Bastille Day

"BASTILLE DAY" Timeline

This is my chronfession about Bastille Day.

I wanted to kick off the series with a story that really showed Hailey and Dennis' characters. Hailey fell right in with the political philosophers leading up to the French Revolution, and Dennis came face to face with historically significant characters, only to for once see them not as characters but as people. These themes will be expanded on through the series.

What went wrong?

The Royal Family on the balcony at
Versailles, overlooking the angry mob

The timeline in Bastille Day is completely wrong, condensed to allow for a fast moving story. Versailles wasn't attacked until October, almost three months after the storming of the Bastille. An angry mob, consisting mostly of market women enraged by the lack of bread and revolutionaries seeking political reform, infiltrated the palace. They murdered servants, looted the place, and ultimately called the king out onto a balcony where he tried to pacify them. They still revered him as a monarch, but called for the death of Antoinette who they saw as a foreign harlot. She came out onto the balcony with one of her children in her arms and the crowd somehow saw her as a kind mother and not the barbaric tyrant they expected. Still, the crowd forced the family into a carriage and took them back to Paris.

The guillotine wasn't in fact used until April 25, 1792, almost three years after the events of our story.

Marie-Thérèse, Queen of France

The "great princess" referenced by Rousseau was obviously not Denis Diderot. The truth is no one's really sure who the philosophe was talking about. Some think it was Marie-Thérèse, the wife of King Louis XIV, who lived a century before Antoinette. It definitely wasn't Antoinette who, as was stated in the story, was only a child in Austria at the time Rousseau published his Confessions (which is where the quote is found).


I guess it's pretty unbelievable that practically everyone spoke English when they needed to; Louis XVI was fluent, but Antoinette only spoke broken English, and the dauphin probably never learned it. Rousseau also never spoke English. Needless to say I bent the truth there for the sake of the story.


Sources:


Belloc, Hilaire. Marie Antoinette. Freeport, NY: for Libraries, 1972. Print.


Denton, C.S. Absolute Power (Arcturus Publishing, Ltd. 2006)


Gibson, Candice, and Josh Clark. "Did Marie Antoinette Really Tell French Peasants to Eat Cake?" Audio blog post. How Stuff Works. Discovery Network, 08 Sept. 2009. Web. 15 Aug. 2011. <www.howstuffworks.com>.


Shenkman, Richard. Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1994. Print.

Oh, and by the way: