On October 5, 1789, a crowd of more than seven thousand women—fish sellers and bakers, working women from the markets, bourgeois “bonnet-wearing” women from the suburbs—marched the twelve miles from Paris to Versailles to demand King Louis XVI release his stores of grain. The march had been planned at the Palais Royal by a group of women who were furious over food shortages, especially after rumors that the king had thrown a lavish feast for his bodyguards only days before. The women swore that together, they would save the city: “Tomorrow things will be better because we will be in charge!”

Armed with pitchforks and pikes, stolen cannons and muskets, and knives snatched up from the kitchen table, the women gathered supporters as they left Paris on the six-hour journey, including the National Guard, led by the Marquis de Lafayette. The guardsmen’s duty was to protect the king, but many supported the women’s cause and had threatened to desert if they were not allowed to accompany the march. Lafayette sent warning to Versailles that he was bringing his soldiers and the marchers to the king.

Women also marched in Paris on January 21, 2017, and in dozens of other cities across the globe. Hundreds of thousands of women participated in marches from Iceland to Antarctica, and in the U.S. participants numbered in the millions. As far as we know, of those millions, no one was arrested. Not in Washington, D.C., where I marched along with at least 500,000 others; not in New York, which approached another half million, where the notably hair-trigger NYPD was reportedly friendly and helpful; not in Chicago, where the rally grew so large that the official march portion was canceled, but the 250,000 participants marched anyway, and a police department mired in a brutality investigation by the Justice department gave them all a pass. Instead, cops took smiling selfies with protesters and even handed out high-fives.

Media, organizers, and marchers alike have crowed over the lack of confrontation at the Women’s March. (The day before, more than two hundred people were arrested while protesting the Inauguration.) It was a triumph they attributed to civility, to good behavior, even to the superiority of their gender. “This is why women should be in charge of everything!” exclaimed some on social media, echoing the bonnet-wearers who schemed at the Palais Royal.

At Versailles, Louis XVI had a regiment of personal bodyguards, but he ordered them not to engage with the marchers; eventually, he dismissed them altogether. Instead, he tried to calm the revolt, first by feeding protesters from the vast Versailles stores, then by promising to address the Parisian shortage. The King could have had his royal guardsmen force the mob to disperse, but he clearly felt it was in his best interest not to fire on a crowd of women. The optics simply weren’t in his favor.