[1789 - 1815] The French Revolution and Napoleon

In 1789, France was a kingdom of contradictions, a world of gilded splendor and abject misery existing side-by-side. In the sprawling Palace of Versailles, King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, lived a life of unimaginable luxury, insulated from the reality of their subjects. Their world was one of intricate court etiquette, powdered wigs, and extravagant feasts. Meanwhile, in the grimy, overpopulated streets of Paris and across the starving countryside, the vast majority of the population—the 27 million people of the Third Estate—shouldered the entire weight of the nation. They were the merchants, the lawyers, the artisans, and the peasants, and they paid nearly all the taxes, from the taille (land tax) to the gabelle (a hated salt tax), while the First Estate (the clergy) and the Second Estate (the nobility) paid virtually none. The air itself seemed thick with discontent. The price of a loaf of bread, the staple food for the poor, had skyrocketed due to poor harvests, costing a laborer nearly a month's wages. The ideas of the Enlightenment—whispers of liberty, equality, and the rights of man—had seeped into every café and salon, making the ancient, rigid social structure seem not just unfair, but intolerable. The kingdom was bankrupt, its coffers drained by costly wars, including its support for the American Revolution, and the crown's insatiable spending. A storm was gathering, and Versailles was its oblivious eye.

The breaking point came when Louis XVI, desperate for funds, summoned the Estates-General, an ancient parliamentary body that had not met in 175 years. Delegates from the three estates arrived in May 1789, but the Third Estate quickly grew furious. Tradition dictated that each estate vote as a single bloc, meaning the clergy and nobility could always outvote the commoners 2-1. Demanding a fairer system of voting by head, the Third Estate, on June 20th, found themselves locked out of their usual meeting hall. In a stunning act of defiance, they gathered in a nearby indoor tennis court and swore a solemn oath—the Tennis Court Oath—not to disband until they had written a new constitution for France. They declared themselves the National Assembly, the true voice of the people. The revolution had begun not with a musket shot, but with a slammed door and a defiant promise. The tension in Paris reached a fever pitch. On July 14th, fearing the king would use his army to crush the new Assembly, a mob of angry Parisians descended upon the Bastille, a medieval fortress used as a state prison. To them, it was the ultimate symbol of royal tyranny. After a bloody, chaotic battle, the crowd overwhelmed the guards and stormed the fortress. The sound of its falling stones echoed across France and Europe. The king had lost control of his capital.

The fall of the Bastille unleashed a wave of revolutionary fervor. Across the countryside, a panic known as the “Great Fear” took hold, as peasants, fearing retaliation from their aristocratic lords, rose up, burned manor houses, and destroyed records of their feudal obligations. In August, the National Assembly issued a document that would change the world: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It boldly proclaimed, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Feudalism was abolished, and the privileges of the nobles and clergy were swept away. Yet, the king still hesitated, and the people still starved. In October, a crowd of thousands of Parisian women, armed with pitchforks, pikes, and even a few cannons, marched 12 miles in the pouring rain to Versailles. They stormed the palace, demanding bread and forcing the royal family to return with them to Paris, to be held captive by the revolution. The gilded cage of Versailles was replaced by the Tuileries Palace, a virtual prison in the heart of the city. The monarchy’s mystique was shattered for good in June 1791, when the royal family attempted to flee France in disguise, only to be recognized and captured in the town of Varennes. To the people, this was the ultimate act of betrayal.

As the revolution grew more radical, Europe’s other monarchies looked on in horror, declaring war on France to crush the movement before it could spread. Fear and paranoia gripped the nation. The Jacobins, a radical political club led by the austere and ruthless Maximilien Robespierre, seized control. They believed the revolution could only be saved through absolute purity and absolute terror. In January 1793, King Louis XVI—now called “Citizen Louis Capet”—was tried for treason and executed by a fearsome new invention, the guillotine, its blade falling in a public square filled with tens of thousands of spectators. Marie Antoinette followed him to the scaffold nine months later. What followed was the Reign of Terror (1793-1794). The Committee of Public Safety, with Robespierre as its driving force, held dictatorial power. Under the Law of Suspects, anyone could be arrested for simply appearing to be an enemy of the revolution. Neighbors informed on neighbors; a careless word could lead to the executioner. The cathedrals were closed, a new calendar was created, and France was plunged into a bloodbath of its own making. An estimated 17,000 people were officially executed by the guillotine, while some 10,000 more died in squalid prisons. But the terror, like a fire, eventually consumed itself. In July 1794, Robespierre’s own allies, fearing they would be next, turned on him. He, too, met his end at the guillotine, and a collective sigh of relief passed through France.

Out of this decade of chaos and bloodshed stepped a figure of boundless ambition and military genius: Napoleon Bonaparte. Born on the island of Corsica, this short, intense artillery officer had risen through the ranks of the revolutionary army with breathtaking speed, scoring brilliant victories in Italy and Egypt. France, exhausted by revolution and governed by a weak, corrupt five-man committee known as the Directory, craved order and stability. Napoleon offered it. In a swift coup d'état on November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar), he seized power, declaring, “The Revolution is over. I am the Revolution.” He became First Consul, then, in 1804, he went a step further. At Notre Dame Cathedral, with the Pope in attendance, Napoleon took the imperial crown and placed it on his own head, then crowned his wife Josephine Empress. It was a stunning display of ego and power. A Corsican upstart was now master of France.

Napoleon proved to be as brilliant a statesman as he was a general. He created the Bank of France to stabilize the economy, reformed the education system, and, most importantly, established the Napoleonic Code. This comprehensive legal framework standardized laws across France, cementing revolutionary principles like equality before the law and abolishing feudal justice. It remains the basis of French civil law to this day. But his ambition was not limited to France. For over a decade, he waged the Napoleonic Wars, pitting his Grande Armée against every major European power. He redrew the map of Europe, placing his relatives on the thrones of conquered nations. He was a master of strategy, and at battles like Austerlitz in 1805, known as the “Battle of the Three Emperors,” his tactics were flawless. He seemed invincible. His only persistent enemy was Great Britain, whose naval supremacy, confirmed at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, kept him from ever invading the island nation.

Napoleon’s downfall began with a catastrophic mistake. In 1812, in an attempt to crush Russia, he assembled the largest European army ever seen—over 600,000 men—and marched on Moscow. The Russians simply retreated, burning their own villages and countryside, even their holy city of Moscow, leaving nothing for the French army to live on. Trapped by the onset of the brutal Russian winter, Napoleon was forced into a disastrous retreat. Starvation, frostbite, and relentless Cossack raids annihilated his army. Fewer than 100,000 men staggered back out of Russia. It was a blow from which his empire would never recover. A coalition of European powers—Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden—pounced on the weakened emperor, defeating him and forcing him to abdicate in 1814. He was exiled to the small Mediterranean island of Elba. But the story was not over. In a final, audacious gamble, Napoleon escaped from Elba in March 1815, landed in France, and rallied a new army from the soldiers sent to arrest him. His return, known as the Hundred Days, sent shockwaves through Europe. His enemies quickly reassembled, and on June 18, 1815, on a muddy field in modern-day Belgium, Napoleon met his final destiny at the Battle of Waterloo. After a brutal, day-long struggle, his forces were defeated by a combined British and Prussian army led by the Duke of Wellington. This time, there would be no return. Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena, a remote, windswept rock in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821. The whirlwind of revolution and empire that had begun in 1789 was finally over, but it left behind a world transformed, a world where kings no longer ruled by divine right and the ideas of liberty and nationhood had been unleashed forever.