Revolutionary France Quotes

So long as danger threatened from without public opinion tolerated the guillotine.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.

In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East.

Marie Antoinette. Her last words were,"Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it,"to a man whose foot she stepped on before she was executed by the guillotine

There was a basket at her feet. She reached into it and lifted out the head of a young woman, a marquise. She wore Bourbon white to her death, but wears the tricolor now - white cheeks, blue lips, red dripping from her neck. Long live the revolution.

I am thirty-three - the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus; an age fatal to revolutionists.

I have left my balls to Robespierre and my legs to Couthon. That should help the Committee of Public Safety for a while.

You [Robespierre] will follow us soon. Your house will be beaten down and salt sown in the place where it stood.

Heard that the mob at Paris had rushed into the Senate and proclaimed the downfall of the dynasty, proclaiming a Republic! This was received with acclamation…. Not one voice was raised in favour of the unfortunate Emperor! How ungrateful!

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine.

Still dreadful news from Paris. The Commune have everything their own way, and they go on quite as in the days of the old Revolution in the last century, though they have not yet proceeded to commit all the same horrors.

Anything written in the French Revolution, that kind of era, is so poignant.

Yes, Bastille. I keep trying to get killed because it's inconvenient for you.

France is revolutionary or she is nothing at all. The revolution of1789 is her political religion.

I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.