After seeing the 2012 film adaptation of the musical Les Misérables in theaters, historian
Julia Gossard caught a snippet of some other viewers’ conversation. “So, that was the
French Revolution?” one woman asked. “And it was unsuccessful?”
Whether or not the French Revolution was “unsuccessful” is debatable. But the first half of the question
has a good old-fashioned yes-or-no answer: It's... No, Les Misérables is not “the French Revolution.”
And I don’t just mean it doesn’t cover the whole revolution or something—it’s literally set
during a different French uprising.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and that one movie-goer is far from the only person to make that mistake.
In fact, there are quite a few French Revolution myths floating around, from who invented the
guillotine to what that Bastille-storming business was really about.
Slap a tricolor cockade on your lapel and let’s get started.
OK, so maybe if you’ve read Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, you already knew this
was false. But the musical doesn’t spell out the historical context of its source material
all that clearly. There’s some talk of bread, a violent citizen uprising against the French
government, and a very strong poor-versus-rich theme throughout. It seems very French Revolution-y.
Here’s what was actually going on.
Though the revolution’s start and end dates aren’t exactly set in stone, it’s generally
agreed that it kicked off in the late 1780s. That’s when bad harvests and a major debt
crisis caused people to question the country’s traditional socioeconomic structure and the
Bourbon monarchy. The upheaval lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte took charge towards the
end of 1799.
When Jean Valjean gets out of prison at the beginning of Les Misérables, it’s already
1815. And the story’s major conflict centers on 1832’s June Rebellion, also known as
the Paris Uprising of 1832. Victor Hugo was even there to witness part of it.
Basically, the monarchy had been restored when Napoleon was ousted some years earlier,
and in 1832, Louis-Philippe was on the throne. He was a reasonably liberal ruler and most
members of the bourgeoisie were fans, but he had plenty of opponents. Republicans were
upset that there was a monarch on the throne at all, while Bonapartists were upset that
the monarch wasn’t, ya know, a Bonaparte. Some argued that Louis-Philippe wasn’t the
legitimate monarch.
There was also a host of issues creating upheaval in the country, many disproportionately affecting
the lower classes. This included a cholera epidemic which eventually claimed the life
of popular republican hero General Jean Maximilien Lamarque. It was at Lamarque’s funeral procession
that thousands of Parisians built barricades and staged a rebellion. One eyewitness wrote,
“Paris is at the moment the scene of dreadful carnage. The people have risen everywhere,
and are fighting with the troops in almost every street. From all sides I hear firing
going on, and, so far as I have seen, the people are getting the better of the troops.
There is every appearance that we are on the evening of a new revolution.”
If you’ve watched or read Les Misérables, you probably know that the people did not
end up getting the better of the troops. The military quelled the riots within about 24
hours, and roughly 800 rebels either died or were wounded. The French monarchy survived
unscathed.
But while the June Rebellion wasn’t technically part of the French Revolution, it definitely
embodied some of that same revolutionary spirit. So, no, Les Misérables is not the quintessential
“French Revolution” story. But you could say it’s a quintessential French revolution
story—lowercase r.
Misconception: Rebels stormed the Bastille to free political prisoners.
The storming of the Bastille, on the other hand, arguably is the quintessential French
Revolution story—though certain important details tend to get lost in the storm.
For one, the Bastille wasn’t the torture fortress you might be picturing. It was definitely
a fortress: eight 100-foot-tall towers with a roughly 80-foot-wide moat. Sadly, no alligators
in the moats as far as my research revealed, but still very fortress-like. Charles V had
ordered its construction back in 1370, and it had turned into a famed prison. But the
Bastille usually only housed about 40 prisoners at a time, mainly well-off citizens who stayed
in relative comfort. Inmates could bring furniture, pets, their whole private library, even servants.
Some prisoners had been sent to the Bastille by their own families. The king of France
could commit someone to prison by issuing an executive order called a lettre de cachet.
No defense, no trial, just straight to prison. Essentially, the real-life version of Monopoly’s
“Go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.”
If you were a French family with a wayward relative bringing shame upon the family name,
you could have the king deal them a “Go to Jail” card. That’s how infamous libertine
the Marquis de Sade ended up in prison, including a spell at the Bastille. There, he decorated
his room with tapestries, shipped in his own wine, and passed the time penning 120 Days
of Sodom. The Marquis was actually moved to another institution mere days before Bastille
Day.
When the fortress was stormed on July 14, 1789, there were only seven inmates. One was
a wayward relative sent by his family, four were serving time for forgery, and two had
been committed due to insanity—not the political prisoners you might have imagined. But if
the goal wasn’t to free prisoners, why attack a prison?
The real reason, according to most historians, was for ammunition.
At the time, it was clear to everyone that France was in serious debt, in part because
they had just helped the U.S. win the American Revolution. Merci for that one, guys. Back
in France, it was the already worse-off citizens who were suffering from the fallout of that
financial crisis. Inflation, food shortages, and so on.
Two months before the attack on the Bastille, King Louis XVI had convened the Estates-General
to figure out a game plan. There were three estates: The First was clergy; the Second
was nobility; and the Third comprised everyone else—which mostly consisted of the bourgeoisie
and peasants. The Third Estate was raring for serious reform, and its members were worried
that the more conservative elements of France would try to tamp them down.
Those worries escalated in July, when Louis XVI fired Jacques Necker, a finance minister
who had enjoyed the Third Estate’s support. That, combined with the fact that troops had
moved into positions surrounding Paris, made Third Estate members think the king was plotting
against them.
