1770, the future of France rests on the shoulders of a young Louis-Auguste, recently named heir
after the untimely demise of his brother and father and today, “today is the day this
15-year-old boy becomes a 15-year-old man, non?
Okay, here we are,” he says “I want those great-grandkids on my desk by February.
Have fun you two!” and he leaves him in a room with a 14-year-old girl named Maria
Antonia.
At least until she came to France and they told her she’s Marie Antoinette.
She’s the Archduchess of Austria and daughter of the great Maria Theresa and the thought
of the French and the Holy Roman Empire being friends was… still as much of a shock to
a lot of French as it is to me.
“So, uh… good to see you.
Maria, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you mind if we… don’t?”
“Yeah let’s not, no” “Oh thank God, I mean not that you’re - you know, it’s
just -” “Yeah.”
Understandably they tucked into bed and faced apart, thinking at least the awkward part
of the wedding was over.
Until the next morning when “Congratulations!”
[intro]
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Louis became king just a few years later.
Inheriting a kingdom as a teenager is kind of like being a child actor -- it rarely ends
well.
If all you know about him is the revolution, you might expect he went completely off the
rails as a mad tyrant, but really, if you’ve seen my Pedro II video, the two were surprisingly
similar.
It bears repeating that even the best monarch does not extend his merits to absolute monarchy
as a form of government but with that said, after Louis became king at the age of 19,
his sole mission as king was to be loved by the people.
In fact as a young man, he was a bit of a revolutionary himself, pushing forward an
edict of religious tolerance that gave people the right to be protestants or jews.
“Always consult public opinion” he would say, “it is never wrong”.
The trouble began in the fact that Louis wanted to be liked by everybody and anything too
forward-thinking was sure to draw the ire of the nobility.
You see France was massively in debt, but it had the money to pay off that debt; it’s
just that the people with money were the same people who were legally exempt from paying
taxes and also the same people who were in charge of tax law.
But the crown had to do something because by 1775 Louis had already had to put down
over a hundred different riots -- in some sense, the revolution was already beginning
to take shape.
Luckily, as long as France didn’t take on any outrageous new spending, they would be
fine.
[growing Star-Spangled Banner, smash cut to American Revolution Montage] “Turgot, do
you see what I’m seeing?”
“Your majesty, we mustn’t” “Turgot, who am I?”
“The king of France, your majesty” “Correct.
And if there is one thing, one thing, that I share with each and every one of my forefathers
for the last thousand years, the very essence of what it is to be French, it is this: with
God as my witness when I see an opportunity to stick it to the British, I am going to
take it!”
So the Yankees get independence and France gets another billion livres in debt.
They tried to fudge the numbers by insisting that ordinary revenues covered for ordinary
expenses, but that didn’t make the problem go away, so a new plan was hatched to spend
their way out of debt.
All they had to do was get enough public spending done to bolster confidence, increase the amount
they can borrow, and to do that all they needed was money from… more debt or more taxes.
If you think those are unpopular options today, when Louis tried to pass one of the most comprehensive
tax reforms pre-revolution not only did the aristocratic courts immediately shoot it down,
even middle-class citizens were out in the streets burning effigies of the finance minister.
And so if he can’t afford to borrow money and he can’t muster new taxes on his own
there’s only one move left.
He must summon… the Estates General.
The most powerful and influential men in France are assembled in Versailles -- businessmen,
politicians, landowners, priests, great thinkers, and war heroes.
The Estates General was the only body powerful enough to break the deadlock and make new
taxes but it was also a huge gamble on the side of the king because they would have the
power to make… other changes as well.
For instance they undid a lot of censorship laws, although I’m not sure exactly what
those laws were covering since there were already pamphlets literally called libelles
having a go at Louis’s supposed infertility.
This is totally unrelated but highly amusing, the pamphlets asked “Can’t the king do
it?” and Marie Antoinette’s brother goes “Oh, I can confirm, he can do it” because,
and this is true, Louis and Marie Antoinette eventually had kids but only after her brother,
the goddamn Holy Roman Emperor himself, came to France, evaluated Louis’s performance
in the bedroom, and gave him coaching tips on how to apply himself to his marital duties.
Now he was never actually in the room, that would have been ludicrous, but he did write
to his brother once saying, and I quote, “Oh, if I could only have been present once, I
would have taken care of him” and trust me, the full context is… much more explicit.
However, the Estates General had not been called in over 150 years, or three Louis’s
ago and was janky as all hell.
There were weird rules about who was allowed to wear what, and most importantly it was
split up into three councils that each got a vote, one for the clergy, one for the nobility,
and one for the other 95% of the population.
