On 20 April 1792, the Assembly voted to declare war on Austria (Holy Roman Empire). They planned to invade the Austrian Netherlands, but the revolution had made the army weak. Many soldiers deserted. Soon, Prussia joined on the Austrian side. They both planned to invade. Together, on 25 July, they wrote the Brunswick Manifesto, promising that if the royal family was not hurt, no civilians would be hurt in the invasion. The French believed that this meant the king, Louis XVI, was working with the foreign kings. Prussia invaded France on 1 August, 1792. This first stage of the French Revolutionary Wars continued until 1797.
In September, things got worse. The Legislative Assembly had almost no power. No single group was controlling Paris or France. The country was being invaded by the Prussian Army. The revolutionaries were very angry and violent. They began to go into prisons and kill people they thought were traitors to France. They hated the priests of the Roman Catholic Church the most, but they also killed many nobles and ordinary people. By 7 September, 1,400 people were dead.
The Legislative Assembly had lost all its power. France needed a new government. On 20 September 1792, the National Convention was formed. The Convention had both Girondins and radical Jacobins.
The Brunswick Manifesto had made many people suspicious of the king. They thought he was plotting with the Prussian and Austrian rulers to invade France. In January 1793, the National Convention voted and found Louis XVI guilty of “conspiracy against the public liberty and the general safety.” On the twenty-first of January, the King was executed using the guillotine. Marie Antoinette, the Queen, was also executed on the sixteenth of October.
People in the area of Vendée did not like the revolutionary government. They did not like the rules about the church in the Civil Constitution of the Church (1790) and new taxes put in place in 1793. They also disliked being forced to join the French army. In March, they rose up against the government in a revolt. The war lasted until 1796. Hundreds of thousands of people from Vendée (Vendeans) were killed by the Revolutionary French army.
Now that the king was dead, the National Convention made a new republican constitution that began on 24 June. It was the first one that did not include the king and gave every man in France a vote. However, it never came into power because of the trouble between the Jacobins and Girondins. The war with Austria and Prussia was causing the state to have money problems. Bread was very expensive and many people wanted things to change. In June 1793, the Jacobins began to take power. They wanted to arrest many Girondin members of the National Convention. In July, they became angrier when Charlotte Corday, a Girondin, killed Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin.
By July, the coup was complete. The Jacobins had taken power. They put in new, radical laws including a new Republican Calendar with new months and new ten-day weeks. They made the army bigger and changed the officers to people who were better soldiers. Over the next few years, this helped the Republican army push back the attacking Austrians, Prussians, British, and Spanish.
In July 1793, a Jacobin called Maximilien de Robespierre and eight other leading Jacobins set up the Committee of Public Safety. It was the most powerful group in France. This group and Robespierre were responsible for the Reign of Terror. Robespierre believed that if people were afraid, the revolution would go better. The Reign of Terror lasted from the spring of 1793 to the spring of 1794.
It was not only the nobility who died in the Reign of Terror. Anyone who broke the Jacobins' laws, or was even suspected of breaking their laws or working against them, could be arrested and sent to the guillotine, most without a trial. Even powerful people who had been involved in the Jacobin coup were executed. Prisoners were taken from the prisons to “Madame Guillotine” (a nickname for the guillotine) in an open wooden cart called the tumbrel.
According to records, 16,594 people were executed with the guillotine. It is possible that up to 40,000 people died in prison or were killed during the Reign of Terror.
By July 1794, people began to turn against Maximilien de Robespierre. He and his Revolutionary Tribunal had killed 1,300 people in six weeks. On 27 July, the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety turned against him. Robespierre tried to get help from the Convention’s right-wing members, but he failed.
A day later, Robespierre and many of his supporters in the Paris Commune were sentenced to death by guillotine without any kind of trial. This reaction against Robespierre is called the Thermidorian Reaction.
Now that the terror was over, the National Convention started to make a new Constitution, called the Constitution of the Year III. On 27 September 1794, the constitution came into effect.
The new constitution had created the Directoire (Directory), which was the first government of France to be bicameral (split into two houses). The lower house, the parliament, had 500 members. It was called the "Conseil de Cinq-Cent" (Council of Five Hundred). The upper house, the senate, had 250 members and was called the "Conseil des Anciens" (Council of Elders). There were five directors chosen every year by the "Conseil des Anciens" from a list made up by the "Conseil de Cinq-Cent". This group was in charge and was called the Directory.
Although the constitution of 1793 had given all men in France a vote, in this constitution only people with a certain amount of property could vote.
The Directory was much more conservative than the governments in France since 1789. The people were tired of radical changes and the unstable governments. Things were much more stable under the Directory than they had been before.
However, the Directors were disliked by the people - especially the Jacobins, who wanted a republic, and the royalists, who wanted a new King. France’s money problems did not go away. The Directors ignored elections that did not go the way they wanted. They ignored the constitution in order to do things to control the people. They used the ongoing war and the army to keep their power.
The Coup of 18 Brumaire brought General Napoleon Bonaparte to power as First Consul of France and in the view of most historians ended the French Revolution. This bloodless coup d'état overthrew the Directory, replacing it with the French Consulate.
The 18 Brumaire marks the end of the Republican part of the French Revolution when Napoleon Bonaparte took the reign.
Daffy Duck
Daffy Duck is a cartoon duck from the Warner Bros. cartoons. He stands on two legs, has a black body, a white ring about his neck, and an orange beak. He first appeared in "Porky´s Duck Hunt" in 1937. In 1946, Daffy had started to change, and Daffy became less looney. Over the years, Daffy Duck had changed from screwball and heckling character to greedy and a jealous character.
1650s
Guillotine
The guillotine is a machine used to execute people by decapitation (chopping off their heads).
A guillotine is made of a heavy blade attached to a rack, which moves up and down on a vertical frame. When the rack is let go, it will fall down and the blade will cut the convict's head off.
Machines like the guillotine were first invented in the Middle Ages, and were used throughout Europe. For example, Scotland used a machine called the "Scottish Maiden".
The first time the guillotine was commonly used was in France, in the French Revolution of 1789. The guillotine became the only legal way to execute someone in France. The guillotine was used because it caused a quick death. Everyone died the same way, no matter what social class you were in, whether you were wealthy or poor.