Power and Politics

Rousseau attributes the line to 'a great princess' in Book VI of *Les Confessions*, written between 1765 and 1770. The book was first published in 1782. Marie Antoinette was born in 1755, arrived in France in 1770 as the 14-year-old bride of the future Louis XVI, and could not have said the line that was in print before she was old enough to have said it. The misattribution to her dates from the early 19th century — long after her 1793 execution — and stuck because it suited the political narrative.

Saint Helena, in the middle of the South Atlantic about 2,000 km from the nearest mainland (Angola). The British chose it specifically because the remoteness made escape essentially impossible. Elba was Napoleon's first exile, after his 1814 abdication; he escaped from Elba in March 1815 and reclaimed the throne for the 'Hundred Days' before Waterloo. Corsica was his birthplace (1769). Devil's Island was the French penal colony where [Alfred Dreyfus](/articles/dreyfus-devils-island) was held 80 years later, but Napoleon was never there.

The Bastille held seven inmates on 14 July 1789: four convicted forgers, two men declared insane by their families, and the Comte de Solages, whose family had used a *lettre de cachet* (a royal arrest warrant for private use) to lock him up over an incest scandal. The Marquis de Sade had been in the Bastille until ten days earlier; he was transferred out on 4 July after shouting from his window that the guards were murdering the prisoners. The storming was symbolic — the Bastille had been planned for demolition for years. Symbolism, however, was the point.

Cromwell ruled as *Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland* under the Instrument of Government (December 1653) — England's only written constitution to date. In 1657 the Second Protectorate Parliament offered him the crown; he agonised over it for six weeks before declining. The reasons were practical and ideological: too many of his senior army officers were committed republicans who would have rebelled against a Cromwellian monarchy. He died in office on 3 September 1658; his son Richard was a brief and unsuccessful Lord Protector before the monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660.

The Cuban Missile Crisis ran from 16 October 1962 (when U-2 photography first confirmed the Soviet missile sites in Cuba) to 28 October 1962 (when Khrushchev announced the withdrawal). The Berlin Wall went up in August 1961 — fourteen months earlier. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 — a year after the crisis ended. Sputnik was October 1957 — five years before the crisis.

Five campaigns over twenty years. His peak was 1912, when he polled 901,551 votes (6.0% of the national total) against Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt. The last campaign was 1920, conducted entirely from his cell at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving ten years for opposing American participation in the First World War. He still got 919,799 votes. President Warren Harding commuted his sentence to time served on Christmas Eve 1921.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost about 12% on Black Tuesday — the largest single-day percentage loss until October 1987. The crash actually began the previous Thursday (Black Thursday, 24 October, also valid as a starting marker), continued through Black Monday (28 October, –13%), and culminated on Black Tuesday. By mid-November the Dow had lost about 40% from its September 1929 peak. It would lose another 60% over the following three years, bottoming at 41 in summer 1932. The 1987 Black Monday was a different crash entirely. 1869's Black Friday was Jay Gould's gold-cornering scheme.

Victoria took the throne on 20 June 1837, aged 18, and died on 22 January 1901 at age 81. Elizabeth II's 70-year reign (1952–2022) eventually overtook her. Victoria's 63 years cover the Industrial Revolution's mature phase, the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the Scramble for Africa, the Boer Wars, and the deaths of nine successive prime ministers. She married her first cousin Prince Albert in 1840 and went into formal mourning when he died in 1861 — and stayed there, in black, for the remaining 39 years of her reign.

Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese final offensive on 30 April 1975. The iconic image of the day is the American helicopter evacuation from the U.S. embassy rooftop. Vietnam was formally reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976. The Paris Accords (January 1973) ended American military involvement but explicitly did not end the war between the two Vietnams. 15 August is the Korean liberation day, not Vietnamese.

Octavian's fleet under his admiral Agrippa beat Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Antony killed himself first, on the false rumour that Cleopatra was already dead; she followed him a few weeks later. Pompey had been dead for seventeen years by then — Caesar had defeated him at Pharsalus in 48 BC, and he'd been murdered in Egypt shortly after. Caesar himself had been assassinated thirteen years earlier on the Ides of March.

Alexander died in the palace at Babylon (modern Iraq) on 10 or 11 June 323 BC after a ten-day fever. The cause is still disputed — typhoid, West Nile, malaria, alcoholic complications, and slow poisoning have all had defenders. He never made it home; his body was hijacked by his general Ptolemy and brought to Alexandria, where it became a major tourist attraction for the next several centuries until the tomb was lost in late antiquity. He had personally burned Persepolis nine years earlier.

