History UsefulNotes / TheFrenchRevolution

On top of this, a significant contingent of liberal nobles sympathetic to the Third Estate's concerns had won election to the Second Estate, including both the UsefulNotes/MarquisDeLaFayette (a great liberal hero in those days) and the King's cousin Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orléans (a great supporter of liberal causes who had also been a gleeful thorn in the side of the royal ministry during the Assembly of Notables[[note]]By the by, the King and the ministry almost certainly knew how annoying the duke was going to be well ahead of the Assembly of Notables, but unfortunately for them, the Duke held the title "First Prince of the Blood" and as such his right to sit in the Assembly was unchallengeable. See what we mean about how Louis ''wished'' his word was law?[[/note]]). (The Duke of Orleans's love of taking the piss out of his crowned cousin probably informed his liberalism almost as much as actual conviction.) While they were hardly a majority, there were enough liberal nobles that the Second Estate's meetings were not the picture of aristocratic unity the Crown might have hoped them to be. (The Duke of Orléans in particular took joy in being as much of a pest as he had been in the Assembly of Notables.)

On top of this, a significant contingent of liberal nobles sympathetic to the Third Estate's concerns had won election to the Second Estate, including both the UsefulNotes/MarquisDeLaFayette (a great liberal hero in those days) and the King's cousin Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orléans (a great supporter of liberal causes who had also been a gleeful thorn in the side of the royal ministry during the Assembly of Notables[[note]]By the by, the King and the ministry almost certainly knew how annoying the duke was going to be well ahead of the Assembly of Notables, but unfortunately for them, the Duke held the title "First Prince of the Blood" and as such his right to sit in the Assembly was unchallengeable. See what we mean about how Louis ''wished'' he was actually an absolute maonarch?[[/note]]). (The Duke of Orleans's love of taking the piss out of his crowned cousin probably informed his liberalism almost as much as actual conviction.) While they were hardly a majority, there were enough liberal nobles that the Second Estate's meetings were not the picture of aristocratic unity the Crown might have hoped them to be. (The Duke of Orléans in particular took joy in being as much of a pest as he had been in the Assembly of Notables.)

On top of this, a significant contingent of liberal nobles sympathetic to the Third Estate's concerns had won election to the Second Estate, including both the UsefulNotes/MarquisDeLaFayette (a great liberal hero in those days) and the King's cousin Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orléans (a great supporter of liberal causes who had also been a gleeful thorn in the side of the royal ministry during the Assembly of Notables[[note]]By the by, the King and the ministry almost certainly knew how annoying the duke was going to be well ahead of the Assembly, but unfortunately as the First Prince of the Blood, the Duke's right to sit in the Assembly of Notables was unchallengeable. See what we mean about how Louis ''wished'' he was actually an absolute maonarch?[[/note]]). (The Duke of Orleans's love of taking the piss out of his crowned cousin probably informed his liberalism almost as much as actual conviction.) While they were hardly a majority, there were enough liberal nobles that the Second Estate's meetings were not the picture of aristocratic unity the Crown might have hoped them to be. (The Duke of Orléans in particular took joy in being as much of a pest as he had been in the Assembly of Notables.)

On top of this, a significant contingent of liberal nobles sympathetic to the Third Estate's concerns had won election to the Second Estate, including both the UsefulNotes/MarquisDeLaFayette (a great liberal hero in those days) and the King's cousin Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orléans (a great supporter of liberal causes who had also been a gleeful thorn in the side of the royal ministry during the Assembly of Notables). (The Duke of Orleans's love of taking the piss out of his crowned cousin probably informed his liberalism almost as much as actual conviction.) While they were hardly a majority, there were enough liberal nobles that the Second Estate's meetings were not the picture of aristocratic unity the Crown might have hoped them to be. (The Duke of Orléans in particular took joy in being as much of a pest as he had been in the Assembly of Notables.)

Despite being a little dim, Louis was well aware that this is more or less exactly what had happened to [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfStuart Charles I of England]] about [[UsefulNotes/EnglishCivilWar 150 years previously]], and that calling the English Estates--that is, Parliament--had eventually cost Charles his head and the English monarchy nearly all of its political power. There was a ''reason'' that none of the French monarchs had seen fit to call an Estates-General since 1614--an Estates-General was a powerful tool because of the immense legitimacy it had to make big changes, but that same legitimacy made it extremely ''dangerous''. Better, Louis thought, to try to make do with what was possible without the Estates. But the Assembly of Notables was his last chance, and they told him in no uncertain terms that he had no options. So after a few futile attempts to bring the ''parlements'' to heel in 1787 and 1788, King Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates-General at Versailles in May 1789.

Ever since the Revolution took place, it has been one of the most debated and contested of all historical events, if not ''the'' most contested and debated event. Conservatives disapproved of such radical social transformation on basic principle, with some (as well as many reactionaries) going so far as to argue that the whole event was arranged by a small minority (possibly members of the Freemasons and/or TheIlluminati) and had zero popular support. Moderate 19th century liberals argued that everything was going fine but was derailed by bloodthirsty radicals who gave power to completely unqualified people, rather than trusting in their carefully voted-in elites. Radical revolutionaries looked at the Terror and said, [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans "Yes, more of that, please,"]] and believed that events failed because its leaders weren't ruthless ''enough''. Unsurprisingly, these interpretations usually say more about later political developments than they do about the actual events. UsefulNotes/PoliticalIdeologies of the 19th and 20th Century, and the [[UsefulNotes/StandardEuropeanPoliticalLandscape European political spectrum]], to this very day, is largely oriented by one's opinions on the French Revolution: the terms "left" and "right" themselves originate in where the delegates sat in the national assembly (other cool terms like Montagnard (Mountaineer) have not survived).[[note]]The French Revolution also influenced American politics. Many political clubs developed in America in imitation of the French, much to President George Washington's displeasure. The pro-Revolution camp was called "Democrat" by Citizen Genet (a Girondin ambassador who got stranded in America when the ReignOfTerror was unleashed).[[/note]] The Revolution also [[TropeMaker made]] and [[TropeCodifier codified tropes]] associated with nationalism, such as national flags, national festivals, national holidays on significant anniversaries, monuments open to the public, museums and institutions for public education.

* ''Film/Danton'', directed by Andrzej Wajda and starring Gérard Depardieu as Danton in the face-off with Robespierre. It is based on the play "The Danton Case" by Stanislawa Przybyszewska which Wajda had alread produced on stage in Warsaw in 1975. The film was originally commissioned by the Mitterand government, but Wajda presented a much too dark image of the year 1794 for their liking, likening Paris during the Terror with Poland during the repression of the Solidarity movement.

* ''Film/Danton(1983)'', directed by Andrzej Wajda and starring Gérard Depardieu as Danton in the face-off with Robespierre. It is based on the play "The Danton Case" by Stanislawa Przybyszewska which Wajda had alread produced on stage in Warsaw in 1975. The film was originally commissioned by the Mitterand government, but Wajda presented a much too dark image of the year 1794 for their liking, likening Paris during the Terror with Poland during the repression of the Solidarity movement.

* ''Danton''(1983), directed by Andrzej Wajda and starring Gérard Depardieu as Danton in the face-off with Robespierre. It is based on the play "The Danton Case" by Stanislawa Przybyszewska which Wajda had alread produced on stage in Warsaw in 1975. The film was originally commissioned by the Mitterand government, but Wajda presented a much too dark image of the year 1794 for their liking, likening Paris during the Terror with Poland during the repression of the Solidarity movement.

