Brad’s Reviews > How Paris Made the Revolution and the Revolution Made Paris: From France's Royal City to Bourgeois Babylon, 1789-1889 > Status Update

"Hausmannization" (named for Parisian prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann) shows overlap between urban redesign suitable to military manoeuvring (wide boulevards) and at the same time economic colonization ("self-financing" via bank-funded gentrification and regressive taxes).

These renovations would foreshadow east-west Parisian divisions and lead directly to the Commune in 1870.

"There were two 'reigns of Terror,' if we would but remember and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years...What is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?"

- Mark Twain on the two Terrors

"Babeuf errs when he talks about the 'propertyless sans-culottes,' that is, when he represents the sans-culottes as proletarians. The sans-culottes are not proletari- ans, but mostly petty-bourgeois artisans and shopkeepers who are and remain attached to the principle of private property."

An adventurist misreading of the revolutionary potential of the petty bourgeoisie again and again proves dangerous...

"It is an indubitable fact, however, that the Terror did deliver the desired results, in other words, that it saved the Revolution."

Something to duly note...

"To 21st-century Frenchmen, visiting Quebec will be like a voyage back in time."

"Many members of the bourgeoisie within and without the assembly are henceforth far less fearful of their upper-class political opponents, the king, the nobility, and the clergy, than of those folks whose revolutionary deeds enabled the bourgeoisie to vanquish the champions of the Ancien Régime, namely the lower-class Parisians."