The French Revolution

The French Revolution was the political and social upheaval that began in France in 1789, when financial crisis, food shortages and widespread resentment of aristocratic privilege led to the fall of the absolute monarchy, the abolition of feudal privileges and the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793 following the declaration of a republic. The revolution proceeded through several distinct and often violent phases, including the radical Jacobin period and the Reign of Terror, before power eventually consolidated in the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized control in 1799 and was crowned emperor in 1804. Its core idea, expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that political legitimacy rests on the nation and the citizen rather than on hereditary monarchy, spread across Europe both through revolutionary example and, later, through Napoleon's conquests, and historians widely treat the revolution as the opening event of the modern age of nationalism, popular sovereignty and mass politics.