why french cuisine is the best

hi, my name is john green, this is crash courseworld history, and today we’re going to talk about the french revolution. admittedly,this wasn’t the french flag until 1794, but we just felt like he looked good in stripes.as does this guy. huh? so, while the american revolution is considereda pretty good thing, the french revolution is often seen as a bloody, anarchic mess,which... mr. green, mr. green! i bet, like always,it’s way more complicated than that. actually no. it was pretty terrible. also,like a lot of revolutions, in the end it exchanged an authoritarian regime for an authoritarianregime. but even if the revolution was a mess, its ideas changed human history - far more,i will argue, than the american revolution.

[theme music] right, so france in the 18th century was arich and populous country, but it had a systemic problem collecting taxes because of the wayits society was structured. they had a system with kings and nobles we now call the ancienrã©gime. thank you, three years of high school french. and for most french people, it sucked, becausethe people with the money - the nobles and the clergy - never paid taxes. so by 1789,france was deeply in debt thanks to their funding the american revolution - thank you,france; we will get you back in world wars i and ii. and king louis xvi was spendinghalf of his national budget to service the federal debt. louis tried to reform this system under variousfinance ministers. he even called for democracy

on a local level, but all attempts to fixit failed and soon france basically declared bankruptcy. this nicely coincided with hailstormsthat ruined a year’s harvest, thereby raising food prices and causing widespread hunger, which really madethe people of france angry, because they love to eat. meanwhile, the king certainly did not lookbroke, as evidenced by his well-fed physique and fancy footwear. he and his wife marieantoinette also got to live in the very nice palace at versailles thanks to god’s mandate,but enlightenment thinkers like kant were challenging the whole idea of religion, writingthings like: “the main point of enlightenment is of man’s release from his self-causedimmaturity, primarily in matters of religion.” so basically the peasants were hungry, theintellectuals were beginning to wonder whether

god could or should save the king, and thenobility were dithering about, eating foie gras and songbirds, failing to make meaningfulfinancial reform. in response to the crisis, louis xvi calleda meeting of the estates general, the closest thing that france had to a national parliament,which hadn’t met since 1614. the estates general was like a super parliament made upof representatives from the first estate, the nobles, the second estate, the clergy,and the third estate, everyone else. the third estate showed up with about 600representatives, the first and second estates both had about 300, and after several votes,everything was deadlocked, and then the third estate was like, “you know what? forgetyou guys. we’re gonna leave and we’re

gonna become our own national assembly.” this did not please king louis xvi. so whenthe new national assembly left the room for a break, he locked the doors, and he was like,"sorry, guys, you can't go in there. and if you can't assemble, how you gonna be a nationalassembly?" shockingly, the third estate representativeswere able to find a different room in france, this time an indoor tennis court where theyswore the famous tennis court oath. and they agreed not to give up until a french constitutionwas established. so then louis xvi responded by sending troopsto paris primarily to quell uprisings over food shortages, but the revolutionaries sawthis as a provocation, so they responded by

seizing the bastille prison on july 14th,which, coincidentally, is also bastille day. the bastille was stormed ostensibly to freeprisoners - although there were only seven in jail at the time - but mostly to get guns. but the really radical move in the nationalassembly came on august 4, when they abolished most of the ancien rã©gime - feudal rights,tithes, privileges for nobles, unequal taxation, they were all abolished - in the name of writinga new constitution. and then, on august 26th, the national assemblyproclaimed the declaration of rights of man and citizen, which laid out a system of rightsthat applied to every person, and made those rights integral to the new constitution. that’squite different from the american bill of

rights, which was, like, begrudgingly tackedon at the end and only applied to non-slaves. the doromac, as i called it in high school,declared that everyone had the right to liberty, property, and security - rights that the frenchrevolution would do an exceptionally poor job of protecting, but as noted last week,the same can be argued for many other supposedly more successful revolutions. okay, let’sgo to the thought bubble. meanwhile, back at versailles, louis xvi wasstill king of france, and it was looking like france might be a constitutional monarchy.which might've meant that the royal family could hang on to their awesome house, butthen, in october of 1789, a rumor started that marie antoinette was hoarding grain somewhereinside the palace.

and in what became known as the women's march,a bunch of armed peasant women stormed the palace and demanded that louis and marie antoinettemove from versailles to paris. which they did, because everyone is afraid of armed peasantwomen. and this is a nice reminder that to many people at the time, the french revolutionwas not primarily about fancy enlightenment ideas; it was mostly about lack of food anda political system that made economic contractions hardest on the poor. now, a good argument can be made that thisfirst phase of the revolution wasn’t all that revolutionary. the national assemblywanted to create a constitutional monarchy; they believed that the king was necessaryfor a functioning state and they were mainly

concerned that the voters and office holdersbe men of property. only the most radical wing, the jacobins, called for the creationof a republic. but things were about to get much more revolutionary - and also worse forfrance. first, the jacobins had a huge petition drivethat got a bit unruly, which led troops controlled not by the king but by the national assemblyto fire on the crowd, killing 50 people. and that meant that the national assembly, whichhad been the revolutionary voice of the people, had killed people in an attempt to reign inrevolutionary fervor. you see this a lot throughout history during revolutions. what looked likeradical hope and change suddenly becomes "the man" as increasingly radical ideas are embraced.thanks, thought bubble.

meanwhile, france’s monarchical neighborswere getting a little nervous about all this republic business, especially leopold ii,who in addition to being the not holy, not roman, and not imperial holy roman emperor,was marie antoinette’s brother. i should note, by the way, that at this point, theholy roman empire was basically just austria. also, like a lot of monarchs, leopold ii likedthe idea of monarchies, and he wanted to keep his job as a person who gets to stand aroundwearing a dress, pointing at nothing, owning winged lion-monkeys made out of gold. and whocan blame him? so he and king william frederick ii of prussia together issued the declaration of pillnitz,which promised to restore the french monarchy. at this point, louis and the national assemblydeveloped a plan: let’s invade austria.

