recoiled in horror, many of them imagining that they had seen her cheeks blush with outrage.

The Girondin, Vergniaud, one of those who had been condemned by Corday’s actions, afterwards said that ‘She has killed us, but she is showing us how to die.’
Frances.

Frances
15th October 2015, 14:12
http://youtu.be/86lczf7Bou8

Ann Hathaway. I Dreamed A Dream.
Song from Les Miserables.
Frances

Elen
15th October 2015, 17:08
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/BA1D0B1D-C891-4209-B06F-352169C60EF2_zps2e1mjyta.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/BA1D0B1D-C891-4209-B06F-352169C60EF2_zps2e1mjyta.jpg.html)

The Deaths Of Jean Paul Marat & Charlotte Corday.

On this date in 1793, Jean Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer.

Originally a doctor, Marat founded the journal L'Ami du Peuple in 1789, and its fiery criticism of those in power was a contributing factor to the bloody turn of the Revolution in 1792. With the arrest of the king in August of that year, Marat was elected as a deputy of Paris to the Convention. In France's revolutionary legislature, Marat opposed the Girondists--a faction made up of moderate republicans who advocated a constitutional government and continental war.

Attacks on the aristocracy.

Beginning in September 1789, as editor of the newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Marat became an influential voice in favour of the most radical and democratic measures, particularly in October, when the royal family was forcibly brought from Versailles to Paris by a mob. He particularly advocated preventive measures against aristocrats, whom he claimed were plotting to destroy the Revolution. Early in 1790 he was forced to flee to England after publishing attacks on Jacques Necker, the king’s finance minister; three months later he was back, his fame now sufficient to give him some protection against reprisal. He did not relent but directed his criticism against such moderate Revolutionary leaders as the marquis de Lafayette, the comte de Mirabeau, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris (a member of the Academy of Sciences); he continued to warn against the émigrés, royalist exiles who were organizing counterrevolutionary activities and urging the other European monarchs to intervene in France and restore the full power of Louis XVI.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4E9C431D-3207-4223-A6D5-4AE9F8D7A32D_zpsuojos61h.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4E9C431D-3207-4223-A6D5-4AE9F8D7A32D_zpsuojos61h.jpg.html)

La Morte de Marat.
Artist Jacques-Louis David.

By 1793, Charlotte Corday, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and an ally of the Girondists in Normandy, came to regard Marat as the unholy enemy of France and plotted his assassination. Leaving her native Caen for Paris, she had planned to kill Marat at the Bastille Day parade on July 14 but was forced to seek him out in his home when the festivities were canceled. On July 13, she gained an audience with Marat by promising to betray the Caen Girondists. Marat, who had a persistent skin disease, was working as usual in his bath when Corday pulled a knife from her bodice and stabbed him in his chest. He died almost immediately, and Corday waited calmly for the police to come and arrest her.
Charlotte was executed 4 days later.

Source:- http://madameguillotine.org.uk/2011/07/17/charlotte-corday-17th-july-1793/

Link to the article below.

In the early hours of the morning of 14th July, after her arrest at 30 Rue des Cordeliers for the assassination of Marat, Charlotte Corday was taken a short distance to the Abbaye prison at the end of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite – a fearsome place with high grey walls topped by small turrets that overlooked the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

A screaming, jeering crowd followed the carriage that took Charlotte there, shaking their fists at her and making occasional attempts to grab hold of her that were swiftly deflected by the guardsmen who escorted the vehicle. Charlotte appeared to notice none of this as she sat, proudly erect and gazing serenely straight ahead, not even looking at the dark Paris streets as they rumbled slowly past.

At the Abbaye, she was greeted by a crowd of surly gaolers and their ferocious dogs, who growled and snapped at her now sadly stained muslin skirts as she went by. Despite her protestations that she had acted alone and not as the tool of the disgraced Girondin party, the authorities were still determined to sniff out evidence of a conspiracy and so it was decreed that she must be imprisoned ‘en secrete‘, in absolute solitude both there and at the Conciergerie, where she was transferred just before her trial a few days later, cut off from prison life and allowed contact only with gaolers and the lawyer who had been appointed to defend her after the one that she had herself requested failed to turn up due to having been arrested himself thanks to his Girondin sympathies.

This probably suited Charlotte very well – she was a serious minded young woman who furthermore appears to have mentally already slipped out of reach to the other side of existence. The hectic, desperately pleasure seeking life in the Terror’s prisons would have held no allure for her.

We don’t know precisely what Charlotte’s state of mind was as she paced the terracotta tiled floor of her damp, gloomy cell but it’s clear that not only had she embraced death but she was also thinking ahead to the judgement of posterity.

‘Ce 15 juillet 1793, an II de la République.
To the citizens of the Committee of General Safety.

Since I have only a few moments left to live, might I hope, citizens, that you will allow me to have my portrait painted. I would like to leave this token of my memory to my friends. Indeed, just as one cherishes the image of good citizens, curiosity sometimes seeks out those of great criminals, which serves to perpetuate horror at their crimes. If you deign to attend to my request, I would ask you to send me tomorrow a painter of miniatures. I would also repeat my request to be allowed to sleep alone. Believe, I beg you, in my sincere gratitude.
Marie Corday.‘

We can only imagine the reactions of Robespierre, Saint-Just and the other members of the Committee when this peculiar request was transmitted to them. However, their imagined bemusement aside, they complied and an artist, Hauër was sent to the Conciergerie during her trial to commence work on a portrait.

Charlotte was still unaware that her lawyer had been arrested and when she stepped into the dank crowded courtroom of the Palais de Justice, next to the Conciergerie and saw another lawyer, Chauveau-Lagarde waiting for her, she felt inspired to write another furious note later when the trial, such as it was, was over:

‘Citizen Doulcet Pontécoulant is a coward for refusing to defend me when it was such an easy matter. The lawyer who did so acquitted himself with all possible dignity and I shall remain grateful to him to the end.‘

As Charlotte had boldly and repeatedly admitted to her guilt and was also adamant that she had acted alone, there was very little for her lawyer to do but he did his best for her anyway, telling the tribunal that her ‘calm, such composure, such serenity in the face of death in a way sublime, are abnormal; they can only come from an exaltation of spirit born of political fanaticism. That is what put the knife in her hand.‘

Corday herself said that: ‘Anything was justified for the security of the nation. I killed one man in order to save a thousand. I was a republican long before the Revolution and I have never lacked that resolution of people who can put aside personal interests and have no courage to sacrifice themselves for their country.‘

Even if the dread tribunal had wanted to save her, they were no match for her own avowed determination to sacrifice herself for the good of France and so it was no surprise to anyone when the terrifying, dark browed Fouquier-Tinville, stood up to deliver a guilty verdict, the gold ‘La Loi’ medallion at his breast swinging to and fro as he did so.

Charlotte bowed her head to the inevitable and slowly left the room, still ignoring the screams and shouts of the mob that had thronged the courtroom. She was taken back to her cell, where Hauër soon joined her to finish his portrait. Afterwards he commented on her ‘unimaginable tranquility and gaiety of spirit‘, while she in her turn commended his work as an excellent likeness.

After this there was nothing to do but sit staring at the bare, damp speckled walls until the gendarmes arrived to take her away to the small, whitewashed, somewhat ironically named salle de la toilette on the ground floor where the executioner’s assistants awaited her with the scissors they would use to roughly cut her chestnut hair short and a long red dyed shift, which she was obliged to wear on her way to her execution in order to proclaim that she had been found guilty of parricide.

Charlotte sat down on the rickety stool in front of them and stared straight ahead, flinching only when the cold steel of their scissors touched her neck, which made the gendarmes laugh coarsely and make remarks about the ‘national razor’. She looked down at the ground, where her hair, which she had once been so proud of lay in thick, long strands around her shoes and then had to quickly look away before fear overcame her.

Once her hair had been cut, the men turned their backs as she removed her own dress and pulled the rough red shift over her head, allowing herself a rueful look down at how it hung so shapelessly around her body. After this one of the assistants stepped forward and tied her hands behind her back then led her outside.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4D73C565-0BD1-43EB-9E50-CCD6DB617F9D_zpspxqc0kzi.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/4D73C565-0BD1-43EB-9E50-CCD6DB617F9D_zpspxqc0kzi.jpg.html)

Like all other people who had been condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was taken out to the pale stone Cour de Mai, which actually seems quite beautiful in stark contrast to the medieval grimness of the Conciergerie. Here, an open wooden tumbril awaited them and without much ceremony she was bundled on to it. Charlotte, a girl from Normandy who had never been to Paris before, turned her head curiously to look at the beautiful Sainte Chapelle as the cart lurched forward and then slowly passed through the ornate iron gates.

The journey to the Place de de la Révolution took over an hour and she almost fell several times as the tumbril passed over the busy Pont au Change, turned on to the Quai de Mégisserie and then bounced alarmingly over the streets. Charlotte looked high above the heads of the curious, staring crowd that had lined the route to watch her pass and instead gazed about her at the city that she had never been to before and which she would never see again. The sky had been dark when she set off from the Conciergerie and now the threatened thunderstorm broke overhead, making many of the huge crowd that had gathered run for cover, their newspapers and aprons held over their heads as rain began to fall in a heavy downpour.

The tumbril rumbled down the long Rue Saint-Honoré past the gates of the Palais Royale where she had spent her last morning of freedom and which was as thronged and buzzing with life as ever. Charlotte, her teeth chattering in the freezing cold and her red chemise soaked through with rain, stared out across the colonnaded galleries and remembered how she had felt that day, full of nervous optimism, fear and excitement as she made her preparations for Marat’s assassination.

Unknown to her, Robespierre and his friends Desmoulins and Danton had gathered together at his window overlooking the execution route and were watching her as she went past. They were not the only ones to watch her in almost fearful admiration – more than one young man was struck by wholehearted infatuation for the brave, beautiful Charlotte as she stood alone in her cart, soaked through with rain, her lovely blue eyes already gazing mistily out into the next world.

They turned down the Rue Royale, at the end of which was the Place de la Révolution. Many of those condemned to death staggered and went pale as she caught their first glimpse of the guillotine, which rose, eerie and macabre in the distance but Charlotte gazed upon it impassively, even admiringly.

At around half past six in the evening, the tumbril came to a halt at the foot of the scaffold and gendarmes came forward to pull the young woman down to the ground. The executioner Sanson’s assistants then took her by the arms and led her to the scaffold steps. She ran lightly up the grimy, blood stained steps, turning at the top to look across to the Champs Elysées and then to the Tuileries. There was an invigorating, autumnal freshness in the air and she savoured every breath as they took hold of her again and led her to the guillotine.

Sanson, the executioner stepped in front of the machine, hoping to hide it from her eyes as she moved towards it. At this time, only a very few women had been guillotined and the men still behaved with careful courtesy, fearful of feminine panics and fainting fits, which would disorder the carefully constructed routine of execution, which was designed to be as smooth and fuss free as possible.

‘Please step aside, citizen,’ Charlotte said firmly. ‘I have never seen a guillotine before and am curious to know what it looks like.’

After the guillotine’s blade had ended Charlotte’s life, one of Sanson’s assistants, Legros who was not one of the permanent crew and had only been hired for the day, immediately snatched her head from inside the basket into which it had fallen and soundly slapped her cheeks. Sanson, who had done his best to treat Charlotte with courtesy and respect, was furious and immediately shouted at him to desist, while the crowd pressed closest to the scaffold recoiled in horror, many of them imagining that they had seen her cheeks blush with outrage.

The Girondin, Vergniaud, one of those who had been condemned by Corday’s actions, afterwards said that ‘She has killed us, but she is showing us how to die.’
Frances.

This was such an incredible story to read, Frances, I couldn't get away reading it. Thank you for making it so much alive. What a brave woman she was, standing up for what she believed in. I don't think murder is the way to go, all the same, but there you go....she did what she set out to do. Thank you for sharing these stories.

Elen

The One
16th October 2015, 12:08
16th of October 1793: execution of Marie-Antoinette by Catherine Delors.

Wow maybe i am her reincarnation lol.I also see 1793 and i was born 1973

Sorry Frances i could not resist

:back to topic:

Frances
18th October 2015, 00:10
http://youtu.be/-qkf0fLU2Ao

One Day More. A Song From Les Miserables.
Frances.

Frances
20th October 2015, 17:29
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/04251AB9-1A1C-46B1-93A1-41463F10CBC4.png_zpswqdwqdbq.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/04251AB9-1A1C-46B1-93A1-41463F10CBC4.png_zpswqdwqdbq.jpeg.html)

Source:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownings_at_Nantes#

The Drownings. The National Bathtub.

Part 1.

The Drownings at Nantes (French: Noyades de Nantes) were a series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in Nantes, France, that occurred between November 1793 and February 1794. During this period, anyone arrested and jailed for not consistently supporting the Revolution, or suspected of being a royalist sympathizer, especially Catholic priests and nuns, was cast into the Loire and drowned on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative-on-mission in Nantes. Before the murders ceased, as many as four thousand or more people, including innocent families with women and children, lost their lives in what Carrier himself called "the national bathtub.

Catholic clergy and émigrés had been victims of angry pro-republican violence and forced deportations by sans-culottes since the Decree of 17 November 1791 went into force. However, it was the Law of Suspects (French: Loi des suspects) approved by the National Convention of the French First Republic on 17 September 1793 that swept the nation with "revolutionary paranoia".[2] This decree defined a broad range of conduct as suspicious in the vaguest terms, and did not give individuals any means of redress.

