Ten years that destroyed a thousand-year-old monarchy, beheaded a king and a queen, invented the modern idea of the citizen, and produced Napoleon himself. It was the first revolution that openly proclaimed: power belongs to the nation, not to a man anointed by God. It all began on May 5, 1789, at Versailles, when Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General — and ended on November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire) with the coup of a young Corsican general. In between came the storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the guillotine on the Place de la Révolution, wars against half of Europe, and roughly 1.4 million dead.
Who was fighting whom
The revolutionaries were not one party but a series of waves that devoured each other. First the Third Estate (the bourgeoisie, lawyers, artisans, peasants) — about 97% of France's 28 million people — against the two privileged orders. Then the moderate Girondins, then the radical Jacobins and Montagnards led by Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton and Jean-Paul Marat. On the streets they were backed by the sans-culottes — Parisian artisans in long trousers rather than the silk knee-breeches (culottes) of the nobility.
The Old Regime — King Louis XVI of the House of Bourbon, Queen Marie-Antoinette (daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa), some 400,000 nobles and 130,000 clergy who owned more than 30% of the land and paid almost no tax. Foreign enemies: Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, Russia, Spain, Sardinia, Naples, Holland — most of Europe's great powers joined the First and Second Coalitions against revolutionary France.
Phases of the French Revolution
The Revolution was not one continuous story — it was five different regimes succeeding one another, often through bloodshed. We will divide it into five phases. Birth of the Crisis (1788—1789): financial collapse, the summoning of the Estates-General, the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of feudalism. Constitutional Monarchy (1790—1791): an attempt to turn France into England — the king stays, but loses most of his powers. First Republic and the Terror (1792—1793): the overthrow of the monarchy, the execution of the king, the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, the guillotine working every day. Thermidorian Reaction (1794—1795): the fall of Robespierre, the end of the Terror. The Directory (1796—1799): a corrupt republic of five Directors, Bonaparte's wars, and the coup of 18 Brumaire. A short section on the cultural revolution and an epilogue follow.
Phase 1. Birth of the Crisis (1788—1789)
In 1788 France was the richest country in Europe — and also bankrupt. The wars of Louis XIV, the Seven Years' War, and aid to the American rebels against Britain had drained the treasury. In August 1788 the government declared a technical default. The king summoned the Estates-General — a representative body that had not met for 175 years. He expected the deputies to approve new taxes. Within fourteen months they would tear down the monarchy instead.
The Estates-General and the financial catastrophe
The royal debt had reached 5 billion livres — half of it servicing interest alone. In 1788–1789 a bad winter and failed harvest piled onto the crisis: the price of bread rose by 88%, and a Parisian worker was now spending 50–80% of his daily wage on it. On May 5, 1789, 1,139 deputies gathered at Versailles: 291 of the clergy, 270 of the nobility, and 578 of the Third Estate. Under the old procedure each estate voted as a single block — meaning the two privileged orders always outvoted the one unprivileged one. The Third Estate demanded voting by head.
On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly — the representative of the whole nation. Legally this was already revolution: sovereignty had passed from the king to the people. Most of the parish clergy, who lived no better than peasants, joined them. The king tried, too late, to dissolve the assembly — and found that the police would no longer obey him.
The Tennis Court Oath
On June 20, 1789, the deputies of the National Assembly arrived for their session and found the doors locked — supposedly for repairs. Instead of dispersing, 577 of the 578 Third Estate deputies moved to a nearby indoor tennis court (jeu de paume) and solemnly swore "not to separate until the constitution of the kingdom is established." The single deputy who refused, Martin Dauch of Castelnaudary, has gone down in history as a study in lonely principle.
It was the first time in history that a nation's representatives openly proclaimed: we matter more than the king. On July 9 the assembly renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly — declaring that it would write a constitution. For the first time in France the ruler became not the sovereign but a function.
