1792
Battle of Valmy
A Prussian army marching on Paris met French volunteers and regulars in Champagne. The French artillery, better than Prussia expected, out-shot them. The Prussians withdrew. Goethe, watching, told friends: 'From this place, and from this day forth, begins a new epoch in the history of the world.' A republic was born the next day.
French Republic Proclaimed
The newly elected National Convention abolished the monarchy and declared France a republic. Year One of Liberty had begun. The calendar itself would soon be rewritten, the months renamed after weather and grain. Europe had not seen a republic of this size since Rome. The Convention's first act was to put Louis XVI on trial for treason; by January his head would roll, and every throne in Europe would tremble.
France Declares War on Austria
The Girondins pushed the Assembly into war with Austria, hoping to unite the nation. Prussia joined Austria; the emigres promised the kings a short campaign. Within months foreign armies were advancing on Paris. The Revolution, attacked from outside, responded by radicalizing at home. The Duke of Brunswick's manifesto, threatening to destroy Paris if the royal family was harmed, achieved the opposite of its intent.
Storming of the Tuileries
Parisian sans-culottes and provincial federes stormed the palace. The Swiss Guard, ordered to stand down, was massacred. The royal family took refuge with the Assembly, which suspended the king. The constitutional monarchy of 1791 was over; a republic was coming. Over six hundred Swiss guardsmen died defending a king who had already fled, making the Tuileries the bloodiest single day of the Revolution so far.
September Massacres
With Prussian armies advancing on Paris and rumors of counter-revolution in the prisons, mobs broke into the jails and killed over 1,100 prisoners - priests, nobles, common criminals. Marat approved; Danton shrugged; Robespierre kept his distance. The Revolution had discovered its capacity for terror. The massacres horrified European opinion and gave Burke's warnings about revolutionary violence a bloody vindication that his opponents could no longer dismiss.
Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman
A butcher's daughter turned pamphleteer rewrote the 1789 Declaration in the feminine, article by article. Woman is born free; woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must equally have the right to mount the tribune. Two years later the Jacobins sent her to the guillotine for opposing Robespierre.
Denmark Bans the Slave Trade
By royal decree, the Danish crown became the first European power to outlaw the transatlantic slave trade - effective 1803. The decree reached few ears, changed few lives immediately, and was made possible by calculation as much as conscience. But it was a first crack in the Atlantic's most lucrative business.