The French Revolution & Napoleon

The 14th of July

Believing the king is preparing a military coup after the dismissal of Necker, Parisians rise. After looting muskets from the Invalides, a crowd marches on the Bastille for its store of powder. The governor de Launay is overpowered and killed, his head paraded on a pike.

The medieval fortress held only seven prisoners — four forgers, two madmen, an aristocratic libertine — but it was the symbol of arbitrary detention by lettre de cachet. The next day Louis XVI noted in his hunting diary the single word: 'rien'. The duc de La Rochefoucauld is said to have corrected him: 'Sire, this is not a revolt — it is a revolution.' Bailly was made mayor of Paris and Lafayette commander of the new National Guard.

Abolition of feudalism and the Declaration of Rights

On the night of 4 August, in an emotional session of the National Assembly, nobles and clergy surrender their seigneurial dues, tithes, hunting rights, venal offices, and provincial privileges. Three weeks later, on 26 August, the Assembly adopts the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The seventeen articles drafted under the eyes of Mirabeau and Lafayette — 'men are born and remain free and equal in rights' — were the founding statement of modern liberalism. Translated into every European language within the year, they would shape constitutional thought from Naples to Caracas. The Ancien Régime, in feudal law, ceased to exist that summer.

The women bring the king to Paris

On 5 October, six thousand market-women march twelve miles to Versailles in the rain demanding bread. They invade the palace, kill two royal guards, and force Louis XVI to return with them to the Tuileries. The Assembly follows. King, queen, and government are now hostages in Paris.

Fête de la Fédération and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy

On the first anniversary of the Bastille, three hundred thousand Parisians and federated National Guardsmen gather on the Champ de Mars; Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun, says mass and the king swears to the constitution. Two days earlier, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had subordinated the French Church to the state.

The Constitution required every parish priest and bishop to take an oath to it. Half the clergy refused — the 'refractory' priests would become a permanent fifth column of counter-revolution, particularly in the Vendée and Brittany. The papal condemnation in March 1791 broke the brief honeymoon of revolution and church; the next two centuries of French laïcité begin here.

The king is arrested at the post-house of Varennes

On the night of 20-21 June, Louis XVI, the queen, and the royal children flee Paris in a heavy berline for the loyalist border armies. Recognised at Sainte-Menehould by the postmaster Drouet, they are detained at Varennes and brought back to Paris in disgrace. The fiction of a constitutional monarchy is mortally wounded.

The 'Champ de Mars massacre' of 17 July — when Lafayette's National Guard fired on a republican crowd demanding the king's deposition — split the patriot party. The new Constitution of September 1791, the first written French constitution, was law on paper; in fact, the country was already moving toward republic.

France declares war on Austria

Pushed by the Girondins and by the king (who hopes for foreign rescue), the Legislative Assembly votes war against the king of Hungary and Bohemia. Prussia joins Austria within weeks. The Brunswick Manifesto of July threatens 'exemplary vengeance' on Paris if any harm comes to the king. It detonates the city.

10 August: the Tuileries are stormed

Insurgent sections of Paris and federated National Guards from Marseille — singing a war song newly composed by Rouget de Lisle, now called La Marseillaise — storm the Tuileries. The Swiss Guard is massacred to the last man. The king and his family flee to the Assembly, which suspends the monarchy and orders their imprisonment in the Temple.

September massacres, Valmy, and the proclamation of the Republic

Between 2 and 6 September, Parisian sans-culottes drag suspected counter-revolutionaries from the city prisons and butcher some twelve hundred. On 20 September, the French army under Dumouriez and Kellermann holds the Prussians at Valmy in a cannonade. On the 21st, the new National Convention abolishes the monarchy and proclaims the French Republic.

Goethe, watching with the duke of Weimar from the Prussian camp, said that evening: 'from this place and from this day forth begins a new epoch in the history of the world, and you can all say you were present at its birth.' He was not exaggerating. The Republic dated its acts from Year I and would soon mint the first secular calendar in Western history.