Nantes, in particular, was besieged by the tragedies of the French civil war in the Vendée at its doorstep. Threats of epidemics and starvation were always present. Battles, skirmishes, and police actions led to the incarceration of more than ten thousand prisoners of war within its confines, and simply feeding them became enormous burden for the city's residents. To control the situation, the leaders of the National Convention put Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a native of the Auvergne region, in charge of obtaining food supplies for Republican soldiers in Nantes. He soon became responsible for furnishing provisions to the entire local population, as well as for maintaining order and putting down suspected royalist revolts.

Fear that contagious diseases, particularly typhus, would spread from prisoners to the general population reached levels of panic in the autumn of 1793. Heavy losses of inmates' lives recorded by military personnel, physicians, nurses, and even judges, shocked civic leaders and pushed them to try anything to stop the further spread of illness. Ultimately, they chose to empty the jails in the city center and to place the inmates at the Coffee Warehouse jail at the port and on vessels moored in the harbor.

The first drownings targeted 160 Catholic priests, called 'refractory clergy' (French: clergé réfractaire). They were first arrested and held at Saint-Clément Convent, then, in the summer of 1793, at the Carmelite Mission, which had been converted into prisons. On 5 July, they were sent to Chantenay immediately west of Nantes, and held on the barge La Thérèse where they suffered miserably from the sun and high temperatures. Between 19 July and 6 August, most of the priests were transferred to the friary of the Petits Capucins and the Hermitage, which also were prisons, that proved more bearable. But on 25 October, the Revolutionary Committee of Nantes ordered the priests back to the docks to be held on the barge La Gloire.

On the night of 16 November 1793 (26 Brumaire Year II of the French Republic) Adjutant-General Guillaume Lamberty and Fouquet ordered a barge that had been specially customized by carpenters to the docks. They directed O'Sullivan, a master of arms, and his men, to transfer the prisoners and to execute the first 90 priests by drowning. Nearly all died as planned, however, three of them were rescued by sailors on the warship L'Imposant, who gave them spirits and warm blankets. Captain Lafloury was ordered to hand them back to civil authorities in Nantes. After being returned to jail, the three perished with the second group of priests who were drowned the next night. A single soul survived this massacre, named Father Landeau. An excellent swimmer, he managed to escape during a struggle, jumped from the boat into the Loire, and swam to safety.

A gunner named Wailly, who served on the boat La Samaritain on the nights of November 16 to 17, left the only first-person account on the first drowning. He described meeting Lamberty and Fouquet, later, hearing the desperate screaming of the drowning men, rousing his fellow comrades who heard the same cries, and the silence that came after they had been swallowed by the Loire.

Continued.....

Frances
20th October 2015, 17:49
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/575F7377-2A71-4B08-9549-4875C97B21C4_zpsi4cdsvhp.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/575F7377-2A71-4B08-9549-4875C97B21C4_zpsi4cdsvhp.jpg.html)

Part 2.

The second mass drowning of priests was also led by Guillaume Lamberty. Several men in his guard led by Marat Foucauld systematically stripped 58 clergymen who had been transported from Angers. The priests were then led to a specially equipped barge and taken far from the port of Nantes to the mouth of the river where they were submersed. This time, no one survived.

On the evening of 4 December 1793 (14 Frimaire, Year II), Jean-Baptiste Carrier, key members of the Revolutionary Committee of Nantes, François-Louis Phélippes Tronjolly and colleagues, Julien Minée for the department, Renard for the city, and representatives of the fr:Société populaire de Nantes, all met. In the course of heated discussions, they appointed a jury to name so-called "criminals." The next day, the jury presented more than three hundred names on a list, which became orders for execution. To carry out the judgements, Carrier imagined a radical process he euphemistically called "vertical deportation": rather than deporting criminals to remote penal colony islands, he proposed loading the condemned onto flat bottom boats, and drowning them by casting them out in the middle of the Loire at Chantenay, an adjacent village. The executions were to be carried out at night, in secrecy, however there was concern among members of the committee that corpses would begin floating-up to the surface, sometimes days later. These concerns proved to be justified.

Two groups received the task of conducting the executions: Guillaume Lamberty and his men, and the Marat Company of Revolutionary Guards, known as the 'American Hussars' (French: hussards américains) due to the presence of former Black slaves and settlers from Saint-Domingue in its ranks.

The third drowning, known as the Bouffay Drownings, are perhaps better known than the previous two events. This execution took the lives of 129 prisoners on the nights of 14 & 15 December 1793 (24 & 25 Frimaire, Year II). Led by Jean-Jacques Goullin and Michel Moreau-Grandmaison, the Marat Company went to Bouffay Prison, most of them drunk. Unable or unwilling to consult their lists, the soldiers went at random, grabbing prisoners from their cells, stripped them of their belongings and money, then, tied them into pairs to heavy rocks. Once loaded onto a flat boat, the guards sailed the anguished men only a short distance downstream and cast them off little further than Trentemoult, a fishing village directly opposite Nantes, near the island of Cheviré.

The drownings of 23 December 1793 (3 Nivôse, Year II) were recorded by three different accounts, with the accuracy of least two stories verified and confirmed. This time, Pierre Robin, Fouquet, and their accomplices forced approximately eight hundred captured 'royalist sympathizers' of all ages and sexes onto two boats, which only sailed as far as Chantenay and drowned them.

Among the most humiliating drownings were what was termed the 'underwater marriages'. It is a matter of dispute what constituted an 'underwater marriage' or if they happened as described, but unverified accounts tell of a priest and a nun, stripped naked, then tied together before they were drowned. These drownings were also called 'republican baptisms' or 'republican marriages.

The next executions, from 29 December 1793 (9 Nivôse, Year II) to 18 January 1794 (29 Nivôse, Year II), were known as the Galiot Drownings (French: Noyades des galiotes). Two-masted Dutch galiots – small trade ships – moored in Nantes as a result of a naval blockade, were moved on this occasion to the quay next to the Coffee Warehouse jail where the condemned could easily board. Whether the galiots made two, three, or more drowning 'expeditions' is unknown, however, the lives of two hundred to three hundred victims – men, women and children – were lost on each sailing. At least one boat was intentionally sunk in the Loire loaded with victims in the hold and the hatches sealed.

Records indicate that the last drownings using these Dutch vessels were organized by Carrier himself, who completely emptied out the Coffee Warehouse jail of all prisoners. These executions were perpetrated on the nights of 29 & 30 January 1794 (10 & 11 Pluviôse, Year II) and involved about four hundred people.
Frances.

Elen
20th October 2015, 19:13
Thank you Frances, I really enjoy these posts that you make. We may wonder if there has been another agenda on the go. What were they covering up with these murders? Were they maybe getting rid of some people that would be difficult to let live? Did these people know something that they shouldn't for a bigger agenda? I'm only fantasizing here. No matter what it is, you've made the record clear, dear. Thank you so much for that.

Elen

Frances
20th October 2015, 19:19
Yes Elen, I know what you are saying.
I am looking for one more story, when I find it, I may take a break.

Some stories I have read (but not posted) have left me shaken inside.
Frances.

Frances
1st November 2015, 13:00
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/272F1462-6276-4278-BC5C-82D855874289.png_zps3lqvwitx.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-10/272F1462-6276-4278-BC5C-82D855874289.png_zps3lqvwitx.jpeg.html)

Source:- https://archive.org/stream/tragicepisodesof00leno#page/68/mode/2up

Link to on-line book : Tragic Episodes Of The French Revoloution In Brittany.
By G Lenotre.

part 1.

At that very hour one of the ninety priests, and one only having escaped the “drowning” , was wandering through the streets of Nantes in terror of being recaptured , and horrified at what he had witnessed.

It was Abbe Julien Landeau incumbent of Saint Lyphard.

When in his turn he had been taken out of the galliot, tied to an old monk and lowered into the lighter, he found that the rope which secured his arm to that of his fellow might easily be unfastened,
The two united in their efforts got rid of the manacle, and waited anxiously.

From the motion of the lighter Abbe Landeau soon realised that the heavy craft was going down-stream.
He heard the mallet blows which opened the ports, in gushing torrents the waters pour in, gurgling and unceasing, over-whelming in a mass the maddened and unwary victims, lifting them up and dashing then against each other in a terrible hubub of cries, floating bodies , and suffocation.

The Abbe was a skilled swimmer, taking in tow the old man whom the ruffians choice had made his brother in the death-struggle, he fought his way out of the dreadful turmoil.

Groping in the murk of the whirling water, and thrusting aside the contorted bodies, he reached a port-hole or scupper, and at length came out on the surface of the river.

Lamberty’s boat was there quite close at hand.
The priest of Saint Lyphard’s saw the ruffians grappling with their boat-hooks and holding under water those quivering wretches whom like himself, a desperate effort had carried out of the lighter and heard the heavy blows of the ores falling on their heads.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/AD62B1CA-3E98-48E2-AF79-6FB3C0109DF4.png_zpsfwyylwkf.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/AD62B1CA-3E98-48E2-AF79-6FB3C0109DF4.png_zpsfwyylwkf.jpeg.html)

Escaping from the hideous melee he swam with his right hand and with the other held up his inert fellow.

Soon he was far away from the full flow of the Loire, panting with exertion, alone on that heaving expanse.
What should he do? Try to reach the bank?
Would he not find there other ruffians on the alert, it might be, or timorous fishermen, who would refuse to help him?
Or should he swim with the current as long as might be and ground in some osier-bed or on some sand bank, where he might take a breath?
And afterwards?
Would he, for that matter have strength to keep up for that long?

The weight of his fellow paralysed his movements. In the icy waters, which blinded and choked him, the old monk, groaning at his last gasp, urged the swimmer not to persist, but to save himself alone and let him die.
Yet Landeau persevered, though each valiant stroke exhausted him, his strength began to fail and his burden stopped all progress.

He felt the clutching hands of the old man unclasp as he resignedly relaxed his hold, and yielding to his fate allowed himself to sink.
Frances.


Continued.....

Frances
1st November 2015, 17:11
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/6F5E8E66-7570-4DD6-AF96-2DF67E78DCF4.png_zpsuh5tbvm5.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/6F5E8E66-7570-4DD6-AF96-2DF67E78DCF4.png_zpsuh5tbvm5.jpeg.html)

The Pink Church Of Saint Lyphard.

Source:- https://archive.org/stream/tragicepisodesof00leno#page/68/mode/2up

Part 2.

Thus lightened, the Abbé found relief by floating on his back, and permitted the stream to carry him wither it would, when suddenly through the cold void and stillness a sound of voices reached his ears.
He turned around in the water and saw the outline of a boat gliding through the night, and heard the men who manned it chatting among themselves.

He struck out until he came alongside, seized the gunwale , and in an imploring voice begged for help.
One of the men astonished, lent over and asked him who he was.
A priest that they have thrown in to drown.
There was a brief consultation between the boatmen, while Landaeu , all a tremble overheard their parley.

"Bah", said one "he's a black cowl", there will be enough of his kind left.
"My friends", cried another", if he was an enemy's dog we should not consent to let him perish, let us save him".
The swimmer was forthwith grappled, and drawn from the water and hoisted onboard the barge, but scarcely was he seated beside the boat-men than these rough men took fright at the half dead man, dripping, shivering and at the last gasp.

Already the fame of the Carrier was spreading baseness, as misamas spread pestilence.
After some debate the boatmen rowed towards the right bank, and landing, left the wretch on the sand, explaining that they had done enough for him, and that he would have to get out of the scrape without their help.

Thus left alone Abbé Landeau tried to find his bearings.
In the middle of November the nights are long, and it was still very far from earliest dawn. He saw, however, that he had come to land near the Hamlet of Roche Maurice, about a league downstream from Nantes.
Shivering with cold, almost naked, and faint with hunger and weariness, the first thing he needed was to find shelter.
Would not asking for help mean self-betrayal?
No matter he was at the end of his energies.

Approaching a hovel he knocked, but the door remained closed, he dragged himself towards another dwelling. There his call was heard, some peasants received him with cordiality, and gave him food and seated him before a good fire.
The Abbé began to breath more freely; little by little the awful nightmare faded away.
Dawn was approaching, what should be his next course?

The peseants who had taken him in were growing alarmed; they too were frightened. They were glad, they said, to have succoured him, and would still be more so to keep him, but the villages were infested with patriots, and the next house which he had visited, but had not been opened to him, was inhabited by one of the most ardent of these.

M. Let Cure must understand that, for his own sake as much as for that of his hosts, he could not stay where he was; everyone must look to his own safety, so he must leave before day light.
For that matter they would not abandon him, their daughter went every day to Nantes to take the milk of her cows; she knew a worthy woman there, Mme. lamy, who like the Abbé, came from Queniguen.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/AF91C0E5-C9E1-4A93-8ABE-9F86D5E8E521.png_zpsnzxp78fy.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/AF91C0E5-C9E1-4A93-8ABE-9F86D5E8E521.png_zpsnzxp78fy.jpeg.html)

No doubt she would be willing to shelter the priest for some days, and would busy herself with placing him in safety.
The incumbent of Saint Lyphard thanked his hosts. They consented out of charity, to let him keep a pair of breeches, a jacket, and some clogs; they furnished him with a basketful of vegetables and bade him adieu.

Thus accounted the priest was shown the door, and with a wary and alert eye, trying to disguise his alarm and affecting the air of a market -gardener, he took the road to Nantes.
He reached the centre of town without mishap, was received at Mme. Lamy's at the Port-au-vin, went to earth there, and from refuge sent a letter to one of his brothers living at Queniguen near Guerande, who came to Nantes, wearing the broad hat, the white jacket, and loose breeches of the marsh men of the peninsula, to look for the incumbent, bringing with him an outfit like his own.
Frances.


Continued....

Frances
3rd November 2015, 20:47
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/381556EB-2C22-473F-8C2D-2E811E16D4E6.png_zpsyovh3fen.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/381556EB-2C22-473F-8C2D-2E811E16D4E6.png_zpsyovh3fen.jpeg.html)

Source:-https://archive.org/stream/tragicepisodesof00leno#page/68/mode/2up

Part 3.

