On July 14, 1789, the gloomy old Bastille prison in Paris surrendered to a ragtag band of revolutionaries.
It marked the beginning of the French Revolution, a republican movement that had its roots in the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the example of the American Revolution. But while the Americans saw much that was good in their British background, the French tried to wipe away all traces of the old regime by creating everything from a new religion to new names for the months.
The experiment worked and didn't work. The republican ideal -- the idea that people can govern themselves -- has survived and flourished, but the French revolutionary government itself degenerated into anarchy and violence that eventually led to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.
For instance, Maximilien Robespierre used his position on the Committee of Public Safety to encourage the bloody Reign of Terror that he hoped would help set up a society based on Rousseau's ideas, (though mass executions were not what Rousseau had in mind). Between June 12 and July 28, 1794 alone, at least 1,285 people were executed by the guillotine, one of the last of which was Robespierre himself.
In the painting to the right, Eugène Delacroix portrayed Liberty holding high the French tricolor flag as she leads the people against the barricades. The man in the top hat was meant to symbolize the middle class, and those around him symbolized the lower class. Though this was the alliance that overthrew the French government in July 1830, by the time the picture was shown in 1831, the middle-class/lower-class alliance had dissolved.
