1733: Voltaire publishes his book Lettres philosophiques, in which he praises Britain’s constitutional monarchy.
1770, Apr 19: Louis XVI is married by proxy to Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna, Archduchess of Austria, who takes the name Marie-Antoinette. Some French people are against the marriage to a foreigner and dub her ‘l’Autrichienne’ – literally, ‘the Austrian woman’, but chienne means bitch.
1774, May 10: Louis XVI becomes King of France.
1785, Aug: Marie-Antoinette is implicated in the ‘necklace affair’, which confirms the general opinion of her as an exorbitant spender of public money.
1787, Feb–May: during the Assemblée des notables at Versailles, selected national bigwigs examine France’s disastrous accounts.
1787, Aug & Nov: the Paris parliament (of aristocratic judges) blocks tax reforms.
1788, summer: the harvest fails.
1788, Dec: Louis XVI doubles the number of representatives of the tiers état, the commoners to be elected to the États généraux, an undemocratic, and occasionally convened, form of royal consultation of the national mood.
1789, Jan: Emmanuel-Joseph de Sieyès publishes Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, a call for increased commoners’ rights.
1789, Jan: Louis XVI commissions the cahiers de doléances, the complaints books to be written by every community in the country. (Or its male citizens, anyway.)
1789, Apr 27–8: a Paris mob ransacks the wallpaper factory of Jean-Baptiste Réveillon. This is the first major riot of the Revolution.
1789, May 5: the États généraux open in Versailles, bringing together the three ‘estates’ – the aristocracy, the clergy and the tiers état, the commoners.
1789, Jun 17: the tiers état revolts, and declares the creation of the Assemblée nationale, a permanent single house of parliament.
1789, Jun 20: meeting in a tennis court (the Jeu de paume) in Versailles, the Assemblée declares that it will install a constitutional monarchy.
1789, Jun 27: Louis XVI orders the aristocrats and clergy to join the Assemblée nationale.
1789, Jul 9: delegates at the Assemblée vote to draft a Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, the basis of France’s new Constitution.
1789: Jul 12–14: food riots in Paris turn violent, culminating in the storming of the Bastille.
1789, Jul 17: Louis XVI is taken into Paris for the day, and wears the tricolour cocarde (rosette). His brother Charles (the future King Charles X) had escaped to Savoy the previous day.
1789, Aug 13: first issue of Le Journal d’Etat et du citoyen, founded by Louise de Kéralio, the first Frenchwoman to publish and edit a newspaper.
1789, Sep 12: first issue of L’Ami du peuple, written and published by Jean-Paul Marat, probably the most bloodthirsty of the revolutionary thinkers.
1789, Oct 5–6: rioters march from Paris and storm the château de Versailles, forcing the royal family to move into the palais des Tuileries in Paris.
1789, Oct 9: Docteur Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposes humane execution for all, regardless of rank.
1789, Nov 2: Church lands and properties are confiscated. About 90 per cent of these will be bought by rich bourgeois.
1789, Dec 19: a new currency, the assignat, is created, based on the value of the confiscated Church lands.
1790, May 21: Paris is divided into 48 sections – district councils that will become hotbeds of insurgency. The general council of Paris is now the Commune.
1790, Jul 14: Louis XVI is guest of honour at the fête de la Fédération in Paris, in commemoration of Bastille Day.
1790, Oct: slaves revolt in Saint-Domingue (French Haiti). 1790, Nov 27: the Assemblée rules that clergymen must now say an oath of allegiance to the state, and must be elected by the people.
1791, Feb 28: an eventful day – a riot at the château de Vincennes west of Paris; an attempt on the life of La Fayette, head of the National Guard; and 400 armed nobles convene at the palais des Tuileries to protect Louis XVI (he sends them away).
1791, Jun 20: the royal family flee Paris, getting as far as Varennes in the northeast of France. They are captured and escorted back. Louis XVI’s brother, Louis Stanislas (the future King Louis XVIII), leaves separately, and escapes.
1791, Jul 17: a riot at the Champ-de-Mars in Paris is repressed; around 50 protesters die in the shooting.
1791, Aug 22: full-blown revolution breaks out in Haiti as slaves, freed former slaves and freeborn citizens of mixed race demand equal rights.
