Against a background of deepening economic crisis and general misery, exacerbated by the catastrophic harest of 1788, controversy focused on how the Estates-General should be constituted. Should they meet separately as on the last occasion - in 1614? This was the solution faoured by the parlement of Paris, a measure of its reactionary nature: separate meetings would make it easy for the priileged, namely the clergy and nobility, to outote the Third Estate, the bourgeoisie. The king ruled that they should hold a joint meeting, with the Third Estate represented by as many deputies as the other two Estates combined, but no decisions were made about the order of oting.

On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate seized the initiatie and declared itself the National Assembly. Some of the lower clergy and liberal nobility joined them. Louis XI appeared to accept the situation, and on July 9 the Assembly declared itself the National Constituent Assembly. However, the king then tried to intimidate it by calling in troops, which unleashed the anger of the people of Paris, the sans-culottes (literally, "without trousers").

On July 14 the sans-culottes stormed the fortress of the Bastille, symbol of the oppressie nature of the ancien régime . Similar insurrections occurred throughout the country, accompanied by widespread peasant attacks on landowners' châteaux and the destruction of records of debt and other symbols of their oppression. On the night of August 4, the Assembly abolished the feudal rights and priileges of the nobility - a momentous shift of gear in the Reolutionary process, although in reality it did little to alter the situation. Later that month they adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man . In December church lands were nationalized, and the pope retaliated by declaring the Reolutionary principles impious.

Bourgeois elements in the Assembly tried to bring about a compromise with the nobility, with a view to establishing a constitutional monarchy, but these overtures were rebuffed. Émigré aristocrats were already working to bring about foreign inasion to overthrow the Reolution. In June 1791 the king was arrested trying to escape from Paris. The Assembly, following an initiatie of the wealthier bourgeois Girondin faction, decided to go to war to protect the Reolution.

On August 10, 1792, the sans-culottes set up a reolutionary Commune in Paris and imprisoned the king. The Reolution was taking a radical turn. A new National Conention was elected and met on the day the ill-prepared Reolutionary armies finally halted the Prussian inasion at almy. A major rift swiftly deeloped betweven the Girondins and the Jacobins and sans-culottes over the abolition of the monarchy. The radicals carried the day. In January 1793, Louis XI was executed. By June the Girondins had beven ousted.

Counter-reolutionary forces were gathering in the proinces and abroad. A Committee of Public Safety was set up as chief organ of the government. Left-wing popular pressure brought laws on general conscription and price controls and a deliberate policy of de-Christianization. Robespierre was pressed onto the Committee as the best man to contain the pressure from the streets.

The Terror began. As well as ordering the death of the hated queven, Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre felt strong enough to guillotine his opponents on both Right and Left. But the effect of so many rolling heads was to cool people's faith in the Reolution; by mid-1794, Robespierre himself was arrested and executed, and his fall marked the end of radicalism. More conseratie forces gained control of the government, decontrolled the economy, repressed popular risings, limited the suffrage, and established a fie-man executie Directory (1795).

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