1. 1789Estates-General meets and deadlocks
2. Jun 1791The king is caught fleeing at Varennes
3. Aug 1791Enslaved Saint-Domingue rises against the planters
4. 1792Sans-culottes rise and the king is suspended
5. 1793Committee of Public Safety takes power
6. 1794Thermidor ends Robespierre and the Terror
7. 1795Constitution of 1795 installs the Directory
8. 1804Civil Code and the hereditary empire
9. 1812Napoleon invades Russia
10. 1814Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba

The fuel is classical liberalism — and its limits are the plot.

The ideology that lights the Revolution has two halves. Liberty means the natural rights Locke named — life, liberty, property — which no government may infringe, plus the freedoms of conscience and participation: toleration, petition, speech, assembly. Equality means civil equality (no man constrained by a discriminatory law) and equality of opportunity (anyone may become successful and wealthy).

What it does not promise is the engine of everything that goes wrong later. It does not guarantee economic equality; it is not socialism; equality of outcome is not on the table. It does not deliver racial or gender equality. And because it is pro-enclosure, anti-guild, and committed to the free market, it has limited appeal to peasants and the urban poor. The most radical stage of the Revolution moves away from classical liberalism entirely, and does so by promising exactly what classical liberalism withheld.

The doctrine had a working model and a proof of concept. England had classical liberalism, more or less, and England was the leading power in war and empire and soon the first to industrialize. Then America turned theory into evidence — Locke’s property becoming Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness, Montesquieu’s power checking power becoming a constitution. For France the example cut twice: it proved a revolt against authority could succeed, and the war France fought to make it succeed deepened the debt that brought the monarchy down.

A monarchy that could not tax the people who had the money.

The Ancien Régime sorted twenty-five million people into three legal orders. The clergy were about 1 percent of the population, owned a tenth of the land, collected the tithe, and paid almost nothing. The nobility were under 2 percent and held roughly a quarter of French land, the key posts in government and army, tax exemptions, and privileges down to game laws that made them the only legal hunters. The Third Estate was the other 97 percent, paying the vast majority of the taxes and doing all of the work.

By the 1780s the scheme no longer described the country. Wealth had moved into a merchant class inside the Third Estate while some nobles struggled; parish priests were often peasants themselves; members of every order had read the same criticism and reached the same conclusions. The categories had gone blurry and the injustice had not. A peasant owed his lord rent, a day’s free labor a week (the corvée), and a fee to inherit his own father’s land; owed the church its tithe; and owed the king the taille, the vingtième, a poll tax, and the gabelle on salt. What survived might be half of a very small income. That is a crisis of political legitimacy.

The fiscal machinery failed alongside it. Every war deepened the debt, and every attempt to tax the privileged ran into the parlements, royal law courts that had to register a decree before it took effect and claimed a right of remonstration against laws contrary to French tradition. Louis XV abolished them and installed puppets; Louis XVI, who wanted above all to be loved, restored them — surrendering the crown’s leverage without reforming the thing it was needed for. By the 1780s half of all revenue went to interest on the debt, leaving 19 percent to run a country.

The Revolution swings like a pendulum; it does not march.

Before the narrative, the shape. A moderate middle-class revolution lurches hard left under war and hunger, rebounds into conservative reaction once the fear passes, and settles into Napoleon’s authoritarian order.

Phase one: the bourgeois revolution

The Estates-General met in May 1789 and deadlocked over procedure. Voting had always been by order, one vote each, which guaranteed the first two could outvote the third; doubling the Third Estate’s delegates changed nothing while the count stayed by order. The Abbé Sieyès, a member of the First Estate arguing for the Third, had already framed the stakes: What Is the Third Estate? Everything. The other two orders are along for the ride.

In June the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and swore in a tennis court not to disband until France had a constitution. That oath is the transfer of sovereignty. The king vacillated, dismissed his liberal ministers, and a Paris with 150,000 unemployed concluded he meant to crush the Assembly; the crowd went hunting for weapons and found them at the Bastille, armory and royal prison and symbol of Bourbon absolutism in one building. The countryside answered with the Great Fear, burning manor houses and the feudal documents inside them, so that feudalism ended in fact before it ended in law. In October the women of Paris marched on Versailles and brought the royal family back inside the reach of the crowd — the very thing Louis XIV had built Versailles to escape.

What the Assembly then built is the liberal revolution entire. On the night of August 4 it abolished the estates, the feudal system, game laws, and the tithe, and confiscated church land, against which it issued the assignats — paper money that inflated because the government overprinted. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen followed, Lockean and classical liberal, silent on the king and explicitly excluding women. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy made priests elected and salaried and demanded an oath two-thirds refused. The Constitution of 1791 produced a constitutional monarchy on a franchise sorted by wealth — a bourgeois democracy, exactly as advertised.

