This morning’s walking tour was full of interesting information about the French Revolution. I was unfamiliar with Georges Danton and his roll (Doyle may have discussed him, but I did not pick up on Danton as a primary figure of the Revolution.). I loved the guide’s story about Danton’s original effort to make himself sound aristocratic by changing his name to D’anton. Smartly, he abandoned this idea and returned to his given spelling after the Revolution began.
Our guide also noted that Danton was known for his ugliness, which he used to his advantage. While the statue in Odeon does make him look, if not handsome, at least heroic, his portrait reveals the scars he carried from misfortunes suffered early in his life (smallpox and attacks from farm animals), showing that his roots were anything but aristocratic.
Our stop at Café Procope was also enlightening. The Cordeliers, journalist Jean-Paul Marat, Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and other revolutionaries met in the café to discuss politics, and the Phrygian cap was allegedly first displayed there. The Procope served Napoleon long before he was emperor. He once had to leave his hat to secure payment (which he never made), and the café still displays it.
At St. Sulpice, the guide discussed the French Revolution’s effect on the state religion of Catholicism and, specifically, the seizure of Church property. Burke was dismayed by this act and discussed it extensively in Reflections on the Revolution in France. To raise money quickly, rather than sell some of the property, the State issued assignats. This one features the issue date in the Republican calendar on the top right and the figures of Law at the bottom left and Justice at the bottom right.
One of the final main stops on the tour was at Luxembourg Palace, which was later converted to the Senate. This is where Helen Maria Williams was imprisoned, and her experiences here are detailed in her Letters from France, 1792, 1795. In the 1792 letter, she discusses the “political clouds” that had begun to gather in the early 1790s, leading to “severity and terror” in which she and other English people in France were caught when they were rounded up and imprisoned in the fall of 1792. While Williams laments her imprisonment, she maintains that “[t]he greater part of mankind in all ages . . . have abused power,” and keeps her belief in the correctness of the revolutionary principles. Her letters praise the many “compassionate men” of the revolutionary committees and describe fondly the “system of equality” practiced in the prison, where each prisoner has as assigned task and where each shares what they have with others.
You can see the French motto, liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity), above the main entrance.
