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The Palace of Versailles was the principal residence of the French kings from the time of Louis XIV to Louis XVI -
By moving his court and government to Versailles, Louis XIV hoped to extract more control of the government from the nobility and to distance himself from the population of Paris. -
A marriage between the two royal houses had been planned since the early 1760's, but only came about in 1770. -
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 -
When revolutionary insurgents attempted to storm and seize control of the medieval armoury, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille -
A period of major social upheaval, It sought to completely change the relationship between the rulers and those they governed and to redefine the nature of political power -
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen came into existence in the summer of 1789, born of an idea of the Constituent Assembly, which was formed by the assembly of the Estates General to draft a new Constitution, and precede it with a declaration of principles -
The Women's March on Versailles was a riot that took place during this first stage of the French Revolution -
Louis XVI died at the guillotine on 21 January 1793. He was the last king to live at the Palace of Versailles, and the revolutionaries duly gave him the nickname “Louis the Last” -
A period of state-sanctioned violence and mass executions during the French Revolution -
A bloodless coup d'état in France that overthrew the government of the French Directory and replaced it with the French Consulate -
The civil code gave post-revolutionary France its first coherent set of laws concerning property, colonial affairs, the family and individual rights -
Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most successful generals of the French revolutionary armies. He was emperor of France -
According to legend, during the coronation he snatched the crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and crowned himself, thus displaying his rejection of the authority of the Pontiff -
Napoleon's army eventually reached a Moscow abandoned and destroyed by the Russian army based on the scorched-earth policy -
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 -
They exiled him to the Mediterranean island of Elba and restored the Bourbons to power