Ten years that invented modern politics — the rights of man, the Terror, and the template every revolution since has copied or feared.
The French Revolution (1789–1799) was the decade that destroyed the French monarchy, dismantled feudalism and proclaimed the universal rights of man — while devouring its own children in the Terror. It invented modern politics: left and right, the citizen-army, the secular state and the national anthem were all born in revolutionary France.
