French Revolution

With France facing economic struggles and rising unemployment revolution was in the air. But who was in charge of the uprising and what did it achieve? Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland storm their ow…

Once there was darkness and then there was light. What was the Enlightenment and why did it matter? Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook explore the Enlightenment and its path towards reason, science, re…

The father of sadism and a prophet of totalitarianism, the Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat and writer, an uncompromising and unashamed libertine with the eerie ability to corrupt those around…

“I would plunge the avenging dagger, up to the hilt, in the breast of the tyrant!” Born in Corsica a year after the island was given to France by the Genoese, Napoleon Bonaparte grew up in a world of…

Within the turmoil of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte stands out to his military superiors, first by defeating the British at Toulon, then by putting down a royalist mob in Paris when outnum…

The French Revolution is one of the great seismic events of global history. A devouring conflagration of bloodshed, violence and utopianism, it changed France and then latterly the whole of Europe for…

In August 1785 a shocking affair came to light which would prove so detrimental to the reputation and standing of the French King Louis XVI, and more especially his already unpopular wife, Queen Marie…

With seismic antecedents such as the Glorious Revolution in England and the American War of Independence, what was it about the French Revolution that saw it become arguably the most important episode…

In the summer of 1788, a monstrous storm swept across France, wiping out the crucial wheat harvest. With the nation already in the throes of political and financial calamity, this meteorological disas…

“It was violence that made the revolution revolutionary”. The storming of the Bastille is viewed by many across the world as a moment of celebration, when the French people were liberated from the…

“Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” Alongside violence, the French Revolution is a story of principles and values. It is the ultimate intersection of brutality and Enlightenment idealism, as epitomise…

By the summer of 1789 the different sections of the Revolution were at loggerheads, and the recently created National Assembly riven in two. Both factions, the radicals on the left and the more modera…

Twelve months after the dramatic Women’s March on Versailles, the Revolution proper was well into its stride, and while Paris overflowed with a sense of unbridled political freedom, the King and Queen…

Welcome to Season 2 of The French Revolution! Revolutionary fervour threatens to engulf the streets of Paris, as demonstrators have gathered on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition demanding the r…

“You have shaken off the yoke of your despots, but surely this was not to bend the knee before a foreign tyrant…” It’s January 1792, and one of the largest factions in revolutionary France, the Giron…

During the "Ancien Regime", royal executioners held an unholy status, and would strike up fear in the crowds as they walked the streets of Paris. But with the Revolution, the role of executioners in s…

The war between revolutionary France and the allied powers of Prussia and Austria has reached fever pitch, and in early August 1792, the latter party threaten a terrible vengeance on Paris should harm…

“Let us march! Let us march! May impure blood water our fields!” Written after the declaration of war against Austria in 1792, “La Marseillaise” was born in the provinces of France, away from the Par…

‘Still more traitors, still more treason…" It is 1792 and France has been at war since April; it is not going well. In Paris, the Tuileries Palace has been stormed, and the royal family imprisoned…

In the summer and Autumn of 1792 - with the Prussians bearing down on Paris, the streets thronged with the stirring swell of the Marseillaise, but also the rotting bodies of those brutally killed duri…