From the Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille through the Declaration of Rights, the fall of the monarchy and the Terror, Thermidor and the Directory, Bonaparte's rise from Vendémiaire and the Italian campaign to 18 Brumaire and the Empire, the coronation and the wars of the Grande Armée from Austerlitz to Moscow, to the Hundred Days and Waterloo. Slide month by month through the years that made and unmade modern Europe.
Locked out of their meeting hall at Versailles on 20 June, the deputies of the Third Estate — now styling themselves the National Assembly — swear in the indoor tennis court not to disband until they have given France a constitution.
From the Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille through the Declaration of Rights, the fall of the monarchy and the Terror, Thermidor and the Directory, Bonaparte's rise from Vendémiaire and the Italian campaign to 18 Brumaire and the Empire, the coronation and the wars of the Grande Armée from Austerlitz to Moscow, to the Hundred Days and Waterloo. Slide month by month through the years that made and unmade modern Europe.
Locked out of their meeting hall at Versailles on 20 June, the deputies of the Third Estate — now styling themselves the National Assembly — swear in the indoor tennis court not to disband until they have given France a constitution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.