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