1. France under Louis XVI: The Structure of the Old Order

11 June 1775 When Louis XVI was consecrated at Rheims, he inherited a kingdom that was a disorganized amalgam of territories acquired over a millennium. This state, known as the Ancien Régime, was defined by a crippling lack of uniformity and profound structural contradictions.

Administrative and Legal Chaos

The kingdom was a patchwork of overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions. It was divided into 39 provinces for governorships, 34 généralités for fiscal administration, 13 sovereign appellate courts known as parlements, and 136 dioceses for the Church. The jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris, for example, covered a third of the kingdom, while others were tiny.

This chaos extended to the legal system. Southern France operated under a system of written Roman law, while northern France, including Paris, was governed by over 300 different local "customs". This meant that laws regarding marriage, inheritance, and property could change simply by crossing a river. Furthermore, a web of internal customs barriers, tolls, and divergent systems of weights and measures stifled commerce and communication.

The Agricultural Economy and Feudal Burdens

France was overwhelmingly a rural, agricultural society, with 80% of its 28 million inhabitants being peasants. This economy was fundamentally inefficient, marked by low productivity, conservative technology, and the waste of leaving huge tracts of land fallow.

Upon this inefficient system, the peasant endured a "triple tax":

• To the State: The primary direct tax, the taille (land tax), was paid almost exclusively by the peasantry.
• To the Church: The tithe, theoretically a tenth of the harvest, was collected by the Church, often with great rigor.
• To the Lord: The peasant was crushed by an anachronistic and burdensome feudal system. This included the cens (rent paid in cash or crops), the corvée (forced labor on roads), and banalités (monopolies forcing peasants to use their lord's mill, oven, or wine-press). Lords also held exclusive hunting rights, allowing them to ride through and destroy crops with impunity.

The Social Order: The Three Estates

Legally, all subjects of the king belonged to one of three estates, or orders, a medieval stratification that no longer reflected economic reality.

This structure was defined by its contradictions. The First Estate (Clergy) was immensely wealthy, yet its wealth was concentrated in the hands of noble bishops and abbots, while the parish priests, who performed the majority of the spiritual and administrative work, were often as poor as their peasant flocks.

The Second Estate (Nobility) was also divided. A minority, the Court Nobility (noblesse de cour), lived in opulent luxury at Versailles. The majority, however, was a poor and proud provincial nobility. Their only source of status was their ancestry and their monopoly on army commissions. This monopoly was formalized by the notorious Ségur Ordinance (1781), which required four generations of nobility for officer candidates, a measure that intensely alienated the wealthy Third Estate.

The Third Estate (Commoners) was a vast, diverse category comprising 98% of the nation. It included everyone from the most wretched beggar to the most successful merchant. At its top was the bourgeoisie: a rising class of merchants, manufacturers, professionals, and lawyers. This group had grown wealthy, owning perhaps a quarter of the land and most industrial and commercial capital. Despite funding the state, they were systematically excluded from political power and the highest echelons of society. This created an acute misalignment of economic and political power.

At the bottom of the Third Estate was the peasantry and the urban poor. Poverty was France's most visible social problem; perhaps a third of the population, 8 million people, lived in destitution. In Paris, this working class of artisans, laborers, and shopkeepers became known as the sans-culottes. Their existence was precarious, tied directly to the price of bread. When crop failures (like the one in 1788) caused bread prices to skyrocket, this class was pushed to the brink of starvation and insurrection.

A Failing State Structure

The institutions of the Ancien Régime were failing. The parlements (high courts) were staffed by the nobility, who used their power to register royal edicts as a political weapon to block any royal reforms, particularly new taxes, that threatened their privileges. They cast themselves as "guardians" of liberty against royal "despotism," but in reality, they were defending their own tax exemptions. The monarchy, in its long-term effort to centralize power through its agents (the intendants), had alienated its natural allies, the nobility. Now, to solve its financial crisis, it needed their cooperation, and the parlements refused. The Ancien Régime was therefore structurally non-viable: its tax system was regressive, its society was misaligned, and its political machinery was paralyzed.