When in order to leave the town, they had to pass the guard, Abbé Landeau, on whom that awful night had left its mark in a morbid timidity , took alarm at seeing soldiers grouped by the door of the guard house.
He was taken with a violent trembling that he could not check; he was like to be noticed and would be questioned, and would not be able to answer.

His brother , who had kept his full presence of mind, pretended to be taking home a drunken man.
He scolded his companion, pushed him about, gave a great cut with the whip on the quarters of the mule the Abbé was riding, and went off at a trot.
The two fugitives thus cleared the dangerous passage without mishap.

The vicar of Saint Lyphard spent the whole winter at Queniguen. It is a hamlet lying on the edge of salt marshes. There he had two hiding places, one at his brothers house, where he lay smothered under a truss of hay, and the other in a hollow west of the village.
At night he went about the country bearing the consolations of his ministry to the faithful.
No one in that secluded spot had an idea what was going on in France. Save for the patrols, who sometimes turned up unexpectedly to make a search at some farm that had been pointed out to the vigilance of the patriots, no stranger ventured into this haunt of the dead.

Often enough the Abbé saw himself on the verge of being taken: he cherished an instinctive and only too well founded terror of the "Blues". But none the less he went all over the Guerande district, carrying consolation to the dying or sprinkling the new born.
The record of baptisms was inscribed by means of a nail on a brass plate which was buried in some field, to be recovered in better days.

One evening at Queniguen some peasants were gathered at the house of the cure's brother, to take part in a night mass which he was making ready to celebrate.
He had already withdrawn the sacred vessels from their hiding place and arranged the simple accessories, when someone took alarm at a sound of some of footsteps in the village. Beware! It was the Guerande National Guard.

In a moment the house was surrounded; the peasants hastily put the preparations for the rite out of sight, the candlesticks returned to their place on the chimney-piece, the chalice was stowed on top of a dresser.
As for the Abbé he had rushed to the steps of the barn, reached his usual lurking place, and slipped under the hay.
The soldiers broke into the house, and called loudly for the "calotin" (frocked gentleman) they were harbouring.
They rapped the walls with their butt-ends and rummaged the stable making a great pother and threatening to burn everything. One of them, raising his eyes, saw the chalice perched on the top shelf of the dresser. What a surprise ! He said nothing, but casting a glance to see that none of his comrades were watching, gave the incriminating object a shove with the tip of his musket, and hid it behind the bulge of the piece of furniture.

The search of the barn was meanwhile proceeding. The "Blues" sounded the piled up forage with their sabres or bayonets, whose points more than once touched the fugitive.
One of the soldiers discovered his presence in that way. The man slipped in among the hay, making to believe to search vigorously, reached the priest, seized his arm, said in a low tone, "don't stir", and going back to his comrades assured them there was no one there, and nothing remained for them but to withdraw.

Abbé Landeau was saved ; but he could not reckon on the recurrence of such a piece of luck, all patriots not being so merciful as the National Guards of Guerande.
For a long time he had been wishing to make his way to Saint Lyphard which he had not seen since his arrest in 1791. He knew that he was beloved there, and could devote himself to his parishioners without too much danger.
Two brothers , Charles and Jean Deniaud, offered to receive him. The latter lived in the hamlet of kerbriant, while the former had a small arm at Kergonan, both places scarcely a league from Saint Lyphard, and remote from the main road.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/A87B5B06-B9D1-4C4A-A871-EEE9AFFF28C5.png_zpskpus4bli.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/A87B5B06-B9D1-4C4A-A871-EEE9AFFF28C5.png_zpskpus4bli.jpeg.html)

Saint Lyphard is a village of some importance, on the outskirt of the Grande Briere, a vast expanse of marsh beneath which a druidical forest lies submerged whose trees still stand unseen, buried in the slime up to their top most boughs; and still bent, men say, by the breath of the west wind, which has not blown on them for over a thousand years.

During two days only of the year the Brierons - as the dwellers on the shore of mud are called - are authorised to rummage in the mire and dig out these tree trunks, twelve or fifteen centuries old, and as hard and black as ebony.
During the week the people of La Briere are also licensed to extract peat from these vast swamps, which they retail in "turfs", a fuel in use throughout lower Brittany.
The rest of the time the folks fish in the ponds for leeches, eels, and pike, or busy themselves with rearing geese and cattle.
For La Briere is at once a sea and a grazing tract.

In winter it is a lake four leagues in length and five in breadth, with little depth of water, without waves or ripples.
In fine weather the soil dries, and sheep and cows can graze on it.
On the Saint Lyphard side, at the promontory of Pierre Fendue, it is impossible to tell where solid ground finishes and marsh begins.
The "Blues", as may be imagined, did not venture on to this quaking area.

Abbé Goujon, vicar of St Lyphard, who had remained in those parts since the outbreak of the Revolution, thanks to his perfect knowledge of the marsh, had thrown out all pursuers.
M Landeau was delighted to see him once more and to share his life of adventure.
Frances.


Continued....

Frances
3rd November 2015, 22:53
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/F22FB78E-80AD-4F88-B0BD-736F1B3A35BD.png_zpsxibgve8w.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-11/F22FB78E-80AD-4F88-B0BD-736F1B3A35BD.png_zpsxibgve8w.jpeg.html)

Source:- https://archive.org/stream/tragicepisodesof00leno#page/68/mode/2up

End.

In constant dread, misery, and nights spent in the marsh, broke down the vigorous health of the vicar of Saint Lyphard.
He died tended by his faithful curate, at Charles Deniaud's on June 24th 1799, aged fifty-five.

His flock, who were not unaware of his story and looked on this sole survivor of the drowning of the priests as a miracle, wished ardently to keep his remains in the village cemetery. But Kernogan, where his death took place, is in the district of Guerande, so it was to Guerande that his body was to be carried and thrown into the common ditch, according to the regulations then in force.
To avoid such profanation they played a last trick with the Abbé in his death; they carried his corpse by night to the hamlet of Crutier, scarcely a hundred metres from Kernogan, but forming part of the Commune of Saint Lyphard.

It was laid, so the story runs, in the bed of an old man at deaths door, whom they carried off to Kernogan, where he died.
The exchange thus having been affected, the common ditch of Guerande was not deprived of a body, while the cemetery of Saint Lyphards resumed its rights to that of Abbé Landaeu.

Hence it was that the death was announced at Crutier, and the priest buried close to his old church. When in more recent times that church was pulled down and the cemetery removed, they laid his honoured remains in the chapel of the new God's acre.
That chapel is a sort of grotto, excavated under a bluff surmounted by a Calvary.
Abbé Landeau's grave adjoins that of M. Goujon, his curate and successor .
From the crest of the bluff which you mount by a steep path, the eye ranges over the whole of La Briere, which begins at this point.

The vicar of St Lyphard - his memory will live as long as men remember the "noyades" of Nantes - lies on the margin of this sleeping ocean, a sea without flood, or tide, or current, as if the element to which Carrier committed his victims here shared the eternal repose of the priest whom the Loire refused to receive.
End.
Frances.

Frances
10th December 2015, 00:31
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/6E16C065-E182-4A05-93CC-638E7C2973AC_zpsmskqc0hi.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/6E16C065-E182-4A05-93CC-638E7C2973AC_zpsmskqc0hi.jpg.html)

Source:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Carrier

To The Guilotine Goes Carrier.

Early in 1794 Carrier was recalled to Paris. A few months later, the Thermidorian reaction led to the fall of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. Carrier's position became dangerously exposed. Prisoners he had brought from Nantes were acquitted and released, and denunciations of Carrier's actions increased.

On 3rd September 1794 Carrier was arrested. At his trial, in the Salle de la Liberté, Carrier was quick to denounce allegations of inhumanity saying, "I took but little share in the policing of Nantes; I was only there in passing, being first at Rennes and later with the army. My principal task was to watch over and see to the victualling of our troops, and for six months I supplied 200,000 men there without its costing the State a halfpenny. Hence I have little information to offer in the matter. I know little or nothing of the accused.

After this statement, a fellow representative (Phélippes) sprang to his feet vocally charging Carrier with drownings, wholesale executions, demolitions, thefts, pillaging, laying waste to Nantes, famine and disorder, and with the butchering of women and children.

Men from the Marat Company (the group of soldiers that Carrier used to purge Nantes) were present during the trial, including Perro-Chaux, Lévêque, Bollogniel, Grandmaison, and Mainguet. All these men were appointed directly and indirectly by Carrier and all were part of the Revolutionary Committee of Nantes. The jury that heard Carrier's case was left dumbfounded as the trial closed and passed a unanimous vote for Carrier's execution, which took place on 16 December 1794.
Frances.

pabranno
10th December 2015, 01:26
My God. What are we, and what have we done?

Dumpster Diver
10th December 2015, 07:08
Marking this thread for later reading.

Novusod
15th December 2015, 00:14
My God. What are we, and what have we done?

The question is not what have we done but what is being done to us by the invisible hand of the world controllers. The French revolution was a classic case of how the hidden hand plays one side off the other to maximize human suffering.

First was how they controlled the tyranny of absolute monarchy characterized by random executions of "enemies of the crown." Then when the absolute monarchy became untenable they flipped it. Meet the new boss same as the old boss. The random executions only continued under a new name. Instead of being branded enemies of the crown people were branded "enemies of the revolution" or "enemies of the people." What the reality was on the ground was these executions were enemies of the world controllers. The crown had merely been a front for the world controllers and likewise the revolutionaries were in the pocket of the hidden hand. The hidden hand controlled both sides so they would never be the target of retribution. Divide and conquer; they played both sides against each other to maximize human suffering. Order out of Chaos; the world controllers thrive on fear and chaos which they use to brutalize populations into submission.

"We will not give them peace until they recognize the supremacy of our international super government." - an infamous world controller is known to have said.

When the time came the original revolutionaries were thrown under the bus by the counter revolutionaries. Thus they too were executed in a second reign of terror. In time the counter revolutionaries were usurped by the restorationists who put Napoleon on the throne. Therein through various power plays of inciting violence against their enemies the world controllers were able to gain complete control over society. Instead of having a King. France would now have an Emperor with even greater powers to inflict violence on the innocent than ever before.

http://i.imgur.com/H5hsJfq.jpg

Emperor Napoleon became the archtype for a world controller placed in the seat of power which was the goal from the start. Napoleon could get away with attacks and atrocities King Louis XVI could only dream of. The Napoleonic wars would go on to kill millions as his armies rampaged from as far away as Egypt and Russia.

The Hidden Hand master of the second veil:
http://i.imgur.com/8VXV4SP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/oFXxgX3.jpg

The French revolution would be copied and exported around the world to maximize human suffering and allow the world controllers of the hidden hand to gain complete control of the planet. The Russian Revolution was pretty much an exact replay of the French revolution.
- Start with a corrupt and hated Monarchy
- Over throw it with an initial revolution (March and November revolutions)
- Throw the initial revolutionaries under the bus (Lenin & Trotsky)
- Install a world controller at the top of society after massively brutalizing the population (Stalin and 50 million dead later)

I will say something there is a reason the plans of the world controllers have never completely worked and I will end it with this quote:

"There is a whole lot of things the world controllers don't know;
There is a joker in the deck and he works for the big dealer who owns the house we all play cards in.
He is pulling leavers that aught not to be pulled and pushing buttons that aught not to be pushed.
They know their end approaches but from where;
Half of them denies this inescapable truth and half of them knows that something has gone terribly wrong.
The thing about awakening is it forces certain considerations before your eyes."

bsbray
15th December 2015, 03:47
While Napoleon was no saint, and Louis XVI's reign was beginning to give the 3rd Estate and common citizens more of a chance to have their complaints heard (which ultimately led to the revolution itself), the regime that the French Revolution overthrew was ideologically despotic. The church and monarchy persecuted anyone who said bad things about the clergy, pope, religion, monarchy, nobility, etc., and they executed people over it. This had been going on already more or less since the feudal period, wherever there was still a feudal system or a monarchy.

The monarchy in Russia was also despotic. Unless the Soviets themselves conspired in revising pre-revolutionary history (which I wouldn't rule out), Russians were even worse off under their monarchs than the French, Austrians, Germans, etc.

My point here is that there were no real "good guys" in either of these revolutions, or else if there were, they came somewhere in the middle and didn't last long. For example, the French Revolution was able to force Louis XVI to agree to a constitutional monarchy, and it looked as though the revolution might actually stop there and establish a stable government. It was because Louis XVI's court and the Austrians were not satisfied with this and trying to force the old order to be restored that it opened up the opportunity for a much more radical and disastrous chain of events that culminated in the Terror and then Napoleon.

And even though Napoleon was a despot, and censored the media when it came to criticisms of his regime, and overthrew governments all over Europe, he also allowed enough free thinking and writing to occur back in France, and things were so well in general, that the French seem to have welcomed him back pretty enthusiastically when he escaped from exile. And even moved importantly, after his final exile, the French had already had already seen enough to no longer be satisfied with monarchs, despite the rest of Europe trying to force them back on the French people.

The morality of these kinds of events on all sides is very murky at best. Both sides in both of these revolutions committed their fair share of atrocities.

Frances
17th December 2015, 18:28
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/A01DD7CA-3102-4EF7-B4FE-B96568F26455.png_zpsalac2qcm.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/A01DD7CA-3102-4EF7-B4FE-B96568F26455.png_zpsalac2qcm.jpeg.html)

Jeanne de Saint-Remy de Valois, Comtesse de la Motte

Source:- http://www.joslinhall.com/diamond_necklace_affair.htm

The "Affair of the Diamond Necklace" was the scandal which raised French hatred of Marie Antoinette to a fever pitch. As Napoleon once commented-

"The Queen's death must be dated from the Diamond Necklace Trial".