* ''Danton'' (1983), directed by Andrzej Wajda and starring Gérard Depardieu as Danton in the face-off with Robespierre. It is based on the play "The Danton Case" by Stanislawa Przybyszewska which Wajda had alread produced on stage in Warsaw in 1975. The film was originally commissioned by the Mitterand government, but Wajda presented a much too dark image of the year 1794 for their liking, likening Paris during the Terror with Poland during the repression of the Solidarity movement.

* Napoleon Bonaparte ended this when he took direct power. He was initially a co-conspirator of a liberal coup masterminded by Abbe Sieyes, but he hijacked the plot to strengthen his power. Bonaparte initially served as one of three Consuls in the Consulate before declaring himself TheEmperor in December 1804 (marking the end of the First French Republic). During the Consulate, he ended Dechristianization, conducted a Concordat with the Catholic Church and oversaw the consolidation of many Revolutionary reforms with his Napoleonic Code (authored by Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, a member of the National Convention).

** Later Romantics such as Percy Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron who were liberal and left-leaning felt that the Revolution brought the spirit of change in Europe. They felt that poets and poetry should also be revolutionary, that artists could and should change society with art, a central belief in romantic literature. Some Romantic composers such as Beethoven were initially pro-Revolutionary but turned bitter when Napoleon became Emperor, i.e. [[CallARabbitASmeerp a king with a different name]]. Some other Romantics, even liberals, saw Napoleon as ''the'' Romantic Hero, a badass who by sheer merit and talent, recognized and rewarded by the Revolution, brought modernity to Europe by radically upsetting ideas of aristocracy and monarchy. His youth and good looks made him closer to a ByronicHero than Byron himself.

** Both pro-and-anti-revolutionaries see the Parisian mob as uneducated illiterate uninformed rabble. Anti-revolutionaries see this as an example of anarchy and grubby peasants trying to attain rights they don't merit (as per Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle), while pro-revolutionaries, Marxists mainly, saw this as an example of the proletariat casting off their chains of oppression and attacking aristocrats. In actual fact, Paris had an entirely literate male population on the eve of the Revolution, they were schooled and aware of ideas by Rousseau and Voltaire as a result of pirated books which proliferated under the guise of pornography. Likewise, the so-called sans-culottes, far from being "proletarians" were more accurately a RagtagBunchOfMisfits comprising of lower-middle class shopkeepers, out of work actors and even some aristocrats who saw the fashion as "hippie lifestyle" avant-la-lettre. Some sans-cullotes were themselves property owners and employers who would agitate on the street, and then go back to his shop and boss his workers around[[note]]who on account of Le loi chapelier had no right to form an Union, this law remained in effect until the 1848 Revolution[[/note]].

Nowhere in France was the failure of the Civil Constitution more apparent in the very rural western region known as the Vendée. In the Vendée, most of the peasants liked the local nobles, who by and large kept to the old principle of ''noblesse oblige'', and the local clergy, whom they regarded as honorable defenders of their deeply-held Catholic faith. Together, the nobles and the clergy funded and ran Catholic charities that served as a fairly decent social support for the region (making the Vendée one of the few places in France where the idealized notions about the nobility and the Church came close to reality). The Civil Constitution, which stripped the Church of its property, combined with the emigration of the nobility and the division of the émigré lands, therefore not only seemed like an unjust attack to the people of the Vendée, it stripped them of their safety net. And they needed that net because of rampant LoopholeAbuse with the sale of the seized property, which was supposed to be available to peasants but was in practice all taken by well-off bourgeois merchants. Moreover, because of the weird way in which seignieurial dues were supposedly "abolished" (certain ones were deemed property rights that could not be taken away without compensation, and so still remained after "abolition"), these new bourgeois owners often enforced to the hilt various dues the less businesslike nobles and Church had let slide, squeezing the peasantry just as they were losing their main means of support in hard times.

* The Terror killed 17,000 people by Guillotine after a trial, while unofficial executions are believed to number approximately 40,000. Towards the final month of Thermidor, it became worse, a period called the "Great Terror". Statistically, and contrary to popular belief, only 8% of the victims were aristocrats (though considering they were 1% of the population, they did feel a disproportionate impact), 25% of the victims were bourgeois and middle-class, 28% were peasants and working-class and the rest were clergy. During the "Great Terror" after the Law of 22 Prarial, where 1000 people were executed in a single month ([[UpToEleven matching all the executions in Paris the previous year]]), the victims became 38% Nobility, 26% Clergy, with [[EatTheRich the wealthy victims]] discriminated against since the law [[KangarooCourt deprived them]] of a right to call for witnesses, legal representatives or evidence by which according to Georges Couthon ([[HangingJudge who drafted the law to the Convention]]), wealthier accused escaped the blade before. Ironically, the largest single mass-execution of the Revolution, 77 people in a single day, happened on the day after Robespierre's execution. Over three days, the National Convention purged and executed without trial 100 people connected to Robespierre and the Paris Commune.

* A significant part of ''{{Literature/TheRedLion}}''.

** ''Explosion in a Cathedral'' [[note]]The Spanish title, ''El Siglo de las Luces'' translates to Century of Lights, or more precisely, Age of Enlightenment, but the English is way more badass, it refers to a painting of the same name[[/note]] deals with Victor Hugues, an obscure Revolutionary, who brought the Emancipation Decree of 1794 to the former slave-run sugar-owning colonies and started several SlaveLiberation(s) in the Caribbean.

* ''VideoGame/BannerOfTheMaid'' is set in an alternate history version of the later stages of the Revolution, chronicling the early campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte's sister Pauline against various enemies of France.

The era in French history known for UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette [[BeamMeUpScotty allegedly]] giving her subjects some dietary advice. The people responded by storming the Bastille, then Versailles, until they found her and her husband and guillotined them, and a few other nobles for good measure. It promised Liberty, Equality, Fraternity but [[MeetTheNewBoss led to the rise of]] UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte. He marched across Europe, stopped only by Richard {{Literature/Sharpe}} or the [[Literature/WarAndPeace Russian winter]], depending on your nationality.

That's TheThemeParkVersion. The real history of the French Revolution was even more of [[GambitPileup a wild ride]]. Start with a series of nations (Britanny, Gascogne, etc. etc.) that have little in common with each other but are bound by King and Church. France was drained by [[UsefulNotes/WarOfTheSpanishSuccession three]] [[UsefulNotes/SevenYearsWar major]] [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution world]] wars in the last hundred years, and lots of smaller ones besides. There were these expensive-to-make-and-keep royal palaces, a new and very young king and queen who don't have a clue how to run the country, a nobility that did not want to pay exorbitant taxes even if they had money and didn't use it at all, with the emerging middle and lower-classes being asked to foot an exorbitant bill. A nation with an obsolete form of government that had missed the reforms [[UsefulNotes/EnglishCivilWar that]] [[UsefulNotes/HanoverStuartWars modernized England]] in the intervening hundred years. Over and above, there was the escalating famine, where bread is too expensive for the average person in the Parisian Basin to buy.