The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789
On July 11 the king dismissed the popular finance minister Jacques Necker. Paris exploded. Rumours spread that 30,000 royal troops were about to disperse the Assembly and put the city to the sword. On July 14 a crowd of about 80,000 Parisians stormed first the Hôtel des Invalides (where they seized 28,000 muskets) and then the Bastille — an old fortress-prison on the east side of Paris. The aim was not to free the prisoners (there were only seven inside — four forgers, two lunatics, and one aristocratic libertine) but to capture the 250 barrels of gunpowder. The siege lasted four hours; about a hundred attackers and six defenders were killed. The governor, the Marquis de Launay, was torn to pieces and his head paraded through the streets on a pike.
The king heard the news the next morning. "Is it a revolt?" he asked the Duke de Liancourt. "No, sire, it is a revolution." July 14 remains the national holiday of France — Bastille Day. The fortress itself was demolished within a year; its stones were sold as souvenirs.
The August reforms: the Night of 4 August, the Declaration, the Women's March
On the night of August 4, 1789, the Constituent Assembly abolished feudalism in a single emotional session. Nobles and bishops rose to their feet and renounced tithes, serfdom, hunting monopolies, seigneurial courts. By morning France had ceased, in law, to be feudal. On August 26 the Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen — seventeen articles proclaiming: men are born free and equal in rights; sovereignty belongs to the nation; no one may be deprived of liberty except by law; all are equal in taxation; freedom of speech, press, and conscience. The Old Regime had fallen, on paper.
The king dragged his feet on signing. On October 5, 1789, about 7,000 Parisian women, hungry and armed with kitchen knives and pikes, marched 21 km on foot to Versailles to demand bread. The next morning they broke into the palace, nearly killed the queen, and forced the royal family to move to Paris, to the Tuileries Palace. From that day onwards the king was effectively a hostage of the capital.
Phase 2. Constitutional Monarchy (1790—1791)
For two years the moderate revolutionaries genuinely believed France could become a constitutional monarchy on the British model — the king reigns but does not rule, while power lies with parliament. The experiment failed for two reasons: the king secretly wanted to escape and reverse everything, and the parliament fell out with the Church and debased its own money. By the summer of 1791 the dream of a peaceful revolution was dead.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the assignats
The treasury was still empty. In November 1789 the Assembly nationalised Church lands — about 10% of the surface of France — and issued paper notes against them: the assignats. They started as bonds and quickly became ordinary money. On 12 July 1790 the Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: priests and bishops were now to be elected by their parishioners (including Protestants and Jews!), and the Pope had no official say. Every cleric had to swear an oath to the new constitution. Around half refused.
Pope Pius VI condemned the reform in March 1791. This was a strategic blunder: it turned millions of devout peasants — especially in the Vendée, Brittany and Normandy — from supporters of the Revolution into its deadly enemies. By 1796 more than 45 billion assignats would be in circulation, worth less than the paper they were printed on. It was the first hyperinflation in modern European history.
The Flight to Varennes
On the night of 21 June 1791 Louis XVI and his family slipped out of the Tuileries in coaches, the king disguised as a valet. He was heading for Montmédy on the Belgian frontier, where loyal troops and the queen's Austrian relatives were waiting. On the way he was recognised by a postmaster's son in the small town of Varennes — from the king's own profile stamped on the 50-livre assignats he had recently signed. A crowd of villagers with pitchforks blocked the carriage. Two days later the king was brought back to Paris under guard, through an eerily silent crowd — onlookers had been ordered neither to cheer nor to jeer.
Until that night most French people had still believed the king was a hostage of circumstance. Now he had left behind a written declaration disowning all the reforms and calling the Revolution "an unlawful struggle." Republican feeling, until then marginal, went mainstream. The king was still legally king — but morally he was a dead man.
The 1791 Constitution and the Champ de Mars massacre
On 17 July 1791 republicans gathered on the Champ de Mars in Paris to collect signatures on a petition to remove the king. The National Guard, commanded by Lafayette — a hero of the American Revolution — opened fire on the crowd. About 50 people were killed. It was the first time a revolutionary government had shot its own citizens. The moderates were frightened back towards the king; the radicals went underground, to re-emerge a year later — this time with a guillotine.
