Most people’s knowledge of the French Revolution, picked up from movies and lurid novels, is pretty much limited to 1789, Bastille Day, and howling mobs, illustrated with snippets from The Scarlet Pimpernel. Guillotines, old hags knitting, innocent aristocrats being persecuted, lots of gore. The Reign of Terror, with rising flames in the background, as depicted in every bad remake of A Tale of Two Cities. Yuck.
So what should make all that stuff relevant to us in the twenty-first century? We in North America don’t have kings and queens to overthrow. There’s no palace of Versailles with its obscene opulence, no titled (more…)
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