Orwell Was RIGHT...

.

.
.
.

"Power is not a means, it's an end. One doesn't establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."
(George Orwell)
.
.
The French Revolution proved that.

The excesses of the Monarchy made that country rife for revolution.

The French Revolution DID NOT mirror the American Revolution, it was a failed Collectivist Coup. The Jacobins were Collectivists who supported true "human equality," which always and everywhere requires tyranny and oppression, because free people ARE NOT equal.

The French Revolution (May 5th, 1789 - November 9th, 1799) proved that too often, "the cure" is worse then the disease.

During that Revolution a bloodletting known as "The Reign of Terror" which ran from September 1793 to July 1794 is estimated to have taken as many as 40,000 lives.

During that period, a mere accusation was enough to get a person executed. As a result, tens of thousands of productive citizens fled France for Alsace-Lorraine (nearby German provinces), Italy, Switzerland, Austria, even the United States.

The guillotine came to be called the 'National Razor' by the revolutionaries.

During the Reign of Terror many high ranking members of France's elite were sent to the guillotine or otherwise executed including King Louis XVI, his wife Marie Antoinette, Louis Philippe II, Madame Roland, and many of the Girondins.

Prior to King Louis XVI's execution a vote was conducted. 361 voted to execute him while 288 voted against it. He and Marie Antoinette were sentenced to death despite their endorsing the Revolution in 1793, in support of a Constitutional Monarchy, run primarily by a Parliament.

It was rumored that Marie Antoinette paid the executioner to ensure the blade was sharp, paying with a purse full of gold coins.

A sharp blade would ensure a quick and hopefully painless death.

King Louis XVI was recognized because his face was on the French coins. Had it not been for that, he may have been able to flee the country with Marie Antoinette and avoid being executed.

Paris' Mayor, Jean Sylvain Bailly (pronounced "By-eee") angered the revolutionaries by merely for proposing that King Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette be imprisoned rather than executed.

On 15 July 1789, Bailly took office as the mayor of Paris. Two days later he was met by Louis XVI at the Hotel de Ville who was there to endorse the Revolution. Bailly presented him with the new symbol of the revolution: the tricolor cockade.

In his function as mayor, Bailly was attacked by Camille Desmoulins and Jean-Paul Marat as too conservative, as Bailly continuously sought to promote the authority of the mayor while limiting the power of the General Assembly of the Commune.

Jean Sylvain Bailly sought, as Mayor of Paris, to be in full control of the Revolutionary administration. He envisioned being in a position where everyone answered to him, and only his orders were to be followed, creating a centralized government within Paris. However most Parisians didn't support this vision.

It was the deployment on the National Guard, a Militia run by Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, known simply as Lafayette.

Mayor Bailly not only played a major role in strengthening the National Guard, but also issued orders to Lafayette, in trying to maintain civility within the city. Bailly used the troops to secure the prisons, certify that all the entrance fees would be collected, and to ensure that beggars would not congregate in the city.

When Lafayette's National Guard fired on a mob attacking the prison, to drag some of those incarcerated to the guillotine, the National Convention used that as a reason to condemn Bailly to death.

Bailly was executed on a cold mid-November day. As he was marched through the streets to the guillotine a heckler is said to have yelled, "Do you tremble Bailly?" To which the Mayor famously responded, "Yes, but it is only the cold."

It's believed that King Louis XVI had actually helped to improve the guillotine years before he was executed by the device.

Even the individual who'd written a revolutionary constitution went into hiding once the Reign of Terror began. His name was Nicolas de Condorcet and once the people sheltering the counter-revolutionaries began to be executed he left his hiding place. He was recognized as an aristocrat and arrested when he ordered an omelette as only an aristocrat would. He killed himself in jail before they could send him to the guillotine.

On July 13th, 1793 the famed Revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat was murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a woman from Caen and an impoverished Royalist (supporter of the Nobility).

Marat had been a vigorous defender of the "sans-culottes" (the lower classes) and was seen as a radical voice. He published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. His periodical "L'Ami du Peuple" (Friend of the People) made him an unofficial link with the radical republican Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793, but once the Montagnards no longer needed his support in the struggle against the Girondins, Robespierre and other leading Montagnards began to separate themselves from him and the National Convention largely ignored his letters.

Marat's murderess, Charlotte Corday was guillotined on 17 July 1793 for the murder. During her four-day trial, she testified that she'd carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000."

Ironically enough, in 1794 Maximilien de Robespierre was also captured and beheaded by those opposing him, at the National Convention.The Reign of Terror ended when several of the main instigators, including Robespierre and Saint-Just, were executed.

Finally, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and effectively ended the French Revolution in 1794 and brought on a stable, though brutal dictatorship that eradicated the idealists of that era, once and for all.

The French Revolution bled France dry and eliminated much wealth, much of that taken with those who fled the Reign of Terror.

In the end the idealists cannibalized each other, resulting in the brutal dictatorship and endless wars of Napoleon.

One version of abusive absolute power, the Monarchy, was replaced by another, the secular, dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Tens of thousands of lives, the innocent, the guilty, even the idealists were lost in that process.
.