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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 (Literaturenovel)|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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** More generally, the [[wikipedia:French Revolutionary War|French Revolutionary Wars]] stand as a Crowning Moment for France as a whole. The brand new republic is in chaos, its treasury is empty, and it's surrounded by hostile powers who want to destroy it. What does it do? Get some help from Poland, Denmark and Norway, and proceed to kick the asses of Germany, Britain, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Turkey ''and'' Italy, expanding its territory in the process. This was also where [[Napoleon Bonaparte]] earned the reputation that would eventually lead him to found the French Empire.
* [[Decapitation Presentation]]: [[wikipedia:File:Hinrichtung Ludwig des XVI.png|Look!]]
* [[Decided Byby One Vote]]: Louis XVI's [[wikipedia:French Revolution#Execution of Louis XVI|execution]]. Sort of.
* [[Disproportionate Retribution]]: During the Terror, you could be convicted as a counter-revolutionary on the slimmest evidence, leading to people being executed for some pretty ridiculous things.
** One could actually be executed for not being enthusiastic enough, let alone against the Revolution.
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* [[Everyone Went to School Together]]: Robespierre and Desmoulins were friends in law school; they wound up as political enemies, resulting in Desmoulins's execution. Louis XVI was there to hear Robespierre's valedictorian speech. Also, Napoleon went to school and was friends with Augustin Robespierre, Maximilien's younger brother.
* [[Evil Cripple]]: Georges Couthon was condemned by Thermidorians [http://saint-just.net/movies/napoleon/original/napoleon-7.html because of that].
* [[Exactly What It Says Onon the Tin]]: The instigators of the Reign of Terror actually ''called it that''.
* [[For Want of a Nail]]: Some experts believe that the famine that was one of the primary catalysts of the Revolution might not have been so bad, or even been averted completely had the French public had not been so resistant to earlier government efforts to introduce a crop from the New World know as a ''pomme de terre'' or in English, a potato.
* [[God Save Us From the Queen]]: [[Incredibly Lame Pun|L'autrichienne]].
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** 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 [[Hanlon's Razor|not tyrannical, just incompetent]]. His two immediate predecessors, on the other hand...
* [[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 Byby 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.
* [[List of Transgressions]]: King Louis received one.
{{quote| 1 - On 20 June, 1789, you attacked the sovereignty of the people by suspending the assemblies of its representatives and by driving them by violence from the place of their sessions. Proof thereof exists in the procès-verbal drafted at the Tennis Court of Versailles by the members of the Constituent Assembly.<br />
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* [[Mind Screw]]: The Revolutionary period is often cited as one of the most complex and confusing areas of historical study, and is sometimes memetically invoked as something that drives people mad or puts them to sleep.
* [[More Deadly Than the Male]]: That was the ''tricoteuses''' reputation, anyway.
* [[Off Withwith His Head]]: The guillotine was extensively used, during the [[Reign of Terror]] in particular.
* [[Reign of Terror]]: The [[Trope Namer]].
* [[The Remnant]]: The Royalists of Vendée and the Chouans saw themselves as this, along with [[La Résistance]], in their uprising from 1793-1799. Their defiance and utter zeal caught the admiration of [[Napoleon Bonaparte]]. [[Never Live It Down|But even to this day, many of their descendants don't take to the Republic well.]]
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== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Rose of Versailles]]''
* ''[[Le Chevalier Deon|Le Chevalier d'Eon]]''
 
== [[Fan Fiction]] ==
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* ''[[Orphans of the Storm]]''
* ''[[The Affair of the Necklace]]'' film about a scandal involving Marie Antoinette. Pre-revolution.
* ''[[Scaramouche (Filmfilm)|Scaramouche]]''
 
== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[A Tale of Two Cities]]''
* ''[[The Scarlet Pimpernel (Literaturenovel)|The Scarlet Pimpernel]]''
* ''[[Scaramouche]]''
* [[Victor Hugo (Creator)|Victor Hugo]]'s novel ''93''
* The ''Pink Carnation'' book series.
* The novel ''A Place of Greater Safety''
* ''[[Honor Harrington (Literature)|Honor Harrington]]'' takes place in the Napoleonic Wars [[In Space]] and thus has the entire plot in the background.
* ''[[The Woman With the Velvet Necklace (Literature)|The Woman Withwith the Velvet Necklace]]'' takes place during the Terror. In reference to [[Moral Event Horizon]], it mentions the execution of King Louis as "the single most important event in human history to date."
 
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Black AdderBlackadder|Blackadder the Third]]'' ([[Anachronism Stew|for one episode]])
* ''[[Doctor Who (TV)|Doctor Who]]'': "The [[Reign of Terror]]"
* ''[[The Time Tunnel (TV)|The Time Tunnel]]'' episode "[[Reign of Terror]]".
 
== [[Music]] ==
* [[Voltaire (Musicband)|Voltaire]]'s song "The Headless Waltz"
* Allan Sherman's song "You Went the Wrong Way Old King Louis"
* Fireaxe's ''[[Food for Thethe Gods|Raise the Black Flag]]''
* "Bastille Day" by [[Rush]]
* [[Pink Floyd|Roger Waters']] opera, ''Ca Ira'', [[Values Resonance|with some deliberate allegories]] [[Anvilicious|to America in]] [[The War Onon Terror|the mid-2000's]].
* [[Queen]]'s "Killer Queen" namechecks [[Marie Antoinette]] and the "let them eat cake" misquote in its opening lyrics.
 
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[Bite Me (Webcomicwebcomic)|Bite Me]], [[Either or Title|or A Vampire Farce]]''.
* ''[[Hark! aA Vagrant]]'': [http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=273 "Yoo hoo], [[Black Comedy|does this pike make me look fat?"]]
 
== [[Web Original]] ==
* ''[[Look to Thethe West]]'' features an [[Alternate History]] version.
 
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* The ''[[Histeria (Animation)|Histeria]]'' episode, titled, [[Exactly What It Says Onon the Tin|well, "The French Revolution"]]
 
{{reflist}}
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