It was already compromised. In June 1791 the king fled in disguise, was caught at Varennes, and was returned under the fiction that he had been kidnapped. When republicans gathered on the Champ de Mars to say what everyone now believed, the National Guard fired on them, destroying the standing of the last two moderates with credit on both sides. The next time Paris rose, no one would be left to restore order.

The Terror is a machine, not a mood.

The usual explanations for 1793 — wicked men, or an ideology with murder built into it — explain too little. What happens is a feedback loop, and its entry point is war.

Watch it turn. On August 10, 1792, tens of thousands of sans-culottes — the urban poor, named for the tailored breeches they could not afford — rose against both king and Assembly. The king was suspended; the Assembly dissolved itself and called a National Convention on broad suffrage. In September the mob stormed the prisons and killed more than a thousand people on a rumor that imprisoned nobles would defect. On September 20 the army held at Valmy, which freed the Convention to abolish the monarchy the next day.

The Convention then split. The Girondins drew on the provinces, feared the sans-culottes and the dominance of Paris, and held that the Revolution was finished; the Mountain was Parisian, Jacobin, backed by the sans-culottes, and intended to keep going. When the king’s letters to Austria surfaced, the Mountain pushed for execution and got it — on a guillotine that was itself a revolutionary innovation, faster than a sword and capable of executing people in quick succession. The Girondins were then purged as defeatists, and in July 1793 the Committee of Public Safety took power. Its logic was administrative before it was ideological: with the king gone there was no executive, and a convention of hundreds could not run a war fast enough. Robespierre became its dominant voice, and it is worth being precise about how — he held no office giving him more authority than any other member. His power was charisma exercised on a body that had to keep voting it to him.

A planned economy, a court that cannot acquit, and a national anthem.

The Terror had three goals — win the war, crush the internal insurrection, establish a republic of virtue — and three instruments. The first is a planned economy, fairly called embryonic socialism: one of the first governments anywhere to set prices and control property in the name of economic equality, which is what a regime resting on the sans-culottes owes them. The Maximum Prices Edict capped bread at a third of its 1790 price and wages at half. Even the loaf was leveled: one bread of equality, no white bread for anyone.

The second is terror as law. The Law of Suspects authorized arresting any citizen not enthusiastically supporting the Revolution, which is to say anyone. Revolutionary courts accepted verbal evidence and seated sans-culottes as juries; the Law of 22 Prairial abolished individual trials because trying people one at a time took too long. Roughly forty thousand died, and the worst was not in Paris: the Vendée cost some two hundred thousand lives, most of them civilians.

The third is nationalism, and it has the longest life. The war became a crusade of patriotism because the people had replaced the king as the state: if you are the state, you fight for yourself. The levée en masse produced an army of some 800,000, four times the size of its opponents, and La Marseillaise carries both halves of the moment at once, the rising nation and the violence. The republic of virtue was rationalism pushed to its terminus: Robespierre executed Hébert on his left and Danton on his right, replaced Catholicism with a cult of the Supreme Being, and renamed the months for the seasons. Then, on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794), the chamber shouted him down.

Thermidor returned the Revolution to the propertied middle class: the Committee, the Supreme Being, and the fixed prices all went, and the Constitution of 1795 elected five Directors as a deliberately weak executive, precisely so no second Robespierre could talk his way into power. It is a republic designed by people afraid of their own electorate, and it worked about as well as that suggests. When royalists rose on 13 Vendémiaire, a young officer dispersed them with a whiff of grapeshot.

The colony that took the Declaration literally.

Saint-Domingue, French since 1659, was the most profitable colony in the empire and one of the most brutal. Nearly every acre was planted in cash crops, which meant a handful of enormous landowners and an enslaved majority. The Code Noir of 1685 set minimum standards of treatment and was generally ignored; planters calculated that working people to death and buying replacements was cheaper than keeping them alive. The same code guaranteed free people of color — about forty thousand, many of them the freed mixed-race children of planters — legal equality with whites, and from the 1760s the planter elite rolled that guarantee back.

Paris detonated all of it at once, and did so by contradicting itself. The National Assembly refused to extend constitutional protections to the colonies — so the Declaration of the Rights of Man did not apply where it was most needed — while reaffirming the trade monopoly that angered the planters, who wanted independence on the American model with slavery intact. Vincent Ogé demanded political rights for free citizens, was refused, took up arms, and was executed. In 1791 the enslaved acted for themselves, destroying hundreds of estates.

