They were a group of Jacobins that dominated
the early days of the Legislative Assembly.
Although they were determined to deal severely
with the enemies of the Revolution, their
attitudes were milder than the Mountain or
Sans-Culottes. They tried to prevent the
execution of Louis XVI and were the first to be
targeted during the Reign of Terror.
The Girondists
They were bonds issued as collateral for
confiscated church lands when the Assembly
decided on November 2nd, 1789 to finance
France’s enormous debt by confiscating the
property of the Roman Catholic Church and sell
the land to pay the debt.
Assignats
She was the wife of Louis XVI and the daughter
of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. Initially
popular in France, she became “that Austrian
woman” and was accused of sexual promiscuity
and personal extravagance
Marie Antoinette
He led the Conspiracy of Equals which called for
more radical democracy and more equality of
property. He and his follower believed that the
Revolution was not complete because the rich
were still in control; the poor had no real relief
and were not represented in the new
government.
Gracchus Babeuf
He was a liberal French aristocrat and a hero of
the American Revolution, who was offered
command of the National Guard after the
storming of the Bastille and it was he who gave
the guard a new badge (cockade): the red and
blue stripes from the colors of the Parisian coat
of arms, separated by the white stripe of the royal
flag.
The Marquis de Lafayette
He was the archbishop of Toulouse and a bitter
foe of Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who
replaced Calonne as French Minister of Finance.
But once in office, he discovered to his horror
that the financial situation of France was as bad
as Calonne had said and immediately sought a
similar land tax.
Étienne Loménie de Brienne
In 1790, this “Father of Conservatism” published
Reflections on the Revolution in France in which
he argued that the French Revolution would end
disastrously because it was not rational and
ignored the complexities of human nature and
society.
Edmund Burke
He replaced Jacques Necker as the French
finance minister and immediately proposed a
series of reforms to encourage internal trade,
lower some taxes, reduce the indirect taxes on
the peasants; and at the same time authorize a
new land tax that all landowners would have to
pay whatever their social status.
Charles Alexandre de Calonne
This battle (September, 1792) was a huge French
victory over the invading Prussians and forced the
invaders to withdraw giving the revolutionaries a
great moral victory – and allowing the victorious
French general, Charles François Dumouriez, to go
on the offensive in Belgium (the Austrian
Netherlands), rout the Austrian army and occupy
the entire country by the beginning of winter.
The Battle of Valmy
He was an invaluable leader during the dark
days of 1792 and had been a member of the
Committee of Public Safety before Robespierre
joined the group, but was one of Robespierre’s
victims when Robespierre turned on his fellow
Jacobin republicans.
Georges Jacques Danton
He was as the most influential of the Émigrés
and the younger brother of Louis XVI. He helped
to formulate the king’s disastrous plan to flee
France in June, 1791. In 1824, he became King
Charles X.
Count of Artois
This constitution replaced the Constitution of
1793 which had never gone into effect. It was a
reflection of the Thermidorian determination to
reject both constitutional monarchy and radical
democracy; and went into effect on August 22
1795. The new constitution created a legislature
of two houses: The Council of Elders and the
Council of Five-hundred
The Constitution of the Year III
He was the Prussian king who promised to
protect Poland and its reformers but, after
Catherine the Great’s armies entered Poland at
the invitation of self-serving Polish nobles, he
changed his mind and participated with
Catherine in the 1793 Second Partition of Poland.
Frederick William II
He was an English scientist, clergyman, political
theorist and radical who is best known the
discovery of oxygen and being the founder of
Unitarianism. Because of his revolutionary ideas,
government inspired mobs drove him out of the
country.
Joseph Priestly
They were the radical wing of the Jacobins and got
their name because their seats were high up in the
assembly hall; they worked with the Sans-Culottes
to win the war and root out the enemies – real or
imagined - of the Revolution.
The Mountain
In 1791, she published a Declaration of the Rights
of Woman and the Female Citizen in which she
challenged the practice of male authority and the
notion of male–female inequality. She demanded
that women be regarded as citizens and given the
right to own property. She was guillotined during
the Reign of Terror.
