Days of The French Revolution Quotes

“Yet, although many priests were extremely poor, the Church as an institution was not only very rich but also powerful. It paid no taxes, voluntarily contributing instead a grant to the state every five years, and, as the amount of this grant was decided in the quinquennial Church Assemblies, the clergy were able to exercise a considerable influence over the policies of the Government.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution

“Overcome by remorse at the part he had played in the downfall of the Girondins, Desmoulins had burst into tears when they were executed. He had since infuriated Robespierre by declaring in an obvious reference to him, ‘Love of country cannot exist when there is neither pity nor love for one’s fellow countrymen but only a soul dried up and withered by self-adulation.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“In Paris thousands of people went out regularly to witness the operations of what the deputy, J. A. B. Amar, called the ‘red Mass’ performed on the ‘great altar’ of the ‘holy guillotine’.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“A woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was consequently condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“three thousand captives perished in an epidemic in the grossly overcrowded prisons and a further two thousand were towed out in barges into the middle of the Loire and drowned, some of them stripped naked and bound together in couples. The river became so choked with these barges that ships weighing anchor brought them up filled with the dead. Birds of prey hovered over the waters, gorging themselves with human flesh, and the fish became so contaminated that orders had to be given forbidding them to be caught.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“decided that the guillotine was too slow an instrument for their purpose and had over three hundred of their victims mown down by cannon fire. ‘What a delicious moment!’ reported an approving witness to a friend in Paris. ‘How you would have enjoyed it! … What a sight! Worthy indeed of Liberty! … Wish bon jour to Robespierre.’ From Feurs, the representative himself reported, ‘The butchery has been good.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“One victim was fetched from prison to face a charge which had been brought against another prisoner with a similar name. Her protests were silenced by the prosecutor who said casually, ‘Since she’s here, we might just as well take her.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“You judge me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavour to carry to the scaffold the courage they displayed.’ She succeeded in doing so. While the mob surrounded the cart, shouting, ‘À la guillotine! À la guillotine!’, she tried to comfort a frightened forger who sat beside her. And on arrival at the scaffold she asked the executioner to behead him first so that he would be spared the spectacle of her death. The executioner declined: it was against the rules. But she pleaded with him, and he gave way. When it was time for her to be bound to the plank, she looked up at the statue of Liberty, which had been erected in the Place de la Révolution in commemoration of the events of 10 August, and uttered her famous apostrophe, ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“Having climbed the steps she stumbled and trod on the executioner’s foot. ‘Monsieur,’ she apologized as he cried out in pain, ‘I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.’ They were the last words she spoke.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“At Lyons, the second most important city in France, royalists had assumed control and were busy executing the republicans whom they had displaced, and at Toulon counter-revolutionaries were soon to hand over arsenal, town and fleet to the British admiral, Lord Hood who, without the discharge of a single broadside, took under his command twenty-six of France’s sixty-one frigates.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“if these extremists are allowed to have their way and the principle of national representation suffers, Paris will be annihilated; and men will soon be searching the banks of the Seine to see if the city had ever existed.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“In the morning we had been talking of roasting and eating the French … Now people avoided each other’s eyes and the only words uttered were curses. In the gathering darkness we sat in a circle. We did not even have a fire as we usually had. Almost everyone remained silent … then someone asked me what I thought of the events of the day … So I simply said, ‘At this place, on this day there has begun a new era in the history of the world; and you can all claim to have been present at its birth.’ ‘You’ll see how these little cocks will strut now,’ wrote one dispirited Prussian after this devastating cannonade at Valmy. ‘We have lost more than a battle.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“I must not venture to describe the excesses of barbarity and lustful indecency with which this corpse was defiled. I shall only say that a cannon was charged with one of the legs.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“One prisoner who did not escape the assassins’ blades was Marie Gredeler, a young woman who kept an umbrella and walking-stick depository in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. Charged with having mutilated her lover, she was herself mutilated, her breasts were cut off, her feet were nailed to the ground and a bonfire was set alight between her spreadeagled legs.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“those who tried to protect themselves with their hands suffered the longest as the blows of the blades were thus weakened before they reached the head; that some of the victims actually lost their hands and arms before their bodies fell; and that those who put their hands behind their backs obviously suffered less pain. We, therefore, recognized the advantages of this last posture and advised each other to adopt it when it came to be our turn to be butchered.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The King accepted the decree disbanding the Household Guard, but he vetoed both those concerning recalcitrant priests and that authorizing the formation of the fédérés camp near Paris. And in protest against these vetoes, Jean Roland, urged on by his wife who had become the guiding force of the ministry, publicly condemned the King’s action, reading out the sharply worded condemnation in His Majesty’s presence and reminding him that he would have to choose between the Revolution and its opponents. The King, already exasperated by the rudeness of Roland who insisted on appearing at Court with laces in his shoes instead of the prescribed buckles, responded by dismissing most of his Ministers and replacing them with more amenable Feuillants.