In spite of everything, on 3 September 1791 the Assembly adopted the first constitution of France. The king remained head of the executive with a power of veto, but all the real work was done by an elected Legislative Assembly. The franchise was based on a tax qualification — about 4.3 million "active citizens" (paying more than 3 livres in tax) could vote; the rest were "passive." Women, as everywhere in Europe at the time, could not vote at all. On 30 September the Constituent Assembly dissolved itself. France's first constitutional regime would last exactly eleven months.
Phase 3. First Republic and the Terror (1792—1793)
The bloodiest and most famous phase of the Revolution. In a single year France overthrew the monarchy, beheaded its king, proclaimed a republic, executed its own queen, introduced universal conscription, unleashed terror against domestic enemies — and at the same time fought successfully against Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, and Holland. Robespierre transformed from a provincial lawyer into the country's de facto dictator. About 17,000 people were guillotined by sentence of the Revolutionary Tribunal; another 23,000 were killed without trial.
The Insurrection of 10 August and the September Massacres
On 20 April 1792 France declared war on Austria — the War of the First Coalition had begun. The first battles were catastrophic: a Prussian-Austrian army marched on Paris, and in July 1792 the Duke of Brunswick threatened "exemplary punishment" of the capital if a single hair on the king's head was harmed. The manifesto had the opposite effect — the Paris sections decided the king was collaborating with the enemy.
On 10 August 1792 about 30,000 sans-culottes and provincial volunteers stormed the Tuileries Palace. The king's Swiss Guard — about 950 men — fought to the last and was wiped out. About 600 attackers were killed. The king and his family took refuge in the Legislative Assembly — and the same day were imprisoned in the Temple tower. Three weeks later, on 2–7 September 1792, amid panic that the Prussians were closing on Paris, mobs broke into the prisons and over five days murdered around 1,300 prisoners — mostly non-juring priests, royalists, and common criminals. The September Massacres were the first taste of what would later be called the Terror.
The First Republic and the execution of Louis XVI
On 20 September 1792 the French revolutionary army unexpectedly stopped the Prussians at Valmy — "a new epoch in the history of the world," as the eyewitness Goethe put it. The next day, 21 September 1792, the newly elected National Convention abolished the monarchy unanimously. On 22 September the First French Republic was proclaimed — and that day became Day 1 of Month 1 of Year I of the new revolutionary calendar.
In the winter of 1792–1793 the Convention put the former king on trial. His personal safe in the Tuileries had been found, full of letters to the Austrian court — legally treason. The vote was by name: 387 for death, 334 against. On 21 January 1793 at 10:22 a.m. Louis XVI was beheaded on the Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde). His last words from the scaffold: "I die innocent. I forgive my enemies. I pray God my blood will not fall on France." The drums drowned out the rest. In response Britain, Holland, and Spain joined the coalition — France was now at war with most of Europe.
The Terror and the Committee of Public Safety
By the spring of 1793 the Republic was balanced on the edge of disaster: coalition armies on the borders, a peasant uprising in the west, Federalist revolts in Lyon and Toulon, an empty treasury. On 6 April 1793 the Convention set up the Committee of Public Safety — nine men with emergency powers. By August the dominant figure on it was Maximilien Robespierre — a 35-year-old lawyer from Arras, a man who never drank, never quarrelled, and wore a powdered wig right up to the scaffold.
On 5 September 1793 the Convention declared that "terror is the order of the day." A Law of Suspects was passed: anyone could be arrested without evidence for "weak revolutionary spirit." Bread prices were frozen by a "General Maximum." On 23 August came the first mass conscription in history (the levée en masse): 300,000 young Frenchmen went into the army. By the summer of 1794 France had about 800,000 men under arms — the largest army in European history up to that point. The guillotine worked daily on the Place de la Révolution, sometimes 30 or 50 heads in a single batch.
Sans-culottes and the war of factions
The Revolution was pushed forwards by the sans-culottes — Parisian artisans, small shopkeepers, day labourers. The word literally means "without knee-breeches": they wore long workman's trousers instead of the silk culottes of the gentry. Armed with pikes, wearing red Phrygian caps, they gathered in the 48 sections of Paris and put pressure on the Convention every time it hesitated. Without them the Revolution would not have survived 1793; with them it moved further and further to the left.
