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

Francisco de Goya is appointed court painter to the new Spanish king, Charles IV

Mozart's opera Così fan Tutte has its premiere in Vienna, in the court theatre of Joseph II

Joseph Haydn sets off for England, where impresario Johann Peter Salomon presents his London symphonies

Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a blistering attack on recent events across the Channel

English painter J.M.W. Turner is only 15 when a painting of his, a watercolour, is first exhibited at the Royal Academy

Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches

French inventor Claude Chappe develops a hilltop signalling system, for which he coins the words telegraph and semaphore

A stranger arrives in Vienna with a mysterious commission for Mozart to write a requiem mass, just months before the composer's death

Louis XVI and his family attempt to flee from Paris to the border but are captured at Varennes

Naval officer George Vancouver sails from Britain on the voyage which will bring him to the northwest coast of America

Mozart's opera The Magic Flute has its premiere in Vienna in a popular theatre run by the librettist, Emanuel Shikaneder

Wolfe Tone is one of the founders in Belfast of the Society of United Irishmen

Mozart dies, at the age of just 35, leaving his Requiem unfinished

Thomas Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man, his reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

The Swedish king Gustavus III is assassinated at a midnight masquerade in Stockholm – an event later dramatized by Verdi

France declares war on the Austrian emperor, an event that plunges Europe into more than 20 years of conflict

In a first demonstration of the gullotine, a highwayman is beheaded in a Paris square

A French officer, Rouget de Lisle, writes a stirring anthem for France, soon to be known as the Marseillaise

Scottish painter Henry Raeburn depicts the Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch

English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Thomas Paine moves hurriedly to France, to escape a charge of treason in England for opinions expressed in his Rights of Man