1791, Aug 27: Austria and Prussia issue the Declaration of Pillnitz, calling on all European monarchies to restore the monarchy in France (not that it has ended – the constitutional monarchy is functioning).
1791, Sep 3: the new French Constitution is officially published, prefaced by the Declaration of Men’s and Citizens’ Rights. Louis XVI signs it on 14 September.
1791, Sep: the playwright Olympe de Gouges writes her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, to be included in a booklet about women’s rights addressed to Marie-Antoinette. She hoped it would be read out before parliament, but this never happened.
1791, Nov 9: the Assemblée orders all émigrés (some 140,000 people, mainly aristocrats, will leave France between 1789 and 1800) to return. Failing this they will be dispossessed and sentenced to death in absentia. (Louis XVI will use his royal veto on this decree.)
1791, Dec 14: Louis XVI threatens war against foreign powers who intervene in France (though under the new Constitution he no longer has the right to declare war).
1792, Mar 25: Louis XVI signs the decree legalizing the use of the guillotine. It will be used a month later, on a murderer called Nicolas Jacques Pelletier.
1792, Apr 20: France declares war on Austria and its ally, Prussia.
1792, Apr 25–6: during the night, an army captain called Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle writes the ‘Marseillaise’. (In 1814 he would write a royalist song, ‘Vive le Roi!’ with less success.)
1792, Jun 20: a Parisian mob storms the palais des Tuileries but is evicted.
1792, Jul 11: the Assemblée declares ‘la Patrie en danger’ – the homeland is in danger of foreign attack and counter-revolution at home.
1792, Jul 25: the Prussians issue the Brunswick Manifesto, threatening carnage if the French royal family is harmed.
1792, Aug 10: the Paris mob storms the Tuileries again, this time ransacking the palace, taking the royal family into custody and putting an end to the constitutional monarchy.
1792, Sep 2–6: the Terreur begins with massacres of around 1,200 inmates in Paris’s prisons. Marie-Antoinette’s friend the Princesse de Lamballe is killed and mutilated, and her head is carried to the Temple prison, where the royal family are being held. Revolutionary leaders fail to condemn the massacres.
1792, Sep 21: Parliament renames itself the Convention nationale.
1792, Sep 22: France is now a republic.
1792, Oct 2: creation of the Comité de sûreté générale (Committee of General Security) to oversee the police and enforce revolutionary justice.
1792, Nov 20: a hidden safe is found in the palais des Tuileries containing documents that reveal Louis XVI’s dealings with foreign counter-revolutionaries.
1792, Dec 3: Maximilien Robespierre tells the Convention: ‘Louis doit mourir pour que la patrie vive’ (‘Louis must die so that the homeland can live’).
1792, Dec 11: Louis XVI hears the accusations against him at the Convention. To most of them, he answers (rightly) that what he did was allowed by the first Constitution.
1792, Dec 26: Louis XVI’s lawyers present his defence.
1793, Jan 14: Louis XVI’s trial begins, and will mostly involve 12-hour daily sittings.
1793, Jan 16 –17: members of the Convention debate possible punishments – death, imprisonment or banishment; 387 vote for death, 334 for other punishments, including imprisonment with death if France is invaded, or imprisonment until peace is restored, followed by banishment.
1793, Jan 20: the verdict is guilty, and 380 vote for death within 24 hours, 310 against. Louis XVI’s cousin, Louis Philippe, now calling himself Philippe Égalité, votes for death.
1793, Jan 21: Louis XVI is guillotined in the place de la Révolution, now the place de la Concorde.
1793, Feb: uprisings in the west of France, mainly in the Vendée and Brittany, will soon develop into a full-blown rebellion. Only partially inspired by royalists, it is mainly a revolt against army conscription and a revolution that has done little to raise peasants out of poverty.
1793, Mar 10: creation of the Tribunal révolutionnaire, the court that needs only flimsy evidence of counter-revolutionary sentiment to condemn someone to death.
1793, Apr 6: creation of the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Salvation), to guard against the enemy within. Its most famous heads would be Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre.
