The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [100]
In Paris, the National Assembly beheaded the king and his family[111] after an escape attempt. It was probably a sad sight watching the royal family, surrounded by cheering crowds and dressed in peasants’ clothes, put to death because they were of royal blood. There was no other crime except their status. That was enough for the Revolution and the Committee of Public Safety as they began killing anyone of royal blood or royal connection. With France fighting to maintain its national sovereignty, radical elements of the Revolution gained more power, soon beginning the Reign of Terror (1793 to 1794) which took the lives of several extremist leaders of the Revolution. At the height of the terror, George Danton and Maximilien Robespierre led the Committee of Public Safety, supervising a killing machine sweeping through France murdering over 18,000 in Paris alone. Both these men’s heads would roll by the very method, the guillotine, they had used to slay so many others. The extremist journalist and publisher Jean Paul Marat got a killing knife stuck in him by the counter-revolutionary Charlotte Corday on July 13, 1793, leading to increasingly harsh measures by the Committee. Marat was demanding the execution of nearly everyone, and the publisher could rouse the mobs of Paris to zealous action at his whim. Charlotte said she killed one man to save one hundred thousand, and was much later viewed as a hero. Scorned at the time, Charlotte was executed four days after she stabbed Marat. In Paris the government devolved into chaos, while outside Paris European states invaded France trying to bring the Revolution to a halt.
War now seemed to be the only way to protect and spread the Revolution. The National Assembly began drafting citizens of the French Republic (the Revolution’s new name) in mass to fight for the “new” nation. An army made up of large numbers of draftees, rather than small numbers of professional soldiers, was an original concept in the Europe of 1800. Once this large army took the field smaller opposing armies endured defeat after defeat. Under Napoleon Bonaparte with his innovative ideas, the combination of massed armies and inspired leadership proved almost unstoppable.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a low ranking artillery officer in the French Army prior to 1789. Born in Corsica, a French island off the Mediterranean coast, his chances in the old aristocratic French army were nil, but revolutionary France opened the door for the rough but able Corsican. Proving himself on the battlefield, he quickly achieved the rank of general and soon held sway over all the armies of France. By 1799, he established a military dictatorship over France and its (his) conquests. The dictatorship was cleverly masquerading as a continuation of the Revolution and the French Republic. Napoleon had conquered nearly all before him, and he expanded the French Republic (later the French Empire) over the face of Europe.[112] On May 18, 1804, while declaring the French Empire, he crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I. It is important to note that he crowned himself; no priest or government official put the crown on his head. As such, he claimed no right flowing from god, the church, or anybody else (such as the people of France). By crowning himself he was showing that his person alone was the cause for his becoming emperor. This is very much in line with the Age of Reason. Once more, as in Rome, we go from a Republic to an Empire through the actions of a great general—only very much faster.
The ascension of Napoleon to the crown ended the French Revolution; although, it really ended in 1799 after Napoleon took over as a dictator in everything except name. The French Revolution rocked Europe to its foundations. All the fundamental truths accepted without question for hundreds of years were gone. Critical to European culture was the decreed demise