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The night of 22 August 1791

The coordinated mass uprising of enslaved people broke out in full force on Saint-Domingue's Northern Plain on the night of 22 August 1791. Dutty Boukman, a coachman on the Clément estate, launched the rebellion in the parish of Acul, and it spread through the plantation districts around Cap-Français.

The rising had been planned by enslaved organizers from numerous plantations. Boukman, Jean-François, Georges Biassou and Jeannot were among its early leaders.

Why the calendars disagree

The 21 August date attached to this entry probably conflates a preliminary or religious gathering — and possibly premature plantation fires — with the mass uprising itself.

Carolyn Fick places the probable Bois Caïman ceremony on 21 August and the full outbreak on 22 August; UNESCO commemorates the beginning as the night of 22–23 August; another university overview describes the coordinated revolt as the night of 21–22 August.

The date, location and details of the Bois Caïman ceremony are themselves contested, because the evidence combines a small number of contemporary references with later oral tradition.

What the first weeks destroyed

A well-attested meeting near the Lenormand de Mézy estate on 14 August had fixed the plans, with about 200 plantation representatives reported present.

Plantations were attacked and burned as the uprising expanded; a Cambridge University Press study reports that 184 sugar plantations were destroyed in the ensuing weeks.

Toussaint Louverture, the figure most often made the face of the revolution, is not securely documented as the commander who launched it — his name does not appear in surviving documents until later in 1791.

10 August 1792: the palace besieged

On 10 August 1792 the insurrectionary Paris Commune, the Paris sections, and armed fédérés from Brittany and Marseille besieged and attacked the Tuileries Palace. During the night of 9–10 August the Commune had displaced the existing municipal authority and organised the rising.

Louis XVI and the royal family left the palace before it was taken and placed themselves under the protection of the Legislative Assembly. They were not seized inside the building; they had already reached the deputies.

The Swiss Guards

The palace's professional defenders were the Swiss Guards. National Guard units were present but divided and unreliable.

The Swiss resisted the attackers, and many were killed in the fighting or massacred after surrendering. Published casualty totals vary widely and often mix combat deaths with later killings, and accounts differ over who fired first and over how quickly the king's order to stop fighting reached the defenders.

Suspended, not deposed

Under pressure from the victorious insurgents, the Assembly unanimously suspended Louis XVI. It chose that narrow constitutional formula even as the insurgents demanded dethronement, and it did not abolish the monarchy that day.

The same sitting called for a National Convention and established a provisional executive council of six ministers. The royal family was placed in custody, and on 13 August imprisoned in the Temple.

21 January 1793, 10:22 a.m.

On 21 January 1793 Louis XVI was taken from his imprisonment in the Temple to the Place de la Révolution in Paris, now the Place de la Concorde. He was executed there by guillotine at 10:22 a.m.

Charles-Henri Sanson, the Paris executioner, supervised and performed it; Antoine-Joseph Santerre, commanding the Paris National Guard, was responsible for the armed escort and the security around the scaffold. A delegation had formally communicated the sentence to Louis at the Temple the previous day.

The arithmetic behind the sentence

The Convention had convicted him of conspiracy against public liberty and attacks on the general security of the state. "Treason" is a convenient shorthand, not the wording of the charge.

In the decisive count on punishment, 361 of the 721 deputies present voted for unconditional death. Another 26 voted for death coupled with postponement under the Mailhe proposal, and 380 voted against a stay of execution.

What the guillotine did not settle

Accounts differ over Louis's exact final words, over who ordered the drums to beat, and over whether the words attributed to his confessor were spoken at all.

The monarchy had already been abolished in September 1792, so the execution did not itself create the Republic. Revolutionaries tried and killed him as Louis Capet — a designation they applied to him, not his Bourbon family surname.

20 March 1800: a letter dated at Como

At Como on 20 March 1800, Alessandro Volta dated a French-language letter to Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, announcing results from his experiments with different conducting substances and asking Banks to communicate them to the Society.

He described an apparatus built by repeatedly pairing silver or copper with zinc or tin, the pairs separated by disks of porous material moistened with salt water. He also described a related chain, or crown, of cups.

About twenty stages, a spark, and a shock

Volta explained that roughly 20 repeated metal stages could produce an electrometer reading, a spark, and shocks when a person touched the two ends. He presented the device as resembling a weakly charged Leyden-jar battery, differing in that it could act repeatedly without an external recharge.

His explanation of why it worked did not survive. Volta held that metal-to-metal contact generated the electricity and treated the wet layers chiefly as conductors; modern electrochemistry attributes the sustained current to oxidation and reduction reactions involving the electrolyte.

London got the news in pieces

The date belongs to the letter, not to any lecture or meeting. The communication travelled to London in separate portions, and Banks passed on enough of it for Anthony Carlisle and William Nicholson to build a pile by late April and use it to decompose water in early May.

The Royal Society's archive records the letter as read on 26 June 1800. It then appeared in Philosophical Transactions, pages 403–431, with a folding plate.

18 May 1803: a declaration laid before Parliament

On 18 May 1803, George III issued a declaration explaining the rupture with the French Republic and the failure of negotiations to preserve the Peace of Amiens. It was presented to Parliament, publicly confirming that Britain and France had returned to open war.

