Word: xvi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coach up ahead, history rides: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children are fleeing revolutionary Paris in disguise, for a rendezvous with royalist allies from abroad and a last gamble on restoration of their absolute power...
Scola and his screenwriter, the late Sergio Amidei (whose credits include such neorealist masterpieces as Shoeshine and Bicycle Thief), want to make two points: that Louis XVI's plans were unhinged not by ideology but by a series of stupid accidents; that the ideas and impressions of the travelers jouncing along in the King's wake are blinkered by their subjectivity and their failure to account for history's indifference to the logical linking of events, which can be imposed by hindsight. Only Barrault's marvelously ironic Restif, curious as a cat and just as amoral...
Reagan began the lesson by noting, in a radio broadcast to the folks back home, that not many steps away from where he was seated in the Versailles Palace, the rotund and wise Benjamin Franklin struck a deal with Louis XVI in 1778 that brought vital French help in the Revolution. "Now, I don't want to give you a history lesson," Reagan said, but of course he did just that. He summoned up images of the proud and stubborn Woodrow Wilson, who journeyed to Versailles after World War I, determined to forge a peace that could...
...privacy and built the Grand Trianon, a modest 72-room hideaway of pink and green marble, a mile and a half away. That edifice, in turn, inspired the Petit Trianon, a 30-room cottage that Louis XV built for his mistress Madame de Pompadour in 1762. When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette fell victim to the French Revolution in 1789, so did Versailles: its paintings were carted off, its tapestries ripped apart for the gold thread, and its furniture sold. In 1830, 15 years after the monarchy was restored, French officials were clamoring to raze the palace, but instead King...
Salt taxes variously solidified or helped dissolve the power of governments. For centuries the French people were forced to buy all their salt from royal depots. The gabelle, or salt tax, was so high during the reign of Louis XVI that it became a major grievance and eventually helped ignite the French Revolution. As late as 1930, in protest against the high British tax on salt in India, Mahatma Gandhi led a mass pilgrimage of his followers to the seaside to make then-own salt...