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Jacques Necker
Jacques Necker was a Genevan banker who became a finance minister for Louis XVI and a French statesman. Necker played a key role in French history before and during the first period of the French Revolution. Necker's chief weakness as a politician was his vanity and his anxiety to preserve his popularity at all costs. -
Jean-Paul Marat
Jean-Paul Marat was a French political theorist, physician and scientist. He was a journalist and politician during the French Revolution. He was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes and seen as a radical voice. He published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. -
Olympe de Gouges
Olympe de Gouges was a French playwright and political activist whose writings on women's rights and abolitionism reached a large audience in various countries. She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension rose in France, Olympe de Gouges became increasingly politically engaged. -
Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer and statesman who was one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. Robespierre was arrested and guillotined because he practice equality severely and issued new rules according to which people had to eat the plain bread, everybody was to be called citizens instead of Sir or madam. -
Georges Danton
George Jacques Danton was a leading figure in the early stages of the French Revolution, in particular as the first president of the Committee of Public Safety. Within months he knew this power was a terrible mistake and fought to have it ended. Robespierre stopped him and used the Tribunal to have Danton and all opposition killed, consolidate his power and slaughter uncounted thousands of French men, women, and children. Ultimately he followed Danton to the guillotine. -
Tennis Court Oath
On 20 June 1789, the members of the French Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath (French: Serment du Jeu de Paume), vowing "not to separate and to reassemble wherever necessary, until the Constitution of the kingdom is established". It was a pivotal event in the French Revolution. -
Attack of the Bastille
On 14 July 1789, a state prison on the east side of Paris, known as the Bastille, was attacked by an angry and aggressive mob. The prison had become a symbol of the monarchy's dictatorial rule, and the event became one of the defining moments in the Revolution that followed. -
Great Fear
Great Fear, French Grande Peur, (1789) in the French Revolution, a period of panic and riot by peasants and others amid rumor's of an “aristocratic conspiracy” by the king and the privileged to overthrow the Third Estate. The Great Fear was a general panic that took place between 22 July to 6 August 1789, at the start of the French Revolution. -
Women's March to Versailles
The Women's March on Versailles, also known as the October March, the October Days or simply the March on Versailles, was one of the earliest and most significant events of the French Revolution. An important event at the start of the French Revolution. It gave the revolutionaries confidence in the power of the people over the king. In 1789 France, the main food of the commoners was bread. -
Flight to Varennes
The royal Flight to Varennes during the night of 20–21 June 1791 was a significant episode in the French Revolution in which King Louis XVI of France, his queen Marie Antoinette, and their immediate family unsuccessfully attempted to escape from Paris in order to initiate a counter-revolution at the head of loyal troops under royalist officers concentrated at Montmédy near the frontier. -
Jacobins
The Jacobins were members of an influential political club during the French Revolution. They were radical revolutionaries who plotted the downfall of the king and the rise of the French Republic. Jacobin is sometimes used in the United Kingdom as a pejorative for radical, left-wing revolutionary politics. -
National Convention
National Convention, French Convention Nationale, assembly that governed France from September 20, 1792, until October 26, 1795, during the most critical period of the French Revolution. ... The Convention numbered 749 deputies, including businessmen, tradesmen, and many professional men. -
Sans-Culottes
The sans-culottes were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. They are a lower-class Parisian republican in the French Revolution. -
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror, commonly The Terror, was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First French Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervor, anticlerical sentiment, and spurious accusations of treason by Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. -
The Directory is formed
Directory, French Directoire, the French Revolutionary government set up by the Constitution of the Year III, which lasted four years, from November 1795 to November 1799. It included a bicameral legislature known as the Corps Législatif. A bloodless coup d'état under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte that overthrew the Directory, replacing it with the French Consulate.
