France

The French Republican Calendar: How Time was Different

Posted on by Geri Walton
French Republican Calendar for the month Vendemiaire. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The French Republican Calendar, also sometimes called the French Revolutionary Calendar, was a calendar created and implemented by the French Republic during the French Revolution from late 1793 to 1805 (and for 18 days by the Paris Commune in 1871). The French Republican calendar came about because the government wanted to distance itself from anything associated with the Ancien régime and religion. Thus, the government decreed on 24 November 1793 that the common era would be abolished.

The new Republic also instituted changes resulting in a new social and legal system, a new system for weights and measures, and a new calendar. The new calendar was influenced by Enlightenment ideas and created using the fundamental blocks of natural constants, multiples of ten, and Latin and ancient Greek derivations. They also decided that new French era would commence on 22 September 1792 (one day after the Convention abolished the monarchy) and they used the Roman Numeral I to indicate the first year of the republic. Continue reading →

Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France: Her Life at the Temple and Her Release

Posted on by Geri Walton
Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France. Courtesy of EstimArt.

Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France was the oldest child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. During Louis XVI’s reign she was known as Madame Royale, a style customarily used for the eldest living unmarried daughter of a reigning French monarch. Marie-Thérèse was also the only child of the King and Queen’s to reach adulthood as her siblings died while young.  

Like her father, mother, aunt, and brother, Marie-Thérèse was imprisoned in August of 1792 at the Temple, which had been built by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century and started out as fort. New headquarters emerged in the thirteenth century in the form of a fortress called enclos du Temple. The Temple originally contained buildings necessary for the order to function and included two towers: a massive one known as the Gross Tour (great tower) and a small one called Tour de Tour de César (Caesar’s Tower). Continue reading →

Marie Antoinette’s Breguet Pocket Watch No. 160

Posted on by Geri Walton
Reproduction (No. 1160) of Marie Antoinette’s Pocket Watch. Courtesy of Breguet.

The story of Marie Antoinette’s Breguet pocket watch begins when Abraham-Louis Breguet, arrived from his native Switzerland in Paris. Breguet’s father had died and his mother remarried a watchmaker named Joseph Tattet. Tattet had a showroom in Paris and tried to get Breguet to take up watchmaking, but he resisted.

Eventually, however, Breguet decided to try watchmaking, and when he did, he astonished Tattet. Breguet’s watchmaking abilities also captured the attention of his mathematics teacher, Abbot Joseph-François Marie, who was also a tutor to the Count of Artois’ sons, the Dukes of Angoulême and Duke of Berry. In fact, it was through Abbot Marie that Breguet was introduced to King Louis XVI and eventually became a leading horologist and watchmaker of his time. Continue reading →

What was it like to be a Prisoner in the Bastille in the 18th Century?

Posted on by Geri Walton
The Bastille. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

To be a prisoner in the Bastille in the 18th century was different from being a prisoner under King Louis XIV in the 1600s. In the 1300s, the Bastille was a fortress with only two towers built to defend Paris’ eastern approach from the English during the Hundred Years War. More towers were added in the 1370s until there were a total of eight with the looming towers being between five to seven stories high and the tallest one no more than seventy-three feet tall. Continue reading →

One of the First Feminists Olympe de Gouges

Posted on by Geri Walton
Olympe de Gouges. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

One of the first feminists, Olympe de Gouges, began her life in 1748 when she born Marie Gouze in Montauban, Quercy in southwest France. Her mother was Olympe Mouisset and her legal father, Pierre Gouze, was a butcher, but she claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pompignan. She was forced in 1765 to marry a man she felt great repugnance for and did not love. He was a caterer and minor official named Louis Aubry. In 1767, around the time he died, she moved with her son, Pierre, to Paris where her sister Jeanne was living.

Whether the name Gouges was a variant spelling or not is unclear. However, what is clear is that Jeanne sometimes signed her name Gouges, and Olympe also adopted Gouges as her surname instead of taking her father’s or husband’s last name. As a single woman intent on surviving in Paris alone, her own surname helped her to establish her independence and identity. Continue reading →

Francis Tussaud: Madame Tussaud’s Son

Posted on by Geri Walton
Francis Tussaud, from his great-grandson’s book of 1920, “The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s.”

