conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about French, Revolution, Terror with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textstorys, Humanities?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'The French Revolution'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The French Revolution
  Dumouriez was apparently acting with the support of the French government. On October 30, Pierre Lebrun, the French Foreign Minister, had written to the French ambassador in London that 'France has renounced all conquests, and this declaration should reassure the English government on the entry of Dumouriez into Belgium.' He restated this position after the victory at Jemappes: 'We do not want to interfere by giving to any people this or that form of government. The inhabitants of Belgium will choose that which suits them best.'
  Dumouriez blamed the reversal of his policy on speculators and on a conspiracy of the new regime at the War Ministry: 'My victory over the Austrians was in vain, this superb expedition will end badly, because all my plans are being frustrated, because they are tyrannising the country, because greedy speculators, supported by the offices of the War Ministry, are hoarding all the supplies, under the pretext of feeding the army, but in fact leave it short of everything.'
  Dumouriez had wanted to pursue a generous war strategy, one that would liberate Belgium and leave it as an independent, self-governing country. But French foreign policy instead took a brutal turn. Danton and his friend and emissary Jean-François Delacroix pressed for the outright conquest and incorporation of Belgium; and it was their policy which was adopted.
  Over the next few months France had many ups and downs in the war, and for a period, at least while England stayed out of it, there was some debate among the Revolutionaries over the relative benefits of liberation and conquest. When French victories made it inevitable that England would join the First Coalition, the war became a life-or-death struggle and these debates were largely silenced.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Those condemned, in addition to Brissot, Vergniaud, Boyer-Fonfrède, Ducos and Gensonné, included Jean-Louis Carra, a fifty-one-year-old self-educated writer and passionate Revolutionary; Charles-Éléonor Dufriche de Valazé, a forty-two-year-old lawyer from Alençon; Marc-David Lasource, a thirty-year-old Calvinist pastor from Tarn; and Charles Alexis Brulart Sillery, marquis de Genlis, a wealthy fifty-six-year-old retired officer of the nobility from Paris. On the announcement of the verdict, Valazé stabbed himself and died in the courtroom.
  THE PEAK OF THE TERROR, in the winter of 1793–94, was highlighted by what is sometimes called Robespierre's 'War Against the Factions', in which he progressively brought down his critics, rivals and other opponents, as well as those whom he believed to be undermining the principles of the Revolution with crime and corruption. At the same time, however, and just as important, the Terror dragged him and his allies into an intense debate about the future of the Revolution, between those who wanted to accelerate it and those who wanted to slow it down.
  From very early on, people had been asking the basic question: when will the Revolution end? As its first years passed without producing any improvement in the lot of ordinary people, more and more wanted it to stop. But there was no way of answering the basic question, because the Revolutionaries had not gone to Versailles with an agreed plan, and they did not have a conceptual picture of any final destination.
  For the most committed and most radical Revolutionaries, the Revolution itself was the destination. For them, as Tocqueville pointed out, it was virtually the equivalent of a new religion, even if many of the central terms were transposed.
  Many traditional French historians of the Revolution tell the story from now on according to dates in the Revolutionary calendar. I shall mainly stick to the familiar modern calendar: it is easier for the reader to understand; and the Revolutionaries did not, in fact, succeed in inaugurating a new era in the secular world. The French may have stuck to their Revolutionary calendar until 1806, long after the end of the Revolution, but the rest of the world did not follow them. On the other hand, some of the most celebrated Revolutionary events and influential laws are still quite often referred to according to the Revolutionary dates on which they were introduced. Where appropriate, I shall use dates from both calendars.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: During much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, most historians said little about the economic or financial dimensions of the French Revolution. Astonishingly, some did not even mention these factors at all.
  In some cases this may have been a question of political orthodoxy: some French historians may have regarded the Revolution as a purely political event, even a heroic political event, a triumph of liberation and republicanism, and they wanted to narrate it that way. It may also have been a question of ignorance, or at least of the narrowness of the way historians were then educated; many did not believe that they were required (or even qualified) to speak about economics. But whatever the reason or combination of reasons, nineteenth-century historians seriously understated the importance of the economic dimension of the French Revolution.