The King himself shared some of this frustration, and he and his various finance ministers (Turgot, Necker, and Callonne) spent the better part of the 1780s trying to figure out a way to reform the royal finances and thus avert financial catastrophe. They had a number of good ideas (and a large number of not-so-good ones), but that didn't really matter because in order for any royal decree to come into effect as law, it had to be registered by the ''parlements'': local judicial and quasi-legislative assemblies of jurists across France that held an important role in France's legislative process. (You thought the King's word was law? He wished!) As it so happened, the ''parlements'' were made up of people who to the last man would be adversely affected by any serious reform, and they used every trick in the book to prevent or at least delay registration of any reform laws--and very effectively, since they were all lawyers. They even got a good amount of popular support, as they argued that they were acting as defenders of French freedom and the ancient traditions of the French constitution--even though they were blocking legislation that would make the lives of most Frenchmen materially better.

Louis was not pleased at this response, because (1) he knew that (the point of the Assembly was not to get ''around'' the ''parlements'', but to encourage/pressure the ''parlements'' to do what the King wanted--"look, the worthiest men of the realm are totally for these changes, don't you think you should just let the decrees go through?") and (2) calling the Estates-General was exactly what he and the royal ministry had been trying to avoid. The Estates-General was an ancient body, going back to the truly feudal era, and largely similar to the old structure of the English/British Parliament: an assembly of clergy (the "First Estate"), an assembly of nobles (the "Second Estate"),[[note]]Of course, these first two are merged in the English system to become the House of Lords[[/note]] and of everyone else (the "Third Estate"). Each "estate" chose its representatives, who would then meet and discuss and advise the King on important matters of state--particularly matters of finance (as France's patchwork tax system was often structured in a way that made it hard to change without an Estates-General).

Despite being a little dim, Louis was well aware that this is more or less exactly what had happened to [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfStuart Charles I of England]] about [[UsefulNotes/EnglishCivilWar 150 years previously]], and that calling the English Estates--that is, Parliament--had cost Charles his head and the English monarchy nearly all of its political power. There was a ''reason'' that none of the French monarchs had seen fit to call an Estates-General since 1614--an Estates-General was a powerful tool because of the immense legitimacy it had to make big changes, but that same legitimacy made it extremely ''dangerous''. Better, Louis thought, to try to make do with what was possible without the Estates. But the Assembly of Notables was his last chance, and they told him in no uncertain terms that he had no options. So after a few futile attempts to bring the ''parlements'' to heel in 1787 and 1788, King Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates-General at Versailles in May 1789.

Therefore, when the Estates met in May 1789, there were still no clear procedures for how the body would function. However, within a few days, the Third Estate had realized that under the circumstances, it could basically dictate terms to the other two estates. Besides the fact that it had as many members as the othe two estates combined, the Third Estate realized quickly that unlike previous sessions of the Estates, the Second and especially the First Estates were not uniformly aristocratic in inclination. For various reasons, the First Estate of 1789 was composed primarily not of prelates of noble descent but of common parish priests, who were uniformly of humble birth and whose concerns were much more aligned with the commoners of the Third Estate than the nobles of the Second. Consequently, the First Estate was sharply divided against itself in 1789, where in previous sessions it had been a relatively united aristocratic assembly.

A few voices even suggested doing away with the King and declaring a republic, but most were still skeptical that a republic could govern such a large nation since it had hitherto mostly been observed in Italian city-states and the ancient world, which covered a smaller area. The only republic of comparable size was the United States, and even the most sympathetic French rightly viewed it skeptically; the first government under its new federal constitution had met that very spring, and even then it still didn't have full control of its claimed territory (North Carolina would not join until November; Rhode Island held out until May 1790).[[note]]Before you say, "what about the Roman Republic?", recall that while the Roman Republic ''controlled'' vast territories, the people of the provinces were not Roman citizens but subjects and tributaries of the Roman state. The business of government was controlled by Roman citizens who either physically lived in Rome or could make it to Rome in time for all the important votes. If you were out in the provinces, the local Roman governor had full policy discretion, limited only by directives from Rome and whatever treaties and deals governed the relationship between Rome and the local cities and tribes. The governor certainly wasn't at all responsible to the locals, as would happen in a modern republic; at best, the locals' deal would require the governor to consult with and inform their leaders about major decisions. TL;DR: the Republican era Roman empire was an empire in the same way as, say, Persia's was, just with the monarch replaced with the Roman state, in which only Roman citizens in Rome could participate.[[/note]] The largest stable republic anyone had ever seen was the Netherlands, and even that was seen as more or less a monarchy (since the Prince of Orange was almost inevitably the stadtholder of all or most of the constituent provinces). The only precedent they had for stable popular government in a country that size was Great Britain's constitutional monarchy.

And then there was religion. The question of separating Church and State, provided a different set of problems and tools than that available to the leaders of the UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution.[[note]]These leaders enjoyed the presence of a pre-established dissenting tradition since many American protestant sects originated as exiles or emigrants from Europe, fleeing the Anglican Church so they were already opposed to one denomination of Christianity enforced from above which made them easier to accept a state that no other sect, and by extension no other religion, could interfere with in exchange for the state not interfering or presenting any official position on religion. This made them amenable to the First Amendment.[[/note]] France was "the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church" and a pillar of the Counter-Reformation, and the Church was its largest land owner; heavily involved in culture, society and rituals, placing them in the firing range to many measures to reform finance, fix the economy and establish nationalism. They had support from reformist priests and bishops[[note]]Many of them joined the Church out of career, position, education opportunities and had no real religious belief. This includes Abbe Emmanuel Sieyes, the Bishop Talleyrand. Only Henri Gregoire, the most revolutionary and progressive of this group, displayed authentic religious belief[[/note]] but not a complete consensus.

There was less daylight between the parish priests and the hierarchy on the subject of Church property, but it wasn't as big a deal as it seemed. While they all hated the principle of seizing Church property and railed against it in their sermons, this wasn't anything they hadn't seen before. Governments across Europe had seized Church property from time to time since the Middle Ages, and while the Church always made a big fuss about it, the resistance was usually limited to scathing oratory so long as the situation was dire (which the French Church admitted it was) and the state took only what it needed. Besides, the priests had long grumbled about the extraordinary splendor of the prelates, and probably didn't care all ''that'' much so long as what was seized was just farms and jewels and such that happened to be Church-owned rather than actual church buildings and holy items. Indeed, parish priests probably would have had not a little bit of ''schadenfreude'' at the prospect of siezing property from the abbeys and monasteries, which were often seen as "[[LockedAwayInAMonastery refuges]]" for indolent and troublesome nobles and unproductive parasites that consumed Church income without ministering to the people or doing any productive work themselves.

Nowhere in France was the failure of the Civil Constitution more apparent in the very rural western region known as the Vendée. In the Vendée, most of the peasants liked the local nobles, who by and large kept to the old principle of ''noblesse oblige'', and the local clergy, whom they regarded as honorable defenders of their deeply-held Catholic faith. Together, the nobles and the clergy funded and ran Catholic charities that served as a fairly decent social support for the region (making the Vendée one of the few places where the idealized notions about the nobility and the Church came close to reality). The Civil Constitution, which stripped the Church of its property, combined with the emigration of the nobility and the division of the émigré lands, therefore not only seemed like an unjust attack to the people of the Vendée, it stripped them of their safety net. And they needed that net because of rampant LoopholeAbuse with the sale of the seized property, which was supposed to be available to peasants but was in practice all taken by well-off bourgeois merchants. Moreover, because of the weird way in which seignieurial dues were supposedly "abolished" (certain ones were deemed property rights that could not be taken away without compensation, and so still remained after "abolition"), these new bourgeois owners often enforced to the hilt various dues the less businesslike nobles and Church had let slide, squeezing the peasantry just as they were losing their main means of support in hard times.