2. The Crisis of Ideas: Enlightened Opinion

The Ancien Régime was collapsing financially and structurally, but the ideology that would replace it was provided by the Enlightenment. This "Age of Reason" did not cause the Revolution, which was a product of financial and political failure, but it provided the "ideological toolkit" to diagnose the old order's sickness and design a new one.

The Philosophes

A generation of thinkers had criticized all aspects of the Ancien Régime:

• Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), advocated for a separation of powers and a constitutional monarchy, arguing against despotism. His ideas were eagerly adopted by the parlements in their struggle with the king.
• Voltaire had campaigned against the "infamy" of religious intolerance and the Church's abuses, famously defending victims of judicial murder like Jean Calas.
• Rousseau, in The Social Contract (1762), argued that sovereignty did not lie with the king but with the people, bound by a "general will". This provided the intellectual foundation for popular sovereignty.

The "Tribunal" of Public Opinion

These radical ideas spread through an expanding print culture. Journals, newspapers, and the great Encyclopédie of Diderot (1751) disseminated critical thought to a growing reading public. Academies, literary societies, and Masonic lodges became new social spaces where nobles and educated bourgeois could mix and debate as equals, creating a "philosophical society" that rendered the old Three Estates obsolete. This created a new, powerful "tribunal" of public opinion, which began to judge the state.

External Catalysts

Two events provided crucial political education:

• The Maupeou Crisis (1771-74): When Louis XV's chancellor, Maupeou, suppressed the rebellious parlements, it triggered a massive pamphlet war. This "dress rehearsal" for 1788 taught the public to equate royal power with "despotism" and the parlements with "liberty".
• The American Revolution (1776-83): This was the critical "proof of concept". It demonstrated that Enlightenment ideals—natural rights, no taxation without representation, popular sovereignty—were not just theories but could be implemented to create a functioning, large-scale republic. The return of French soldiers (like Lafayette) and the presence of Benjamin Franklin in Paris electrified this new public sphere.

3. The Financial Maelstrom: Crisis and Collapse (1776–1788)

The immediate trigger for the Revolution was the one problem the Ancien Régime's paralyzed structure could not solve: state bankruptcy.

The Debt Crisis

The primary cause was the massive debt incurred from France's successful but ruinously expensive participation in the American War of Independence. The Finance Minister, Jacques Necker, funded the war entirely through loans, not new taxes. In 1781, he published his Compte Rendu (Account to the King), a misleadingly optimistic budget that concealed the true scale of the deficit, making him immensely popular but delaying the day of reckoning.

Calonne and the Assembly of Notables (1787)

By 1786, the new Controller-General, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, informed Louis XVI that the state was on the verge of bankruptcy. He proposed a revolutionary reform package: a universal land tax to be paid by all landowners, including the nobility and clergy. To bypass the parlements, which he knew would reject this, he gambled by convening an Assembly of Notables (February 1787), a hand-picked body of the kingdom's elite.

The "Aristocratic Revolt"

The gamble failed. The Notables, defending their privileges, refused to approve the tax. They argued they had no authority to consent to new taxes and that only the nation's ancient representative body, the Estates-General (which had not met since 1614), could do so.

This was the "Noble Revolt," the true first phase of the Revolution. The nobility, in an attempt to roll back royal absolutism and protect their own tax exemptions, had inadvertently created a political vacuum and provided the language of "consent" and "liberty" that the Third Estate would soon use against them.

Calonne was dismissed. His successor, Loménie de Brienne, tried to force the reforms through the parlements. The Parlement of Paris refused, also demanding the Estates-General. The King's use of force (a lit de justice and the exile of the magistrates) led to widespread unrest and street fighting. By August 1788, the government was paralyzed, suspended treasury payments, and capitulated. Brienne resigned, Necker was recalled, and Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General to meet in May 1789.

4. The Revolution of 1789: From Estates-General to National Assembly

The summoning of the Estates-General created a national political debate, but a crucial question remained: how would it be organized? The Parlement of Paris, in a disastrous miscalculation, declared it should follow the "Forms of 1614," which meant voting by Estate, not by head. This would ensure the two privileged orders could always outvote the Third Estate. This aristocratic arrogance shattered the parlement's popular reputation overnight.

