Tea at Trianon: What Was the Reign of Terror?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 6, 2024

What Was the Reign of Terror?

From Live Science:

The Reign of Terror, also called the Terror, was a period of state-sanctioned violence and mass executions during the French Revolution. Between Sept. 5, 1793, and July 27, 1794, France's revolutionary government ordered the arrest and execution of thousands of people. French lawyer and statesman Maximilien Robespierre led the Terror, which was caused in part by a rivalry between France's two leading political parties: the Jacobins and the Girondins.
At the end of the French Revolution, a revolutionary government called the National Convention came into power and formed the first French Republic. The Convention found King Louis XVI guilty of treason in 1792 and beheaded him by guillotine in January 1793. Many areas of France — including Normandy and the city of Lyon — opposed the revolution and rebelled against the new government.
In March 1793, an armed revolt in the Vendée resulted in first several towns and eventually the entire region being captured by a counterrevolutionary army. After a bloody campaign, republic forces defeated the rebellion, resulting in around 200,000 deaths, New Republic reported. (Read more.)

Did climate change ignite the French Revolution? From Time:

Starting in the mid-13th century, the northern hemisphere entered a period of prolonged cooling known as the Little Ice Age. This extended chill was not smooth and uniform, however, but marked by intervals of plummeting temperatures in the midst of otherwise stable warmth. Around 1770, one such interval of abrupt freezing began in the Northern Atlantic, wreaking immediate havoc on shipping, transportation and agriculture. In 1775, severe grain shortages in France caused by successive years of poor harvests resulted in bread riots throughout the kingdom. Later dubbed the Flour War, it was a harbinger of things to come.

Compounding the worsening climate, the Laki volcanic fissure in Iceland erupted in June 1783. Over the next eight months, the fissure spewed 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Across northern Europe, a “blood coloured sun” barely showed through a thick persistent haze. In addition to the excess mortality caused by the foul air, the Laki eruption radically altered the atmosphere, causing the climate of the 1780s to become extremely volatile. After a long spell of cooling, the summer of 1783 was suddenly the hottest on record. The unseasonably hot weather triggered severe thunderstorms with hailstones large enough to kill livestock. The scorching summer gave way to an equally extreme winter of severe freezing, followed by a warm spring that rapidly melted the snow and ice which caused extensive flooding.

These abnormally wild extremes defined weather patterns for years to come: dry and blistering summers interspersed by violent thunderstorms, followed by deep winter freezes, snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures. The fluctuations ravaged the lives of the French population, ruining crops, killing livestock and creating an unbreakable cycle of hunger, poverty, stress, fear and hardship. Touring France in 1785, John Adams wrote, “The country is a heap of ashes. Grass is scarcely to be seen and all sorts of grain is short, thin, pale and feeble while the flax is quite dead….I pity this people from my soul. There is at this moment as little appearance of a change of weather as ever.” (Read more.)