The trial, and the subsequent Memoirs of its chief feminine player, the Comtesse de la Motte, are also credited by many historians with being the gust of foul wind which finally fanned the long-smouldering fire of popular discontent into the uncontrollable conflagration of the French Revolution.

The tale is long, complex and not just a little sordid; it has several different versions (depending on whose memoirs you read), and has been told many times, most recently in a beautifully costumed Hollywood version starring Hilary Swank. The movie, which includes a stirring performance by Miss Swank as the Countess, takes some (but not all) of the Countess's claims at face value, which is another way of saying that it takes extreme liberties with what most historians regard as the actual truth.

Although she claimed to be descended from royalty, it is now generally agreed that Jeanne de Saint-Remy de Valois, Comtesse de la Motte, came of what might be termed "humble origins" and basically talked, schemed and slept herself almost all the way to the Royal Chambers at Versailles.

Jeanne carried on an affair with the Cardinal Louis Rene Edouard, Prince de Rohan, a man more attuned to matters earthly than spiritual. Jeanne also borrowed money from the Cardinal, and was soon deep in his debt. For his part the Cardinal was out of favor with Marie Antoinette, and was anxious to get into the Queen's good graces, if not her bed. Jeanne, who was undertaking her own campaign to gain access to the Queen and have her "family estates" "returned" to her, persuaded the Cardinal that she had the Queen's ear and could arrange reconciliation.
The gullible and perhaps somewhat oversexed Cardinal agreed and the Countess arranged a correspondence between him and the Queen. His letters to Marie Antoinette were real enough, but never delivered; the Queen's return letters were forgeries produced by Jeanne herself, or possibly her husband, or perhaps her "secretary" and lover, the gallant former-cavalier Retaux de Vilette.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/C3DF3C62-C339-4959-943F-D63DF3FCF3AA.png_zps7sochhxt.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/C3DF3C62-C339-4959-943F-D63DF3FCF3AA.png_zps7sochhxt.jpeg.html)

Cardinal Louis Rene Edouard, Prince de Rohan

The Prince wanted nothing more than to win Marie Antoinette's approval. Nevertheless, the Queen shunned the Cardinal because he had attempted to thwart her marriage to Louis XVI and she was aware of his scandalous and venial lifestyle.

The famous and scandalous Count Cagliostro, alchemist, healer and all-round man-of mystery, had been befriended by the Cardinal, and the Cardinal relied on Cagliostro's direction and ability to see into the future to direct his dealings with the "Queen". Cagliostro, apparently also taken in by Jeanne, went into trances and told the Cardinal that he saw the Cardinal being favored by the Queen and rising to a very high post in the government. The diabolical farce seemed to reach its climax with a midnight rendezvous in the Grove of Venus at the Palais-Royal Gardens, between the Cardinal and "Marie Antoinette" -actually an actress (or prostitute, or perhaps both, who could keep track at this point?) named Mademoiselle Leguay d'Olivia, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the Queen... and then the extravagant and fabulously costly diamond necklace entered the scene.

Ah, the necklace...

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/0A973245-C9D6-45C1-B1F0-C2702431F309.png_zpsswsxro1d.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/0A973245-C9D6-45C1-B1F0-C2702431F309.png_zpsswsxro1d.jpeg.html)

The Diamond Necklace came into being courtesy of a firm of Parisian jewelers who had, several years earlier, made it (so they had unwisely speculated) to sell to Madame du Barry. They had tried to interest Marie Antoinette in the necklace several times, and although she had been tempted, she considered it too extravagant and had refused to purchase it. Now the jewelers, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because of the interest payments on the money they had borrowed to buy the stones, approached the Countess, who openly boasted about how close she was to the Queen, and asked her to persuade Antoinette to buy the overwrought bauble which was worth as much as a full-rigged warship.

Jeanne shrewdly took the matter to the Cardinal, who was very much inclined to negotiate a purchase he thought would endear him further to Marie. Once more the Cardinal consulted the Count Cagliostro, and once more Cagliostro went into a trance and foresaw the Cardinal enriched and rewarded by the Queen with a post at the highest rank of the government. More outrageous lies, forgeries and deception ensued, and in the end the Queen agreed to purchase the necklace, or so the lovesick Cardinal and desperate jewellers thought. The jewelers delivered the necklace to the Cardinal, and the Cardinal delivered it to a trusted servant of the Queen (or so it appeared) and then the necklace simply vanished!

The first Marie Antoinette knew of all this was when the jewelers (most humbly and very, very anxiously) sent her a dunning letter for the gigantic unpaid bill. Then, as they say, all Hell broke loose. The scandal became public; the Cardinal was denounced, and Jeanne was arrested along with just about everybody else who had ever as much as shaken hands with the Cardinal. Acting against some very good advice, Marie Antoinette insisted on a trial for the Cardinal on the charge that he was guilty simply because he had believed that she was capable of having the sort of "relationship" with him he had thought she had. This, of course, played right into the hands of the Queen's numerous enemies who were only too happy to have publicly broadcast the exact nature of what the Cardinal had thought were the Queen's morals, or lack thereof.

There followed a sensational trial, which was ostensibly about the Cardinal's actions but was really about the Queen's reputation. Jeanne's lawyer was Maitre Doillot, a respected advocate who was in somewhat over his head in dealing with Jeanne. He was the family lawyer of the Paris Police Lieutenant General, and had been recommended to Jeanne by that worthy as a favor -for what we will not speculate, though many others did at the time. The Count Beugnot, himself a lawyer (and another one of Jeanne's former lovers) had turned down her plea that he defend her, and had this to say about Maitre Doillot-

"Doillot had been in practice before the Paris bar for many, many years, and not without renown. Deep in his sixties or beyond, he had retired to his study, where he was still consulted as an eminent jurist. Even a sage old gentleman such as this could not with impunity survive close contact with the Countess de la Motte. She completely turned his head. He believed implicitly all the tales she spun him, became emotionally involved with his client and put up an impassioned defense of her innocence, making his debut in the case with the publication of a trial brief, the most extravagant defense plea ever to flow from the pen of an attorney in all the years since attorneys first began composing defense pleas. Fantastic as a tale out of 'The Arabian Nights', it enjoyed, nonetheless, a sensational success. And to think that it was the composition of a venerable white-wig of seventy summers!".

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/50FC9D1F-0C18-483C-93F4-62B283F1E150.png_zps6coaqnu0.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/50FC9D1F-0C18-483C-93F4-62B283F1E150.png_zps6coaqnu0.jpeg.html)

The Abbe Georgel called Doillot's first plea "a tissue of lies, of striking improbabilities, contradictions and anachronisms". According to Mossiker, Doillot's own brother agreed-
"The man has either gone stark raving mad or Madame de la Motte has bewitched him as she did the Cardinal".

After much scandal mongering in both the courtroom and the streets the Queen's enemies won and the Cardinal was acquitted. Others were not so lucky- the Count Cagliostro was exiled from France, and eventually returned to Italy where he was arrested and convicted on charges of practicing Freemasonry; he died in prison in 1795. Jeanne was convicted and whipped, branded.

A young woman found guilty of conspiring in intrigues against the queen, Jeanne de la Motte was sentenced to be whipped, branded (with a V on each shoulder for voleuse [thief]) and imprisoned for life. She did not know this at the time as French prisoners were only told their fate immediately prior to the sentence being carried out (with the exception of the death penalty).
Minor punishments such as beatings, whippings and branding were normally carried out by executioners' aids but due to her high status, Jeanne's punishment was undertaken by the chief executioner of France. In order to maintain court dignity the sentence was scheduled for six o'clock in the morning June 21st 1786 in the courtyard of the Palace de Justice.

At five o'clock Jeanne was removed from her celll and taken to Parlement to hear her sentence pronounced. Haughty and scornful at first she refused to kneel whilst she heard her sentence as was customary but started screaming and thrashing about when she learned of her sentence. She had to be restrained and physically tied up abd carried down to the courtyard where a scaffold had been erected. Despite the early hour, a crowd of hundreds had gathered, for whippings of women were extremely popular entertainment. On seeing the scaffold, whips and braziers, Jeanne continued to thrash about and it took some time to remove her clothes. With much effort she was finally stripped of her attire and forced down upon her stomach whilst the executioner administered the punishment.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/FDD413BF-B0DC-450D-A487-F73DF438E349.png_zpsgol8sxcq.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/FDD413BF-B0DC-450D-A487-F73DF438E349.png_zpsgol8sxcq.jpeg.html)

Jeanne's escape from prison with her maid, Jeanne was disguised as a boy.

Jeanne was now a favorite of the anti-Antoinette faction, which was growing quickly in France, and she was able to intrigue to escape the country and made her way, with her husband, to London.

Once there she immediately set out on a plan of revenge against the Queen which took the form of her famous "Memoires Justificatifs de la Comtesse de Valois de la Motte". These contained her own highly slanted version of her life and the Diamond Necklace Affair, as well as some thirty pieces of correspondence she claimed had passed between the Cardinal and the Queen.

"From the moment of my arrival in London," she wrote, "my first and only thought had been publication of my justification for the eyes of all the world... I too would have preferred to spare the honour of the Queen, and I tried to warn her Majesty that I was in Possession of certain letters...incriminating her and exculpating me... All I asked in return was restitution of property rightfully mine which had been seized, after an iniquitous verdict, to enrich the coffers of the King. But I really never considered it likely that the French court would capitulate to those terms, and besides, my main goal was public vindication. To this purpose, then, I eagerly took up my pen, denying my feeble, tortured body even the minimal physical requirements of nourishment and sleep until my memoirs should be ready for publication. Although we were obliged to borrow money to defray the costs of printing, five thousand copies in French have now come off the press, and three thousand more in English; the latter went on sale at a guinea each in New Bond Street shops."

The readers of England and France could not get enough of the Countess's memoirs, although what you thought of them depended on which side of the Royal table you sat on- "a cesspool of calumny" was the verdict of the Abbe Georgel, friend and secretary of Cardinal Rohan. In October of 1789 a "Second Memoirs justicatif", much more barbed and venomous than the first, was rushed to the printers, another direct attack on the Queen by Jeanne, published in French and English and distributed in Paris where it stirred the mobs to a new frenzy. Mirabeau said of the Countess- "Madame de La Motte's voice alone brought on the horrors of July 14 and of October 5" (the storming of Versailles and the slaughter of the troops there by the 'Women's Army').

Her works spawned a storm of other pamphlets, each one trying to outdo the other in decrying the licentiousness and debauchery of the Queen. Frances Mossiker, in "The Queen's Necklace", notes, however, that's Jeanne's works were the most influential-

"There were other attacks perhaps more obscene, but they were published under noms de plume and therefore were never as pungent and convincing as those signed by a real-life name, a name famous, moreover, throughout Europe ever since the Necklace Trial".

In 1791 the Countess's two volume "Story of My Life" came off the presses, but Jeanne would not live to enjoy its fruits. In early June the London newspapers reported that a London bailiff had appeared at her lodgings to serve an order for her mounting debts. Others said that the men were actually secret agents sent by the Duke of Orleans; that was what Jeanne believed, and to get away from them she barricaded herself in and then climbed out a third floor window, falling to the street below. Badly injured, she lingered in extreme pain through the hot weeks of July and into August, when, on August 23rd, 1791, she died. She was buried a few days later in the churchyard of St. Mary's, in Lambeth. The Queen against whom Jeanne had intrigued for so long survived her by just two years, one month, and 23 days, before mounting the steps to the guillotine in Paris to the howling delight of the mob.
Frances.

Frances
17th December 2015, 18:39
http://youtu.be/1pZHXr4FE44

Édith Piaf - ''Ah! Ça ira!'' (vidéo)

Elen
18th December 2015, 16:30
Such an intriguing space in our history, Frances. So much to remember that is painful. Thank you for posting that.

Frances
18th December 2015, 19:06
I was greatly affected by all the pain I was reading about at the start of my walk through "The French Revolution.
I cope better with it now, although I still need a break at times.
The songs help, because I like them all, I play them when I am browsing through the thread.
Frances.

Frances
26th December 2015, 19:00
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/C6C62178-473D-43B8-B329-8F107F2BF894.png_zps9m5csmxt.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/C6C62178-473D-43B8-B329-8F107F2BF894.png_zps9m5csmxt.jpeg.html)

Maximilien Robespierre

Source:- http://www.historytoday.com/marisa-linton/robespierre-and-terror

Robespierre and the Terror

By Marisa Linton

Maximilien Robespierre has always provoked strong feelings. For the English he is the ‘sea-green incorruptible’ portrayed by Carlyle, the repellent figure at the head of the Revolution, who sent thousands of people to their death under the guillotine. The French, for the most part, dislike his memory still more. There is no national monument to him, though many of the revolutionaries have had statues raised to them. Robespierre is still considered beyond the pale; only one rather shabby metro station in a poorer suburb of Paris bears his name.

Although Robespierre, like most of the revolutionaries, was a bourgeois, he identified with the cause of the urban workers, the sans-culottes as they came to be known, and became a spokesman for them. It is for this reason that he came to dominate the Revolution in its most radical phase. This was the period of the Jacobin government, which lasted from June 1793 to Robespierre’s overthrow in July 1794; the months when the common people became briefly the masters of the first French republic, which had been proclaimed in September 1792. It is also known, more ominously, as the Terror.

The enigmatic figure of Robespierre takes us to the heart of the Revolution, and throws light both on its ideals, and on the violence that indelibly scarred.

