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The Estates-General of 1789 was a meeting of the three estates of pre-revolutionary France: clergy, nobility, and commons. Summoned by King Louis XVI of France to deal with financial and societal crises, it ended with the Third Estate breaking from royal authority and forming a National Assembly. -
In the Tennis Court Oath, representatives of the non-clergy and non-nobles of France swore they would not disperse until a constitution was established for France. While the oath-makers were successful, the French Revolution soon tumbled out of control. -
Who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? The Marquis de Lafayette, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, composed a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and presented it to the National Assembly -
On July 14, 1789, fears that King Louis XVI was about to arrest France's newly constituted National Assembly led a crowd of Parisians to successfully besiege the Bastille, an old fortress that had been used since 1659 as a state prison. -
The Women's March on Versailles, also known as the October March, the October Days or simply the March on Versailles, was one of the earliest and most significant events of the French Revolution. -
Following the Tennis Court Oath, the National Assembly began the process of drafting a constitution as its primary objective. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August 1789 eventually became the preamble of the constitution adopted -
King Louis XVI of France and his wife Queen Marie Antoinette were both beheaded by the guillotine at the Place de la Révolution in Paris, France. -
The Reign of Terror was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervour, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety. -
At the death of his father on 21 January 1793, royalists and foreign powers intent on restoring the monarchy held him to be the new king of France, with the title of Louis XVII. -
The coup d'état of 18 Brumaire brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power as First Consul of France. In the view of most historians, it ended the French Revolution and led to the coronation of Napoleon as emperor. This bloodless coup d'état overthrew the Directory, replacing it with the French Consulate. -
Napoleon built his empire through conquest of territories belonging to his enemies. Napoleon greatly assisted in defeating the First Coalition in 1792–1797, in which the newly formed French republic annexed a part of the Rhine and also the formerly Austrian Netherlands, in addition to client states. -
On June 24, 1812, the Grande Armée, led by French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, crossed the Neman River, invading Russia from present-day Poland. The result was a disaster for the French. The Russian army refused to engage with Napoleon's Grande Armée of more than 500,000 European troops. -
The Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815 was a series of international diplomatic meetings to discuss and agree upon a possible new layout of the European political and constitutional order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. -
Following Napoleon's retreat from Russia and the subsequent defeat of his army by the Sixth Coalition at Leipzig (1813), the armies of the Sixth Coalition invaded France and advanced toward Paris, which capitulated -
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on 18 June 1815 between Napoleon's French Army and a coalition led by the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blücher. The decisive battle of its age, it concluded a war that had raged for 23 years, ended French attempts to dominate Europe, and destroyed Napoleon's imperial power forever.