Then there's the issue of who gets to vote. About the only thing everyone (Royalist-Centrist-Leftist) agreed on was that [[StayInTheKitchen only men could vote]]; [[ValuesDissonance on this they agreed with the American Founding Fathers and the English Parliamentarians]]. But after that, the disagreements began. Initially there was suffrage censitatire--distinctions between "active" and "passive" citizenship, where active citizens (wealthy tax paying property owners) could vote but passive citizens could not. This struck many as [[FullCircleRevolution a revival of feudal caste distinctions]], but the historical precedent at the time was that no republic or democracy in the classical world ever had universal suffrage.[[note]]The classical tradition beloved by all politicians were schooled in the philosophy and ideas of the Optimate Republicans of Ancient Rome such as Cato and Cicero who had vociferously and repeatedly agitated against expanding suffrage, ideas which were taken up by populares such as the Gracchi, Marius, Caesar and historically associated, in the conservative imaginary, with authoritarianism and majoritarianism[[/note]] The people of Paris and other parts of France, gathering in a variety of political clubs[[note]]Membership was expensive and open only to men who could pay, but the club assemblies were open to public and free. They also distributed political pamphlets, and introduced for the first time in the political lexicon, a word borrowed from the Catholic Church for distributing information to prospective converts, ''propaganda''[[/note]] obviously resented these distinctions between "passive" and "active" citizens [[DudeWheresMyRespect and felt miffed about having no voice]] after all the public support they gave to [[UngratefulBastard the Third Estate and Assembly]]. Repeated dismissals of these gatherings as a mob, also made them partial to the idea of "direct democracy"; where the assemblies of people in the Paris Commune, clubs and other parts of the nation were no less legitimate than the actions and goings on of the National Assembly. After all the Assembly claimed their legitimacy from popular sovereignty, and how could representatives compete with actual popular gatherings.[[note]]Some of the popular revolutionaries actually believed sovereignty to be an inversion of royal power. When the King had decreed an act, it was absolute and irrevocable. Now that the republic was based on popular sovereignty that meant people were sovereign just like the King was. These assemblies likewise believed that they were the people, they were sovereign, so what ''they'' say goes. When the King called for death, no one could argue otherwise, so when they call for death...well too bad for you[[/note]]

These debates, at first, played out in the National Assembly, in journals, debated in the clubs and the streets. Eventually [[SeriousBusiness it became matters of life and death]], as everyone took a stance for their beliefs on increasingly partisan lines. A series of incidents took place, often described as [[ShortLivedBigImpact a century's worth of activity in a decade]]. The King after seemingly accepting the Constitution and Limited Monarchy, discredited himself in the failed plot of the Flight to Varennes. This set off a chain reaction of events: [[LongList there was an agitation for war to spread the revolution, a second insurrection that toppled the Constitutional Monarchy and installed the First French Republic, victory and setbacks in the battlefield, the execution of the King, internal insurrections in different parts of France, invasion by external powers on all sides, calls for extreme measures on the government to meet these threats]], the ReignOfTerror with its many high profile victims, [[BackFromTheBrink the stunning reversal of the military situation]] from the jaws of defeat to total victory, the end of the terror, a new conservative Republic that resorted to using the army to purge factions that seem to topple the centrist hegemony, and ending with the military coup of UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte.

The Revolution's liberal and progressive achievements were enshrined in The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen. Several basic rights were first outlined here. In a radical idea at the time, divorce was legalized and so was, surprisingly, homosexual sex. Guilds were abolished, allowing more people to enter professions that had previously placed stringent requirements meant to protect its members from competition.[[note]]This development is directly responsible for the rise of the restaurant and the codification of [[UsefulNotes/SnailsAndSoOn French cuisine]], as combined with the dispersion of the aristocracy it meant both that cooks had to cater to the ascendant bourgeoisie and that anyone could become a cook.[[/note]] It also expanded equal rights of citizenship to minorities such as Jews and Protestants, and later free men of colour and mulattos. The more radical measures from the later parts of the revolution would be reversed by the time of Napoleon's arrival, or even before it, but these measures still proved important for the later development of democracy. This includes the first general election of elected representatives by universal male suffrage in the history of the world. This took place in 1792 after the August 10 Insurrection and the establishment of the First French Republic.[[note]]Actual voter turnout given the chaos, and primitive means of communication, was low. The presence and activity of the political clubs and their ability to mobilize voters and suggest who best represented them would today smack of political machinery, while the repression of royalists falls short of multi-party plurality. But [[FairForItsDay this was still a huge radical measure and a great advance for modern democracy]].[[/note]]

Ever since the Revolution took place, it has been one of the most debated and contested of all historical events, if not ''the'' most contested and debated event. Conservatives disapproved of such radical social transformation on basic principle, reactionaries argued that the whole event was arranged by a small minority of the Freemasons and TheIlluminati and had zero popular support. Moderate 19th Century liberals argued that everything was going fine but was derailed by bloodthirsty radicals who gave power to people completely unqualified, rather than trusting in their carefully voted-in elites. Radical revolutionaries looked at the Terror and said, [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans "Yes, more of that, please,"]] and believed that events failed because its leaders weren't ruthless ''enough''. Unsurprisingly, these interpretations usually say more about later political developments than they do about the actual events. UsefulNotes/PoliticalIdeologies of the 19th and 20th Century, and the [[UsefulNotes/StandardEuropeanPoliticalLandscape European political spectrum]], to this very day, is largely oriented by one's opinions on the French Revolution: the terms "left" and "right" themselves originate in where the delegates sat in the national assembly (other cool terms like Montagnard (Mountaineer) have not survived).[[note]]The French Revolution also influenced American politics. Many political clubs developed in America in imitation of the French, much to President Washington's displeasure. The pro-Revolution camp was called "Democrat" by Citizen Genet (a Girondin ambassador who got stranded in America when the ReignOfTerror was unleashed).[[/note]] The Revolution also [[TropeMaker made]] and [[TropeCodifier codified tropes]] associated with nationalism, such as national flags, national festivals, national holidays on significant anniversaries, monuments open to the public, museums and institutions for public education.

* The French Revolution's political goal wasn't originally to abolish the monarchy, but to diminish the King's powers. Louis XVI remained popular until the Flight to Varennes and stayed King until 1792. His title before the Revolution was King of France and Navarre. In 1791, when he swore to uphold the Constitution, his title changed to "King of the French."[[note]]This title would be revived by King Louis Philippe [[UsefulNotes/FrenchPoliticalSystem during the July Monarchy]].[[/note]] He called the Estates-General in 1789 and despite recalcitrance, took an oath to abide by the Constitutional Monarchy which, at Mirabeau's insistence, gave him a veto. This did not work out quite as expected, since the King and the Royal Court kept issuing vetoes on every issue (earning him and his wife the nickname "Monsieur and Madame Veto").
* Constitutional Monarchy at the time enjoyed consensus until the death of Mirabeau. At this time, [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness even Robespierre was reluctant]] about a Republic, he wanted to erode the King's inviolability and veto, but felt confident in the Constitutional Monarchy. This changed after the Flight to Varennes, an unmitigated PR disaster which discredited the formerly popular King, led to a protest gathering to petition for a formation of a Republic, which was suppressed by the National Guard, leading to the Champs de Mars massacre. This led to increasing polarization and factionalism, and converted moderates into radicals.