Born in Arras in 1758, Robespierre suffered loss early in his life. His mother died when he was six, and soon after, his father abandoned the family. The children were brought up by elderly relatives who continually reminded them of their dependent situation and their father’s irresponsibility. Maximilien was the eldest, a conscientious, hardworking scholarship boy. As soon as he was able he shouldered the burden of caring for his younger siblings. He became a lawyer, leading a quiet and blameless life in his native town. He was best known for defending the poor, and for some rather lengthy and tedious speeches at the local academy.

In 1789, when he was in his early thirties, the Revolution transformed his destiny. He launched himself into the political maelstrom that would immerse him for the rest of his life. He was elected as a deputy for the Third Estate in the Estates General in May, and he witnessed the onset of the Revolution that broke the power of the absolute monarchy two months later. Painstakingly, he worked to forge a reputation for himself as a public speaker in the Assembly. He had his power base in the Jacobin Club, the most important of the revolutionary clubs where people debated events.

From the first, Robespierre was a radical and a democrat, defending the principle that the ‘rights of man’ should extend to all men – including the poor, and the slaves in the colonies. This stance won him a reputation among the sans-culottes and the radical left, but the earlier years of the Revolution were dominated by men who had no wish to see power in the hands of the propertyless. Robespierre was undaunted. As a spokesman for the opposition and critic of government, he was tireless and consistent. He was also for a long time a vehement opponent of the death penalty. Why did he later change his mind and become an advocate of Terror? Part of the answer to this question lies in the deterioration of the political situation between 1789 and 1792, and the failure of the attempt to set up a workable constitutional monarchy, under Louis XVI.

From the spring of 1792 onwards France was involved in a spiral of war, revolt and civil war. Counter-revolutionaries were plotting the restoration of the absolute monarchy with the support of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II (succeeded in March by Francis II). The Girondins, then the dominant revolutionary faction in the Legislative Assembly, spearheaded the drive for an aggressive war with the Empire, declaring war in April 1792. The avowed intention of their leader, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, was to polarize French politics, oblige the counter-revolutionaries to emerge into open opposition, and force the monarchy either to capitulate to the revolutionaries or to face its own destruction. In these circumstances, political views hardened, suspicion and fear increased, and the early optimism of the Revolution vanished.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/291D5408-97F6-42AD-B3FB-B0E913785962_zpscj1wyiij.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/291D5408-97F6-42AD-B3FB-B0E913785962_zpscj1wyiij.jpg.html)

Sans-Culottes

Robespierre himself had long warned of the dangers of provoking counter-revolution. He had tried to oppose the war, because he thought it would divide France and rally support for the counter-revolutionaries. Nor did he believe, as Brissot did, that the ordinary people of Europe would welcome an invading French army, even one that claimed to deliver liberty and equality. ‘No one,’ said Robespierre, ‘welcomes armed liberators.’ He stuck doggedly to this position, though it was deeply unpopular and he became politically isolated.

By the summer of 1792, his worst fears were realized. The French army, far from being victorious, was on the verge of defeat and suffered from disorganization and raw and inexperienced troops. Many people thought (not without reason) that Louis was secretly on the side of the Austrian and Prussian armies, which were now threatening Paris itself. Many now felt that Robespierre spoke for them when he declared that the aristocrats were plotting a conspiracy to destroy the Revolution. In August the monarchy was overthrown in a pitched battle at the Tuileries palace. A new government, the National Convention, was formed in September 1792, which promptly declared France to be a republic. By now Robespierre’s ascendancy in the Jacobin club was unrivalled. The Jacobins identified themselves with the popular movement and the sans-culottes, who in turn saw popular violence as a political right.

The most notorious instance of the crowd’s rough justice was the prison massacres of September 1792, when around 2,000 people, including priests and nuns, were dragged from their prison cells, and subjected to summary ‘justice’. The Convention was determined to avoid a repeat of these brutal scenes, but that meant taking violence into their own hands as an instrument of government.

When the Convention debated the fate of Louis XVI, now a prisoner of the revolutionaries, Robespierre and his youthful colleague, Saint-Just (1767-94) – also once an opponent of the death penalty – led the way in claiming that ‘Louis must die in order for the Revolution to live’. Robespierre had not abandoned his libertarian convictions, but he was coming to the conclusion that the ends justified the means, and that in order to defend the Revolution against those who would destroy it, the shedding of blood was justified.

In June 1793, the sans-culottes, exasperated by the inadequacies of the government, invaded the Convention and overthrew the Giron*dins. In their place they endorsed the political ascendancy of the Jacobins. Thus Robespierre came to power on the back of popular street violence. Though the Girondins and the Jacobins were both on the extreme left, and shared many of the same radical republican convictions, the Jacobins were much more brutally efficient in setting up a war government. A Committee of Public Safety was established to act as a war cabinet. It became the chief executive power, with Robespierre – now moving from opposition to government for the first time – one of its twelve members. Like so many politicians making such a move, Robespierre’s attitude to political power was to change dramatically from this moment. In June the Jacobins drafted a new constitution, the most libertarian and egalitarian the world had yet seen. Yet for some months they hesitated to implement it, as the pressures of war with Austria and Prussia, and of full-blown civil war in the Vendée in the west were compounded by revolts across the country by départements rejecting the authority of the radical government in Paris.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/320A38EE-53E7-4E8D-A42A-7FCAA7882C77_zpsg6rrq5io.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/320A38EE-53E7-4E8D-A42A-7FCAA7882C77_zpsg6rrq5io.jpg.html)

Mass shootings at Nantes, 1793

In September 1793, the impatient sans-culottes once again invaded the Convention to exert pressure on the deputies. They wanted economic measures to ensure their food supplies, and the government to deal with counter-revolutionaries. A delegation of the forty-eight sections of sans-culottes urged the Convention to ‘make Terror the order of the day!’ The Jacobins responded: the Law of Suspects was passed on September 17th, 1793, giving wide powers of arrest to the ruling Committees, and defining ‘suspects’ in broad terms. In October the Convention passed the Decree on Emergency Government. This authorized the revolutionary government to suspend peacetime rights and legal safeguards and to employ coercion and violence. Saint-Just decreed that the government ‘would be revolutionary until the peace’. The constitution was shelved: the libertarian ideals of the Revolution were suspended, indefinitely. Sans-culottes formed armed militias to go out into the provinces to requisition supplies for the armies and the urban populace and to root out counter-revolutionaries. In October Brissot and other Girondin leaders, as well as Marie-Antoinette went to the guillotine.

For the first time in history terror became an official government policy, with the stated aim to use violence in order to achieve a higher political goal. Unlike the later meaning of ‘terrorists’ as people who use violence against a government, the terrorists of the French Revolution were the government. The Terror was legal, having been voted for by the Convention.

Robespierre, like a number of the Jacobin government, had been a lawyer. He clung to the form of law partly in order to prevent the sans-culottes taking the law into their own hands through mob violence. As fellow revolutionary Danton said, ‘let us be terrible in order to stop the people from being so’. The resort to Terror also emerged out of relative weakness and fear. The Jacobins had only a shaky legitimacy and innumerable opponents throughout France, ranging from intransigent royalists to more moderate revolutionaries who had seen power centralized and their ideas superseded. Many people in France were already indifferent, if not openly hostile, to the Revolution. For many the Revolution now meant requisitioning of supplies, military conscription and the constant threat to their traditional ways of life, churches, even time – for the revolutionaries had even invented a new calendar. Throughout the year of Jacobin rule, it was the sans-culottes who kept them in power. But the price of that support was the blood-letting.

The number of death sentences in Paris was 2,639, while the total number during the Terror in the whole of France (including Paris) was 16,594. With the exception of Paris (where many of the more important prisoners were transferred to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal) most of the executions were carried out in regions of revolt such as the Vendée, Lyon and Marseilles. There were wide regional variations. Because on the whole the Jacobins were meticulous in maintaining a legal structure for the Terror clear records exist for official death sentences. But many more people were murdered without formal sentences imposed in a court of law. Some died in overcrowded and unsanitary prisons awaiting trial, while others died in the civil wars and federalist revolts, their deaths unrecorded. The historian Jean-Clément Martin, suggests that up to 250,000 insurgents and 200,000 republicans met their deaths in the Vendée, a war which lasted from 1793-96 in which both sides suffered appalling atrocities.

Today the civil war in the Vendée is largely forgotten except by specialists. It is of the guillotine that most people think when they hear about the Terror. After so many bloodlettings of the twentieth century, why does that image still have the power to shock us? The historian Lord Acton once famously said that in terms of the time, the deaths under the Terror were relatively few in number (he was thinking of the official death sentences). As Acton pointed out, many millions were to die in Napoleon’s wars for no better reason than his own glory. Yet the aura of the hero still clings to Napoleon, while Robespierre’s name is synonymous with violence and horror.

Perhaps it is because of the stark contrast between Robespierre’s ideals and what he became that the question of the Terror remains shocking. In the mind of Robespierre and many of his colleagues, the Terror had a deeper moral purpose beyond winning the civil war: to bring about a ‘republic of virtue’. By this he meant a society in which people sought the happiness of their fellow humans rather than their own material benefit. France must be regenerated on moral lines. ‘What is our aim?’ he asked in a speech of February 1794:

The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws are written, not on marble or stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them and of the tyrant who denies them.
He came to the conclusion that in order to establish this ideal republic one had to be prepared to eliminate opponents of the Revolution. The irony of this idea rings through in the same speech, when he justified the Terror. He said:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.
Throughout his time in government Robespierre conducted his private life as a man of virtue. Far from living in palaces, amassing treasure, or allying himself with royalty, as Napoleon was to do, Robespierre lived a celibate life as a lodger, occupying simple rooms in the house of a master carpenter. He was known as ‘the Incorruptible’ for, unlike many politicians, he refused to use a public position for private gain and self-advancement. He lived simply on his deputy’s salary. He walked everywhere, never taking a carriage. He enjoyed walks in the country and musical soirées with his landlord’s family.

Yet the other side of this benign, if dull, domestic life, was the public role he undertook as a spokesman for the Committee of Public Safety and the guiding hand on the policy of Terror. He had become an astute political tactician, and he used these means finally to achieve political power. He could be accused, justly, of political ambition, but he himself did not see this as inconsistent with his dedication to the Revolution. He had an unshakable belief that his own aims coincided with what was best for the Revolution. He was a man of painful sincerity. He was not a hypocrite. He really did believe that the Terror could sustain the republic of virtue. But he was naturally self-righteous, suspicious and unforgiving. All these qualities came to the fore as it became evident that while the Terror played a key part in winning the war and quelling the counter-revolution, it was having the reverse effect as far as installing the republic of virtue was concerned, undermining any genuine enthusiasm for the Revolution. Even Saint-Just, Robespierre’s most loyal friend on the Committee of Public Safety, could not be blind to the way the Terror, with its neighbourhood surveillance committees and denunciations, encouraged an atmosphere of duplicity, cynicism and fear, even among the Revolution’s most fervent supporters, the Jacobins. ‘The Revolution is frozen’, he wrote dispairingly in a private note in 1794.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/D30467F6-0CFD-467A-8433-725EDE72A03B_zpswseda8ny.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/D30467F6-0CFD-467A-8433-725EDE72A03B_zpswseda8ny.jpg.html)

Le Vieux Cordelier: launched by Desmoulins

Some of the victims of the last months of the Terror were Robespierre’s former friends and colleagues, stalwarts of the Jacobin Club. They included Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre’s comrade from his schooldays. Desmoulins had taken the fateful step of supporting Georges Danton, another former friend of Robespierre, in his call that the Terror be wound down, and the power of the Committee of Public Safety broken. In December 1793  he launched a journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, arguing that the Revolution should return to its original ideals. Up to a point Robespierre had supported Desmoulins and his campaign against the more violent extremism of the sans-culottes, led by the journalist, Hébert. Robespierre read, and approved, the first two issues of Le Vieux Cordelier in proof. But in the third issue of the journal, Desmoulins parodied the notorious Law of Suspects and its wide range of people who could be considered ‘counter-revolutionary’. Under the Roman Empire, he said, paraphrasing Tacitus, people could be condemned as counter-revolutionary for being ‘too rich ... or too poor ... too melancholy ... or too self-indulgent’. Robespierre saw this satire – rightly – as a veiled attack on the Committee of Public Safety itself. Robespierre tried to persuade Desmoulins to burn the journal publicly in the Jacobin Club. Desmoulins refused, recklessly citing the words of Robespierre’s hero, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, against him: ‘burning is not an answer’. Robespierre was stung, and stopped trying to help his friend. When the Committees decided to arrest Danton and Desmoulins in March 1794, Robespierre used his personal knowledge of the two men to supplement his notes for the official indictment against them. Desmoulins’ wife, Lucille, tried to agitate for his release but she too was accused of conspiracy against the Revolution and followed her husband to the guillotine in April. The letter from her heart-broken mother to Robespierre, begging for his intervention to save her daughter, went unanswered. Robespierre had said that a man of virtue must put the good of la patrie before private loyalty, even to his friends. Never had his own virtue seemed so appalling and inhuman as at that moment.

Perhaps he thought so too, and the strain of what he had become was beginning to tell. In the last few weeks of his life he shut himself in his rooms, and did not attend the meetings of the Committee or the Convention. He was losing his grip, both on himself and on power. In his absence it is notable that it was ‘business as usual’ for the Terror: in Paris the executions intensified, based on the notorious Law of 22nd Prairial (June 10th, 1794) which, by depriving the accused of counsel and removing the need for witnesses to substantiate accusations, removed the vestige of justice from the Tribunal.

