You Gotta Know These People from the French Revolution
- Louis XVI (1754–1793) was the king of France during the French Revolution. A member of the Bourbon dynasty, Louis inherited the crown during a financial crisis, which was exacerbated by France’s intervention in the American Revolution. After failed attempts at reform, Louis called the Estates-General, France’s long-dormant parliament, into session in 1789. When the Third Estate (consisting of everyone other than the clergy and nobility) declared itself the National Assembly and Parisian mobs stormed the Bastille, Louis reluctantly became a constitutional monarch. However, he resisted revolutionary policies and eventually tried—and failed—to flee France with his family in the Flight to Varennes. In 1792 he was deposed in the Insurrection of August 10; he was guillotined the next year.
- Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) was queen of France during the revolution. The daughter of Austrian empress Maria Theresa, she married the future Louis XVI to seal her mother’s alliance with France. Marie Antoinette’s Austrian background made her unpopular with the French people, and her standing worsened when she was wrongfully accused of not paying for jewelry during the Diamond Necklace Affair. A lavish spender, the queen was nicknamed “Madame Déficit” by those who blamed her for worsening the kingdom’s fiscal crisis. Marie Antoinette ardently opposed the revolution, and, like her husband, was guillotined in 1793.
- The Comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791) was the preeminent figure in the National Assembly during the first years of the revolution. A scandal-plagued nobleman before 1789, Mirabeau rose to power through his oratory and close relationship with the royal family. He attempted to build a constitutional monarchy in France that resembled the government of Great Britain. After his death in 1791, the Panthéon was commissioned to hold his body and those of other great Frenchmen, though Mirabeau’s corpse was later removed when he was revealed to have received payments from the royal family.
- The Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was another leading liberal noble who helped launch the revolution. As a young man, Lafayette became famous fighting under George Washington in the American Revolution. He was an early leader in the National Assembly, becoming commander of France’s newly formed National Guard and drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man with his friend Thomas Jefferson. Lafayette’s influence waned after the National Guard killed protesters during the Champ de Mars Massacre. He fled France in 1792 and was imprisoned by Austria. His exploits in the U.S. and France earned him the nickname “Hero of Two Worlds.”
- Georges Danton (1759–1794) was a key leader of the Insurrection of August 10 that toppled the French monarchy in 1792. At the start of the revolution, Danton became a member of the Paris Commune that governed the capital, but soon emerged as a leader in more radical groups like the Jacobin Club and the Cordeliers Club. As foreign armies invaded France, Danton and his allies deposed Louis XVI with the support of the Parisian sans-culottes. Danton spearheaded the creation of the Committee of Public Safety—which effectively ruled France in 1793 and 1794—but after stepping back from politics, he and his allies were purged and guillotined in April 1794.
- Maximilian Robespierre (1758–1794) became the de facto leader of France during the Reign of Terror. Robespierre was a former lawyer from Arras who joined the Estates-General and, with Danton, led the left-wing Montagnard faction of the Jacobin Club. Robespierre supported a French republic, and his strict ideological and moral principles earned him the nickname “the Incorruptible.” In 1793 he rose to dominate the Committee of Public Safety and led its campaign to eliminate enemies of the revolution. He oversaw purges of the moderate Jacobin Girondins and the far-left Hébertists, as well as Danton and his allies. Robespierre also promoted a new deist faith he called the Cult of the Supreme Being. In July 1794 Robespierre was overthrown during the Thermidorian Reaction and was guillotined.
- Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) was a radical newspaper publisher and proponent of revolutionary terror. A former scientist, Marat founded the Friend of the People newspaper in September 1789 and published incendiary articles calling for violence against those he saw as insufficiently committed to the revolution. To avoid arrest, Marat hid in Paris’s sewers, which gave him a debilitating skin condition, which he treated by taking long baths. In 1792 he supported the overthrow of the king and generated support for the September Massacres, in which mobs killed thousands of prisoners. In 1793 he was stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday; Jacques-Louis David depicted the scene in his painting The Death of Marat.
- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754–1838) was the leading French diplomat of the revolutionary period. Talleyrand was a bishop when the revolution broke out and championed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which nationalized the Catholic Church in France. He later became foreign minister under the Directory, a five-man government that took power after Robespierre’s fall. Talleyrand’s demand to be bribed by U.S. diplomats sparked the XYZ Affair. In 1799 he helped Napoleon take power, but he eventually broke with the emperor and represented post-Napoleonic France at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) became consul and emperor of France at the end of the revolution. Born to minor nobility in Corsica, Napoleon rose to fame in 1795 by defeating a Royalist uprising against the Directory with a “whiff of grapeshot.” He then led French armies to victory in Italy and led an expedition to conquer Egypt. In 1799 he overthrew the Directory in the Coup of 18 Brumaire and led France for the next 15 years. His seizure of power is often cited as the end of the French Revolution.
- Louis XVIII (1755–1824) was Louis XVI’s younger brother, whose return to power marked the definitive end of the revolutionary era. Louis XVIII, known as the Comte de Provence before the took the throne, led the émigrés who fled France during the revolution alongside his brother, the Comte d’Artois (later Charles X). After Louis XVI’s young son, the Dauphin, died in prison, Provence became the heir to the Bourbon line. When Allied forces defeated Napoleon in 1814, they restored Provence to the throne under the regnal name Louis XVIII. As king, Louis XVIII tried to roll back many elements of the revolution, with mixed success.
This article was contributed by ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ editor Ben Miller.