Olympe de Gouges
This was a replacement for the Cult of Reason
ordered by Maximilien Robespierre in May of
1794 and was a deistic cult that reflected
Rousseau’s vision of a civic religion that would
create greater public morality.
The Cult of the Supreme Being
Like the Marquis de Lafayette, he was a veteran
of the American Revolution; he was a Polish
officer who resisted the 1792 invasion of Poland
by Russian forces but was defeated and driven
into exile. In 1794, Polish officers rebelled against
Russia and he returned only to be defeated and
captured
Tadeusz Kosciuszko
He was the Bourbon King of France who ruled
from 1643 to 1715. An adherent to the Divine
Right of Kings, he worked hard to create a
centralized state and eliminate the remnants of
Feudalism. During his reign he sought to
dominate Europe and fought three major wars.
His reign took France to the pinnacle of its glory
and yet he sowed the seeds of its destruction by
his foreign wars and lavish spending.
Louis XIV
This document was intended to be a statement
of broad principles that would outline the
constitution that the National Constituent
Assembly was writing. Its two most powerful
ideas were civic equality and popular
sovereignty.
The Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen
He was a Swiss banker appointed by Louis XVI to
make reforms and increase income. In 1781, he
produced a report which implied that the
financial situation was not as bad as was
thought. He argued that if the monies spent on
the American war effort were not factored in,
then the budget was actually in the black (i.e.,
had a surplus).
Jacques Necker
He was the well-intentioned but weak-willed
king of France who could not stop France’s
escalation into bankruptcy. In 1789 he called the
Estates General and quickly lost control. He was
put on trial for treason as Citizen Capet. In spite
of Girondist support, he was convicted of
conspiring against the liberty of the people,
condemned and guillotined on January 31st, 1793.
Louis XVI
This was a social/political order loosely modeled
on Rousseau’s Social Contract, especially the part
where he emphasizes that a person ought to
sacrifice himself for the better good, in this case
the Revolution. And it was in this idea of putting
the public good above the individual good that
caused the Committee of Public Safety to carry
out its policies of terror.
The Republic of Virtue
He was the British Prime Minister who in the
1790s began to take measures to suppress reform
and popular movements. He was even able to
have Parliament suspend Writs of Habeas
Corpus (which requires a person under arrest to be
brought before a judge or into court thus making it
impossible to hold a prisoner without sufficient
evidence) and making the writing of certain ideas
treasonable.
William Pitt the Younger
This group was formed after the Prussian
commander invading Belgium, the Duke of
Brunswick, threatened to destroy Paris if the royal
family was harmed. In response, the Government
of Paris created this unelected political entity –
which soon came to dominate the Revolution.
The Paris Revolutionary Commune
He was the person who most idealized the
Republic of Virtue and who became the de-facto
dictator of the Committee of Public Safety. He
was a shrewd politician and his own man. His
name became synonymous with the Reign of
Terror. But he overshot himself and he and about
eighty of his supporters went to the guillotine.
Maximilien Robespierre
This was presented to the king at the Estates
General which was about to meet at Versailles and it criticized government waste, church
taxation and the hunting rights of the aristocracy
- and also called for regular meetings of the
Estates General, fair taxation, more local
authority in government and a free press.
The Cahiers de Doléances
(or list of grievances)
This 1791 law forbade the formation of workers
associations because the Assembly saw the
efforts of the workers to organize as an attempt
to reassert the old medieval guilds and thus to
oppose the new and revolutionary values of
political and social individualism.
The Chapelier Law
He was appointed Chancellor of France in 1770
by Louis XV. He abolished the Parlements, exiled
their members to different parts of France, taxed
the aristocrats and made the government more
efficient. His efforts collapsed when Louis XV
suddenly died in 1774 and Louis XVI dismissed
him and attempted to regain the favor of the
aristocrats.
