Sunday, October 7, 2012
Saturday, October 6, 2012
The March on Versailles was an event in the French Revolution. It was also called the Bread March of Women.
Although the National Assembly had taken the Tennis Court Oath and the Bastille had fallen at the hands of the crowd, the poor women of Paris still found that there was a considerable bread shortage and the prices were very high. A crowd had once killed a baker for overpricing his bread. On October 5, 1789, rumours spread in Paris that the royals were hoarding all the grain. Becoming increasingly angry and incited by revolutionaries, a hungry mob of 6,000 burly, knife-wielding fishwives and their husbands decided to march on the Palace of Versailles.
Many in the crowd unjustly blamed Queen Marie Antoinette for the lack of bread and gleefully sang songs about killing her. Fortunately, one of the king's courtiers, the young Duc de Fronsac, was in the city at the time and ran on foot through the woods to the palace to warn the queen of the rowdy crowd's deadly intentions. An emergency meeting was held to determine the king's response with Marie Antoinette once again repeating a plea that the royal family flee. Her husband, King Louis XVI, refused.
Since she was aware that she was the primary target of the mob's anger, Marie Antoinette chose to sleep on her own that evening. She left strict instructions with the governess of the royal children, the Marquise de Tourzel, that she was to take the children straight to the king if there were any disturbances.
In the early hours of the morning, the mob broke into the palace. Two of the Royal bodyguard were massacred, their heads severed and stuck high on pikes. The queen and her two ladies-in-waiting only narrowly escaped with their lives through a secret passage way before the crowd burst in and ransacked her chambers. Taking the Duc de Fronsac's advice, the three ladies ran to the king's bedchamber. The king's younger sister, Madame Elisabeth, was already there. The royal couple's two children, Marie-Thérèse and her younger brother Louis-Charles, soon arrived, and the doors were locked.
A large crowd had gathered in the palace's courtyard and were demanding that the queen come to the balcony. She appeared in her night-robe, accompanied by her two children.
The crowd demanded that the two children be sent back inside. So the queen stood alone for almost ten minutes, whilst many in the crowd pointed muskets at her. She then bowed her head and returned inside. Some in the mob were so impressed by her bravery that they cried "Vive la Reine!" ("Long live the Queen!")
The stoic behaviour of the queen had greatly calmed the crowd, but the women still demanded bread and food. As well as this, they asked that the royal family leave Versailles and return to Paris to lead the people. WILL XVI reluctantly agreed, and the royal family moved to the Tuileries Palace, the dilapidated royal residence in Paris. Amid great confusion, the entire court and the National Constituent Assembly accompanied the royal family on its journey back to Paris. There was a triumphant entrance into the city. Louis XVI, however, had made a fatal mistake and was to never see Versailles again.
The Women's March to Versailles was one of the turning points of the French Revolution; it showed that the peasants of the Third Estate were a force to be reckoned with.
This march, mostly composed of women at the outset, also showed that women could be a driving force in history. These women of the Third Estate, however, were from the Parisian underclass, and are depicted as such (often crudely) in art from the Revolution. Since many of the women worked in the city's fish market, artists frequently display them naked with fish heads replacing their real heads
Source: encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com
October 4, 1789
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Oct 5 1789 - The Women's March on Versailles
Two hundred and twenty-two years ago today, an angry mob of some 7,000 working women – armed with pitchforks, pikes and muskets – marched in the rain from Paris to Versailles in what was to be a pivotal event in the intensifying French Revolution. To the beat of a drum, the women chanted “Bread! Bread!” – for, despite the fertile French soil, the populace of Paris was starving while the remote Louis XVI and the much-hated Marie Antoinette continued to feast like proverbial kings and queens at their salubrious country gaffe twelve miles west of Paris. The Revolution had begun two months earlier, but neither the Storming of the Bastille, the “Great Fear”, the August Decrees or the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” had thus far managed to topple France’s seemingly intrinsic social and aristocratic Ancien Régime. But the women who set out to Versailles to demand bread from the King were about to change that, and the very course of modern history.
