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Let them eat cake! Learn the real stories behind the storming of the Bastille, the guillotine, and how Les Misérables ties into it all. Host Justin Dodd (@juddtoday) breaks down some common myths and misconceptions about the French Revolution. Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1 About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss Misconceptions About the French Revolution | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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After seeing the 2012 film adaptation of the musical Les Miserables in theaters
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historian Julia Gossard caught a snippet of some other viewer's conversation. So, that was the French Revolution, one woman asked, and it was unsuccessful
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Whether or not the French Revolution was unsuccessful is debatable, but the first half of the question has a good old-fashioned yes or no answer
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It's no. Les Miserables is not the French Revolution. And I don't mean it just doesn't
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cover the whole revolution or something. It's literally set during a different French uprising
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Hi, I'm Justin Dodd, and that one moviegoer is far from the only person to make that mistake
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In fact, there are quite a few French Revolution myths floating around, from who invented the
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guillotine to what that Bastille storming business was really all about. Slap a tricolor
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cockade on your lapel, and let's get started. Le Miserable takes place during the French Revolution
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Okay, so maybe if you've read Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables, you already knew this was false. But the musical doesn't spell out the historical context of its
1:07
source material all that clearly. There's some talk of bread, a violent citizen uprising against
1:13
the French government, and a very strong, poor-versus-rich theme throughout. It seems very
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French Revolution-y. Here's what was actually going on. Though the revolution's start and
1:23
end dates aren't exactly set in stone, it's generally agreed that it kicked off in the late
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1780s. That's when bad harvests and a major debt crisis caused people to question the country's
1:33
traditional socioeconomic structure and the Bourbon monarchy. The upheaval lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte took charge towards the end of 1799. When Jean Valjean gets out of prison at
1:45
the beginning of Les Mis, it's already 1815, and the story's major conflict centers on 1832's
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June Rebellion, also known as the Paris Uprising of 1832. Victor Hugo was even there to witness part
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of it. Basically, the monarchy had been restored when Napoleon was ousted some years earlier
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and in 1832, Louis-Philippe was on the throne. He was a reasonably liberal ruler, and most
2:08
members of the bourgeoisie were fans, but he had plenty of opponents. Republicans were upset that
2:13
there was a monarch on the throne at all, while Bonapartists were upset that the monarch wasn't
2:18
you know, a Bonaparte. Some argue that Louis-Philippe wasn't the legitimate monarch at all
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There was also a host of issues creating upheaval in the country, many disproportionately affecting
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the lower classes. This included a cholera epidemic, which eventually claimed the life
2:34
of popular Republican hero General Jean-Maximilien Lamarck. It was at Lamarck's funeral possession
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that thousands of Parisians built barricades and staged a rebellion. One eyewitness wrote
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Paris is, at the moment, the scene of dreadful carnage. The people have risen everywhere and
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are fighting with the troops in almost every street. From all sides I hear firing going on
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and so far as I have seen, the people are getting the better of the troops. There is every appearance that we are on the evening of a new revolution
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If you watched or read Les Mis you probably know that the people did not end up getting the better of the troops The military quelled the riots within about 24 hours and roughly 800 rebels either died or were wounded The French monarchy survived unscathed
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But while the June Rebellion wasn't technically part of the French Revolution, it definitely embodied some of that same revolutionary spirit. So, no. Les Miserables
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is not the quintessential French Revolution story. But you could say it's a quintessential
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French Revolution story, lowercase r. The storming of the Bastille, on the other hand
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arguably is the quintessential French Revolution story, though certain important details tend to
3:43
get lost in the storm. For one, the Bastille wasn't the torture fortress you might be picturing
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It was definitely a fortress, eight 100-foot-tall towers with a roughly 80-foot-wide moat
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with sadly no alligators in the moats as far as my research revealed, but still very fortress-like
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Charles V had ordered its construction back in 1370, and it had turned into a famed prison
4:05
But the Bastille usually only housed about 40 prisoners at a time, mainly well-off citizens who stayed in relative comfort
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Inmates could bring furniture, pets, their whole private library, even servants. Some prisoners had been sent to the Bastille by their own families
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The king of France could commit someone to prison by issuing an executive order called
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Elettre de Cachet. No defense, no trial, just straight to prison. Essentially, the real-life version of Monopoly's go-directly-to-jail, do not pass go, do not
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collect $200. If you were a French family with a wayward relative bringing shame upon the family name
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you could have the king deal them a go-to-jail card. That's how infamous Libertine the Marquis de Saad ended up in prison, including a spell
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at the Bastille. There, he decorated his room with tapestries, shipped in his own wine, and passed the time
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penning 120 Days of Sodom. The Marquis was actually moved to another institution mere days before Bastille Day
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When the fortress was stormed on July 14, 1789, there were only seven inmates
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One was a wayward relative sent by his family, four were serving time for forgery
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and two had been committed due to insanity. Not the political prisoners you might have been imagining
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But if the goal wasn't to free prisoners, why attack a prison? The real reason, according to most historians, was for ammunition
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At the time, it was clear to everyone that France was in serious debt, in part because
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they had just helped the U.S. win the American Revolution. Merci for that one, guys
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Back in France, it was the already worse-off citizens who were suffering from the fallout
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of that financial crisis. Inflation, food shortages, so on. Two months before the attack on the Bastille, King Louis XVI had convened the Estates General
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to figure out a game plan. There were three estates. The first was clergy, the second was nobility, and the third comprised everyone else, which
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mostly consisted of the bourgeoisie and peasants. The Third Estate was raring for serious reform
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and its members were worried that the more conservative elements of France would try to tamp them down. Those worries escalated in July when Louis XVI fired Jacques
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Necker, a finance minister who had enjoyed the Third Estate's support. That, combined with the