Francis (François in French) Tussaud was Madame Tussaud‘s son. He was born to her and her husband François on a Saturday, 2 August 1800. Two years later, Madame Tussaud decided to promote her waxworks in England, and she left her son Francis behind in the care of her husband, mother, and aunt, and took her 4-year-old son, Joseph, with her. Madame Tussaud eventually broke it off with her husband but continued to write to Francis, her mother, and her aunt from England.

Francis grew into a young man who had a strong desire to be an architect. However, his father must have thought otherwise because he obtained an apprenticeship for him with a grocer. The apprenticeship proved costly, and once François discovered this, he then found an apprenticeship for his son with a billiard table builder. For a time, Francis unhappily pursued that career, and, perhaps, that is why he finally joined his mother and brother in England. Continue reading →

The French Feral Boy Victor of Aveyron and a Visit with Madame Récamier

Posted on by Geri Walton
French feral boy Victor of Aveyron
Lithograph from 1800 of Victor of Aveyron. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

One famous French beauty and socialite was Juliette Récamier or Madame Récamier. She was known to hobnob regularly with aristocrats and the elite, and one day, in 1803, when she was hosting and mingling, a rather interesting incident occurred. It involved Jean March Gaspard Itard. He was a French physician at the National Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and he had been accompanied to Madame Récamier’s by a feral boy* whose case he had taken up and whom he named Victor of Aveyron.

The story of Victor begins when he was first spotted by woodsmen near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance in the commune of Aveyron as early as 1794. Periodically, between 1797 and 1798, Victor was again seen. Stories differ as to whether he emerged from the forest on his own or whether woodsmen captured him with their nets. However, once he emerged from the woods, he stayed with numerous people, although he also ran away regularly and was recaptured. Continue reading →

The Widow Gras or Jeanne Bricourt: The Jekyll and Hyde Murderess and Courtesan of France

Posted on by Geri Walton
Widow Gras. Public domain.

The Widow Gras or Jeanne Bricourt, also sometimes called Jeanne Brécourt, was considered the female version of a Jekyll and Hyde murderess and one France’s most notorious courtesans. She was born Eugénie Arménaïde Bricourt on 8 April 1837 in Paris and was the neglected child of a printer and a vegetable seller. Because she was so neglected, a Baroness took pity upon her and became her benefactress. However, when Jeanne was eleven, her parents removed from the Baroness’s care and forced her to sell gingerbread, which she did for the next six years. Continue reading →

Breastfeeding or Nursing with Wet Nurses in the Eighteenth Century

Posted on by Geri Walton
Visit to the Wet Nurse by Belgian painter Basile de Loose. Public domain.

Breastfeeding or nursing with wet nurses in the eighteenth century was a common occurrence. That was because by medieval times the idea of breastfeeding was often regarded as too menial a task for royal women and they began to use wet nurses. Other reasons for the use of wet nurses was that mothers sometimes were unable to produce enough milk, died during child birth, or suffered some physical ailment. There were also some women who claimed breastfeeding was time consuming or they argued that it ruined their figures. Sometimes a woman’s husband might not support her breastfeeding activities, or sometimes a woman wanted to quickly get pregnant again and thought it would happen faster if she didn’t nurse. Continue reading →

The House Napoleon Owned as a Private Citizen

Posted on by Geri Walton
Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Napoleon owned one house as a private citizen and that house was situated at no. 6 rue Chantereine, which is also the place where some people say he met his future wife Josephine. The story is that after Parisians were ordered to give up their swords, Josephine’s son Eugene went to Napoleon and appealed to keep his father’s sword because his father had been guillotined. Eugene’s appeal so touched Napoleon, he asked to meet the boy’s mother and went to her home.

Although there are several other versions of how Josephine and Napoleon met, what is most important is that after they met, Josephine thoroughly captivated Napoleon. He was so captivated he began to visit her frequently. She was leasing a house in a fashionable district of Paris known as the Chaussee d’Antin located at no. 6 rue Chantereine. The street was so named because chantereine translates in French to “singing frogs,” and there were reportedly many croaking frogs that lived in the nearby marsh. Continue reading →