Louis Xvi Quotes

Amy gritted her teeth. "King Louis XVI even put Franklin's picture on a chamber pot!" Jonah looked at his dad. "Do we have souvenir chamber pots?" "No." His dad whipped out his phone. "I'll make the call.

In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.

Il n'est pas nécessaire de vivre. Il est nécessaire de naviguer.

With just the ‘Carmagnole’ to sing he will only overthrow Louis XVI; but give him the ‘Marseillaise’ and he will liberate the world.

As long as he has for refrain nothing but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the Marseillaise, and he will free the world.

Aujourd’hui, rien. That’s what Louis XVI wrote in his diary on the day of the storming of the Bastille.

...the former King Louis XVI, who, after titles were abolished, was now simply called "Louis Capet" - a mocking reference to his distant ancestor Hugh Capet, who had assumed the throne in the year 987.

L'architecture n'a rien à voir avec les «styles». Les Louis XV, XVI, XIV ou le Gothique, sont à l'architecture ce qu'est une plume sur la tête d'une femme; c'est parfois joli, mais pas toujours et rien de plus.

We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining event. Yet as late as halfway through 1792, most of the familiar images of the revolution had yet to occur. Louis XVI was still king, and the Assembly was negotiating a new constitutional arrangement for the monarchy, not so different from Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, “In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?

We cannot search for the truth and for the way out of suffering without the freedom to think, investigate, and experiment. Secular people cherish freedom, and refrain from investing supreme authority in any text, institution or leader as the ultimate judge of what’s true and what’s right. Humans should always retain the freedom to doubt, to check again, to hear a second opinion, to try a different path. Secular people admire Galileo Galilei who dared to question whether the earth really sits motionless at the centre of the universe; they admire the masses of common people who stormed the Bastille in 1789 and brought down the despotic regime of Louis XVI; and they admire Rosa Parks who had the courage to sit down on a bus seat reserved for white passengers only.

Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government’s expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI to the guillotine.

When Franklin was ushered into the king’s bedchamber at noon, after the official levee, Louis XVI was in a posture of prayer.

Eventually, in the 1780s, Louis XVI, who had ascended to the throne on his grandfather’s death, realised that half his annual budget was tied to servicing the interest on his loans, and that he was heading towards bankruptcy.

The offices are decorated with neon-Louis XVI furniture and are dominated by grey, Mr. Dior’s favourite colour when he opened the famous house on avenue Montaigne back in 1947. The design is even more stunning than I remembered: both chic and understated, with lots of open space –the apex of luxury. The silk curtains dressing the window fall to the floor like ball gowns, delicate silver vases holding pink roses have been artfully placed throughout the room, and grey and white settees and oval-backed chairs provided artful seating areas.

Louis XVI made the Franco-American treaties official by receiving the three commissioners at Versailles on March 20. Crowds gathered at the palace gates to catch a glimpse of the famous American, and they shouted “Vive Franklin” as his coach passed through the gold-crested gates.

Memories of the wrath of the League and the clashes of the Fronde had favored the establishment of absolute monarchy; the governments of Louis XIV's despotism, when that great prince went to relax among his ancestors in Saint-Denis, made the yearning for freedom more bitter. The old monarchy had lasted six and a half centuries with its feudal and aristocratic liberties. How long had the state formed by Louis XIV lasted? One hundred and forty years. After that monarch's tomb, there were only two monuments of monarchy: the pillow of Louis XV's debauchery and Louis XVI's executioner's block.

Just as negative self-paradigms can put limitations on us, positive self-paradigms can bring out the best in us, as the following story about the son of King Louis XVI of France illustrates: King Louis had been taken from his throne and imprisoned. His young son, the prince, was taken by those who dethroned the king. They thought that inasmuch as the king’s son was heir to the throne, if they could destroy him morally, he would never realize the great and grand destiny that life had bestowed upon him. They took him to a community far away, and there they exposed the lad to every filthy and vile thing that life could offer. They exposed him to foods the richness of which would quickly make him a slave to appetite. They used vile language around him constantly. They exposed him to lewd and lusting women. They exposed him to dishonor and distrust. He was surrounded twenty-four hours a day by everything that could drag the soul of a man as low as one could slip. For over six months he had this treatment—but not once did the young lad buckle under pressure. Finally, after intensive temptation, they questioned him. Why had he not submitted himself to these things— why had he not partaken? These things would provide pleasure, satisfy his lusts, and were desirable; they were all his. The boy said, “I cannot do what you ask for I was born to be a king.

