French Revolution

The 'Age of Revolutions' touched many countries - including the so-called 'Austrian Netherlands' In 1789 the began. But it wasn’t alone... Next door, in what’s now Belgium, the ‘Brabant Revolution’ was happening at the exact same time.

How the people of France captured a Parisian prison and brought down the French monarchy once said that a riot is the language of the unheard. For centuries before 1789, politics in the Kingdom of France concerned itself with kings and noblemen.

The story of how a tennis court became one of the most important sites in radical history... You might expect revolutions to start out in factories, shipyards, or prisons – not luxury tennis courts.

The revolutionary leader who liberated his people and took on Napoleon's army... Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live, and take comfort!

Everyone's heard of the French Revolution - but did you know there was more than one? Revolutions don’t usually begin with dinner parties. By 1848, France had been the European champion of revolutionary politics for half a century.

Known as the 'Father of Reform', John Cartwright paved the way for the democratic campaigns of the 19th and 20th centuries... In the summer of 1819, the Manchester Patriotic Union organised a mass rally for universal manhood suffrage.

The man who was killed for trying to make the French Revolution even more radical...

How one pamphlet infuriated the entire British establishment Long before the in the US, there was the trial of Thomas Paine in England. But in the 1790s, the spectre haunting the British Establishment was republicanism, not socialism.

Born today in 1770, Sir Francis Burdett, 5th Baronet of Bramcote, was a radical you might not have expected. The decades either side of 1800 – the so-called 'Age of Revolutions' – were a time of closed ranks for the European aristocracy.

CLR James (1901-1989) was born today in 1901. His book, 'The Black Jacobins', remains one of the great monuments in the history of radical history. Illustration depicting combat between French and Haitian troops during the Haitian Revolution.