* As the war started going badly, there were calls for {{Conscription}}. An attempt to call for conscription in the Vendee region provoked a massacre of 200 Republicans at Machecoul and the weakness of the early troops sent to deal with them exacerbated an insurrection into a full-blown counter-revolutoniary rebellion. When the War started losing ground, and General Dumouriez who the Girondins had touted as highly sympathetic to the nation, defected to the enemy along with other noble defections, France found its borders threatened. This led to a city-wide insurrection that put the Jacobins in power, drove the Girondins to exile and prison, sparking another provincial rebellion, described as the federalist revolt. France [[EverythingTryingToKillYou now had enemies on all its sides, two rebellions inside its border, and an increasingly angry Parisian mob]].
* To meet the challenge of the war, the [[EmergencyAuthority emergency laws]] of the Terror were unleashed, in response to public demand. It was justified by Minister of Justice Georges Danton as maintaining [[https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-monopoly-on-violence the state monopoly on violence]] and to this end, Danton established the Revolutionary Tribunals. The proper beginning of the Terror comes with the passing of the Law of Suspects. The ReignOfTerror was confined geographically to Paris, and areas of external and internal revolt, with the majority of France unaffected by it.
* The National Convention granted mandate to the Commitee of Public Safety to ensure that the government remains "Revolutionary until the Peace". Membership in the Committee was renewed every month by votes in the convention and they were an executive body of 12 Men, charged with revolutionary dictatorship. They introduced mass {{Conscription}} - the Levee en masse issued by the great engineer Lazare Carnot. This involved able-bodied men, women and children performing all kinds of actions in what is often seen as the first attempt to mount a total war. Women were sent to hospitals and sent to work while the men were sent to fight the War in all kinds of capacities. Such initiative and mobilization would be repeated on a far grander scale during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI and UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.
* The Terror killed 17,000 people by Guillotine after a trial. While unofficial executions may have gone up to 40,000. Towards the final month of Thermidor, it became worse, a period called the "Great Terror". Statistically, and contrary to popular belief, only 8% of the victims were aristocrats (who considering they were 1% of the population did feel a disproportionate impact), 25% of the victims were bourgeois and middle-class, 28% were peasants and working-class and the rest were clergy. During the "Great Terror" after the Law of 22 Prarial, where 1000 people were executed in a single month ([[UpToEleven matching the executions in Paris the previous year), the victims became 38% Nobility, 26% Clergy, with]] [[EatTheRich the wealthy victims]] discriminated against since the law deprived them of a [[KangarooCourt right to call for witnesses, legal representatives or evidence]] by which according to Georges Couthon ([[HangingJudge who drafted the law to the Convention]]), wealthier accused escaped the blade before. Ironically, the largest single mass-execution of the Revolution, 77 people in a single day happened on the day after Robespierre's execution. Over three days, the National Convention purged and executed without trial 100 people connected to Robespierre and the Paris Commune.

* There were only seven prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed, none of whom were political: four forgers, a lunatic, a failed assassin, and one "sexually deviant" aristocrat. In any case the goal of the rioters wasn't to free political prisoners, but to plunder the Bastille's stores of gunpowder. This didn't stop the revolutionary press from immediately depicting the Bastille as a fortress of horrors, printing lurid stories of hundreds of political prisoners, tortured and held for decades, and portraying the storming as a heroic strike against despotic tyranny.
* The Different governments of the Revolution were: The National Assembly (1789), The National Constituent Assembly (1789-1791), Legislative Assembly (1791-1792), National Convention (1792-1795), The Directory (1795-1799) and the Consulate (1799-1804).

* DecidedByOneVote: A very popular [[HollywoodHistory myth]] about Louis XVI's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Execution_of_Louis_XVI execution]]. Execution was in fact widely ahead, but if you add the "death with delaying conditions" to the opposing votes, it comes to this. It was a close run thing, out of 721 voters, 34 voted for death, by delay, 2 voted for life imprisonment in irons, 319 voted for imprisonment until the end of the war (to be followed by banishment). But a majority of 361 voted for death without conditions, among the people who voted was Philippe-Egalite, duc d'Orleans, the King's Cousin.

** The monarchs and nations fighting against France during the Wars of the French Revolution (often after France declared war on ''them'') also often are portrayed as utter reactionaries hell-bent on undoing every single political and social advance created by the Revolution (or to "[[UndeadHorseTrope turn back the clock to before 1789]]"), in effect ascribing the ideology of the most extreme royalist "ultras" to all of them.[[note]]That many European monarchs were in fact in favour of reforms in the spirit of "enlightened absolutism" (and that e. g. Denmark managed its modernization without a revolution of its own and without being put under revolutionary French tutelage) tends to be ignored.[[/note]] Some nationalistic historians also like to portray the war as if the very existence of France was at stake, while the monarchic governments in fact pursued widely divergent aims - which e. g. made Prussia and Spain drop out of the coalition in 1795 - and for the sake of the balance of power wanted to preserve France in its established position as a major European power.

** Comte de Mirabeau, the original leader of the Revolution, he rebelled against aristocratic conventions, did time in Bastille for "libertinage" and ultimately even lost his privileges which made him highly empathetic to the common people and their plight. Because of his complex background he became a popular leader and middleman between the aristocrats who were to be gently coerced to losing their privileges and the angry Third Estate.
** Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, the future Empress Josephine, also fell to hard times thanks to the Revolution by which her family fortune in Martinique was threatened. In order to hide her aristocratic origins, she apprenticed her son Eugène with a cabinet-maker. Her first husband Alexandre de Beauharnnais was guillotined on a false charge during the Terror which led to her being imprisoned before being released after Thermidor, after which she met Napoleon.

** The legendary Thomas Alexandre Davy de la Palettiere was the son of a French nobleman and a Haitian African slave. In France, he was raised with full privileges and education. During the Revolution, he fell out with his father and he took his mother's family name and called himself Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. He fell into hard times towards the end of the Revolutionary Wars and the Rise of Napoleon (they hated each other) and Dumas was unfairly stranded in an Italian prison for two years which badly affected his health. After his release, Napoleon refused to give him and his wife a pension and when he died, his wife had to raise her young son Creator/AlexandreDumas in poor circumstances for which they blamed Napoleon.
** In general, during the Revolution, a lot of money and property was transferred from the nobility and clergy to the bourgeosie and - to a lesser degree - the more well-to-do peasants, and a lot of shifts happened in the class structure. Napoleon and the Bourbon and July Monarchy restored some monarchical titles to good and bad effect but it was mostly InNameOnly. In some cases, noblemen actually joined the sans-culottes and blended in and threw off their old life, hippie-style.

* ReignOfTerror: The TropeNamer. Creator/MarkTwain reflected on the disproportionate focus on the Terror and the association of it with the Revolution a hundred years later:

* TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized: The overwhelming conservative opinion. It's also how the French Revolution is usually portrayed in fictions, especially anglophone anti-revolutionary popular culture, enshrined in works like ''Literature/ATaleOfTwoCities'' which greatly shaped the collective imagination, focusing disproportionately on Mob Violence. Historians however, differ on ''why'' it wasn't civilized.
* RomanticismVersusEnlightenment: The French Revolution is usually seen as the event that marked the two eras decisively with Romanticism largely being a reaction to the event. Romanticism itself was divided between hostility and enthusiasm for the French Revolution. A good example is Creator/VictorHugo who was critical and dismissive of the Revolution but later came to embrace it.
** Early Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge were initially supportive before becoming disillusioned. Early Romanticist writings across Europe (but especially in England and Germany) and even in France, were prone to nostalgia for the Ancien Regime and the centuries long tradition that the Revolution was radically upsetting. They also saw the Terror as a new form of IntellectuallySupportedTyranny and the dangers of cold, excessive, rationalism which tended to clamp down on the individual.
** Later Romantics such as Percy Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron who were liberal-leftist felt that the Revolution brought the spirit of change in Europe. They felt that poets and poetry should also be revolutionary, that artists could and should change society with art, a central belief in romantic literature. Some Romantic composers such as Beethoven were initially pro-Revolutionary but turned bitter when Napoleon became Emperor, i.e. [[CallARabbitASmeerp a king with a different name]]. Some other Romantics, even liberals, saw Napoleon as ''the'' Romantic Hero, a badass who by sheer merit and talent, recognized and rewarded by the Revolution, brought modernity to Europe by radically upsetting ideas of aristocracy and monarchy. His youth and good looks, made him closer to a ByronicHero than Byron himself.

** Robespierre personal papers were burnt by the government after Thermidor. Consequently, we only know him through his speeches, letters and other people's testimonies. This partly explains the contradictory views about him, since we have no way to know him "from the inside".
** Marie Grosholtz, a wax-maker later became an exile to England, remarried and became Madame Marie Tussaud. During the Revolution, she was briefly imprisoned (sharing a cell with Josephine de Beauharnais) but was spared by Collot d'Herbois. In exchange, according to her, she made death masks of famous victims. In London, Madame Tussaud's wax exhibitions were highly popular and endures to this day. However, historias have generally regarded most, if not all, her "death masks" as fakes, which doesn't stop semi-serious scholars from using them as a source to reconstruct appearances of historical figures.
** On the side of the counter-revolution, during the Restoration a number of myths were formed to glorify Jean Chouan as a martyr for the rebellion in Mayenne and Brittany. The real Chouan was called Jean Cottereau and he was a smuggler and suspected murderer who rose against the Republic because they were clamping down on his illegal businesses. The restoration transformed him into a reactionary fantasy of a Robin Hood who rose against an "unlawful" republic while living in the forest with his merry men.[[note]]In general a lot of the myths of the Chouannerie and Vendeean rebellion, until very recently, drew from oral histories and tall tales than actual research though the latter is compounded by the fact that very little first-hand records exist about the Civil War.[[/note]]
** During the Restoration, a number of UrbanLegend about the Revolution caught life, such as the idea that UsefulNotes/LouisXVI was executed because of a single vote majority (which helped the royalist propaganda that the King was an innocent done in by an evil cabal), that Revolutionaries converted Royalists into GenuineHumanHide and used the leather to bind books which shows up in some Revolutionary-era fiction like ''Explosion of a Cathedral'' and ''Assassin's Creed Unity''. In addition there were tropes like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bals_des_victimes Victims Balls]] where aristocratic women wore mourning clothes and red sashes around their necks as a symbol of the guillotine they narrowly avoided.[[note]]In actual fact only 8% of all victims of the Terror were aristocrats, and until the Great Terror/Law of Prairial there was no attempt to deliberately target aristocrats as victims. The vast majority of victims were either peasants who hoarded foods, actual counter-revolutionaries, suspected counter-revolutionaries and clergy[[/note]] None of this ever really happened, and there is no evidence to support any of it.
** Both pro-and-anti-revolutionaries see the Parisian mob as uneducated illiterate uninformed rabble. Anti-revolutionaries see this as an example of anarchy and grubby peasants trying to attain rights they don't merit (as per Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle), while pro-revolutionaries, Marxists mainly, saw this as an example of the proletariat casting off their chains of oppression and attacking aristocrats. In actual fact, Paris had an entirely literate male population on the eve of the Revolution, they were schooled and aware of ideas by Rousseau and Voltaire as a result of pirated books which proliferated under the guise of poronography. Likewise, the so-called sans-culottes far from being "proletarians" were more accurately a RagtagBunchOfMisfits comprising of lower-middle class shopkeepers, out of work actors and even some aristocrats who saw the fashion as "hippie lifestyle" avant-la-lettre. Some sans-cullotes were themselves property owners and employers who would agitate on the street, and then go back to his shop and boss his workers around[[note]]who on account of Le loi chapelier had no right to form an Union, this law remained in effect until the 1848 Revolution[[/note]].

* Creator/AlejoCarpentier, the Cuban author wrote two classics about the impact of the French Revolution on Latin America.

Ever since the Revolution took place, it has been one of the most debated and contested of all historical events, if not ''the'' most contested and debated event. Conservatives disapproved of such radical social transformation on basic principle, reactionaries argued that the whole event was arranged by a small minority of the Freemasons and TheIlluminati and had zero popular support. Moderate 19th Century liberals argued that everything was going fine but was derailed by radicals who were greedy for voting rights they didn't merit, rather than trusting in their carefully voted-in elites. Radical revolutionaries looked at the Terror and said, [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans "Yes, more of that, please,"]] and believed that events failed because its leaders weren't ruthless ''enough''. Unsurprisingly, these interpretations usually say more about later political developments than they do about the actual events. UsefulNotes/PoliticalIdeologies of the 19th and 20th Century, and the [[UsefulNotes/StandardEuropeanPoliticalLandscape European political spectrum]], to this very day, is largely oriented by one's opinions on the French Revolution: the terms "left" and "right" themselves originate in where the delegates sat in the national assembly (other cool terms like Montagnard (Mountaineer) have not survived).[[note]]The French Revolution also influenced American politics. Many political clubs developed in America in imitation of the French, much to President Washington's displeasure. The pro-Revolution camp was called "Democrat" by Citizen Genet (a Girondin ambassador who got stranded in America when the ReignOfTerror was unleashed).[[/note]] The Revolution also [[TropeMaker made]] and [[TropeCodifier codified tropes]] associated with nationalism, such as national flags, national festivals, national holidays on significant anniversaries, monuments open to the public, museums and institutions for public education.

Ever since the Revolution took place, it has been one of the most debated and contested of all historical events, if not, ''the'' most contested and debated event. Conservatives disapproved of such radical social transformation on basic principle, reactionaries argued that the whole event was arranged by a small minority of the Freemasons and TheIlluminati and had zero popular support. Moderate 19th Century liberals argued that everything was going fine but was derailed by radicals who were greedy for voting rights they didn't merit, rather than trusting in their carefully voted-in elites. Radical revolutionaries looked at the Terror and said, [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans "Yes, more of that, please,"]] and believed that events failed because its leaders weren't ruthless ''enough''. Unsurprisingly, these interpretations usually say more about later political developments than they do about the actual events. UsefulNotes/PoliticalIdeologies of the 19th and 20th Century, and the [[UsefulNotes/StandardEuropeanPoliticalLandscape European political spectrum]], to this very day, is largely oriented by one's opinions on the French Revolution: the terms "left" and "right" themselves originate in where the delegates sat in the national assembly (other cool terms like Montagnard (Mountaineer) have not survived).[[note]]The French Revolution also influenced American politics. Many political clubs developed in America in imitation of the French, much to President Washington's displeasure. The pro-Revolution camp was called "Democrat" by Citizen Genet (a Girondin ambassador who got stranded in America when the ReignOfTerror was unleashed).[[/note]] The Revolution also [[TropeMaker made]] and [[TropeCodifier codified tropes]] associated with nationalism, such as national flags, national festivals, national holidays on significant anniversaries, monuments open to the public, museums and institutions for public education.