Louis XVI executed on the Place de la Révolution

After a five-week trial and a roll-call vote in which a bare majority of the Convention chose death without appeal, the king — now called Citizen Louis Capet — is guillotined on what is now the Place de la Concorde on 21 January. He is forty years old. Within weeks war is declared on Britain and the Dutch Republic.

The Vendée rises; the Committee of Public Safety is born

Mass conscription provokes a Catholic and royalist rising in the Vendée and along the lower Loire under noble and peasant leaders — La Rochejaquelein, Cathelineau, Charette. The Convention responds by creating, on 6 April, the Committee of Public Safety: nine, then twelve, men with emergency authority over the war and the state.

The Mountain purges the Convention

On 2 June, surrounded by eighty thousand National Guards under Hanriot, the Convention votes the arrest of twenty-nine Girondin deputies. The Mountain — Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, Marat, Danton — rules. In the provinces a 'federalist' revolt breaks out from Lyon to Toulon.

Charlotte Corday stabs Marat in his bath

On 13 July a young Girondin sympathiser from Caen, Charlotte Corday, is admitted to Marat's apartment on the pretext of denouncing fugitive deputies and stabs the journalist of L'Ami du peuple to death in his medicinal bath. She is guillotined four days later. David's painting will turn the demagogue into a republican saint.

The Law of Suspects

On 17 September the Convention passes the Law of Suspects, authorising the arrest of anyone who 'by their conduct, their connections, their utterances, or their writings have shown themselves partisans of tyranny'. The Reign of Terror, formally placed à l'ordre du jour on 5 September, is law.

By July 1794 the revolutionary tribunals would condemn some seventeen thousand people to death and accumulate three hundred thousand suspects in the prisons; perhaps as many would die without trial in the Vendée and the federalist cities — at Lyon, demolished in part as a punishment, and at Nantes, where Carrier drowned thousands of prisoners in the Loire. The Levée en masse of August had meanwhile put fourteen armies in the field.

Marie-Antoinette and the Girondins go to the guillotine

On 16 October the widow Capet, broken by the Temple prison and the Conciergerie, mounts the scaffold; David sketches her in the tumbril. Two weeks later twenty-one Girondin deputies — Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné — sing the Marseillaise on the carts to their execution. The Republic of Virtue is devouring its founders.

Hébertists and Dantonists fall

In March Robespierre destroys the radical Hébertists of the Paris Commune; on 5 April he sends to the guillotine his own former ally Danton, along with Camille Desmoulins and the Indulgents who had called for an end to the Terror. With the foreign armies driven back, only Robespierre is left.

9 Thermidor: the fall of Robespierre

On 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July), surrounded enemies in the Convention shout him down. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, and twenty of their followers are arrested. The Commune of Paris fails to rescue them. The next day, his jaw shattered by a pistol-ball, Robespierre is guillotined with twenty-one comrades on the Place de la Révolution.

Thermidor closed the Jacobin republic. The Convention dismantled the apparatus of terror: the Committee of Public Safety reduced, the revolutionary tribunal abolished, the maximum on prices repealed. The 'gilded youth' beat the last Jacobins in the streets of Paris; the Constitution of Year III established a five-man Directory. The Revolution would consume one more cycle of governments before a soldier ended it.

A whiff of grapeshot

On 13 Vendémiaire (5 October), a royalist insurrection of the Paris sections is broken up on the steps of Saint-Roch by a young brigadier named Napoleone Buonaparte, firing canister into the crowd. The Directory takes office a few weeks later; the brigadier is rewarded with command of the Army of the Interior, and a Creole widow, Joséphine de Beauharnais.

Bonaparte takes command of the Army of Italy

The twenty-six-year-old general arrives at Nice and takes over a ragged, unpaid army of thirty-eight thousand. Within fourteen months he separates the Austrians and Piedmontese, wins fourteen pitched battles — Montenotte, Lodi, Castiglione, Arcole, Rivoli — and dictates terms in Italy in defiance of his own government.

