*In the 1700s as many nations began to modernise, France was still ruled by the Ancien Regime (or old order).  The king was at the top and at the centre of government, with the royal court at Versailles alone accounting for a significant percentage of the government budget and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette enjoying a life of lavish and conspicuous consumption.  The nobility, although not as powerful as they had been before the time of Louis XIV, still controlled about 95% of the wealth of France (despite making up, perhaps, 4% of the population).  The church, although not as prestigious as it had been in the middle ages, still owned about 10% of the land in France, and was quite wealthy.  The 90-95% of the population that remained ranged from poor farmers to a rising middle class, but they bore the bulk of the nation's tax burden.

*By the 1780s, France was in trouble.  The wars of the 1600s and 1700s, especially the recent Seven Years' War and the Wars of the American Revolution had left France deep in debt (between a third and half the budget now went to debt payments) and, for the most part, these wars gained very little land or power for France.  French involvement in the American Revolution had also caused many Frenchmen to question their system of government.

*France also had few ways to raise new money.  The nobility paid some taxes, but were exempt from others, and the church not only did not have to pay taxes, it collected a tithe of its own.  Colbert's policies had done a great deal for France in the 1600s, but by the last 1700s, something new was needed and could not easily be found, as the common people of France were already crushed by the taxes they paid.

*One man who tried to solve these problems was Jacques Necker, who was director-general of the finances between 1776 and 1781.  He tried to even out the tax burden more fairly, encourage trade within France, and attempted to modernise system of government loans.  He also encouraged the royal family to cut down on expenditures, which annoyed Marie Antoinette, and suggested taxing the nobility and clergy, which ultimately led to his dismissal.  Afterwards, he published the Compte redu du roi, or account of the king, to describe national finances (although in ways that made him seem more successful than he had been) for public edification.  This ultimately contributed to public bitterness against the government.  In 1788 Necker would be called back to run France's finances again, but it would be too late.

*In 1787, the King convened an Assembly of Notables, with high nobility, important church leaders, and even wealthy members of the middle class attending.  The hope was that they would be willing to accept taxes on the nobility and church, but despite a growing desire for reform, the church and the nobility (particularly the 'little sparrows,' poor nobles (but holders of noble titles nonetheless) who wanted to keep the traditional rights that were all they had) were not willing to give up their privileges.  The one thing they did do was say that a meeting of the Estates-General could approve new taxes—something it had not done before (it had only advised kings in the past).

*In fact, the Estates-General had not done anything for a long time—they had not been called for 175 years (since 1614).  However, as much as possible, the 1614 forms were followed.

*Many of the people wanted serious reform, even some members of the First and Second estates, like the Abbe Sieyes, a member of the clergy, who wrote a pamphlet entitled 'What is the Third Estate?'  "What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To be something."  Many of the representatives of the third estate who attend the Estates-General wanted to be something—after all, about half were lawyers and most of the rest were merchants and professionals, and all were elected as delegates by property-owning men (the only ones who could vote).

*The Estates-General met with great celebration, but with tensions, too.  The First and Second estates were lavishly dressed and came in the main entrance; the Third Estate was dressed in black, required to go bare-headed, and came in the side door.  Furthermore, each Estate got on vote each, meaning that the Third Estate, representing at least 90% of the population could be outvoted by the other two estates.

*Frustrated, members of the Third Estate (with some members of the nobility and the clergy) met as a new organisation, the National Assembly.  They wanted a constitution and elimination of noble privileges.  King Louis XVI ordered the building where they were meeting locked up, so they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and agreed to the Tennis Court Oath, refusing to disband until they had gotten a constitution.  When the majority of the clergy and 47 nobles had joined them, the King had to pay attention, and recognised the National Constituent Assembly.

*Shortly afterwards, the common people of Paris too matters into their own hands.  Jacques Necker (seen as a hero of the people) had again been dismissed as director-general of finances, partly for trying to drastically cut the royal family's budget, there were famines in the countryside and bread shortages (and price increases—from 8 to 15 sous) in the city, and the King had sent the army to Paris to keep order, although it turned out that the Royal French Guard would support the people against the government when the time came. 

*Fearing that Necker's dismissal and the dispatch of troops to Paris indicated an attempt to crush the reform movement, the people of Paris rioted with the support of the French Guard.  On 14 July 1789, they surrounded the Bastille, and ancient fortress that held political prisoners (although only 7 at the moment) along with guns and powder.  When the guards fired on the crows, they stormed the Bastille, freed the prisoners, killed the commander, murdered the mayor of Paris, and soon raised a new flag over France, the Tricolor.  The Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution and friend of the people, was placed in command of the National Guard, a volunteer force of the common people.  The storming of the Bastille is often seen as the symbolic beginning of the French Revolution.

*The countryside was gripped by the Great Fear, as food shortages and political instability led to uprisings as deeds were burnt, taxes went unpaid, and even the chateaux of nobles were destroyed.

*On 4 August 1789, the National Constituent Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man.  Among other things, it abolished the special rights of the nobility—soon people would not even address them as 'my lord,' but everyone would be called Citizen.  Many nobles fled the country.  Soon the National Constituent Assembly was drafting a constitution that would have a single legislative body and in which the king would only have a suspensive veto—delaying but not preventing the passage of laws.  Eventually all tax-paying men of 25 or older could vote in the constitutional monarchy the Assembly sought to create.

*The King was reluctant to go along with this, but the country slipped farther into chaos.  On 5 October, 7,000 women of Paris marched on Versailles (with cannon and other weapons) demanding bread and insisting on seeing the king.  20,000 guardsmen under Lafayette arrived to keep order, and Lafayette convinced the king to give in and move to Paris to be with his people.  Crowds cheered for the king, who wore the triclour cockade in his hat, but for the next three years he and his family were practically prisoners in their palace in Paris.

