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Francois Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture
an ex slave who changed sides and committed his troops to the French. -
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Tadeusz Kosciuszko
Some leaders fled abroad including this guy an officer who had been a foregin volunteer in the War of American Independence and who now escaped to Paris -
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Maximilien Robespierre
A lawyer from northern France who laid out the principles of a republic of virtue and of the Terror; his arrest and execution in july 1794 brought an end to the Terror -
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Georges-Jacques Danton
In principle the best way to ensure the future of the republic was through the education of the young. The deputy Georges, Robespierre's main competitor as theorist of the Revolution maintained that after bread the first need of the people is education -
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Friedrich Schiller
One of the greatest writers of the age he typified the turn in sentiment against revolutionary politics. -
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King Stanislaw August Poniatowski
The Patriots sought to over haul the weak commonwealth along modern western European lines and looked to him to lead them -
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King Gustavus 3
In Sweden King Gustavus 3rd was assassinated by a nobleman who claimed that the king has violated his oath and declared himself an enemy of the realm -
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Louis 16th
French King who was tried and found guilty of treason; he was executed -
The Dutch Patriot Revolt
The Dutch Patriots as they chose to call themselves wanted to reduce the powers of the prince of Orange, the kinglike shadholder who favored close ties with Great Britain. -
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Revolts
In the Dutch Republic , the Austrian Netherlands and Poland as well as france revolts began to break out under the name of Liberty. -
1787
The French crown granted civil rights to Protetants -
1787
Faced with a mounting deficit in 1787 Louis submitted a package of reforms to the assembly of Notables a group of Handpicked nobles clergymen and officials. -
1788
Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun painted a portrait of the French Queen Marie-Antoinette and her children in 1788. The eldest son Louis died in 1789. When he died her second son also called Louis became heir to the throne. Known to be supporters of the monarch as Louis 17th died in prison in 1795 and never ruled. -
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Monarchy To Republic
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1789
Twelve hundred deputies journeyed to the king's palace in Versailles for the opening of the Estates General in May, many readers avidly followed the developments in newspapers that sprouted overnight -
1789
The fall of the Bastille. At first Louis appeared to agree with the National Assembly but he also ordered thousands of soldiers to march to Paris. The deputies who supported the Assembly feared a plot by the king and high-ranking nobles to arrest them and disperse the Assembly -
1789
After six weeks of stalemate on June 17th the deputies of the Third Estate took unilateral action and declared themselves and whoever would join them the National Assembly in which each deputy would vote as an individual. -
1789
The king fired Jacques Necker, the Swiss Protestant finance minister and the one high official regarded as symphathetic to the deputies' case -
capture the Bastille
Armed Parisians captured the Bastille a royal fortress and symbol of monarchical authority in the center of the capital -
1789
Noble deputies announced their willingness to give up their tax exemptions and seigneurial dues. -
Declaration 1789
The preamble to the French constitution drafted in August it established the sovereignty of the nation and equal rights for citizens -
Women's March to Versailles
A crowd of armed women marched to Versailles to confront the kind. The sight of armed women frightened many observers and demonstrated that the Revolution was not only a men's affair -
1789
Before the elections to the Estates General the king agreed to double the number of deputies for the Third Estate making them equal in number to the other two combined, but he refused to mandate voting by individual head rather than by order -
1789
In the winter and spring of 1789 villagers and townspeople alike held meetings to elect deputies and write down their grievances. The effect was immediate. Although educated men dominated the meetings at the regional level, the humblest peasants voted in their villages and burst forth with complaints especially on taxes. -
Jacobin Club
A French political club formed in 1789 that inspired the formation of a national network whose members dominated the revolutionary government during the Terror. -
The Great Fear
Peasants greeted the news of events with a mixture of hope and anxiety. As food shortages spread they feared that the beggers and vagrants crowding the roads might be part of an aristocratic plot to starve the people by burning crops or barns this was the Great Fear -
Polish Patriots
A reform party calling itself the Patriots also emerged in Poland which had been shocked by the loss of a third of its territory in the first partition -
