fast-and-the-curious:vikingofficial: I’m so tired of this glorifying and romanticizing of the French
fast-and-the-curious:vikingofficial: I’m so tired of this glorifying and romanticizing of the French Revolution. So sit down. We’re about to learn some history. It was mass bloody murder where they beheaded not just people y’all believe need it or whatever, but innocents and children. It was run by a mob. They had almost no direction and when they couldn’t curl their bloodlust, they turned to people who didn’t “deserve” it as y’all would put. Only 9% of the people killed were “rich” the others were commoners. They think between 14,000 and 40,000 were killed. They didn’t just behead people, they tortured them first. So that’s the gist of it. If y’all want to read into more detail, keep reading below. I’m going to post some quotes from Christopher Hilbrert’s The French Revolution Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 the Terror was maintained unabated. The Committee of Public Safety insisted that it was vitally necessary to stamp out the machinations of both royalists and federalists, hoping thereby to persuade the militant sans-culottes that they shared a common cause and the Convention that the omnipotence of the Committee was essential at a time of crisis in the Revolution’s course. Nearly 3,000 executions took place in Paris; about 14,000 in the provinces. Countless people lived in constant fear of death and went to bed dreading the sound of a knock on the door in the middle of the night when most arrests took place.“You have no more grounds for restraint against the enemies of the new order, and liberty must prevail at any price,” cried Saint-Just, who, like Robespierre, “regarded all dissidents as criminals”. “We must rule by iron those who cannot be ruled by justice… You must punish not merely traitors but the indifferent as well.” An even more violent Jacobin, Brichet, advised that the Law of Suspects should be interpreted so that all the well-to-do came within its scope: questions should be asked in every village about the means of the principal farmer; if he were rich he should be guillotined without further ado — he was “bound to be a food-hoarder.” But it was not only the rich, or even mainly the rich, who suffered. The poor were executed with the well-to-do, women with men, the young with the old, some accused of “starving the people”, others of “depraving public morals’, one witness for “not giving his testimony properly’”Under the direction of Jean Tallien, the son of the maitre d’hotel of the Marquis of Bercy, a young man of twenty-six who had worked as a lawyer’s clerk and in a printer’s office, even more cruel punishments were inflicted in Bordeaux:… A woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was consequently condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.“The time was come which was foretold,” as Madame Roland had said, “when the people would ask for bread and be given corpses.”Another man, who heard the screams of the victims comforted his shocked wife in words quoted by Baron Thiebault: “This is a very terrible business. But they are our deadly enemies, and those who are delivering the country from them are saving your life and the lives of our dear children.”There was another quote that I’m not going to put in here as it was too gory and I don’t wish to trigger anyone. But the Queen’s closest emotional friend was brought out in front of a crowd, mutiliated, raped, and then brutally killed. One of the major things that happened was the storming of the Bastille. Which, was almost empty. They just wanted it for the weapons inside. They lynched the guy running it by dragging him through the streets, and when he begged them to let him die, the mob descended on him, stabbed him to death, and sawed off his head. Then, they sawed his body up and tossed it to the crowd so they could wave it in triumph. The Reign Of Terror killed around 17,000 people. Oh? And what is that you may ask? Well, The Reign Of Terror lasted from 1793 -1794. Here is an excerpt from Britannica With civil war spreading from the Vendée and hostile armies surrounding France on all sides, the Revolutionary government decided to make “Terror” the order of the day (September 5 decree) and to take harsh measures against those suspected of being enemies of the Revolution (nobles, priests, and hoarders). In Paris a wave of executions followed. In the provinces, representatives on mission and surveillance committees instituted local terrors. Here is a quote from Robert Wilde in his piece A History of the French Revolution: the Reign of TerrorMarat may have been killed, but many French citizens were still forwarding his ideas, chiefly that only the extreme use of the guillotine against traitors, suspects, and counter-revolutionaries would solve the country’s problems. They felt terror was necessary—not figurative terror, not a posture, but actual government rule through terror.The Convention agreed, and in addition voted to finally organize the revolutionary armies people had agitated for over previous months to march against the hoarders and unpatriotic members of the countryside, although they turned down Chaumette’s request for the armies to be accompanied by guillotines on wheels for even swifter justice. In addition, Danton argued that arms production should be increased until every patriot had a musket and that the Revolutionary Tribunal should be divided to increase efficiency. The sansculottes had once again forced their wishes onto and through the Convention; terror was now in force.On September 17th, a Law of Suspects was introduced allowing for the arrest of anyone whose conduct suggested they were supporters of tyranny or federalism, a law which could be easily twisted to affect just about everyone in the nation. Terror could be applied to everyone, easily. There were also laws against nobles who had been anything less than zealous in their support for the revolution. A maximum was set for a wide range of food and goods and the Revolutionary Armies formed and set out to search for traitors and crush the revolt. Even speech was affected, with ‘citizen’ becoming the popular way of referring to others; not using the term was a cause for suspicion.However, it is the executions for which the Terror is so infamous, and these began with the execution of a faction called the Enrages, who was soon followed by the former queen, Marie Antoinette, on October 17th and many of the Girondins on October 31st. Around 16,000 people (not including deaths in the Vendée, see below) went to the guillotine in the next nine months as the Terror lived up to its name, and around the same again also died as a result, usually in prison.In Lyons, which surrendered at the end of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety decided to set an example and there were so many to be guillotined that on December 4th-8th, 1793 people were executed en masse by cannon fire. Whole areas of the town were destroyed and 1880 killed. In Toulon, which was recaptured on December 17th thanks to one Captain Bonaparte and his artillery, 800 were shot and nearly 300 guillotined. Marseilles and Bordeaux, which also capitulated, escaped relatively lightly with ‘only’ hundreds executed.Around half a million people may have been imprisoned across France, and 10,000 may have died in prison without trial. Many lynchings also occurred. However, this early phase of the terror was not, as legend recalls, aimed at nobles, who made up only 9% of the victims; clergy were 7%. Most executions occurred in Federalist areas after the army had regained control and some loyal areas escaped largely unscathed. It was normal, everyday people, killing masses of other normal, everyday people. It was a civil war, not class.And from PBS they state: On September 5, 1793, Maximilien Robespierre began the Reign of Terror in response to the invasion of France by foreign troops. Thousands of so-called counterrevolutionaries were slaughtered; estimates range from 14,000 to 40,000. France remained in Robespierre’s bloody grip for 10 months until he too was captured and beheaded. With the Reign of Terror over, France found some peace, but the country remained at war with Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain following Louis XVI’s execution.In 1795, a new constitution was adopted, with the Directory — five men elected from the National Assembly — acting as an executive branch and remaining in power throughout much of John Adams presidency. Four years later, Napoleon Bonaparte and his army overthrew the Directory and signed the Convention of 1800 with the United States, a commercial agreement that ended the so-called Quasi War. Napoleon would eventually declare himself “Emperor of the French.” John Adams had feared just such a chaotic end: A revolution of this sort, he had argued, would lead not to democracy but despotism. France had abolished its monarchy only to find itself under the rule of an emperor. Years later Thomas Jefferson would admit that his own support for the French Revolution was misguided: “Your prophecies,” he wrote to Adams, “… proved truer than mine. … I did not, in ‘89, believe they would have lasted so long, nor have cost so much blood.”So I’m begging you guys, just stop. This whole romanticizing of the French Revolution is just…weird. Please stop. -- source link