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During the French Revolution, the National Assembly, which existed from 17 June 1789 to 9 July 1789, was a revolutionary assembly formed by the representatives of the Third Estate of the Estates-General; thereafter, it was known as the National Constituent Assembly, though popularly the shorter form persisted.
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The National Convention was a parliament of the French Revolution, following the two-year National Constituent Assembly and the one-year Legislative Assembly. Created after the great insurrection of 10 August 1792, it was the first French government organized as a republic, abandoning the monarchy altogether. The Convention sat as a single-chamber assembly from 20 September 1792 to 26 October 1795.
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The directory was the governing five-member committee in the French First Republic from 2 November 1795 until 9 November 1799, when it was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in the Coup of 18 Brumaire and replaced by the Consulate. It gave its name to the final four years of the French Revolution. Mainstream historiography also uses the term in reference to the period from the dissolution of the National Convention on 26 October 1795 to Napoleon's coup d’état.
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The consulate was the top-level Government of France from the fall of the Directory in the coup of Brumaire on 10 November 1799 until the start of the Napoleonic Empire on 18 May 1804. By extension, the term The Consulate also refers to this period of French history.
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Napoleon Bonaparte was a French statesman and military leader who led many successful campaigns during the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars, and was Emperor of the French from 1804 until 1814 and again briefly in 1815 during the Hundred Days. Napoleon dominated European and global affairs for more than a decade while leading France against a series of coalitions during the Napoleonic Wars.
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Louis XVIII king of France by title from 1795 and in fact from 1814 to 1824, except for the interruption of the Hundred Days, during which Napoleon attempted to recapture his empire and Charles X king of France from 1824 to 1830. His reign dramatized the failure of the Bourbons, after their restoration, to reconcile the tradition of the monarchy by divine right with the democratic spirit produced in the wake of the French Revolution.