In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy. It is a movement that describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another after a complete transition. A change of regulations concerning property without a corresponding change of government is not a revolution, but a reform. There is no kind of economic revolution, whether its methods are violent or pacific, which is not, at the same time, manifestly political. Revolution can already be distinguished, in this way, from rebellion. The warning given to Louis XVI: "No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a revolution," accents the essential difference. It means precisely that "it is the absolute certainty of a new form of government." Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas.

On January 21, with the murder of the King-priest, was consummated what has significantly been called the passion of Louis XVI. It is certainly a crying scandal that the public assassination of a weak but goodhearted man has been presented as a great moment in French history. That scaffold marked no climax—far from it. But the fact remains that, by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarna-tion of the Christian God. Up to now God played a part in history through the medium of the kings. But His representative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king. Therefore there is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven of principles.

However, an imagined order cannot be sustained by violence alone. It requires some true believers as well. Prince Talleyrand, who began his chameleon-like career under Louis XVI, later served the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes, and switched loyalties in time to end his days working for the restored monarchy, summed up decades of governmental experience by saying that ‘You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.

Hun ble stående i døråpningen og gispe av skrekkblandet fryd. Det var så overdådig at det nesten ville passet på et horehus. Kranene var formet som gulldelfiner, og flisene var italienske og håndmalte. En Venus fra Milo i alabast stod i en egen hjørnenisje omgitt av flasker med badesalt. Tykke, bløte håndklær var drapert over en håndklevarmer, og krystallampene fikk morgenkåpen av silke, som hang over en kopi av en bodoir-stol i Louis XVI-stil, til å glitre. Folket på Kurrajong badet neppe i gjørmete vann.

Eventually the potato's undeniable advantages over grain would convert all of northern Europe, but outside of Ireland the process was never anything less than a struggle. ... Louis (XVI) hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly convinced of the crop's value, made off in the night with the royal tubers.

the boldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the water there; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time;[89] if his wife had implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of him, and all quite in vain;—then the history of your father would have been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais." [89] the privilege of filling up blank forms: Mr. Lorry refers to a lettre de cachet, literally, "letter of the seal," meaning the king of France's personal seal. A lettre de cachet was an order, approved by the king, that could send anyone in France to prison without trial, for any reason, and for any length of time. They had often been abused in the 17th and early 18th centuries by aristocrats taking advantage of the king's favor to do away with an enemy or an inconvenience. Once a notorious symbol of arbitrary and absolute power in France, by Louis XVI's reign in the 1770s and 1780s they became much harder to acquire.

So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said `no.' I did not think that I had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil. I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child. In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted for fraternity, concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light. We have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn of joy." "Mixed joy," said the Bishop. "You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there." "You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a demolition complicated with wrath." "Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of humanity.

Le fameux discours de Saint-Just a ainsi tous les airs d'une étude théologique. "Louis [XVI] étranger parmis nous", voila la thèse de l'adolescent accusateur. Si un contrat, naturel ou civil, pouvait encore lier le roi et son peuple, il y aurait obligation mutuelle; la volonté du peuple ne pourrait s'ériger en juge absolu pour prononcer le jugement absolu. Il s'agit donc de démontrer qu'aucun rapport ne lie le peuple et le roi. Pour prouver que le peuple est en lui-même la vérité éternelle, il faut montrer que la royauté est en elle-même crime éternel.

A religion that executes its obsolete sovereign must now establish the power of its new sovereign; it closes the churches, and this leads to an endeavor to build a temple. The blood of the gods, which for a second bespatters the confessor of Louis XVI, announces a new baptism. Joseph de Maistre qualified the Revolution as satanic. We can see why and in what sense. Michelet, however, was closer to the truth when he called it a purgatory. An era blindly embarks down this tunnel on an attempt to discover a new illumination, a new happiness, and the face of the real God. But what will this new god be?