Cleisthenes's reforms in 508/507 BC reorganised the Athenian citizen body into ten new tribes and introduced the lot-based council that ran daily business. Pericles in the mid-5th century pushed direct popular participation further. The system lasted about 180 years before Macedonian conquest in 322 BC suppressed it. Participation was restricted to adult male citizens — roughly 30,000–60,000 men out of a city population of perhaps 300,000 including women, slaves, and resident foreigners. Demosthenes was a 4th-century BC orator at the tail end of democratic Athens, not its founder. The Bronze Age date predates Greek writing entirely.

Approximately 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, impounded from the Moldovan-flagged MV *Rhosus* in 2013, had been sitting in Warehouse 12 of Beirut port. A fire at the warehouse on 4 August 2020 detonated it. The blast killed at least 218 people and was felt in Cyprus. The same chemical caused the Texas City disaster (16 April 1947, ~580 dead) and the AZF Toulouse explosion (21 September 2001, 31 dead — ten days after 9/11). Ammonium nitrate is normally stable; it detonates only under specific conditions of contamination, confinement, and heat.

Cortés didn't take Tenochtitlán by Spanish military superiority alone. He had about 1,300 Spaniards and tens of thousands of Indigenous allies — primarily Tlaxcalans, the Aztecs' chronic enemies. The *Noche Triste* in 1520 was the Spanish retreat after an uprising, in which Cortés lost two-thirds of his force; the August 1521 fall was the second go. Smallpox brought by Spanish carriers had also killed perhaps a quarter of Tenochtitlán's population during the siege. 12 October 1492 was Columbus's first landfall — twenty-nine years earlier.

The President's mistress Marguerite Steinheil was in the office; she escaped via a back staircase before the household discovered him. The official press release described the death as 'cerebral congestion' — true in the most literal possible sense. Faure's political project had been to consolidate French presidential authority, partly in opposition to the campaign to clear Alfred Dreyfus's name; his death within months of the case's climax was politically convenient for the Dreyfusard side. Steinheil resurfaced a decade later, on trial for two murders. She was acquitted.

Catherine of Aragon (divorced, after a 24-year marriage and the political crisis that broke England from Rome), Anne Boleyn (beheaded for fabricated adultery, 1536), Jane Seymour (died of postpartum complications, 1537), Anne of Cleves (divorced after six months because Henry didn't like the look of her), Catherine Howard (beheaded for actual adultery, 1542, at age 18 or 19), and Catherine Parr (outlived him, married someone else, died 1548). Henry himself died at Whitehall on 28 January 1547, aged 55. None were burned — execution by burning was for heretics, not queens.

Charles IV of France died in February 1328 without a male heir, ending three centuries of Capetian male succession. The French magnates invoked the Salic Law to exclude Edward III of England (whose mother Isabella was Philip IV's only surviving daughter) and gave the throne to his more distant male-line cousin Philip of Valois. Edward initially accepted the decision and even paid homage to Philip for Aquitaine in 1329. He revoked his acceptance in 1337 after a sequence of subsequent diplomatic provocations. The other three answers all describe real disputes between the English and French crowns of the period, but the constitutional succession question is the spine of the war.

Approximately 60 senators were in the conspiracy, although only a fraction were active in the actual stabbing in the Theatre of Pompey. The 23 wounds reported in the autopsy weren't all from the same person. Brutus and Cassius were the political organisers; the stabbing itself was a group act, with each conspirator expected to make a personal contribution. Caesar's body lay where it fell for some hours before being recovered. None of the assassins survived the resulting civil war; Brutus and Cassius died at Philippi in 42 BC.

Isabella was the daughter of King Philip IV of France and the wife of Edward II. She invaded England with her lover Roger Mortimer in September 1326, deposed her husband, and ran the kingdom as regent for her teenage son Edward III. The son grew up, organised a coup at Nottingham Castle in October 1330, executed Mortimer, and confined his mother to comfortable house arrest. Isabella lived another 28 years and died at Castle Rising in Norfolk. The 18th-century English label *She-Wolf of France* was retrospective and partisan; her contemporaries used more neutral terms.

