115 Fun Facts About French Revolution

When the Estates-General met in 1789, the commoners' deputies demanded that votes be counted how?

By head: with their numbers doubled to match the clergy and nobles combined, the commoners could win only if deputies voted one by one; voting by estate, as at the last meeting in 1614, left them outvoted two to one.

Whom did Louis XVI dismiss as chief minister on 11 July 1789, helping trigger the Bastille unrest?

Necker, the minister Parisians trusted, was sacked on 11 July 1789 and told to leave France at once; the next day crowds paraded his bust through the streets, and two days after that the Bastille fell.

Whose 1786 plan for a land tax on every landowner did the Assembly of Notables reject?

Calonne put his plan to Louis XVI in August 1786: one land tax with no exemptions for nobles or clergy. The Assembly of Notables refused it in 1787, insisting only an Estates-General could approve such a change.

Abbé Sieyès's influential 1789 pamphlet posed which question in its title?

'What Is the Third Estate?' was Sieyès's January 1789 pamphlet; his answer was 'everything', and he argued the commons alone could speak for the nation.

On 17 June 1789 the deputies of the commons declared themselves to be what body?

The National Assembly was the name the commons took on 17 June 1789; six days later the king declared its decisions void, the deputies refused to leave their hall, and within the week he told the other two orders to join them.

Locked out of their hall on 20 June 1789, the deputies swore their famous oath in what kind of venue?

An indoor tennis court, the Jeu de Paume at Versailles, hosted the oath of 20 June 1789; the deputies vowed not to disperse until France had a constitution.

Rumoured to be full of prisoners, how many was the Bastille actually holding on 14 July 1789?

Just 7 prisoners were inside: four forgers, two men held as insane and one nobleman locked up at his family's request; the fortress mattered as a symbol and an arsenal, not a prison.

Who was the governor of the Bastille, killed and paraded on a pike after surrendering the fortress?

Bernard-René de Launay threatened to blow up the fortress's gunpowder unless his garrison could leave unharmed, then backed down and opened the gates; the crowd killed him outside the Hôtel de Ville.

Who was chosen to command the new Paris National Guard after the fall of the Bastille?

The Marquis de Lafayette, already a hero of the American war, took command the day after the fortress fell; three years later he was branded a traitor, fled France and spent years in foreign prisons.

What is the wave of rural panic and agrarian revolt across France in summer 1789 called?

The Great Fear swept the countryside in late July 1789: peasants armed against imagined brigands and burned châteaux and manorial records, pushing the Assembly into its sweeping night of 4 August.

The August Decrees of 1789 are best remembered for abolishing what?

Feudalism was abolished on the night of 4 August 1789: seigneurial dues, the church tithe and venal offices were swept away, though peasants were at first told to buy out many of the dues.

The women who marched on Versailles on 5 October 1789 were primarily protesting what?

High food prices, above all the cost and scarcity of bread, drove some 7,000 Parisian women to march on Versailles; they returned with the royal family in tow on 6 October.

What new title did the deputies vote to give Louis XVI in autumn 1789?

'King of the French' replaced 'King of France and Navarre' in autumn 1789: Louis XVI was now to reign by the constitutional law of the state as well as by the grace of God, king of a people rather than of a territory.

What was the name of the paper currency backed by confiscated church property?

Assignats were issued from December 1789 against the value of confiscated church lands; printed in ever greater quantities to pay the state's bills, they were worth under a tenth of their face value by 1795.

Which pope condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791?

Pius VI broke months of silence in spring 1791 to condemn the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and the French church split into priests who had sworn the state's oath and 'refractory' ones who refused.

The royal family's disguised flight from Paris in June 1791 ended in which town?

Varennes is where the royal coach was stopped late on 21 June 1791: a postmaster who had spotted the king at an earlier halt rode ahead to raise the alarm, short of the loyal troops waiting at Montmédy.

The crowd fired upon at the Champ de Mars on 17 July 1791 had gathered to sign a petition demanding what?

The king's deposition was the demand, weeks after his failed escape; the National Guard fired on the crowd, killing between a dozen and 50 people, wrecking its commander's standing and driving Marat into hiding.

The 1791 Declaration of Pillnitz was issued by Emperor Leopold II and which country's king?

Prussia's Frederick William II signed the declaration with Leopold II on 27 August 1791; worded so that neither ruler would have to act alone, it was still read in France as a threat and handed the war party its pretext.

In the Legislative Assembly of 1791, the Feuillants were best described as what?

