conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about History, Quinnipiac, Michael with the genre: History, Europe?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'French Revolutions For Beginners'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: French Revolutions For Beginners
  On August 28, 1793, a British fleet captured the port city of Toulon and destroyed France's entire Mediterranean fleet. Making matters worse, they were able to sail in unopposed after royalists took control of the city and let the British in. It was France's greatest military disaster to date and sent the Convention into a panic. Just one month prior, on July 13, a Girondin sympathizer by the name of Charlotte Corday entered Marat's room and stabbed him to death while he was in the bathtub.
  While Robespierre abhorred violence of any form, he believed that harsh measures were necessary to save the Republic. Saint-Just took a much more sanguine attitude towards killing and viewed the Terror as a kind of crucible – one that would remove the weaknesses and impurities from society, leaving behind a pure, hardened revolutionary alloy. Saint-Just saw no need to cloak violence in euphemism or Terror in high-minded justifications, but spoke plainly about his intent. Not only traitors deserved death according to Saint-Just, but also those who were merely indifferent, passive, or apathetic. Never one for understatement, he delivered famously grisly lines on the floor of the Convention such as, "a nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses," and that "the vessel of the Revolution can only arrive safely in port on a sea reddened with torrents of blood." Saint-Just quickly developed a heated rivalry with old guard revolutionaries Danton and Desmoulins, viewing them as soft appeasers, while they saw him as a pompous, self-righteous upstart.
  In December of 1793, French forces succeeded in booting the British out of Toulon, thanks to the genius of a young Corsican artillery officer who only spoke French with a thick Italian accent and had the foreign-sounding name Napoleone Buonaparte. In recognition of his victory, the Convention promoted him to the rank of general and gave him command of an army. He would soon after assume the more French-sounding name history knows him by: Napoleon Bonaparte.
  Rumors of corruption had swirled around Danton since before the Revolution. Unlike Robespierre, the true believer, and Desmoulins, the social liberal, Danton was a political opportunist, plain and simple. While all three men had careers as attorneys under the old regime, Robespierre and Desmoulins lived hand-to-mouth, representing helpless clients pro bono against powerful aristocratic and clerical interests. Danton, on the other hand, had a lucrative legal practice, even attaining the coveted position of King's Counsel. In many ways, Danton was the polar opposite of Robespierre. Unlike the small, academic, unassuming Maximilien, famously abstinent from fine food, drink, gambling and women, Danton was a huge, barrel-chested back slapper, well known throughout Paris for his equally massive appetites. To him, kickbacks were a just reward for being a Founding Father of the Republic. After all, what's so wrong about lining your own pockets while changing the world? While Danton was on top, nobody questioned his shady dealings. However, once he started speaking out against the establishment, his enemies used their large dossier of corrupt financial dealings to attack him. Bribes, under the table payoffs, embezzlement from public funds – all these accusations, both truthful and not, came at Danton fast and furious. While he was able to shake off most of them, what ultimately brought him down was his involvement in a massive insider-trading scheme involving the French East India Company.
  Originally founded as a publicly traded company in 1664, with a royal monopoly to import exotic goods and spices from the Far East, the French East India Company embodied all the royalist, preferential, and bourgeois aspects of the old regime the Jacobins hated most. In 1793, the Convention banned all joint-stock companies, forcing them to liquidate their assets under state supervision. The directors of the East India Company, hoping to cash out their stock for a tidy profit, paid off several members of the Convention to allow them to handle their own liquidation without government supervision. One of Danton's right hand men was a key player in this scheme, even forging official state documents in the process. The scandal was a huge embarrassment for the Convention, and while Danton's direct involvement was never proven, the implication alone (along with his reputation for greasy palms) was enough to call his loyalty into question.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Never one to let opposition stifle his carefully laid plans, the idea of creating an imperial nobility of his own proved too tempting for a glory hound like Napoleon to resist. Napoleon's real 'complex' was that his brother monarchs never accepted the legitimacy of his reign. In their view, he was a rowdy, uninvited guest crashing their royal cocktail party, and they would do everything possible to see him ejected from it. Napoleon was acutely aware of this and tried to overcompensate with the most pompous and elaborate court ceremonial on the Continent. Perhaps by creating a new nobility (with suitably grand titles of his own design) he could woo monarchial Europe to his side and further cement Imperial France's role as its leading power.
  The ability to award titles of nobility also gave the Emperor a cheap new form of social control. He knew that the Revolution had not quenched the burning desire of ambitious men to set themselves above and apart from all others. What sweeter way to satisfy this craving than by dangling the forbidden fruit of a principality or duchy in front of them? In this way, he could keep his supporters loyal and pacify his critics by tying their own self-interest to the continued survival of his regime.
