French Revolution

I read half of Citizens by Schama in the 90's but I've been enjoying history more in my middle age, and I picked up Ian Davidson's book on the French Revolution. I want to list podcasts, and lectures, verbal opportunities to learn for free on the internet.

History Extra Podcast episode of French Revolution (48 minutes)

Wikipedia Links

French Revolution had a major impact on European and Western history, by ending feudalism and creating the path for future advances in broadly defined individual freedoms.

Reign of Terror an attempt to eradicate alleged "counter-revolutionaries".

Storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris, France, on the afternoon of 14 July 1789. The medieval armory, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille represented royal authority in the centre of Paris. The prison contained only seven inmates at the time of its storming, but was seen by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the monarchy's abuse of power; its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution.

Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

People

Louis XVI In less than a year, the king was reduced to a figurehead, the nobility deprived of titles and estates and the church of its monasteries and property. Clergy, judges and magistrates were controlled by the state, and the army sidelined, with military power placed held by the revolutionary National Guard. The central elements of 1789 were the slogan "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" and "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen", which Lefebvre calls "the incarnation of the Revolution as a whole.

Maximilien Robespierre campaigned for universal manhood suffrage[1] and the abolition both of celibacy for the clergy, and slavery.

Jean-Paul Marat was a French political theorist, physician and scientist. He was a journalist and politician during the French Revolution. He was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes and seen as a radical voice.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord He worked at the highest levels of successive French governments, most commonly as foreign minister or in some other diplomatic capacity. His career spanned the regimes of Louis XVI, the years of the French Revolution, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Louis-Philippe. Those Talleyrand served often distrusted him but, like Napoleon, found him extremely useful. The name "Talleyrand" has become a byword for crafty, cynical diplomacy.

Georges Danton: He was guillotined by the advocates of revolutionary terror after accusations of venality and leniency toward the enemies of the Revolution.

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau A noble, he had been involved in numerous scandals before the start of the Revolution in 1789 that had left his reputation in ruins. Nonetheless, he rose to the top of the French political hierarchy in the years 1789–1791 and acquired the reputation of a voice of the people. Historians are deeply split on whether he was a great leader who almost saved the nation from the Terror, a venal demagogue lacking political or moral values, or a traitor in the pay of the enemy.

Olympe de Gouges a playwright who was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists.

Madame Roland was a French revolutionary, salonnière and writer.

François-Noël Babeuf was a French proto-socialist, revolutionary and journalist of the French Revolutionary period. "The French Revolution was nothing but a precursor of another revolution, one that will be bigger, more solemn, and which will be the last."

Links

Terms (Like Sans-culottes: Urban workers and peasants, whose name—literally, “without culottes,” the knee-breeches that the privileged wore—signified their wish to distinguish themselves from the high classes. The mob mentality of the sans-culottes constituted the most radical element of the Revolution.

Movies

One Nation, One King (Free on Tubi (4/26/21))

Today (4/26/21) till 630pm Dialogues des Carmélites, is an opera by Francis Poulenc