History Quotes / TheFrenchRevolution

-> ''"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!"''
-->-- '''Creator/WilliamWordsworth'''[[note]]He was in Paris during the first three years of the Revolution[[/note]]

-> De nous [[PrecisionFStrike faire tomber sur le cul]]; [To drop us on our arses]

-> ''"Only a democratic or republican government-- these two words are synonyms despite the abuses in common speech--because an aristocracy is no closer than a monarchy to being a republic. Democracy is not a state in which the people, continually meeting, regulate for themselves all public affairs, still less is it a state in which a tiny fraction of the people, acting by isolated, hasty, and contradictory measures, decide the fate of the whole society. Such a government has never existed, and it could exist only to lead the people back into despotism. Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are of their own making, do for themselves all that they can do well, and by their delegates do all that they cannot do for themselves...the French are the first people of the world who have established real democracy, by calling all men to equality and full rights of citizenship; and there, in my judgment, is the true reason why all the tyrants in league against the Republic will be vanquished."''

!! Authors

-->-- '''Napoleon Bonaparte''', ''After his Defeat at Leipzig in 1813''.

-->'''Duke of La Rochefoucauld''': ''Sire, the Bastille has been taken.''
-->'''Louis XVI''': ''Taken? But by who?''
-->'''Duke of La Rochefoucauld''': ''By the people, sire.''
-->'''Louis XVI''': ''Is it a revolt?''
-->'''Duke of La Rochefoucauld''': ''No Sire, it is a revolution.''

--> ''[[TheRevolutionWillNotBeVilified Unité, Indivisibilité de la République]]; '''Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité''' '''[[GiveMeLibertyOrGiveMeDeath ou la mort]]'''[[note]]Unity, Indivisibility of the Republic; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.''[[/note]]

--> "Antoinette avait résolu [Antoinette had decided]
--> De nous [[PrecisionFStrike faire tomber sur le cul]]; [To drop us on our arses]
--> Mais le coup a manqué [But the plan was foiled]
--> Elle a le nez cassé." [And she fell on her face.]

--> What is the Third Estate? The purpose of this essay is very simple. We have three questions to consider:
--> 1. What is the Third Estate? '''Everything'''.
--> 2. What has it been until now in the political order? '''Nothing.'''
--> 3. What does it ask? To become '''something'''."

--> ''"Five or six hundred [aristocratic] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers."''

--> ''"... popular and democratic government is the only constitution which suits France, and all those who are worthy of the name of men."''

--> ''"If you have orders to remove us from this hall, you must also get the authority to use force, for '''[[BringIt we shall yield to nothing but bayonets]]'''."''

--> ''"Those who have not lived in the eighteenth century, [[NostalgiaFilter in the years before the Revolution]] do not know the sweetness of living [[EndOfAnEra and cannot imagine what it was like to have happiness in life]]."''

--> ''"[[DawnOfAnEra Happiness is a new idea in Europe]]."''

--> ''"'''[[RefugeInAudacity Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace]]''', et la France sera sauvée!"'''[[note]] We need Audacity, and even more audacity and forever audacity and France will be saved.[[/note]]

--> ''"To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem."''

--> ''A king should be tried not for the crimes of his administration, but for that of having been king, for nothing in the world can legitimize this usurpation, and whatever illusion, whatever conventions royalty surrounds itself in, it is an eternal crime against which every man has the right to rise up and arm himself... '''No one can reign innocently''': the madness of this is too obvious. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. '''This man must reign or die.''' ''

--> ''"Formerly, when a king died at Versailles the reign of his successor was immediately announced by the cry: "The king is dead, long live the king", in order to make it understood [[RoyaltySuperpower that despotism is immortal]]! Now an entire people, moved by a sublime instinct, cried: '''Long live the Republic!''' to teach the universe that tyranny died with the tyrant."''

--> ''"Citizens, we have reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, will successively devour all its children, [[{{Foreshadowing}} and finally produce despotism, with the calamities that accompany it]]."''

--> ''"O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!"''
--> (Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!)

--> ''"Let us be terrible in order to prevent the people from being terrible themselves!"''

--> ''"We have finally docked on the isle of freedom, and we have burned the vessel that brought us there."''

--> ''"After me, the Revolution -- or, rather the ideas which formed it -- will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off."''

--> ''"In 1793 such a force as no one had any conception of made its appearance. War had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a people numbering thirty millions, every one of whom regarded himself as a citizen of the State... By this participation of the people in the war... a whole Nation with its natural weight came into the scale."''

--> ''"There is, moreover, in this disease of the French Revolution something very strange that I can sense, though I cannot describe it properly or analyse its causes. It is a virus of a new and unknown kind. There have been violent Revolutions in the world before; but the immoderate, violent, radical, desperate, bold, almost crazed and yet powerful and effective character of these Revolutionaries has no precedents, it seems to me, in the great social agitations of past centuries. Where did this new race come from? What produced it? What made it so effective? What perpetuates it?...Independently of all that can be explained about the French Revolution, there is something unexplained in its spirit and in its acts. I can sense the presence of this unknown object, but despite all my efforts, I cannot lift the veil that covers it."''

