MARIE ANTOINETTE

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette

The modern history of France and its liberal heritage could be said to begin with the revolution in May 1789. For the first time in French history, the middle class and the common people began to mount an effective challenge toward the king, nobility, and clergy who had dominated their lives. In France, the first estate was the nobility, the second the clergy, and the third estate what Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto(1848) called the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the working class. Because of the way that the first and second estates, in alliance with the monarchy, controlled France, the real financial burden for the country rested upon those who could often afford it the least: members of the third estate. Vladimir I. Lenin, who founded Russian communism, quoted Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator in writing the Manifesto, “society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.” This, in fact, would be the condition of France for much of its modern history.

King Louis XVI summoned the three estates to meet collegially as the Estates-General to help solve the growing French financial crisis. But the same “irrecon-cilable antagonisms” that had plunged the last meeting of the Estates-General into disarray in 1614 happened again. However, this time the third estate did not retreat meekly back into its shops and factories. It demanded a say in its own governing, something that successive kings had systematically denied it.

During those critical years, the dissolution of the monarchy, with Louis XVI playing virtually no role in the greatest drama of his life (except suggesting that the guillotine have a triangular blade for a cleaner, sharper cut!), continued apace. On June 20, 1791, Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were apprehended at Varennes during an abortive flight to the French border. Any hopes for defense of the monarchy died when Louis's Swiss Guards were slaughtered at the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792, after Louis ordered the mercenaries to put down their guns—when they were on the verge of destroying the Jacobin Parisian street mob. The moderate Girondin faction in the assembly was swept away by the ruthless ascendance of the Jacobins.

It was during this period that the Jacobins sat to the left in the assembly and the Girondins to the right, thus beginning the association of leftism with radicalism and rightism with conservatism.

A National Convention was established in September 1792 to solidify the revolutionary movement and to give the revolutionaries recourse to defend it from the counterrevolutionaries, the royalist emigres, who sought to undo the revolution in collusion with the monarchies of Europe. Based on allegations of his complicity with the emigres in invading France, Louis XVI was sent to the guillotine he had improved on January 21, 1793; Marie Antoinette rode in the tumbril cart to the guillotine's blade on October 16, 1793.

The tumultuous series of events that began with the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and ended ...