*In December 1789, the Assembly took over the property of the Church to help the nation's financial troubles (and issued paper money backed by confiscated property), and in 1790, passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, making all church officials government employees.  Many clergy refused to sign and walked out (although others went along with it).  Soon there was violence against priests, and over the next few years, the Church would lose more and more power to the government, Church laws would be replaced (divorce would be legalised in 1792), and eventually all churches would even be closed down and replaced with a Cult of Reason.  This was one of many things that led to splits within the Revolution and revolts against it, such as the Vendee, a revolt by peasants, clergy, and lesser nobility against efforts to crush the church (the Vendee, of course, was crushed instead).

*Besides noble and clerical opposition to the Revolution (and increased opposition to it from other European monarchies), the Assembly also divided into three groups:  the Feulliants (monarchists), Girondists (liberal republicans), and Jacobins (radicals).  It is said that the most conservative members of the Assembly sat on the right-hand side of the chamber, and the most liberal on the left, thus forming the basis of left-right nomenclature in politics.  Outside the Assembly, poorer revolutionary members of the Third Estate were known as sans-culotes because they did not wear the fashionable knee-breeches of the aristocracy.  Everyone, even the King, was under great pressure to wear the Tricolour cockade, and even the Phrygian cap—modern fashion may date to this point, when wearing knee-breeches could be deadly.

*Fearing an ever-more radical legislature, the King and his family attempted to flee Paris on 20 June, 1790.  They were recognised and captured, and confined to the Tuileries Palace. 

*In 1791, Austria began to issue vague threats against France if they did not treat their king and his family well (Marie Antoinette was brother to Leopold II of Austria) and French emigre nobles also agitated against France from abroad.  There was particular tension over Alsace, which France had controlled for a century but was within the borders of the Empire.  However, war did not begin until the French Assembly, wanting to make a pre-emptive strike (and, for some, to spread Revolutionary ideas) declared war on Austria (and thus its ally Prussia) in April 1792.  At first the war went badly for France, and the King was blamed.

*In August, mobs stormed the Tuileries Palace and took the king and his family hostage.  A third of the Assembly, mostly Jacobins, met and declared the monarchy suspended, and later abolished it.  21 September 1792 later became the first day of the Year One of the French Republic as the new government created a new calendar with twelve months of three ten day weeks (and five sans-culottieds at the end of the year) and no Sunday or other religious holidays allowed.

*When the Austrian and Prussian government issued threatening statements against the French Republic, King Louis was accused of conspiring with them, and thereby found guilty of treason.  By a narrow margin, Louis was condemned to death and beheaded on 21 January 1793.  Marie Antoinette followed him in October.  They, and thousands more, were executed with a revolutionary, rational, efficient, clean, humane killing machine, the guillotine.

*As the war continued to go badly (among other things, Britain, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands joined the war against France) and food prices rose, the sans-culottes still wanted to riot, and the factions within the French Republic continued to fight.  In the summer of 1793 the sans-culottes overthrew the Girondists and placed all power in the hands of the Jacobins, who soon consolidated it in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety under Maximilien Robespierre, called 'the Incorruptible.'  This was the beginning of the Reign of Terror.

*The Reign of Terror was simply the Age of Reason taken to its utmost extreme.  Robespierre meant to create a Republic of Virtue, so anyone who was not yet virtuous must be forced to be so.   Robespierre said that goodness without terror is helpless, and he had plenty of terror to go around.  Thousands (perhaps up to 40,000) were executed (mostly by guillotine) or just beaten to death by mobs.  Laws were changed to allow execution on even the flimsiest of evidence of treason, conspiracy, or sedition.  Although the Reign of Terror initially targeted the nobility, the clergy, and some wealthy members of the middle class, it eventually touched everyone and, in fact, 31% of its victims were sans-culottes, 28% were peasants, 11% were lower middle class, 14% upper middle class, and only 8% were nobility and 7% were clergy.  Beheading became so popular that heads were knocked off of statues.

*To defend France from the Coalition, the Committee of Safety instituted the Levee en Masse, nation-wide conscription to fight the enemies of the Republic, and this created a new kind of army—one fighting for its fatherland, called in France the patrie—hence the world patriotism.  These armies were very successful, threw back the armies of the Coalition, and began spreading liberty to neighbouring countries—by force.

*By the summer of 1794, however, everyone was tired of the Reign of Terror.  In the Revolutionary month of Thermidor (late July) Robespierre was overthrown and executed by a combination of radicals who wanted to go even further than Robespierre and conservatives who wanted to slow down the revolution (a few were even secretly monarchists).  This is known as the Thermidorean reaction, and afterwards, the Jacobins would have little power.  Some Parisians rebelled against this, but were put down by the military, including a young officer of artillery named Napoleon Bonaparte, who gave the mobs a whiff of grapeshot.

*The Committee of Safety would be followed by the Directory, a bicameral legislature.  There were 500 members of the Council of Five Hundred and 250 in the Council of Elders.  The Council of Elders then chose five Directors from a list proposed by the Council of Five Hundred.  The directorate wanted peace and toleration, but was faced with war and debt, as well as distrust from the public.  It often rigged elections, and sometimes still lost the elections that it tried to rig.

*Eventually, the only successful parts of the French Republic were its army, which conquered parts of neighbouring countries, and its nationalism, as people developed a love of France and of being French—but just as the French Republic tried to spread Republicanism, it also spread nationalism, as nations began to define new identities for themselves in opposition to the French.