Nov. Church property seized as property of the nation
Dec. Paper money called “assignats” issued by France to prevent its
bankruptcy
The French press: Before the Estates General met at Versailles in May 1789, there were only a handful of state-sanctioned newspapers in Paris. By June, there were more than three hundred newspapers in Paris, not including a deluge of pamphlets and magazines. Historians estimate that 70 percent of men and 80 percent of women in Paris had some basic literacy; those who couldn’t read had the news read to them by street criers or friends. Jean-Paul Marat printed 3,000 copies of his newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple; Jacques Hébert’s Le Père Duschesne had a print run of 80,000 copies in a city of 600,000 people. Since each copy of these radical newspapers was probably read by more than one person, their influence was vast.
March on Versailles: On October 5–6, 1789, a group of about six thousand women marched the fourteen miles from Paris to Versailles to protest the price and scarcity of bread. Among them were women who ran market stalls, sex workers, middle-class and working-class women, as well as men dressed as women (some sources say they were agitators in the pay of the duc d’Orléans). Before they left Paris, they were joined by fifteen thousand sympathetic members of the National Guard. Fearing they would desert if he did not let them march, Lafayette accompanied them. The women ransacked Versailles, threatened to kill the queen, decapitated several guards, and their protests led the king to agree to sign the new constitution. Sixty thousand people marched alongside the king’s carriage as it made its way back to Paris: a sign of the people’s new power.
The Great Fear: In the summer of 1789, people displaced by famine roamed the French countryside, looking for food and work. The revolutionary events of the spring, most important the meeting of the Estates General and the storming of the Bastille, had given peasants hope, but they also feared aristocratic payback. Fueled by fear and lightning-fast rumor, peasants mobilized in large groups and attacked anyone who threatened them (vagrants, peddlers, the homeless, nobles). These attacks fueled more panic, which in turn fueled more attacks. As historian George Lefebvre observed, “What matters in seeking an explanation for the Great Fear is not so much the actual truth as what the people thought the aristocracy could and would do.”
The poor: I drew inspiration for Camille’s pamphlets from Henry Mayhew’s important series of articles published as London Labour and the London Poor (1849–1852). Mayhew interviewed hundreds of poor Londoners, from an eight-year-old girl who sold watercress to a disabled Black boy who, for a coin, swept a clean path for pedestrians crossing the street. Although Mayhew wasn’t as enlightened as he might have been, he brought attention to the plight of his city’s poor. Edmé Bouchardon’s “The Cries of Paris,” (1737–1746) a series of drawings of people who worked on the streets of Paris, also inspired me. You can view them at www.getty.edu/art/mobile/interactive/bouchardon/index.html.
Balloons: Strange as it may seem, when I dreamed up a balloon corps for Lazare to lead, I had no idea that such a balloon corps had actually existed. But it did! In 1794, the French Aerostatic Corps (Compagnie d’Aérostiers) was created to aid the French government with gathering information, communication (through signaling), and the distribution of propaganda. As far as I know, Lafayette was never involved with it. The balloon corps saw action in Napoleon’s imperial battles in Egypt before it was disbanded in 1799.
Revolutionary women: The ghosts of several real-life women of the French Revolution whispered in my ear as I wrote this book. Their names aren’t as widely known as Robespierre’s and Danton’s, but they deserve to be. The first is the playwright Olympe de Gouges, who in 1791 wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Women as a corrective to the Declaration of the Rights of Man after demands for equal rights for women were repeatedly ignored. De Gouges was also an abolitionist. Her beliefs were seen as treasonous, and on November 3, 1793, she was executed by guillotine. The second is Charlotte Corday, who murdered one of the Revolution’s leaders, Jean-Paul Marat, in his bath when she was twenty-four. Few believed Corday herself was responsible, though she insisted she acted alone for the good of the revolution to kill the “monster” Marat. She was guillotined on July 17, 1793. You can read more about these and other revolutionary women in Lucy Moore’s