Hawkesbury told Otto repeatedly that Britain could do nothing to curtail ‘the liberty of the press as secured by the constitution of this country’, but Otto pointed out that under the 1793 Alien Act there were provisions for the deportation of seditious foreign writers such as Peltier.49 Talleyrand added that far from being immutable, the British constitution was unwritten and even habeas corpus had been suspended at various moments during the Revolutionary Wars. It has been alleged that Napoleon was too authoritarian to understand the concept of freedom of the press; in fact the question was not simply one of freedom or repression, since there were ‘ministerial’ papers which were owned by members of the government, and the prime minister’s own brother, Hiley Addington, even wrote articles for them. He also knew that London had been the place of publication of equally vicious libelles against Louis XV and Louis XVI written by disaffected Frenchmen.50 The diatribes of

Devrimin kaderi, kendi kendine tanımış olduğu bütün dinlenme anlarını silip geçmek, hedeflerini, elde edilir edilmez, daha da yükseltmek olmuştur. Başlangıçta, Kral’ın etkisiz hale getirilmesiyle, sonra tahttan indirilmesiyle üstüne düşeni yerine getirdiğini sanır devrim. Fakat altında tahtı, başında tacı olmayan bu zavallı tehlikesiz adam hâlâ bir semboldür; hele cumhuriyet, yüzyıllardan beri toprak altında yatan kralların kemiklerini bile çıkarıp çoktan toprak olanı bir kez daha yakmak istiyorsa, canlı bir kralın gölgesine bile nasıl tahammül edebilir ki? Böylece önderler, herhangi bir geri dönüşü kesin olarak önlemek için, XVI. Louis’nin siyasi ölümünün arkasından bedenen ölümünün de gelmesi gerektiği inancına varır. Kökten bir cumhuriyetçi için, cumhuriyet binası ancak harcı, kral kanıyla karılmışsa kalıcı olabilecektir; çok geçmeden daha az köktenci olan başkaları da, halkın gözüne girme yarışında geri kalmaktan korktuklarından, onlara katılır ve aralık ayında Louis Capet’nin mahkeme edilmesi kararlaştırılır.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?" Pierre wondered. "Good for me, but bad for the next traveler, and anyway he can't help it - he has to eat. He told me an officer thrashed him for that. But the officer thrashed him because he was in a hurry. And I shot Dolokhov because I considered myself insulted. Louis XVI was executed because he was considered a criminal, and within a year the men who executed him were killed as well for doing something or other. What's bad and what's good? What should we love and what should we hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What kind of force is it that directs everything?" He kept asking himself. And there were no answers to any of these questions, except one illogical response that didn't answer any of them. And that response was: "You're going to die, and it will be over and done with. You're going to die and you'll either come to know everything or stop asking." But dying was horrible too. The Torzhok pedlar woman was whining away, offering her wares, especially some goatskin slippers. "I've got hundreds of roubles, money I don't know what to do with, and she stands there in her tatty coat hardly daring to look at me," Thought Pierre. "And what does she want money for? As if it could give her a hair's breadth of extra happiness or put her soul at rest. Is there anything in the world that can make her and me any less subject to evil and death? Death, the end of everything, and it must come today or tomorrow - either way it's a split second on the scale of eternity." And again he twisted the screw that wouldn't bite, and the screw went on turning in the same hole.

He was in love with France before he even reached Paris. Jefferson’s work in Europe offered him a new battlefield in the war for American union and national authority that he had begun in the Congress. His sojourn in France is often seen as a revolutionary swoon during which he fell too hard for the foes of monarchy, growing overly attached to—and unhealthily admiring of—the French Revolution and its excesses. Some of his most enduring radical quotations, usually considered on their own with less appreciation of the larger context of Jefferson’s decades-long political, diplomatic, and philosophical careers, date from this era. His relationship to France and to the French, however, should be seen for what it was: a political undertaking in which Jefferson put the interests of America first. He was determined to create a balance of global power in which France would help the United States resist commercial and possible military threats from the British.5 From the ancien régime of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to the French Revolution to the Age of Napoleon, Jefferson viewed France in the context of how it could help America on the world stage.6 Much of Jefferson’s energy was spent striving to create international respect for the United States and to negotiate commercial treaties to build and expand American commerce and wealth. His mind wandered and roamed and soared, but in his main work—the advancement of America’s security and economic interests—he was focused and clear-headed. Countries earned respect by appearing strong and unified. Jefferson wanted America to be respected. He, therefore, took care to project strength and a sense of unity. The cause of national power required it, and he was as devoted to the marshaling of American power in Paris as he had been in Annapolis. E