Robespierre was never the head of the government, nor the only terrorist: he was one man on the Committee – albeit its most high-profile member. Other members of the Committee, together with members of the Committee of General Security (responsible for the police, prisons and most of the arrests), were as much responsible for the running of the Terror as Robespierre. Some of his colleagues were hard, ambitious men, not averse to political corruption unlike Robespierre, and scornful of his dream of a virtuous republic. There were aspects of the Terror with which Robespierre disagreed. He was an opponent of dechristianization – a policy carried out by some militant sans-culottes of forcibly closing churches and preventing any kind of religious activity. In June 1794 he organized the festival of the Supreme Being, based on Enlightenment deist beliefs, intended to unify the people around broadly moral and vaguely religious principles. It made him a laughing stock with the atheists among the deputies and failed to conciliate devout Catholics, long since alienated from the Revolution by its anti-clericalism.

Robespierre also deplored the violent excesses of some of the Jacobin deputies sent out ‘on mission’ from the Convention to oversee the implementation of policy in the provinces and with the armies. While many of the deputies on mission were conscientious and restrained, others misused their powers to arrest, intimidate and execute local populations. Robespierre had some of these deputies, including Tallien, Fouché, Fréron, Barras and Collot d’Herbois, in his sights when he went to the Convention for the first time in more than four weeks on the July 26th (8 Thermidor by the revolutionary calendar). It was the turning point. He had already quarrelled with men on both the ruling Committees, and, having rejected the reconciliation
which Saint-Just tried to broker, he was left with little alternative but to try to destroy his enemies before they could do the same to him. He made a long speech in which he sought to justify the stand he had taken as a defender of virtue. But he also took the opportunity to demand another purge of suspect deputies. In a fatal miscalculation, he failed to name these men. Not unnaturally, many of the fearful deputies thought he might mean them. ‘The names!’ they shouted. But he refused. His enemies among the Jacobins spent that night in organizing their conspiracy. The next day Saint-Just was shouted down when he tried to speak in his friend’s defence. Robespierre and his closest associates were arrested and, after a futile attempt to rally the sans-culottes to defend them at the town hall, they were executed the following day.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/8E87638C-A44A-4509-9412-660A7D977C57_zps7r1xpobr.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2015-12/8E87638C-A44A-4509-9412-660A7D977C57_zps7r1xpobr.jpg.html)

The execution of Robespierre

The men who overthrew Robespierre were more ruthless and cynical terrorists than he. They included Vadier, Elie Lacoste, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois on the Committees, as well as the deputies who had carried out atrocities whilst ‘on mission’. Initially they wanted the Terror to continue. But it rapidly became clear that the public had sickened of it. Since the overwhelming victory over the Austrians in the Low Countries at Fleurus on June 26th, the military justification for it had also diminished. In the reaction after Thermidor, as the coup is known, terrorist politicians rapidly restyled themselves. Members of the Committees now claimed that they had concerned themselves exclusively with the war: it was only the Robespierrists who had been terrorists.

In the popular imagination Robespierre the enigma rapidly became the embodiment of the Terror. Yet he would never have been so influential had he not spoken for a wide swathe of society and government. When he spoke of conspiracies against the Revolution, of the threats to ‘the patrie in danger’, and the need for extreme measures, he voiced the fears of many at that time that France was about to be overwhelmed by foreign and internal enemies. The policies of the Jacobin Committees had, after all, been endorsed by the deputies of the Convention. Perhaps this is why he has been so vilified: in holding one individual culpable for the ills of the Terror, French society was able to avoid looking into its own dark heart at that traumatic moment. Robespierre, you might say, took the rap.

Marisa Linton is Senior Lecturer in History at Kingston University and the author of The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Palgrave, 2001).
Frances.

bsbray
28th December 2015, 08:16
A curiosity about Robespierre is that while he was a prominent member of the revolutionary government, he was actually styling himself among those close to him as a messianic figure. One of his colleagues discovered some letters to him that were addressing him as if he were a deity, and embarrassed him publicly about the ordeal, which stifled any schemes he had to become something like a Napoleon figure (or worse) himself.

Frances
10th January 2016, 21:56
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/D9D5DA63-3B23-4AE8-9873-8FF6449D9966.png_zps9uzzsua4.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/D9D5DA63-3B23-4AE8-9873-8FF6449D9966.png_zps9uzzsua4.jpeg.html)

Madame Tussaud, age 20
A Portrait Study by John T. Tussaud

Source:- https://archive.org/stream/11499676.2170.emory.edu/11499676_2170#page/n7/mode/2up

Memoirs Of Madame Tussaud : Witness To The French Revoloution.

Part 1.

Story starts with Madame Tussaud and her mother going to stay in Paris with her uncle, John Christopher Curtius, who had, for some years previously been practising his profession as a medical man at Berne, when the Prince de Conti, happened to be sojourning in that city, and having accidentally seen some portraits and anatomical subjects modelled in wax by M. Curtius, the Prince was so struck with the exquisite delicacy and
beauty which these ingenious specimens of art displayed, that he called upon the artist, and personaly complimenting him upon his talent, offered to give not only his own patronage, but secure him the support of many members of the royal family and the principal nobility in France if he would take up his residence in Paris, and further, that at the outset his royal highness would provide for him at his own cost suitable apartments.

M. Curtius, who had hitherto considered himself only an amateur in the art of modelling, was over- joyed at the approbation of a royal prince, especialy one so wealthy and powerful as the Prince de Conti was at that period, and he at once profited by so favourable opportunity. Renouncing, therefore, the medical profession, he proceeded to Paris, where he found that his royal patron had selected for him handsome apartments at the Hotel d'Allegre, in the Rue St. Honore. The artist's time was for a considerable period wholly occupied in executing orders for the prince, whose liberality and kindness not only equalled but rather surpassed his promises.
The art of modelling wax was at that period in France considered a fashionable accomplishment, and M. Curtius's studio became one of the lions of Paris.

Little Marie Gresholtz was then but six years of age, but no sooner did her uncle's eyes fall upon her than he said, " From this time you are my adopted daughter."
It was indeed a wonderful change from the quiet homeliness of her mother's residence at Berne to be introduced, child as she was, to all the great and noble in France, for the house of M. Curtius at that period was the resort of the most talented men of the day, particularly as regarded the literati and artists. Amongst those who were frequently in the habit of dining at her uncle's, Madame Tussaud specially remembered Voltaire, Rousseau, Dr. Franklin, Mirabeau, and La Fayette.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/669A8E38-38DA-490B-B9CC-52AB085E9149_zpsys9r3jmt.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/669A8E38-38DA-490B-B9CC-52AB085E9149_zpsys9r3jmt.jpg.html)

Voltaire

Marie Gresholtz however, did not employ the whole of her time in entertaining guests or in contemplating upon men and manners. She early imbibed not only a taste but an interest
for that art in which M. Curtius so much excelled and so closely did she imitate her uncle that after a few years it was impossible to distinguish as to the degree of excellence between their performances. At that period modelling in wax was much in vogue, in which representations of flowers, fruit, and other subjects were often most beautifully executed ; and to such a perfection had the niece arrived in giving character and accuracy to her portraits, that, whilst still very young, to her was confided the task of taking casts from the heads of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Mirabeau, and the principal men of the day, who most patiently submitted themselves to the hands of the fair artist. The cast which she took from the face of Voltaire was only two months before he died.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/9EDB47FC-50C2-4077-AC98-076B7AC351D5.png_zpsgn0itjor.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/9EDB47FC-50C2-4077-AC98-076B7AC351D5.png_zpsgn0itjor.jpeg.html)

Rousseau

Now we arrive at the crowning feature in Madame Tussaud's history—one which ever after- wards attached her to the royal family of France, which led her, in her zeal for the royal cause, to be herself imprisoned, to deeply sympathize with the sufferings of many innocent persons, and finally to leave the country of her adoption and settle in England, thankful to be free from the dreadful acts committed by all parties during the period of the French Revolution.

Amongst the numerous members of the royal family who were often accustomed to visit M. Curtius's apartments, and admire his works and those of his niece, was Madame Elizabeth, the king's sister. The princess, being desirous herself to learn the art of modelling in wax, sought the services of Marie Gresholtz, and her royal highness became so attached to her young instructress that she applied to M. Curtius to permit his niece to reside at the palace of Versailles, and become her companion and friend.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/88EBD5D1-2035-4923-886F-755033C61901_zpsdaoeljzk.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/88EBD5D1-2035-4923-886F-755033C61901_zpsdaoeljzk.jpg.html)

Benjamin Franklin

Madame Tussaud never forgot the kindness she received within the palace, nor the amiable qualities of the members of the royal family. She says in her Memoirs, " Had not the rank and misfortunes of Madame Elizabeth claimed the sympathy of posterity, her virtues alone so endeared her to those who knew the royal lady, that her memory would still have been indelibly impressed upon the hearts of those who enjoyed her friendship. She was strictly religious and charitable, in the purest sense of the word, in all her thoughts and actions ; benevolence and a sense of generosity characterized all she did." In fact, so amiable does Madame Tussaud represent the princess to have been, that up to the close of her own life she could never speak of Madame Elizabeth without shedding tears.

The palace of Versailles, where Madame Elizabeth with the rest of the royal family resided, was specially celebrated at that day as one of the most magnificent in the world. At the period when Madame Tussaud was a guest at this palace, the Court was revelling in the acme of its gaiety.
In the preceding reign, pleasure, luxury, dissipation, and even debauchery, had arrived at their climax; but when Louis XVI., with Marie Antoinette, ascended the throne, although all that was splendid, with every display of wealth and grandeur.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/DF045934-BD22-4E60-AEE5-F2FAA6B84786.png_zpsay7i3ewj.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/DF045934-BD22-4E60-AEE5-F2FAA6B84786.png_zpsay7i3ewj.jpeg.html)

Gardens in the Palace of Versailles

Such a Court, presided over by a queen whose personal charms were only equalled by the elegance and affability of her deportment, operated as a magnet which attracted the majority of the French nobility. All strove to pay their court to the rising sun ; all were endeavouring to outvie each other in the strain of compliment with which they addressed their royal mistress, whose superior qualifications justly comanded their admiration, while a constant attempt at expressing their deep sense of her perfections created a high-flown style of language and an habitual tone of gallantry, until it became the necessary style in high society for ladies to be addressed in an exalted tone of imagery ever intended to convey flattery.

Whatever could be added to the fascination of the colloquial powers by adorning the person was not neglected ; the expense and richness displayed in costumes far exceeded that which is exhibited in the present day, particularly as regards male attire. The rich and costly embroidery with which the gentlemen's drapery was then bedecked had a far more brilliant effect than the plain coats and waistcoats of our own times ; lace frills, powder, a sword, and diamond buckles much contributed to give eclat to the male costume of that day, whilst the stomachers of the females were often one blaze of diamonds.
Frances.


To be continued....

Elen
12th January 2016, 11:40
Hope you don't mind Frances.

This is from the museum in London, The Madame herself as she appeared later in life.

1477

Elen

Frances
12th January 2016, 13:25
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/D1D2D5EC-C64E-4647-844C-ED67E2DF7E53.png_zpslsrykgdv.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/D1D2D5EC-C64E-4647-844C-ED67E2DF7E53.png_zpslsrykgdv.jpeg.html)

Marie Antionette

Source:- https://archive.org/stream/11499676.2170.emory.edu/11499676_2170#page/n7/mode/2up

Memoirs Of Madame Tussaud : Witness To The French Revoloution.

Part 2.

With the soft and gentle manners of the women, and the gallant and chivalrous tone of the men, a constant air of extreme gaiety was united, moving, as they were, in a vortex of pleasure. Their minds were employed upon nothing beyond devising new inventions for varying their enjoyments ; but whilst experiencing a succession of these luxurious delights, whilst following a career of extravagant dissipation, and whilst basking in the lap of voluptuous ecstasy, it must not be imagined that the pleasant vices were wholly banished from the palace of Versailles.

Gaming, in particular, predominated to an excess, the queen and princess losing deeply, whilst the Duke of Orleans won to an immense amount. Intrigues of various descriptions were by no means strangers, although not so prevalent as during the reign of Louis XV Constantly conforming to the habits and etiquette of the Court had engendered a love of dress and a degree of effeminacy in the men which lowered them in the estimation of other nations.

It is necessary to say this before we turn to the other side of the picture which Madame Tussaud so graphically describes in the Memoirs she has left behind her. She says, " Let us turn awhile from those scenes of revelry, from those gorgeous assemblies where wealth was lavished with a reckless hand, where profusion and luxury abounded even to satiety, where the cup of pleasure was quaffed till its votaries were bewildered with delirium of enjoyment ; and let us behold the source from whence came the means to supply these costly banquets.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/A9B5F027-FBDA-43E3-82AA-EC397C1ED09F_zpsudjmp9q7.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/A9B5F027-FBDA-43E3-82AA-EC397C1ED09F_zpsudjmp9q7.jpg.html)

And what do we see but an impoverished country, a peasantry in the last stages of deprivation and misery, by the people being so oppressively and injudiciously taxed that the cultivator, on whom the burden principally fell, could scarcely, even by his own hard-earned labour, obtain a miserable sustenance, the major part of his produce being absorbed by the exactions of the State ? An English author who travelled in France at that period stated that he had seen a plough drawn by a wretched horse, a cow, a donkey, and a goat, whilst a peasant without shoes and stockings guided it, as a half-naked urchin was endeavouring to whip his miserable team forward." This, Madame Tussaud thinks, must be an exaggerated picture, but she is ready to admit that the excessive extravagance of the French Court was paid at that period by the sweat of the peasant's brow.

This was written after years of reflection ; but still Madame Tussaud insists in saying that Louis XVI. was kept in ignorance of his people's sufferings ; that Marie Antoinette, his queen, combined every attribute which could be united to constitute loveliness and amiability in woman, possessing youth, grace, and elegance to a degree never surpassed, a sweetness and fascination in her manners enchanting all who ever had the hapiness to be greeted by the beam of her smile, in which there was a witchery that has more than once converted the fury of her most brutal enemies into admiration.

