Conflict, Crisis & Reaction (Late 18th C.): every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
62 flashcard terms for AP European History Unit 5, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 25-question quiz — free, no account needed.
A convergence of crises: crushing state debt (from wars including American intervention), a regressive tax system exempting nobles and clergy, bad harvests and bread prices, Enlightenment critiques of privilege, and a monarchy too weak to reform itself.
The Three Estates
Old Regime France's legal orders: the First Estate (clergy, ~130,000), Second Estate (nobility, ~350,000), and Third Estate (everyone else — 97% of the population, from wealthy bourgeois to peasants) — with tax burdens falling almost entirely on the Third.
Estates-General (May 1789)
The representative assembly of the three estates, summoned by Louis XVI for the first time since 1614 to solve the fiscal crisis. Deadlock over voting procedure (by order vs. by head) triggered the Revolution.
Abbé Sieyès — 'What Is the Third Estate?'
The revolutionary pamphlet of 1789: 'What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.' It made the nation, not the king or the privileged, the source of legitimacy.
National Assembly (June 1789)
The Third Estate's declaration that it — as representative of the nation — constituted the true legislature, inviting the other estates to join. The revolutionary act that transferred sovereignty from king to nation.
Tennis Court Oath (June 20, 1789)
Locked out of their hall, National Assembly deputies swore on a tennis court not to disband until France had a constitution — collective defiance that made the Revolution's constitutional goal explicit.
Storming of the Bastille (July 14, 1789)
Parisian crowds seized the royal fortress-prison seeking arms and gunpowder as royal troops massed near Paris. Militarily minor, symbolically immense: popular violence saved the Assembly and became the Revolution's founding image.
The Great Fear (Summer 1789)
Waves of rural panic — rumors of aristocratic 'brigands' — during which peasants attacked manor houses and burned feudal records, forcing the Assembly to act against feudalism.
August 4, 1789 — Abolition of Feudalism
In one extraordinary night session, the National Assembly abolished feudal dues, serfdom, tithes, venal offices, and noble tax privileges — dismantling the legal structure of the Old Regime.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 1789)
The Revolution's charter: men are born free and equal in rights (liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression); sovereignty resides in the nation; law is the general will; careers open to talent; freedom of speech and religion.
Women's March on Versailles (October 1789)
Thousands of Parisian women, protesting bread prices, marched to Versailles and forced the royal family to move to Paris — placing king and Assembly under the capital's watchful eye.
Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790)
The Assembly's reorganization of the Catholic Church — clergy elected and salaried by the state, loyalty oath required. It split France: about half the clergy ('refractory' priests) refused, turning many devout Catholics against the Revolution.
Flight to Varennes (June 1791)
Louis XVI's failed attempt to flee France, caught near the border. It destroyed trust in the king, energized republicanism, and made the constitutional monarchy of 1791 a doomed experiment.
Constitution of 1791
France's first constitution: a constitutional monarchy with a Legislative Assembly elected by 'active' (taxpaying) citizens — the liberal revolution institutionalized, and almost immediately overtaken by war and radicalization.
Declaration of Pillnitz & War (1792)
Austria and Prussia's threat to restore Louis XVI helped push France to declare war (April 1792). War radicalized everything: defeats bred paranoia, and paranoia bred the Terror. France remained at war until 1815, with brief pauses.
Storming of the Tuileries & September Massacres (1792)
On August 10, 1792, Parisian militants stormed the royal palace, toppling the monarchy; in September, panicked crowds massacred over 1,000 prisoners. Revolutionary violence escalated as Prussian armies advanced.
The National Convention & the Republic (September 1792)
A new assembly, elected by universal male suffrage, abolished the monarchy and declared France a republic — Year I of a new era, confirmed days after the battlefield miracle at Valmy.
Execution of Louis XVI (January 21, 1793)
Convicted of treason by the Convention, 'Citizen Louis Capet' was guillotined. Regicide committed the Revolution irrevocably and united Europe's monarchies against France.
Jacobins vs. Girondins
Rival republican factions: the Girondins — provincial, moderate, hesitant about Paris's crowds; the Jacobins (the Mountain) — centralizing radicals allied with the Parisian sans-culottes. The Jacobins purged the Girondins in June 1793.
Sans-Culottes
Parisian working people ('without knee-breeches') — artisans, shopkeepers, laborers — the Revolution's street power. They demanded price controls, direct democracy, and vigilance against traitors, driving the Revolution leftward.
Committee of Public Safety
The twelve-man emergency executive (dominated by Robespierre from mid-1793) that governed France during the Terror — organizing war, economy, and repression with dictatorial power.