On the left of the Convention sat the Montagnards ("the Mountain" — the highest benches) — Robespierre, Danton, Saint-Just, Couthon. On the right, the moderate Girondins led by Brissot and Vergniaud. In June 1793 the sans-culottes surrounded the Convention and forced the arrest of the Girondins — 29 of them were later guillotined. Robespierre then destroyed the more radical Hébertists in March 1794 (Jacques-René Hébert and his allies), and two weeks later the more moderate Dantonists: on 5 April 1794 Georges Danton himself — the man who, more than any other, had saved the Republic in 1792 — went to the guillotine. From the scaffold he told the executioner: "Show my head to the people — it's worth seeing."
The War in the Vendée
While Paris was beheading aristocrats, the western department of the Vendée exploded into its own war. In March 1793, when the Convention ordered the conscription of 300,000 men, the Catholic peasants refused en masse: they would not fight for a republic that locked up their priests and sold off their churches. The uprising was led by local nobles and former gamekeepers — an army of over 80,000 peasants armed with pitchforks, scythes, and old hunting muskets.
The Convention responded with unprecedented brutality. In January 1794 General Louis-Marie Turreau sent in the "infernal columns" — twelve mobile units with orders to burn the Vendée to the ground: torch the villages, kill men, women and children, poison the wells. In Nantes the commissar Jean-Baptiste Carrier drowned prisoners in the Loire in barges, 90 at a time — the killings nicknamed "Republican baptisms." By the time the war officially ended in 1796, the Vendée had lost, depending on the estimate, between 170,000 and 300,000 people — roughly a quarter of its entire pre-war population. Modern French historians often call it the first genocide of the modern age.
The murder of Marat and the execution of Marie-Antoinette
On 13 July 1793, a 24-year-old provincial noblewoman named Charlotte Corday walked into the house of Jean-Paul Marat on the rue des Cordeliers in Paris. Marat — doctor, journalist, deputy of the Convention, and editor of the newspaper L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People") — was sitting in a copper bathtub, easing a chronic skin disease. Corday hid a knife under her apron and struck him through the heart. She was guillotined four days later, dignified to the end. Jacques-Louis David's legendary painting The Death of Marat appeared two months on. Today we would call Corday a lone-wolf assassin; to French royalists she remains a heroine.
On 16 October 1793 it was the former queen's turn. Marie-Antoinette, aged 37, after two years in a solitary cell of the Conciergerie, widowed, having lost her son (the 8-year-old dauphin Louis-Charles would die in prison in 1795 in inhuman conditions). She was driven to the scaffold not in a carriage like the king, but in an open tumbril for common criminals, her hair cropped to the shoulders. The court had convicted her of high treason and — as a separate, gratuitous charge — of incest with her own son. Her last words: "Pardon me, sir," after she accidentally trod on the executioner's foot.
Phase 4. Thermidorian Reaction (1794—1795)
Robespierre's paradox: the more enemies he guillotined, the more appeared — because every deputy now realised the executioner might be coming for him next. In July 1794 the Convention woke up, terrified, and cut off the head of its own leader. The Terror was over within a week. For the next year the country wandered without a clear course, scrubbing the Place de la Révolution clean of blood and searching for a new constitution.
The fall of Robespierre — 9 Thermidor
On 26 July 1794 Robespierre gave his last long speech in the Convention, hinting that there were traitors among the deputies — but, deliberately, naming none. It was fatal: every man now had to save his own skin. The next day — 9 Thermidor Year II of the republican calendar (27 July 1794) — the hall erupted in hysterical cries of "Down with the tyrant!" Saint-Just was not allowed to finish his speech. Robespierre, his brother Augustin, the paralysed Couthon, and Saint-Just were all arrested.
That night the Paris Commune tried to free them. Robespierre, freed for a few hours, was at the Hôtel de Ville when Convention troops broke in. Someone — either he himself or the gendarme Méda — shot him through the jaw. He lay until morning on a clerk's table, his face wrapped in a handkerchief, unable to speak. On 10 Thermidor (28 July 1794), without trial, he and 21 of his allies went to the guillotine. As the executioner ripped the bandage off before the blade fell, Robespierre let out a scream of pain — the first and only time in days that the crowd heard his voice. The Terror was over.
