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Jacques Necker
Jacques Necker was a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI. He was a reformer, but his innovations sometimes caused great discontent. -
Jean-Paul Marot
Jean-Paul Marat was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. -
Olympe de Gouges
Olympe de Gouges was a French playwright and political activist. She is best known for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen and other writings on women's rights and abolitionism. Born in southwestern France, de Gouges began her prolific career as a playwright in Paris in the 1780s. -
louis XLI
Louis XVI was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. The son of Louis, Dauphin of France, and Maria Josepha of Saxony, Louis became the new Dauphin when his father died in 1765. -
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France prior to the French Revolution. She was born an archduchess of Austria, and was the penultimate child and youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I. -
Marquis de Lafayette
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette, known in the United States as Lafayette, was a French aristocrat, freemason, and military officer who volunteered to join the Continental Army, led by General George Washington, in the American Revolutionary War. -
Charlotte Corday
Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont, known as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution who assassinated revolutionary and Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat on 13 July 1793. -
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte, later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French emperor and military commander who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led successful campaigns during the Revolutionary Wars. -
Jacobins
The Society of the Friends of the Constitution, renamed the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality after 1792 and commonly known as the Jacobin Club or simply the Jacobins, was the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. -
Formation of the National Assembly
During the French Revolution, the National Assembly, which existed from 17 June 1789 to 9 July 1789, was a revolutionary assembly of the Kingdom of France formed by the representatives of the Third Estate of the Estates-General and eventually joined by some members of the First and Second Estates. -
Tennis Court Oath
The Tennis Court Oath was a key moment that set off the French Revolution. On June 20, 1789, the Tennis Court Oath was taken. There, the men of the National Assembly swore an oath never to stop meeting until a constitution had been established. -
Attack on the Bastille
storming of the Bastille, iconic conflict of the French Revolution. On July 14, 1789, fears that King Louis XVI was about to arrest France's newly constituted National Assembly led a crowd of Parisians to successfully besiege the Bastille, an old fortress that had been used since 1659 as a state prison. -
Great Fear
The Great Fear was a general panic that took place between 22 July to 6 August 1789, at the start of the French Revolution. Rural unrest had been present in France since the worsening grain shortage of the spring. -
Calling of the Estates-General
Calling the Estates-General. The Estates-General of 1789 was a general assembly representing the French estates of the realm summoned by Louis XVI to propose solutions to France's financial problems. It ended when the Third Estate formed into a National Assembly, signaling the outbreak of the French Revolution. -
Women’s March to Versailles
The Women's March on Versailles was a riot that took place during this first stage of the French Revolution. It was spontaneously organized by women in the marketplaces of Paris, on the morning of October 5, 1789. They complained over the high price and scant availability of bread, marching from Paris to Versailles. -
Flight to Varennes
Definition. The Flight to Varennes was a pivotal moment of the French Revolution (1789-1799), in which King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-92), his wife Queen Marie Antoinette (1755-93), and their children attempted to escape from Paris on the night of 20-21 June 1791. -
National Convention is formed
The National Convention was a single-chamber assembly in France from September 20, 1792, to October 26, 1795, during the French Revolution. It succeeded the Legislative Assembly and founded the First Republic after the Insurrection of August 10, 1792. -
Execution of Louis XVI
Louis XVI, former king of France since the abolition of the monarchy, was publicly excuted on 21 January 1793 during the French Revolution at the Place de la Révolution in Paris. -
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervour, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety. -
The Directory is formed
Directory, the French Revolutionary government set up by the Constitution of the Year III, which lasted four years, from November 1795 to November 1799. It included a bicameral legislature known as the Corps Législatif. -
Napoleon Invades Russia
The French invasion of Russia, also known as Russian campaign and in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812, was initiated by Napoleon with the aim of compelling the Russian Empire to comply with the continental blockade of the United Kingdom. -
Emmanuel-Josephy Sieyes
Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, usually known as the Abbé Sieyès, was a French Roman Catholic abbé, clergyman, and political writer who was the chief political theorist of the French Revolution; he also held offices in the governments of the French Consulate and the First French Empire. -
Sans-culottes
The sans-culottes were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. -
Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a prominent French lawyer and statesman, widely recognized as one of the most influential, and controversial figures of the French Revolution. -
Georges Danton
Georges Jacques Danton; was a French lawyer and a leading figure in the French Revolution. He became a deputy to the Paris Commune, presided in the Cordeliers district, and visited the Jacobin club.