A Child's History of the World

by V. M. Hillyer

Measles and Mumps are very catching.

So are Revolutions.

Just a little later than the Revolution of the thirteen colonies, the people in France had a Revolution, too. They saw how successful the Americans had been in their fight against the king of England, and so they rebelled against their own king and queen in France. This was called the French Revolution.

The reason the French people rebelled against their king was because they had very little, and the king and his royal family and nobles seemed to have everything. Both the Americans and the French rebelled against paying taxes. With the Americans, however, it was a matter of principle more than anything else. Their taxes were not very large, but they thought them unjust. The French taxes, however, not only were unjust but they took almost everything away from the people.

I have already told you how bad things were under Louis XIV, and they got worse until the people could stand it no longer.

At this time the king of France was Louis XVI, and his queen was named Marie Antoinette. Although the people were so poor they had hardly anything to eat except a very coarse and bad-tasting kind of bread called black bread; they were compelled to pay the king and the nobles money so that they could live in fine style and have “parties”; and they had to do all sorts of work for them for nothing or next to nothing. If any one complained he was put in a great prison in Paris called the Bastille and left there to die. In spite of the fact that all the people were so terribly poor, the king and the queen and their friends lived in luxury and extravagance with everything in the world they wanted, all paid for by the poor people.

Neither the king nor his wife was really wicked. They were simply young and thoughtless. They meant well, but like a great many well-meaning people they lacked common sense and did not know how others lived. They didn’t seem to understand that people could be poor, for they had so much themselves. Marie Antoinette was told that her subjects had no bread to eat. “Then why don’t they eat cake?” she is said to have asked.

To right the wrongs of the people, a body of many of the best men from all France gathered together and, calling themselves the National Assembly, tried to work out some plan to do away with all the injustice the people had been suffering. They wanted to make every one free and equal and give everybody a “say” in the government.

But the poor had become so furiously mad at the way they had been treated by the rich that they would stand things no longer and a wild and angry mob of them attacked the old prison of the Bastille. They battered down the walls and freed the prisoners and killed the guards of the Bastille simply because they were servants of the king. Then they cut off the heads of the guards and stuck them on poles and, carrying them aloft, paraded through the streets of Paris. There were only about half a dozen prisoners in the old jail, so that freeing them didn’t matter much, but this attack was to show that the people would no longer allow the king to imprison them.

The Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789. This is the beginning of what is called the French Revolution, and this day is celebrated in France in almost the same way that our Fourth of July is, for it is the French Declaration of Independence against kings.