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Convening the Estates General
On 5 May 1789, amidst general festivities, the Estates-General convened in an elaborate but temporary lle des États set up in one of the courtyards of the official Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs in the town of Versailles near the royal château. Many in the Third Estate viewed the double representation as a revolution already peacefully accomplished. -
Period: to
French
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Tennis Court Oath
The Tennis Court Oath was a pivotal event during the first days of the French Revolution. The Oath was a pledge signed by 576 of the 577 members from the Third Estate who were locked out of a meeting of the Estates-General on 20 June 1789. They made a makeshift conference room inside a tennis court located in the Saint-Louis district of Versailles , near the Palace of Versailles. -
Storming of the Bastille
The storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris on the morning of 14 July 1789. The medieval fortress and prison in Paris known as the Bastille represented royal authority in the centre of Paris. While the prison only contained seven inmates at the time of its storming, its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution. In France, Le quatorze juillet is a public holiday, formally known as the Fête de la Fédération. It is usually called Bastille Day in English. -
Great Fear
Rural unrest had been present in France since the worsening grain shortage of the spring, and the grain supplies were now guarded by local militias as rumors that bands of armed men were roaming the countryside. -
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a fundamental document of the French Revolution, defining the individual and collective rights of all the estates of the realm as universal. Influenced by the doctrine of "natural right", the rights of man are held to be universal: valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. -
Women’s march to Versailles
The march began among women in the marketplaces of Paris who, on the morning of 5 October 1789, were near rioting over the high price and scarcity of bread. -
Louis and Marie’s flight to Varennes
The Flight to Varennes was a significant episode in the French Revolution during which King Louis XVI of France, his wife Marie Antoinette, and their immediate family attempted unsuccessfully to escape from Paris in order to initiate a counter-revolution. -
- Constitution of 1791
The short-lived French Constitution of 1791 was the second written constitution of France. One of the basic precepts of the revolution was adopting constitutionality and establishing popular sovereignty, following the steps of the United States of America. -
Brunswick Manifesto
The Brunswick Manifesto was a proclamation issued by Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Allied Army (principally Austrian and Prussian), on 25 July 1792 to the population of Paris, France during the French Revolutionary Wars. -
National Convention
During the French Revolution, the National Convention or Convention, in France, comprised the constitutional and legislative assembly which sat from 20 September 1792 to 26 October 1795 (the 4th of Brumaire of the year IV under the French Republican Calendar adopted by the Convention). -
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 - 28 July 1794) (the latter is date 10 Thermidor, year II of the French Revolutionary Calendar),[1] also known simply as The Terror (French: la Terreur), was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution." The death toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillot -
French Directory
The Directory (French: Directoire exécutif) was a body of five Directors that held executive power in France following the Convention and preceding the Consulate. The period of this regime, commonly known as the Directory era, constitutes the second to last stage of the French Revolution. -
Napoleon Bonaparte takes over
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The Concordat of 1801
The Concordat of 1801 was an agreement between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII, signed on 15 July 1801. It solidified the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France and brought back most of its civil status. -
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase (French: Vente de la Louisiane "Sale of Louisiana") was the acquisition by the United States of America of 828,000 square miles (2,140,000 km2) of France's claim to the territory of Louisiana in 1803. The U.S. paid 60 million francs ($11,250,000) plus cancellation of debts worth 18 million francs ($3,750,000), for a total sum of 15 million dollars (less than 3 cents per acre) for the Louisiana territory ($233 million in 2011 dollars, less than 42 cents per acre) -
Napoleon becomes Emperor
As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815. His legal reform, the Napoleonic Code, has been a major influence on many civil law jurisdictions worldwide, but he is best remembered for his role in the wars led against France by a series of coalitions, the so-called Napoleonic Wars. -
Napoleonic Code
The Napoleonic Code — is the French civil code, established under Napoléon I in 1804. The code forbade privileges based on birth, allowed freedom of religion, and specified that government jobs go to the most qualified -
Battle of Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a sea battle fought between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French Navy and Spanish Navy, during the War of the Third Coalition (August–December 1805) of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). -
Continental System
The Continental System or Continental Blockade was the foreign policy of Napoleon I of France in his struggle against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland during the Napoleonic Wars. It was a large-scale embargo against British trade, which began on November 21, 1806. This embargo ended on April 11, 1814 after Napoleon's first abdication. -
Peninsular War
The Peninsular War was a war between France and the allied powers of Spain, the United Kingdom, and Portugal for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars. The war began when French and Spanish armies crossed Spain and invaded Portugal in 1807. Then, in 1808, France turned on its ally, Spain. The war lasted until the Sixth Coalition defeated Napoleon in 1814. -
French invasion of Russia
The French invasion of Russia of 1812 (also known as the Patriotic War of 1812, Russian: Отечественная война 1812 года) was a turning point in the Napoleonic Wars. It reduced the French and allied invasion forces (the Grande Armée) to a tiny fraction of their initial strength and triggered a major shift in European politics as it dramatically weakened French hegemony in Europe. -
Exile to Elba
In the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the victors exiled him to Elba, an island of 12,000 inhabitants in the Mediterranean, 20 km off the Tuscan coast -
Exile to St. Helena
Napoleon was imprisoned and then exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, 1,870 km from the west coast of Africa. In his first two months there, he lived in a pavilion on the Briars estate, which belonged to a William Balcombe. Napoleon became friendly with his family, especially his younger daughter Lucia Elizabeth who later wrote Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon.[147] This friendship ended in 1818 when British authorities became suspicious that Balcombe had acted as an -
Battle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. An Imperial French army under the command of Emperor Napoleon was defeated by combined armies of the Seventh Coalition, an Anglo-Allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington combined with a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blücher.