Edward III specifically denied Mortimer the beheading privilege that was normally extended to noblemen. He was hanged naked at Tyburn on 29 November 1330 on the common gallows. Tyburn (modern Marble Arch) would be London's main public execution site for the next 453 years. Beheading on Tower Green was the comparatively dignified end reserved for senior aristocrats — Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey. Hanging, drawing, and quartering at Smithfield was the punishment for treason against the Crown by commoners. Burial alive was practiced in medieval Europe but not at this level of state ceremony.

The Republic lasted from 509 BC to approximately 27 BC — about 482 years. The legendary trigger was the rape of Lucretia by Tarquin's son, which produced an aristocratic revolt under Lucius Junius Brutus that expelled the Tarquin dynasty. 753 BC was the traditional Roman foundation date for the city itself. 264 BC was the start of the First Punic War. 27 BC is the Augustan settlement that effectively ended the Republic.

Russia in 1917 still used the Julian calendar, which was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the rest of Europe. So the *February Revolution* actually occurred 8–16 March on our calendar; the *October Revolution* was on 7 November. The names stuck because that's what contemporary Russian newspapers called them. The Bolsheviks switched Russia to the Gregorian calendar in February 1918, which created a single fourteen-day jump in the recorded date when the new system took effect.

Caroline had ruptured an umbilical hernia during the birth of her youngest daughter Princess Louisa in 1724. She concealed it from her husband, her physicians, her ladies-in-waiting, and the wider court for thirteen years. The 18th-century English aristocratic-female taboo against acknowledging any bodily defect — and the matching social taboo that prevented royal physicians from examining the queen's abdomen without explicit permission — made the concealment possible. The hernia ruptured on 9 November 1737; she did not admit its existence until 13 November; surgical intervention by John Ranby on 18 November came too late. She died on 20 November, aged 54. George II outlived her by 23 years and never remarried.

Picquart was transferred to Tunisia in January 1897 to keep him away from Paris; he continued to pursue the Dreyfus case from there through his Paris lawyer. He was eventually arrested on fabricated charges of mishandling intelligence material in September 1898 and held at the Cherche-Midi military prison for eleven months. The Henry forgery confession of August 1898 destroyed the Army's institutional position; Picquart was released without trial. He was rehabilitated, promoted to brigadier general, and on 25 October 1906 appointed Minister of War — the same day Dreyfus's final rehabilitation was pronounced. He died in 1914 in a horseback-riding accident.

King Sebastian of Portugal had spent years organising a Catholic crusading expedition into Morocco. He died charging into the centre of his collapsing army; his body was never reliably identified, and a Portuguese myth (*Sebastianismo*) insisted for centuries that he had survived and would return. The two Moroccan kings — the reigning Saadi sultan Abd al-Malik (probably typhus) and his rival Mohammed al-Mutawakkil (drowned in the river fleeing) — also died that afternoon. Sebastian's childless death produced the Iberian Union of 1580 (Spain inherited Portugal under Philip II), which produced — eight years later — the catastrophic Spanish Armada.

Tycho was granted the small island of Hven (about 4.5 km long) in 1576. He built the main observatory complex *Uraniborg* between 1576 and 1580, with a secondary underground observatory *Stjerneborg* added in 1584. He worked there for 21 years and produced the most accurate pre-telescope astronomical observations ever made. He fell out of royal favour after Frederick's death (1588) and the regency of the young Christian IV; he left Hven in 1597 and died in Prague in 1601. Uraniborg was demolished progressively after his departure. Hven became Swedish in 1658.

Cleopatra Selene II married Juba II of Mauretania around 25 BC. Both had been raised in the same Roman aristocratic household; Augustus gave them Mauretania as a client kingdom. Their capital, Iol, was renamed Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria). Numidia had been Juba's father's kingdom but was annexed by Rome after the father's suicide in 46 BC. Cappadocia had its own Roman client dynasty. The Bosporan kingdom was a different Roman client kingdom around the Sea of Azov — Cleopatra Selene had nothing to do with it.

Kepler personally took on his mother's case, returned from his observatory at Linz multiple times to represent her, and wrote the surviving 128-page legal brief in his own hand. She was acquitted in October 1621 after fourteen months of formal trial proceedings and six years of accumulated accusations. The trial documents — including Kepler's brief and the prosecution's catalogue of complaints from neighbours — are some of the most complete surviving records of a 17th-century German witchcraft case. Katharina died six months after the acquittal, broken by the imprisonment. Galileo never wrote about her. The Catholic Church had limited authority in Lutheran Württemberg.