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Location and Land
France is the third-largest European country and is bordered by mountains
to the south and to the east.
The English Channel is to its north, the Atlantic Ocean to its west,
and the Mediterranean Sea to its south.
The French capital, Paris, is in the north central region.
Ten miles outside Paris, a royal dwelling was first built at Versailles
for King Louis XIII around 1624.
By 1682 his son, Louis XIV, had greatly expanded the property and moved
the French government to this location.
One hundred years later, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would leave the
palace and face a violent end to their rule.
The Storm Breaks
The years of the French Revolution, between 1789 and 1799, offer lessons
in political life that are still
studied. The first part of the Revolution, beginning with the attack on
the Bastille on July 14, 1789,
forced an end to the feudal divisions of the Old Regime. Fear and mob
violence shook the country in the
early days of the Revolution, including an October uprising in which
women marched on the Versailles palace
to demand that the king and his family come to Paris.
Like the American revolutionaries, French political activists were
influenced by the Enlightenment
ideas of Rousseau, Voltaire, and other philosophers who placed a
high value on human reason.
The National Assembly, the Revolutionary ruling body in France,
adopted the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen, reflecting Enlightenment ideals,
and established a constitutional
monarchy. In 1792, however, Louis XVI was found guilty of treason
and the monarchy was abolished.
The National Convention established a republic on September 1, 1792,
and the king was executed on January 21, 1793.
The Reign of Terror and Its Aftermath
During 1793 and 1794, France experienced a year of officially
sanctioned bloodshed known as the
Reign of Terror. The revolutionaries in charge, led by Maximilien
Robespierre, believed that the
virtue of the new republic needed to be enforced through terror.
The so-called committee of Public
Safety condemned to death thousands upon thousands of suspected
enemies of the Revolution. In addition
to those who died on the guillotine, hundreds of others were shot,
hanged, or drowned. In a strange twist
of fate, Robespierre too became a victim of the guillotine in July of 1794.
By this time nearly everyone was tired of violence and upheaval.
After some confusion, a
new constitution was adopted in 1795. Weak leadership, however,
led to a series of coups d'état, o
r government overthrows. In 1799, a coup d'état by Napoleon
Bonaparte ushered in a new era in French
politics. Napoleon abandoned some of the Revolution's ideals while
gathering others into a set of laws
known as the Napoleonic Code.
Credits: Girondists © Corbis; Storming of the Bastille,
July 14, 1789. Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France.
Photo © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York; Portrait of Robespierre.
Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France. Photo © SEF/Art Resource, New York.
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