False Economy - Alan Beattie [32]
If anything, the Parisian mob played an even more defining role in the French Revolution. It helped to escalate what had started as an exercise in creating a constrained constitutional monarchy (in place of the absolutist rule of Louis XVI) into a murderous, drawn-out chaos that ended with the bloodstained birth of a republic.
Having gained a sense of their own power by storming the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789 (albeit finding only seven prisoners inside to release), Parisians created their own city government, the Paris Commune, and established the National Guard as its military force. The first governments of the Revolution, the National Assembly and Legislative Assembly, which wanted a limited monarchy somewhat like the English model, were swept aside. Louis XVI and his family were prevented from fleeing and in effect imprisoned inside the Tuileries
Palace in the center of Paris by a mob dominated by "sans-culottes"—so called because they eschewed, or could not afford, the fashionable knee-breeches worn by richer Frenchmen.
With the help of the mob, the radical leadership, particularly Georges Danton, head of the administrative departement of Paris and commander of the district battalion of the National Guard, forced the Legislative Assembly to dissolve itself in 1792. A new national convention was elected that declared France a republic and executed the king. Struggles for power between the various power bases in Paris started the mass killings of royalists, priests, and, increasingly, anyone who was declared an enemy of the Revolution, and not until 1795 did moderates take control and end the Reign of Terror.
In both Paris and London, the cities' violent pasts have left indelible marks on the architecture. Famously, when the French emperor Napoleon III commissioned Georges-Eugene Haussmann to redesign Paris in the years 1852—1870, his new broad boulevards, admired for their sweeping vistas, had grimly practical as well as aesthetic purposes. Their width was designed to give cavalry and artillery wide thoroughfares down which to charge and a clear field of fire, the better to suppress any future popular uprising. Washington, D.C., has similar avenues, named after the states, that cut diagonally across the perpendicular monotony of the familiar American street grid system. (On one of them, Pennsylvania Avenue, stands the White House.) In Washington's case the avenues reflected the influence of French architects without the same practical imperative in mind.
In London, the forbidding two-story windowless "curtain wall" that now surrounds the Bank of England in the heart of the City of London was added after the bank (along with nearby prisons at Newgate and Fleet) was badly damaged in the Gordon Riots of June 1780. The riots, named for their leader, followed an anti-Catholic demonstration (sound familiar?) of more than 40,000 people that got out of hand. The bank was thereafter guarded at night by a picket armed with muskets. The guard was ended only in 1973, by which time the threat of mass anti-papist mob violence was thought to have diminished sufficiently to take the risk.
In Russia, control of the capital didn't just bring down the Romanov dynasty of tsars but, even more dramatically, showed how a small, disciplined political movement focused on the capital could seize control of a country of 170 million people covering 6.5 million square miles.
Russian tsar ism was a vulnerable despotism which suppressed the rise of any alternative locus of power, such as the country's feeble Duma (parliament), yet which itself held frail authority over a vast and sparsely populated country. Undermined by Russia's dismal military failure on the Eastern Front of the First World War, the tsar abdicated in February 1917