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Estates General
To garner support for these measures and forestall a growing aristocratic revolt, the king summoned the Estates General (les états généraux) – an assembly representing France’s clergy, nobility and middle class – for the first time since 1614. -
The enlightenment
According to most historians, the Enlightenment in France is generally considered to have started around 1715, with the beginning of the reign of Louis XV, and lasted until the French Revolution in 1789; marking this period as the core of the French Enlightenment era -
High Enlightenment
Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French “philosophes”the High Enlightenment might best be summed up by one historian’s summary of Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary a chaos of clear ideas. Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged. “Encyclopédie”which brought together leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge. -
Napoleon Bonaparte was born.
Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. He was the second of eight surviving children born to Carlo Buonaparte a lawyer, and Letizia Romalino Buonaparte. Although his parents were members of the minor Corsican nobility, the family was not wealthy. The year before Napoleon’s birth, France acquired Corsica from the city-state of Genoa, Italy. Napoleon later adopted a French spelling of his last name. -
Age of enlightened
It was an age of enlightened despots like Frederick the Great, who unified, rationalized and modernized Prussia in between brutal multi-year wars with Austria, and of enlightened would-be revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, whose “Declaration of Independence” (1776) framed the American Revolution in terms taken from of Locke’s essays. -
Napoleons childhood
As a boy, Napoleon attended school in mainland France, where he learned the French language, and went on to graduate from a French military academy in 1785. He then became a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment of the French army. -
How it strarted
In the fall of 1786, Louis XVI’s controller general, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, proposed a financial reform package that included a universal land tax from which the aristocratic classes would no longer be exempt. -
Bloody Terror
High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led a decade later to the rise of Napoleon still its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and inspired both the Haitian war of independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguay’s first post-independence government. -
The French Revolution starts
The French Revolution was a watershed event in world history that began in 1789 -
The meeting was scheduled
The meeting was scheduled for May 5, 1789; in the meantime, delegates of the three estates from each locality would compile lists of grievances (cahiers de doléances) to present to the king. -
Third Estate
France’s population, of course, had changed considerably since 1614. The non-aristocratic, middle-class members of the Third Estate now represented 98 percent of the people but could still be outvoted by the other two bodies.
In the lead-up to the May 5 meeting, the Third Estate began to mobilize support for equal representation and the abolishment of the noble veto—in other words, they wanted voting by head and not by status. -
National Constituent Assembly
On June 12, as the National Assembly (known as the National Constituent Assembly during its work on a constitution) continued to meet at Versailles, fear and violence consumed the capital.
Though enthusiastic about the recent breakdown of royal power, Parisians grew panicked as rumors of an impending military coup began to circulate. -
Tennis Court Oath
The king himself. On June 17, with talks over procedure stalled, the Third Estate met alone and formally adopted the title of National Assembly; three days later, they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and took the so called Tennis Court Oath vowing not to disperse until constitutional reform had been achieved. -
National Assembly
Within a week, most of the clerical deputies and 47 liberal nobles had joined them, and on June 27 Louis XVI grudgingly absorbed all three orders into the new National Assembly. -
Stormed the Bastille fortress
A popular insurgency culminated on July 14 when rioters stormed the Bastille fortress in an attempt to secure gunpowder and weapons; many consider this event, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution. -
The great fear.
Known as the Great Fear (la Grande peur), the agrarian insurrection hastened the growing exodus of nobles from France and inspired the National Constituent Assembly to abolish feudalism on August 4, 1789, signing what historian Georges Lefebvre later called the “death certificate of the old order.” -
The end
It ended in the late 1790s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. During this period, French citizens radically altered their political landscape, uprooting centuries-old institutions such as the monarchy and the feudal system. -
The king fails to flee.
For months, its members wrestled with fundamental questions about the shape and expanse of France’s new political landscape. For instance, who would be responsible for electing delegates? Would the clergy owe allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church or the French government? Perhaps most importantly, how much authority would the king, his public image further weakened after a failed attempt to flee the country in June 1791 -
The Guillotine
In 1791, a French doctor named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed the machine be used in France, as a more humane method of capital punishment. The first execution was carried out on a highwayman in 1792 and the machine became known as the guillotine. -
France’s first written constitution
Adopted on September 3, 1791, France’s first written constitution echoed the more moderate voices in the Assembly, establishing a constitutional monarchy in which the king enjoyed royal veto power and the ability to appoint ministers. This compromise did not sit well with influential radicals like Maximilien de Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, who began drumming up popular support for a more republican form of government and for the trial of Louis XVI. -
Legislative Assembly declared war
In April 1792, the newly elected Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria and Prussia, where it believed that French émigrés were building counterrevolutionary alliances; it also hoped to spread its revolutionary ideals across Europe through warfare. -
Revolutionaries had overthrown the monarchy
The French Revolution began in 1789, and within three years revolutionaries had overthrown the monarchy and proclaimed a French republic. During the early years of the revolution, Napoleon was largely on leave from the military and home in Corsica, where he became affiliated with the Jacobins, a pro-democracy political group. -
Clash with the nationalist Corsican governor
In 1793, following a clash with the nationalist Corsican governor, Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807), the Bonaparte family fled their native island for mainland France, where Napoleon returned to military duty. -
Condemned to death
On January 21, 1793, it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later. -
Napoleons death
In October 1815, Napoleon was exiled to the remote, British-held island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean. He died there on May 5, 1821, at age 51, most likely from stomach cancer. -