french revolution

Actually no: his own family petitioned to have him banged up because he was running around getting the family into disgrace (by doing things like shagging his sister-in-law and accidentally poisoning whole orgies-ful of prostitutes) and, far worse, wasting the family patrimony. His mother-in-law decided he had to be stopped, and he was stopped.

I have read some of the Marquis' works out of curiousity and indeed he was gross.

What happened to him after he got out of the Bastille?

The French Revolution happened a long time ago, seaglass.

Let it go.

Re: marquis de sade
De Sade was imprisoned in the dungeons of Vincennes (Victor Riqueti, the marquis de Mirabeau, whom he had insulted, was imprisoned there as well).
In 1784, he was transferred to the Bastille
After he shouted that quoted above, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton, where he remained until 1790.


After his release from there, he became secretary of the Revolutionary Section of Les Piques in Paris, in 1792.

After a while, he got imprisoned again, till he died in 1814. During his life he stood in prison for about 30 years.

Wow, the high and mighty in French society had their own "Gates".

Can anyone name the other six that were released from the Bastille that fateful day? Were they all political figures?

Let what go Gus?

Probably not, because they were "common right" prisoners.

Four of them were forgers and the other two were insane....

Madam LaFarge, of course, was a Dicken's character. Did she have a counterpart in the actual storming of the Bastille and subsequent beheadings?

There were not very many women who were named "vainqueure de la Bastille," although i think there were a few.

You ought not to take the image of La Farge so literally. The Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789--the terror, per se, only begins after the excesses in September, 1792. Many events were at least as important or more important than the storming of the Bastille, which was mostly symbolic. At les Invalides, which one might consider the "old soldiers home" in Paris, the retired and disabled soldiers there had deliberately delayed assembling the muskets and marshalling the artillery which was to have been used to disperse the mobs in the city. In Versailles, in June, before the Bastille was stormed, a bare majority of the assembled members of the Estates General had met in an enclosed tennis court when they were locked out of their usual meeting hall, and had taken "the Tennis Court Oath," not to disperse until they had written a constitution for the nation. In Metz, far to the east, members of an important frontier regiment had accused their officers of peculation (stealing public money entrusted to an official), claiming their pay had been stolen from them--and they mutinied. Thereafter, members of la Garde Française--the royal bodyguard, more or less--had mutinied as well, and accused their officers of peculation.

A great many important events occured between the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the beginning of the relentless slaughter of the Terror in 1792. Most significantly, France had been invaded by Austrian and Prussian forces. The government had been taken over by le commité de salut publique (the Committee for Public Safety), which declared la patrie en danger--the fatherland endangered. Large levies of surprisingly enthusiastic peasants and common workers were marched to the front, and, with some false starts, thoroughly trashed the Brunswickers (think, Prussians) and the Austrians. Meanwhile, back in Paris, a handful, a few hundred at most, of the more bloodthirsty among the street revolutionaries went into the prisons and dragged out aristocrats and priests, and slaughtered them in the streets, over a three day period in September, 1792. They often mutilated the corpses, and drank the blood or ate the hearts. Even when not indulging in such grisly feasting, they were fed by the mob in the streets, and often used the corpses as tables for their more ordinary fare. They were known as the Septembriseurs, which is a double entendre--septembre means, of course, Septermber; briser means to break or shatter--so, Septembriseurs means the "breakers" of September. What they "broke," was the tension of the latent hostility between the commons and the aristocracy and the priesthood. Thereafter, Dr. Guillotin's "wife," la Guillotine, began it's relentless work. The Committee for Public Safety could not have mobs in the street constantly cutting down anyone suspect, so a round of "trials" and executions began, which lasted for a little more than a year, until the final fall and death of Robespierre in 1794.

In reading Dickens, it is important to remember that to the monarchists of England, the French revolution was the ultimate social monstrosity. No characterization of the monsters of that revolution could be too strong, too exagerated for the mind of most Englishmen and -women. That old flannel-mouthed Parliamentary orator, Edmund Burke, referred to the Revolution when he made his remark that the only thing needed for evil to prosper was that good men do nothing. It didn't work, though--the English were not easily moved to attempt to interfer in the Revolution, and when finally they were, at Toulon and Walcheren Island, both efforts proved to be too little, too late--and the former adventure helped to launch the career of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Thanks to Dickens, many people have an image of the Revolution as nothing but the Terror, and all perpetrated by a monstrously hateful peasantry against a largely innocent ascendancy. As with all great historical passage, the reality is a good deal more detailed and complex.

It wasn't only Dickens, Set, unfortunately not ...