In response, Necker agreed to "double the Third" (giving them 600 deputies, equal to the other two combined) but critically, he remained silent on whether voting would be by head. This ambiguity set the stage for the first confrontation. The winter of 1788-89 saw an explosion of political pamphlets. The most influential was Abbé Sieyès's What is the Third Estate?, which argued that the Third Estate, the "98 percent," was not just an order but the Nation itself.

The Juridical Revolution (May-June 1789)

• May 5, 1789 The Estates-General convenes at Versailles. A deadlock immediately begins over whether to verify credentials separately (by Estate) or in common (by head).
• June 10 After six weeks of stalemate, Sieyès moves that the Third Estate begin verification on its own.
• June 17 The Third Estate, joined by a few liberal clergy, formally declares itself the National Assembly, claiming sole authority to represent the nation. This was the juridical revolution, a transfer of sovereignty from the King to the Nation.
• June 20 (Tennis Court Oath) Finding their hall locked by royal order, the deputies move to a nearby indoor tennis court. There, they swear a solemn oath "never to separate... until the constitution of the realm is established".
• June 23 (Royal Session) The King holds a lit de justice, declares the Assembly's actions void, and orders the estates to disperse. The Third Estate, led by Mirabeau, refuses.
• June 27 Louis XVI, lacking the will to use force, capitulates and orders the clergy and nobility to merge with the National Assembly.

The Popular Revolution (July 1789)

The King's capitulation was a sham. He began concentrating foreign mercenary regiments around Paris, preparing to dissolve the Assembly by force.

• July 11 Louis dismisses Necker, the popular finance minister.
• July 12-13 Paris explodes. Seeing Necker's dismissal as the start of a royalist coup and a "massacre" of patriots, the sans-culottes, rallied by orators like Camille Desmoulins, begin to arm themselves, attacking customs posts.
• July 14 (Storming of the Bastille) The crowd moves to the Bastille, a medieval fortress and hated symbol of royal despotism, to seize its gunpowder. After a bloody, four-hour siege, the crowd storms the prison, murders its governor, de Launay, and begins its demolition.

5. The Principles of 1789: Deconstructing the Old Regime

The events in Paris unleashed chaos in the countryside. The "Great Fear" (July-August 1789) saw peasants, driven by rumors of "brigands" in the pay of aristocrats, arm themselves and attack châteaux. They burned the feudal archives (terriers) to destroy the legal basis of their manorial obligations.

The Night of August 4, 1789

To pacify this rural insurrection, the National Assembly staged one of the most dramatic sessions in history. Liberal nobles, in a frenzy of patriotic sacrifice, renounced their own privileges. The Assembly voted to "abolish the feudal system entirely". The August Decrees (finalized Aug. 11) eliminated tithes, the gabelle, venality of office, provincial privileges, and all feudal dues and exclusive hunting rights. In a single night, the legal and social structure of the Ancien Régime was annihilated, replaced by the principle of equal taxation and equal eligibility for office.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

August 26, 1789 The Assembly issued its foundational philosophical statement, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Drafted by Lafayette and Sieyès with input from Thomas Jefferson, it was a product of Enlightenment thought. It declared the "natural and imprescriptible rights of man" to be "liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression". It established the principles of popular sovereignty (the nation, not the king, is sovereign), equality before the law, freedom of speech and religion, and the separation of powers.

The October Days

Louis XVI refused to sanction either the August Decrees or the Declaration. With a bread shortage again causing panic in Paris, tensions reached a breaking point.

• October 5 A crowd of thousands of Parisian women, protesting the price of bread, marched 13 miles to Versailles. They were followed hours later by the Paris National Guard, who forced a reluctant Lafayette to lead them.
• October 6 The crowd, now joined by men, invaded the palace, killed several guards, and sought the queen. To prevent a massacre, the King appeared and agreed to their demands: he sanctioned the decrees and agreed to move the royal family to Paris.

The royal family was escorted to the Tuileries Palace as virtual prisoners of the capital. The National Assembly followed. This event was the true end of the Ancien Régime. By moving the center of power from the royal city of Versailles to the revolutionary hub of Paris, the "October Days" ensured that the popular movement, and the Parisian mob, would be the permanent arbiter of the Revolution's future.

6. The Breakdown of Consensus (1790–1791)

Now based in Paris, the National Constituent Assembly set about constructing a new France. It rationalized the "administrative chaos" by abolishing the old provinces and creating 83 new, uniform départements. It nationalized all Church property to serve as collateral for a new paper currency, the assignat, and abolished the parlements.

