Back to the French Revolution

We returned to the Carnavalet Museum for the exhibit on the French Revolution.  Most of the art focused on the scenes & personalities of the Revolution, some names I recognized from street names here but most others I didn't.   Very few portraits of Louis XVI & Marie-Antoinette.

Here is a Louis bust & an M-A painting:

Louis, a pleasant looking if somewhat portly chap.

A stately, attractive lady loyal to her husband to the end.  And the end was years in coming with a miserable life leading up to it.

And what account of the Revolution would be complete without a gander at the Bastille?  Somewhere in our neighborhood today are remnants of the foundation but the rest of it was taken apart brick by brick by totally P.O.'d citizens.
























So here we are on the first anniversary of the Revolution, July 14, 1790.  Great rejoicing.  The government is in the hands of the people, the guillotines are beginning to do their work plus Louis & M-A are safely tucked away in separate cells in the Conciergerie. 
The new citizen-led government was barely working.   No IRS, no EPA, no Federal Reserve.  Ron Paul would be proud.

Ahh, what to do with Louis & M-A.  In January, 1793 it was decided  "off with their heads".  CNN had just opened their Paris bureau & was off doing another story so we're stuck with an artist's rendering.  Here's Louis XVI just before the guillotine dropped.
 

For the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette, the artist decided to let the guillotine drop, then paint.  So we have M-A ex-sanguinating, (a bit clinical but less icky) while the man on the left is parading her head on a pike.

 Hey folks, we had public executions in the West until the late 19th century.

Then there's Napoleon.  He played a minor but crucial role in the Revolution.  He was an artillery officer and at a particular time & place the good guys were taking it on the chin until Napoleon put forth some well placed cannon rounds & saved the day.  With that, he became a hero of sorts and in his own less than quiet megalomaniac way, he played that up until he became Le Grande Fromage.

We shall end our foray into a fractured French revolutionary history with this clock, having nothing to do with the Revolution but from that period, 1795.  I love seeing all the gears exposed.  Would dearly love to see this mechanical marvel actually ticking & tocking.

Thanks for tuning in.  See you with the next post.







.