Horrible Histories Historical Historical Wife Swap French Royal Special

During his troubled adolescence, Louis XVI also liked making courtiers chase him around his rooms in Versailles before they could ceremonially undress him, and one yanked out the earring of one of his guards with a blue sash of state. No wonder he grew up into the marvelously effective ruler remembered by French history.

La Jaconde

On the subject of Napoleon and Josephine's boudoir, once Napoleon became First Counsol, he and Josephine moved to the Tuileries palace. Josephine did not like their lodgings, first of all because she felt haunted by the spirit of Marie Antoinette, and second of all, because she objected to Napoleon's sense of interior decoration.

That is to say, Napoleon had hung the Mona Lisa in their bedroom and Josephine got extremely jealous of the painting and had him move it- first to his bathroom and then to the Louvre, where it hangs to this day, amid all the other bits of cultural patrimony Napoleon took from other parts of Europe and neglected to give back once he was deposed.

There were a lot of very stupid monarchs running around during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but, in the Amateur Historian's opinion, the award for "Wow, I Hope That Was the Fault of Inbreeding" goes to Marie-Caroline, queen of Naples.

Marie-Caroline was not a fan of Bonaparte, who she saw as a parvenu, undeserving of a place among all the Hapsburg-jawed monarchs feasting at the European banquet table. Moreover, she was the sister of Marie-Antoinette and never forgave France for killing off her favorite sibling. Therefore, Marie-Caroline (who ran Naples while her indolent husband went slumming) liked to pit Naples against France whenever the other nations were feeling up to forming a new coalition. However, Marie-Caroline did not seem to learn, as each coalition got their royal backsides handed to them with a side-helping of localized republican uprisings. Marie-Caroline actually lost her kingdom twice thanks to her ill-informed attempts at trying to make Naples into a world power (which royally pissed off everyone in Naples) and at fighting the French (which pissed off Napoleon Bonaparte, which is never a good idea).

After the collapse of the second coalition, Marie-Caroline apparently learned nothing and tried again to a. make Naples (which hated her) a world power and b. defeat Bonaparte. This led to quite possibly one of the stupidest stunts she could have pulled: trying to flatter Napoleon and therefore France into submission while forming a "secret" alliance with Great Britain. Or course, Marie-Caroline did an extremely poor job of covering her tracks and did not appear to notice that Napoleon had one of the best spy networks in all of Europe (coming in a very, very close second to Britain, who simply had more money to buy off officials and the like).

Napoleon sent her a very pointed letter, which she unwisely ignored: "Your Majesty has already lost her kingdom twice, would she like to lose it a third time?"

She did.

Happy Bastille Day!

A very happy 14th of July to you all, commemorating the day when Parisians, spurred on by street orators like Camille Desmoulins, panicked about the economic crisis, the food shortage, the dismissal of the enormously popular finance minister, Necker, and the fact that the king had stationed foreign troops around the city. The king had done so to keep the Parisians from rioting at the loss of the only finance minister they had liked in the past five years, but this plan backfired catestrophically. The Parisians assumed that Necker's dismissal meant the triumph of the conservative faction and therefore the violent shut down of the National Constituent Assembly (the group that had broken off from the Estates-General and demanded a government with a constitution).

Several street orators jumped up onto tables to prolethyse the crowds, but the most famous of these is Camille Desmoulins, who jumped up onto a table whilst holding two pistols and shouted, "'Citizens, there is no time to lose; the dismissal of Necker is the knell of a Saint Bartholomew for patriots! This very night all the Swiss and German battalions will leave the Champ de Mars to massacre us all; one resource is left; to take arms!"

Unfortunately, the people didn't really have arms, so they raided where they could and, after about two days of continuous rioting, converged on the Bastille, where they heard there were arms and gunpowder. The Bastille was an old, costly fortress that was then housing a grand total of seven prisoners: four forgers, two lunatics, and one deviant aristocrat, the comte de Solages . The Marquis de Sade had been removed from the Bastille ten days earlier for harassing the people who walked too close to his window. Though the Bastille was not popular and was going to be shut down because it was too expensive to maintain, it was the place you were most likely to end up if you were arrested on a lettre de cachet, or rather, a letter signed by the king and a cabinet minister to enforce arbitrary legislation and effectively outlawing any possibility of an appeal.

After a shoot-out lasting several hours, in the Amateur Historian's personal favorite part of the proceedings, one man actually scaled the chains holding up the drawbridge of the Bastille and cut them down, allowing his fellow Parisians to seize the fortress and completely freak out the French aristocracy.

This culminated in the very famous dialogue between Louis XVI and the Duc de Rochefoucauld.

"Then it's a revolt?" asked Louis XVI.

"No, Sire," the duc replied. "It is a revolution."