The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, by a Paris mob has become the enduring symbol of the French Revolution.
The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, by a Paris mob has become the enduring symbol of the French Revolution.
The pressure for widescale reform within France had been growing for more than 50 years.
A series of wars had been an enormous drain on the country’s finances. By the time Louis took the throne in 1774 France was spiralling into bankruptcy.
The country needed a leader of genius to pull it out of the crisis. Unfortunately, Louis XVI was a weak and indecisive man.
From 1776 a succession of finance ministers made the situation worse by operating a policy that relied entirely on the state borrowing money.
Within a decade the Government’s credit was exhausted.
In 1786 finance minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne came up with a desperately-needed programme of reform.
Central to it was the replacement of a series of taxes with a single universal land tax. But aristocrats refused to accept the reforms.
By the summer of 1787 Louis was in dire need of money. His new finance minister Lominie de Brienne tried to persuade the provincial Parlement of Paris to support tax reforms.
But in November the king lost his patience. He ordered armed troops to surround the building Parlement was meeting in and forced it to approve some loans he needed.
The move sparked fury among the people of Paris.
Over the next few months royal edicts were ignored, royal officials were assaulted and pamphlets denouncing Louis as a despot were published all over France.
As the financial crisis deepened Louis summoned a meeting of the Estates-General.
This was a consultative body of representatives from France’s three legally-defined social classes — clergy, nobility and commoners.
The Estates-General came together for the first time in almost 200 years on May 1, 1789.
After a few weeks of fruitless debate, the commoners — known as the Third Estate — decided to try to force the pace of political change.
In June its members, which now called themselves the National Assembly, met at an indoor tennis court and swore not to disband until a constitution had been established.
Rumours began to circulate that Louis was moving 16 regiments of foreign mercenaries to Paris to overthrow the Assembly by force.
The news incensed the poorer citizens of Paris, who were being stirred up against Louis and his unpopular Austrian wife Marie Antoinette by political agitators.
Crowds roamed the capital looking for arms to fight off a royal attack.
On July 14 the mob attacked and captured the Bastille, a fortress that had once housed political prisoners.
At the end of August, the National Assembly issued its famous Declaration of the Rights of Man — a document that denied the king’s right to rule.
On October 5 a Parisian mob marched to the king’s palace at Versailles to protest at the high cost of bread.
When Marie Antoinette was told of their protest she is said to have exclaimed: “Let them eat cake.”
The demonstration became a riot. Louis and his family were forced to return to Paris with the mob.
With the royal family virtual prisoners, the Assembly set about debating reforms which would leave the king as head of a constitutional monarchy.
The debates were still going on when, in June 1791, the royal family was caught trying to flee France in disguise and arrested.
The failed flight inflamed revolutionary feeling and split the Assembly into radical and moderate factions.
In August 1792 a mob that supported the extremist Jacobins stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris, hacking to death 600 soldiers.
Over the next few weeks Paris lurched into anarchy.
On September 21 France was declared a republic. The Jacobins, led by the young lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, pressed for Louis to stand trial on treason charges.
In January 1793 he was found guilty and guillotined.
By the summer, the government was effectively in the hands of a 12-man body called the Committee of Public Safety, with Robespierre at its head.
The committee began executing anyone it deemed a threat to the revolution — ushering in a period known as The Terror.
Over the next months 17,000 were guillotined, among them Marie Antoinette.
In July 1794 Robespierre and 82 followers were arrested during a coup and executed. With his death, the revolution’s radical phase ended.
By 1799 France was being ruled by the brilliant young general Napoleon Bonaparte.
Mutiny on the Bounty
In 1787 William Bligh, a young Navy officer who had recently served with Captain Cook, was commissioned to travel to Tahiti in the HMS Bounty.
He and his crew were to obtain a large number of breadfruit plants which were to be transplanted to the Caribbean to provide food for slaves.
The voyage was long and bad feeling began to grow between Bligh and his crew.
After a long stay in Tahiti the Bounty began the second leg of the trip to the Caribbean.
On April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian and 12 crew members led a mutiny, eventually setting Bligh and his supporters adrift in a small boat.
After incredible hardships they reached Timor in the East Indies on June 14, having travelled more than 3,600 miles.
Christian, once a close friend of Bligh’s, set up home on Pitcairn Island with the other mutineers and some Tahitian men and women.
He is thought to have been killed by the Tahitians five years after the mutiny.
