The French Revolution

The French Revolution (1789–1799) was the most radical and consequential political upheaval of the modern era. It destroyed the French monarchy, abolished feudal privileges, proclaimed the universal rights of man, unleashed revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence on a massive scale, and ultimately produced Napoleon Bonaparte — whose wars would reshape the entire European order.

The revolution's causes were multiple: a fiscal crisis driven by war debt, an archaic tax system that exempted the wealthy, Enlightenment ideas that questioned the legitimacy of absolutism, and a series of bad harvests that pushed ordinary people to the breaking point. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, became the revolution's founding symbol. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 1789) proclaimed that 'Men are born and remain free and equal in rights' — a statement whose radical implications would take generations to work out.

The revolution radicalized over time. The moderate constitutional monarchy gave way to a republic, regicide (Louis XVI was guillotined in January 1793), and the Reign of Terror under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, during which perhaps 17,000 people were executed. The revolution consumed its own leaders — Robespierre himself was guillotined in 1794. The revolutionary chaos eventually enabled Napoleon's rise, but the principles of 1789 — liberty, equality, popular sovereignty, the abolition of feudal privilege — became the foundation of modern democratic politics worldwide.