Vous dites que vous voulez une révolution

Hokay, so. The French revolution happened.

Basically Louis XVI was like “Yo, La Fayette, go and ‘elp zee Eengleesh colonists while I eat some brioche,” and La Fayette was like “D’accord” and then the colonies got their independence but France went kind of bankrupt. The guillotine was invented by a guy named Guillotin, but they didn’t like him so they cut his head off*. And the French were like “hey, wait un minute! Zees idée of révolution is pas mal!” and so they got really pissed at the king, who in the meantime was like “LOL whatever I have a huge castle.” So the revolutionaries (or sans-culottes, I think, which means pantsless guys) decided that they were going to storm a castle, but not the REAL castle, just the Bastille, which was like a mental-hospital-cum-prison-house and so kind of dumb to attack if you think about it. Meanwhile, guys like Rousseau and Robespierre were being impassioned and writing things. So the Bastille falls and then nothing really happened until a year after that, when they decided, “what le hell, let us ‘ave a Bastille Day Party!” and they did. Then things got more intense, for some reason that is unclear to me, and they started hating the king a lot more, and thus was born the cherished French tradition of having protests. But eventually they realized that protesting doesn’t actually do anything, so they just hauled Louis off to the guillotine and were like “okay, maintenant it is Year Un, even zo zees weel kind of fuck up our calendriers un peu.” Then Terror reigned, but upon realizing that Terror also sucks, they were like “well Robespierre it is trop mal pour vous but you ‘ave failed us” and summarily guillotined him. Then for good measure they guillotined his wife, and kids, and cats, and dogs, and the guy who caught his head when it was cut off. Meanwhile America’s all “y’all are so dumb, your constitution is nowhere near as cool as ours” and France is like “oh yeah well at least we don’t have zee slaves!” Eventually things settled down, I guess, seeing as I’ve yet to see a guillotining.

In conclusion, I don’t think I will have to study much for my final on Friday.

*This is a major theme of French history.