The commission investigating the events of October 1789 also interrogated many women who had participated. Most of them denied any role in the violence, but they did explain their mixture of political and economic motives, citing the high price of…
Voltaire was the pen name of François–Marie Arouet (1694–1778), an Enlightenment writer known for his plays and histories and his acerbic criticism of the French Catholic Church. This set of selections is from his Philosophical Dictionary of 1764.…
Voltaire was the pen name of François–Marie Arouet (1694–1778), an Enlightenment writer known for his plays and histories and his acerbic criticism of the French Catholic Church. Although Voltaire eventually became a kind of cultural icon celebrated…
François–Marie Arouet, who wrote under the name Voltaire, was both the best–known and most tireless advocate of the Enlightenment and also a close associate of several European kings and many French aristocrats. In his widely read history, The Age of…
In 1781, after the failure of two successive finance ministers, Turgot and then Necker, to reform the royal bureaucracy, and after the death of his politically astute first minister Maurepas, Louis XVI turned to a more conservative politician, Count…
Publicity about political machinations, coupled with the continued high price of bread, mobilized market women and encouraged many men to support them. They hoped to fetch the King and his family to end attempts against the Revolution and stabilize…
In 1774, on the accession of Louis XVI, Anne–Robert–Jacques Turgot was named Controller–General of Finances. In this position, he also became responsible for administrative policies relating to taxation, the economy, and local government. With his…
In 1774, the newly ascendant Louis XVI appointed as his minister of finance a pro–Enlightenment economist and administrator named Anne–Robert–Jacques Turgot, a baron from a noble family with many generations of service to the kings of France. In…
Returning home from the October march to Versailles, the women and the guardsmen display the heads of troops who confronted the marchers. Note the use of tree branches, symbolizing support for the revolution here as in other prints.
Some months after the execution of her husband, Marie Antoinette found herself in the dock of the public prosecutor, Antoine Quentin Fouquier–Tinville. The intervention of the radical journalist Jacques–René Hébert had pushed her case to the top, and…
