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“Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The” quote by Tom Reiss — Download Open image

““Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The””

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“Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects. They took the issue of human bondage to the sovereign parlement courts of France—and won, in nearly every…

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“Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another," General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home.”

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“This mulatto gentleman could powder and dress as he liked, however, because he was acknowledged to be the greatest swordsman in Europe. Over the previous decade and a half, every white champion had stepped up to try to beat Saint-Georges; except for one Italian, who fought him under exceptional circumstances, they all failed. Saint-Georges”

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