The French Revolution and the Rise of Napoleon

Book excerpt: In his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities, the great nineteenth-century English author Charles Dickens famously called the era of the French Revolution the best and worst of times. For 10 long years, from 1789 to 1799, France sought to rid itself of its old social order, grounded in the French monarchy and the Catholic Church, and inaugurate a new order based on the Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Throughout this bloody period, men wrote constitutions, women marched for bread, politicians condemned innocent people to death, and a little Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte came to dominate and redefine the European continent. Read about this watershed moment in European history in The French Revolution and the Rise of Napoleon. Milestones in Modern World History introduces students to seminal historical events that helped shape the modern world. Bolstered by biographical sketches, illustrations, photo-graphs, excerpts from primary source documents, and first-person narratives, this curriculum-based series is ideal for students writing reports. Book jacket.