Words matter. These are the best French Revolution Quotes from famous people such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edvard Munch, Adam Michnik, Gore Vidal, Octavio Paz, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have often said that just as the French revolution, for instance, understood itself through antiquity, I think our time can be understood through the French revolution. It is quite a natural process to use other times to understand your own time.
This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer’s art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
After the French Revolution, it was not the treason of the king that was in question; it was the existence of the king. You have to be very careful when you judge and execute somebody for being a symbol.
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London’s primacy in the money markets.
The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Europeans are forever the offspring of Machiavelli, trapped in a historical rollercoaster that can bring us a monarchy-toppling French Revolution and then a few years later Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor.
The French Revolution was a kind of 21st-century moment in the heart of the 18th century – and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids.
The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans – all of the other major powers – keep slavery. And the fact is that it’s almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire.
Iris Johansen’s lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught’s heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code.
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn’t choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.
People don’t see very often their death coming… Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, ‘We’re doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.’
The French Revolution will be found to have had great influence on the strength of parties, and on the subsequent political transactions of the United States.
If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes – the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War – they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.
Back in my 20s, when I wrote ‘A Place of Greater Safety,’ the French Revolution novel, I thought, ‘I’ll always have to write historical novels because I can’t do plots.’ But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
