King Louis XVI was deeply alarmed by the creation of the National Assembly – he hadn’t at all foreseen this turn of events. Consequently, he decided to meet with the few remaining members of the Estates General, but, most portentously, he had the National Assembly’s meeting room locked and barred. When the members of the National Assembly turned up and saw the locked doors, however, they weren’t discouraged or demoralized, as the King had hoped. Instead, the National Assembly was all the more energized and more determined than ever to achieve their reformist aims. Defiantly, they held their meeting instead on a tennis court – hence, the name of the oath – and there passed a solemn resolution that they would continue to meet, no matter what the King did to oppose them, until they had drafted a new national constitution, with all of their changes included. They also renamed themselves the National Constituent Assembly. The King tried to quash this latest development but it was too late, especially as the remaining members of the Estates General defected in support of the Assembly. From now on, the King was going to have to try and cooperate with the Assembly if he hoped to have any say in his nation’s government.

Initially, during the summer of 1789, most members of the National Constituent Assembly were in favor of instituting some form of constitutional monarchy in France. Many looked to the constitutional monarchy already in place in England, in which the English monarch and the Parliament shared rule under the Magna Carta, as a good model. But as King Louis XVI continued to make one sociopolitical blunder after another, support for any government which included the monarchy at all swiftly began to evaporate. Increasingly, the King looked to be an untrustworthy, inept, and/or entirely disinterested potential participant and so the Assembly began to consider other forms of government, including more drastic types.

Following his failed attempt to disband the National Constituent Assembly, King Louis XVI decided to place contingents of royal troops around both Versailles and Paris. The King hoped that the presence of his soldiers would dissuade the Assembly from taking any sort of drastic actions but, like so many of the King’s other endeavors, this plan had unintended consequences. The citizens of Paris, who had been suffering food shortages without any reprieve from their own government, were very much in support of the Assembly and so they viewed the royal troops in their midst as a direct threat to the Assembly’s continued existence. Desperate to keep the Assembly in place, on July 14th, 1789, a mob of enraged Parisians decided to assault the nearby Bastille prison, a fortress which had once held political prisoners but now stored weapons instead. When the Bastille’s guards fired into the approaching crowd and killed ninety-eight people, the remaining citizens responded by storming the fortress. In the ensuing chaos, the mob released all seven of the Bastille’s prisoners, captured weapons for their National Guard militia, and killed the prison’s governor and several other guards.

The July 14th, 1789 storming and destruction of the Bastille by the citizens of Paris marked the beginning of the “journées.” The “journées” were otherwise known as incidents in which groups of French citizens banded together to take the Revolution into their own hands, often through destructive and/or violent means. This pattern would persist, again and again, throughout the entire Revolution, culminating in and coinciding with the infamous Reign of Terror. After the fall of the Bastille, the National Constituent Assembly very quickly realized that it was no longer entirely in control of the Revolution; instead, the French people were determined to play a part and would continue to do so. The reaction to such events within the Assembly was decidedly mixed; many members were disturbed by these outbreaks of disruption, but many others (most notably Maximillian Robespierre), saw the “journées” as crucial opportunity for power and control of the building Revolutionary movement.

On June 20th, 1791, fearful of the future and acting on his exiled brother’s advice, King Louis XVI, together with Queen Marie Antoinette, managed to escape their Parisian palace. Disguised as servants, the royal couple made a frantic journey through the surrounding countryside, but just when it seemed that their freedom was imminent, they were spotted and captured by militia outside the city of Varennes. At first, the National Constituent Assembly tried to cover up the King’s near escape, but it proved impossible to conceal such a dramatically ruinous occurrence from the ever-suspicious French people. As the nation erupted in anti-monarchy fervor, the Assembly came to a portentous conclusion: now that the King had proven himself to be untrustworthy, it was no longer conceivable for the nation to function as a constitutional monarchy. The Assembly would have to abandon this plan and implement another governmental structure.

The Girondists were one of the most influential political groups in the era of the French Revolution. Originally part of the Jacobins, the Girondists separated from their former allies in 1791 over a difference in goals and tactics. While the Jacobins were primarily focused on mustering support for and creating a new republican government, the Girondists were almost exclusively concerned with defending the Revolution from any and all opponents. The Girondists considered anyone who expressed doubt, criticism, or outright opposition to the Revolution to be an immediately dangerous threat, whether the critic was a French citizen or a foreign head of state. These opponents, so the Girondists believed, should be dealt with harshly, using whatever means were necessary – unsurprisingly, these methods were often violent. It was the Girondists who convinced the Legislative Assembly to declare war on Austria on April 20th, 1792. (The Austrian Emperor was Queen Marie Antoinette’s older brother and he had hardly been quiet about his hatred for France’s revolutionary zeal.)

On April 20th, 1792, the French Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria and its ally, Prussia. This was the perfect definition of a high-stakes gamble: after all, France was already embroiled in the beginnings of its own internal revolution. So why would the nation want to further jeopardize its already precarious existence by starting an external war with its European neighbors? The decision to go to war was primarily encouraged by two factions within French society: the Girondists and King Louis XVI and his fellow loyalists. The Girondists favored war as the best possible defense of the Revolution; by defeating France’s external foes, they imagined the Revolution would become unstoppable, as the citizenry united in joy over their martial victory. As for the King, he and all those loyal to him viewed war as their last hope of retaining monarchical power. Without external rescue, the King feared his reign, and possibly his very life, were utterly doomed.

During the opening week of September 1792, the city of Paris was convulsed by a series of violent executions. Known as the September Massacres, these executions were carried out by the Paris Commune, with mass popular support from the city’s working-class population. These murders specifically targeted prisoners who were then being kept in the city’s jails, whom the Commune and its supporters wrongfully assumed were anti-revolutionaries. In truth, the vast majority of these inmates were simply common criminals, jailed for everyday offenses, with no counter-Revolutionary alliances. In total, over one thousand prisoners were executed, before the Commune was apprised of its mistake.

Under the strong influence of the Paris Commune, the French Legislative Assembly created a new government body, the Convention (named after the earlier American Constitutional Convention). Although the Convention was specifically created to write a new Constitution, instead the Convention’s members, as their very first act of governorship, officially declared France to now be a republic. This declaration, issued on September 21st, 1792, permanently ended France’s tenure as a constitutional monarchy and put King Louis XVI out of a job.

The French Revolution began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and the dissolution of the Estates General. The Estates General was replaced with the National Assembly. The National Assembly was itself replaced by the Committee of Public Safety, which enacted the year-long Reign of Terror (in which thousands of French people were publically executed as enemies of the revolution). The establishment of the Directory followed the abolition of the Committee of Public Safety. The Directory presided over a series of successful foreign conquests, but was unpopular with the Parisian public due to its repressive policies. The Directory was overthrown in 1799 and replaced by the French Consulate under the control of Napoleon, thus ending the French Revolution.