The French Revolution

The French Revolution began in 1789 with the meeting of the States General in May. On July 14 of that same year, the Bastille was stormed: in October, Louis XVI and the Royal Family were removed from Versailles to Paris. The King attempted, unsuccessfully, to flee Paris for Varennes in June 1791. A Legislative Assembly sat from October 1791 until September 1792, when, in the face of the advance of the allied armies of Austria, Holland, Prussia, and Sardinia, it was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the Republic. The King was brought to trial in December of 1792, and executed on January 21, 1793. In January of 1793 the revolutionary government declared war on Britain, a war for world dominion which had been carried on, with short intermissions, since the beginning of the reign of William and Mary, and which would continue for another twenty-two years.... Read more on The Victorianweb

The French RevolutionThe Ideology of the French RevolutionCulturally, the French Revolution provided the world with its first meaningful experience with political ideology. The word, and the concept it expressed, were revolutionary in origin. Indeed, it was Napoleon, a man who had no truck with idle thought, who called the intellectual system-makers of the late eighteenth century ideologues, abstractionists, or, as we have heard in recent years, "eggheads." The father of the DuPont who founded the famous American chemical company was called an ideologue by Napoleon. And this Pierre-Samuel DuPont de Nemours (1739-1817) spent half a lifetime drawing up constitutions, writing letters, while also finding time to offer a learned paper to the American Philosophical Society on the language of ants, and to inform his son that gout was the disease of the intellectual. Read more on Britannia