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dinsdag 15 september 2009 |
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A Year of Tears & Tears Part 1
News from Ellis Taylor:
From 11th September 2009 Feature:
Posted: 11:36:19 PM
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 The French Revolution Marie Antoinette The vulnerability of the deposed king was exposed on 10 August, when a clash between Swiss Guards and republican forces forced the royal family to take refuge with the Legislative Assembly. Several hundred Swiss Guards died in the fighting. The royal family was imprisoned in the tower of the Temple in the Marais on 13 August, under conditions considerably harsher than their previous confinement in the Tuileries. A week later, many of the royal family's attendants, among them the princesse de Lamballe, were taken in for interrogation by the Paris Commune. Transferred to the La Force prison, the princesse de Lamballe was one of the victims of the September Massacres, killed on 3 September, her head affixed on a pike that was marched around the city. Although Marie Antoinette did not see the head of her dear friend as it was paraded outside of her prison window, she fainted upon learning about the gruesome end that had befallen her former companion. On 21 September, the monarchy was officially ended, and the National Convention was installed as the legal authority of France. The royal family was re-styled as the non-royal "Capets". Preparations for trying the king in a court of law began. Charged with undermining the First French Republic, Louis was separated from his family and tried in December. He was found guilty by the Convention, led by the Jacobins who rejected the idea of keeping him as a hostage. However, the sentence did not come until a month later, when he was condemned to execution by guillotine. Read more here - on WIKI Louis XVI However, the twenty-year-old king inherited a government deeply in debt, and a society in which entrenched privilege made it difficult if not impossible to effect the social, economic, and political reforms that were necessary both to solve the monarchy's financial problems and to keep up with a rapidly changing society and economy. In 1789 he convened the Estates-General for the the first time in almost 200 years to address these problems. But when the representatives of France's traditional three estates (the clergy, the nobility, and everybody else) gathered in Versailles that spring, they proved unwilling or unable to agree even upon how the deliberations should take place and votes should be counted. Out of the ruins of the Estates General the representatives of theThird Estate claimed power as the National Assembly, forced the King to order the other representatives to join them, and the French Revolution had begun.
Posted: 11:53:34 AM
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