The Feuillants were constitutional monarchists who walked out of the Jacobin Club in July 1791 and took their name from the former Feuillant convent where they met; they wanted the Revolution to stop at the new constitution.

The Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 suppressed what?

The Le Chapelier Law of 14 June 1791 banned guilds and workers' organisations and made strikes illegal; the ban outlived the Revolution by generations, and French workers did not regain the right to strike until 1864.

On which country did France declare war in April 1792, beginning the French Revolutionary Wars?

Austria was the enemy: on 20 April 1792 France declared war on Francis II as King of Hungary and Bohemia; the opening campaign in the Austrian Netherlands went badly, feeding the panic that toppled the monarchy in August.

Which royal residence did National Guardsmen and fédérés storm on 10 August 1792, effectively ending the monarchy?

The Tuileries Palace was stormed on 10 August 1792; hundreds of the Swiss Guards defending it were killed, and the Legislative Assembly suspended the king the same day.

Which battle of 20 September 1792 was the first major victory for the army of revolutionary France?

Valmy, a cannonade on 20 September 1792 that turned back the Duke of Brunswick's invading army, was the revolutionary army's first success; the monarchy was abolished the next day and the invaders retreated.

Robespierre, Danton and Marat headed which radical faction in the National Convention?

The Montagnards, 'the Mountain', were named for the high benches where they sat together in the Convention hall; the uncommitted deputies on the lower seats became known as the Plain.

At his trial before the Convention, the deposed Louis XVI was referred to as Citizen Louis what?

Capet reached back to Hugh Capet, the medieval founder of the royal line: giving the dethroned king a plain surname put him on trial as an ordinary citizen, with no title and no royal style.

How many deputies voted unconditionally for the death of Louis XVI on 17 January 1793?

361 deputies voted for death without conditions, a majority of one; 288 voted for detention or banishment and another 72 for death subject to delaying conditions.

Louis XVI was guillotined in the Paris square later renamed Place de la what?

Place de la Concorde was the Place de la Révolution when Louis XVI died there on 21 January 1793; it was given its present name in 1795, a gesture of reconciliation meant to draw a line under the bloodshed.

Refusing to be bound with rope on the scaffold, Louis XVI agreed to be tied with what instead?

His own handkerchief served as the binding after his confessor Edgeworth talked him into accepting the restraint; the executioner was Charles-Henri Sanson, who had served him as royal executioner.

In February 1793 the Convention declared war on Britain and which other state?

The Dutch Republic and Britain were both named when the Convention declared war on 1 February 1793, eleven days after Louis XVI's execution had turned Europe's courts against France; war with Spain followed within weeks.

Which rural, devoutly Catholic region of France rose in revolt in March 1793?

The Vendée, on the Atlantic coast, rose in March 1793 when conscription came on top of the church reforms; the war dragged on until 1796 and cost well over 100,000 lives.

Which French general, defeated at Neerwinden in March 1793, promptly defected to the enemy?

Charles-François Dumouriez, victor of the previous autumn's battles, tried to march his army on Paris to restore a constitutional monarchy; when his troops refused, he crossed to the enemy lines and lived out his life in exile.

Who assassinated the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat on 13 July 1793?

Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathiser from Caen, stabbed Marat in his bath on 13 July 1793 and was guillotined four days later.

What was the title of Marat's newspaper?

L'Ami du peuple ('The Friend of the People') first appeared in September 1789; its attacks on ministers and officials brought arrest warrants, and Marat repeatedly had to stop publishing and go into hiding.

Which ally of Robespierre read the Convention report that sent Danton before the Revolutionary Tribunal?

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just read the report of 31 March 1794 that denounced Danton before the Convention; Danton went to the scaffold within the week, and Saint-Just followed him there before the summer was out.

Napoleon Bonaparte first made his name commanding the artillery at the 1793 siege of which port?

Toulon, opened to a British-led fleet by rebels against the Convention, fell in December 1793 after Bonaparte's guns were sited above the harbour; he was promoted to brigadier general days later, aged 24.

Which law of 17 September 1793 let revolutionary committees arrest anyone they judged an enemy of freedom?

The Law of Suspects swept up anyone whose conduct, contacts, words or writings marked them as an enemy of freedom; at least 300,000 people were arrested under it, and some historians date the Terror from this decree.

The 'noyades', mass drownings of prisoners in the winter of 1793–94, took place in which river?

