Between 1789 and 1815 France rebuilt almost everything it could reach: the calendar, the map, the yardstick, the law. These stories keep to what can be checked. A locked door at Versailles, a postal official who knew a face from a banknote, a prize for keeping food fresh, and an emperor whose height was a conversion error.
Every tile in a French Revolution and Napoleon game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Three men who knew him recorded his height as just over five feet two. The catch is that those were French inches, each about 2.7 centimeters against the English 2.54. Converted, he stood about 1.67 to 1.69 meters, roughly five feet six, which was average or a little better for his day. The British caricaturist James Gillray drew him tiny anyway, labeling him Little Boney in an 1803 cartoon, and the joke has outlived every treaty he signed.
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There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever told anyone to eat cake. The line was fastened onto her and has never come off. The queen underneath it was the fifteenth child of the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, born in Vienna and married into the French court in 1770, where the public had not forgotten a long enmity with Austria. What actually wrecked her name was a swindle, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, in which she was the victim.
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Joseph-Ignace Guillotin opposed the death penalty. Unable to stop executions, he argued for a single swift mechanical method applied the same way to every rank. He did not design the machine: the surgeon Antoine Louis did, and it was first nicknamed the Louison. In 1791 the Assembly made beheading the only legal method, and the machine was adopted to carry it out in March 1792. Nor did it kill Guillotin, who died in 1814 at seventy-five. His family asked the government to rename the machine, were refused, and changed their own name instead.
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She was a self-educated butcher's daughter from the south of France who wrote plays against slavery under a name she had chosen for herself. In September 1791 she answered the Declaration of the Rights of Man with a Declaration of the Rights of Woman, article by article. Article ten made the case that still lands: "woman has the right to mount the scaffold, so she should have the right equally to mount the rostrum." She was guillotined two years later.
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Before the Revolution he was a provincial lawyer in Arras who rarely lost a case, partly because he took one only when the injustice was obvious. By 1790 admirers were calling him the Incorruptible, and in 1791 he asked the National Assembly to strike the death penalty out of French law. It refused. He joined the Committee of Public Safety on 27 July 1793 and became its dominant voice. He was guillotined on 28 July 1794, one year and one day after that appointment.
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Danton trained as a lawyer and bought himself a place before the royal council, then rode the insurrection of August 1792 into the ministry of justice. He helped create the Committee of Public Safety in April 1793 and sat on the first one, but was voted off that July, when his efforts to negotiate peace with the enemy coalition had won him no friends. By late 1793 he led the Indulgents, who wanted the killing slowed. He was tried over three days in April 1794 and executed on the fifth.
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She was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on a Martinique plantation in 1763, and everyone called her Rose. Her first husband was guillotined in July 1794; she had spent that spring and summer in prison on one bottle of water a day for every use, expecting the same ending. On 9 March 1796 she married a young general, and he reached past Rose for her middle name. Joséphine is what he decided to call her.
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At nineteen he left France for America in 1777 without telling his family, because the king had expressly forbidden the trip. He came home a hero of somebody else's republic. When the Bastille fell in July 1789 he was handed command of the new National Guard and told to keep Paris in order. He spent the next two years trying to hold a line between the crowd and the crown, which earned him enemies in both directions.
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Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte enlisted as a common soldier in 1780 and was a marshal of France by 1804. Then Sweden went looking for an heir to a childless king, and wanted a general who might win Finland back from Russia. The Riksdag elected the Frenchman crown prince in August 1810. He took the name Charles John, allied with Russia and Britain against his old emperor, became king in 1818, and his descendants are on the Swedish throne today.
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France had not summoned the Estates-General since 1614, so nobody alive had seen one at work. In July 1788 the king ordered towns to search their archives for records of past meetings and invited scholars to send in whatever they knew. On 5 May 1789 about twelve hundred deputies gathered in a temporary hall at Versailles. The Third Estate, well over ninety percent of the country, held about six hundred seats, roughly as many as the clergy and nobility combined. Six weeks later it declared itself the National Assembly.
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On 20 June 1789 the deputies of the new National Assembly arrived at their hall in Versailles to find the doors locked and soldiers standing guard. Instead of going home they walked to an indoor tennis court nearby and swore never to separate, and to meet wherever circumstances required, until the kingdom had a constitution on solid foundations. A king had shut a door, and the men on the other side of it decided that wherever they met, the nation met.
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It began with the price of bread. On 5 October 1789 thousands of market women walked the thirteen miles from Paris to Versailles in heavy rain, and the National Guard followed them. They wanted bread, and they wanted the king close enough to see what he was governing. The next day Louis XVI came back to Paris with them and moved into the Tuileries. The court never returned to Versailles, and the palace never housed a king again.
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Valmy was less a battle than an argument between guns: more than twenty thousand rounds fired across open ground on 20 September 1792, with only a few hundred casualties on both sides together. The invasion stopped there, and the next day in Paris the Convention abolished the monarchy. Goethe was traveling with the Prussian army, and by his own account he told his dejected comrades that a new epoch in world history had begun. He wrote that account decades later, partly from other people's testimony, so historians are not sure he said it.
