French Revolution

The French Revolution began in 1789 amid fiscal crisis, food shortages, and resentment of the privileges of the clergy and nobility under the Ancien Régime. King Louis XVI convened the Estates-General in May 1789 for the first time since 1614; deadlock over voting procedure led the Third Estate to declare itself the National Assembly on 17 June 1789, followed by the Tennis Court Oath three days later. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 became the revolution's iconic moment and is now France's national day.

Key developments included the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 1789), the abolition of feudal privileges, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), and the Constitution of 1791, which established a constitutional monarchy. War with Austria and Prussia began in April 1792; the monarchy was abolished in September 1792 and the First Republic proclaimed. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793 and Marie Antoinette in October 1793.

The Reign of Terror (1793–1794), associated with Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, saw mass executions before Robespierre himself was guillotined in July 1794 (Thermidorian Reaction). The Directory governed from 1795 until Napoleon Bonaparte's coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799), conventionally treated as the revolution's endpoint.

For IR and political-theory students, the revolution matters as a foundational event for modern concepts of popular sovereignty, citizenship, nationalism, and secularism (laïcité). It also catalysed the Napoleonic Wars and the conservative reaction codified at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815). Its slogan, liberté, égalité, fraternité, remains the official motto of the French Republic, and its legal legacy survives in the Napoleonic Code (1804), which influenced civil-law systems across Europe and Latin America.