Terrell, Paul, 66–67, 68 Tesler, Larry, 96–97, 99, 114, 120, 136, 301 Tevanian, Avadis “Avie,” xvi, 259, 268, 272–74, 300–301, 303, 308–9, 362, 366, 458–59, 461 textbook industry, 509–10, 554 “There Goes My Love” (song), 498 “Things Have Changed” (song), 412 “Think Different” advertising campaign, vii, xviii, 328–32, 358 original Jobs version, 577 Thomas, Brent, 162 Thomas, Dylan, 19 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 235 Thurman, Mrs., 12 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 119 Tiffany, Louis, 123 Time, xvii, xviii, 90, 166, 218, 290, 323, 381, 383, 429, 473, 495, 504, 506 SJ profiled by, 106–7, 139–41 Time Inc., 330, 473, 478, 504, 506–7 Time-Life Pictures, 330 “Times They Are A-Changing, The” (Dylan), 168, 207 Time Warner, 506 Tin Toy (film), 248 Toshiba, 385, 386 touchscreens, 93 Toy Story (film), 285–91, 305, 311, 372, 373–74, 427, 428, 430, 434, 437, 472, 565 basic idea for, 285–86 blockbuster success of, 290–91 budgeting of, 288

Mais j’avais revu tantôt l’une, tantôt l’autre, des chambres que j’avais habitées dans ma vie, et je finissais par me les rappeler toutes dans les longues rêveries qui suivaient mon réveil ; chambres d’hiver où quand on est couché, on se blottit la tête dans un nid qu’on se tresse avec les choses les plus disparates : un coin de l’oreiller, le haut des couvertures, un bout de châle, le bord du lit, et un numéro des Débats roses, qu’on finit par cimenter ensemble selon la technique des oiseaux en s’y appuyant indéfiniment ; où, par un temps glacial, le plaisir qu’on goûte est de se sentir séparé du dehors (comme l’hirondelle de mer qui a son nid au fond d’un souterrain dans la chaleur de la terre), et où, le feu étant entretenu toute la nuit dans la cheminée, on dort dans un grand manteau d’air chaud et fumeux, traversé des lueurs des tisons qui se rallument, sorte d’impalpable alcôve, de chaude caverne creusée au sein de la chambre même, zone ardente et mobile en ses contours thermiques, aérée de souffles qui nous rafraîchissent la figure et viennent des angles, des parties voisines de la fenêtre ou éloignées du foyer et qui se sont refroidies ; – chambres d’été où l’on aime être uni à la nuit tiède, où le clair de lune appuyé aux volets entr’ouverts, jette jusqu’au pied du lit son échelle enchantée, où on dort presque en plein air, comme la mésange balancée par la brise à la pointe d’un rayon – ; parfois la chambre Louis XVI, si gaie que même le premier soir je n’y avais pas été trop malheureux, et où les colonnettes qui soutenaient légèrement le plafond s’écartaient avec tant de grâce pour montrer et réserver la place du lit ; parfois au contraire celle, petite et si élevée de plafond, creusée en forme de pyramide dans la hauteur de deux étages et partiellement revêtue d’acajou, où, dès la première seconde, j’avais été intoxiqué moralement par l’odeur inconnue du vétiver, convaincu de l’hostilité des rideaux violets et de l’insolente indifférence de la pendule qui jacassait tout haut comme si je n’eusse pas été là ; – où une étrange et impitoyable glace à pieds quadrangulaires barrant obliquement un des angles de la pièce se creusait à vif dans la douce plénitude de mon champ visuel accoutumé un emplacement qui n’y était pas prévu ; – où ma pensée, s’efforçant pendant des heures de se disloquer, de s’étirer en hauteur pour prendre exactement la forme de la chambre et arriver à remplir jusqu’en haut son gigantesque entonnoir, avait souffert bien de dures nuits, tandis que j’étais étendu dans mon lit, les yeux levés, l’oreille anxieuse, la narine rétive, le cœur battant ; jusqu’à ce que l’habitude eût changé la couleur des rideaux, fait taire la pendule, enseigné la pitié à la glace oblique et cruelle, dissimulé, sinon chassé complètement, l’odeur du vétiver et notablement diminué la hauteur apparente du plafond.

