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Portrait of The French Revolution

History · Revolutions & empires

The French Revolution

1789–1799

The old order in France overthrown, from the Estates-General to Napoleon's coup

Summoned to fix a bankrupt treasury, the Estates-General of 1789 instead dismantled the absolute monarchy. Within months France had a National Assembly, a Declaration of the Rights of Man and a king brought back to Paris; within four years it had a republic, a guillotined monarch and the Terror. The decade ended with a young general seizing power in November 1799, but the Revolution had already remade Europe's political vocabulary.

How to spot them

  • ▸An oath sworn in a real tennis court; a fortress-prison stormed in July; a Declaration of the Rights of Man
  • ▸A flight to Varennes; a queen dubbed 'Madame Déficit'; a king tried as Citizen Capet
  • ▸A Committee of Public Safety, a blade named for a doctor, and a new calendar with months called Thermidor and Brumaire
  • ▸Ends when a general back from Egypt dissolves the Directory

What happened

Deputies locked out of their hall swear in a real tennis court not to disperse until France has a constitution (20 June 1789)

The Third Estate, having declared itself the National Assembly, defied the king at Versailles.

A market women's march that brought the royal family from Versailles back to Paris (5–6 October 1789)

'The baker, the baker's wife and the baker's boy' were escorted to the Tuileries.

A royal family caught at a small town in the Meuse while fleeing in disguise towards the frontier (20–21 June 1791)

The failed escape destroyed what was left of trust in Louis XVI.

The execution of Citizen Louis Capet in the Place de la Révolution (21 January 1793)

The Convention convicted him by a large majority and voted death by a single-figure margin.

Sixteen months of revolutionary tribunals and mass executions under the Committee of Public Safety (1793–94)

Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon dominated the Committee until 9 Thermidor.

The fall of the Incorruptible on 9 Thermidor, guillotined the next day with his jaw shattered (27–28 July 1794)

Maximilien Robespierre's arrest ended the Terror and opened the way to the Directory.

A general back from Egypt overturns the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799)

Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul; the Consulate replaced the Directory.

Key ideas

  • The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 1789) proclaimed men born free and equal in rights, and made sovereignty reside in the nation
  • 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité' — a slogan of the revolutionary decade that only became France's official motto under the Third Republic
  • The republican calendar of 1793 renamed the months (Vendémiaire to Fructidor) and dated Year I from 22 September 1792
  • Olympe de Gouges answered the Declaration with a Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791); she was guillotined in 1793

Quick-fire facts

  • •Louis XVI called the Estates-General in May 1789 for the first time since 1614, to deal with a fiscal crisis
  • •The guillotine is named after Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a doctor who proposed a swift, uniform method of execution but did not invent the machine
  • •Marie Antoinette was executed on 16 October 1793; the line about cake ('Qu'ils mangent de la brioche') predates her and is not hers
  • •Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in his medicinal bath by Charlotte Corday in July 1793, a scene painted by Jacques-Louis David
  • •The First French Republic was proclaimed on 22 September 1792, the day after the monarchy's abolition
  • •'La Marseillaise' was written by Rouget de Lisle at Strasbourg in 1792 as a war song for the Army of the Rhine
  • •Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) drew a famous reply in Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
  • •It ended not in a treaty but in a coup: Napoleon's seizure of power on 18 Brumaire, Year VIII

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources