Bastille
[ba-steel; French bas-tee-yuh]
The Bastille,
built in 1379 under the rule of Charles V, is best known for its role
in the French Revolution. In the 17th century, the Bastille became a
state prison that held political prisoners. July 14, 1789, marks the
Storming of the Bastille. On this day a crowd of revolutionaries
captured the prison in a historic demonstration against the existing
political order. The French first celebrated Bastille Day as a national
holiday in 1880 to commemorate the event recognized as the beginning of
the French Revolution.
In pre-Revolutionary France, the bourgeois,
or professionals of the middle class, were part of the Third
Estate--the First and Second Estates were made up of the clergy and
nobility, respectively. The term bourgeois comes from the Old French borjois meaning "town dweller." When the term bourgeois
first entered English in the 1500s, it referred to the French middle
class. However, over time, its meaning extended to include middle
classes in other countries, as well. By the late-1800s, bourgeois was appropriated by communist and socialist theorists to refer to capitalists.
Guillotine
[gil-uh-teen, gee-uh-; esp. for v. gil-uh-teen, gee-uh-]
The guillotine
is the decapitation device famously used in France for official
executions. It gets its name from the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin,
who was a proponent of executions being as quick and painless as
possible, and who helped pass a law in 1789 requiring all executions be
done by machine. The French government used the guillotine for
executions as late as 1977. In 1981, France abolished capital
punishment, and along with it, did away with beheadings by means of the
guillotine.
Bourgeois
[boor-zhwah, boor-zhwah; French boor-zhwa]
Brioche
[bree-ohsh, -osh; French bree-awsh]
While brioche,
a term referring to a type of sweet French bread, didn't enter the
English language until the 1820s, this small cake played a large role in
public opinion during the French Revolution. The infamous phrase "Let
them eat cake!" attributed to Marie-Antoinette translates into "Qu'ils
mangent de la brioche!" in French. This notorious shout by the clueless
queen consort was in response to the March on Versailles on October 5,
1789, by a mob of angry peasants to protest the high price and scarcity
of bread.
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror, or La Terreur
in French, lasted from September 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794. During this
time the Committee of Public Safety, under the leadership of the
radical Maximilien de Robespierre, executed around 17,000 people
suspected of counterrevolutionary leanings. The Great Terror was a short
and particularly bloody period of the Reign of Terror in which about
1,400 people were executed. Robespierre was ultimately guillotined
without a trial on July 28, 1794, going down in history as a
blood-thirsty dictator.
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