The Tanzimat Reforms were enacted in the mid-nineteenth century by the government of the Ottoman Empire. The Tanzimat Reforms were designed to modernize the Ottoman Empire and to address the threat of rising nationalism within the Empire.

The Haitian Revolution ended colonial control of the island called Sainte Domingue by France and introduced independence and the renaming of the country to Haiti in 1804.

Of these Latin American colonies Haiti was the first to gain independence in 1804. Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia followed in the next few decades. Puerto Rico gained its independence from the Spanish Empire in 1898, although was immediately thereafter annexed and occupied by forces of the United States.

The “cahiers de doléances” were a set of complaints and suggested changes devised by many members of the Estates General, from both the Second and Third Estates. The overall aim of the “cahiers” was to secure equal rights for all (aka white male) French citizens. This goal was to be achieved through the implementation and removal of many monarchial procedures. For example, the Estates General was to be allowed to meet on a regular basis, without kingly interference. In addition, local and regional governing bodies were to be granted greater autonomy over themselves, taxes were to be apportioned on a more equitable basis, some aristocratic privileges (such as reserved hunting forests) were to be abolished, and the press was to be permitted to operate freely. The “cahiers” proved that many members of the Second and Third Estates held very similar ideas of reform, in spite of their social differences and classist outlooks.

At the start of the summer of 1789, when the members of the Estates General finally gathered together to hold their first meeting, King Louis XVI (perhaps fearing a dilution of his own power) attempted to gain back some level of dominance over the group. Already made uneasy by the claims for equality expressed in the “cahiers de doléances,” the King vehemently distrusted the Third Estate and so he refused to allow their members to take part in the same session, at the same time, as their fellow First and Second Estate legislators. Naturally, the Third Estate saw the King’s new rule as a direct attack against themselves, and so they refused to follow his order. When the King made no move to retreat from his policy, the Third Estate abandoned the entire Estates General and decided to make their own legislature, along with any members of the First and Second Estates who wanted to join them. Many members of the First Estate, as well as the entire Second Estate, took the Third Estate up on its offer and so, on June 17th, 1789, they all converged to form the new National Assembly.

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.