Rene Maupeou
This blunder was a law passed by the National
Constituent Assembly on July 12 1790. Its goal
was to subordinate the Roman Catholic Church
in France to the French government. It also
provided for the election of parish pastors and
bishops who became salaried employees of the
state.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy
This was the executive body of the legislature
created by the Constitution of the Year III. It was
a five person _______________chosen by the
Council of Elders from a list submitted by the
Council of Five Hundred.
Directory
He was a priest, political writer and one
of the chief political thinkers of the
French Revolution. His 1789 pamphlet,
What is the Third Estate?, became the
manifesto of the Revolution:
Abbé Sieyès
This was decreed as the new religion of France by
the Convention on November 10th 1793 and set
about making churches across France into
Temples of Reason. The Cathedral of Notre
Dame in Paris saw the largest of these
ceremonies when its Christian altar was turned
into an Altar to Liberty and an inscription To
Philosophy was carved in stone over the
cathedral's doors.
The Cult of Reason
This document was issued by Frederick William
II of Prussia and Leopold II of Austria on August
27th, 1791 and was intended to frighten the French
revolutionaries and protect Louis XVI and his
family. The two monarchs promised to intervene
in French affairs to protect the royal family and
to preserve the monarchy if any other major
European power agreed.
The Declaration of Pilnitz
These were the names given to the new “states”
that replaced the old French provinces. They
were approximately equal in size and named
after rivers, mountains and other geographical
features. They were further subdivided into
districts, cantons and communes.
Departments
This was the process by which the king’s royal
council strengthened the Third Estate by
allowing it to elect twice as many representatives
as the clergy or nobility. Thus the Third Estate
could easily dominate the Estates General if
voting was done by majority vote rather than by
order
Doubling the Third
They were the upper middle class professionals
such as bankers, merchants, doctors and lawyers
of the Third Estate. They were capitalist oriented
and made up the vast majority of the delegates of
the Third Estate who came to Versailles in 1789.
The Bourgeoisie
They were about 16,000 French
aristocrats who fled France and
settled in other countries near the
French border and became involved
in counterrevolutionary activities.
Émigrés
The Estates General was an assembly that
represented the entire French population through
groups known as estates. The First Estate
consisted of about 100,000
Roman Catholic Clergy
The Second Estate consisted of about
400,000 aristocrats
The Third Estate consisted of
the rest of the population or about
24 million people.
He was the pope who reacted harshly to the
removal of the Refractory clergy and condemned
not only the Civil Constitution of the Clergy but
also the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen; he even condemned the French clergy
who had signed the oath to support the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, especially bishops
who had ordained new, elected clergy.
Pius VI
This was a result of the rioting that followed the
Storming of the Bastille in 1789 and swept
through much of the countryside. Peasants,
afraid of royal troops being sent to suppress their
uprisings and driven by rumors of grain
shortages, attacked churches, monasteries and
many manor houses (châteaux) destroying many
legal records and documents.
The Great Fear
His own pleasure seeking, and his gifts to the
nobility and his favorites, financial scandals like
the Mississippi Bubble and the Wars of the
Austrian Succession and the Seven Year’s War –
and France’s participation in the American
Revolution drained France financially - even
more than his great grandfather.
Louis XV
They were the most famous of the clubs of the
Third Estate. They were excellent networkers and
they established local clubs throughout France.
They demanded a republic and the elimination
of the monarchy - and as such were among the
most radical members of the National Assembly.
The Jacobins
This system drafted the entire population of France
into the war effort directing all economic
production for military purposes. Young men
became soldiers; middle aged men manufactured
arms and weapons for the army; women made
tents and bandages or worked in hospitals – even
children and the elderly had roles to play. Never
before had Europe seen a nation organized so
efficiently and the revolutionaries raised an army
of more than a million men - larger than any in
European history.
The Levee en Masse
This group was proclaimed in June of 1789 after
the National Assembly had achieved a de facto
Glorious Revolution to show that the main
objective of the newly named assembly was to
write a constitution which would be completed
in 1791.
The National Constituent Assembly
He was the author of Common Sense and a
supporter of the French Revolution. In 1791, he
wrote a book, The Rights of Man, as a criticism of
Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in
France and a defense of revolutionary principles.
He argued that the good of the monarch and the
good of the people are the same.
