I’ve read A Tale of Two Cities. I took high school history. I have access to Wikipedia.
But I somehow can’t really believe it. Did a mass of unwashed peasants really kidnap hundreds, maybe thousands of aristocrats and send them to the guillotine? Were there trials? What was the legal pretense, if any, for doing this? Who was rich enough to get executed and who was considered not rich enough? Did it even really happen or was it just the royal family that was executed, and it was exaggerated over time?
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Sort of yes. Essentially France was still working under the feudal system. Virtually all of the power lay in the hands of the nobility and the church. And the big problem here is that they severely mismanaged the country to the point where France’s rapid population growth under their governance created extreme social and economic inequality.
It wasn’t so much that France didn’t have the resources to support its population, it was simply that those resources were mismanaged and largely hoarded by the nobility and the church. Eventually, this situation boiled over and revolution occurred.
The revolution essentially removed the feudal system where noble land owners collected taxes and other fees on the peasants farming their land. Effectively this removed the primary income streams from the nobles and in part the church. Which obviously created a lot of tension.
The revolutionary government that replaced the old guard eventually created a state of affairs they called the reign of terror. The general idea was that counter-revolutionaries (those supporting the old system) were a serious threat to the republic.
Terrors were essentially round-ups of people, including many nobles, who were suspected of being counter-revolutionaries. These people were put on trial, convicted and executed by power of the new revolutionary government.
In reality, these trials were often just rush jobs. At the height of the terror people could only get acquitted or sentenced to death and lines people were rushed past their judges.
Some 17.000 people were executed under the guillotine during this period while another 10.000 or so died awaiting trial.
Eventually, people realised that the architect of the terror had garnered far too much power and was something of a dictator himself. He to in turn lost his head when people got sick of the terror and things finally calmed down.
Interestingly, today we tend to describe the French revolution in terms of the poor against the rich. But it was also very much a revolution of capitalism against feudalism.
French feudalism had the country in a stranglehold. The nobles and the church possessed the land, set the taxes and effectively had the majority for writing the law.
It was the socioeconomic inequality that set off the French revolution. But it didn’t do away with the rich. Instead, it shifted wealth from hereditary nobility in a feudal system to merchants in a capitalist system.
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