Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution

by Simon Schama

Women were included for their exemplary patriotism, especially when it was directed, as in the case of Jeanne d’Arc, at the British.

Controller-General Silhouette, for example, in 1759, had proposed a tax on luxury items like gold and silver plate, jewelry, carriages – as well as on celibacy – and was drummed out of office for his temerity, amidst a chorus of execration.

It was the connection of anger with hunger that made the Revolution possible. But it also programmed the Revolution to explode from over-inflated expectations.

But the apparently picayune matter of the Scheldt became a symbol of both sides’ intransigence.

The brutality of the Vendée rising, and of its repression, was a product of the Manichaean language of the revolutionary war.