  One of the consequences was that in the nineteenth century, British novelists like Jane Austen and French novelists like Honoré de Balzac could describe social and economic situations in monetary terms, secure in the knowledge that readers would recognise the meaning and value of these references. In the twentieth century, by contrast, monetary stability collapsed, and in these new circumstances, novelists ceased to be able to describe social and economic situations in necessarily understandable monetary terms.
  This dazzling biography of Voltaire celebrates his extraordinary life through the thousands of his letters to have survived.
  Alexis de Tocqueville, French aristocrat, liberal politician and writer of genius was the greatest of all modern political writers. His writings are ever more influential and hugely valuable for the study of French and American society during the Age of the Democratic Revolution.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: His writings are ever more influential and hugely valuable for the study of French and American society during the Age of the Democratic Revolution..
  Alexis de Tocqueville, French aristocrat, liberal politician and writer of genius was the greatest of all modern political writers.
  This dazzling biography of Voltaire celebrates his extraordinary life through the thousands of his letters to have survived. In the twentieth century, by contrast, monetary stability collapsed, and in these new circumstances, novelists ceased to be able to describe social and economic situations in necessarily understandable monetary terms.
  One of the consequences was that in the nineteenth century, British novelists like Jane Austen and French novelists like Honoré de Balzac could describe social and economic situations in monetary terms, secure in the knowledge that readers would recognise the meaning and value of these references. But whatever the reason or combination of reasons, nineteenth-century historians seriously understated the importance of the economic dimension of the French Revolution. It may also have been a question of ignorance, or at least of the narrowness of the way historians were then educated; many did not believe that they were required (or even qualified) to speak about economics.
  In some cases this may have been a question of political orthodoxy: some French historians may have regarded the Revolution as a purely political event, even a heroic political event, a triumph of liberation and republicanism, and they wanted to narrate it that way. Astonishingly, some did not even mention these factors at all.During much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, most historians said little about the economic or financial dimensions of the French Revolution
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The French Revolution
  The final title—'little suppers' was a euphemism for sexual orgies—may help to explain Vergennes' concern.
  Certainly, there is abundant evidence that a fertile current of salacious mockery was undermining respect for Church and state at the same time as the greatest works of the age were proposing radical reform of structures of power and privilege. But this was an urban phenomenon: what of the countryside, where four-fifths of the French people lived? Could the peasantry read—and what, if anything, did they read?
  So how might we explain the unanticipated and unprecedented events of 1789? People have debated this ever since the first revolutionary acts of the summer of that year. In broad terms, there are two debates. One is about why an apparently stable regime collapsed: was this because of deep-seated, long-term changes in French society that finally erupted in 1789 or because of short-term political ineptitude among the ruling elites? The other debate is about whether the causes of Revolution were endogenous—to be located in a specifically French crisis—or exogenous, that is, to do with the place of France within an international context.1
  In placing emphasis on different dimensions of the crisis of the 1780s and the Revolution of 1789, historians are actually responding to different questions. Asking why the regime of Louis XVI was mired in fiscal crisis to the point of collapse is not the same as asking whether there were revolutionary pressures or impulses. History is replete with examples of regimes that have collapsed because of their own failure or inability to respond to crisis. It is much rarer that such collapses result in a revolutionary shift in who holds power and for what purposes. France in 1789 was one of those rare occasions.
  Contemporaries and historians have agreed that one of the immediate causes of the French Revolution of 1789 was France's involvement in the American War of Independence of 1776–83. The financial crisis resulting from French involvement erected the stage on which the French Revolution of 1789 was enacted.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'I have even heard here some young of Silly living in Meaux boast of having participated in these massacres'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I have even heard here some young of Silly living in Meaux boast of having participated in these massacres... As for me, I believe that the day will come when they themselves are horrified to have said such things... Today everyone has gone mad: there is talk only of massacring, of guillotining, of hanging from lamp-posts, and so on.6
  Another who was shocked to his core was Nicolas-Joseph Grain, secretary to the municipal council of Vadencourt in the northeastern department of Aisne. In early September 1792, he was in the administrative centre of Soissons, near the front, which was in a state of panic about the rapidly approaching Prussian soldiers. About 25 000 French soldiers and volunteers were camped outside the town, their numbers regularly swollen by new arrivals from all over the country. The rumour spread that one of these new arrivals was in fact enrolling volunteers to cross to the enemy. Other soldiers dragged him through the streets, stabbing him with their bayonets to cries of 'Long live the homeland! Death to the traitor!' He was taken to the town hall where the council tried in vain to convince the volunteers to release him. Almost dead, the individual was forced to kneel, ask forgiveness from 'the nation', and then he was decapitated. His head was presented to the town council on the end of a bayonet, where Grain recalled how:
  I recoiled in horror from this sight because there is nothing more horrible to see. I shuddered to the tips of my fingers. The sight followed me everywhere and I just couldn't forget it.