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The dismissal of Narbonne caused uproar in the Assembly where Vergniaud rose to condemn it on behalf of the Girondins and to threaten the Court at the Tuileries in the most violent terms. ‘Terror and dread have often sallied forth from that place,’ he cried. ‘Let them today enter it in the name of the law. Let all those who now live there know that the King alone is inviolable, that the law will, without distinction of persons, overtake all the guilty sheltered there, and that there is not a single head which, once convicted of crime, can escape its blade.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“On his return to France, vain, quarrelsome but undoubtedly ingenious, he had found himself again in demand as a fashionable physician whose writing-paper was adorned with an imaginary coat of arms. He had composed various scientific papers, on light, heat and electricity, which he had presented to the Académie des Sciences whose members, shocked by his contradictions of Newton, refused to admit him to their number, thus increasing the sense of persecution which haunted him and drove him to excess.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“Moreover, in his own opinion, he was not only more experienced than they were but also far more wise and honest. ‘When the Revolution came I immediately saw how the wind was blowing,’ he wrote. ‘And at last I began to breathe in the hope of seeing humanity avenged and myself installed in the place which I deserved.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“Marat’s targets, who were attacked with equal venom if less scabrously in his paper L’Ami du peuple, were more diverse. Indeed, suspecting almost everyone and constantly complaining, ‘Nous sommes trahis’, Marat attacked the Assembly, the Feuillants, the royal family, the Ministers and municipality with fine impartiality. ‘In order to ensure public tranquillity,’ he once declared, ‘two hundred thousand heads must be cut off.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The petition was laid out on an altar which had been erected for the recent celebration of the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. As the signatories filed past, many writing their names with evident difficulty, some unable to write at all, two men, one a hairdresser, the other an invalide with a wooden leg, were discovered under the steps leading up to the platform. It was later supposed that they had hidden there to peep up the women’s skirts, but at the time the cry went up that they intended to set fire to the altar of liberty, that they were spies for counter-revolutionaries. They were dragged out and hanged on the spot.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The Days of the Tuileries 20 June and 10 August 1792 ‘What a joy for these gentlemen to be able to give orders to their head clerk, the King of France’ BARON NECKER”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The crowds were immense. Every window and roof in the Champs Elysées was filled with faces. People clambered on to gates and into the trees. But there was a strange silence broken only by shouts of ‘Vive la Nation!’ Hundreds of official notices had been pasted to the walls of Paris reading: ‘Whoever applauds the King shall be flogged. Whoever insults him shall be hanged.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The Queen’s bedroom and the children’s were also found to be deserted. And soon the tocsin was ringing and crowds of people from all over Paris were surging round the Tuileries, at first in a mood of indignant anger, so one observer considered, then in one of taunting contempt. They pushed through the gates on which was hung a sign reading ‘House to let’, telling a worried postman who was trying to deliver letters to mark them, ‘Gone away. Left no address’. They then streamed into the palace, examining the rooms with curiosity, insisting that the palace servants remove their livery but otherwise neither molesting anyone nor doing any damage. A cherry hawker sat with her basket on the eiderdown quilt of the Queen’s bed. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Today, it’s the nation’s turn to be comfortable.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The radicals sat on the President’s left, the less numerous conservatives on his right, this disposition providing thereafter, in other countries as well as France, a useful addition to the terminology of politics.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The president, Jean Joseph Mounier, had gone to consult the King leaving his chair to the Bishop of Langres who was quite incapable of controlling the rabble. ‘Order! Order!’ the bishop called as the women clambered on to the platform. ‘We don’t give a fuck for order,’ they shouted back at him. ‘We want bread.’ Several of them pushed their faces at him, demanding to be kissed. He obliged them with a sigh. Others threatened to play boule with the head of ‘that damned Abbé Maury’. A few, who had gone into assommoirs were now quite drunk, some of them vomiting over the benches. One of the prettiest sat down on the knee of her ‘little mother Mirabeau’ who seemed very happy to hold her.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“The Day of the Vainqueurs De La Bastille 14 July 1789 ‘Yes, truly we shall be free! Our hands will never wear shackles again”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“There were still no rules of procedure and when it was suggested that lessons might be learned from the House of Commons in London, the proposal was rejected contemptuously as yet another example of that intolerable anglomania which the Comtesse de La Tour du Pin said had become so extreme at Court that people took to affecting English accents.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“Never was any such event so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen’ ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE”
― Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution

“When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, though, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. The various taxes and duties levied in France – the gabelle, the traites, the aides as well as the capitation and the vingtièmes–were all, as he discovered, subject to variations, exemptions, inequalities in distribution and abuses in collection that made the evils of the system one of the principal causes of social unrest. Yet the increasing expenses of government and public works and the costs of the country’s wars – in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about 2,000 million livres–rendered the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution