1793
Execution of Louis XVI
At 10:22 on a cold Paris morning, Louis Capet - once Louis XVI of France and Navarre - climbed the Revolutionary scaffold in the Place de la Révolution. He tried to speak; the drums drowned him. Sanson dropped the blade. A guard displayed the head. European monarchies went into shock.
Whitney Invents the Cotton Gin
A young Yale graduate tutoring in Georgia watched enslaved women picking seeds from cotton bolls and built a box with wire teeth to do the job mechanically. His machine, simple and unpatentable in practice, made short-staple cotton profitable - and made Southern slavery, which had been in decline, suddenly more profitable than tobacco or rice.
Macartney Embassy Received by Qianlong
Lord Macartney, after a year's journey, knelt before the Qianlong Emperor at the summer palace at Jehol - but declined to kowtow. He asked for trade relations and a resident ambassador. Qianlong's famous reply: China possessed all things and had no use for barbarian manufactures. The embassy went home empty-handed.
Reign of Terror Begins
With armies invading, the Vendee in revolt, and Paris starving, the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre suspended the new constitution and declared terror 'the order of the day.' The Law of Suspects authorized arrest on rumor. In nine months, tens of thousands died on scaffolds across France. The guillotine, designed as a humane instrument of equality in death, became the Revolution's most recognizable and most feared symbol.
France Declares War on Britain and the Netherlands
The National Convention added Britain and the Dutch Republic to its list of enemies, joining Austria and Prussia. Pitt the Younger assembled the First Coalition. The French revolutionary wars became a continental affair that would last, with brief intermissions, until Waterloo - twenty-two years away. The conflict forced Britain to expand its navy to six hundred ships, creating the maritime supremacy that would define the nineteenth century.
Execution of Marie Antoinette
The widowed queen, hair gone white, was tried on charges including incest with her son and taken to the scaffold in a tumbrel - dressed in plain white, hands bound. She stepped on the executioner's foot on the platform and apologized. The blade fell at quarter past noon. She was thirty-seven.
Second Partition of Poland
Russia and Prussia - without Austria, distracted by France - took another great slice of Poland. Russia gained most of Belarus and Ukraine; Prussia took Danzig and Thorn. A Polish patriotic uprising would follow the next year, led by Kosciuszko, the engineer who had helped fortify West Point for Washington.