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ESTATES GENERAL MEETING
The Estates General stemmed from a meeting that reunited an equal number of representatives from each Estate to solve this serious political crisis.
Everyone met at the Palace of Versailles to debate some major problems. -
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY IS FORMED
From June 17 to July 9, 1789, it was the name of the revolutionary assembly formed by representatives of the Third Estate; thereafter (until replaced by the Legislative Assembly on Sept. 30, 1791) its formal name was National Constituent Assembly, though popularly the shorter form persisted. -
TENNIS COURT OATH DECLARED
On June 17, the Third Estate decided to break from the Estates General and draw up their own constitution. They also dubbed themselves the "National Assembly." On June 20, 1789 they found themselves locked out of their regular meeting place, and so they gathered in an nearby tennis court and vowed that they would continue to meet until they had established a new constitution for France. This was the first step of the French Revolution -
STORMING OF THE BASTILLE
Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops storm and dismantle the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed. -
DECLARATION OF THE RIGHT OF MAN WRITTEN
one of the basic charters of human liberties, containing the principles that inspired the French Revolution. Its 17 articles, adopted between August 20 and August 26, 1789, by France’s National Assembly, served as the preamble to the Constitution of 1791. Similar documents served as the preamble to the Constitution of 1793 (retitled simply Declaration of the Rights of Man) and to the Constitution of 1795 (retitled Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Citizen).