1793, Jun 2: moderate Girondins (so-called because many of them came from southwest France) are ousted from the Convention by Robespierre and his allies, backed by a Parisian mob that invades parliament. More than 20 MPs are condemned to death as traitors.
1793, Jul 13: Marat is stabbed to death by a Norman woman called Charlotte Corday. She is guillotined on 17 July.
1793, Sep 17: the loi des suspects is passed. Now, merely being suspected of opposing or criticizing the Convention is punishable by death.
1793, Oct 24: the revolutionary calendar is implemented, backdated to the declaration of the republic on 22 September 1792 (24 October 1793 is now 3 brumaire an II).
1793, Oct 14: Marie-Antoinette is tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
1793, Oct 16: she is guillotined.
1793, Dec 12: the town of Le Mans, occupied by anti-revolutionary rebels, the so-called ‘Chouans’, is captured. Around 1,000 are massacred, including women and children. Fugitives are hunted down and killed; about 9,000 are taken to prison in Nantes, where from December 1793 to January 1794 at least half of them will be shot, drowned, stabbed or beaten to death.
1793, Dec 19: a rebellion in the port of Toulon is crushed by a young artillery captain, Napoleon Bonaparte.
1794, Feb 4: slavery is abolished in French colonies.
1794, Feb 15: the tricolour becomes the flag of the French republic.
1794, Apr 5: Danton is guillotined after becoming ‘too moderate’.
1794, May 10: Louis XVI’s sister Élisabeth is guillotined. 1794, Jun 10: a law is passed taking away a suspect’s rights to a defence or a hearing if accused of treason.
1794, Jul 27: moderate members of the Convention oust Robespierre from power. He is arrested at the Hôtel de Ville while trying to organize an uprising by the Paris mob. He is guillotined the following day.
1795, Jun 8: Louis XVI’s son, Louis Charles (now, according to royalists, officially Louis XVII) dies in prison, probably of tuberculosis, aged ten.
1795, Aug 22: a new, very conservative, Constitution is published. The Convention becomes a bicameral system, headed by a five-man committee, the Directoire.
1795, Oct 5: Napoleon uses his cannons to crush a royalist uprising in Paris.
1799, Dec 13: Napoleon leads a coup d’état and declares that the Revolution is ‘finie’.
1802, May 20: Napoleon reinstates slavery in the French colonies.
1804, May 18: Napoleon declares himself Emperor of France (or rather, he is voted as such by 99 per cent of the electorate).
1814, Apr 6: Napoleon abdicates, and the monarchy is restored, under Louis XVIII (Louis XVI’s brother Louis Stanislas).
1815, Mar 20: Napoleon escapes from exile on the island of Elba and returns to power.
1815, Jun 22: after 100 days, Napoleon abdicates again, and Louis XVIII returns. He will reign until 1824, and be succeeded by his brother Charles X.
1830, Aug 2: after days of rioting by the Paris mob, Charles X flees and the monarchy ends again. Or rather, a new one starts, as Louis-Philippe, the son of Louis XVI’s cousin Philippe Égalité, takes the throne.
1848, Feb 24: a coup d’état ousts Louis-Philippe, and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor, becomes President of France.
1852, Dec 2: Louis-Napoléon declares himself Emperor Napoléon III.
1870, Sep 4: after a disastrous war against Prussia, Napoléon III is overthrown when a mob invades parliament, and a new republic (the ‘third’) is declared. When the Prussians invade and besiege Paris, the government takes refuge in Bordeaux, then Versailles.
1871, Feb 8: in parliamentary elections, of 675 seats, 396 are won by the two main monarchist movements, the légitimistes (anti-republican supporters of the Bourbon royals) and the orléanistes (those in favour of Philippe Égalité’s purported ideal of a post-revolutionary monarchy). It is only disagreements between these two factions (especially about whether to have a white or tricolour flag) that prevent a restoration of the monarchy.
1871, Mar 18–May 28: when the siege of Paris is lifted, the city declares itself a semi-autonomous Commune in the spirit of 1789, and is invaded by the French army. There is fierce street fighting, and tens of thousands of Communards are either killed on the barricades, massacred after surrendering, or marched out to Versailles and executed after a trial. Some of the most ruthless army commanders are overt royalists.