Thomas Paine
They led the August attack on the Tuileries
Palace in which the Swiss Guard was massacred
and sent gangs of thugs into the prisons in the
September Massacres to put on trial and
arbitrarily murder over 1,400 victims - and
invited the other French cities to follow this
example.
The Paris Revolutionary Commune
This was a period of time from the fall of 1793 to
the summer of 1794, when many people – from
the nobility to clergy to Bourgeoisie to shop
keepers and peasants – were arbitrarily arrested
and – in many cases – executed by the guillotine.
This ferocity was justified because the
revolutionaries believed that the preservation of
the Revolution was more important than
personal security or property or even people’s
lives.
The Reign of Terror
They were clergy who refused to take an oath to
support the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. So
in reprisal, the National Constituent Assembly
removed them from their clerical functions both
sacramental and administrative.
The Refractory Clergy
They were the common people of Paris. Their
name means “without breeches” and referred to
the long trousers of working men. They were
shopkeepers, artisans, and poor workers. They
felt that they had been ignored by the old regime
and taken for granted by the wealthy men of the
National Assembly. They were angry and knew
what they wanted: an end to inflation, food
shortages and every form of social inequality.
The Sans-Culottes
This group was founded in May 1793, by Pauline
Léon and Claire Lacombe. Its purpose was to fight
the internal enemies of the Revolution. They saw
themselves a militant citizens and the filled the
galleries of the Convention to hear the debates
and cheer their favorite speakers. But as they
became more radical – seeking stronger control
on food prices, ferreting out food hoarders, street
fighting with working market women and
demanding they wear the revolutionary cockade –
the Jacobins began to fear them.
The Society of Republican Women
This phenomenon occurred just after the
execution of Maximilian Robespierre. The fall of
Robespierre might have been just another violent
turn of events but it actually had sobering effect
on France. The members of the Convention used
the Robespierre’s death to reassert their power
and within a short time the Reign of Terror came
to a close. This phenomenon can be described as
a widespread feeling that the Revolution had
gone too far and a return to center was necessary.
The Thermidorian Reaction
This moment in history came about after the
National Assembly formed itself but king decided
to reassert his authority and announced a “Royal
Session” of the Estates General for June 23rd and
closed the room where the National Assembly
had been meeting. On June 20th, the National
Assembly discovered they were locked out and
moved to a nearby indoor tennis court where its
members took this famous action and not to
disband until they had given France a written
constitution.
The Tennis Court Oath
This event took place as a result of a mutiny of
Polish officers ordered to join their forces with the
Russian forces. Led by Thaddeus Kosciuszko, they
were defeated and the victors (Austria, Prussia
and Russia) wiped Poland off the map causing
Poland to cease to exist as an independent state
for a hundred and twenty three years – until after
the First World War.
The Third Partition of Poland
This was the name given to reprisal attacks on
Jacobins and others responsible for the Reign of
Terror with little more due process of law than the
Reign of Terror had observed. Sometimes the
Convention gave its approval; other times gangs
of aristocratic or draft dodging youths roamed the
streets assaulting Jacobins.
The White Terror
They were the upper middle class professionals
such as bankers, merchants, doctors and lawyers
of the Third Estate.
Bourgeoisie
He said in this manifesto of the Revolution: What
is the Third Estate? Everything! What has it been
in the political order up till the present? Nothing!
What does it ask? To become something!
Abbé Siéyès
This occurred when Louis XVI hesitated in
ratifying the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen causing many people to believe that
he might try to regain his power and because of
the scarcity of bread and inflated prices. Its
participants “forced” the king to return to Paris.
The Women’s March on Versailles
They were bitterly anti-monarchial, strongly
republican and even suspicious of representative
government. They believed that the people
should make the decisions of government.
The Sans-Culottes
Edmund Burke correctly predicted that the
French Revolution would end in tyranny; that is a
dictatorship. Some scholars thought he was
referring to the Marquis de Lafayette but it would
be this young Corsican of minor nobility who
would make Burke’s prediction come true.
Napoleon Bonaparte