Burning the Guardhouse on the Pont Neuf
This retrospective shows that early in the French Revolution targets were often economic. This should be no surprise as the populace had a long tradition of taking the law into its own hands to rectify what they saw as injustices. Here a guardhouse is destroyed during a riot focused on a network of facilities regulating the market. Most dangerously, the crowd burned an effigy of Brienne, the... Read More »
Canadian Women's History
Caribbean Views
Carrying Native-American Babies
This watercolor (fig. 1) of a mother carrying her baby was painted c. 1585 by John White who explored the mid-Atlantic region with other Englishmen including Thomas Hariot. Hariot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia published in 1590 included an illustration based on White’s watercolor by engraver, Theodore de Bry. (fig. 2)
While John White had painted... Read More »
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Colonial Latin America
Congress of Vienna
The treaty in the spring of 1814 had accepted Napoleon’s surrender, but a general meeting of European countries convened to settle broader issues of a postrevolutionary era. While the allies were working on a number of concerns—and as a byproduct, raising French anxieties—Napoleon returned to capitalize on this negative reaction. Within three months he was defeated yet again, and this meeting—... Read More »
Costumes of the Council of Five Hundred
In this bicameral legislature, the smaller of the two councils (the Elders with 250 members) had to pass all the legislation, while the Five Hundred could initiate legislation. The revolutionaries decided on the division of authority. The directors functioned as the executive branch, in order to make less possible the consolidation of power, as in the Terror.
Damiens Being Broken on the Wheel
This straightforward representation of Damiens gives no hint of sympathy for a would–be pre-revolutionary royal assassin.
Day 1 of Prairial of the Year III
Men and women threaten the deputies on 20 May 1795. They demand "Bread and the Constitution of 1793." This day marked one of the last interventions of ordinary women into national politics.