By pure change I come aware of a site which has a "report" called Persecution of Christians Growing in the United States. From that "article":

I am never surprised to learn of gross distortions of history and outright lies by religionists, for whom the agendae are always rather obvious.

With christians, and espeically fundamentalist christians, there is the added incentive that they love the concept of martyrdom and persecution--so long, of course, as they do not themselves actually experience any personal discomfort.

Oh my, and the French are supposed to be so civilized. I'm suprised they didn't swim across the channel and get Dickens too.

It's amazing that England fared so well during a period of 'industrial revolutions'.

I've been trying to find a list of the vainqueurs de la bastille, although without much luck. All i've been able to come up with so far is a law passed in April, 1833, which accorded a pension to those who had been designated vainqueurs de la Bastille, and that the list had been originally compiled by Jean Joseph Dusaulx, who published said list and an account of the assault on the prison in 1790. If i can come up with better information, i'll post it here.

There was not, at first, much of a reaction among working class Englishmen, who were not too badly off, and who, at any event, had recently been distracted by the American revolution. Agricultural workers had already been displaced and made homeless in large numbers by enclosure and the effects of the Corn Law for many generations--it would be from those displaced by the rise of the cotton mills that the impetus for political and social change would come.

At the time of the revolution in France, Burke not only lent his mouth-for-hire to disparage the Revolution in Parliament, he published a pamphlet entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. This included an attack on the "Rights of Man," a document published by the National Assembly at Paris. Mary Wollstonecraft published a rejoinder to Burke entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Man, and later followed that with A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is considered to be the first published feminist document. (Her duaghter married Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the author of Frankenstein.) The issue remained largely a matter of debate among intellectuals. It was not until the later years of the wars with Napoleon that the commons of England began to be restless. The English continue to claim that Napoleon's "continental system" had no effect on their commerce, but modern research shows that the steady growth of English overseas commerce was badly damaged, and bad harvests in these years when the Corn Law mechanisms would not bring any grain in from France or Germany led to a growing discontent among the rural and urban poor. It is worth noting that the French revolution's original spark was provided by a disasterous harvest in 1788, followed by agitation against "hoarders," by which was meant those who bought grain and held onto it, speculating on a price rise.

After the end of the Napoleonic wars, during the ministry of Lord Liverpool, while the Duke of Wellington was still commander of the Army, a body of would-be trades unionists planned for a large, outdoor meeting--what were called in those days "monster meetings"--to be held at St. Peters Field near Manchester. The local "city fathers" became alarmed, and called upon a local militia unit, dragoons, to disperse the meeting. Dragoons are heavy cavalry on large horses, and when they rode down the crowd, a great many were killed, espeically among women and children. It was immediately dubbed the "Peterloo Massacre," which was a swipe at the Duke of Wellington, whose greatest victory had been just four years earlier at Waterloo. Wellington had not actually called out any units of the army, and had not been involved, but he was definitely an arch-Tory (conservative), and approved of the action, although he later claimed not to have done.

The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 was one of many incidents which eventually lead to the first Parliamentary Reform Act in 1832. The English never actually dissolved into revolution, but things got very bad, and many Tories were sufficiently alarmed that they went along with parliamentary reform, even though philosophically opposed, because they feared revolution. George III had been succeeded upon his death in 1820 by his nasty, vicious son George IV, another arch-conservative, but upon his death in 1830, he was succeeded by George III's third son, who became King William IV. In 1830, before the Reform Act was passed, William was alarmed on several occasions, and was dissuaded from placing the nation under martial law by Lord Grey, whose ministry eventually passed the act. William was himself almost injured at Ascot, when someone threw a very large rock at him upon his arrival for the race meeting. He had a small head, though, and because the hat which had been provided him was too large, he had wrapped a large silk handkerchief around his head so the hat would fit properly. That protected him from serious injury--although the rock was large enough that he was staggered and fell to his knees. William was convinced, by turns, that either martial law were needed, or parliamentary reform. Cooler head prevailed, and Lord Grey passed his reform bill.

The English ruling elite have always known when to give a bit to avoid having something worse forced on them.

(Mrs S just reminded me that William IV was nicknamed Silly Billy, not the brightest star in the firmament, typical Hanoverians).

He was a sailor . . . he used to tell off-color stories at state dinners . . .

Everything you tell me about the history of our Royal Family makes me (distressingly) rather fond of them.

Note I said history.

Well, some join the navy and really see the world - other envious persons describe the stories about that life as ... :wink:

And I was never nicknamed Silly Walter!