The Assembly's most fateful reform, however, was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790). This was the Revolution's great "unforced error." It was a purely ideological act that served no urgent financial or political purpose. It sought to subordinate the French Church to the state by:

• Aligning dioceses with the new départements.
• Making bishops and priests elected officials, paid by the state.
• Forcing them to take an oath of loyalty to the constitution.

This measure tore the nation in half. Only seven bishops and about half the parish priests took the oath. The rest became "non-juring" or "refractory" priests, now branded as enemies of the Revolution. When Pope Pius VI condemned the law in 1791, it created an irreparable schism. It gave the scattered counter-revolution a popular, spiritual, and moral cause, creating millions of new enemies for the Revolution in the deeply Catholic countryside.

This schism was the primary motivation for the King's Flight to Varennes (June 20-21, 1791). Louis XVI, a devout Catholic, was appalled by the religious policy. He and his family fled Paris in disguise, hoping to reach the royalist stronghold of Montmédy. They were recognized, arrested in Varennes, and escorted back to Paris in humiliating disgrace.

7. The Republican Revolution (1791–1793)

The new Legislative Assembly, which convened in October 1791, was dominated by a new faction, the Girondins (led by Brissot). They aggressively pushed for war with Austria for two reasons: they believed it would expose the king as a traitor, and they saw it as an ideological crusade to spread the Revolution. The King and Queen, in turn, secretly supported the war, believing France would lose and foreign armies would restore their throne.

April 20, 1792 France declared war on Austria, and Prussia soon joined the conflict. The French army, disorganized by three years of revolution, was routed. This disaster was blamed on treason at the top. When the allied commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued the Brunswick Manifesto (July 25), threatening to destroy Paris if the royal family was harmed, it was seen as final proof of the King's collusion.

This threat triggered the "Second Revolution." On August 10, 1792, an enraged mob of Parisian sans-culottes and fédéré (provincial) troops stormed the Tuileries Palace. The King's Swiss Guard was massacred. The King and his family fled to the Assembly, which, under mortal threat, voted to suspend the monarchy.

The fall of the monarchy and the advance of the Prussian army created a paranoid vacuum in Paris. Fearing that the "internal enemies" (priests and nobles) in the city's prisons would break out and join the invaders, mobs stormed the prisons from September 2-6. They conducted summary trials and slaughtered between 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners, an event known as the September Massacres.

On September 20, the French army, against all odds, halted the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy. The victory saved the Revolution. The next day, September 21, 1792, the newly elected National Convention met. Its first act was to abolish the monarchy and proclaim the French First Republic.

The Convention's next act was to try "Citizen Louis Capet." The Girondins, now the moderate faction, sought to spare his life. But the radical Montagnards, led by Robespierre, argued that the King's guilt was not in question; the only question was of "public safety."

Found guilty of treason, Louis XVI was executed by guillotine on January 21, 1793. This act was the definitive point of no return. It made the war existential; the "regicides" of the Convention now had no choice but to win total victory or face execution themselves.

8. The Republic in the Balance: War and Internal Revolt (1793)

The execution of the king united Europe in horror. Great Britain, Spain, and the Dutch Republic joined Austria and Prussia, forming the First Coalition. France was now at war with the entire continent. In the spring of 1793, its armies were defeated and driven from Belgium.

This external crisis was compounded by two catastrophic internal wars.

The War in the Vendée

The Convention's decree for a levée (draft) of 300,000 men was the final spark for the peasants of the deeply Catholic Vendée region, already angered by the persecution of their "non-juring" priests. A massive, spontaneous uprising created a "Catholic and Royal Army", which began a brutal civil war that threatened the Republic's very existence.

The "Federalist" Revolt

In Paris, the growing crisis led the radical Montagnards, backed by the sans-culottes, to purge their republican rivals. On June 2, 1793, they besieged the Convention and forced the arrest of 29 leading Girondin deputies. This coup triggered the "Federalist" Revolt, as the Girondin-supporting provincial capitals—Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Toulon—rose up in armed rebellion, not against the Republic, but against the centralization of power in Paris.

