Liberty equality death
One fine day, late in 1790, a wedding was held at the church of Saint-Sulpice in the Parisian Latin Quarter. The groom, Camille Desmoulins, was a revolutionary journalist; his bride, Lucile Duplessis, a girl of 20 whom he had loved hopelessly for years, without prospect of having enough money to marry.
Among the 60 guests were many radical revolutionaries, all the groom’s friends. Desmoulins told his father how many guests wept with joy, declaring himself “the happiest of men who desires nothing more in the world”. Less than four years later, many of the people present at that wedding, including the bride and groom, had died under the guillotine, victims of a factional struggle that ripped through the leadership of a revolution that had begun in a spirit of liberty, equality – and fraternity.
The French Revolution began in June 1789, when the commoner deputies of the Estates-General, summoned to help absolute monarch Louis XVI solve impending state bankruptcy, swore to give France a constitution and form a national representative assembly. Amid fears that the king intended to use troops to crush the revolution, people in the capital rushed to arm themselves.
Camille Desmoulins, then a penniless lawyer, leapt onto a table in the gardens of the Palais Royal, waving two pistols, defying arrest, and haranguing the crowd to arm themselves in defence of their revolution. His words poured