She was above the middle height, and had a commanding air, such as did not exact but that won obedience ; her complexion was so extremely fair that Madame Le Brun, the celebrated portrait painter of that period, observed, when taking the picture of the queen, that it was impossible for the art of colouring to render justice to the exquisite delicacy and transparency of her skin. So fair a being, and one who occupied so exalted a position, could not fail to constantly meet with the poison of adulation, but it never sullied the purity of her heart, at least as far as Madame Tussaud was enabled to judge, and she formed her opinion from a thorough knowledge of the character of Marie Antoinette, which she conceived she had the best opportunity of acquiring from having so long lived under the same roof as her royal mistress.
That She was fond of pleasure, dress, and admiration there can be no doubt, and that to the latter she might lend too willing an ear is possible, but that she ever was induced to be guilty of any dereliction from morality Madame Tussaud regards as the foulest calumny.

Louis XVI. was a man of portly appearance, rather handsome than otherwise ; he was nearly five feet ten in height, but perhaps stouter than is consistent with our ideas of a handsome figure. He was an intellectual man, however he might lack that nerve and decision of character which was so peculiarly demanded by the extraordinary events which took place during his reign, and the very critical positions in which he was placed. He did not enter freely into all the extravagance and dissipation of the Court, but wanted firmness and resolution to repress those costly banquets and expensive nights of revelry in which he would not participate. Instead of joining the gay throng he would often retire to his studies.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/9E0B7D18-5CE9-46E7-94C9-2E57768A6A5D.png_zps1nhiujek.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/9E0B7D18-5CE9-46E7-94C9-2E57768A6A5D.png_zps1nhiujek.jpeg.html)

King Louis in his forge

Though hunting was said to be his favourite pursuit, Madame Tussaud says lock-making was his darling recreation, and that he would be occupied hours each day in making locks, and that many of those on the doors of the palace of Versailles were made by his own hands.

So much did the taste for resemblances in wax prevail during the reign of Louis XVI. that his majesty, the queen, and all the members of the royal family, and most of the eminent characters of the day submitted to M. Curtius and his niece whilst they took models of them ; and when the ambassadors of Tippoo Sahib were at Paris, the Court amused themselves in a singular manner with the credulity of the Indians. After they had seen the exhibition of M. Curtius's wax figures, they were shown, as they supposed, wax figures of the members of the king's household at the palace of Versailles ; but instead of being wax models the courtiers themselves entered the glass cases, and the king and queen were highly amused at the remarks of the Indians, who were forcibly struck with the life resemblance.


Of all the interesting characters who visited Madame Elizabeth, Madame Tussaud says she was most charmed with the Princesse de Lamballe, whose misfortunes and fatal end afterwards excited so deep a sympathy that her name can scarcely be pronounced without causing an involuntary shudder. She was rather under the middle stature, remarkable for the extraordinary fairness of her skin, had light hair, a good colour, aquiline nose, and blue eyes, the chin rather too long and promi- nent.and altogether more pleasing than handsome. But her amiable qualities and sweetness of manners endeared her to all who had the opportunity of appreciating her merits This unfortunate princess was born in 1749, at Turin, and was christened Marie Therese Louise de Savoie-Carignan. She married the Prince de Lamballe, son of the Due de Penthievre; and only six weeks after they were united, he was killed in a duel by the Prince de Conde in the gardens of the Temple, for which the latter was temporarily exiled to his estates. She consequently became a widow, and remained so. She was a very intimate friend of Madame Elizabeth and the queen, and used frequently to visit them.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/3ABFEB3D-8F57-4077-AE36-8FA685EEF6B3.png_zpsjulfr03g.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/3ABFEB3D-8F57-4077-AE36-8FA685EEF6B3.png_zpsjulfr03g.jpeg.html)

Marie Therese de Savoie, princesse de Lamballe by Louis-Édouard Rioult

Whilst in the palace all was gaiety, all was splendour, without there were murmurings, but these never appeared to have reached the royal ear. Madame Tussaud says that, on reflecting upon those days spent at the Palace of Versailles, she considers it remarkable how little notice was apparently taken at Court of the disturbances and political storms which were raging and fomenting without. She,however, remembers so often to have seen Madame Elizabeth weeping, and she could only suppose that these tears were caused by the increasing troubles which menaced her brother's kingdom.

She Well recollects the circumstance Of the king banishing his Parliament, but no conversation was held upon the subject at the palace, although she remembers her most intimate friend, Madame Campan (afterwards appointed governess to the children of the Legion of Honour), observing in confidence how important a bearing it would have on the future progress of State affairs, how dangerous was such a measure, and how much she dreaded the consequences. But there appeared generally a sort of understanding, even amongst the attendants in the palace, that politics should be a forbidden subject ; so that it was only by accident that Madame Tussaud ever heard of the transactions which were occurring relative to the Government, and threatening its dissolution, with that of the monarchy, and in fact of all social order.
Indeed, it would seem that the courtiers did all they could to keep Louis XVI. in the dark concerning the democratic feeling of the nation, and until too late the king believed his subjects were loyal and his actions generally approved.

Many and great had been the changes in the public mind during the many months that the young artist remained in the Palace of Versailles, but she was entirely ignorant of these matters. At the commencement to of the year 1789, M. Curtius was anxious to have his niece once more under his own roof ; accordingly, he repaired to Versailles and made arrangements for her departure, and with much reluctance she took leave of her kind friend and patron, Madame Elizabeth. Soon after being installed again as her uncle's housekeeper, Madame Tussaud found that his guests were of a different stamp from those who had formerly visited him, and that he himself had very much changed his views in regard to loyalty. Formerly, philosophers and the amateurs and professors of literature, the arts, and sciences, ever resorted to the hospitable dwelling of M. Curtius ; but they were replaced by fanatic politicians, furious demagogues, and wild theorists, for ever thundering forth their anathemas against monarchy, haranguing on the different forms of government, and propounding their extravagant ideas on republicanism.

The mob appearing to increase every hour in number and strength, the National Assembly sent a representation to the king of the state of excitement existing in Paris, and imploring his majesty to remove the troops surrounding the city, who, being so obnoxious to the people, caused such irritation as to be dangerous to the public welfare. The king foolishly answered, " I am the best judge of the necessity of the troops remaining where they are."
The populace soon became cognizant of the king's intention to retain the hated troops, and they became desperate ; they congregated about the Bastille. " There can be no liberty," said one, " whilst that prison stands." The words had a magical effect, and on the celebrated 14th of July, 1789, it was taken by the people, after a tremendous conflict, which would have done credit to a better cause. This strong fortress was taken by an armed rabble and rebel troops in a few hours.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/0660C59A-AA0E-48A6-ACC4-7A95BA6AA02F.png_zpsltou0aw3.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-01/0660C59A-AA0E-48A6-ACC4-7A95BA6AA02F.png_zpsltou0aw3.jpeg.html)


To be continued....

Frances
5th February 2016, 15:15
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-02/779589E4-A3A7-4232-9F9A-4388CF68D104_zpsspsulwfb.png (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-02/779589E4-A3A7-4232-9F9A-4388CF68D104_zpsspsulwfb.png.html)

Louis XVI and family being returned to Paris after their failed escape.

Source:- https://archive.org/stream/11499676.2170.emory.edu/11499676_2170#page/n7/mode/2up

M. Curtius was a man of acute penetration, and knowing exactly the position of affairs, he was enabled to calculate what must be the inevitable issue whenever the trial of strength should be brought to the dreaded ordeal which he foresaw was rapidly approaching. Therefore, for his own preservation and that of his family and property, he adhered in appearance to that party whom he knew must prevail ; although he always declared to Madame Tussaud and her mother, that he was at heart a royalist, but he observed, if he pro- claimed himself such, it would not serve the king an iota nor retard for an instant the thunder- bolt which threatened all the royal family with annihilation ; even if he remained neutral, M.Curtius assured his family, he should only ensure their destruction whenever the republican party obtained the ascendancy.

This was the explanation Madame Tussaud received from her uncle when accounting for the number of visitors who frequented his house whose politics were of the most fanatical description, and whose theories concerning the different forms of government all tended to the subversion of monarchy. Amongst the rest, the Duke of Orleans was a most frequent visitor, and was regarded by Madame Tussaud almost with detestation, as were many of his satellites, by whom he was constantly surrounded ; and although these revolutionary enthusiasts seldom entered to any great extent on political subjects during dinner, and the ladies retired immediately after, yet enough was heard to convince Madame Tussaud that a terrific storm was gathering, and to cause her to tremble for its consequences.

Though the commissioners delegated to inquire into the affair of the king's departure acquitted him of any evil intentions towards his country, the mob without, and the Jacobin club, were determined to denounce him, and this led to repeated disturbances in the streets of Paris, which often terminated in bloodshed. Robespierre now made his appearance on the stage in support of republicanism ; but Danton and Camille Desmoulins were the most daring orators of the mob. Madame Tussaud remembered the latter, quite at the commencement of the Revolution in 1780, liaranguing the people in the Palais Royal mounted upon a table with a brace of pistols in his hand, shouting, "To arms !" He now plucked a leaf from a tree, with which he formed a cockade, and exhorted the people to follow his example, that it might form a bond of union in the sacred cause of contending for their liberties.

The trees were soon stripped of their leaves ; and as Camille Desmoulins remained the mouthpiece of the mob, and was by profession a lawyer, he was called the " Attorney-General of the Lamp-post," having caused and presided over several of these summary executions by the mob. He was born at Guise in Picardy, and was the son of a lieutenant-general. He first appeared before the public at the bar pleading against his father, whom he wished to compel to give an increase of allowance to his unnatural son, though he was aware that his parent's circumstances were too limited to render such an increase possible. He subsequently became secretary to Danton, and was a most active agent in promoting every bad purpose suggested by his employer.

At length the National Assembly arrived at the termination of its sittings. The constitution was completed and presented by sixty members to the king, by whom it was accepted, and immediately he was restored to an appearance of freedom ; that is to say, the guard under which Louis had been kept in a state of surveillance, was removed, and on his declaration of his acceptance of the constitution, there was a feeling of satisfaction in Paris, whilst La Fayette, taking advantage of so auspicious a moment, proposed a general amnesty, which should cast, as it were, a veil of oblivion upon all acts associated with the revolution. This proposition was carried and proclaimed amid shouts of applause, which was followed by throwing open all the prisons, and this was hailed by shouts of approbation from all quarters of the capital, and echoed from the remotest provinces of France.

But Louis scarcely understood the new constitution or the powers it gave to the Legislative Assembly. he had to suffer severe humiliations; first, the terms " majesty " and " sire " were to be omitted ; secondly, when the king entered the Assembly the members remained sitting, and one republican, more bold than the rest, ventured to come into his presence without taking off his hat. All this was gall and wormwood to Louis, who sobbingly told the queen the insults to which he had been subject at the first meeting of the Assembly. She endeavoured to console him, but the wound was not to be healed.

The king endeavoured to keep up as much dignity as possible, and the subject which gave most umbrage to the people was that Louis would not give up his veto ; which meant,of course, that he should have the privilege of annulling any decree of the Legislative Assembly if he should think it wise to do so. But the enemies of the king represented the veto in so obnoxious a light, that many absolutely thought that within it centred all their grievances, and, as a term of reprobation, the mob called his Majesty " Monsieur Veto." general was this designation, that many thought it was his real name. Madame Tussaud remembers a person asking her uncle the question, who expressed the deepest astonishment when told that the king's name was Capet.

At the commencement of the year 1792 every- thing was fast tending to republicanism. The masses wore the bonnet rouge as the symbol of liberty. The dress of the sansculottes was also very general. Madame Tussaud remembers once to have seen the Duke of Orleans clad in that singular costume. It consisted of a short jacket, pantaloons, and a round hat, with a handkerchief worn sailor fashion loose round the neck, with the ends long and hanging down, the shirt-collar seen above, the hair cut short, without powder, a la Titus, and shoes tied with strings. This dress at that period was in every respect remarkable, for
it consisted of the very reverse of the prevailing fashion.

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-02/4F15AC01-0030-411E-9EA1-D9625523A45A.png_zpsdldizpkx.jpeg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/2016-02/4F15AC01-0030-411E-9EA1-D9625523A45A.png_zpsdldizpkx.jpeg.html)

The hair short, without powder, a la Titus.

Marat at this time published a paper of a most malicious character, and a decree had been issued against him for having recommended murder. " The outrageous conduct of this demon," says Madame Tussaud, " had more than once obliged him to remain in concealment, and having been a visitor of my uncle's, he came one Saturday night and requested an asylum, having in his hand a carpet-bag containing what few clothes and linen he required, and he remained with us until the following Saturday. Thus was I in the same house with Marat a whole week, the most ferocious monster that the revolution produced.

He was very short, of middle height, with very small arms, one of which was feeble from natural defect, and he appeared lame. His complexion was sallow, of a greenish hue, his eyes dark and piercing, his hair wild and raven black, his countenance had a fierce
aspect, he was slovenly in his dress, and even dirty in his person, his manner was abrupt, coarse, and rude. He used to write almost the whole day in a corner by the aid of a little lamp, and on one occasion he came to me, gave me a tap upon the shoulder with such roughness as caused me to shudder, saying, ' There, mademoiselle, it is not for ourselves that I and my fellow-labourers are working, but it is for you, and your children, and your children's children. As to ourselves, perhaps we shall not live to enjoy the fruits of our exertions,' adding that ' all the aristocrats must be killed.' He made a calculation how many persons could be destroyed in one day, and decided that the number might amount to 260,000.

The next Saturday, about dusk, he took his leave of us, telling me that I was a very good child, and thanking us for the asylum we had afforded him. I never saw him again until one day two gens d'amies came for me to go to the house of Marat, just after he had been killed by Charlotte Corday, for the purpose of taking a cast of his face. He was still warm, and his bleeding body and the cadaverous aspect of his almost diabolical features presented a picture replete with horror, and I performed my task under the most painful sensations."

