French Revolution
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The French Revolution overthrew the monarchy of Louis XVI and remade France in the decade between 1789 and 1799. A financial crisis caused by war debt and a poor harvest forced the king to summon the Estates-General in May 1789 for the first time since 1614; the deputies of the Third Estate declared themselves a National Assembly and swore in the Tennis Court Oath not to separate until France had a constitution. The Bastille, the symbol of royal authority, fell on 14 July, and in the night of 4 August the Assembly abolished feudal privilege. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in August, proclaimed liberty, property and resistance to oppression as natural rights. The king's flight to Varennes in 1791 destroyed trust, war with Austria and Prussia from 1792 brought radicalisation, and the monarchy was abolished in September 1792. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre governed through the Terror until he fell in July 1794. The Directory that followed was weak and corrupt, and in November 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte's coup brought it down. The revolution ended hereditary privilege, created the metric system, the modern administrative departement and the idea of the nation in arms, and its slogans still frame political argument.