The Brunswick Manifesto, rather than accomplishing Louis XVI's rescue, paved the way to the guillotine, which could have been foreseen if Karl Wilhelm had given the matter any forethought, but thinking ahead is given to chess players, not to autocrats.

Having approved this manuscript’s defense of the “dubious” servant, the Institute of the House of Bourbon in Paris affirmed that Jean-Baptiste Cléry was truly a faithful subject of His Majesties King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, and that his name should be cleared of any collaboration with the revolutionary republicans.

Commoners already paid the lion’s share of national taxes and, because of these old feudal records, they now also paid a whole host of other duties to their local nobles (who, further inspiring anger, were exempt from most national taxes). Like the American Revolution before it, the French Revolution began as a tax revolt, and there were even rumors that King Louis XVI himself authorized the burning sprees because he felt the taxes on his people were unjustly high.

The two branches of Freemasonry—the Templars and the Rosicrucians (Sionists)—were to play a major part in the American and French revolutions. In the end, the Priory of Sion would prove itself dominant over the Templars. They seemed to be better entrenched in the European power matrix as well as being better funded. The Templars—Sion’s partners-in-crime, so to speak—were behind the American Revolution and with regard to the French Revolution, both the Templar and Rosicrucian factions combined forces to avenge the death, four centuries earlier, of Jacques de Molay the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who was burned at the stake by Philip IV of France in 1314. The French Bourbons were related to Philip so Louis XVI’s beheading, in 1792, was meant as penance for de Molay’s death. Chapter 10 - Sion's Army.

there was a dramatic coup d’état against the moderate Girondins at the National Convention. Twenty-nine leading Girondists were arrested on June 2 and many were subsequently guillotined.

La vie d'un homme est une oeuvre, on n'étudie pas une oeuvre par ouï-dire, c'est pourtant ce qu'on a fait pour Louis XVI

The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted to get more money from the traveler. “Is this good or bad?” Pierre asked himself. “It is good for me, bad for another traveler, and for himself it’s unavoidable, because he needs money for food; the man said an officer had once given him a thrashing for letting a private traveler have the courier horses. But the officer thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as possible. And I,” continued Pierre, “shot Dólokhov because I considered myself injured, and Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who executed him—also for some reason. What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?”1 There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: “You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was also dreadful.

In a recent Gallup poll conducted in France while riding a horse, two out of three sweaty Frenchman (there were only three people surveyed) stated that my armpits are the greatest thing since Louis XVI. Personally, I don't think they are that great. And I’m not just attempting to be humble when I say that I think it's a more reasonable assertion to compare my armpits as equal or greater than anything in the historical timeline since Louis XVII. But, if the people deem my armpits that important, who am I to argue?

I would have praised you more if you had praised me less.

who went on to write one of Louis XVI and a good synography of Robespierre. They

On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI—who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots—was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution. The death of Louis Capet—he had lost his royal title—was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats aloft, and licked the king’s blood, while one executioner did a thriving business selling snippets of royal hair and clothing. The king’s decapitated head was wedged between his lifeless legs, then stowed in a basket. The remains were buried in an unvarnished box. England reeled from the news, William Pitt the Younger branding it “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.” On February 1, France declared war against England, Holland, and Spain, and soon the whole continent was engulfed in fighting, ushering in more than twenty years of combat.

Monroe also saved Tom Paine, whose revolutionary fervor had inspired him to become a French citizen and win a seat in the Convention. When Paine voted against executing King Louis XVI, however, Robespierre sent him to prison, where he languished in ever-deteriorating health until Monroe rescued him in November 1794, and brought him to La Folie to recuperate.

This is entirely in agreement with what Calvin says, namely, that the statement that Christ was seated at the right hand of God is equivalent to saying “that He was installed in the government of heaven and earth, and formally admitted to possession of the administration committed to Him, and not only admitted for once, but to continue until He descend to judgment.”[Inst., Bk. II. XVI. 15.] It

. . .for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.

