The French Revolution, 1789–1799: Phases and Turning Points

A phase-by-phase guide to the French Revolution, from the debt crisis and the Bastille to the Terror, the Directory, and Bonaparte's coup, with the debates still open.

Avevide · Last reviewed October 24, 2026 · 9 min read

In the spring of 1789, almost no one in France imagined the country without a king. Within four years Louis XVI had been deposed and executed. Within ten, a general had seized power in a coup and the republic that replaced the monarchy was on its way to becoming an empire. Few political experiments have moved so fast or tried so many forms in so short a time.

The French Revolution is easier to follow if you treat it as a series of phases, each with its own turning point, rather than one long explosion. This deep dive walks through those phases from the financial crisis of the 1780s to the coup of 1799. It draws heavily on the essays and documents collected by George Mason University and the City University of New York in their project Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and it pauses at the questions historians still argue over.

A note on names: "the Mountain" and "the Girondins" were factions in the revolutionary assemblies, not parties in the modern sense, and the sans-culottes were the politically active working people of Paris.

Phase one: a bankrupt monarchy, 1787 to 1789

The trigger was money. Long wars had left the crown spending far more than it collected, and it covered the gap by borrowing. In the 1780s, for reasons the project's essay says "historians still argue about," that credit dried up. In 1787 the government proposed major reforms of taxation and spending. An Assembly of Notables and the royal law courts, especially the Parlement of Paris, resisted and insisted that only the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614, could consent to new taxes. Facing bankruptcy, Louis XVI agreed. The French National Assembly's history pages date the summons to August 8, 1788, for a meeting in May 1789.

The structure of that body mattered enormously. Traditionally it had three orders, the clergy, the nobility, and the commons, each voting as a single bloc. Because nobles made up a majority of the clergy's deputies, the privileged orders could outvote commoners who made up the vast majority of the population. The king agreed to double the Third Estate's delegation, but pamphleteers demanded voting "by head" rather than "by order." The deeper argument, as the project puts it, was for a new concept of society in which commoners had the same value as the other orders.

Underneath the politics lay hard conditions. France had nearly 30 million people by the reign of Louis XVI, about 80 percent of them living in villages of 2,000 or fewer. Historians have estimated that in lean years 90 percent of peasants lived at or below subsistence. Bread was the staple of most urban diets, and a sharp rise in its price was felt immediately.

Phase two: the revolution of 1789

The Estates-General met in May 1789, and the gap between noble and commoner deputies only widened. On June 17 the deputies of the Third Estate declared that they alone represented the "nation" and constituted the body holding sovereignty. The deputies reaffirmed that stand in the famous Tennis Court Oath, while the king wavered between resistance, including locking them out of their meeting hall, and accommodation.

Paris then entered the story. Rumors spread that royal troops would disband the assembly, and on July 12 Parisians learned that the popular finance minister, Jacques Necker, had been dismissed. On July 14 crowds took the Bastille, a medieval royal fortress looming over the workers' neighborhoods. The seven prisoners freed that day included no actual victims of political oppression, but the radical press immediately proclaimed the event a blow against despotism, and the building was soon demolished.

In the countryside, rumors that nobles were sending armed "brigands" to burn crops set off what became known as the Great Fear. Hundreds of thousands of peasants attacked manors and destroyed the property deeds recording feudal dues. The National Assembly, anxious to stay ahead of events, decreed the abolition of feudalism on August 4. On August 26 it approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which proclaimed that "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights," that "The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation," and that "Law is the expression of the general will."

The king resisted these measures. In October, with bread prices at their highest levels of the century, market women marched to Versailles, joined by National Guard soldiers. They occupied the palace overnight and brought the royal family back to Paris. Soon afterward Louis consented to the Declaration.

Phase three: a constitutional monarchy that could not hold, 1789 to 1792

For two years the revolution tried to build a constitutional monarchy, and for much of that time the king remained genuinely popular. Two problems undermined the effort.

The first was religion. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed in July 1790, made clergy elective and required them to swear an oath to the new order. Church land became "national property" to be sold to pay the state's debts. Almost half the clergy refused the oath, and because most of these "refractory" priests lived in the countryside, the measure bred lasting resentment among peasants.

The second was the king himself. On the night of June 20, 1791, the royal family, disguised as servants, fled toward the border. Louis was recognized and arrested at Varennes. The assembly accepted his weak claim that he had never meant to flee, largely because punishing him seemed too destabilizing, and he accepted the new constitution in September. When patriots demonstrated for a republic on the Champ de Mars, the Paris National Guard attacked them.

The new constitution also drew new lines inside the nation. It distinguished "active" citizens, who could vote and hold office, from "passive" citizens who could not, based on income, gender, and other criteria. A revolution made in the name of equality had produced a new hierarchy, and many Parisians noticed.