The Constitution of Year III and a new bicameral legislature
The summer of 1794 to the winter of 1795 became known as the "White Terror": now royalists and moderates hunted Jacobins. Robespierre's clubs were closed, the Parisian sans-culottes disarmed. In April and May 1795 the hungry poor of the capital rose twice (the insurrections of 12 Germinal and 1 Prairial of Year III) — both crushed by the army. The hard currency of the assignats had collapsed to near zero; peasants wanted only gold or bread, not paper printed with the slogans of liberty.
On 22 August 1795 a new Constitution of Year III was adopted. The executive passed to a board of five Directors; the legislature was split in two — the Council of Elders (250 deputies aged over 40) and the Council of Five Hundred (younger). The franchise became property-based again. On 5 October 1795 (13 Vendémiaire of Year IV) the royalists made one last attempt at a rising — and a thin, unknown artillery general, Napoleon Bonaparte, dispersed them with grapeshot on the steps of the church of Saint-Roch. It was the first time France heard his name.
Phase 5. The Directory (1796—1799)
Four years of corrupt, unstable, and despised rule, saved only by the cannons of a young Corsican. On the streets of Paris a "gilded youth" appeared — fashionable muscadins with long curls and clubs, who beat up Jacobins. The government trusted no one: a series of coups in 1797, 1798, and 1799. Meanwhile, in Italy and Egypt, French armies won battle after battle, and war began to feed itself. By the summer of 1799 it was obvious to France that the Directory was finished — the only question was who would take its place.
The Directory's instability and the assignat hyperinflation
The Directory had three problems to solve — and solved none. First, the currency. Over the course of 1795 the assignats lost 312-fold of their value; in February 1796 the government officially stopped printing them, and the printing plates were publicly smashed on the Place Vendôme. They were replaced by "territorial mandates," which collapsed even faster. By 1797 France had effectively returned to metallic currency — only to find the treasury had almost none.
Second, the opposition. On 4 September 1797 (18 Fructidor Year V) three of the five Directors used the army to overturn the election results and exile 53 royalist deputies to Cayenne; on 22 May 1798 another coup, this time against the neo-Jacobins; on 18 June 1799 a third. Third, the war. The First Coalition fell apart in 1797 after Bonaparte's Italian victories, but by 1798 a Second Coalition had formed — Britain, Austria, Russia, the Ottomans, Naples. In 1799 French armies in Italy and Switzerland suffered defeats at the hands of Suvorov. The Directory was left without money, without authority, and without a future.
Bonaparte's Italian Campaign (1796—1797)
In March 1796 the Directory, wanting to ship a young and ambitious general as far away as possible, appointed the 26-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte commander of the Army of Italy — a ragged, starving force without boots, 38,000 men against 80,000 Austrians and Piedmontese. Bonaparte's first speech to them became legend: "Soldiers, you are hungry and naked. I shall lead you into the most fertile valleys in the world — Italy lies before you."
In twelve months Bonaparte won eighteen battles: Montenotte, Lodi, Castiglione, Arcole, Rivoli. He let his soldiers loot, but he also paid them in gold — something they had not seen for years. In October 1797, by the Treaty of Campo Formio, Austria ceded Belgium and Lombardy to France and recognised the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics. A river of art flowed back into France: the Laocoön, the bronze horses of Saint Mark's in Venice, Veronese's Wedding at Cana. Bonaparte returned to Paris a national hero at the age of 28, and immediately began thinking about what to do next.
The Egyptian Campaign (1798—1799)
Britain could not be beaten directly — the Royal Navy ruled the Channel. Bonaparte proposed instead a strike at Britain through Egypt: seize the Nile, cut the road to India, make France the heir of the ancient pharaohs. In May 1798 a fleet sailed from Toulon: 38,000 soldiers, 13 ships of the line, plus 167 scholars and engineers — astronomers, botanists, painters, linguists. Bonaparte wanted not just to conquer Egypt, but to describe it.