A bunch of folks from that third category go “This is dumb, you’re dumb, we’re
making our own council where we all get counted equally and we’re the ones making the laws!”
and a bunch of the priests go with them and Louis goes “Wait, wait no, this isn’t
how this is supposed to work, what - what are you guys voting on there guys stop!”
but it was too late.
By this point a majority of the Estates had made the switch and the monarchy was absolute
no longer.
So the French Revolution is weird because it kind of happened from the top down and
the bottom up simultaneously because this was a bunch of appointed officials taking
power away from the king but at the same time you’ve got stuff like the storming of the
Bastille which was common people on the ground tearing down the old establishment, but in
general this was the phase when everybody still had their ships together, the National
Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man with a little help from Jefferson,
all in all it was the kind of origin story that democracies dream about and for the most
part Mr. “will of the people” seemed to tolerate it because he couldn’t do much
else and maybe France could have transitioned with relative peace to a constitutional monarchy
and become like Britain today.
But one day the people showed up at his doorstep one day with guns.
A bunch of women in the Parisian marketplace said to themselves “Hey, we can’t afford
to eat, isn’t there someone who’s supposed to fix this sort of thing?” and soon enough
a small army of 7,000 had made their way to Versailles.
A small delegation made their way to the king’s chambers to whom he turned on the charm and
went “Ladies, believe me, we are gonna disburse food from the royal stores and you will not
starve” but like in a way that was somehow so charming that one of the women fainted,
unless that was just malnutrition, but the rest of the crowd was not so moved.
“Is it just me or is that angry mob getting bigger?”
[ringtone] “Lafayette, defender of truth justice and the American way.”
“Lafayette, come quickly, bring the national guard!”
[Lafayette enters] “I got some good news and some bad news for you chief.
The good news is the national guard is already here.
The bad news is they all joined the protestors.”]
[Marie Antoinette enters, slams the door.
Hands break through like zombies, chanting “Come to Brazi- to Pariiiisss”] “They’re
inside the palace!”
Lafayette: “Your majesty if you wish it I’m here to die with you but I have a plan”
[The Royal family steps out onto the balcony] “Oi!
Move the kids so we can shoot you!”
“*Ahem* people of Paris!
We hear you, and we will go to Paris!”
Lafayette: “Your words, they move me!
Long live the king!
Long live the king!”
Crowd: “Long live the king!”
[The king is grabbed by armed guards and paraded along with the crowd as they continue chanting]
At this point the king kind of disappears while under house arrest in Paris, but it’s
said when he arrived in the city he came to visit an old, dilapidated palace and sat a
while in its library, rummaging through its wise and dusty tomes to consult with the written
memory of England’s decapitated monarch.
Meanwhile the people of Paris were whipped into a frenzy by guillotine-enthusiast Maximillien
Robespierre.
Not only has Louis lost the support of the lawmakers and the goodwill of the people,
he’s completely lost his grip on the army.
So if the French army won’t fight for him…
maybe the Austrian army will.
After all, they don’t want their people getting any ideas and it would be great if
their new ally wasn’t too busy fighting itself.
The royal family sneaks out a back entrance while Lafayette is supposed to be guarding
them and makes it to the countryside, but just before they can make it to the border
somebody recognizes Louis because his face is on their money.
Louis gets hauled back to Paris on charges of treason, which he thinks is ridiculous,
but that defense didn’t work out so well for England’s Charles I.
Meanwhile Lafayette is held responsible for letting the king escape, Robespierre marks
him as a traitor, people start throwing stones at the national guard and the national guard
opens fire killing 13-50 people so Lafayette just accidentally did a Boston Massacre.
The Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Prussia issue a threat saying that if anything happens
to Louis the French had better watch out and ooh that did not make the situation better.
It was really just an incidental little thing they said while they were partitioning Poland
again but those were fighting words.
So even though you’ve got France’s finest diplomats out trying to prevent war, France
fires first.
Because they didn’t plan on hurting their king, but dammit they’ll fight like hell
to defend their right to hurt him if they want to!
The Prussian-Austrian army, (oh my God Prussia and Austria on the same side of a war, cats
and dogs living together), they end up doing really well at first but they declare their
intention to restore Louis to full power and that right there is his death sentence.
He’s found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to immediate execution by one vote.
Citizen Capet is marched to the scaffold and tells the people “I hope at last I may make
you happy, even if it is with my blood.
But when one can be sacrificed for the many, why not two, or three, or ten.
Little by little, we will find reasons for sacrificing the many for the happiness of
the many, and we will think it was a bargain.”