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The French Revolution: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Too soon to tell."''|'''[[Red China|Zhou Enlai]]''', in 1972, on the historical impact of the French Revolution<ref>It didn't actually refer to this one though.</ref>}}
Era in French History when [[Marie Antoinette]] [[Beam Me Up, Scotty|tried giving her subjects a little dietary advice]], who responded by storming Versailles and putting her and her brave husband Louis XVI to death by the guillotine. Their son, the Dauphin, makes it out of France alive, though, thanks to the tireless efforts of that "demmed elusive [[The Scarlet Pimpernel (Literature)|Pimpernel]]". Everyone in this time period wore pastel-colored satin, big fancy wigs, fake beauty marks, and snorted snuff like it was cocaine. Unless they were poor, in which case they wore trousers with tricolor badges and sung "String the aristocrats from the lamp posts!" whilst [[Torches and Pitchforks|waving their pitchforks]] and gnashing their rotting teeth. Don't forget about taking down ''l'ancien régime''.
Then Napoleon took over, and marched across Europe, stopped only by Richard [[Sharpe]] or the [[War and Peace|Russian winter]], depending on your nationality.
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* [[God Save Us From the Queen]]: [[Incredibly Lame Pun|L'autrichienne]].
** For those who don't speak French: ''autrichienne'' means '(female) Austrian', but ''chienne'' means, well, 'female dog' (and is just as insulting as in enlgish). In addition, ''autruche'' means 'ostrich'.
* [[Gorgeous Period Dress]]/[[Pimped
* [[Historical Domain Character]]: Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, and Napoleon spend so much time in fictions set in this period, one wonders how they managed to play their parts in history.
* [[Historical Villain Upgrade]]: [[Well
** Jean-Paul Marat perhaps got it worse than anybody else from that period, and went from being an almost godlike figure whose bust replaced crosses in churches to be described as an "angry monster insatiably hungry for blood" after the Reign of Terror was pretty much done and finished.
** On the other side, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette got this, especially during the Revolution. Marie Antoinette did not actually say the infamous line, "Let them eat cake", and Louis XVI was [[
* [[Hit So Hard the Calendar Felt It]]: As noted above, the revolutionary government made 1792 the Year I, and France counted years that way for a while thereafter.
* [[Hoist By His Own Petard]]: The salon culture of Paris that served as the intellectual birthplace of many Revolutionary ideas grew as the result of the active patronage of the Duke of Orleans, Louis XVI's uncle, who was hoping to use the popular discontent against the King to usurp the throne himself. Suffice to say, things did not go as planned.
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* [[Rousing Speech]]: Several. For instance, Henri de la Rochejaquelein addressing the Vendean Royalist rebels: "If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; [[Honor Before Reason|if I retreat, kill me!]]"
** The most well-known may still be Danton's "''(...) de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace (...)!''".
* [[Self
* [[Wooden Ships and Iron Men]]: The Revolution helped create this trope - the Ancien Regime had sometimes managed to defeat Britain at sea (most notably during [[The American Revolution]]) but the loss of France's best naval officers (as they were aristocrats) left Britain facing a weakened opponent and led to the string of victories that created Britain's naval mythos.
* [[Wouldn't Hit a Girl]]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women%27s_March_on_Versailles How the king was forced back to Paris from Versailles].
** Also [[Amazon Brigade]]: the Revolutionary Republican Women [[Blonde Republican Sex Kitten|(NOT to be confused with...)]].
* [[Upperclass Twit]]: Whatever else you think about Marie and Louis, it's pretty obvious they had no clue what they were doing. The other French aristocrats weren't much more efficient, and [[Aristocrats Are Evil|most higher clergy and nobles constantly blocked any economic reforms that would help the country]] ([[Money, Dear Boy|since said reforms would also require them to give up some of their cash and nobility privileges]]). Others (usually poorer ones) supported them, some because they sincerely believed the country needed change. Others opposed reforms just because they hated Calonne.
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