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In June 1794 a new law took away the accused person's lawyer, the questioning of witnesses and any real investigation, and in the seven weeks that followed around fourteen hundred trials before the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal ended in execution. Then the Convention that had passed the law turned on Robespierre, the man most identified with the Terror. On 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794, he was declared an outlaw and arrested, and the next day he was guillotined with twenty-one of his supporters. The Terror ended with him.
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Napoleon took scholars to Egypt as well as soldiers, but the discovery that mattered came from men repairing a fort. In July 1799, at a fort near Rashid in the Nile delta, soldiers demolishing a wall uncovered a dark slab inscribed in three scripts, and an engineering officer named Pierre-François Bouchard saw at once that it might be important. Two years later the French surrendered in Egypt, and the stone sailed to Portsmouth in February 1802 as British property.
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Napoleon spent the better part of two years preparing the largest invasion force Europe had yet seen. Estimates of the army that crossed the Niemen in June 1812 run from about four hundred and fifty thousand to more than six hundred thousand French and allied troops. Wastage did the work long before the enemy did, and over a hundred thousand men were gone before the first major battle was fought. By December the losses ran to several hundred thousand, and only a fraction of the army that went in came out.
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Napoleon brought seventy-two thousand men and two hundred and forty-six guns to the field on 18 June 1815, against sixty-eight thousand under Wellington. Early in the battle French troops broke into the walled farm of Hougoumont through its north gate, and a small party of defenders forced the gate shut behind them. The farm held all day, and Wellington later said the success of the battle turned upon the closing of those gates. Then forty-eight thousand Prussians arrived. Within three weeks the allies were in Paris and Napoleon had abdicated.
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He left Elba on 26 February 1815 with about a thousand men and landed near Cannes on 1 March. Near Laffrey a battalion of the 5th Line, sent to arrest him, blocked the road. He walked out ahead of his men toward their muskets and asked whether they did not recognize their emperor. Instead of firing, they rushed forward shouting for him. Accounts of his exact words differ. At Grenoble the townspeople tore down the city gates and handed him the pieces, and on 20 March he was in Paris.
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Genoa sold Corsica to France in 1768, and at the Battle of Ponte Novu in May 1769 the French defeated Paoli's Corsicans, who were forced into hiding. That 15 August, Napoleone di Buonaparte was born at Ajaccio, a French subject by a margin of months. His father, Carlo, had backed Corsican independence, but after the defeat he swore allegiance to his new French overlords. The future emperor of the French began life with an Italian name, on an island that had been French for little more than a year.
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In 1779 the nine-year-old Napoleon entered the royal military school at Brienne-le-Château on a crown scholarship, one of sixty places for boys from the poor nobility. He stayed until October 1784, lived in a small unheated cell, and was teased by classmates who called him "straw nose." Nearly thirty years after he left, he came back as emperor, made the town's château his headquarters and fought the Battle of Brienne there on 29 January 1814. From Saint Helena he left the town a million francs.
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After the royal family left in October 1789, repairs at Versailles went on, and Louis XVI even ordered the Grand Canal cleaned. Hopes of his return faded, and his execution in January 1793 ended them. That July the Convention declared the palace a public establishment, and that summer more than seventeen thousand lots of royal furniture went under the hammer in one apartment, the Princess of Lamballe's former rooms. The Grand Canal was drained, the trees went for firewood, and by the Revolution's end no fountain worked. Napoleon relaunched the fountain shows in 1801.
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Marie Antoinette was brought to the Conciergerie on the night of 1 August 1793 and held there for seventy-six days, in a room where two gendarmes watched her night and day and, most of the time, with nothing to write with. Her trial opened on 14 October before the Revolutionary Court. Two days later she was taken by cart to the Place de la Révolution. The building is still there, one of the oldest surviving parts of the medieval royal palace on the island in the Seine.
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The Panthéon began as a thank-you note. Gravely ill at Metz in 1744, Louis XV promised Saint Genevieve a new church if he recovered, then paid for it with a vast royal lottery. Soufflot designed it, died before it was done, and his collaborators finished the building in 1790, just in time for the Revolution to take it. When Mirabeau died in 1791 it became a resting place for great men instead. Voltaire arrived that year, Rousseau in 1794.
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Joséphine bought Malmaison, west of Paris, on 21 April 1799 for 325,000 francs, while her husband was away in Egypt. He approved the purchase when he came back and became its owner, and from 1800 to 1802 his ministers often met there. The park held kangaroos and emus, and some two hundred plants, dahlias and camellias among them, were grown in France for the first time in its gardens. After the divorce in 1809 he gave her the house and its collections. She died there on 29 May 1814, weeks after he was sent to Elba.
