Old Paris

When learning about the French Revolution and all the things that are attributed to it, I couldn't stop thinking about what the city of Paris might have been like in 1789 and how that might have affected the revolution.

When pairing the primary source of Georges Cain’s description of old Paris from his childhood and photos from Paris in the mid-1800s gives a fantastic insight into what the city might have been like. While the pictures don't show the streets bustling with people. Cain talks about the narrow cobble paths/streets that web their way through the city being so narrow that when carriages passed by they needed to get as far over as humanly possible to not be run over. The imagery that Cain conveys in his writing really gives the impression of a city that is full of people who are just trying to survive. Living shoulder to shoulder amongst their neighbors trapped in the center of Paris.

When looking at this map the “Le Palais Royal” kinda in the middle west of the map is one of the smaller mansions on the map of Paris yet when I googled it to see what this puny mansion is one of the most immaculate buildings I've ever seen (on the internet). Seeing this building today is jaw-dropping, one could only imagine what a lower-class citizen in Paris was thinking about this “small” mansion that the royal family has.

Being able to see this disparity through pictures and descriptions shows just how obvious the gap between the classes was. How could the events that lead up to the bastille storming not be expected? Were the royals at the time really this sheltered from the “real world”? I know this might be far-fetched but I wonder if there was any correspondence between royals that show if they were at all aware that a revolution was likely to happen. Maybe the royals weren't this thick-headed, maybe they thought the people in Paris and France didn't care that the royals were living massively extravagant lives.