The Loire at Nantes: the Convention's envoy Jean-Baptiste Carrier had prisoners sunk in barges by the thousand; he was recalled to Paris in February 1794 and guillotined that December.

Which future Minister of Police directed the mass killings in Lyon during the Terror?

Joseph Fouché and Collot d'Herbois found the guillotine too slow for Lyon and had chained prisoners blasted with cannon fire; more than 1,600 people were put to death, yet Fouché went on to run Napoleon's police.

Who was executed alongside Georges Danton on 5 April 1794?

Camille Desmoulins, the journalist of 'Le Vieux Cordelier', died beside Danton, although Robespierre was his old schoolmate and had been a witness at his wedding; his wife Lucile was guillotined eight days later.

Which deist civic religion did Robespierre promote with a lavish festival on 8 June 1794?

The Cult of the Supreme Being was Robespierre's deist answer to both Catholicism and the atheist Cult of Reason; he led its great festival in person, seven weeks before he was overthrown and guillotined.

The overthrow of Robespierre in July 1794 takes its name from which month of the republican calendar?

Thermidor names the coup of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794); the Thermidorian Reaction that followed repealed the Law of 22 Prairial and closed the Jacobin Club.

Under the Constitution of the Year III, executive power was held by how many directors?

Five directors held executive power, picked by the Council of Ancients from a list drawn up by the lower house; each year they drew lots to decide which of them had to step down and be replaced.

Napoleon's coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799 replaced the Directory with which regime?

The Consulate began with three provisional consuls, Bonaparte, Sieyès and Roger Ducos, but the constitution written weeks later made Bonaparte First Consul with nearly all the power.

'La Marseillaise' was originally a 'chant de guerre' for the French troops on which front?

The Rhine front: Rouget de Lisle wrote the 'Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin' at Strasbourg in April 1792, and it got its nickname when Marseille volunteers sang it marching into Paris.

What was the profession of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who in 1789 proposed a humane beheading machine?

Guillotin was a physician and deputy who urged a quick, painless beheading machine in 1789 but never designed or built one; the surgeon Antoine Louis did, and at first it was nicknamed the Louisette after him.

The poet Fabre d'Églantine named the twelve months of the republican calendar after what?

Weather and harvests: Fabre d'Églantine coined names such as Brumaire for mist, Floréal for flowers and Messidor for harvest; adopted in October 1793, his calendar outlived him, as he was guillotined the following spring.

The revolutionaries' red liberty cap is also named for which ancient Anatolian region?

The Phrygian cap, named for Phrygia in central Anatolia, was conflated with the Roman pileus that a freed slave received as a symbol of liberty, which is why revolutionaries wore it.

The tricolour cockade added which two colours of Paris to the white of the Ancien Régime?

The Paris militia adopted the blue and red on 13 July 1789, and revolutionaries pinned it over the old white cockade.

Which mocking nickname did Marie Antoinette's critics give her?

Madame Déficit pinned France's empty treasury on the queen's spending; she was a symbol of the court's extravagance rather than the sole cause of the debts, but the name stuck.

Marie Antoinette was born in 1755 in which city?

Vienna's Hofburg Palace was her birthplace on 2 November 1755; she was the fifteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa and, as a small girl, met the child prodigy Mozart at court.

After Louis XVI's execution, Marie Antoinette was moved from the Temple to which prison?

The Conciergerie, the medieval prison on the Île de la Cité, held her from August 1793; a plot to free her, passed to her in a note hidden in a carnation, failed, and she was tried and guillotined that October.

Olympe de Gouges, executed in November 1793, is best remembered for writing what?

The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) argued that if a woman may mount the scaffold she must equally be free to mount the speaker's rostrum; its author went to the scaffold two years later.

Which British statesman attacked the Revolution in 'Reflections on the Revolution in France' (1790)?

Edmund Burke, the Whig MP, published 'Reflections' in November 1790; the pamphlet war it sparked drew replies from Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine's 'Rights of Man'.

After the republican coup of September 1797, dozens of leading royalists were deported to which colony?

French Guiana received the deportees: the coup cancelled that spring's royalist election wins, and leading royalists, among them General Pichegru and the director Barthélemy, were shipped across the Atlantic to the colony.

France invaded Switzerland in 1798 and reorganised it as which short-lived puppet state?

The Helvetic Republic, proclaimed in April 1798, replaced the old confederation of cantons with a single centralised state on the French model; Napoleon's Act of Mediation scrapped it in 1803 and gave the cantons back their powers.

Which currency, created by law in 1803, gave France stable money until the First World War?