Phase four: war and the fall of the monarchy, 1792

War changed everything. The Girondins, who dominated the new Legislative Assembly, found that confrontational rhetoric against the émigré nobles gathering across the border was popular, and France declared war on Austria in April 1792. French forces performed badly, Prussian and Austrian troops invaded, and Paris panicked.

On August 10, 1792, crowds from the Paris neighborhoods and clubs invaded the Tuileries Palace and effectively deposed the king. In September, as foreign armies approached, crowds massacred thousands of political prisoners in the September Massacres. The suffrage changed too: a decree of August 11, 1792, abolished the distinction between active and passive citizens for electing a new National Convention, and according to the National Assembly's history pages the number of voters in the primary assemblies rose from 4 to 7 million. After the first great French victory, at Valmy on September 20, the newly seated Convention declared France a republic.

The Convention then had to decide the king's fate. The discovery in November of a locked chest of incriminating letters revived the outcry against him. After a trial lasting over two months, the Convention voted to convict him of treason, and Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793. For supporters, the project's essay observes, it represented liberation; for detractors, the cruelty and stupidity of the revolution.

Phase five: the Terror, 1793 to 1794

The new republic faced foreign war, civil war, and factional war at once. On June 2, 1793, after crowds surrounded the Convention, the Girondin deputies were expelled, and the Mountain took control. In the western Vendée, peasants, former nobles, and refractory priests formed a guerrilla army after Paris called for 300,000 army "volunteers." Government troops besieged cities that resisted the Mountain's centralizing rule, revolts that Parisians lumped together as "federalism."

To govern through this, the Convention had delegated power to a twelve-member Committee of Public Safety in the spring of 1793. In September, pushed by the sans-culottes, the Committee led the Convention into the Terror: the organized use of state coercion, with a revolutionary tribunal trying "suspects" and sending the convicted to the guillotine. The Terror also enforced price and wage "maximums." Marie Antoinette was executed in October 1793. The government introduced a new calendar of ten-day weeks and launched a study that produced the metric system.

By early 1794 French armies were defeating the invaders, but the domestic purges continued. The Law of 22 Prairial (June 10, 1794) put the apparatus of the Terror directly under the Committee's control. Fearing they would be next, Maximilien Robespierre's enemies persuaded the uncommitted deputies to turn on him, and on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) he and his followers were arrested and executed. The essay is careful on a point often missed: the coup's leaders acted to save themselves, not to end the Terror as such, and dismantling it took several more months.

Phase six: the Directory and Brumaire, 1795 to 1799

The Constitution of the Year III (1795) restored property qualifications for voting and officeholding and placed executive power in a five-member Directory. It came to power with military support, after the army, commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte, put down a royalist-influenced rising in October 1795, and it never escaped that dependence. When the elections of 1797 strengthened the royalist right, the Directors annulled the results in the coup of 18 Fructidor; in 1798 they did the same to the left.

Meanwhile Bonaparte conquered much of Italy in 1796 and 1797 and led an expedition to Egypt in 1798 before abandoning his stranded army and returning home. Emmanuel Sieyès, who had helped start the revolution in 1789, now arranged a coup to reorganize the government. On 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799), the Directory was replaced by a three-man Consulate. Sieyès badly underestimated his partner: within a couple of months Bonaparte was the real ruler of France.

Where historians disagree

The sources gathered by the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity project are unusually open about unsettled questions:

Causes: the essays suggest social unrest may not have been the basic cause, and ask whether the nobility's fear of losing privilege mattered more than middle-class assertiveness.
The Bastille: was July 14 a conscious political defense of the assembly, or a traditional bread riot that took on political meaning only as events unfolded?
The Terror: some see it as rooted in the principles of 1789, either as a necessary sweeping-away of the old order or as an authoritarian streak hidden in democratic language; others see a revolution knocked off course by war and circumstance.
The Directory: often dismissed as unheroic, it has received relatively little scholarly attention, though it consolidated much of what the decade had achieved.

None of these debates is likely to be closed by a single document. What the evidence does show is how contingent each turn was. Bread prices, rumors, a failed escape, and a declaration of war each pushed events in directions no faction had planned.

Key takeaways

A royal debt crisis forced the calling of the Estates-General, which met in May 1789 for the first time since 1614.
The year 1789 brought the National Assembly (June 17), the fall of the Bastille (July 14), the abolition of feudalism (August 4), and the Declaration of the Rights of Man (August 26).
The constitutional monarchy failed amid religious conflict, the king's flight to Varennes, and war; the monarchy fell on August 10, 1792, and Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793.
The Terror ran from September 1793 to Robespierre's fall on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794); the Directory followed and ended in Bonaparte's coup of November 9, 1799.
Historians still debate the revolution's causes, the meaning of the Bastille, and whether the Terror grew from 1789's principles or from war and crisis.

Sources

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