By the time the women reached Versailles, their rage was focussed on Marie Antoinette – whose misattributed response to the plight of the breadless and starving peasants, “let them eat cake”, was nevertheless a wholly accurate indication of her cluelessness. 20,000 French National Guardsmen had been dispatched to protect the royal family, but the mob still managed to break into the palace to search for the Queen – who only narrowly escaped by fleeing to the King’s secure apartments through a secret passageway (two of her bodyguards were not so lucky; their severed heads impaled on pikes served as a clear statement of the mob’s intent). The women then assembled in the palace courtyard and demanded to see the Queen. She eventually emerged, alongside her two children – but the crowd demanded she face them alone. For ten minutes, Marie Antoinette stood on the balcony with her head bowed while the angry throng below screamed and pointed their muskets at her. Remarkably, they did not kill her. Instead, something far more unlikely happened: the miserable masses recognised their strength against the mighty monarchy. The women thenceforth demanded that King Louis XVI distribute bread that the palace had been hoarding, sanction the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and accompany them back to Paris to see for himself the plight of the city and its citizens. The King had no choice but to agree to the terms. The next day, the royal family Two hundred and twenty-two years ago today, an angry mob of some 7,000 working women – armed with pitchforks, pikes and muskets – marched in the rain from Paris to Versailles in what was to be a pivotal event in the intensifying French Revolution. To the beat of a drum, the women chanted “Bread! Bread!” – for, despite the fertile French soil, the populace of Paris was starving while the remote Louis XVI and the much-hated Marie Antoinette continued to feast like proverbial kings and queens at their salubrious country gaffe twelve miles west of Paris. The Revolution had begun two months earlier, but neither the Storming of the Bastille, the “Great Fear”, the August Decrees or the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” had thus far managed to topple France’s seemingly intrinsic social and aristocratic Ancien Régime. But the women who set out to Versailles to demand bread from the King were about to change that, and the very course of modern history.
By the time the women reached Versailles, their rage was focussed on Marie Antoinette – whose misattributed response to the plight of the breadless and starving peasants, “let them eat cake”, was nevertheless a wholly accurate indication of her cluelessness. 20,000 French National Guardsmen had been dispatched to protect the royal family, but the mob still managed to break into the palace to search for the Queen – who only narrowly escaped by fleeing to the King’s secure apartments through a secret passageway (two of her bodyguards were not so lucky; their severed heads impaled on pikes served as a clear statement of the mob’s intent). The women then assembled in the palace courtyard and demanded to see the Queen. She eventually emerged, alongside her two children – but the crowd demanded she face them alone. For ten minutes, Marie Antoinette stood on the balcony with her head bowed while the angry throng below screamed and pointed their muskets at her. Remarkably, they did not kill her. Instead, something far more unlikely happened: the miserable masses recognised their strength against the mighty monarchy. The women thenceforth demanded that King Louis XVI distribute bread that the palace had been hoarding, sanction the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and accompany them back to Paris to see for himself the plight of the city and its citizens. The King had no choice but to agree to the terms. The next day, the royal family became prisoners of the Third Estate, or the “common people”, in the Tuileries Palace in Paris until the king and queen were executed in 1791.
The Women’s March brought to an end the great monarchy of Versailles. But, of equal significance, it forever transformed the role of women in revolution and what political gains they could expect for themselves. What immediately followed these events amounted to nothing less than a sub-revolution for the women of France. In the wake of their extraordinary success, they quickly began to organise – and just one month after the March, they would present a groundbreaking demand for equality in The Women’s Petition to the National Assembly. became prisoners of the Third Estate, or the “common people”, in the Tuileries Palace in Paris until the king and queen were executed in 1791.
The Women’s March brought to an end the great monarchy of Versailles. But, of equal significance, it forever transformed the role of women in revolution and what political gains they could expect for themselves. What immediately followed these events amounted to nothing less than a sub-revolution for the women of France. In the wake of their extraordinary success, they quickly began to organise – and just one month after the March, they would present a groundbreaking demand for equality in The Women’s Petition to the National Assembly. orks, pikes and muskets – marched in the rain from Paris to Versailles in what was to be a pivotal event in the intensifying French Revolution. To the beat of a drum, the women chanted “Bread! Bread!” – for, despite the fertile French soil, the populace of Paris was starving while the remote Louis XVI and the much-hated Marie Antoinette continued to feast like proverbial kings and queens at their salubrious country gaffe twelve miles west of Paris. The Revolution had begun two months earlier, but neither the Storming of the Bastille, the “Great Fear”, the August Decrees or the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” had thus far managed to topple France’s seemingly intrinsic social and aristocratic Ancien Régime. But the women who set out to Versailles to demand bread from the King were about to change that, and the very course of modern history.
