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| Controller general of finance. He suggested that, among other things, France begin taxing the previously exempt nobility. |
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| Louis XVI decided in 1789 to convene the Estates-General, an ancient assembly consisting of three different estates that each represented a portion of the French population. |
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consisting of the general French public—was many times larger than either of the first two.
Realizing that its numbers gave it an automatic advantage, the Third Estate declared itself the sovereign National Assembly |
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| National Assembly's members swore that they would not relent in their efforts until a new constitution had been agreed upon. |
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| The Storming of the Bastille |
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| In Paris, citizens stormed the city’s largest prison, the Bastille, in pursuit of arms. In the countryside, peasants and farmers revolted against their feudal contracts by attacking the manors and estates of their landlords. |
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| freed those peasants from their oppressive contracts. |
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| The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen |
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| The National Assembly the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which established a proper judicial code and the autonomy of the French people. |
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| Issued bythe Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and Frederick William II of Prussia. It declared the joint support of the Holy Roman Empire and of Prussia for King Louis XVI of France against the French Revolution. Called on European powers to intervene if Louis was threatened. |
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| First acts of the newly named National Convention: |
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| The abolition of the monarchy and the declaration of France as a republic. The convention tried and executed Louis XVI on the grounds of treason. |
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| The era following the ousting of Robespierre :a period of governmental restructuring began, leading to the new Constitution of 1795 and a significantly more conservative National Convention |
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| To control executive responsibilities and appointments, a group known as the Directory was formed. Though it had no legislative abilities, the Directory’s abuse of power soon came to rival that of any of the tyrannous revolutionaries France had faced. |
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| A liberal nobleman who led French forces assisting in the American Revolution. The common people of France revered Lafayette as an idealistic man who was dedicated to liberty and the principles of the Revolution. Although Lafayette organized the National Guard of armed citizens to protect the Revolution from attack by the king, he balked as the Revolution became more radical. |
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| A Swiss-born banker who served as France’s director general of finance in the late 1770s, with high hopes of instituting reform. As it turned out, Necker was able only to propose small efforts at eliminating costly inefficiencies. He did produce a government budget, however, for the first time in French history. |
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| A brilliant political tactician and leader of the radical Jacobins in the National Assembly. As chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre pursued a planned economy and vigorous mobilization for war. He grew increasingly paranoid about counterrevolutionary opposition, however, and during the Reign of Terror of 1793–1794 attempted to silence all enemies of the Revolution in an effort to save France from invasion. After the moderates regained power and the Thermidorian Reaction was under way, they had Robespierre executed on July 28, 1794. |
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| A liberal member of the clergy, supporter of the Third Estate, and author of the fiery 1789 pamphlet “What Is the Third Estate?” Sieyès was one of the primary leaders of the Third Estate’s effort at political and economic reform in France. |
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| Civil Constitution of the Clergy |
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| A document, issued by the National Assembly in July 1790, that broke ties with the Catholic Church and established a national church system in France with a process for the election of regional bishops. The document angered the pope and church officials and turned many French Catholics against the revolutionaries. |
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| Committee of Public Safety |
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| A body, chaired by Maximilien Robespierre, to which the National Convention gave dictatorial powers in April 1793 in an attempt to deal with France’s wars abroad and economic problems at home. |
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| The new French constitution that in 1791 established a constitutional monarchy, or limited monarchy, with all executive power answerable to a legislative assembly. Under the new constitution, King Louis XVI could only temporarily veto legislation passed by the assembly. |
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| Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen |
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| A document, issued by the National Assembly on August 26, 1789, that granted sovereignty to all French people. The declaration, which drew from the ideas of some of the Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers, asserted that liberty is a “natural” and “imprescriptible” right of man and that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” |
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a conference of ambassadors of European states and held in Vienna.
The objective of the Congress was to settle the many issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. |
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| a treaty signed in Paris on 20 November 1815 by the United Kingdom, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. It renewed the alliance first agreed to in 1813 and it modified the aims of the alliance from defeating Napoleon Bonaparte to upholding the settlement following the Napoleonic Wars: with France's admission in 1818, it became the Quintuple Alliance, though British government distaste for the other allies' reactionary policies meant that it lapsed into ineffectiveness after the mid-1820s. |
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| The first modern organized body of law governing France |
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