How many nobles died in the french revolution

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All rights reserved. The Open University is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in relation to its secondary activity of credit broking. But the French nobility - la noblesse - is still very much alive. In fact, in sheer numbers there may be more nobles today than there were before the Revolution.

True, at the Revolution there were 12, families. But today families are much broader. So overall we reckon there are between and , nobles in France today - roughly the same as in the s.

So says a man who should know - Jacques de Crussel, the Duc d'Uzes. So we stocked up on numbers! According to the story, the ANF was founded in the s after two French nobles realised that the porter who was carrying their luggage at a Paris station was one of their own.

They resolved to create and manage a fund to help distressed nobility - a function the ANF carries on to this day. Its other job is one of research and certification. Every year come more than applications from nobles - or maybe "nobles" would be better - wanting proof of lineage. Most are authentic, so - after exhaustive checking in the ANF's large archives - they are approved.

But there are mistakes and frauds too - men and women who claim to be from the nobility but are not. In general, executions were designed to fit the crime. The authorities often burned heretics and witches, ostensibly in an attempt to purify them. Fire cleansed the soul and, when coupled with a sincere confession, gave the individual one last chance to reach heaven. Of course, some heretics suffered other fates. To complete the ritual, his body, along with two of his fellow reformers, was hung in a gibbet from the church tower for the next fifty years.

Although the bodies were removed, the gibbets remained in place into the twentieth century. Commoners were typically hanged. The goal was not to break the neck immediately, but rather to let the individual slowly strangle to death while he or she struggled to escape. This lengthy death would complete the humiliation of the victim who would typically flail about and, eventually, lose control of their bowels. To further punish the family of the victim, the state might display the body on a gibbet or give the body to the local medical college for dissection.

Since the taboo on dissection remained fairly strong during this time period, this action further disgraced the family of the criminal.

Some people condemned for more heinous crimes were broken on the wheel. This entailed attaching the criminal to a large wheel and then beating him or her with iron bars over a period of time until the criminal died.

Regicides were tortured and then drawn and quartered. This occurred during an extended ceremony designed to emphasize the particularly awful nature of the crime. His arms and legs were then tied to four horses, each of which literally pulled him apart as they set off in different directions. Not surprisingly, these patterns of violence also shaped the direction and momentum of the French Revolution, the event often regarded as signaling the end of the early modern period.

The French Revolution of and the fall of the Bastille led directly to the overthrow of the monarchy. The revolutionaries of set up a constitutional monarchy. This lasted three years.

Suspicion of the monarchy was a big factor in the declaration of war on the foreign powers in April It was a war that went very badly for France and led to a second revolution, on 10 August , that overthrew the monarchy. A National Convention was instated, voted for on the basis of a democratic male franchise. Its deputies declared France to be a republic. Not true in , when Brissot was the voice of the radical Revolution, calling for war with the foreign powers, in the hope that the turmoil of war would expose the treason of the king.

The situation only changed because events proved Robespierre right. As he had predicted war destabilised the political situation. It generated panic and the search for conspirators.

The Girondins were caught up in that downward political spiral, were outflanked, and became moderates. They were overthrown at the demand of the Paris popular militants, the sans-culottes , and condemned as traitors in league with the foreign powers — though their real faults were incompetence, ambition, and recklessness. A contentious statement. They passed a series of laws which enabled them to use terror.

They saw it as justice — albeit the harsh justice of wartime. It was chaotic, ad hoc, and violent certainly, but not a coherent system. The guillotine was the principal means of execution, routinely used from the early stages of the Revolution to hack off the heads of counter-revolutionaries.

The revolutionaries of did not foresee the recourse to violence to defend the Revolution and some, like Robespierre in , wanted the death penalty abolished altogether. Execution by guillotine began with the execution of the king in January A total of 2, people were guillotined in Paris, most of them over nine months between autumn and summer Many more people up to 50, were shot, or died of sickness in the prisons.

Most of the casualties there were peasants or republican soldiers.