that what of Wisdom they do send us bring fruit in its season! – It remains to be seen how the quellers of Sansculottism were themselves quelled, and sacred right of Insurrection was blown away by gunpowder: wherewith this singular eventful History called French Revolution end. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution
David’s Rome rebuilt as the New France. Simon Schama’s Power of Art: David, BBC 2006
His depiction of the Tennis Court Oath: it’s a picture filled with noise, the roar of the oath, the crash of a great electrical storm. The Revolution as an unstoppable force of Nature. And at the centre of it all an enormous space ... filled with light, the rushing wind ... An idea so big it dwarfs the humans who enact it. ibid.
There was no going back. From now on David and his art belonged to the Revolution. ibid.
The terror had begun. And David had become part of the great engine of killing. ibid.
David’s downfall was inextricably linked to the fate of Robespierre. ibid.
The journey to the guillotine and to the World War would start with the dreams of a philosopher. But not any old philosopher. Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was here ... just outside Paris, reshaped the mental habit of an entire generation, turning them from creatures of thought to creatures of feeling ... And the British couldn’t get enough of it. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Forces of Nature, BBC 2002
Men of feeling in tune with the rhythms of nature. What appealed to men and women of feeling in the English provinces was Rousseau’s belief that urbanity, the graces and fashions of Metropolitan life were symptoms of everything that was rotten about the old world, the cosmetic mask behind which lurks the poxy disfigurement of a deceitful vicious terminally-diseased nation. ibid.
But when the lynching started [Edmund] Burke decided the revolution was above all an act of violence ... Democracy? Mobocrasy more like, said Burke. Heads stuck on pikes, the law of the lynch mob – we don’t want that here. ibid.
In 1791 he [Thomas Paine] published his counterblast – The Rights of Man. ibid.
In August 1792 the monarchy had been overthrown and a revolutionary republic created in its place. ibid.
Fourteen hundred men and women held in Paris prisons were demonised as a fifth column and butchered in cold blood. ibid.
A time for all radicals to ask themselves difficult questions. How could you remain a cheerleader for revolution knowing now what you knew? Having seen the dreams turn to violence and bloodshed? The poet William Wordsworth had been as fervent as anyone in the early days of revolution hope. Now those hopes were turning to doubts. ibid.
Britain confronted Napoleon’s empire: epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal. A world of conflict from India to the Caribbean. With spectacular naval victories like Trafalgar. During these roller-coaster years the country’s woes were muffled; patriotic propaganda drowned out any voices of complaint. The symphony of cannon and drum reached its climax on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo. ibid.
It continued for five days. The River Seine ran red with blood and copy-cat attacks occurred throughout France ... The Reformation had led ordinary Christians to butcher one another. Ann Widdecombe, Christianity s1e5: A History: Reformation, Channel 4 2009
A mastermind breaks into the most heavily fortified vault in France. Tunnelling under the busy city streets he advances at a rate of six inches a day, and scores twelve million in cash and jewels. Masterminds s1e15: Riviera Job, truTV 2004
Without Arms, Without Hate and Without Violence. ibid. message on walls of vault
Spaggiari now assembles his elite team made up of former paratroopers, members of the Marseilles Mob and tunnelling experts. ibid.
He not only confesses to the crime he brags about his brilliance. ibid.
Spaggiari disappears without a trace. ibid.
After thirteen years on the run Spaggiari surfaces one last time ... Suffering from cancer the mastermind of France’s greatest vault heist dies. ibid.
We believe that the honour of France lies in continuing the war alongside our allies. General Charles de Gaulle, London broadcast
Thank God for the French army, said Winston Churchill when he came to power. But in 1933 the French Army was no longer the superlative weapon it had once had been. The World at War 3/26: France Falls, ITV 1973
France between the wars was deeply divided ... On the very day Hitler came to power France was without a government. ibid.
France in the thirties build a series of great forts along her frontier with Germany ... The Maginot Forts were truly twentieth century wonders. ibid.
The Maginot Line ironically protected Germany better than it protected France. ibid.
Little attempt was made to harass the enemy. ibid.
Life at the front was dreary and drab. Badly paid, leave became an obsession for the French soldiers. ibid.
Fifty British and French airfields were attacked on the first day. ibid.
At one time twelve million people were on the road to northern France. ibid.
The German infantrymen knock over the French as if they came from a different world. World War II: The Apocalypse: Collapse of France aka Apocalypse: The Second World War: Crushing Defeat, National Geographic 2009
The Germans have reached the English channel. ibid.
400,000 men cram the beach helpless and in disarray. ibid.
The British forces have left behind almost all of their equipment. ibid.
3,000 African soldiers and officers from the French army will be shot and killed after they are captured. ibid.
Paris 1789: the Great Revolution has begun ... The growing mounds of noble heads are only matched by the growing mounds of return tickets ... Madam Guillotine claims them all. Carry on Don’t Lose Your Head 1966 starring Sid James & Kenneth Williams & Jim Dale & Charles Hawtrey & Peter Butterworth & Joan Sims & Dany Robin & Peter Gilmore & Marianne Stone & Richard Shaw et al, director Gerald Thomas
In Louis’s Catholic kingdom was no representative assembly to come between the King and his people ... One King. One Law. One Catholic Faith. And the formula seemed to work, for in little more than a decade Louis had transformed France from the sick man of Europe into the continental superpower and the very model of a modern Monarchy. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e1: Return of the King, Channel 4 2006
At first the French fared better. Louis advanced in Holland and occupied five of seven provinces. But the Dutch refused to roll over. They broke their dikes; they used the floodwaters to stop the French advance. ibid.
On 21st January 1793 King Louis the VI was sent to the guillotine ... Few such foreign events have evoked such horror in England. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e5: Survival
From henceforth monarchies would be measured by how they responded to this new post-Revolutionary world ... What the British monarchy would do was by no means a foregone conclusion. ibid.
Imagine Britain in the middle of the Napoleonic wars. We had been fighting the French for years. Napoleon tightens his grip on Europe. Dr Lucy Worsley, Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency 2/3, BBC 2011
In 1815 the final struggle: the Battle of Waterloo was a decisive victory over Napoleon. ibid.
Napoleon’s rise to power ... Napoleon decided France had to break free of debt. William T Still, The Money Masters, 1996
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
On the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of the public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics and enquiries into moral and political science have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions or sophisms like those of Mr Malthus calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. Percy Bysshe Shelley, preface The Revolt of Islam
In seventeenth-century France they built one of the greatest engineering feats of its time: a massive canal across the country from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations s3e2: The European Story: The Canal King, Discovery 2005