The 14 Darkest Moments Of The French Revolution

French revolutionaries attacked all vestiges of the Old Order - especially aristocrats who had been closely associated with the royal family. The Princesse de Lamballe - a close friend of Queen Marie Antoinette - was one such person who became a victim of the anti-monarchical rage of the revolution.

Marie-Louise of Savoy was born in Turin on September 8, 1749. In 1766, at the age of 17, she married a member of the extended French royal family. His passing left her with considerable wealth and entry into the highest circles of French society. She quickly befriended future queen Marie Antoinette, who was a teen bride from Austria at the time. Marie Antoinette's seeming foreignness made her an outsider in her own court, so she held close to her few friends. The Princesse de Lamballe was one of a handful of intimates who spent considerable time with the queen. Critics of the monarchy used the friendship between the two women as a weapon. They claimed their friendship was illicit in nature and proof of the queen's Austrian depravity. 

When revolution broke out in 1789, the Princesse de Lamballe was unwavering in her support for the queen. She hosted members of the National Convention in her salon. In 1791, she went to Great Britain to petition powerful friends to aid the royal family's escape from France. By the summer of 1792, the Princesse de Lamballe was imprisoned. She was brought before a revolutionary tribunal on September 3, 1792. When pressed to swear a loyalty oath to the revolution, she flatly refused, and the assembly washed their hands of her by throwing her into the street, where a mob had assembled.

There are many accounts of the Princesse's demise; historians don't agree on a single version. What is certain is that she met a violent end and her body was desecrated. The frenzied revolutionaries then attached her head to a pike and carried it to the queen's prison cell, where they tried to force the queen to kiss the severed head of her dear friend.

Not everyone embraced the revolution's growing radicalism in the early 1790s. Indeed, an entire region in northwestern France refused to submit to the revolution's ideals and new policies of de-Christianization, mass conscription, and the upending of the social order. That region, the Vendée, faced serious reprisal. 

Peopled mainly by poor, religious peasants, the Vendée was the principle site of a massive uprising against the revolution. Civilians even launched their own army and clashed with revolutionary forces over the course of several bloody battles throughout 1793. By the end of 1793, the fighting had more or less stopped, but retribution against the Vendéans was just getting started.

In early 1794, the government began a brutal policy to punish the region. General Louis Marie Turreau deployed his so-called "infernal columns" - lines of troops - to march through the Vendée and slaughter all royalist men, women, and children in their path. They also burned villages and scorched the earth. In total, around 170,000 people in the Vendée were slain. 

Though the details of the War in the Vendée and its aftermath remain hotly debated, the fact remains that the revolution did not just represent "the people;" it also turned on them when they resisted.

When people think of the French Revolution - a period of about 10 years - they often think of the Reign of Terror, a stage of the revolution that lasted just shy of one year, from 1793-1794. Incredibly, that brief period saw the deaths of around 27,000 men, women, and children: about 17,000 were executed and 10,000 perished in prison. Though violence in the revolution neither began nor ended with the Reign of Terror, it's clear this period was an exceptionally chilling moment in the revolution.

Maximilien Robespierre was a Jacobin (a radical who believed that violence was necessary to establish order) and passionately believed in the Terror. Though the guillotine was adopted by moderate, Enlightenment-minded revolutionary reformers, who thought it would give condemned criminals a kind, swift end, Robespierre and the Jacobins used it with gusto. For its part, the public loved it, and guillotining enemies of the revolution became a public spectacle. 

The Reign of Terror claimed scores of victims. Among them: feminist revolutionary Olympe de Gouges; King Louis XVI; Queen Marie Antoinette, who by all accounts met her fate with dignity; and, ultimately, Robespierre himself in 1794.

Most people associate the French Revolution with Madame Guillotine in Paris, but other parts of the country were prolific in their political mass murders. Over the course of around four months - November 1793 to February 1794 - the city of Nantes experienced its own reign of terror in which thousands of men, women, and children were drowned. Jean-Baptiste Cartier, representative of the National Convention, was sent to Nantes to identify counter-revolutionaries and took up his task with passion, setting up a tribunal. 

Cartier's method was straightforward: Prisoners suspected of anti-revolutionary activity were bound and brought into the Loire River on a ship with a special trap-door. They were then dropped into the river, meeting a slow, watery end. Given that the mass drownings were carried out in winter, the freezing waters would have been especially lethal. Some reports indicate that Cartier ordered "republican marriages," as well, wherein a male and female prisoner were unclothed and tied together before being dumped into the river. 

Though anyone suspected of anti-revolutionary activity was at risk, Cartier especially targeted members of the clergy, since priests and nuns comprised the premier level of society in the Old Order. On one night in November 1793, 90 priests were slain.

Estimates vary regarding the total number of victims who perished in the drownings at Nantes. Most historians agree that at least 1,800 people perished, though it could have been upwards of 4,600. 

One of the most notorious and mythic deaths in the French Revolution was that of Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist whose newspaper L'Ami de peuple routinely attacked conservative voices in the revolution and supported the Jacobins, a radical faction that believed the revolution needed to remake society and purge the revolution of its enemies. He especially attacked members of the rival Girodin political faction. He also suffered from a disease that ravaged his skin. 

On July 13, 1793, Marat was taking a bath as treatment for his skin condition when Charlotte Corday, herself a Girodin, showed up at his flat. She claimed to have important information for him, so he allowed her to address him while he bathed. Instead, Corday pulled out a blade and buried it in Marat's chest, giving him a bloody, swift end.

Corday was soon arrested and brought before a revolutionary tribunal. Over the course of her examination, she revealed her belief that she had "killed one man to save 100,000." Corday met a similarly bloody end: On July 17, 1793, she was guillotined. 

Louis Hercule Timoléon de Cossé-Brissac, duc de Brissac, was a distinguished member of the royal court and owner of one of the most French names in history. He even took Madame du Barry, the last mistress of King Louis XV, as his lover. 

During the revolution, Louis headed the king's constitutional guard, a kind of security force. When the revolutionary tribunal disbanded the constitutional guard, the duc de Brissac himself became a target of the revolution.

Like many aristocrats and individuals associated with the monarchy, the duke met a violent end. On September 9, 1792, he was slain at Versailles in the so-called September Massacres. His enemies cut off his head and stuck it on a pike. They then paraded the pike all the way to the apartments of Madame du Barry, where they hurled it through her window, causing the woman to faint in horror.