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1793: King Louis XVI of France guillotined in Paris. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man banned; Paine condemned in absentia (he is in France) for high treason. The British government, headed by Prime Minister Pitt, begins to arrest anyone publishing anything criticizing the government. William Godwin publishes Political Justice, a huge philosophical tract that argues Paine's case from a theoretical point of view. Godwin is not imprisoned largely because his book's price (forty times the price of …

…he did set maximum prices for bread and flour, thus reducing the threat of either hunger or bread riots. According to Robert B. Holtman, author of The Napoleonic Revolution, peasants did not necessarily fare badly under Napoleon, as he maintained the work the revolutionaries had done (namely, abolishing feudalism). However, other scholars have asserted that Napoleon was largely uninterested in social and economic reforms that would improve the quality of life for his poorer subjects.