This image shows "the people" as a chained and blindfolded man being crushed under the weight of the rich, including both clergy and nobility. Such a perspective on the period before 1789 purposely exaggerates social divisions and would have found…
Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was a salesman for a cloth merchant in Lyons who conceived of a different form of social organization, called a "phalanx," that was part garden city and part agricultural commune. All jobs would rotate and a network of…
Since 1793, the French government had carried out policies intended to ruin British commerce; it hoped in this way to eliminate or at least dampen the British will to join in and its ability to finance military coalitions against the French. Napoleon…
This retrospective shows that early in the Revolution targets were often economic. This should be no surprise as the populace had a long tradition of taking the law into its own hands to rectify what they saw as injustices. Here a guardhouse is…
Laborie provides the perspective of the planter himself. He gives a detailed description of the organization of slave labor in the production of coffee. Although he shared quite negative views of the African slaves, he recognized that extreme…
Long after sans–culotte influence on the government had waned, social conflicts continued to drive some revolutionary events. Throughout 1794 and 1795, urban and rural radicals alike demanded "bread and the constitution of 1793," meaning that the…
Here Moreau de Saint–Méry describes the topography and peoples of the French part of the island, providing some important basic knowledge which he expands upon in subsequent passages.
Born in 1770 and married to the only surviving son of one of the greatest noble families in France, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin endured humiliation, emigration, and Terror during the first part of the revolutionary decade. Upon her return to…
Madame Ducroquet wrote to her son in the spring of 1794 about the continuing shortage of food. She expressed her worries upon reading that someone with the same name had been arrested; in fact, it was her son, who went to the guillotine only a few…
In September 1793 the Convention furthered its role as the guarantor of the basic right to subsistence of all citizens by instituting price maximums on all essential consumer goods, especially foodstuffs, and on wages paid in the production of those…