So on July 14, about 2000 people raided Paris’s Hôtel des Invalides for weapons and then
marched to the Bastille to seize its ammunition. Guards tried to resist, but the Bastille’s
governor, Bernard-René de Launay, finally gave in. It didn’t turn out great for Launay—he
was beaten badly, and when he kicked someone in the crotch, the mob cut his head off and
paraded it around town. So, like I said, not great.
It didn’t take long for the storming of the Bastille to take on an almost mythic significance.
Revolutionaries considered the fortress a symbol of monarchical overreach and oppression,
and they slowly tore it down over the coming months.
As for all those torture rumors, revolutionaries propagated those, too. As Simon Schama wrote
in his 1989 book Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, “Ancient pieces of
armor were declared to be fiendish ‘iron corsets’ applied to constrict the victim
and a toothed machine that was part of a printing press was said to be a wheel of torture. … Countless
prints … supplied suitably horrible imagery, featuring standing skeletons, instruments
of torture and men in iron masks.”
Yes, the Bastille was a prison, and some inmates were treated better than others. But reports
of actual torture were, to use the technical phrase, a bunch of baloney.
It’s generally assumed that the guillotine was named after some guy named “Guillotine.”
This is true: His full name was Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, and he was a French physician.
But versions of the guillotine had been used around the world for centuries before it became
known as “the guillotine.” Scotland had the Maiden from the mid 1500s to the early
1700s; Germany had the planke in the Middle Ages; and Italy had the mannaia during the
Renaissance. England’s Halifax Jibbet was older than all three. Heck, France itself
is believed to have used a guillotine-like machine before the 18th century.
Not only did Joseph-Ignace Guillotin not invent guillotines, he didn’t even design the ones
used during the French Revolution. All he really did was suggest that France standardize
executions. Like most other parts of life during the Ancien Régime, your execution
method depended on your socioeconomic status. High-class folks usually got beheaded, while
most other criminals were hanged.
Beheadings were viewed as the more ‘honorable’ method of execution, and were quicker and
less painful—that is, if your executioner did a good job. But a lot can go wrong when
it comes to lopping off a head with an axe or sword.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was against the death penalty altogether, but apparently he realized
that France was nowhere near being ready to give it up. So, in 1789, he proposed that
France use an official decapitation contraption to make all executions as humane as humanly
possible. “With my machine,” he explained, “I strike off your head in the twinkling
of an eye and you won’t feel a thing.” Cute.
As for what that machine would look like, he didn’t offer up any diagrams. And the
National Assembly wasn’t exactly clamoring for details—Guillotin wasn’t a very well-respected
physician. One contemporary described him as “a nobody who made himself a busybody.”
By the fall of 1791, however, decapitation was made official and the number of death
sentences was rapidly climbing, and Guillotin’s call for an equitable, efficient means of
execution suddenly seemed like a worthy idea. An engineer named Antoine Louis designed the
machine, and another guy named Tobias Schmidt constructed it.
Much to the horror of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, nobody forgot about his early involvement,
and everyone started calling the machine “the guillotine.” After he died in 1814, his
family members petitioned the government to formally pick a different name for it. When
they didn’t, the Guillotins picked a different last name for themselves.
As legend would have it, Marie Antoinette was informed that French peasants had no bread—their
main food source—and she responded with “Let them eat cake.” In other words: “I
am so out of touch up here in my big castle with my big wigs and big feasts that I don’t
understand the problem. No bread, peasants? Eat something else!”
Just for pedantry’s sake, the sentence in French is “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,”
which literally means “Let them eat brioche.” Brioche is a rich, buttery bread that’s
way more extravagant than what poor peasants would’ve been eating—it’s not exactly
cake, but it doesn’t really change the supposed sentiment.
But the correct French phrasing does shed a little light on how it got popularized.
The earliest known record of “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” comes from philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s Confessions, penned in the 1760s. In Book Six, he wrote, translated from French:
“At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being
informed that the country people had no bread, replied, ‘Then let them eat brioche!’”
Marie Antoinette didn’t even move to France and marry the future king until 1770, so it’s
safe to assume that she’s not the “great princess” Rousseau mentioned. It could’ve
been Maria Theresa of Spain, who married Louis XIV a century earlier. She supposedly suggested
that instead of bread, starving subjects should just eat croûte de pâté, which is essentially
pie crust. Two of Louis XVI’s aunts, Madames Sophie and Victoire, have also been credited
with “Let them eat brioche.”
This type of comment isn’t confined to France, either. A 16th-century German story, for example,
has a wealthy woman asking why impoverished people don’t eat a sweet bread called krosem.
In short, really rich people have a long history of being unmoved by the plight of the poor.
But how unfeeling and/or oblivious was Marie Antoinette? Maybe less than you think, according
to biographer Antonia Fraser. Around the time of the Flour War in 1775, when bread shortages
caused a wave of riots, the queen wrote home to her mother:
“It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their
own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness.”
Marie Antoinette was known to avoid riding through the fields because she knew it would
damage the peasants’ crops, and she once asked her husband for 12,000 francs in order
to free poor people who were in debtors’ jail for failing to pay for their children’s
wet-nurses, and even more to help the poor of Versailles.
Would those small acts of sympathy save her from Madame Guillotine? Absolutely not. She
was convicted of treason and beheaded on October 16, 1793.
Thanks for watching Misconceptions, make sure to subscribe to Mental Floss so you can learn
everything you’ve gotten wrong about everything. New videos on our channel every week. Comment
your favorite Les Mis song down below, and I’ll see ya next time.