Reign of Terror (1793–1794)
The Revolution's emergency dictatorship: some 17,000 official executions (and many more deaths), the Law of Suspects, surveillance committees, and revolutionary tribunals — justified as defending the Republic against invasion and civil war.
Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794)
'The Incorruptible' — Jacobin leader who dominated the Committee of Public Safety, theorizing that terror was 'nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice' flowing from virtue. Overthrown and guillotined in Thermidor (July 1794).
Levée en Masse (1793)
The revolutionary mass conscription decree mobilizing the entire nation for war — young men to fight, others to make arms, women to sew tents, elders to preach unity. It created million-man citizen armies and modern total war.
Vendée Rebellion
A massive Catholic-royalist peasant uprising in western France (1793) against conscription and the Revolution's religious policies. Its brutal suppression killed perhaps 200,000 — the Terror's bloodiest theater.
Dechristianization & the Revolutionary Calendar
Radical campaigns closed churches, promoted the Cult of Reason (then Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being), and replaced the Christian calendar — Year I from the Republic's birth, ten-day weeks — remaking time itself.
Law of the Maximum (1793)
Price and wage controls demanded by the sans-culottes to fight inflation and hoarding — revolutionary economic intervention that fed Paris but alienated peasants and merchants.
Abolition of Slavery (1794)
The Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies — driven by the enslaved themselves in Saint-Domingue (the Haitian Revolution). Napoleon restored slavery in 1802; Haiti won independence in 1804.
Olympe de Gouges
Author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791) — 'Woman is born free and equal to man in rights.' Guillotined in 1793; the Republic banned women's political clubs the same year.
Thermidorian Reaction (July 1794)
The Convention's overthrow of Robespierre (9 Thermidor), ending the Terror. What followed: dismantling of the Terror's machinery, White Terror reprisals, and a swing back toward propertied moderation.
The Directory (1795–1799)
The five-man executive of the conservative republic that followed the Terror — corrupt, unstable, dependent on the army to annul elections, and finally overthrown by its most successful general.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
Corsican artillery officer risen through revolutionary armies (Toulon, Italy, Egypt) to First Consul (1799) and Emperor (1804) — heir, consolidator, and betrayer of the Revolution, and master of Europe until 1815.
Coup of 18 Brumaire (November 1799)
Napoleon's overthrow of the Directory, establishing the Consulate with himself as First Consul. The Revolution's political experiment ended in military dictatorship ratified by plebiscite.
Napoleonic Code (Civil Code, 1804)
Napoleon's codification of law: legal equality of men, property rights, religious toleration, merit-based careers — locking in revolutionary gains — while restoring patriarchal authority over wives and restricting workers. Exported across Europe; still the basis of many legal systems.
Concordat of 1801
Napoleon's settlement with the pope: Catholicism recognized as the religion 'of the majority of the French,' clergy salaried by the state, confiscated church lands kept by their buyers — healing the schism while subordinating the Church.
Napoleon's Domestic Reforms
Beyond the Code: the Bank of France, the franc, centralized prefects in every department, lycées, the Legion of Honor — a rationalized, meritocratic administrative state with plebiscitary trappings and police censorship (Fouché).
Napoleon Crowns Himself Emperor (1804)
At Notre-Dame, Napoleon took the crown from the pope and crowned himself — symbolizing power owed to his own achievement (and the nation's ratification), not to God or the old dynasty.
Battle of Trafalgar (1805)
Nelson's destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet, establishing British naval supremacy for a century and ending any hope of invading Britain — forcing Napoleon toward economic warfare instead.
Battle of Austerlitz (1805)
Napoleon's masterpiece — crushing the combined Austrian and Russian armies. Within months the Holy Roman Empire, a thousand years old, was dissolved (1806) and replaced by the French-dominated Confederation of the Rhine.
Continental System (1806)
Napoleon's embargo forbidding continental Europe to trade with Britain — economic war meant to strangle 'the nation of shopkeepers.' It leaked everywhere, hurt Europe more than Britain, and drove Napoleon into Iberia and Russia.
Peninsular War (1808–1814)
Napoleon's occupation of Spain and Portugal ignited ferocious popular resistance — the original 'guerrilla' (little war) — draining French strength ('the Spanish ulcer') while Wellington's British army pressed from Portugal. Goya's art recorded the horror.
Invasion of Russia (1812)
Napoleon's Grande Armée of over 600,000 marched to Moscow through scorched earth; winter, hunger, typhus, and Cossacks destroyed it on the retreat. Fewer than 100,000 returned — the catastrophe that broke Napoleonic power.
