istoryworld
Events relating to france
Benjamin Franklin persuades the French to sign a Treaty of Alliance, committing France to the US cause
France, joining the American colonies in their fight against Britain, sends a large fleet across the Atlantic
15-year-old Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun earns enough from painting portraits to support the rest of her family
The 10-year-old Napoleon is admitted as a student in a military college at Brienne, near Troyes
French paper manufacturer Joseph Montgolfier sends a hot-air balloon 3000 feet (1000m) into the air, in front of a crowd in Annonay
Ten days after the first human ascent in a hot-air balloon the feat is repeated, again in Paris, in a version lifted by hydrogen
Louis XVI watches through his telescope the first balloon flight with living passengers – a sheep, a cock and a duck
A hot-air balloon rises from a Paris garden, carrying the first human aeronauts – Pilàtre de Rozier and the marquis d'Arlandes
Jacques-Louis David, establishing a reputation with his severe classical paintings, is elected to the French academy
Napoleon graduates from his military college and is commissioned in an artillery regiment
The French queen Marie Antoinette is wrongly implicated in a scandal involving a diamond necklace
French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb begins publishing his discoveries in the field of electricity and magnetism
French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon crosses the Atlantic to sculpt a statue of George Washington from the life at Mount Vernon
French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier publishes a system for classifying and naming chemical substances
The French finance minister, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, is dismissed when his proposed reforms meet aristocratic opposition
The ministers of Louis XVI reluctantly announce that the estates general will meet in 1789, for the first time since 1614
A pamphlet published in France by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès asks a challenging question, What is the Third Estate?
A left-wing political club begins to meet in a Jacobin convent in Paris, thus becoming known as the Jacobins
Delegates of the Third Estate swear an oath in a tennis court at Versailles, pledging themselves not to disperse until France has a constitution
The painter Jacques-Louis David sketches the events in the Versailles tennis court
An excited Paris mob liberates the seven prisoners held in the forbidding fortress of the Bastille
Parisians force their way into the palace at Versailles and insist on Louis XVI and his royal family accompanying them back to Paris
French doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposes a decapitation machine as a more humane form of capital punishment
Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a blistering attack on recent events across the Channel
French inventor Claude Chappe develops a hilltop signalling system, for which he coins the words telegraph and semaphore
