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Rumors of an impending military coup began among the people of France, and they responded by storming the Bastille Fortress in an attempt to obtain gunpowder and weapons to fight back. This event is considered the beginning of the French Revolution.
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The Assembly adopted the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen. It contained democratic principles grounded in the philosphical and polictical ideas of Enlightenment thinkers. The new system was bases on equal opportunity, freedom of speech, popular sovereignty, and representative government.
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The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen is adopted, establishing a constitutional monarchy in which the king enjoyed royal veto power and the ability to appoint ministers.
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Shortly after the Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria and Prussia, the political crisis took a radical turn when a group of insurgents led by the extremist Jacobins attacked the royal residence in Paris and arrested the king.
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The Legislative Assembly was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the aboliition of the monarchy and the establishment of the French Republic.
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King Louis XVI is condemed to death by the guillotine for high treason and crimes against the state. His wife, Marie Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.
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The Jacobins seized control of the National Convention from the Girondins and instituted a series a radical measures. One result of this was the ten-month period known as the "reign of terror", in which suspected enemies of the revolution were guillotined by the thousands.
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Many of the killings in the Reign of Terror were orchastrated by a man named Robespierre, who dominated the draconian Commitee of Public Safety until his own death.
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The National Convention approved a new constitution that created France's first bicameral legislature, where executive power would lie in the hands of a five-member Directory appointed by Parliament. Royalists and Jacobins protested the new regime, but were silecned by the army, now led by the young general Napoleon Bonaparte.
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Bonaparte staged a coup, aboilshing the Directory and appointing himself as France's "first consul". This event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic Era.
