Old Regime
This class made up 98% of the French population and included peasants, urban workers, and the bourgeoisie.
What is the Third Estate?
On July 14, 1789, an angry Parisian mob stormed this medieval fortress and prison searching for gunpowder.
What is the Bastille?
The revolutionary slogan that captured the core principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
What is "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"?
Nobles, clergy, and others who fled revolutionary France and reported horror stories of attacks on their privileges abroad.
Who are émigrés?
The fast-falling blade device introduced as a more humane execution method that became the symbol of horror during the Reign of Terror.
What is the guillotine?
The prosperous middle class at the top of the Third Estate, made up of bankers, merchants, lawyers, and doctors.
Who are the bourgeoisie?
Notebooks listing grievances prepared by all three estates in preparation for the Estates General meeting.
What are cahiers?
The 1790 document that placed the French Catholic Church under state control and made bishops and priests elected, salaried officials.
What is the Civil Constitution of the Clergy?
Working-class men and women in Paris who wore long trousers and pushed the revolution toward radical action.
Who are the sans-culottes?
The 12-member group given almost absolute power by the National Convention to battle threats to France.
What was the Committee of Public Safety?
This economic term describes a situation where a government spends more money than it takes in.
What is deficit spending?
The pledge taken by the National Assembly promising not to disband until they had drawn up a constitution for France.
What is the Tennis Court Oath?
On October 5, 1789, thousands of women marched 12 miles to Versailles demanding bread and forcing the royal family to return to this city.
What is Paris?
The revolutionary political club made up mostly of middle-class lawyers and intellectuals who advanced the republican cause.
Who were the Jacobins?
The shrewd lawyer known as "the incorruptible" who led the Committee of Public Safety and orchestrated the Reign of Terror.
Who was Maximilian Robespierre?
Financial wizard and adviser to Louis XVI who proposed taxing the First and Second Estates before being dismissed by the king.
Who was Jacques Necker?
A wave of panic fueled by rumors of marauders attacking villages and troops seizing peasant crops in 1789.
What was the Great Fear?
The Constitution of 1791 established this type of government in place of an absolute monarchy.
What is a limited (or constitutional) monarchy?
The 1791 document in which the King of Prussia and Emperor of Austria threatened to intervene to protect the French monarchy.
What is the Declaration of Pilnitz?
The right to vote, which the National Convention extended to all male citizens, not just property owners.
What is suffrage?
This feudal obligation required peasants to perform unpaid labor to repair roads and bridges.
What is the corvée?
The aristocratic "hero of two worlds" who led the National Guard and was the first to don the tricolor badge.
Who was the Marquis de Lafayette?
This journalist wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman to demand equal citizenship for women.
Who was Olympe de Gouges?
British thinker who wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, accurately predicting that the revolution would turn violent.
Who was Edmund Burke?
This rousing marching song from the port city of Marseilles eventually became the French national anthem.
What is "La Marseillaise"?