Rights, exclusions, and the end of the Terror

The Revolution's rights were real, but they were unevenly shared. Women marched, petitioned, and fought for the Revolution, yet were denied political rights. Olympe de Gouges answered the Declaration with her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791), insisting women were citizens too. She was later executed during the Terror.

There were also astonishing extensions of liberty. In 1794, partly under pressure from a huge uprising of the enslaved in the colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), the Convention abolished slavery — one of the Revolution's boldest acts. Yet even this was later reversed under Napoleon.

The Terror, meanwhile, began to consume its own leaders. In July 1794 — the month called ThermidorThe revolutionary month (July 1794) in which Robespierre was overthrown, ending the Terror. — Robespierre was overthrown and executed, and the Terror came to an end. What followed was weak and unstable government.

Into that instability stepped a successful young general. In 1799 Napoleon BonaparteThe general who seized power in 1799, ending the revolutionary decade and later crowning himself emperor. seized power, closing the revolutionary decade. He kept some of its gains — legal equality, a unified law code — while ending its fragile democracy and eventually crowning himself emperor.