Glossary of References

Abolition of Slavery
Slavery in France was abolished in 1789 but was allowed in the French West Indies colonies for the economic value of slavery to trade; not abolished in the colonies until 1848.

Citizen(s)
The ideology of national citizenship developed during the French Revolution, entailing civil equality, shared rights and shared obligations, institutionalization of political rights, and the differentiation between citizens and foreigners.

French National Assembly
…existed from 17 June 1789 to 30 September 1791. It was a revolutionary assembly formed by the representatives of the Third Estate (commoners) of the Estates-General; thereafter (until replaced by the Legislative Assembly on 30 Sept 1791) it was known as the National Constituent Assembly, although the shorter form was favored.

French National Convention
…was as a parliament of the French Revolution, following the two-year National Constituent Assembly and the one-year Legislative Assembly. Created after the great insurrection of 10 August 1792, it was the first French government organized as a republic, abandoning the monarchy altogether.

Girodins
Originally part of the Jacobins, they supported suspending the King but not overthrowing him. Once the King was overthrown in 1792, they were anxious to stop the revolutionary movement they had helped to set in motion. More radical Montagnard revolutionaries led by Robespierre and Marat led to not only their loss of power in the Convention but to their massacre during the Terror.

Guillotine
Origins date back to the Middle Ages, though the name “guillotine” dates to the 1790s and the French Revolution. Similar execution machines had already been in existence for centuries.

Jacobin
…a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary political movement that was the most famous political club during the French Revolution (1789–1799). The club got its name from meeting at the Dominican rue Saint-Honoré Monastery of the Jacobins. The members were a caucus of different factions but mostly for Montagnards, the most extreme of the revolutionaries, inspiring the Terror during which they implemented the massacre of their political rivals, the Girondins.

Jean-Paul Marat
(1743 – 1793) was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. He denounced the Girondins and as such was held responsible for inciting the mass execution of the Girodins during the Terror. He was killed by Girondin sympathizer, Charlotte Corday.

King Louis XIV (Louis XVI’s grandfather) 1638-1715
called the Sun King, or Le Roi Soleil, was King from 14 May 1643 until his death in 1715. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest recorded of any monarch of a sovereign country in history. Louis XIV's France was emblematic of the age of absolutism in Europe. Significant achievements during his reign which would go on to have a wide influence on the Early Modern Era well into the Industrial Revolution and up to today, include the construction of the canal du midi, the creation of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles, the sponsorship and patronage of such artists and composers as Jean-Baptiste de Lully, Molière, and Hyacinthe Rigaud, as well as the founding of the French Academy of Sciences, among others.

King Louis XVI (1754-1793)
Louis XVI was the last King of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as Citizen Louis Capet during the four months just before he was executed by guillotine. His early attempts to reform French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas were foiled by the aristocracy. His misguided deregulation of the grain market led to food scarcity and a revolt of the masses. From 1776 his support of the American Colonists and the ensuing debt and financial crisis led to the unpopularity of the ancien régime and the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. France’s lower and middle classes increasingly became opposed to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife Marie Antoinette were representatives. With increasing tensions and violence Louis was forced to recognize the authority of the National Assembly. His unsuccessful flight to Varennes (near the Belgian border) in June 1791 seemed to justify the rumors that he sought foreign intervention to save himself politically. Louis was arrested Sept 21, 1792 and was executed 21 Jan 1793. A month later the monarchy was abolished and The First French Republic was established. He was the only King of France to be executed and his death brought an end to a thousand years of continuous French monarchy.

La Marianne
French national symbol, comparable to England’s John Bull or America’s Uncle Sam

Liberté Egalité Fraternité
“Liberty Equality Fraternity” motto of the Republic of France

Massacre of Swiss Guards
During the Revolution, the Swiss Guards of Louis XVI were massacred at the Tuileries on 10 August 1792. Eventually the Swiss took the side of the Revolution, forming the Helvetic Republic

Montagnards
Supported radical violence and pressures of the lower classes. The Montagnards and the Girodins were the two major opposing factions in the Revolution. The Girodins were dominant in the National Assembly and the Montagnards dominated the National Convention.

National Guard
formed in 1789, was an organized militia intended to defend Paris from external military threats including royalists attacks while maintaining order in the city. The first commander was the Marquis de Lafayette.

Olympe’s abolition play
L’Esclavage des Noirs, ou l’heureux naufrage (The Slavery of the Blacks, or the Happy Shipwreck) 1792

"Peasants have no food"
"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", supposedly spoken by "a great princess" upon learning that the peasants had no bread.

Reign of Terror
…was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervor, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety.

Saint-Domingue
French colony from 1659 to 1804 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola; the island that now hosts two countries, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The name was also used, at times, for the island of Hispaniola as a whole, all of it, nominally, being at times a French colony. By the 1740's Saint-Domingue was the main supplier of the world's sugar and the third largest source of income to France. Saint-Domingue was the most profitable French colony in the world, indeed one of the most profitable of all the European colonies in the 18th century.

Saint-Domingue Slave Rebellion (The Haitian Revolution)
Between 1791 and 1804, the leaders François Dominique Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the revolution against the slave system established on the island. The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labor), and ruled by non-whites and former captives. The rebels' organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere. The revolution represented the largest slave uprising since Spartacus' unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier, and challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about slaves' ability to achieve and maintain their own freedom.

Sans-culottes
(literally "without breeches") were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. The term sans-culotte, which is opposed to that of the aristocrat, seems to have been used for the first time on 28 February 1791 by Jean-Bernard Gauthier de Murnan in a derogatory sense.

Thomas Jefferson reference
…to his enslaved African American servant and mistress, Sally Hemings.