Good morning Hank, it's Thursday.
We left off yesterday in our study of the 
French Revolution in early 1793,
with King Louis XVI being separated from 
his head via guillotine,
and France's ensuing war with almost all of Europe.
Meanwhile, and I don't want to overemphasize this, 
no one has done anything to fix the famine!!!
So these poor laborers, known as the sans-culottes because they wore pants
instead of shorts or... humorous outfits
...they start rioting.
And eventually, these guys and the Jacobins get an idea to solve the famine,
which is even WORSE than the idea 
of going to war with Austria:
Government price controls for bread.
This, of course, fails miserably, and eventually,
having failed at stealing grain from the rest of Europe,
the French government sends its army into the countryside to steal grain from itself.
All this happened under the leadership of 
the Committee of Public Safety,
(Motto: "We suck at protecting public safety")
which was led by Maximilien Robespierre, a fascinatingly paranoid despot
who would foreshadow fascinatingly paranoid despots like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin.
Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety hated anyone
associated in any way with the Church or the royalty.
And between the summers of 1793 and 1794, they oversaw the guillotining of more than 16,000 people,
including many nobility, many inadequately revolutionary revolutionaries,
clergy who refused to sign an oath to the government, and of course, in October, Marie Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette, the King's wife, who, for the record, never said "Let them eat cake,"
and who, like almost everyone murdered during the terror, posed absolutely no threat to the government.
So what had just recently been the First and Second Estates of France, the people who ran the show,
had suddenly become the enemies of this new secular state.
And in the end, this led to a lasting decline in the relevance of religion and class
to governments and economies in Europe.
The rampant guillotining during the terror is often seen as an example of Enlightenment thinking run amok,
but, in fact, more people were killed by guns during the terror than by the guillotine, so...
yeah... no.
However, among the people killed by the guillotine was
Robespierre, who, after a year of being paranoid
that people were trying to kill him,
of course inevitably got himself killed.
Which is one of the great lessons of history and also life:
If you act out of a paranoid fear of something happening, you will *always* make that thing happen.
Right, so Robespierre was guillotined in the month of Thermidor in the year two—
Oh! That reminds me of something I forgot to mention,
which is that, while there was this famine going on and France was broken, fighting like nine wars,
the Committee of Public Safety decided 
to change the French calendar.
You know, because the traditional calendar, with its 24-hour days
and its dating from the birth of Christ,
was all irrational and religion-y.
They renamed all the months
and decided that every day would only have ten hours and every hour one hundred minutes.
*That* would be an example of 
Enlightenment thinking run amok.
So after the Committee collapsed,
France passed a new Constitution,
and for the next four years, from 1795 to 1799,
France was run by a group of directors,
who stole elections and bungled the economy, but didn't cut off sixteen thousand people's heads, so...
bonus points for them.
But the French military was actually having 
a lot of success,
largely because in 1793,
France instituted the first military draft.
Which meant they had way more soldiers 
than anybody else.
And really, the military was the only institution
in which people had confidence,
which is why, when General Napoleon Bonaparte
seized power in 1799,
people were initially pretty psyched!
And so it was that after more than a hundred thousand lives lost, a decade of suffering, a continent-wide war,
France went from one supreme ruler to another.
The best quote ever about the French Revolution
comes from the former Chinese President Zhou Enlai,
who, in the 1960s was asked what he thought
the French Revolution's impact had been,
and he answered, "It's too soon to say."
And in a way it still is.
The French Revolution brought to the fore many of the conflicts that continue to define modernity:
between secularism and religion, between idealism and pragmatism, between oligarchy and democracy.
And to answer the inevitable student question
of why we even have to study this stuff,
that would be my first answer: The past isn't past.
It's still shaping the present.
But even more than that, I believe that the study of history is essentially an exercise in empathy.
You have to imagine what it was like to be a peasant in eighteenth century France,
or to be King Louis XVI, or to be
Marie Antoinette, or Robespierre.
Lookin' good!
What the study of history forces you to confront is
how people who are acting rationally,
who think they're acting in their own best interest,
and in many cases think they're acting
in the best interest of their countries,
can end up killing so many people,
and in many cases killing themselves!
I believe that thinking about those questions
makes *us* better at living *our* little lives,
even if it is in a less fancy costume.
In my case...
a much less fancy costume.
Hank, I'll see you on Friday.
