Paris During the Revolution and The Rise of Napoleon

The French Revolution effectively began in Paris, which the king had garrisoned with foreign troops to quell any unrest.

On 13 July 1789 a hitherto unknown lawyer named Camille Desmoulins sparked the revolt when he jumped on a caf� table in the Palais-Royal and denounced Louis XVI's dismissal of his minister, Jacques Necker, who was widely seen as the only honest man in the government. Desmoulins ended his speech with the call "Aux armes!" ("To arms!").

The following day, 14 July the mob seized the arsenal at the Invalides, acquiring thousands of guns, and stormed the Bastille.

A brief battle ensued in which 87 revolutionaries were killed before the fortress surrendered. This event marked the first real manifestation of the Revolution, and is still marked in France as Bastille Day.

Paris became the scene of revolutionary ferment, with political clubs taking over buildings for their headquarters. The uprising had, however, badly disrupted food supplies and in October an angry crowd marched to Versailles to protest - whereupon Marie Antoinette allegedly dismissed them with her famous remark, "let them eat cake."

The furious crowd began attacking the palace and were only placated when Louis himself appeared and agreed to return to Paris with his family. The royal family were reduced to virtual prisoners in the Tuileries. They tried to escape on 20 June 1791 but were caught and returned to Paris as captives.

With other European powers mobilising to crush the Revolution, which they saw as threatening their own monarchies, the political climate in Paris worsened as rumours of foreign plots and invasions took hold.

Louis and those who supported an agreement with the monarchy were accused by the radical Jacobins of being the stooges of foreign powers, and on 10 August 1792 a mob demanded that the National Assembly depose the king.

When the demand was refused, the mob attacked the Tuilleries and seized the royal family. Power now passed to the radical Commune de Paris, led by Georges Danton,

Marat and Robespierre.

The following month, more than 2,000 people were massacred in Paris as revolutionary mobs hunted down and killed anyone seen as an opponent of the new order.

The monarchy was formally abolished on 22 September 1792, "Day I of Year I of the French Republic." An invading Prussian army heading for Paris was defeated shortly afterwards, clearing the way for the bloodiest phase of the Revolution.

A guillotine was erected in what is now the Place de la Concorde and was used on 21 January 1793 to execute Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette followed in October 1793.

The revolutionaries became steadily more extreme, turning on the "enemy within." This included not just royalists but those accused of simply being not sufficiently revolutionary, including Danton and Camille Desmoulins.

Over 1,300 people were executed in just six weeks in 1794. In the end, the extremists' bloodthirstiness destroyed their own moral standing; a group of moderates seized control in July 1794, sending Robespierre and his allies to the guillotine in a last spasm of bloodletting.

The new rulers organised themselves into a five-man Directoire but had only a shaky grip on power. In 1795 they were saved from a royalist revolt by a young army officer named Napoleon Bonaparte, who dispersed a hostile Parisian mob by the simple expedient of firing into it with cannons at point-blank range.

The grateful Directoire sent Napoleon to Italy to aid the defence against the various foreign armies threatening France. He was spectacularly successful and in 1798 was given command of an expedition to Egypt, which he nearly conquered. He returned with great prestige, which he used to ruthless effect in November 1799 to seize power. The following year, Napoleon was declared first consul.

Under Napoleon's rule, Paris became the capital of an empire and military superpower. He crowned himself Emperor in a ceremony held in Notre-Dame on 18 May 1804.

Like his royal predecessors, he saw Paris as a "new Rome" and set about building public monuments befitting the capital of an empire. Some of these were conscious copies of great Roman buildings, such as the �glise de la Madeleine.

Napoleon's military campaigns against the British, Austrians and Russians initially met with great success but hubris, overconfidence and poor planning caused the annihilation of his army in 1813 in the depths of a Russian winter.

Russian and Austrian armies invaded France in 1814 and on 31 March 1814, Paris fell to the Russians - the first time in 400 years that the city had been conquered by a foreign power.

Napoleon's brief return from exile in 1815 saw him pass through Paris, en route to destiny at Waterloo on 18 June.

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