  To finance all these grand projects (and maintain public order) Napoleon needed to strengthen France's ever-precarious economy. While no economic expert, Napoleon's instinctive grasp of human psychology led him to understand the importance confidence plays in stimulating growth. When the economy is stable, investors with excess capital will feel confident channeling their money into (hopefully) productive enterprises, and consumers will be confident enough in their own financial circumstances to spend extra money on goods and services. A stable economy required a stable currency, and the best guarantor of stable currency is to link its value to a commodity with a (relatively) stable price – i.e., precious metal. In 1803, the newly formed Bank of France issued coinage, pegging its value to that of gold and silver. Known as the 'Germinal Franc,' the coin proved so popular that it survived Napoleon by more than a century.
  Napoleon was certainly a ruler who believed in protecting a lot. England had long been France's greatest economic rival, so to turn the tables on the British (a country he contemptuously referred to as a "nation of shopkeepers"), Napoleon issued a directive known as the Milan Decree in 1807, ordering all European ports closed to trade with the United Kingdom. This 'Continental System' had the dual goal of depriving England of her trading wealth while establishing a common marketplace where goods could flow freely across borders – a precursor to the European Union. The problem was that the system was not mutually beneficial in conception, or even truly economic at its core, but rather a war measure meant to enrich France and starve England at the expense of every other country in Europe. As you can likely imagine, France's shotgun allies in Prussia, Austria, and Russia chafed at the requirement that they purchase more expensive French goods over cheaper British imports. The British struck back by blockading French ports, even violating the laws of the sea by stopping neutral vessels engaged in trade with France (eventually leading to war with the United States in 1812).
  The year 1812 for the French Empire was truly Dickensian in being both the best and worst of times. Marie-Louise did what Josephine could not do and gave birth to a son the year prior, quickly given the title King of Rome and Heir to the Empire. With his line of succession now secure, the once restless Napoleon grew more complacent. The Emperor's thinning hair and expanding waistline seemed physical manifestations of his Empire's own growing decadence. While on the cultural and economic fronts, France was the strongest it had been since the Revolution began, cracks were starting to show in her foreign policy. Portugal had refused to take part in the Continental System and invited the British in to help them resist. This exacerbated the already serious 'Spanish ulcer' of civil war on the Iberian Peninsula, as Catholic and royalist partisans engaged in a bloody civil war against the French occupation. Regardless of how many troops Napoleon threw into the mess, Spain was a black hole that continued to suck up men and resources. The brilliant British commander Arthur Wellesley drove the French from Madrid in 1812, after smashing King Joseph Bonaparte's army at the Battle of Salamanca, winning for himself the title Duke of Wellington. With the Spanish capital lost and their armies losing battle after battle to Wellington, the French could no longer maintain the pretext of control over their rebellious satellite kingdom; the entire Grand Empire suddenly looked very vulnerable.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: For the first time since their defeat in the June Days Uprising more than twenty years earlier, Parisian radicals (calling themselves Communards) saw the opportunity to establish their dreamed-of Democratic and Social Republic. Out went the tricolor; in came the red flag. The Gregorian Calendar got the axe in exchange for the Republican Calendar, defunct since 1805. The Communal Council issued a whirlwind of decrees: they seized Church property, suspended delinquent rent and debt payments, granted pensions to National Guardsmen, regulated work hours, and guaranteed the right of workers to take over abandoned businesses. In later years Karl Marx would wax poetic about the efforts of the Communards to create the first worker's state in an industrialized country, and future Communist leaders Lenin and Mao formulated their strategies based on the experiences of the Paris Commune.
  Haussmann's renovations of Paris served their intended purpose, restricting the ability of Communards to form defensive barricades while allowing government troops to march around the city in formation. Atrocities abounded on both sides. The army shot suspected Communards on sight, with some summary executions numbering hundreds at a time. The Communards took hostages, mostly clergymen, civil servants, and those otherwise favorable to the government, and executed them in retribution. Unlike prior revolts, Government forces used heavy artillery to blast buildings fortified by the Commune, while the Communards set explosives in sewers and threw Molotov cocktails, burning down the Tuileries, Hôtel de Ville, Louvre, and Palais de Justice. By the time the fighting ended on May 28, Paris was a rubble-strewn, burnt-out shell of itself, and while there is no complete list, the estimated casualty numbers are all quite high, possibly topping 20,000 dead and wounded with several thousand more deported to penal colonies.
  The bloody end of the Paris Commune represented the last spasm of the French Revolutions. After eighty years of turmoil, it was as if all those revolutionary animal spirits were finally exhausted. While never popular, and constantly threatened by both monarchists on the right and socialists on the left, the majority of the French people settled on establishing a Third Republic as the "form of government which divides us least," in the words of Thiers. It would last for the next seventy years, until its collapse in 1940, after defeat by Nazi Germany.
  While it might sound strange, the events are still too close in time and the conflicts too raw for us to evaluate dispassionately. What is the lasting impact of the French Revolutions? When a reporter once asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai this question, his famous response perhaps summed it up best: "Too soon to say."