But Louis XV, in arguably the biggest single blunder of his reign, capitulated to clerical pressure and to specious arguments such as the ‘donation of Constantine’, whereby the first Christian emperor had given land to the church unencumbered and in perpetuity. The problem did not go away: clerical resistance to taxation was to defeat Louis XVI’s major reforming initiative too.

But somewhere deep inside him a glass tube clanked.

Parker wasn't the first to play the role of the hedonist's enabler; the divine Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, was the first identifiable fashion icon to champion such unbridled consumption...the queen's personal mission at Versailles was to beautify: to teach her court subjects a more refined and more luxurious lifestyle.

78. François Bluche, La Vie quotidienne au temps de Louis XVI (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 87. 79. Four indispensable studies on this subject are Jean Apostolidès, Le Roimachine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Norbert Elias, La Société de cour, trans. Pierre Kamnitzer and Jean Etoré (Paris: Flammarion, 1985); and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). It is nonetheless important to note, as Elias does, that Louis XIV did not so much invent French court etiquette as consolidate and systematize it (76–77). A more colorful, less analytical account of etiquette under Louis XIV appears in W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century (New York: Sloane, 1953), 54–66.

The occasion for all of this excitement was the world’s first cold-storage banquet: a meal at which only previously refrigerated foods were to be served. On Monday, October 23, 1911, more than four hundred guests sat down amid the drapery and gilt of the Hotel Sherman’s Louis XVI room, unfolded their white linen napkins, and, over the course of two hours of what The Egg Reporter later described as “unalloyed pleasure,” consumed a five-course meal in which everything except for the olives in their dry martinis had spent between six months and a year in the refrigerated rooms of local cold-storage companies. Rather than the grower or variety, the menu proudly listed each item’s most recent address: the salmon came from a short stay at Booth’s Cold Storage, the chicken had resided at Chicago Cold Storage since December 1910, and the turkey and eggs had spent the past eleven and seven months, respectively, at the Monarch refrigeration plant. Addressing a reporter from the Bulletin of the American Warehouseman’s Association, Meyer Eichengreen, vice president of the National Poultry, Butter and Egg Association, one of the event’s sponsors, was happy to provide more detail. “Your capon received its summons to the great unknown along about last St. Valentine’s day,” he explained. “And the egg in your salad—go right on and eat—well, some happy hen arose from her nest and clucked over that egg when winter was just merging into spring.

HIS MOST CHRISTIAN MAJESTY, Louis XVI, king of France and Navarre,

In Heracles and Alcestis the mighty son of Zeus and Alcmena is described as a good-natured drunkard, with the appetite of Gargantua and the brains of Louis XVI.

On 28 March, the ‘Paris Commune’ was officially declared, ‘in the name of the people,’ in a benign spectacle staged outside the Hôtel de Ville, with red flags flapping in the wind and red sashes worn with pride. That the representatives of the city, whose election had restored to Paris after a long absence the same administrative rights enjoyed by ‘communes’ of villages, towns and cities throughout France, should have chosen to adopt a similar corporate appellation was unsurprising. An already nervous bourgeoisie, however, would have received the news with profound unease, for it had been ‘the Commune’ of Paris that had deposed Louis XVI in 1792, and that had wielded substantial power behind the scenes throughout the Terror, growing every more monstrous in its whims. Nevertheless, for many the ceremony was to be cherished as a rare cause for jubilation.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’ Pierre wondered. ‘Good for me, but bad for the next traveller, and anyway he can’t help it – he has to eat. He told me an officer thrashed him for that. But the officer thrashed him because he was in a hurry. And I shot Dolokhov because I considered myself insulted. Louis XVI was executed because he was considered a criminal, and within a year the men who executed him were killed as well for doing something or other. What’s bad and what’s good? What should we love and what should we hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What kind of force is it that directs everything?’ he kept asking himself. And there were no answers to any of these questions, except one illogical response that didn’t answer any of them. And that response was: ‘You’re going to die, and it will be over and done with. You’re going to die and you’ll either come to know everything or stop asking.’ But dying was horrible too. The Torzhok pedlar woman was whining away, offering her wares, especially some goatskin slippers. ‘I’ve got hundreds of roubles, money I don’t know what to do with, and she stands there in her tatty coat hardly daring to look at me,’ thought Pierre. ‘And what does she want money for? As if it could give her a hair’s breadth of extra happiness or put her soul at rest. Is there anything in the world that can make her and me any less subject to evil and death? Death, the end of everything, and it must come today or tomorrow – either way it’s a split second on the scale of eternity.’ And again he twisted the screw that wouldn’t bite, and the screw went on turning in the same hole. His servant handed him a half-cut volume – it was a novel in letters by Madame de Souza.1 He started reading about the trials and struggle for virtue of someone called Amélie de Mansfeld. ‘Why did she resist her seducer,’ he thought, ‘when she loved him? God couldn’t have filled her heart with any desires that went against his will. My ex-wife didn’t, and maybe she was right. Nothing has been discovered,’ Pierre said to himself again, ‘and nothing has been invented. The only thing we can know is that we don’t know anything.

