Marie Antoinette: The French Revolution

There are many aspects of the French Revolution, from the politics of the bourgeoisie and the Third Estate in opposition to King Louis the XVI to the Haitian Revolution and its effects on France in terms of their economy and government with abolitionists. George Rudé’s article “The Bread Riots of May 1775 in Paris and the Paris Region” gives a social and economic history of the working class in smaller towns and how politics, social construction, and economic pricing affects and mirrors future anarchical events of the French Revolution. The cultural history article, ““Ça Ira” and the Birth of the Revolutionary Song,” by Laura Mason shows how politics and social understandings evolved over the course of the late 1780s to the 1790s through cultural phenomena in music and plays. Last but not least, the gendered history article, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” by Lynn Hunt explores new ways of looking at history and the political influences behind such circumstances. The article discusses more than just Marie Antoinette, but also the exploitation of her body as a ploy for women to stay within the private sphere, and the actions of both men and women during her rule as queen. These three articles show how social, economic, cultural and gendered events and ideologies changed throughout the course of the French Revolution, as well as the methodologies and theories studied today.

Rudé has a Ph.D. from the University of London on the French Revolution, more specifically people’s cooperation and action, what I like to call “crowd control”. What I find most interesting is that Rudé himself was a Marxist-Communist, but tried to have as unbiased an opinion as possible in this article and not use a serious Marxist approach, which is especially hard in dealing with social and economic factors in