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fact that troops had moved into positions surrounding Paris made Third Estate members think the king was plotting against them So on July 14th about 2 people raided Paris Hotel des Invalides for weapons and then marched to the Bastille to seize its ammunition
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Guards tried to resist, but the Bastille's governor, Bernard-René de Lannay, finally gave in
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It didn't turn out great for Lannay. He was beaten badly, and when he kicked someone in the crotch
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the mob cut his head off and paraded around town. So, like I said, not great
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It didn't take long for the storming of the Bastille to take on an almost mythic significance
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Revolutionaries considered the fortress a symbol of monarchical overreach and oppression, and they slowly tore it down over the coming months
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As for all those torture rumors, revolutionaries propagated those too. As Simon Schama wrote in his 1989 book Citizens, a Chronicle of the French Revolution
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ancient pieces of armor were declared to be fiendish iron corsets applied to constrict
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the victim, and a tooth machine that was part of a printing press was said to be a wheel
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of torture. Countless prints supplied suitably horrible imagery, featuring standing skeletons, instruments of torture, and men in iron masks. Yes, the Bastille was a prison, and some inmates
7:24
were treated better than others, but reports of actual torture were, to use the technical
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phrase, a bunch of baloney. The guillotine was invented during the French Revolution
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It's generally assumed that the guillotine was named after some guy named Guillotine
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This is actually true. His full name was Joseph Ignace Guillotine, and he was a French physician
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But versions of the guillotine had been used around the world for centuries before it became
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known as the guillotine. Scotland had the Maiden from the mid-1500s to the early 1700s, Germany had the Planck
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in the Middle Ages, and Italy had the Mania during the Renaissance
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England's Halifax gibbet was older than all three. Heck, France itself is believed to have used the guillotine-like machine before the 18th century
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Not only did Joseph Ignace Guillotine not invent guillotines, he didn't even design the ones
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used during the French Revolution. All he really did was suggest that France standardize executions
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Like most other parts of life during the Ancien Regime, your execution method depended on
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your socioeconomic status. High-class folks usually got beheaded, while most other criminals were hanged
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Things were viewed as the more honorable method of execution, and were quicker and less painful
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But a lot can go wrong when it comes to lopping off a head with an axe or sword
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Joseph Ignace Guillotine was against the death penalty altogether, but apparently he realized
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that France was nowhere near being ready to give it up. So in 1789, he proposed that France use an official decapitation contraption to make
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all executions as humane as humanly possible. With my machine, he explained, I strike off your head in the twinkling of an eye and you
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won't feel a thing. Cute. As for what that machine would look like, he didn't offer up any diagrams, and the
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National Assembly wasn't exactly clamoring for details. Guillotine wasn't a very well-respected
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physician. One contemporary described him as a nobody who made himself a busybody
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By the fall of 1791, however, decapitation was made official and the number of death
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senses was rapidly climbing and Guillotine call for an equitable efficient means of execution suddenly seemed like a worthy idea An engineer named Antoine Louis designed the machine and another guy named Tobias Schmitt constructed it Much to the horror of Joseph Ignace guillotine nobody forgot about his
9:38
early involvement, and everyone started calling the machine the guillotine. After he died in 1814
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his family members petitioned the government to formally pick a different name for it. When they
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did not, the guillotines picked a different last name for themselves. Marie Antoinette said, let them eat cake. As legend would have it, Marie Antoinette was
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informed that French peasants had no bread, their main food source, and she responded with
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let them eat cake. In other words, I am so out of touch up here in my big castle with my big wigs
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and my big feasts that I do not understand the problem. No bread, peasants? Eat something else
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Just for pedantry's sake, the sentence in French is, qu'ils mange de la brioche, which literally
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means let them eat brioche. Brioche is a rich, buttery bread that's way more extravagant than
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what poor peasants would have been eating. It's not exactly cake, but it doesn't really change
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the supposed scent. But the correct French phrasing does shed a little light on how it
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got popularized. The earliest known record of Kiel's Mange de la Brioche comes from philosopher
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, penned in the 1760s. In Book 6, he wrote, translated from
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French. At length, I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess who, on being informed
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that the country people had no bread, replied, then let them eat brioche. Marie Antoinette didn't
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even move to France and marry the future king until 1770, so it's safe to assume that she's
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not the great princess Rousseau mentioned. It could have been Maria Theresa of Spain
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who married Louis XIV a century earlier. She supposedly suggested that instead of bread
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starving subjects should just eat croute de petite, which is essentially pie crust
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Two of Louis XVI's aunts, Madame Sophie and Victoire, have also been credited with
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let them eat brioche. This type of comment isn't confined to France either. A 16th century German
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story, for example, has a wealthy woman asking why impoverished people don't eat a sweet bread
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called crossam. In short, really rich people have a long history of being unmoved by the plight of
11:36
the poor. But how unfeeling and or oblivious was Marie Antoinette? Maybe less than you think
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according to biographer Antonia Fraser. Around the time of the Flower War in 1775
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when bread shortages caused a wave of riots, the queen wrote home to her mother
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It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune
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we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. Marie Antoinette was known to avoid riding through the fields because she knew it would
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damage the peasants' crops. And she once asked her husband for 12,000 francs in order
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to free poor people who were in debtor's jail for failing to pay for their children's
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wet nurses and, even more, to help the poor of Versailles. Would those small acts of sympathy save her from Madame Guillotine? Absolutely not. She
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was convicted of treason and beheaded on October 16, 1793. Comment your favorite Les Mis song down below, and I'll see you next time
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