The franc germinal, named for the republican month in which the law of April 1803 was passed, was defined as 5 grams of silver at 900 fineness with gold at a fixed ratio; its value held until 1914.

Before storming the Bastille, the Paris crowd took its muskets from which veterans' hospital?

Les Invalides yielded thousands of muskets on the morning of 14 July but no powder; 250 barrels had just been moved into the Bastille, so the armed crowd marched on the fortress next.

Which astronomer became the first mayor of Paris the day after the Bastille fell?

Jean-Sylvain Bailly had presided over the deputies in June and was acclaimed mayor on 15 July 1789; his popularity collapsed after the Champ de Mars shootings of 1791, and he was guillotined in 1793.

Which minister, rumoured to have told the hungry to eat hay, was lynched by a Paris crowd on 22 July 1789?

Joseph Foullon was dragged to the Hôtel de Ville, hanged from a lamp-post and then beheaded, his mouth stuffed with hay in mockery of the remark; his son-in-law was killed the same day.

Panic over the invaders' advance on which fortress, after Longwy fell, set off the September Massacres of 1792?

Verdun's fall opened the road to Paris; believing that jailed plotters were about to rise in support of the invaders, crowds killed more than a thousand prisoners within days, most of them not political at all.

On what date in 1793 was the Committee of Public Safety created?

6 April 1793 was the date the Convention created the Committee of Public Safety, with Danton among its first nine members; it was recognised as the supreme organ of Revolutionary Government that October.

Which act did the 1793 Declaration of Rights call 'the most sacred of rights'?

Insurrection was proclaimed 'the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties' by Article 35 of the Declaration prefixed to the Constitution of 1793, which was adopted on 24 June but never applied.

The weeks of mass executions after the Law of 22 Prairial are called what?

The Great Terror followed the law of 10 June, which stripped the accused of counsel and left juries only acquittal or death; about 1,400 people were executed before Robespierre fell on 27 July.

The 1791 slave uprising that grew into the Haitian Revolution began in which French colony?

Saint-Domingue's slaves rose in the north in August 1791; their victory created Haiti in 1804, and the failure to retake the colony helped persuade Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States.

What were the knitting women who became hardcore regulars at the guillotine called?

Tricoteuses ('knitters') are said to have knitted beside the guillotine; Dickens drew the type in Madame Defarge, who knits the names of the doomed into her work in A Tale of Two Cities.

Which pair of political labels dates back to France's revolutionary assembly of 1789?

Left and right began as seating: supporters of the revolution gathered on the assembly president's left, defenders of the old order on his right.

Which wax modeller, later famed for a London museum, said she cast death masks of guillotined royals?

Marie Tussaud said she was arrested during the Terror herself and had her head shaved for the guillotine before she was freed.

The barricades of Les Misérables belong to which Paris uprising, four decades after the French Revolution?

The June Rebellion of 1832 was a two-day republican rising in Paris against King Louis-Philippe, and Victor Hugo built his 1862 novel around it.

Which chemist, who gave oxygen its name, was guillotined during the Terror as a former royal tax collector?

Antoine Lavoisier helped run the Ferme générale, the hated private company that collected the king's taxes, and appeals to spare him for his science failed.

Which future US president was serving as American minister to France when the Bastille was stormed?

Thomas Jefferson was in Paris on 14 July 1789, four years after succeeding Benjamin Franklin as minister to the French court.

Which hands-on craft was the future Louis XVI encouraged to practise from an early age as a useful pursuit?

Locksmithing came back to haunt him: the Versailles locksmith who fitted a hidden iron safe in the king's Paris apartments revealed its existence in November 1792.

Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed to death in July 1793 while doing what to ease a chronic skin condition?

Taking a medicinal bath filled much of Marat's day, so he worked and received visitors from the tub; his killer was admitted around eight in the evening.

Marie Antoinette's recorded last words were an apology to which person, whose shoe she had stepped on?

Her executioner got the apology at the scaffold, which she reached in an open cart; her husband had been allowed a carriage for the same journey.

The main key to the Bastille, sent to America as a gift in 1790, is displayed at which president's home?

Mount Vernon is George Washington's Virginia estate; he was given the key the year after Parisians stormed the fortress, and it is kept in the entrance hall.

Which notorious writer was moved out of the Bastille ten days before it fell, after shouting to passers-by?

The Marquis de Sade yelled that prisoners were being massacred, so he was sent to the Charenton asylum; the crowd later looted the belongings left in his cell.