Wars of Liberation & Abdication (1813–1814)
After Russia, a grand coalition (Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain, Sweden) defeated Napoleon at Leipzig — the 'Battle of Nations' (1813) — invaded France, and forced his abdication and exile to Elba (1814). The Bourbons returned under Louis XVIII.
Hundred Days & Waterloo (1815)
Napoleon's escape from Elba and triumphant return ended at Waterloo (June 18, 1815), defeated by Wellington and Blücher. Exiled to remote St. Helena, he died in 1821 — leaving a legend and a legal code.
Congress of Vienna (1814–1815)
The peace conference of the great powers — Metternich (Austria), Castlereagh (Britain), Alexander I (Russia), Hardenberg (Prussia), and Talleyrand (France) — that redrew Europe's map and system after 23 years of war.
Klemens von Metternich
Austrian foreign minister and the Congress's presiding genius — architect of the conservative order (legitimacy, balance, suppression of liberalism and nationalism) that bore his name until 1848.
Legitimacy, Compensation, Balance of Power
Vienna's principles: restore 'legitimate' dynasties (Bourbons in France and Spain), compensate powers with territory (Austria in Italy, Prussia in the Rhineland, Russia in Poland), and encircle France with strengthened buffers — equilibrium against any future hegemon.
Concert of Europe
The post-Vienna system of great-power consultation (congresses at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, Verona) to manage crises and suppress revolution — conservative internationalism that kept general peace for decades.
Holy Alliance & Quadruple Alliance
Alexander I's Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria, Prussia) pledged Christian monarchical solidarity; the practical Quadruple Alliance (adding Britain) bound the victors to enforce the settlement and police France.
Edmund Burke — Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
The founding text of modern conservatism: society is a contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn; abstract reason cannot replace inherited institutions; revolutionary utopianism ends in terror and military despotism — predicted before it happened.
Thomas Paine — Rights of Man (1791)
Paine's answer to Burke: hereditary government is illegitimate; each generation has the right to remake its institutions; rights belong to living men, not tradition. Sold in hundreds of thousands — radicalism for the common reader.
Britain's Reaction to the Revolution
Initial sympathy gave way to repression as war began: Pitt's government suspended habeas corpus, tried radicals for treason, and passed the Two Acts against seditious meetings — while loyalist propaganda mobilized 'Church and King' opinion.
Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)
The enslaved of Saint-Domingue — led by Toussaint Louverture — rose, won emancipation (1794), defeated French, Spanish, and British armies, and after Napoleon's attempt to restore slavery, declared Haitian independence (1804): the only successful slave revolution in history.
Napoleon and Haiti
Napoleon's expedition under Leclerc (1802) captured Toussaint (who died in a French prison) but was destroyed by resistance and yellow fever. The failure led Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the U.S. (1803) and abandon American empire.
Nationalism Unleashed
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars spread the idea of the nation in arms — and provoked it in reverse: Spanish guerrillas, German patriots (Fichte's Addresses), and Russian resistance turned French nationalism's weapons against France.
The Revolution and Religion — Legacy
From the Civil Constitution through dechristianization to the Concordat, the Revolution broke the Catholic Church's monopoly on French public life — beginning the long European struggle between clerical and secular visions of society.
Metric System
The Revolution's rational measurement — meter, gram, liter, based on nature and decimals — replacing thousands of local units. Enlightenment universalism in everyday life, eventually adopted worldwide.
Left and Right
The modern political spectrum was born from seating in the revolutionary assemblies: supporters of change sat to the president's left, defenders of king and tradition to his right.
Assignats and Inflation
Revolutionary paper money backed by confiscated church lands. Over-printing produced ruinous inflation, feeding popular unrest, price controls, and the economic chaos that plagued every revolutionary government.
Citizen and Nation
The Revolution's deepest transformation: subjects of a king became citizens of a nation — equal under law, taxed uniformly, conscripted into national armies, educated into a shared identity. The template of modern political life.
Romanticism as Reaction
The artistic and intellectual movement rising from the revolutionary era — exalting emotion, nature, history, and the particular against Enlightenment universal reason; both revolutionary (Delacroix) and conservative (Chateaubriand) in politics.
Napoleon's Legacy — Ambiguity
Destroyer of the republic yet carrier of its principles: everywhere his armies went, feudalism, serfdom, ghettos, and legal privilege fell, and the Code followed. Tyrant to some, lawgiver to others — the Revolution's contradictions in one man.