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Emperor Leopold 2
Faced with the choice between the Austrian emperor and our current tyrants the democrats chose to support the return of the Austrians under Emperor Leopold 2 -
1790
The Festival of Federation on this date marked the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. -
1790
Faced with resistence to these changes on this day the National Assembly required all clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitiion of the Clergy. Pope Pius 6th in Rome condemned the constitution and half of the French clergy refused to take the oath -
Constitution
Refor minded Parliament which enacted the Constitution. It established a hereditary monarchy with some what strenghtened authority, ended the veto power that each aristocrat had over legislation, granted townspeople limited political rights, and vaguely promised future Jewish emancipation, abolishing serfdom was hardly mentioned -
1791
The royal family escaped in disguise from Paris and fled to the eastern border of France -
1791
The constitution finally completed in 1791 provided for the immediate election of the new Legislative Assembly. -
1791
Catholics and Presbyterians both excluded from the vote came together in 1791 in the Society of United Irishmen which eventually pressed for secession from England -
1792
Louis declared war on Austria. Prussia immediatley entered on the Austrian side. Thousands of French aristocrats including two thirds of the army officer corps had already emigrated including both the king's brothers and they were gathering along France's eastern border in expectation of joining a counterrevolutionary army -
1792
An angry crowd invaded the hall of Assembly in Paris and threatened the royal family. -
The Second Revolution
Faced with the threat of military retaliation and frustrated with the inaction of the Legislative Assembly the sans-culottes organzied an insurrection and attacked the Tuileries palace, the residence of the king. -
1792
The fall of the monarchy in August, however the Jacobins divided into two factions. -
1792
The new divorce law was the most far-reaching in Europe: a couple could divorce by mutual consent or for reasons such as insanity, abandonment, battering or criminal conviction -
1792
The most important of these societies the London Corresponding Society founded in this year corresponded with the Paris Jacobin Club and served as a center for reform agitation in England -
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King Gustavus 4th
Gustavus 4th was convinced that the French Jocabins had sanctioned his father's assassinatoin and he insisted on avoiding licentious liberty. -
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Reign of Terror
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Representing Liberty
Liberty was represented by a female figure because in French the noun is feminine. This painting by Jeanne-Louise Vallain captures the usual attributes of Liberty: she is soberly seated, wearing a Roman style toga and holding a pike with a Roman liberty cap on top. Her Roman appearance signals that she represents an abstract quality -
Louis 16th executed
Found guilty of Treason and was executed -
April 6, 1793
Setting the course for government and the war increasingly fell to the twelve-member Committee of Public Safety set up by the National Convention. -
1793
Marat was aquitted and Parisian militants marched into the National Convention on June 2 forcing the deputies to decree the arrest of their twenty-nine Girondin colleagues. -
1793
Other forms of resistance were more individual. One young women, Charlotte Corday, assassinated the outspoken deputy Jean-Paul Marat on this day -
1793
The National Convention established the General Maximum on this day which set limits on the prices of thirty-nine essential commodiites and pierre explained the necessity of government by terror -
Marie-Antoinette executed
Wife of Louis 16th and queen of France who was tried and executed -
1793
Even the measures of time and space were revolutionized. In October the National Convention introduced a new calendar to replace the Christian one. Its bases were reason adn republican principles -
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Thermidorian Reaction
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1794
The National Convention formally abolished slavery and gratned full rights to all black men in the colonies. These actions had the desired effect. One of the ablest black generals allied with the Spanish, the ex slave changed sides and committed his troops to the French -
1794
The Terror intensified until this date when a group of deputies joined within the Convention to order the arrest and execution of Robespierre and his followers -
1794
The French nation inarms had stopped the advance of the allied powers and in the summer of 1794 it invaded the Austrian Netherlands and crossed the Rhine River. -
1795
Those who remained in the National Convention prepared yet another constition setting up a two-house legislature and an executive body, the Directory, headed by five directors -
1795
When Prussia declared neutrality in this year the French armies swarmed into the Dutch Republic abolished the stadholderate and with the revolutionary penchant for renaming created a new Batavian Republic, a satellite of France. -
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Napoleon