French First Republic

08/06/2011 by Thor

The French First Republic (1792-1804) was established by the National Convention on September 22, 1792, and was legally created and enforced by the Constitution of 1793, during the French Revolution. The establishment of the National Convention that instated the First Republic was a direct consequence of August 10th events (1792), when members of the insurrectionary Paris Commune had attacked the Tuileries Palace, killing five hundred of the King’s Swiss guards and forcing Louis XVI and the royal family to take shelter with the Legislative Assembly. As a result, a party of six members of France’s Legislative Assembly had been assigned the task of overseeing elections for a new governing body which would hold executive powers and would have the task of drafting a new constitution. This new body was called the National Convention, whose first measure was to abolish the monarchy, and the second was the establishment of the French First Republic.

During the first two years of the First Republic, the National Convention was dominated by the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre and his followers, who established the what is known as the Reign of Terror, during which, not only the King and his wife Maria Antoinette were executed on the guillotine, but also 30,000 people, most of them members of the nobility and the clergy. After Robespierre was overthrown and executed, the more moderate members of National Convention created the Constitution of 1795, establishing the French Directory, which was composed of five members who held executive powers, and a bicameral parliament that had legislative powers. In 1799, after a military coup organized by a member of the Consulate and Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Consulate was created. It lasted until 1804, when Napoleon was crowned emperor.