A struggling economy, the impact of the Enlightenment and the king’s hold on power were just a few of many factors that led to the revolution’s outbreak in 1789. Though most of the working classes were poor and hungry, the aristocracy remained rich and well-fed in their palaces. These were the hallmarks of a feudal system that meant little had changed since the Middle Ages. The king wielded absolute power and the majority of French citizens had little hope of change.The country had been bankrupted by war, and the bourgeoisie (the upper and middle-classes) had limited political power. Educated citizens, influenced by the writers of the Enlightenment, became jaded with the absolutist regime that had been in place for centuries. They decided it was time for change. Different factions rose up within the various revolutionary governments, all with their own approaches and definitions of revolution.

The Estates-General met in May 1789 and began arguing immediately. By 17 June, the frustrated Third Estate, representing the majority of the population, had had enough. Even though it had the most members, the Third Estate wasn’t permitted a vote for every man present, neutering its ability to bring about reform. So it renamed itself as the National Assembly, a body that would represent the people and not the estates themselves. Over the next few days, members of the clergy and nobility joined them, and on 27 June the king surrendered power to the Assembly.

Marie Antoinette had long provoked gossip, but in a world of blossoming print culture, her supposed misdemeanours became inescapably public – disastrously so in 1785. In what became known as the ‘Affair of the Diamond Necklace’, the queen was held responsible for a jewellery heist that was in fact the scheme of the impoverished noblewoman Jeanne de la Motte.In a ruse to obtain a necklace worth 1.6 million livres, La Motte persuaded an out-of-favour cardinal to procure it and arrange payment on behalf of ‘the Queen’, with her as go-between. By the time the fraud was exposed, it had been broken up and sold. The trial declared La Motte guilty, but doubt had been cast on the Queen and cemented her reputation as deceitful and extravagant.

On 21 September 1792, the newly established National Convention in France had voted for the monarchy to be abolished. Just four months later, after being put on trial by members of the new republican regime, King Louis XVI was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. He was executed by guillotine at the Place de la Concorde in Paris on 21 January 1793.His wife, Marie Antoinette, was also sentenced to execution by guillotine, and lost her life on 16 October 1793.

On 14 July 1789 Parisians stormed the medieval fortress-prison of the Bastille, situated in eastern Paris. For centuries the enemies and victims of royal power had been carried there in shuttered coaches, and rumours ran of unspeakable tortures in its dungeons. Revolutionaries swarmed over the fortress, with some smashing drawbridge chains and others dismantling cannon and hauling them over the barricades. The tiny garrison yielded on the point of being overwhelmed, and at the news, royal troops elsewhere in the city packed up and marched away, their officers unwilling to try their loyalty against the triumphant people.

The leading revolutionary Camille Desmoulins was imprisoned in the spring of 1794, at the height of the revolutionary Terror. The order for his arrest had been signed by his former friends, as he reflected on to his dismay in this letter, which he penned to his wife, Lucile. Desmoulins had come under suspicion for writing his newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier, in which he publicly called for the end of the Terror and challenged the authority of two leading committees of the revolutionary government.   He was arrested with a group of other key revolutionaries who had belonged to the Jacobin faction, including Georges Danton. They were all condemned to death as traitors on 5 April.

Bizarrely, the smile – which in the Enlightenment had been a broadly democratic gesture – had become a symbol of resistance to official revolutionary culture under the Terror. It was viewed as a shared emblem among those who experienced political victimhood, a hidden sign by which the powerless could symbolically cock a snook at the powerful. Many female victims of the Terror in particular smiled on their way to the guillotine; an act intended to convey their virtue of character and authenticity of their identity.

“The Bat” was Napoleon’s battlefield nickname, inspired by his hat’s bat-like silhouette. He always carried 12 bicorne hats with him, specifically tailored to be unusually en bataille (with corns parallel to the shoulders) rather than en colonne, with the corns perpendicular, as was the fashion for most of his officers.As well as a fashion statement, the hat was Napoleon’s homage to his early revolutionary ideals. The red, white and blue cockade, the only flourish to adorn it, was the symbol of the French Revolution, of the everyman and his revolutionary yearning for democracy and liberty.

Yes, despite the fact that almost every historian since 1815 has stated unequivocally that the battle of Waterloo was won by the armies of the Duke of Wellington and his Prussian ally, General Gebhard von Blücher, Napoleon thought differently.In his official account of Waterloo, written on 20 June 1815, two days after the battle, he wrote: “After eight hours of firing and infantry and cavalry charges, the whole [French] army was able to look with satisfaction upon a battle won and the battlefield in our possession.”