French Revolution

In the late 18th century, France was the most powerful nation in Europe, but it was hollowed out by debt from the American Revolutionary War and a regressive tax system. While the nobility and clergy (the First and Second Estates) enjoyed tax exemptions and feudal privileges, the burden fell entirely on the Third Estate—everyone from wealthy lawyers to starving peasants. A series of crop failures led to bread riots, making the status quo physically unsustainable for the masses.

The collapse began not with a riot, but with a meeting. When King Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General in 1789 to solve the debt, he inadvertently gave the Third Estate a platform. They broke away to form the National Assembly, claiming they—not the King—represented the "will of the nation." This shifted the source of political legitimacy from the crown to the people, effectively ending the absolute monarchy before the first drop of blood was shed.

The Revolution’s most enduring achievement was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It discarded the idea that people were "subjects" of a king and redefined them as "citizens" with inherent, universal rights. This wasn't just a change in terminology; it was a total dismantling of the feudal order. The state seized Church lands, abolished noble titles, and established that the law should be the expression of the general will.

This transformation required a new secular "religion" of the state. The revolutionaries introduced a new calendar, a decimal time system, and the metric system to purge France of its royalist and religious past. By standardizing laws and measurements, they created a centralized, modern nation-state where everyone was theoretically equal under a single set of rules.

As the Revolution faced threats from foreign monarchies and internal counter-revolutionaries, it radicalized. The Committee of Public Safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre, argued that "terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice." The guillotine became the symbol of this era, used to eliminate not just "enemies of the people" like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but also former revolutionaries who were deemed not radical enough.

This period proved that revolutions often spiral into purity tests. The "Law of 22 Prairial" stripped the accused of their right to a defense, leading to thousands of executions in a matter of weeks. Ultimately, the paranoia became so pervasive that the National Convention turned on Robespierre himself. His execution in 1794 ended the most violent phase, but it left a political vacuum that the fractured republic could not fill.

The Revolution ended in 1799 with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant general who seized power in a coup. While he eventually declared himself Emperor—seemingly betraying the Republic—he actually solidified the Revolution's core social changes. He realized that the French people valued the "equality" and "property rights" of the Revolution more than they valued the "liberty" of a messy democracy.

His greatest legacy, the Napoleonic Code, exported these French ideals across Europe via his conquests. It abolished feudalism, established religious tolerance, and made the law clear and accessible. Even after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, the European monarchies could not simply "reset" the clock; the idea that a nation belonged to its people, rather than a royal family, had become a permanent part of the global political consciousness.