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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Escapades, and Other Lesser Known Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan January 21, 2020 33 min

William Carver - Butch Cassidy — Butch Cassidy, far right, The Sundance Kid, far left, and other members of the Wild Bunch gang. Wikimedia

12. History Would be Quite Different If the French Had Not Guillotined Louis XVI

Storming of the Bastille in 1789. Wikimedia

The French Revolutionary Wars, and later the Napoleonic Wars, roiled Europe and much of the world from the 1790s until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. They went into high gear after the revolutionary French government chopped off the head of their former king, Louis XVI. That scared the daylights out of the rest of Europe’s monarchs, and guaranteed their undying enmity towards revolutionary France. However, the unfortunate Louis had come quite close to avoiding that fate.

The years after the French Revolution had been tough on Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. The absolute monarchy had been drastically weakened, and in October of 1789, the unwashed masses had burst into the Palace of Versailles, and forcibly transferred the royal family to Paris. Ever since, kings and queens lived as virtual prisoners of their subjects. Feeling increasingly humiliated as they were forced to adjust to the role of constitutional monarchs, the royal couple decided to slip out of Paris. They almost got away.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.