By the time the women reached Versailles, their rage was focussed on Marie Antoinette – whose misattributed response to the plight of the breadless and starving peasants, “let them eat cake”, was nevertheless a wholly accurate indication of her cluelessness. 20,000 French National Guardsmen had been dispatched to protect the royal family, but the mob still managed to break into the palace to search for the Queen – who only narrowly escaped by fleeing to the King’s secure apartments through a secret passageway (two of her bodyguards were not so lucky; their severed heads impaled on pikes served as a clear statement of the mob’s intent). The women then assembled in the palace courtyard and demanded to see the Queen. She eventually emerged, alongside her two children – but the crowd demanded she face them alone. For ten minutes, Marie Antoinette stood on the balcony with her head bowed while the angry throng below screamed and pointed their muskets at her. Remarkably, they did not kill her. Instead, something far more unlikely happened: the miserable masses recognised their strength against the mighty monarchy. The women thenceforth demanded that King Louis XVI distribute bread that the palace had been hoarding, sanction the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and accompany them back to Paris to see for himself the plight of the city and its citizens. The King had no choice but to agree to the terms. The next day, the royal family became prisoners of the Third Estate, or the “common people”, in the Tuileries Palace in Paris until the king and queen were executed in 1791.
The Women’s March brought to an end the great monarchy of Versailles. But, of equal significance, it forever transformed the role of women in revolution and what political gains they could expect for themselves. What immediately followed these events amounted to nothing less than a sub-revolution for the women of France. In the wake of their extraordinary success, they quickly began to organise – and just one month after the March, they would present a groundbreaking demand for equality in The Women’s Petition to the National Assembly.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Hairstyles
Never before, like in the nineteenth century, was so demonstrated that the hair may be the outward expression of our thoughts. In the first half of the century, the literary movement, which later would become a way of thinking, was the Romanticism. This word is more related with a philosophical tendency than with a love feeling. It was the complete opposition to the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment; the other extreme of the logical rationalism of the 18th century. Romantic literature is fantastic, ideal, far from the everyday reality. The eighteenth century's rationalism believed in a world driven by mechanical laws into a universe what they thought was a smooth running machine; in an artificial life concentrated in cities; they felt that they were living in the best of all possible worlds. Romanticism discovers mystery everywhere; is irrational, conflicted and dubitative; it prefers the solitude, the melancholy of nostalgic feelings; it prefers the Nature and the release of social structures. The supreme authority will not more be the Reason, but, instead, the individual imagination. And the hair, in the first half of the century, was that way: disordered, dry, natural, with no artificial products, with no ostentation; an expression of the sense of individual freedom and a suggestion of "not-belonging" to anything previously uniformed. From the classical models of the Greek aesthetic, at the end of the 18th century, they jumped to an encounter with the medieval aesthetic. Romanticism accepts with more pleasure the mysteries of the obscurantism than the rationalist explanations of the Enlightenment. In the first years of the 19th century men wore this kind of "open-mind" hairstyle, and beards and moustaches were rarely seen.
BEAU BRUMMELL
George Bryan Brummell was a real "dandy" of the 19th century. He was born in London in 1778 and died at his 61 years of age in Caen, France. He was the dictator of men's fashion in the British Regency court and for all the English society. He established the use of men's tailored suits with W collar and ties, worn by everybody today. His complete style, his hair, his clothes, manners and behavior were copied by every Englishmen at that time. It was also copied his habit of bathing, cleaning his teeth and shaving every day. He used to bath his body in milk, like the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. He broke with all the eccentricity inherited from the former century and favorite a style of plain, sober and elegant colors. He used to say that he had the art of being "conspicuously inconspicuous". He delayed five hours dressing before leaving outside. He was a personal friend of the Prince of Wales, who later was the king George IV. Brummell made of his "dandyism" the profession of his life. Unfortunately he threw away a fortune, spending and gambling. Ruined, and leaving England with his creditors behind, he immigrated to France in 1837, where he was living until his death in 1840, impoverished and helped by a modest annual salary provided by his friends from England.
Women hairstyle was, at the times of the Napoleonic Empire, which coincided with the Georgian and the Regency in Great Britain, -the first decade of the century-, a neo-classic style inspired in the Ancient Greece hairstyles. This style was characterized by using curls on the forehead and above the ears, and the hair held with a knot or a chignon at the back of the neck; hairstyles were usually adorned with ribbons, head bands or diadems. Near 1820 they started to wear the hair parted in the center and pulled back smoothly toward the back. At this time every woman wore a hat or a bonnet in public places. Those hairstyles were also called "Jane Austen's hairstyles", because of the diffusion that her stories have had, like the famous "Pride and Prejudice" from 1813.
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Around 1835 women hairstyles became a little more elaborate and men started to use beard and moustaches again.
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