Bonaparte dictates peace to Austria

Without consulting the Directory, Bonaparte signs the Treaty of Campo Formio with Austria. France keeps the Austrian Netherlands and the left bank of the Rhine; Venice is wiped off the map after a thousand years of independence and divided with Austria. The First Coalition is broken.

Battle of the Pyramids

Landed in Egypt with thirty-five thousand men and one hundred and sixty-seven savants — to strike at British India — Bonaparte destroys the Mamluk cavalry of Murad Bey within sight of the pyramids. 'Soldiers, forty centuries look down upon you from these monuments,' he is supposed to have said.

Nelson destroys the French fleet at Aboukir

On the night of 1-2 August, Nelson catches the French fleet of Admiral Brueys at anchor in Aboukir Bay and destroys eleven of its thirteen ships of the line. Bonaparte's army is stranded in Egypt; the Second Coalition forms; the Mediterranean is British.

Bonaparte overthrows the Directory

Slipped past the British blockade, Bonaparte joins the conspirators Sieyès and Talleyrand. On 18-19 Brumaire (9-10 November), with bayonets at Saint-Cloud and the dexterity of his brother Lucien, president of the Five Hundred, he scatters the legislative councils and is proclaimed First Consul of the new Consulate.

The Constitution of Year VIII, plebiscited in December, gave the First Consul a ten-year term and the substance of all executive power. The Revolution, in Bonaparte's phrase, was 'fixed to the principles which began it; it is ended.' For the next fifteen years, the history of France would be the history of one man.

Bonaparte saves Italy at Marengo

Having crossed the Great St Bernard Pass in May, the First Consul faces General Melas's Austrians at Marengo in Piedmont. The battle is being lost when Desaix arrives with reinforcements and dies in the charge that wins it. Italy is again French.

Bonaparte reconciles with Rome

A Concordat with Pope Pius VII recognises Catholicism as 'the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen'. The state will pay the clergy, who in turn must swear loyalty to it. The schism with the refractory Church of the Revolution is closed.

France and Britain make peace

The Treaty of Amiens ends a decade of war and gives Europe its first general peace since 1792. Britain returns nearly all her conquests; France keeps the natural frontiers. In August a plebiscite makes Bonaparte Consul for Life. The breathing-space will last fourteen months.

The Code Civil and the execution of the duc d'Enghien

On 21 March, the Code Civil is promulgated: a single, secular, written civil law for all Frenchmen, the most enduring legacy of the Revolution. The same day Bonaparte's police execute the abducted Bourbon prince the duc d'Enghien in the moats of Vincennes — a crime, as Talleyrand observed, that was 'worse than a crime, it was a blunder'.

Napoleon crowns himself emperor at Notre-Dame

On 2 December, in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris before Pope Pius VII (brought up from Rome for the occasion), Napoleon Bonaparte places the laurel crown on his own head and then crowns Joséphine. The Empire is proclaimed. David's twenty-foot canvas would record the scene for the Louvre.

Nelson dies; Britain rules the waves

Off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October, Vice-Admiral Nelson with twenty-seven ships destroys Villeneuve's combined Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three. France loses twenty-two ships of the line; Nelson dies on the quarterdeck of the Victory. The invasion of England is over before it began.

The Battle of the Three Emperors

On 2 December, the anniversary of his coronation, Napoleon destroys the joint armies of the emperors Francis II of Austria and Alexander I of Russia in the Moravian fog at Austerlitz. The Treaty of Pressburg dissolves the Holy Roman Empire within the year; Napoleon is master of central Europe.

Jena and Auerstedt; the Continental System

On 14 October, in twin battles at Jena and Auerstedt, Napoleon and Davout annihilate the Prussian army of Frederick the Great's heirs. Berlin falls. From the Prussian capital on 21 November, Napoleon decrees the Continental System closing Europe to British trade.