  The 750 members of the Convention were elected by universal manhood suffrage in early September, this time with direct rather than indirect voting. It was composed of professional men, officials, landowners and businessmen with a few artisans and farmers. There were still forty-six clergy but now just twenty-three former nobles. The men of the Convention were younger than their predecessors: 46 per cent were younger than forty years (compared with 32 per cent of the National Assembly in 1789). Most of the younger men were Jacobins. But they were experienced: although only 37 per cent had been deputies previously, no fewer than 86 per cent had held some sort of office since 1789. They were revolutionaries and 'patriots', determined to win the war and secure the Revolution.
  As the new assembly proclaimed the Republic, news arrived of the first great military victory, at Valmy, 180 kilometres east of the capital, where largely volunteer troops fought under generals Kellermann and Dumouriez, against Brunswick's 50 000 strong Austro–Prussian army, fresh from victories at Longwy and Verdun. While the enemy retreated rather than being defeated, this reversal was a major turning-point. In the words of the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, himself in the Prussian army, 'this place and this day mark a new epoch in world history'. The coincidence had profound emotional and symbolic impact, but it was only a temporary respite in a relentless battle to check the Austro–Prussian advance. Deputies grappling with the enormity of the military crisis also had to seek a new form of constitution: France was now a Republic and the Constitution of 1791 was no longer operable (indeed, the metal plates used for its printing were destroyed publicly by the 'national pile-driver' in January 1793).
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Similarly, European attitudes to France changed dramatically in 1792–93 because of war, the proclamation of the Republic and the execution of Louis XVI. One of the most important consequences of the French Revolution was the hostile European reaction after 1792, which linked suspicion of radicalism with the strengthening of support for established forms of government and religion. In Britain and elsewhere, there was widespread repression of democrats and the unleashing of war propaganda depicting French revolutionaries as bloodthirsty dictators and cannibalistic mobs. A cluster of brilliant young writers—including Samuel Coleridge, Helen Maria Williams, William Godwin, William Drennan, and Wordsworth himself—had their careers limited or had to make significant political compromises in the context of Prime Minister William Pitt's 'reign of alarm'.24
  In territories occupied by French forces, most of the population resented or openly opposed French rule, which quickly took the form of military occupation rather than revolutionary emancipation, and which relied on isolated minorities of pro-French reformers. In other parts of Europe, in contrast, the Revolution strengthened the desire for national self-determination. In Poland, after partition in 1793 (between Russia, Prussia and Austria), nationalist rebellion in 1794 temporarily succeeded under the leadership of Tadeusz Kosciusko, but was repressed bloodily by the end of the year. In Ireland, sympathy for France remained strong among the 'United Irishmen', a clandestine organisation of Protestants and Catholics united in opposition to direct rule from England and the dominance of the Anglican Church over both the Irish Catholics and the large number of Scottish Presbyterians in the north. In 1798, there were risings against English rule, in particular in Wexford, where a Republic was proclaimed, slogans of 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' were painted on walls and the revolutionary calendar was adopted. The killing of ninety pro-English Protestants held as hostages, then the failure after initial success of a French fleet sent to the west of Ireland, prompted a fierce repression of Irish nationalists. There would be as many executions of Irish nationalists in six weeks as of counter-revolutionaries in the year of the Terror in France, in a population one-sixth the size.
  The reception of news of the French Revolution was profound but varied around the Mediterranean, but widespread hostility developed particularly in Egypt following the failed French invasion of 1798. There were also repercussions in the South Pacific as Britain and France explored, mapped and seized territory. Most importantly in the longer term, the strains placed on the Spanish and Portuguese empires by the costs of war with France, combined with the revolutionary message of national self-determination and rights, would foment independence movements in Latin America in 1810–21 (Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, Brazil, and Argentina).25