Which system of measurement, built on a fraction of the pole-to-equator distance, did France adopt in the 1790s?

Metric units began with the metre, fixed at one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator as measured along the meridian through Paris.

Which Parisian militants took their name from wearing long trousers instead of aristocratic knee-breeches?

The sans-culottes were literally 'without breeches': culottes were the fashionable silk garments of the nobility and bourgeoisie, a badge of the class they opposed.

Which former royal palace opened as a public art museum on the first anniversary of the French monarchy's fall?

The Louvre opened on 10 August 1793 with 537 paintings, most of them drawn from the royal collection and from confiscated church property.

Which famous church hosted the Revolution's largest Festival of Reason in 1793, its altar swapped for one to Liberty?

Notre-Dame was rededicated as a Temple of Reason: a costumed Goddess of Reason presided, and a dedication to philosophy was carved over its doors.

Which author of Candide, dead since 1778, was reburied in Paris in 1791 as a forerunner of the Revolution?

Voltaire had twice been locked in the Bastille under the old monarchy, the second time without trial after he challenged a powerful nobleman to a duel.

Which female figure, usually shown in a red liberty cap, has personified the French Republic since the Revolution?

Marianne holds a place of honour in French town halls and law courts, and her profile appears on the country's euro coins and postage stamps.

The gabelle, among the most hated taxes of pre-revolutionary France, was levied on which everyday commodity?

Salt was a state monopoly, and in the most heavily taxed provinces everyone over the age of eight had to buy a minimum amount each year; prices varied wildly by region.

Which Baroness Orczy hero, outwardly a wealthy English fop, rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine?

The Scarlet Pimpernel is the alias of Sir Percy Blakeney, a swordsman and master of disguise who first appeared in a 1903 stage play, two years before the novel.

Which painter of The Death of Marat befriended Robespierre and was imprisoned once his ally fell from power?

Jacques-Louis David switched allegiance again after his release from prison, going on to paint Napoleon Crossing the Alps and The Coronation of Napoleon.

Which formerly enslaved general led the Haitian Revolution and died in a French mountain fortress in 1803?

Toussaint Louverture, born into slavery, was deported to France and jailed at the Fort de Joux; Haiti declared its independence months after he died there.

Which English-born author of Common Sense was elected to France's National Convention despite speaking no French?

Thomas Paine left England in 1792 with a sedition charge hanging over him and took his seat that September, yet by December 1793 he was a prisoner in the Luxembourg Prison in Paris.

Which radical political society took its popular name from the Dominican monastery in Paris where it met?

The Jacobin Club began as a circle of deputies from Brittany at Versailles, then rented the refectory of the Dominicans, whose Paris nickname was 'Jacobins'.

Maximilien Robespierre practised which profession in his home town of Arras before entering politics in 1789?

Lawyer was his father's profession too, and Robespierre is said to have given up a post as a criminal judge in Arras out of discomfort at hearing death-penalty cases.

Which British prime minister, in office from the age of 24, led his country into war with Revolutionary France?

Pitt the Younger is the youngest prime minister in British history, and he also introduced the country's first-ever income tax.

In 1791 France became the first European country to give full citizenship to followers of which minority religion?

Judaism had about 40,000 followers in France when they were emancipated, and Napoleon later carried the same freedom into the lands he conquered.

Which Enlightenment thinker argued for the separation of powers in his 1748 work The Spirit of Law?

Montesquieu published the book anonymously, and it was read closely in the American colonies, where it shaped the drafting of the US Constitution.

The 1785 scandal that sullied Marie Antoinette's reputation centred on which piece of jewellery she had refused to buy?

A diamond necklace was obtained by a con-woman who used forged letters in the queen's name to persuade the Cardinal de Rohan to buy it.

Which 1859 Charles Dickens novel ends with Sydney Carton taking another man's place at the guillotine?

A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is Dickens's best-known historical novel and is said to be one of the best-selling novels of all time.

Which republican faction was purged from the National Convention after armed Parisians surrounded it in June 1793?

The Girondins, named after the Gironde département around Bordeaux, were a loose group of allies rather than an organised party; the purge handed the Convention to their radical rivals.

Which philosopher co-founded and edited the Encyclopédie with the mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert from 1751?

Denis Diderot grew so short of money that Catherine the Great bought his library and paid him a salary to stay on as its custodian for life.

The remark about cake wrongly pinned on Marie Antoinette names which rich French bread in the original?

Brioche is the word in the original French, and the line appears in Rousseau's Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was nine years old and had never been to France.