By July 1793, the Republic was on the verge of collapse: foreign armies were invading, the Vendée was controlled by royalists, and the nation's second and third-largest cities were in open revolt.

9. Government by Terror (1793–1794)

The response to this existential, three-front crisis was the Reign of Terror. The Terror was not mindless chaos; it was an emergency government, a "war of liberty against its enemies".

The Convention delegated its power to the Committee of Public Safety (CPS), a 12-man executive that gained "virtual dictatorial control" over France. Led by figures like Maximilien Robespierre, its goal was to "save the Revolution" by any means necessary.

The Terror operated through several key mechanisms:

The Law of Suspects (September 17, 1793)

This law created a broad definition of "enemies of liberty," leading to the arrest of at least 300,000 suspects.

The Revolutionary Tribunal

This Paris court tried enemies of the state. During the Terror, 16,594 "official" death sentences were passed in France, and an estimated 40,000 died in total (including massacres and deaths in prison).

The Economic Terror

To win the war and placate the sans-culottes, the CPS imposed the General Maximum, a national system of price controls on all essential goods. It also decreed the levée en masse (August 1793), a total conscription of the entire nation for the war effort, creating an army of over a million men.

The Military Terror

The CPS ruthlessly suppressed internal revolts. Lyons and Toulon were recaptured and subjected to mass executions. The Vendée was shattered, and "infernal columns" were sent to depopulate the region, resulting in immense loss of life.

The Cultural Terror (Dechristianization)

An unofficial, radical movement led by extremists (the Hébertists) swept France in the fall of 1793. Churches were closed, religious icons destroyed, and priests forced to marry. The Cult of Reason was celebrated in Notre-Dame Cathedral, and the Revolutionary Calendar was adopted, eliminating Sundays and Christian holidays.

10. Thermidor: The Fall of the Factions and the End of the Terror

By the spring of 1794, the military situation had improved, and the CPS, now at the height of its power, moved to eliminate all internal dissent.

Fall of the Factions

Robespierre turned first on the extremist Left, executing the Hébertists (who had championed dechristianization) in March 1794. He then turned on the moderate Right, executing the Dantonists (who had called for an end to the Terror) in April 1794.

The "Great Terror"

With all rivals eliminated, Robespierre became the dominant voice. He attempted to forge a new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being (June 1794). The Law of 22 Prairial (June 10) stripped defendants of all legal rights, unleashing the "Great Terror," which saw over 1,300 guillotined in Paris in just six weeks.

The Coup of 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794)

Robespierre's messianic rhetoric and his vague threats of one final purge terrified his own colleagues. A conspiracy of other terrorists (like Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois) and moderates (like Tallien) formed against him. They shouted him down in the Convention and decreed his arrest. Though freed by the Paris Commune, the Convention's troops stormed the Hôtel de Ville. The next day, Robespierre, his jaw shattered, was executed with his key allies, Saint-Just and Couthon.

This was the Thermidorian Reaction. It was a "palace coup" by other terrorists who had feared for their own lives, but the public interpreted it as the end of the Terror itself. The "Thermidorians" were forced to become the moderates the public demanded. They dismantled the Terror: the CPS was depopulated, the Jacobin Club was closed, and the Revolutionary Tribunal was reformed.

A "White Terror" erupted, particularly in the south, as royalist and "Muscadin" (gilded youth) gangs hunted down and massacred former Jacobins. The final break with the popular revolution came in December 1794, when the Convention abolished the Maximum. This ended the social contract with the sans-culottes and led to catastrophic inflation. The starving sans-culottes rose one last time in the Prairial Uprising (May 1795), invading the Convention and demanding "Bread and the Constitution of 1793". This time, the Convention called in the army, which crushed the uprising and disarmed the Parisian sections. The popular phase of the Revolution was over.

11. The Directory: A Bourgeois Republic (1795–1799)

The Thermidorian Convention drafted the Constitution of the Year III (1795), a conservative document designed to establish a stable, bourgeois republic and prevent the return of either monarchy or Jacobinism. It created a five-man executive Directory and a bicameral legislature with a property-based suffrage. Fearing a royalist electoral victory, the Convention passed the "Two-Thirds Decree," mandating that two-thirds of the new legislature must be former Convention members.