Tribune gossiped the following morning. “Joan of Arc, complete with solid silver mail; Christopher Columbus; Louis XVI; Queen Elizabeth I in a bright red wig; the goddess Diana; Daniel Boone. By 11:30 a bouillabaisse of kings, queens, fairies, toreadors, and gypsies blocked Fifth Avenue.

For a nation that had been without a real head of state since the execution of Louis XVI,

The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.

The Legislative Assembly’s decision in April 1792 to declare war on Austria did even more than religious conflict to radicalize the Revolution. The combination of foreign war and internal conflict turned France into the world’s first police state, committed to the surveillance and repression of all opposition. Pressure for its creation came less from revolutionary leaders than from popular hysteria in Paris, whipped up by conspiracy theories of a secret alliance between enemies abroad and counter-revolutionary traitors at home. Many believed that Louis XVI and the Austrian-born Marie-Antoinette were part of an aristocratic plot to join forces with the invading Austrian army and its Prussian allies

As for the croissant, Marie Antoinette brought the recipe when she came from her native Austria to marry King Louis XVI. And she, history claims, added her own spark to the fire of the French Revolution by saying of the populace demanding bread, “Let them eat cake.

French Rev·o·lu·tion   the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in France (1789-99). The French Revolution began with the meeting of the legislative assembly (the States General) in May 1789 when the French government was already in crisis; the Bastille was stormed in July of the same year. The revolution became steadily more radical and ruthless with power increasingly in the hands of the Jacobins and Robespierre; Louis XVI's execution in January 1793 was followed by Robespierre's Reign of Terror. The revolution failed to produce a stable form of republican government, and after several different forms of administration, the last, the Directory, was overthrown by Napoleon in 1799.

None of this internecine combat affected the future of Catholicism quite so much as the dramatic, often horrifying events in France. In August 1792 a decree by the new French Legislative Assembly ordered all priests who refused the revolutionary oath to be expelled from the country. The King, Louis XVI, was put to death in January 1793 and in February France declared war on England.

A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic of Geneva, became the center of the revolutionary movement in France, and a Prince of the blood-royal went thither to swear the destruction of the successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai. The registers of the Order of Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d'Orleans, was Grand Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that his successors were the Duc de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Conde, and the Duc de Cosse-Briassac. The Templars comprotmitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars demanded. The secret movers of the French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the Altar upon the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis XVI. was executed, half the work was done; and thenceforward the Army of the Temple was to direct all its efforts against the Pope.

In 1775 Louis XVI had been faced with his own Coronation Oath crisis. His chief minister, Turgot, wanted the King to drop the King’s pledge to extirpate heretics, which had actually been inserted in the thirteenth century to deal with the Albigensian heresy of the Cathars, but was now applied to Protestants.

Well, Monsieur said Louis XVI good-naturally, are you happy with your King? « Sire, this is the second time that Your Majesty gives me back my life. The first time was by agreeing to endorse the will of my father; this time it's protecting me with this royal generosity. I have always belonged to him, but now, since I will have the honor to be the guardian of his person, I want the King to know that he can demand anything from me, he can expect anything from my devotion, and if a falcon, I shall be that in the future for the King, he can start at any time whatsoever, on any enemy whatsoever, in peace as in war, in the shadow as in the light.   « So be it, Monsieur! The King accepts your tribute and will register your promise. You will be a safe weapon in his hand, a weapon he will use, you can be certain, for only the most just causes. You will be in the future the Kings Falcon, but only for three people, me, you and… Monsieur de Rochambeau present here who witnessed your commitment.