Which Paris landmark, built as a church to the city's patron saint, became a tomb for great Frenchmen in 1791?

The Panthéon took the orator Mirabeau as its first honoured burial, but he was later declared an enemy of the Revolution and his remains were removed.

Which inscribed slab, now in the British Museum, did soldiers of Napoleon's army unearth in Egypt in 1799?

The Rosetta Stone turned up when troops demolished a wall inside a fort, and Britain claimed it two years later under the surrender terms that ended France's Egyptian campaign.

Which royal bodyguard, killed defending Louis XVI's palace in August 1792, is honoured by a dying-lion sculpture?

The Swiss Guards are mourned by the Lion of Lucerne, a ten-metre relief of a mortally wounded lion hewn into a cliff face in 1820–21 and praised by Mark Twain.

Which English Romantic poet visited revolutionary France in 1791 and fathered a daughter there with Annette Vallon?

William Wordsworth was called home when his family cut off his allowance, and it was 1802, during a lull in the war, before he and his sister visited mother and daughter in Calais.

Which English writer, mother of the author of Frankenstein, moved to Paris weeks before Louis XVI was guillotined?

Mary Wollstonecraft went against friends' advice with war looming, and an American lover later told his embassy that she was his wife to protect her from arrest.

Which German philosopher's 1784 essay defined enlightenment as the courage to think for oneself?

Immanuel Kant wrote it for a Berlin monthly, replying to a clergyman who had posed the question a year earlier, and his became the most famous of the many answers.

Which cousin of Louis XVI renamed himself Philippe Égalité and then voted for the king's death in 1793?

The Duke of Orléans did not outlive the king by long: he was tried and guillotined that November, and his own son later took the throne as Louis-Philippe.

Which Beaumarchais comedy, banned from the public stage by a shocked Louis XVI, became a Mozart opera in 1786?

The Marriage of Figaro has a valet who outwits and lectures his noble master, and the revolutionary leader Georges Danton later said that the play had killed off the nobility.

Which Bishop of Autun proposed seizing the Church's property in 1789 and later served Napoleon as foreign minister?

Talleyrand was excommunicated in 1791 and left the clergy for good, then served one French government after another, most often as its chief diplomat.

Which army engineer, himself a royalist who was later jailed, wrote La Marseillaise in April 1792?

Rouget de Lisle wrote it after his garrison town's mayor lamented, at a dinner for the officers, that France had no national anthem.

Which military engineer on the Committee of Public Safety earned the nickname Organizer of Victory in 1793–94?

Lazare Carnot ran France's war effort from Paris, and his son Sadi went on to found the science of thermodynamics.

Which salon hostess, wife of France's interior minister, wrote her memoirs in prison before her execution in 1793?

Madame Roland is famed for her last words at the scaffold, a lament addressed to Liberty that has come down in two different versions.

Which mathematician and champion of votes for women died in a French prison cell in 1794 after a spell in hiding?

Nicolas de Condorcet spent his time in hiding writing a hopeful history of human progress, which his widow published in 1795 and which ranks among the Enlightenment's major texts.

Which profanity-laced newspaper did the radical Jacques Hébert publish from 1790 until days before his execution?

Le Père Duchesne spoke in the voice of a fictional, furious old man, and street criers sold each issue by shouting that he was damn angry today.

Which allied commander's 1792 manifesto threatened Parisians with reprisals if the French royal family came to harm?

The Duke of Brunswick's threat was meant to frighten Paris into submission, but many read it as final proof that Louis XVI was in league with the invaders.

What did the levée en masse, decreed in August 1793 as foreign armies threatened France, impose on the nation?

Conscription took unmarried men aged 18 to 25 first, while the same decree set married men to forging arms and women to making tents and clothes.

Which signalling system, devised by Claude Chappe, carried its first messages between Paris and Lille in 1794?

Semaphore telegraph towers had pivoting arms that the next station read through a telescope; the network carried war dispatches and lasted until electric lines replaced it in the 1850s.

At the Battle of Fleurus in 1794, French officers observed the enemy's movements for hours from what?

A balloon named L'Entreprenant, filled with hydrogen, kept them aloft; its crew formed the world's first manned aircraft unit and dropped written notes to the army below.

Which Paris landmark was built as the centrepiece of the 1889 World's Fair marking the French Revolution's centenary?

The Eiffel Tower drew a protest petition from leading artists while it was still being built, published in the newspaper Le Temps in 1887.