This decree triggered the royalist Uprising of 13 Vendémiaire (October 5, 1795). The Convention's defense was entrusted to a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who decimated the royalist columns with "a whiff of grapeshot," saving the regime.

The Directory (1795-99) was a period of chronic instability, lurching between threats from the Left and the Right.

• Threat from the Left: The Conspiracy of the Equals (1796), a proto-communist plot led by Gracchus Babeuf, aimed to overthrow the Directory and abolish private property. The plot was betrayed, and Babeuf was executed.
• Threat from the Right: Royalists won the elections of 1797. The Directors responded with the Coup of 18 Fructidor (September 1797), calling in the army (General Augereau, sent by Napoleon) to purge the royalist deputies and annul the elections.
• Threat from the Left: Jacobins won the elections of 1798. The Directory responded with the Coup of 22 Floréal, politically annulling the results.

12. The Great Nation: Occupied Europe and the "Sister Republics" (1794–1799)

After 1794, the revolutionary wars transformed into wars of conquest. France expanded to its "natural frontiers" (the Rhine, Alps, and Pyrenees) and created a buffer zone of "Sister Republics"—client states modeled on the French Directory. These included:

• The Batavian Republic (Holland, 1795)
• The Cisalpine Republic (Italy, 1797), created by Napoleon
• The Helvetic Republic (Switzerland, 1798)
• The Roman Republic (1798), after the Pope was exiled
• The Parthenopean Republic (Naples, 1799)

This project marked the degradation of the Revolution's universalist ideals into a pretext for French nationalist imperialism. These "liberated" territories were not freed; they were "a means of controlling occupied lands", systematically plundered of art and treasure and forced to pay heavy indemnities to fund the French war machine.

13. An End to Revolution (1799–1802)

By 1799, the Directory was politically and financially bankrupt. A War of the Second Coalition saw French armies in retreat across Europe. This crisis provided the opportunity for the final coup.

The Coup of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799) was planned by one of the Directors, Abbé Sieyès, who sought to create a stronger executive. His "sword" was Napoleon Bonaparte, who had just returned from his Egyptian campaign as a national hero. The plotters forced the Directory to resign and used troops to disperse the legislature.

The Directory was replaced by the Consulate. The new Constitution of the Year VIII, drafted by Sieyès, was a "sham". It created a de facto dictatorship under First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, who held all real power.

Napoleon's regime provided the stability the nation craved by "ending the Revolution". He did this by resolving its two most intractable conflicts:

The Religious Schism

The Concordat of 1801 made peace with Pope Pius VII. It recognized Catholicism as the "religion of the great majority", allowing the Church to return. In exchange, the Pope gave up all claims to the confiscated Church lands. This brilliant move pacified devout peasants (like those in the Vendée) and, most critically, guaranteed the property titles of the bourgeoisie who had bought those lands. It "privatized" the counter-revolution by separating religion from royalism.

The Foreign War

Napoleon's military victories led to the Peace of Lunéville (1801) with Austria and the Peace of Amiens (1802) with Great Britain. This "marked the end of the French Revolutionary Wars". For the first time in ten years, Europe was at peace.

Napoleon was the "Thermidor of the bourgeoisie." He was an autocrat who suppressed political liberty and the free press, but he guaranteed the core social and economic gains of 1789: the abolition of feudalism, equality before the law (in his Napoleonic Code), and the security of private property. Having ended the Revolution's "uncertainties", he was made "Consul for Life" in 1802 and, in 1804, Emperor.

14. The Revolution in Perspective: Legacy

The Revolution definitively destroyed the Ancien Régime. It replaced a society based on feudalism, privilege, and divine-right monarchy with one based on the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Its ideas of liberal democracy, popular sovereignty, and nationalism had a profound and lasting impact on the entire world.

However, this transformation came at the cost of the Terror, regicide, and devastating wars. The greatest paradox of the Revolution, identified by Alexis de Tocqueville, is that it ultimately resulted in a more powerful, centralized state than the Ancien Régime it had set out to destroy. The Revolution, which began in 1789 by demanding liberty from a strong state, culminated in the 1793 levée en masse, the 1794 Terror, and the 1802 Consulate—the very mechanisms that created the modern, bureaucratic, and all-powerful state.