Neither Louis nor Marie Antoinette was at ease with the truly important people of their day. When Voltaire, after an exile of twenty-seven years, was allowed to return to France by Louis XVI's order, Marie Antoinette never received him. True, he had too often made France and the French the butt of his satire, and he had chosen freely to live in the court of Frederick the Great. But those near Marie Antoinette believed that her reason for not receiving him was not political. She just didn't know what to say to a man of such giant intellect. When the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia came to pay a visit, Marie Antoinette was so confused that she left their presence abruptly and went to her room. "It is even harder to face other rulers," she whispered to her lady-in-waiting, "than to face courtiers!" Although Benjamin Franklin was living in Paris through much of their reign, the Queen never chose to see him. She was particularly uneasy with brilliant women. During the eighteenth century women in France were more powerful than in any other time in history. Their influence in worldly affairs was greater than ever before or since. In their salons the finest minds gathered, and there conversation became an art cultivated for its own sake. But Marie Antoinette avoided contact with these intellectuals. She could never in the world have taken part in their conversations. She had never been educated. She had scarcely even read a book, and she knew only too well what such a handicap meant.

Louis XVI--Louis Capet--was led to the guillotine in the Place de la Revolution by Santerre, the brewer. Louis stepped firmly and resolutely up the steps of the scaffold. "Frenchmen," he said, "I die innocent of the crimes which are imputed to me; I forgive the authors of my death, and I pray that my blood may not fall upon France." He was still speaking when Santerre ordered the drums, and their rolling drowned out his voice.

The structure of de Prony’s computing office cannot be easily seen in Smith’s example. His computing staff had two distinct classes of workers. The larger of these was a staff of nearly ninety computers. These workers were quite different from Smith’s pin makers or even from the computers at the British Nautical Almanac and the Connaissance des Temps. Many of de Prony’s computers were former servants or wig dressers, who had lost their jobs when the Revolution rendered the elegant styles of Louis XVI unfashionable or even treasonous.35 They were not trained in mathematics and held no special interest in science. De Prony reported that most of them “had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the two first rules [of addition and subtraction].”36 They were little different from manual workers and could not discern whether they were computing trigonometric functions, logarithms, or the orbit of Halley’s comet. One labor historian has described them as intellectual machines, “grasping and releasing a single piece of ‘data’ over and over again.”37 The second class of workers prepared instructions for the computation and oversaw the actual calculations. De Prony had no special title for this group of workers, but subsequent computing organizations came to use the term “planning committee” or merely “planners,” as they were the ones who actually planned the calculations. There were eight planners in de Prony’s organization. Most of them were experienced computers who had worked for either the Bureau du Cadastre or the Paris Observatory. A few had made interesting contributions to mathematical theory, but the majority had dealt only with the problems of practical mathematics.38 They took the basic equations for the trigonometric functions and reduced them to the fundamental operations of addition and subtraction. From this reduction, they prepared worksheets for the computers. Unlike Nevil Maskelyne’s worksheets, which gave general equations to the computers, these sheets identified every operation of the calculation and left nothing for the workers to interpret. Each step of the calculation was followed by a blank space for the computers to fill with a number. Each table required hundreds of these sheets, all identical except for a single unique starting value at the top of the page. Once the computers had completed their sheets, they returned their results to the planners. The planners assembled the tables and checked the final values. The task of checking the results was a substantial burden in itself. The group did not double-compute, as that would have obviously doubled the workload. Instead the planners checked the final values by taking differences between adjacent values in order to identify miscalculated numbers. This procedure, known as “differencing,” was an important innovation for human computers. As one observer noted, differencing removed the “necessity of repeating, or even of examining, the whole of the work done by the [computing] section.”39 The entire operation was overseen by a handful of accomplished scientists, who “had little or nothing to do with the actual numerical work.” This group included some of France’s most accomplished mathematicians, such as Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) and Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823).40 These scientists researched the appropriate formulas for the calculations and identified potential problems. Each formula was an approximation, as no trigonometric function can be written as an exact combination of additions and subtractions. The mathematicians analyzed the quality of the approximations and verified that all the formulas produced values adequately close to the true values of the trigonometric functions.