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After Waterloo the British wanted no second Elba. Castlereagh suggested a fort in Scotland, but on 21 July 1815 the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, settled on Saint Helena, about 1,200 miles off Africa, reasoning that at such a distance intrigue would be impossible and Napoleon would soon be forgotten. The island was no empty rock: English ships on the India route stopped there. Napoleon arrived in October 1815 and died there on 5 May 1821, at fifty-one. Nineteen years later France needed Britain's permission to bring his body home.
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Bringing Napoleon home was the quick part. Louis-Philippe decided in 1840 to move the remains from Saint Helena to the Invalides, where they waited two decades in a side chapel. The architect Visconti cut an open crypt beneath the dome, the sarcophagus stone came from Russia, and the work was nearly done in 1853 when Visconti suddenly died. The emperor was laid in it on 2 April 1861. He shares the church with his son, two of his brothers, Marshal Foch and Turenne, whose tomb Napoleon himself had placed there in 1800.
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Napoleon ordered the arch in February 1806 and never saw it finished. Chalgrin, the architect, died in 1811 with the pillars only about a dozen meters high. Work stopped when the empire fell, restarted under Louis XVIII in 1823 and stalled again after the revolution of 1830. The Arc de Triomphe was finally inaugurated on 29 July 1836, thirty years after it was begun. The grand celebration had been canceled for fear of an attack on King Louis-Philippe, so eleven people attended, six of them national guardsmen.
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In 1790 the National Assembly asked the Academy of Sciences for a standard no king owned, and the answer was a fraction of the planet: one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Two astronomers, Delambre and Méchain, spent six years measuring the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona, harassed and at times jailed by people who did not believe their explanation. France made the system law in 1795 and cast the standards in platinum in 1799.
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From October 1793 France counted its years from the founding of the Republic and threw out the seven-day week. Each month held three decades of ten days, ending on decadi instead of Sunday, with five or six spare days at the end of the year. The poet Fabre d'Églantine named the months for weather and harvest: Brumaire for fog, Nivôse for snow, Thermidor for heat. Workers noticed they now got one rest day in ten. Napoleon ended it by decree in 1805, and the old calendar returned on 1 January 1806.
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France's anthem was written in one night, in Strasbourg, for a different army. When war with Austria came in April 1792, Strasbourg's mayor asked for a marching song, and Rouget de Lisle, a captain of engineers, wrote the War Song for the Army of the Rhine. Volunteers from Marseille sang it in Paris during the uprising of 10 August 1792, and it took their city's name. The Convention made it the national anthem on 14 July 1795. Its author slipped back into obscurity, though in 1915 his ashes were moved to the Invalides.
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The Rosetta Stone carried one decree in three scripts, hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, and scholars could already read the Greek. Six times, the hieroglyphs ringed the same group of signs in an oval. The English physicist Thomas Young showed that those signs spelled the royal name Ptolemy, proof that some hieroglyphs recorded sounds. Jean-François Champollion started where Young left off, publishing in 1821 and 1822, and was the first to see the full mix: some signs stood for sounds, others for a whole idea. He went on to list the signs with their Greek equivalents.
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The Civil Code was adopted on 21 March 1804, during the years when Napoleon was consolidating power rather than fighting for it. It carried forward liberal reforms of the Revolution and set them out as a single body of rules. Then it went abroad with the armies and was taken up across much of continental Europe, which is why it outlasted every frontier he drew and most of the governments that came after him.
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Napoleon founded the Legion of Honor on 19 May 1802, while he was still First Consul. What set it apart was the entry rule: it rewarded individual merit and service to the nation, not birth, and it was open to civilians as well as soldiers. In his own words he decorated "his soldiers and his savants," though soldiers made up about three quarters of the members until the Second Empire. It outlasted his empire, and it is still France's highest national decoration.
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Before it was a flag, it was a hat badge. In July 1789 the new Paris militia wore cockades in blue and red, the old colors of the city. Lafayette, commanding what became the National Guard, is credited with adding the royal white, to show that the Guard stood with both the people and the crown. The crown fell, and when the Bourbons returned in 1814 they brought back the plain white flag. The revolution of 1830 restored the tricolor, and Article 2 of the 1958 constitution names it the national emblem.
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When the Bastille came down, its key crossed the Atlantic. The fortress's main key was handed to Lafayette, commander of the new National Guard, soon after the crowd took it, and in March 1790 he sent it to George Washington as a tribute from an adopted son to his father. The wrought-iron key, weighing a pound and three ounces, was shown at a presidential reception in New York that August and then in Philadelphia. In 1797 it went to Mount Vernon, where it still hangs in the mansion's central hall.
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In 1803 James Monroe joined Robert Livingston, the American minister in Paris, with authority to spend up to ten million dollars on New Orleans and West Florida. Napoleon offered the whole of Louisiana instead: 828,000 square miles for fifteen million. He had meant to retake Saint-Domingue from a slave rebellion and feed it from Louisiana, but his army there was being cut down by yellow fever and war with Britain was coming. The envoys accepted, far beyond their instructions, and the United States doubled in size.
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