--> ''"Historically speaking, the most obvious and most decisive distinction between the American and the French Revolutions was that the historical inheritance of [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution the American Revolution]] was "limited monarchy" and that of the French Revolution an absolutism which apparently reached far back into the first centuries of our era and the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and [[LaserGuidedKarma to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.]]"''

--> ''"I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her [UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette] with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."''

--> ''"It is obvious that the French Revolution was a vaster and more profound social upheaval, involving more violent conflict between classes, more radical reorganization of government and society, more far-reaching redefinition of marriage, property, and civil law as well as of organs of public authority, more redistribution of wealth and income, more fears on the part of the rich and more demands from the poor, more sensational repercussions in other countries, more crises of counterrevolution, war, and invasion, and more drastic or emergency measures, as in the Reign of Terror. From very early in the French Revolution the American Revolution came to seem very moderate."''

--> ''"He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country."''

--> ''"For the same reason that the Ancien Regime is thought to have an end but no beginning, the Revolution has a birth but no end."''

--> ''"Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation."''

-->''"There were two, three or four French Revolutions. Like a multi-stage rocket today, the Revolution involved several successive explosions and propellant thrusts."''

--> ''"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."''

--> ''"[[ReignOfTerror Ninety-three]] was the war of Europe against France, and of France against Paris. And what was the Revolution? It was the victory of France over Europe, and of Paris over France. Hence the immensity of that terrible moment?, '93, greater than all the rest of the century"''

--> ''"The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, [[Creator/MarquisDeSade Sade]]. The only poet of the times was the guillotine."''

--> ''"When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently—being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat."''

--> ''"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!"''

--> ''"Let us be terrible in order to prevent the people from being terrible themselves!"

--> ''"A king should be tried not for the crimes of his administration, but for that of having been king, for nothing in the world can legitimize this usurpation, and whatever illusion, whatever conventions royalty surrounds itself in, it is an eternal crime against which every man has the right to rise up and arm himself... '''No one can reign innocently''': the madness of this is too obvious. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. '''This man must reign or die.'''"'

--> ''"To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem."''

--> ''"A revolution can be neither made nor stopped. The only thing that can be done is for one of several of its children to give it a direction by dint of victories."''
-->-- '''UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte'''

--> ''"I think I may say that most political errors come from regarding legislation as a difficult science."''
-->-- '''Louis Antoine de Saint-Just'''

-->-- '''Creator/WilliamWordsworth'''[[note]]He was in Paris during the first three years of the Revolution[[/note]]

-->-- '''Creator/VictorHugo''', ''Quatre-Vingt-Treize''

-->-- '''UsefulNotes/MaximilienRobespierre'''

--> ''"Independently of all that can be explained about the French Revolution, there is something unexplained in its spirit and in its acts. I can sense the presence of this unknown object, but despite all my efforts, I cannot lift the veil that covers it...There is moreover in this disease of the French Revolution something very strange that I can sense, though I cannot describe it properly or analyse its causes. It is a virus of a new and unknown kind."''

--> ''"I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."''

--> 2. What has it been until now in the political order?'''Nothing.'''

--> ''"What we need is a single will (il faut une volonté, une). It must be either republican or royalist. If it is to be republican, we must have republican ministers, republican papers, republican deputies, a republican government. The internal dangers come from the middle classes; in order to defeat the middle classes we must rally the people... The people must ally itself with the Convention, and the Convention must make use of the people."''

-->-- ''UsefulNotes/MaximilienRobespierre''

!! Pamphlets

--> 3. What does it ask? To become '''something'''."''

--> ''"Those who have not lived in the eighteenth century, [[NostalgiaFilter in the years before the Revolution]] do not know the sweetness of living [[EndOfAnEra and cannot imagine what it was like to have happiness in life]]."''
-->-- '''Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord''', '' Mémoires du Prince de Talleyrand: La Confession de Talleyrand, V. 1-5 Chapter: La jeunesse – Le cercle de Madame du Barry.''

--> ''"[[DawnOfAnEra Happiness is a new idea in Europe]]."''
-->-- '''Louis Antoine de Saint-Just''

--> ''"What is the Third Estate? The purpose of this essay is very simple. We have three questions to consider:

--> ''"Independently of all that can be explained about the French Revolution, there is something unexplained in its spirit and in its acts. I can sense the presence of this unknown object, but despite all my efforts, I cannot lift the veil that covers it...There is moreover in this disease of the French Revolution something very strange that I can sense, though I cannot describe it properly or analyse its causes. It is a virus of a new and unknown kind."''
-->-- '''Alexis de Tocqueville'''

-->-- '''UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte'''

-->-- '''Creator/WilliamWordsworth'''[[note]]He was in Paris during the first three years of the Revolution[[/note]]

--> ''"What is the Third Estate? The purpose of this essay is very simple. We have three questions to consider://
1. What is the Third Estate? '''Everything'''.//
2. What has it been until now in the political order?'''Nothing.'''//
3. What does it ask? To become '''something'''.//