Dr Guillotin was actually the guy who located and accessed the tennis court for the third estate to meet and agree the monumental Tennis Court Oath, but that's not what he's most famous for. Honestly, invent one device that's used to chop 40,000 people's heads off and that's all anyone bangs on about.
Everyone was really ugly, apparently. Jean Paul Marat is described as having 'burning, haggard eyes' amd a 'toadlike mouth', Robespierre's features were 'repulsive' and was even described by his revolutionary counterpart Danton as having 'the face of a cat who tasted vinegar'. Camille Desmoulins on the other hand was at least 'ugly with an energetic ugliness', so at least he was putting some effort into it.
During the French Revolution, slavery was officially abolished in 1794, following a revolt and defeat of the French army on the island of San Domingo. It was then reinstated by Napoleon in the French colonies in 1802; but at least they tried.
The grave diggers on duty when Marie Antoinette was beheaded were so slow to bury her that a woman had time to sculpt a model of her head out of wax. That woman was Madame Marie Tussaud.
The Marquis de Sade was there, and his experience was a mixed bag to say the least. He was arrested twice and everything he wrote during his first internment was lost during the storming of the Bastille. The second time he was interred, he was marked as 'absent' on the day he was due to be executed and the next day the Jacobin government was overthrown. He was then put into an asylum, but his room had a four poster bed and he was allowed to build a theatre within the asylum to put on plays and operas.
During the time following the Storming of the Bastille people were so afraid that of the backlash of the Ancien Regime that sometimes panic erupted when villages in the countryside mistook the sunset for another burning village in the distance.
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