Napoleon meets Alexander on the Niemen

After Friedland, the two emperors meet on a raft anchored in the river Niemen at Tilsit on 25 June and divide Europe. Russia joins the Continental System; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw is created from Prussia; Napoleon is at the height of his power.

Dos de Mayo and the Bayonne abdications

After luring the Spanish Bourbons to Bayonne and forcing their abdication in favour of his brother Joseph, Napoleon faces the rising of 2 May in Madrid — immortalised by Goya — and a national insurrection across Spain. The Peninsular War he calls his 'ulcer' will run for six years.

Austria humbled again

On 5-6 July, after a tactical defeat at Aspern-Essling, Napoleon defeats the Archduke Charles in the costliest battle of his career on the Marchfeld east of Vienna. The Treaty of Schönbrunn strips Austria of three and a half million subjects; in April 1810 Napoleon marries the emperor's daughter Marie-Louise.

The Grande Armée crosses the Niemen

On 24 June six hundred and eighty thousand soldiers of the Grande Armée — half of them Germans, Poles, Italians, Dutchmen, and others under twenty languages of command — cross the Niemen into Russia. It is the largest army Europe has ever assembled. Behind them lies an empire of vassal kings; ahead, a Russian summer.

Borodino and the burning of Moscow

On 7 September, at Borodino seventy miles west of Moscow, Napoleon wins his bloodiest battle: seventy thousand casualties in a single day. A week later he enters Moscow, abandoned and on fire. He waits five weeks for Alexander to sue for peace. No envoy comes.

The Grande Armée dies in the snow

Beginning the retreat on 18 October, the Grande Armée is harried by Cossacks, starved, and frozen. The crossing of the Berezina in late November becomes a byword for catastrophe; Marshal Ney is the last man over the bridges. Of six hundred thousand who crossed the Niemen, perhaps thirty thousand recross it.

Napoleon left the army at Smorgoni on 5 December and raced across Europe to reach Paris on the 18th, in time to suppress a coup attempt by General Malet. Charles Joseph Minard's later diagram of the campaign — the thin black line of the retreating army shrinking against the temperature graph — would become the single most haunting infographic in modern history.

Leipzig: Napoleon defeated by all Europe

From 16 to 19 October at Leipzig, the joined armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden — half a million men in all — beat the two hundred thousand Napoleon can still field. He retreats to the Rhine, abandoning Germany. Holland and the satellite kingdoms fall away within months.

Fontainebleau, Elba, and the Bourbon Restoration

Allied armies enter Paris on 31 March. On 6 April, abandoned by his marshals, Napoleon abdicates at Fontainebleau and is granted sovereignty over the tiny island of Elba. Louis XVIII — long an exile in England — returns to Paris in a carriage of the regent; the Bourbon flag flies again over the Tuileries.

Napoleon lands at Golfe-Juan and marches on Paris

On 1 March, with eleven hundred guards, Napoleon lands from Elba on the Mediterranean coast. The army sent to arrest him at Grenoble joins him instead — 'le voilà!' — and within twenty days he is at the Tuileries; Louis XVIII has fled to Ghent. The Hundred Days have begun.

Wellington and Blücher break the Empire

On 18 June, in a square mile of Belgian rye south of Brussels, Wellington's Anglo-Allied army holds out from morning to evening against Napoleon's Armée du Nord. The arrival of Blücher's Prussians on the right flank completes the rout. Napoleon flees the field; the Empire dies on the slope of the Belle Alliance.

Napoleon abdicated a second time on 22 June, surrendered on the British man-of-war Bellerophon at Rochefort on 15 July, and was packed off to the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died of stomach cancer on 5 May 1821. The Congress of Vienna, working through the spring, had already redrawn the map of Europe to last a hundred years. The Revolution and Napoleon had unmade the old order and bequeathed to the nineteenth century the modern state — codified law, conscript army, secular administration, careers open to talent — and a memory that would shape French politics until the Third Republic.