the idea was to plunder austria’s wealthand maybe steal some austrian grain to shore up french food supplies, and also, you know,spread revolutionary zeal. but what actually happened is that prussia joined austria infighting the french. and then louis encouraged the prussians, which made him look like anenemy of the revolution, which, of course, he was. and as a result, the assembly votedto suspend the monarchy, have new elections in which everyone could vote (as long as theywere men), and create a new republican constitution. soon, this convention decided to have a trialfor louis xvi, who was found guilty and, by one vote, sentenced to die via guillotine.which made it difficult for austria and prussia to restore him to the throne. oh, it’s timefor the open letter?

an open letter to the guillotine. but first,let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today. oh, there’s nothing. oh my gosh, stan! jeez.that’s not funny! dear guillotine, i can think of no better example ofenlightenment thinking run amok. dr. joseph guillotine, the inventor of the guillotine, envisionedit as an egalitarian way of dying. they said the guillotine was humane and it also madeno distinction between rich or poor, noble or peasant. it killed equally. you were also celebrated for taking the tortureout of execution. but i will remind you, you did not take the dying out of execution. unfortunatelyfor you, france hasn’t executed anyone since 1977. but you’ll be happy to know that thelast legal execution in france was via guillotine.

plus, you’ve always got a future in horrormovies. best wishes, john green the death of louis xvi marks the beginningof the terror, the best known or at least the most sensational phase of the revolution.i mean, if you can kill the king, you can kill pretty much anyone, which is what thegovernment did under the leadership of the committee of public safety (motto: we suck atprotecting public safety), led by maximilien robespierre. the terror saw the guillotining of 16,000enemies of the revolution including marie “i never actually said let them eat cake”antoinette and maximilien robespierre himself, who was guillotined in the month of thermidorin the year two.

alright, so while france was broke and fightingin like nine wars, the committee of public safety changed the measurements of time because,you know, the traditional measurements are so irrational and religion-y. so they renamedall the months and decided that every day would have 10 hours and each hour 100 minutes. and then, after the terror, the revolutionpulled back a bit and another new constitution was put into place, this one giving a lotmore power to wealthy people. at this point, france was still at war with austria and britain,wars that france ended up winning, largely thanks to a little corporal named napoleonbonaparte. the war was backdrop to a bunch of coups andcounter coups that i won’t get into right

now because they were very complicated, butthe last coup that we’ll talk about, in 1799, established napoleon bonaparte as thefirst consul of france. and it granted him almost unlimited executive power under yetanother constitution. and when he was declared first consul of france, napoleon proclaimed"citizens! the revolution is established on the principals with which it began. it isover." by which he presumably meant that france’s government had gone all the way from hereto here to here. as with the american revolution, it’s easyto conclude that france’s revolution wasn’t all that revolutionary. i mean, napoleon wasbasically an emperor and, in some ways, he was even more of an absolute monarch thanlouis xvi had been. gradually the nobles came

back to france, although they had mostly losttheir special privileges. the catholic church returned, too, although much weaker becauseit had lost land and the ability to collect tithes. and when napoleon himself fell, france restoredthe monarchy, and except for a four-year period, between 1815 and 1870, france had a king whowas either a bourbon or a bonaparte. now, these were no longer absolute monarchs whoclaimed that their right to rule came from god; they were constitutional monarchs ofthe kind that the revolutionaries of 1789 had originally envisioned. but the fact remainsthat france had a king again, and a nobility, and an established religion and it was definitelynot a democracy or a republic. and perhaps this is why the french revolutionis so controversial and open to interpretation.

some argue the revolution succeeded in spreadingenlightenment ideals even if it didn’t bring democracy to france. others argue that thereal legacy of the revolution wasn’t the enhancement of liberty, but of state power. regardless, i’d argue that the french revolutionwas ultimately far more revolutionary than its american counterpart. i mean, in someways, america never had an aristocracy, but in other ways it continued to have one - thefrench enlightenment thinker, diderot, felt that americans should “fear a too unequaldivision of wealth resulting in a small number of opulent citizens and a multitude of citizensliving in misery.” and the american revolution did nothing to change that polarization ofwealth.

what made the french revolution so radicalwas its insistence on the universality of its ideals. i mean, look at article 6 of thedeclaration of rights of man and citizen: “law is the expression of the general will.every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. it mustbe the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.” those are radical ideas, that the laws comefrom citizens, not from kings or gods, and that those laws should apply to everyone equally.that’s a long way from hammurabi - and in truth, it’s a long way from the slaveholdingthomas jefferson. in the 1970s, chinese president zhou enlaiwas asked what the affects of the french revolution had been. and he said, “it’s too soonto say.” and in a way, it still is. the

french revolution asked new questions aboutthe nature of people’s rights and the derivation of those rights. and we’re still answeringthose questions and sorting through how our answers should shape society today - mustgovernment be of the people to be for the people? do our rights derive from nature orfrom god or from neither? and what are those rights? as william faulkner said, “the past is neverdead. it’s not even past.” thanks for watching. i’ll see you next week. crash course is produced and directed by stanmuller, our script supervisor is danica johnson, the show is written by my high school historyteacher raoul meyer and myself, our graphics team is thought bubble, and we are ably internedby meredith danko.

last week’s phrase of the week was "gianttea bag"; if you want to suggest future phrases of the week, or guess at this week's you cando so in comments, where you can also ask questions about today’s video that willbe answered by our team of historians. thanks for watching crash course, and as wesay in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.

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