The setup
In the 1780s, France looked, on the surface, like the most powerful country in Europe — Versailles, the Sun King's legacy, a huge army, a global empire. Underneath, it was bankrupt. A century of expensive wars (including bankrolling the American Revolution out of spite against Britain) had hollowed out the treasury. The tax system was both regressive and inefficient: the church and aristocracy paid almost nothing, while ordinary people paid a tangle of overlapping levies. Two bad harvests in 1788 sent bread prices soaring.
King Louis XVI — well-meaning, indecisive, more interested in lock-making than ruling — finally called the Estates-General, a medieval representative assembly that hadn't met for 175 years, to ask permission to raise new taxes.
It did not go as planned.
Things move fast
The Third Estate — the commoners, technically representing 95% of France — refused to be outvoted by the clergy and nobility. In June 1789 they walked out and formed a National Assembly. Days later, locked out of their usual meeting hall, they swore the Tennis Court Oath: they would not disband until they had written France a constitution.
On July 14, 1789, a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille — a medieval fortress and royal prison, more symbol than military target (it held seven prisoners). The governor was killed, his head paraded on a pike. France had its revolutionary holiday before anyone had decided what the revolution was about.
The next month, the Assembly abolished feudalism in a single night-session and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: liberty, equality, the right to property, freedom of speech and religion. It was breathtaking — and it was 1789, not 1989.
The radical turn
For a couple of years, France tried to be a constitutional monarchy. It might have worked. But Louis XVI tried to flee the country in 1791 (caught at Varennes), foreign monarchies threatened to invade, and the revolution moved leftward. In 1792, France abolished the monarchy, declared a Republic, and — in January 1793 — guillotined Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette followed in October.
What came next is what the revolution is mostly remembered for: the Reign of Terror. Under Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, perhaps 17,000 people were officially executed, with thousands more dying in prison or summary killings. The revolutionary government was at war with most of Europe, fighting royalist uprisings in the Vendée region, and convinced that any internal opposition was treason.
Robespierre eventually became the Terror's last victim — guillotined July 28, 1794, the day after he tried to demand a new round of executions and his own colleagues turned on him.
How it ended (and didn't end)
The French Revolution didn't end with Robespierre, or with the corrupt Directory that followed, or even with Napoleon Bonaparte's coup in 1799. In a sense it kept playing out for another century, through three more monarchies and three more republics, before France settled — sort of — into the Republic that still exists today.
What stuck:
- Equality before the law. No more legal privileges for nobles or clergy.
- A metric system. Yes, that came out of the Revolution.
- The idea that political legitimacy comes from the people, not from God or birth. This was new, and once it was out, no European monarchy could really get it back in the box.
- Modern nationalism. La Marseillaise. The blue-white-red. The very concept of "the French nation" as something everyone — peasant or banker — belongs to and dies for.
The Revolution also showed how fast a movement for justice can curdle into mass killing in the name of justice. France has been thinking about that ever since.
Where to see it
- The Conciergerie — where Marie Antoinette was held before her execution. Restored cells, the actual Revolutionary Tribunal chamber.
- Place de la Concorde — the giant square where the guillotine stood. Louis XVI was executed roughly where the obelisk now stands.
- The Panthéon — converted from a royal church into a temple of the Republic during the Revolution; final resting place of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Revolution's philosophical fathers.
- The Louvre — opened as a public museum in 1793, during the Terror. Royal art collection redistributed to the people.