* There were only seven prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed, none of whom were political: four forgers, a lunatic, a failed assassin, and one "sexually deviant" aristocrat. The goal of the rioters wasn't to free political prisoners anyhow, but to plunder the Bastille's stores of gunpowder. This didn't stop the revolutionary press from immediately depicting the Bastille as a fortress of horrors, printing lurid stories of hundreds of political prisoners, tortured and held for decades, and portraying the storming as a heroic strike against despotic tyranny.

** The notorious Creator/MarquisDeSade was writing the ''120 Days of Sodom'' in the Bastille before being released two weeks before 14 July, 1789. During the revolution, he worked in the popular theaters and became a spokesman in the Radical Paris Section (City Ward) Piques (it was Robespierre's ward!). He was highly popular and well-liked by the sectionnaires and sans-culottes and became a committed radical, even writing a eulogy for Marat which compared him to Jesus. He faced problems when his son, fighting in the French Army, defected to the enemy and he also argued against the Terror which led to his imprisonment. After Thermidor, he was virtually penniless, being forced to sell his remaining estate and barely subsisting until Napoleon whimsically ordered his imprisonment to Charenton after reading ''Juliette''.

* During the Terror, the Revolutionary Calendar was introduced. The calendar operated in decimal measures[[note]]Each Day had 10 Hours, Each Hour Had 100 Minutes and Each Minute Had 100 Seconds. Each month had thirty days organized in three 10 day weeks, with the tenth day being a public holiday. Five extra days were added to the end of the year to make a total of 365 days and a leap year likewise had six extra days.[[/note]]. Each year had 12 months divided into sets of three months to reflect the four seasons of Autumn (Vendémiaire,[[note]]from Latin vindemia, "grape harvest"[[/note]] Brumaire,[[note]]From brume, French for "fog"[[/note]] Frimaire,[[note]](From French frimas, "frost")[[/note]]) Winter, (Nivôse [[note]] from Latin nivosus, "snowy"[[/note]] Pluviôse,[[note]]from Latin pluvius, "rainy"[[/note]] Ventôse,[[note]](from Latin ventosus, "windy")[[/note]]) Spring, (Germinal,[[note]]from Latin germen, "germination"[[/note]] Floréal,[[note]]from Latin flos, "flower"[[/note]] Prairial,[[note]]from French prairie, "pasture"[[/note]]) and Summer (Messidor,[[note]]Harvest[[/note]] Thermidor,[[note]]summer heat[[/note]] Fructidor[[note]]Fruitful Month[[/note]]). There is a conversion table [[http://www.shtukoviny.ru/calendar/index.html for contemporary dates into the French Calendar.]] One problem with the new calendar, apart from widespread cultural inertia vis-a-vis the Gregorian calendar, was that the new months, while corresponding well, more or less, to the seasonal climate of Paris, were not quite as appropriate to the colonies or parts of France where a month literally called "Snowy" (Nivôse) might not get any snow. During the Terror, the Gregorian calendar continued to be used in daily practice, and it was actually the Directory government that made serious efforts to enforce it. A more prosaic reason the calendar was unpopular was that it reduced the number of weekends people got (one day's rest out of ten, instead of one out of seven). The calendar was also deliberately designed so that what ''would'' be Sunday in the old calendar would now be a normal workday, just to grind the Church's face into the dirt a little more. Today the Calendar only remains well known on account for the fact that some of the dates have become proverbial, namely 9 Thermidor (The Fall of Robespierre), and 18 Brumaire (The Rise of Napoleon).

* There were only seven prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed, none of whom were political: four forgers, a lunatic, a failed assassin, and one "sexually deviant" aristocrat. The goal of the rioters wasn't to free political prisoners anyhow, but to plunder the Bastille's stores of gunpowder. This didn't stop the revolutionary press from immediately depicting the Bastille as a fotress of horrors, printing lurid stories of hundreds of political prisoners, tortured and held for decades, and portraying the storming as a heroic strike against despotic tyranny.

* There were only seven prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed, none of whom were political (the Marquis de Sade had been moved 10 days earlier). Besides, the goal of the rioters wasn't to free them but to get some weapons to defend themselves against royal troops. This event appears to have come about from rumours about said troops preparing a massacre of revolutionaries.

* During the Terror, the Revolutionary Calendar was introduced. The calendar operated in decimal measures[[note]]Each Day had 10 Hours, Each Hour Had 100 Minutes and Each Minute Had 100 Seconds. Each month had thirty days organized in three 10 day weeks, with the tenth day being a public holiday. Five extra days were added to the end of the year to make a total of 365 days and a leap year likewise had six extra days.[[/note]]. Each year had 12 months divided into sets of three months to reflect the four seasons of Autumn (Vendémiaire,[[note]]from Latin vindemia, "grape harvest"[[/note]] Brumaire,[[note]]From brume, French for "fog"[[/note]] Frimaire,[[note]](From French frimas, "frost")[[/note]]) Winter, (Nivôse [[note]] from Latin nivosus, "snowy"[[/note]] Pluviôse,[[note]]from Latin pluvius, "rainy"[[/note]] Ventôse,[[note]](from Latin ventosus, "windy")[[/note]]) Spring, (Germinal,[[note]]from Latin germen, "germination"[[/note]] Floréal,[[note]]from Latin flos, "flower"[[/note]] Prairial,[[note]]from French prairie, "pasture"[[/note]]) and Summer (Messidor,[[note]]Harvest[[/note]] Thermidor,[[note]]summer heat[[/note]] Fructidor[[note]]Fruitful Month[[/note]]). There is a conversion table [[http://www.shtukoviny.ru/calendar/index.html for contemporary dates into the French Calendar.]] One problem with the new calendar, apart from widespread cultural inertia vis-a-vis the Gregorian calendar, was that the new months, while corresponding well, more or less, to the seasonal climate of Paris, were not quite as appropriate to the colonies or parts of France where a month literally called "Snowy" (Nivôse) might not get any snow. During the Terror, the Gregorian calendar continued to be used in daily practice, and it was actually the Directory government that made serious efforts to enforce it. A more prosaic reason the calendar was unpopular was that it reduced the number of weekends people got (one day's rest out of ten, instead of out of seven). The calendar was also deliberately designed so that what ''would'' be Sunday in the old calendar would now be a normal workday, just to grind the Church's face into the dirt a little more. Today the Calendar only remains well known on account for the fact that some of the dates have become proverbial, namely 9 Thermidor (The Fall of Robespierre), and 18 Brumaire (The Rise of Napoleon).

