What year did the French Revolution begin?

1789, conventionally dated from the storming of the Bastille on 14 July - which was militarily trivial. The fortress held seven prisoners, four of them forgers, and the crowd went there for the gunpowder rather than to liberate anyone. Its power was symbolic and immediate: a royal fortress in the middle of Paris had fallen to a crowd.

The trigger was money. France was effectively bankrupt, partly from funding the American Revolution, and the Estates-General was summoned for the first time since 1614 to approve taxes. It deadlocked over whether voting should be by estate - which gave clergy and nobility two votes against the commons' one - and the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, which is the actual constitutional break.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man in August was the extraordinary document, and its limits are as instructive as its claims. It declared men born free and equal in rights; it did not extend to women, which Olympe de Gouges pointed out in 1791 with a Declaration of the Rights of Woman, and she was guillotined two years later. Haiti then took the Declaration at its word, and the only successful slave revolt in history produced a republic that France spent the next century punishing with an indemnity it was still paying in 1947.