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Estates-General
The suggestion to summon the Estates General came from the Assembly of Notables installed by the king on 22 February 1787. It had not met since 1614. The usual business of registering the king's edicts as law was performed by the Parlement of Paris. In this year it was refusing to cooperate with Charles Alexandre de Calonne's program of badly needed financial reform, due to the special interests of its noble members. Calonne was the Controller-General of Finances, appointed by the king to addres -
storming of the battle
This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed. -
DEclaration of the rights of men
The last article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was adopted on 26 August 1789 by the National Constituent Assembly, during the period of the French Revolution, as the first step toward writing a constitution for France. -
Flight to Varennes
June 1791 was a significant episode in the French Revolution in which King Louis XVI of France, his queen Marie Antoinette, and their immediate family attempted unsuccessfully to escape from Paris in order to initiate a counter-revolution at the head of loyal troops under royalist officers concentrated at Montmédy near the frontier. They escaped only as far as the small town of Varennes, where they were arrested after having been recognized at their previous stop in Sainte-Menehould. -
french constitution
A twelve-member Constitutional Committee was convened on 14 July 1789 (coincidentally the day of the Storming of the Bastille). Its task was to do much of the drafting of the articles of the constitution. It included originally two members from the First Estate, (Champion de Cicé, Archbishop of Bordeaux and Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun); two from the Second (the comte de Clermont-Tonnerre and the marquis de Lally-Tollendal); and four from the Third (Jean Joseph Mounier, Abbé Sieyès, Nicholas Berg -
French revolution
The Insurrection of 10 August 1792 was one of the defining events in the history of the French Revolution. -
king louis xvi executed
The next January, Louis was convicted and condemned to death by a narrow majority. On January 21, he walked steadfastly to the guillotine and was executed. Nine months later, Marie Antoinette was convicted of treason by a tribunal, and on October 16 she followed her husband to the guillotine -
law of suspect
With the Law of Suspects, anyone at all was deemed suspicious "who, by their conduct or their relationships, either by their words or writings, have been partisans of tyranny or federalism and enemies of freedom, those whose [actions] cannot justify, in the manner prescribed by the decree of 21 March, their financial means and remunerations from their civic duties; those to whom have been denied citizenship certificates, removed by public officials or suspended from their functions by the Nation -
The queen defense
On October 14th, 1793, I happened to be in the country when I received the news that I had been named with M. Tronson Ducoudray to defend the Queen before the revolutionary tribunal, and that the trial was to start on the following morning at eight o'clock.I immediately set out for the prison filled with a sense of the sacred duty which had been imposed on me, mingled with an intense feeling of bitterness.The Conciergerie, as is well known, is the prison in which are confined persons due to -
Proclamation
Whereas such unwarrantable measures, being contrary to the laws of nations and to the duties incumbent on every citizen of the United States, tend to disturb the tranquillity of the same, and to involve them in the calamities of war; and
Whereas it is the duty of the Executive to take care that such criminal proceedings should be suppressed, the offenders brought to justice, and all good citizens cautioned against measures likely to prove so pernicious to their country and themselves, should th
