Page 76 - A History of the World in 25 Cities

Life in
Several years of crop failures along with very harsh winters left many in 1780s Paris nearly starving to death. To be poor in Paris at this time meant to have nothing – no job, no warm clothes, no shelter and often not even a crust of bread to eat.
The rich had as much food as they could eat brought to them by maids in their huge, fancy houses. For the poor it was a different story – they often had nothing to eat at all, or even a place to call home. Rich children had private tutors, while most
poor children could not read or write. Wealthy children played with toys such as wooden animals and china dolls, and sometimes even gruesome toy guillotines
(miniature versions of the kind used to behead the king and queen!), while poor children had to make do with roughly carved wooden dolls.
Diseases were common in the crowded and dirty city. Children born to poor parents had only a 50 per cent chance of surviving the first year of life! Even in rich households, poor hygiene and lack of medical knowledge meant that many children did not make it to adulthood.
Getting rid of the monarchy proved to be a lot easier than setting up a new, fairer system of government. Paris turned into a dangerous, violent place
for the best part of two decades, with the newly formed Committee of Public Safety taking over the revolutionary government and arresting up to 300,000
people on suspicion of being ‘against’ the revolution.
At least 17,000 of this number were executed, some of them children as young as ten, with 10,000 more people dying in prison, sometimes without a trial.
Marie-Antoinette was the last queen of France. Born in Austria and married to the future king of France at just 14 years of age, she was unpopular with the public as the French were often at war with her home country. During the 1780s, she became more unpopular still due to her lavish spending on clothes and wigs at a time when many people in the country could barely afford to eat. When told the people were angry because of the lack of bread, she is supposed to have said: “Let them eat cake.”
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