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a632/nicolaR1/Mobile%20Uploads/BA1D0B1D-C891-4209-B06F-352169C60EF2_zps3gzl8zvo.jpg (http://s1287.photobucket.com/user/nicolaR1/media/Mobile%20Uploads/BA1D0B1D-C891-4209-B06F-352169C60EF2_zps3gzl8zvo.jpg.html)

Charlotte Corday & the murder of Murat

Charlotte Corday, Madame Tussaud tells us, was an heroic girl. She travelled alone from Normandy to Paris, determined to rid the country of a monster. When she arrived in the capital she was not quite resolved which should be her victim.
Robespierre and Danton were nearly as odious to her mind as Marat, but the latter and his atrocities were more known in the provinces, particularly in the struggle which had taken place in the suppression of the insurrection in Calvados, where the cruel effects of his suggestions had been most severely felt. Her first attempt to see Marat proved unsuccessful ; but on the second, though his housekeeper, a young woman, refused to admit her, yet Marat, who was in his bath, hearing the voice of Charlotte Corday, and having had a letter from her stating that she had intelligence of importance to communicate, ordered that she should be admitted. She first amused him with the account of the deputies at Caen, when Marat said, " They shall all go to the guillotine." " To the guillotine ? " she exclaimed ; and as he caught up a pencil to write the names of the offenders, Charlotte Corday plunged a knife into his heart.

"Help, my dear!" he cried, and his housekeeper obeyed the call, and a man who was near rushed in and knocked down the avenger of her country with a chair, whilst the woman attendant trampled upon her. A crowd was instantly attracted to the spot by the uproar, when Charlotte Corday rose and looked around her in a composed and dignified manner. Her beauty, her courage, and her calm demeanour interested the authorities, and they conducted her to prison, protecting her from insult.

After taking the cast of the murdered man's features, Madame Tussaud visited Charlotte Corday in the Conciergerie Prison, and found her a most interesting personage. She was tall and well proportioned ; her countenance had something noble in it ; her complexion was remarkably clear, and her manners extremely pleasing ; her mind was perhaps rather of a masculine character ; fond of history, she had made it her study, and naturally became deeply interested in the politics of her country. She was a great admirer of pure republican principles, and thought that the Girondins adopted her views. To this party she became enthusiastically attached, and imbibed a proportionate detestation of the Mountain party; hence the success of that resolution which brought her to the scaffold.

She conversed with Madame Tussaud cheerfully. During the trial she observed the same self-possession, and avowed everything without reserve. When conveyed to the scaffold some few of the rabble abused her, but far more pitied and admired her, and many women shed tears as she passed. A smile of happiness played upon her features on her way to execution, and when the last preparations were being performed, as the handkerchief was withdrawn, and discovered her bosom, the blush of modesty suffused her cheek, but she never once displayed the slightest emotion of fear. As soon as her head was severed the cowardly executioner held it up and buffeted it, an action which was witnessed by the people with shuddering. The mutilated head was conveyed to the Madeleine and a cast of it was taken by Madame Tussaud.

She had been affianced to Major Belsance, a very handsome young man, who was in the royal guards, and assassinated in one of the popular commotions in 1789. She wrote a letter to her father, begging pardon for what she had done, and stating that she believed it to be her duty, bidding him remember that Corneille had said that "the crime, not the scaffold, constitutes the shame".
Frances.


To be continued....

bsbray
16th February 2016, 08:37
Since we've already been reading about aspects of the revolution not specifically confined to the Reign of Terror, I'll throw in some research I've been doing into the illegal literature leading up to 1789.

These are books that were banned by French officials because they either talked trash about the king, the clergy (Catholic Church and even attacking the basic principles of Christianity itself), the nobility, or for violating "common morality" (ie, pornographic works, which were often also graphically political in nature...).

The illegal book trade in 18th-century France was big business and the state could not suppress it effectively. Works like Diderot's massive Encyclopedia and Rousseau's Social Contract (which were both illegal in France) are often cited as ideological influences upon the revolution, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, Diderot's many-volumed Encyclopedia was too expensive for anyone but the wealthy to order. The majority of literate France was feeding its imagination with obscene satires, heretical attacks on the church which have scarcely been surpassed even today, and a diverse variety of other offensive literature that, in the end, must have accomplished its fair share in the beheading of King Louis XVI, his wife, and countless others.


Robert Darnton has done more research into the illegal book trade leading up to the revolution than anyone else, using original catalogues and other period documents from the Société typographique de Neuchâtel in Switzerland, which was a major smuggler of illegal works into France. Out of records for 28,000 copies of illegal works, spanning 720 separate titles, about 32% were criticisms on the Catholic Church or religion, 29% were political, 22% philosophical, 14% were pornographic, and the rest dealt with occultism, freemasonry and other varied subjects.

The pornographic works were usually attacks on the church or monarchy as well. King Louis was mocked for being unable to produce a male heir, while fictional stories about Marie Antoinette's wild orgies were circulating all over France. European monarchs are supposed to have been appointed by God to rule over their people. You can imagine, it would be very hard for a population to take that idea seriously when they are reading this kind of literature, along with books arguing how all three of the Abrahamic religions are built on lies and nonsense in the first place (such as an infamous but popular work titled The Three Impostors, referring to Moses, Jesus and Mohammed). This kind of literature only seems to have exploded in the first time in the 18th century, with the spread of the printing press and popular literature with free market ideas.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier (author of what appears to have been by far the illegal best-seller of the time, called The Year 2440, or L'An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante, a novel about a future utopia), in Le Tableau de Paris, detailed “the success that obscene publications and engravings enjoyed” during this period, as summarized by Jean Marie Goulemot:


They were sold on thoroughfares and places where prostitutes plied their trade, such as the Palais Royal, the entry to the Tuileries [the former royal palace], the Opéra, and even more outrageously in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Soubise [property formerly owned by the Knights Templar prior to them being outlawed, then the site of a mansion for the marshall of the French military], and in the most popular and fashionable cafés. One of the main places in which these forbidden books were sold was Versailles [the royal palace and home of Louis XVI]: not only in the town, which had several private booksellers, but also in the château itself and in the park. An inspection carried out in 1749 revealed that there were erotic books everywhere, from the apartments of the highest nobility to the little room of a preacher's servant. On 14 March 1749 Lacasse Jean, a kitchen boy at the royal court, was taken to the Bastille on the authority of a lettre de cachet for having 'placed in the royal chapel at Versailles a complete edition of Le Portier des Chartreux'. He remained in the fortress until 1 October 1750. On 17 May it was the turn of Marcel de Gamaches, a master binder (released on 9 July), for having placed another copy of Le Portier des Chartreux in the château of Versailles.

Forbidden book peddlers also set up “stalls at the annual fair in the park at Saint-Cloud, or found a place at the entry to the basilica at Saint-Denis, which as a religious foundation was exempt from the interference of the inspectors sent out by the directorate general of the book trade.” Sellers would even go door-to-door selling these books and placing orders for shipments from Switzerland and Holland.

By 1740 arrests for erotic literature began to increase, though precise figures or even distinctions between pornographic writings, political satires and philosophical literature were not kept. But authorities had become aware of an “upsurge” in obscene literature and responded accordingly, and at this time we have early examples of heretical (Jansenist) material and erotic literature being printed side-by-side at some printers, which would seem to suggest that profit was more of a factor than a sense of moral obligation. Criticism of authorities, including “remarks against the person of the king,” were apparently also taking place already around this time period.

In 1757, Robert-François Damiens unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Louis XV, and was subsequently executed for it. Following this, though Jansenism was again suspected, inspectors are said to have mostly cracked down on publications which were “defamatory satires, remarks against the person of the king and the diffusion of banned books which, for this period, consisted mainly of philosophical or anti-religious work.”

Despite the crack-down, obscene works that made a mockery of the king became more prominent soon after. Again quoting Goulemot, from Forbidden Texts:


The turning-point seemed to come around 1765 with the arrest of Louis, Auguste and François Dieudé from Saint Lazare, for having made 'foul utterances against the king', a crime that earned them exile to Brittany. Under this heading of 'propos abominables', 'mauvais propos', which became more and more common, is probably hidden a language that is both pornographic and scatological in nature, and which is targeted at the person of the king, his policies and his mistresses, and which fed the nouvelles à la main ["news by hand"] – by which we should understand the sort of handwritten news-sheets, filled with unfounded rumours and the most injurious political denunciations. These circulated on an irregular basis in the streets of Paris, and there was no end to the arrests of those found distributing or writing them. […] With the start of the reign of Louis XVI, the production of these sorts of licentious satires continued unabated. In 1776 the majority of crimes relating to the book trade involved nouvelles à la main, whose style should be now be [sic] entirely familiar. In 1777 Jean-Baptiste-Jacques Lefebvre, a bookseller selling on the main staircase in the château of Versailles, was arrested on 19 September for having sold 'satires which contained insults and calumnies against the queen'. He was condemned to an exile of 30 leagues from the court on 17 April 1778. In the 1780s a new reason for imprisonment appeared: defamation, by which we should understand the writing and circulation of foul-mouthed and pornographic satires against the queen and ministers (Les Amours du Vizir Vergennes; Les Petits soupers de l'hôtel de Bouillon, among others). […] The le Collier affair encouraged the growth of the genre. In 1786 arrests became more and more frequent, both of hawkers and printers working underground, and against those booksellers distributing pamphlets attacking the honour of the queen and the virility of the king. If erotic works continued to be written, disseminated and read … then it was no longer the main target of the censors, either. Political satires, whether compounded by pornographic material or not, were of more immediate concerns to the powers that be. In these troubled times there were far more urgent matters requiring attention than the defence of standards of decency.

In the meanwhile, it was true that pornography, and especially the erotic pamphlets devoted to the queen (such as the well-known Les Amours de Charlot et de Toinette, 1779), were a part of the general movement towards the desacralization of the monarchy. The queen was soiled, if only in the imagination of her subjects, mixed in with the most sordid foursomes, and offered up to the desires of those who read such satires. This if anything was a sign of the crisis facing the Ancien Régime. After the storm broke the freedom of the press was rapidly established. On 4 August 1789 the Constituant Assembly decided to abolish the system of privilèges, and thus the requirement for authorization of both authors and presses disappeared. On the 24th of the same month freedom of expression and thought were sanctioned by decree. There followed an explosion of pornographic and filthy pamphlets, both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. […] The massacre, the erotic show, the heavy-handed denunciations, couched in the crudest terms imaginable, knew no bounds. The fashion lasted until the days of the Consulate, culminating in the publication of the infamous pamphlet, La France foutue ["F***** France"].

At this point we can more clearly see the accomplishments of obscene literature in 18th century France. In previous periods, the monarch in France was seen as a sovereign who received his authority to rule from God, who was inviolable and demanded respect simply for existing. This image was irreparably damaged by the portrayals of the monarchy in 18th century France, particularly and increasingly in the years leading up to the revolution.

This was also a period in French literary history where people from many diverse positions in society, from courtiers to “middlemen running between the booksellers,” virtually anyone who could read and write and had the opportunity were tempted for the first time to make a living or supplement their income through writing, even if only within the genre of pornography, though the fact that even philosophes such as Voltaire (Pucelle d'Orléans) and Diderot (Bijoux indiscrets) penned such work is a testament to its relative profitability.


The aforementioned best-seller of the time, The Year 2440, tells the story of a man who falls asleep and wakes up over 600 years in the future, in a sort of utopian version of Paris, where, among other things, there is no longer any monarchy as the French would have recognized it, but apparently a republic with a “king” as an executive. It is within this fictional framework that the book makes social commentaries and expresses dangerous ideas about the France of its own time, that would have made the American founding fathers proud.

Some excerpts from this immensely popular work of fiction (and remember the year first published -- 1770, almost 20 years before the revolution even began):


For some states there is a stage which is unavoidable – a bloody and terrible stage, though it announces freedom to come. I speak of civil war. Here all the great men rise up, some attacking, others defending, liberty. Civil war gives free rein to the most hidden talents. Extraordinary citizens come forth and prove themselves as commanders of men. This is a horrible remedy! But after the long slumber of the state and its inhabitants, it becomes necessary.


Liberty engenders miracles: it triumphs over nature, it makes crops sprout from rocks, it lends a cheerful air to the saddest regions, it enlightens simple shepherds and renders them more profound than the proud slaves of the most sophisticated courts. Other climates, which are the masterpiece and glory of creation, once they fall into slavery, exhibit only abandoned fields, pale faces, lowered glances which dare not look heavenward. Man! Choose, then, to be happy or miserable, if you are capable of choosing: fear tyranny, detest slavery, take up arms, live free or die.


Why couldn't the French some day adopt certain republican forms? Who in this kingdom is unaware of the privileges of the nobility, based upon its origin and confirmed by several centuries of practice? As soon as the Third Estate emerged from its degradation, in the reign of John, it took its place in the national assemblies, and this proud and barbarian nobility accepted it, protesting, as belonging to the orders of the kingdom, even though the times were still rife with prejudices based on the administration of fiefs and the profession of arms. The French sense of honor – which is still a motivating principle and which is greater than our most venerable institutions – could perhaps one day become the soul of a republic, especially when the taste for philosophy, the knowledge of political laws, and the experience of so many misfortunes will have destroyed this superficiality and the indiscretion which contaminate those brilliant qualities that would make of the French the finest nation in the world, if they but knew how to plan, develop, and sustain their projects.

Frances
16th February 2016, 19:55
I enjoyed your article bsbray, it's a very fine, academic, and educational point of view.
Frances.


You should give your article a title bsbray, as its your own research.