Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [11]
As the 18th century progressed, new economic and social circumstances rendered the ancien régime (old order) dangerously out of step with the needs of the country and its capital. The regime was further weakened by the antiestablishment and anticlerical ideas of the Enlightenment, whose leading lights included Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot. But entrenched vested interests, a cumbersome power structure and royal lassitude prevented change from starting until the 1770s, by which time the monarchy’s moment had passed.
The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) was one of a series of ruinous military engagements pursued by Louis XV. It led to the loss of France’s flourishing colonies in Canada, the West Indies and India. It was in part to avenge these losses that Louis XVI sided with the colonists in the American War of Independence (1775–83). But the Seven Years’ War cost France a fortune and, more disastrously for the monarchy, it helped to disseminate at home the radical democratic ideas that were thrust upon the world stage by the American Revolution.
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COME THE REVOLUTION
By the late 1780s, the indecisive Louis XVI and his dominating Vienna-born queen, Marie-Antoinette, known to her subjects disparagingly as l’Autrichienne (the Austrian), had managed to alienate virtually every segment of society – from the enlightened bourgeoisie to the conservatives – and the king became increasingly isolated as unrest and dissatisfaction reached boiling point. When he tried to neutralise the power of the more reform-minded delegates at a meeting of the États-Généraux (States-General) at the Jeu de Paume in Versailles from May to June 1789 (Click here), the masses – spurred on by the oratory and inflammatory tracts circulating at places like the Café de Foy at Palais Royal – took to the streets of Paris. On 14 July, a mob raided the armoury at the Hôtel des Invalides for rifles, seizing 32,000 muskets, and then stormed the prison at Bastille – the ultimate symbol of the despotic ancien régime. The French Revolution had begun.
At first, the Revolution was in the hands of moderate republicans called the Girondins. France was declared a constitutional monarchy and various reforms were introduced, including the adoption of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme and du Citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen). This document set forth the principles of the Revolution in a preamble and 17 articles, and was modelled on the American Declaration of Independence. A forward-thinking document called Les Droits des Femmes (The Rights of Women) was also published. But as the masses armed themselves against the external threat to the new government – posed by Austria, Prussia and the exiled French nobles – patriotism and nationalism mixed with extreme fervour and then popularised and radicalised the Revolution. It was not long before the Girondins lost out to the extremist Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre, Georges-Jacques Danton and Jean-Paul Marat. The Jacobins abolished the monarchy and declared the First Republic in September 1792 after Louis XVI proved unreliable as a constitutional monarch. The Assemblée Nationale (National Assembly) was replaced by an elected Revolutionary Convention.
In January 1793 Louis XVI, who had tried to flee the country with his family but only got as far as Varennes, was convicted of ‘conspiring against the liberty of the nation’ and guillotined at place de la Révolution, today’s place de la Concorde. His consort, Marie-Antoinette, was executed in October of the same year.
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A DATE WITH THE REVOLUTION
Along with standardising France’s – and, later, most of the world’s – system of weights and measures with the almost universal metric system, the Revolutionary government adopted a new, ‘more rational’ calendar from which all ‘superstitious’ associations (ie saints’ days and mythology) were removed. Year 1 began on 22 September 1792,