FIVE MYTH OF FRENCH REVOLUTION:

TWO hundred twenty-six years after the fall of the Bastille, the French Revolution stirs passions
mostly among historians like myself. But many of the myths surrounding the revolution have
proved more difficult to extinguish. Even the name Bastille Day is something of a misnomer.
Frances national holiday commemorates two separate events: the fall of the Bastille fortress in
Paris to revolutionary crowds on July 14, 1789, but also because 19th-century legislators
wanted something less bloody to celebrate the massive, peaceful Festival of Federation held
throughout the country on July 14, 1790, to express the French peoples commitment to liberty
and unity. To mark this years remembrance, here are the real stories behind five other canards.
1.

When told that the starving poor had no bread to eat, Queen Marie-Antoinette replied,
Let them eat cake.

Just three years ago, the New York Post not only repeated this myth but claimed that it
reputedly sparked the French Revolution. In fact, the French word was not gteau (cake) but
brioche (a bread-like pastry), and the queen never made the remark. Versions of it, attributed to
several earlier French rulers, circulated as early as the 1600s and appeared most famously in
Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Confessions, which was written before Marie-Antoinette even married
the future Louis XVI. It expressed the widespread popular conviction that luxury-besotted royals
neither understood nor cared for the famine-prone poor.
Marie-Antoinette, while no paragon of humility or simplicity, had genuine charitable instincts
toward poor people. But after 1789, her opposition to the French Revolution made her one of the
most hated figures in the country. Misogynistic journalists depicted her as a murderous,
hedonistic, sexually insatiable lesbian plotting to betray the country to Frances enemy, her
native Austria (their pamphlets had titles like The Royal Dildo and National Bordello Under the
Auspices of the Queen). The purported callous remark about the poor was just icing, so to speak,
on the brioche.
In the fall of 1793, less than a year after the execution of her husband, King Louis XVI, the
revolutionary government put Marie-Antoinette on trial for crimes that included the alleged
sexual abuse of her son. Found guilty, she died on the guillotine.
1.

The French Revolution was an uprising of the downtrodden.

Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities is only the best known of many novels that portray
Frances wretched poor taking revenge on their aristocratic oppressors during the revolution.
(Not on the list, please note, is Victor Hugos Les Misrables, source of the popular musical,
whose climactic scenes take place during the Parisian insurrection of 1832, not the events of
1789).
But the poorest of the poor played relatively little part in a revolution that began among wealthy
nobles and professionals in meeting halls at Versailles, weeks before the fall of the Bastille. Even
the dramatic popular violence that repeatedly drove the revolution forward was mostly carried
out by men with more than a little to lose. In the countryside, as many historians have shown, it

was directed against elite fief-holders, and the taxes and tolls they collected above all from welloff, entrepreneurial peasants. In the cities, the urban militants who called themselves sansculottes (without breeches i.e., those who did not dress like the wealthy) mostly came from
the ranks of artisans, shopkeepers and clerks. Their leaders, though they often called themselves
simple labourers, in fact included professionals and workshop owners.
1.

The French Revolution invented the guillotine.

In the popular imagination, nothing symbolises the revolution more vividly than the guillotine,
which became its principal means of public execution, accounting for some 16,000 deaths during
the Reign of Terror of 1793-1794. No less an intellectual celebrity than the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida has attributed the device to the revolutionary legislator and doctor Joseph-Ignace
Guillotin, who himself barely escaped it after being imprisoned during the Terror in 1794.
The book French Revolutions for Beginners gets somewhat closer to the truth, maintaining that
while the device first saw the light of day during the revolution, Guillotin did not invent it. In
fact, he opposed the death penalty, and advocated humane and painless execution by a
decapitation machine as a first step on the way to the abolition of capital punishment altogether.
Whats more, similar devices had been developed centuries earlier, including the nearly identical
Halifax Gibbet in West Yorkshire, England, and the Scottish Maiden, which can be seen at the
Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The guillotine remained in use in France as late as 1977.
1.

Maximilien Robespierre was a bloodthirsty dictator.

The figure most closely associated with the revolutionary Reign of Terror, Robespierre is widely
seen, particularly on the European and American right, as a proto-totalitarian who lusted after
absolute power. As Ann Coulter put it in her 2011 book, Demonic: Hitler got his playbook from
Robespierre. Even Jonathan Israel of the Institute for Advanced Study, a somewhat more
reputable authority, spoke repeatedly of Robespierres dictatorship in his 2014 history of the
revolution.
Robespierre, a stiff-mannered lawyer from the northern French town of Arras, was just one of 12
members of the Committee of Public Safety, which exercised quasi-dictatorial powers for less
than a year in 1793-1794. He was the committees most influential member, and his writings and
speeches did more than anything else to define the ideology of the Terror. But the incessant
demands of revolutionary politics took a heavy mental and physical toll, and as the Terror rushed
toward its climax, he spent crucial weeks confined to his bed less the man who ruined the
Revolution than . . . a man the Revolution ruined, to quote the historian Colin Jones.
Robespierres unstable mental condition, and his inability to exercise dictatorial control over
events, led directly to his fall and execution, along with several of his key allies, at the end of
July 1794 (or, according to the new revolutionary calendar, the month of Thermidor, Year II).
1.

The revolutionaries stormed the Bastille to free the political prisoners held there.

This myth dates back to the revolution itself and still appears regularly every July 14. On this
day in 1789, crowds stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, which is where King Louis XVI kept
his enemies, NPRs Steve Inskeep repeated just a year ago.
It is true that during the 17th and 18th centuries, the French monarchy imprisoned hundreds of
supposedly seditious writers including, most famously, Voltaire in the large, sinister
fortress that loomed over eastern Paris. But it largely discontinued the practice years before the
revolution, and on July 14, 1789, the Bastille held only seven prisoners: four counterfeiters, two
madmen and a nobleman accused of sexual perversion.
The Parisian crowds marched on it to seize gunpowder stored there so they could arm themselves
against a feared attack on the city and the new revolutionary assembly by the royal army. The
memory of the Bastilles earlier role, however, gave its fall tremendous symbolic importance.
Soon afterwards, the assembly triumphantly ordered the buildings demolition. Incidentally, the
column that stands on the site today does not commemorate the fall of the Bastille but rather the
three glorious days of a later French revolution, in 1830.
Bell teaches French history at Princeton. His Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past
and Present is forthcoming from Oxford University Press