* During the Terror, the Revolutionary Calendar was introduced. The calendar operated in decimal measures[[note]]Each Day had 10 Hours, Each Hour Had 100 Minutes and Each Minute Had 100 Seconds. Each month had thirty days organized in three 10 day weeks, with the tenth day being a public holiday. Five extra days were added to the end of the year to make a total of 365 days and a leap year likewise had six extra days.[[/note]]. Each year had 12 months divided into sets of three months to reflect the four seasons of Autumn (Vendémiaire,[[note]]from Latin vindemia, "grape harvest"[[/note]] Brumaire,[[note]]From brume, French for "fog"[[/note]] Frimaire,[[note]](From French frimas, "frost")[[/note]]) Winter, (Nivôse [[note]] from Latin nivosus, "snowy"[[/note]] Pluviôse,[[note]]from Latin pluvius, "rainy"[[/note]] Ventôse,[[note]](from Latin ventosus, "windy")[[/note]]) Spring, (Germinal,[[note]]from Latin germen, "germination"[[/note]] Floréal,[[note]]from Latin flos, "flower"[[/note]] Prairial,[[note]]from French prairie, "pasture"[[/note]]) and Summer (Messidor,[[note]]Harvest[[/note]] Thermidor,[[note]]summer heat[[/note]] Fructidor[[note]]Fruitful Month[[/note]]). There is a conversion table [[http://www.shtukoviny.ru/calendar/index.html for contemporary dates into the French Calendar.]] The real problems with the use of the calendar, aside from widespread cultural inertia with the Gregorian calendar, is that the new months while corresponding well, more or less, with the seasonal structure of France was not quite as appropriate to the colonies or parts of France where a Snowy Month (Nivôse) doesn't snow. During the Terror, the Gregorian calendar continued to be use in daily practice, and it was the Directory government that made serious efforts to enforce it facing opposition from workers who hated the number of holidays being reduced. The Calendar remains well known on account for the fact that some of the dates have become proverbial, namely 9 Thermidor (The Fall of Robespierre), and 18 Brumaire (The Rise of Napoleon).

* During the Terror, the Revolutionary Calendar was introduced. The calendar operated in decimal measures[[note]]Each Day had 10 Hours, Each Hour Had 100 Minutes and Each Minute Had 100 Seconds. Each month had thirty days organized in three 10 day weeks, with the tenth day being a public holiday. Five extra days were added to the end of the year to make a total of 365 days and a leap year likewise had six extra days.[[/note]]. Each year had 12 months divided into sets of three months to reflect the four seasons of Autumn (Vendémiaire,[[note]]from Latin vindemia, "grape harvest"[[/note]] Brumaire,[[note]]From brume, French for "fog"[[/note]] Frimaire,[[note]](From French frimas, "frost")[[/note]]) Winter, (Nivôse [[note]] from Latin nivosus, "snowy"[[/note]] Pluviôse,[[note]]from Latin pluvius, "rainy"[[/note]] Ventôse,[[note]](from Latin ventosus, "windy")[[/note]]) Spring, (Germinal,[[note]]from Latin germen, "germination"[[/note]] Floréal,[[note]]from Latin flos, "flower"[[/note]] Prairial,[[note]]from French prairie, "pasture"[[/note]]) and Summer (Messidor,[[note]]Harvest[[/note]] Thermidor,[[note]]summer heat[[/note]] Fructidor[[note]]Fruitful Month[[/note]]). There is a conversion table [[http://www.shtukoviny.ru/calendar/index.html for contemporary dates into the French Calendar.]] The real problems with the use of the calendar aside from widespread cultural inertia with the Gregorian calendar, is that the new months while corresponding well, more or less, with the seasonal structure of France was not quite as appropriate to the colonies or parts of France where a Snowy Month (Nivôse) doesn't snow. During the Terror, the Gregorian calendar continued to be use in daily practice, and it was the Directory government that made serious efforts to enforce it facing opposition from workers who hated the number of holidays being reduced. The Calendar remains well known on account for the fact that some of the dates have become proverbial, namely 9 Thermidor (The Fall of Robespierre), and 18 Brumaire (The Rise of Napoleon).

Ever since the Revolution took place, it has been one of the most debated and contested of all historical events, if not, ''the'' most contested and debated event. Conservatives disapproved of such radical social transformation on basic principle, reactionaries argued that the whole event was arranged by a small minority of the Freemasons and TheIlluminati and had zero popular support. Moderate 19th Century liberals argued that everything was going fine but was derailed by radicals who were greedy for voting rights they didn't merit, rather than trusting in their carefully voted-in elites. Radical revolutionaries unsurprisingly took inspiration from the Terror and saw it as means for bringing about [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans utopian changes to society]] and believed the events failed because its leaders were ''too'' moderate. Unsurprisingly, these interpretations usually say more about later political developments than they do about the actual events. UsefulNotes/PoliticalIdeologies of the 19th and 20th Century, and the [[UsefulNotes/StandardEuropeanPoliticalLandscape European political spectrum]], to this very day, is largely oriented by one's opinions on the French Revolution: the terms "left" and "right" themselves originate in where the delegates sat in the national assembly (other cool terms like Montagnard (Mountaineer) have not survived).[[note]]The French Revolution also influenced American politics. Many political clubs developed in America in imitation of the French, much to President Washington's displeasure. The pro-Revolution camp was called "Democrat" by Citizen Genet (a Girondin ambassador who got stranded in America when the ReignOfTerror was unleashed).[[/note]] The Revolution also [[TropeMaker made]] and [[TropeCodifier codified tropes]] associated with nationalism, such as national flags, national festivals, national holidays on significant anniversaries, monuments open to the public, museums and institutions for public education.

These debates, at first, played out in the National Assembly, in journals, debated in the clubs and the streets. Eventually [[SeriousBusiness it became matters of life and death]], as everyone took a stance for their beliefs on increasingly partisan lines. A series of incidents took place, often described as [[ShortLivedBigImpact a century's worth of activity in a decade]]. The King after seemingly accepting the Constitution and Limited Monarchy, discredited himself in the failed plot of the Flight to Varennes. This set of a chain reaction of events: [[LongList there was an agitation for war to spread the revolution, a second insurrection that toppled the Constitutional Monarchy and installed the First French Republic, victory and setbacks in the battlefield, the execution of the King, internal insurrections in different parts of France, invasion by external powers on all sides, calls for extreme measures on the government to meet these threats]], the ReignOfTerror with its many high profile victims, [[BackFromTheBrink the stunning reversal of the military situation]] from the jaws of defeat to total victory, the end of the terror, a new conservative Republic that resorted to using the army to purge factions that seem to topple the centrist hegemony, and ending with the military coup of UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte.

A few voices even suggested doing away with the King and declaring a republic, but most were still skeptical that a republic could govern such a large nation since it had hitherto mostly been observed in Italian city-states and the ancient world, which covered a smaller area. The only republic of comparable size was the United States, and even the most sympathetic French rightly viewed it skeptically; the first government under its new federal constitution had met that very spring, and even then it still didn't have full control of its claimed territory (North Carolina would not join until November; Rhode Island held out until May 1790).[[note]]Before you say, "what about the Roman Republic?", recall that while the Roman Republic ''controlled'' vast territories, the people of the provinces were not Roman citizens but subjects and tributaries of the Roman state. The business of government was controlled by Roman citizens who either physically lived in Rome or could make it to Rome in time for all the important votes. If you were out in the provinces, the local Roman governor had full policy discretion, limited only by directives from Rome and whatever treaties and deals governed the relationship between Rome and the local cities and tribes. The governor certainly didn't have to consult with the locals, as would happen in a modern republic. TL;DR: the Republican era Roman empire was an empire in the same way as, say, Persia's was, just with the monarch replaced with the Roman state, in which only Roman citizens in Rome could participate.[[/note]] The largest stable republic anyone had ever seen was the Netherlands, and even that was seen as more or less a monarchy (since the Prince of Orange was almost inevitably the stadtholder of all or most of the constituent provinces). The only precedent they had for stable popular government in a country that size was Great Britain's constitutional monarchy.