All historians on French history agree on the fact that Napoleon’s campaigns were not that of a display of might and valor, which was still partially true, but the results of multiple events piling on one another since the bloody massacre known as the French Revolution. The French Revolution was the tipping point that tested and broke the patience of an entire nation burdened by war and famine. The monarch and the upper echelons of society feasted and drank merrily in their halls while the poor lay dying of starvation on the streets, the corpses piling up every day as the helpless victims of fate. A saying popularly quoted of a high-born noblewoman (usually identified as Queen Marie Antoinette despite lack of any concrete evidence), which is a popular favorite among many history teachers, is “If they can’t eat bread, let them eat cake.” Despite not knowing who this quote can be attributed to, it still shows how ignorant the upper-class and nobles were of the life and conditions of the general populace, who were mostly peasants and laborers overburdened by taxes that supported the incessant lavish lifestyle of their monarchs and the nobles. 

The French Revolution occurred during the regime of King Louis XVI, the last of France’s hedonistic monarchs whose administration was such a sheer and utter failure that it sparked a state of revolution within the nation for a little over ten years, beginning on May 5th, 1789 and ending on November 9th, 1799. The events that followed afterward not only affected France but the fate of its surrounding countries as well, starting the period known as the French Revolutionary Wars in the pages of history.

A lot of key factors were in play during the French Revolution and impacted the general state of the nation afterward which, when inherited by Napoleon Bonaparte, was forced to undertake a series of military conquests to ensure the existence and continued prosperity of the French nation. These factors included a mismanaged and crumbling economy that wasn’t generating anything sustainable; a corrupt social system that forced people to step up for their rights, albeit in a bloody way; and a gradual change in the cultural values of the French lowborn society, which gave rise to the importance of the opinions of the masses instead of the opinions of the Church and kings. 

All these factors turned the course of history in France, along with King Louis XVI’s desperate attempts to lay more taxes on his subjects. He did this during the convention of the Estates General of 1789 in which he stripped Jacques Necker of his political power as the minister of finance due to Necker being a sympathizer of the commoners, the Third Estate, which helped to start the initial unrest. The Estates General was a general assembly where the monarchy, nobility, clergy, and the commoners were to come to one decision regarding state policies, but those policies always favored the nobility and the clergy, never the lower classes. Furthermore, the monarch decided to enlist the aid of military strength from neighboring allies, namely the German and the Swiss armies, for the convention of the Estates General, which only raised the tensions between the nobles and the commoners more. As usual, the king and his noblemen did nothing while the clergy delayed the convention, prompting the commoners to form the short-lived National Assembly. The main reason Necker was stripped of his post was because he gave a passionate three-hour speech on behalf of the commoners, which soon became the National Constituent Assembly after the events of Bastille Day.

Although the Estates General was comprised of commoners (the clergy and the nobility, the First and Second Estate, respectively, were also represented), it became clear that the latter two segments did not give much weight to the voice of the Third Estate, which ultimately led the commoners to doubt whether their grievances, which had lasted for decades, would ever be heard, if resolved, at all, leading to one of the darkest and most violent days in French history—Bastille Day. The National Assembly failed to gain the ear of the elites and the monarch, which prompted all-out mob fury. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, one of the key figures in the events of the coup of 18 Brumaire, incited the people with speeches and pamphlets, which brought them pouring into the streets while generating sympathy for Necker, who to them was the only honest public representative in the Estates General. When the news of Necker’s dismissal on July 11th, 1789 circulated all throughout France, protests and violent unrest started erupting.

Though the revolutionaries were now under the control of the Bourgeois Militia of Paris, they had to seize weapons in order to exert control. So, on July 14, two days after the riots started, the revolutionaries in Paris aimed to take control of the Bastille, a lavish prison which was all but a fortress that housed the gunpowder they needed for the weapons they took from the Hôtel des Invalides. The prison housed only seven prisoners, who were all political prisoners that, at one time or another, had crossed King Louis XVI. What initially started out as a protest that surrounded the prison and called for its surrender turned into full-fledged mob fury when shots were fired. Representatives had been invited into the Bastille earlier in the day, and as the crowd continued to wait, they began to push closer in. Around 1:30 p.m., a group broke the chains on the drawbridge, causing a l