Like almost every revolution in history, the French Revolution of 1789 was a muddled affair with all kinds of people either taking advantage of events or fighting against them, and many innocent people suffered greatly.
I shall probably receive furious attacks for saying that the storming of the Bastille was in itself unimportant, since we have to recognise that, when a mob managed to steal arms from one of the major storehouses in Paris and the newly armed then use them for their own personal purposes, this was the cause of serious problems.
The Ancien Régime was rotten to the core, but its effect on the individual citizen varied enormously depending on where he or she lived. Some land-owners took their responsibility for those living on their lands very seriously, but others wished solely to live useless lives on the biggest profits which they could extract from the land and the workers.
Louis XVI, the king in 1789, was a harmless, quiet man who enjoyed using his hands in his hobby of watch-making, and he had never shown any tendency towards either cruelty or extravagance, but he almost certainly knew (and therefore understood) little of the hardships suffered by many of his subjects. His wife, who had been brought up in the notoriously extravagant court in Vienna, seems to have been a charming but empty-headed woman who knew even less than her husband of what life was like outside the cocoon of court life.
Those who rose to power in Paris, as the acknowledged capital of the country, as a result of the turmoil surrounding the revolution which really started in the Etats Généraux (especially among the representatives of the middle classes), were themselves mainly reasonably well-educated men who wanted above all to gain wealth and power at the expense of the nobility. The last thing that they wanted to do was to give power to the ordinary people, whom they despised and mistrusted, so they made much of such principles as equality while ensuring that it was never likely to dent their position of financial and political control. This made them feel the need to accuse their opponents of failing to match their loyalty to the 'cause', and we see the same thing happening now in the USA where opposing candidates express doubts about one another's commitment to the glory of the nation.
As to the rest of the country, it could do little against the Terror and other excesses which spread out from Paris as the new and ruthless rulers saw the need to ensure provisions for the capital, and they started in the larger towns, where they managed to entice many other middle class people to follow their lead.
However, in some more remote areas, and particularly in the countryside, where different classes of people lived much less separate lives from one another, the ordinary people did not see any benefit in exchanging masters whom they knew and who often looked after them in difficult times for new masters whose sole interest was very obviously concentrated on making indecent profits. The desire of the new rulers in Paris to increase their control over the lives of reasonably content peasants by replacing the old masters by themselves gave rise to strong resistance from the ordinary folk.
This happened in patches all over the nation, but the most worrying to the new masters was in the west of France, where they had to send thousands of troops to crush all such resistance most bloodily, and the folk memory in such areas as the Vendée and Brittany is full of tales of the cruelty of the hated Parisian troops. Peace only came when Napoléon finally gave up his attempts to crush the people when he was moving towards his imperial ambitions, and he then changed tack to allow the ordinary people to live their own lives, particularly in the matter of religion.
With a view towards uniting the nation it was comparatively recently decided that, when we celebrate our National Day, no official reference should henceforth be made to a minor event in Paris in 1789, and, whatever might be our historical background and whatever side in the revolutionary wars our families might have supported, we can all now join together. For this reason, it is known officially as our Fête Nationale, as being a day of national celebration. Please therefore forget any reference to the Bastille on 14th July, and just wish us well as we sail once again into rough political waters under a president who shows no desire to act decisively to protect either us or other peoples from foreign imperialist domination.
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