On 21 July 1798 he crushed the Mamluks at the foot of the pyramids ("Soldiers! Forty centuries look down upon you!"). But ten days later the British admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, and the army was trapped. The campaign turned into a disaster: plague at Jaffa, a retreat from Syria, famine. Yet Bonaparte's scholars unearthed something more lasting: in 1799 his sappers near Rosetta dug up the Rosetta Stone, which twenty years later would let Jean-François Champollion crack the hieroglyphs and open ancient Egypt to the modern world. In August 1799 Bonaparte secretly abandoned his army and sailed home — without victory, but also without defeat in the eyes of the public. The newspapers wrote about pyramids, not about plague.
The Coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799)
By November 1799 the Directory was a prisoner of its own constitution: no measure of its could clear the Council of Five Hundred, and every Director suspected the others. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès — the same abbé who in 1789 had written the famous pamphlet What is the Third Estate? — was now plotting a coup. All he needed was a "sword" — a general with an army to do the dirty work. He picked Bonaparte, who had returned from Egypt on 16 October 1799 and was already back in Paris.
On 9 November 1799 — 18 Brumaire Year VIII — the Council of Elders, citing a Jacobin plot, was transferred to Saint-Cloud outside Paris. The next day, 19 Brumaire, Bonaparte walked into the Council of Five Hundred — and was nearly stabbed to death amid cries of "outlaw him!" His brother Lucien Bonaparte, President of the Council, refused to put the motion to a vote. He ran out to the grenadiers and swore on his sword, pointed at his own brother's chest, that Napoleon was no tyrant. The grenadiers came in with fixed bayonets; the deputies jumped out of the windows. By evening a new government had been formed — a provisional Consulate of three, with Bonaparte as the First. The Revolution was over. Drafting the new constitution was only a matter of time.
The Revolution as a cultural rupture
The French Revolution was not just politics — it was a total redesign of daily life that the modern age is still wearing out. The guillotine, invented by Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin on humane grounds (one quick blade instead of an axe that often took three or four blows), became the symbol of the Revolution itself. The Marseillaise, written by Captain Rouget de Lisle in a single night in Strasbourg in April 1792, was carried to Paris by Marseille federates — and has remained the national anthem of France ever since. The Republican Calendar (1793–1805) began counting time from 22 September 1792 and gave the months new poetic names — Germinal ("germination"), Floréal ("flowering"), Thermidor ("heat"); the week was redrawn to ten days, which quickly proved unworkable.
In 1795 the Convention introduced the metric system: the metre was defined as one ten-millionth of a quarter of the Paris meridian. Today 95% of humanity uses it. The desacralisation of religion: first the Cult of Reason (1793), when an actress played the Goddess of Reason in a Phrygian cap inside Notre-Dame, then Robespierre's more moderate Cult of the Supreme Being (1794). Women were given the right to divorce for the first time (1792), abolished again by Napoleon in 1804; Olympe de Gouges in 1791 wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen — and was guillotined for it two years later. The red Phrygian cap itself, worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome, became the symbol of the Republic and still sits on the head of Marianne — the personification of France.
Why it still matters
The French Revolution invented the modern world — and, at the same time, its curse. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 is the direct ancestor of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948: the same language of natural rights, equality before the law, freedom of speech. The slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" still stands on the flagstaff of the French Republic and is engraved on its coins. The modern terms "left" and "right" in politics were born on the floor of the Convention in 1792: the radicals sat to the left of the rostrum, the moderates to the right.
The Revolution became the model — and the fuel — of every revolution after it: 1830 in France, 1848 across Europe (the "Springtime of Nations"), 1871 the Paris Commune, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the revolutions of Latin America, and the decolonisation of Africa. Marx read Robespierre; Lenin imitated the Committee of Public Safety; Stalin quoted Saint-Just. But along with the ideals of liberty, the Revolution also bequeathed to the world its model of revolutionary terror: the idea that, in the name of the highest good, one can execute without trial anyone branded an enemy of the people. The twentieth century would rewrite this script again and again — in Moscow in 1937, in Cambodia in 1975, in Beijing in 1966. Liberty and the guillotine were born in France together, and we are still learning to have one without the other.