French Revolution

A revolution rarely begins as a demand to abolish a monarchy outright. More often it begins as a narrower demand the existing order cannot survive meeting, and the French Revolution is the clearest instance of that pattern in modern political history: a king summoned a representative body to solve a debt crisis, and the body he convened ended up dissolving the absolute monarchy that had convened it.

Louis XVI called the Estates General in May 1789 to approve new taxes after decades of war debt and a failing harvest had exhausted royal finances. Its Third Estate, representing commoners, broke away within weeks and declared itself the National Assembly, claiming the authority to write France a constitution. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 announced that royal power in Paris had broken, and that August the Assembly abolished feudal privilege outright and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, asserting liberty, equality and popular sovereignty as the basis of legitimate government rather than royal descent. The Revolution radicalised through the Terror of 1793 and 1794, cycled through the Directory, and ended in 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power, but the principles the Assembly had proclaimed a decade earlier outlived every government that followed.

Unlike the American Revolution fought the same generation, France's revolution did not separate a colony from a distant government; it overturned an existing order from within, rewriting who was sovereign rather than where a border sat. The Declaration of the Rights of Man became a reference point for constitutional movements well beyond France, cited by reformers and nationalists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whenever a movement needed to argue that governing authority rests on the people rather than on inherited title.