"THOSE MAGNIFICENT GARDENS BECAME THE MEETING-PLACE OF FOREINGERS, DEBAUCHEES, IDLERS AND ESPECIALLY AGITATORS...
The most radical speeches were given in the cafés or in the garden itself. An orator would climb up on a table, and, gathering a crowd around him, excite it by the most violent language, which was never punished, for the multitude reigned.
Men thought to be devoted to the Duke of Orleans were the most ardent... ."
-- Histoire de la Révolution française par Adolphe Thiers, 1854
Paperblog, no source given; please scroll down
The phrase "Let them eat cake"* was was spread from there as were violent, often pornographic images against the monarchy.
* Said by one of the bigoted, reactionary aunts, daughters of Louis XV.
Some of the milder ones:
This and the next two images are from the web, without sources.
"Live free or die"
"The aristocratic hydra:" Its heads are cut off.
"The two are one:"
Louis wears a cuckold's horns and snakes spring from Marie Antoinette's coiffure.
# # #
At a time of extreme tension* Parisians thought that 30,000 soldiers called from the frontier to maintain order had come to massacre. When a young lawyer jumped up on a table and made the first call to arms, the crowd rushed off to find muskets, two days later stormed the Bastille and the French Revolution began.
*Two days before the taking of the Bastille mobs had destroyed 40 of the 54 hated toll-collection points that had recently been established in a new wall that circling the city. That they had been forbidden from pillaging (though they did) shows an authority behind them, and that the two that belonged to the Duke of Orleans were spared, suggest that it was he.
-- La Foule dans la Revolution française par George Rudé, 1982, pp.66-67.
The site was the Café de Foy...
Nineteenth-century illustration sold on the web / zoom
The video begins with scenes of the activity at Palais-Royal: please click.
No comments:
Post a Comment