Paris then chased the situation leftward — full citizenship for free people in 1792, then abolition throughout French territory by the National Convention. Toussaint L’Ouverture switched from Spanish service to France, helped recover the colony, and kept abolition whatever Paris did next, governing as governor for life under a constitution of his own. Napoleon, needing revenue, sent General Leclerc with 30,000 troops to retake the colony and restore slavery; Leclerc won quickly and L’Ouverture died in a French prison, and then yellow fever killed much of the expedition, Leclerc included. Jean-Jacques Dessalines led a second rising and declared independence on January 1, 1804 — the second independent state in the Americas and the first led by formerly enslaved people. It also paid: France imposed an indemnity for lost “property,” land and people alike, that crippled the economy for decades, and Jefferson’s United States refused recognition and trade.

He saved the Revolution by ending it.

Napoleon Bonaparte is what the Revolution made possible. Commissioned into the artillery at sixteen, he had no prospects in an officer corps reserved for nobles. The Revolution removed the ceiling: Toulon made him a brigadier general at twenty-four, grapeshot on 13 Vendémiaire made him the Directory’s reliable soldier, and Italy made him famous. Even Egypt, a strategic failure once Nelson destroyed his fleet at the Nile, became an asset, because he abandoned the army and reached home ahead of the news. That is the man in miniature: rational to a fault, and willing to leave an army in the desert when the political arithmetic requires it.

The coup of 18 Brumaire succeeded because the Directory was already shopping for a strongman; Sieyès helped, expecting a puppet, and discovered he had installed a master. The Consulate is a masterpiece of decorative constitutionalism: three consuls of whom only the First matters, a Senate the consul appoints, a Tribunate that may debate laws but not vote on them and a Legislative Assembly that may vote but not debate, universal male suffrage that elects from a list the Senate drew, and eighty-three prefects appointed from Paris. The plebiscites were won by margins that would embarrass a modern dictatorship: life consulship in 1802, hereditary emperor in 1804.

His domestic program — the romance is over, history must begin — used three tools. Religion: the Concordat of 1801 restored Catholicism while conceding nothing that mattered, since Napoleon appointed the bishops, paid the clergy, took their oath, and kept the confiscated land. It is the Civil Constitution of the Clergy with a papal signature on it. Law: nearly three hundred legal systems collapsed into one, and the Civil Code of 1804 fixed equality before the law and the abolition of feudal remnants — while stripping women of the divorce rights and the legal independence the Revolution had granted, because Napoleon understood the state as a family and himself as its father. Education: schools in every commune and department and an Imperial University in 1808, on a curriculum he supervised personally, because schools produce bureaucrats, soldiers, and taxpayers, and can be made to produce admirers.

The nationalism he exported is what destroyed him.

Napoleon’s foreign policy is his domestic policy at continental scale: fuse Europe into one empire with one law, one court system, and one ruler — or at minimum his relatives. The method was to engineer states into manageable sizes, breaking up what was too large to control and merging what was too small. The Act of Secularization of 1803 did that to Germany, inviting the larger states to swallow the ecclesiastical principalities and free cities. Two keys made the system work: he harnessed the nationalism the Revolution had unleashed, and he divided enemies who each wanted something different. Both eventually turn the other way.

On land he was, for a decade, unbeatable. Austerlitz left Austria at his mercy and frightened Emperor Francis into dissolving the Holy Roman Empire rather than see Napoleon wear its crown — a thousand-year-old institution ended by anticipation. Prussia was shattered in a fortnight and Russia beaten at Friedland. At sea he lost everything that mattered in a single afternoon: Britain could not be invaded without six hours’ control of the Channel, and Nelson broke the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar by sailing through the enemy line instead of trading broadsides along it. So Napoleon reached for economic warfare instead — the Continental System, barring British goods from every port he controlled. It was unenforceable and it did not work, but it gave him a reason to invade the two countries that would kill him.

Spain was the leak. Napoleon deposed the Bourbon king, installed his brother Joseph, abolished the Inquisition and feudalism, and imposed the Civil Code — genuinely better law — and the Spanish rose anyway, because he was not Spanish. That is his blind spot in full: a man so hyper-rational he could not price emotional motivation. What followed was a guerrilla war no conventional army could pacify, tying down 300,000 French troops who never won. Then Russia left the Continental System, and in June 1812 Napoleon marched east. Borodino failed to destroy the Russian army; Moscow was evacuated and burned; Alexander declined to negotiate on the grounds that he had more land and more men. The retreat cost between two and three hundred thousand dead.

After that the arithmetic was simple. The Sixth Coalition swore not to disband until he was finished and beat him at Leipzig, the largest land battle in Europe before the First World War. He abdicated in 1814 and was exiled to Elba, which was far too close; he came back, and the troops sent to arrest him joined him instead. The Hundred Days ended at Waterloo, and the second settlement was harsher — reparations, the 1789 borders, occupation, and St. Helena, where he died in 1821.