My friend and resident HSW H&G editor Ryan sent me a link to CNN’s reprint of Mental Floss’s “Seven Civil War stories your teacher never told you.” It’s a fun article — one that you should take five minutes to read. Since I’ve told you to read it, I won’t spoil all seven stories. But I will spoil one of them.

Says Mental Floss, “Hungry ladies effectively mugged Jefferson Davis.” As the tale goes, the South didn’t cope well with the dearth of food supplies. The problem was exacerbated by the “wild[ly] fluctuati[ng]” CSA currency. A group of women in Richmond, Va., decided to take their case directly to Gov. John Letcher. As fate would have it, CSA president Jefferson Davis happened to be keeping company with him that day in April 1863. The women didn’t appeal to the Confederate leaders like Southern gentlewomen. As Mental Floss explains, “they overturned carts [and] smashed windows” and couldn’t be pacified by the money Davis proffered the angry crowd — it took gunfire to command the women’s attention and acquiescence. No further details as to whether the ladies were able to secure better food prices.

When I read this, my thoughts turned immediately to the French Revolution. It was a mob of women, angry about the unfair cost of bread, who marched to Versailles and brought Louis and Marie Antoinette to Paris. This was a bloodthirsty group; historians say that they broke past the guards into the palace and would’ve probably killed Marie Antoinette if she’d been in her bedroom.

In a reductive assessment of history, the stories are rather parallel: Women denied the sustenance they need for their families go straight to the source of power to demand it and violence ensues.

More revolutionary reading:
How the French Revolution Worked
What happened to the other two men on Paul Revere’s ride?
Why did brothers fight on opposite sides of the Civil War?