War did not begin through one self-contained legal act. The Privy Council had already authorised general reprisals and the seizure of French and Batavian shipping on 16 May.

The argument was about Malta

The declaration defended Britain's continued occupation of Malta, arguing that the treaty's guarantees and the arrangements for restoring the island to the Order of St John had not been completed. Britain's final position sought possession of Malta for as long as ten years.

Amiens had set a different clock: British evacuation within three months of the exchange of ratifications, subject to stated conditions. Charles Whitworth delivered Britain's demands to Talleyrand and left Paris after the negotiations failed.

What the treaty did not say

Britain also demanded French withdrawals from Holland, and France rejected the ultimatum as incompatible with the Amiens settlement, tying a Dutch withdrawal to Britain's own compliance.

The treaty usually blamed for that dispute never expressly told French troops to leave Holland — its evacuation clause covered Naples and the Roman States. And France was still a republic on this date; Napoleon did not proclaim the Empire until 1804.

4 July 1803: the news arrives as a newspaper item

On 4 July 1803, Washington's National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser published the first official public announcement that France had agreed to cede Louisiana to the United States.

It was not a presidential address or a proclamation. Samuel Harrison Smith's paper served as the administration's politically aligned organ, which is what made a newspaper item the official channel.

One day after Jefferson found out

The announcement followed by a single day the news reaching Jefferson that Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe had obtained all of Louisiana — not merely the objectives their instructions covered.

Livingston admitted to Jefferson that the negotiators had exceeded their powers. The stated price was $15 million, for an area conventionally estimated at 828,000 square miles.

Nothing actually changed hands

Publication made the agreement public; it neither ratified it nor transferred possession. The official treaty documents did not reach Washington until 14 July.

Possession came later still — New Orleans on 20 December 1803, Upper Louisiana in March 1804 — and what France ceded was its imperial claim, over land Indigenous nations continued to hold.

20 October 1803: 24 to 7

Meeting in Washington on 20 October 1803, the U.S. Senate approved the treaty with France for ratification, 24 votes to 7. All seven opponents were Federalists, and the supporters cleared the constitutionally required two-thirds with room to spare.

Samuel White of Delaware, opposing, warned that settlers so far away might end up alienated from the Union. James Jackson of Georgia urged the Senate not to let the opportunity pass.

Why Jefferson was in a hurry

The agreement required ratification and exchange within six months, and Jefferson had called Congress into early session to get it done. Delay risked missing the 30 October deadline, or giving Napoleon time to reconsider.

He had weighed proposing a constitutional amendment to authorise the acquisition, and dropped the idea for the same reason.

Consent is not possession

Senate consent let the United States complete ratification, and American and French representatives — Louis-André Pichon acting for France — exchanged ratified copies in Washington the next day.

Plenty was still outstanding. Congress had to create the stock used to pay France and authorise the president to take possession; New Orleans changed hands on 20 December, Upper Louisiana in March 1804.

1 January 1804, at army headquarters in Gonaïves

At Gonaïves on 1 January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines assembled the Indigenous Army's generals and asked each of them to swear to renounce France forever, to die rather than live under French rule, and to defend independence to the last breath.

He then publicly proclaimed the former French colony independent under the name Haiti. Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre drafted the surviving French declaration and address.

Three documents, not one

The independence documents were signed by Dessalines, Boisrond-Tonnerre and the assembled army commanders — the BnF's history portal counts Dessalines, 36 generals and officers, and Boisrond-Tonnerre.

A separate act dated the same day proclaimed Dessalines governor-general of Haiti for life, empowered him to make war and peace, and allowed him to name his successor. Toussaint Louverture was not among the signatories; he had died in French imprisonment on 7 April 1803.

Two printings rediscovered

Only two contemporary printed versions are known, both rediscovered in the UK National Archives, in 2010 and 2011. The first was an eight-page government pamphlet printed about three weeks after Independence Day.

France did not recognise the new state in 1804, and Haiti remained diplomatically and economically isolated.

30 Ventôse, Year XII — 21 March 1804

The law of 30 Ventôse, Year XII — 21 March 1804 — gathered 36 previously enacted civil laws into one body titled the Code civil des Français. It arranged them in three books, covering persons, property, and the different ways of acquiring property, under a single continuous numbering sequence of 2,281 articles.

Napoleon Bonaparte signed it as First Consul. He was not yet emperor, and the familiar name Code Napoléon was imposed only in 1807.

Articles 6 and 7

Article 6 preserved the individual effective dates of the component laws, so 21 March was not the first day on which every provision took effect.

Article 7 did the demolition: it ended the legal force of Roman law, ordinances, general and local customs, statutes and regulations in the civil matters the code now governed.

Who actually wrote it

Four jurists formed the drafting commission — Portalis, Tronchet, Maleville and Bigot de Préameneu. Tronchet hosted and presided over their working meetings; Portalis wrote the Preliminary Address.

Cambacérès, who had produced three unsuccessful revolutionary-era drafts, chaired many of the Council of State deliberations that revised the project, and Napoleon took part in those debates frequently. Courts reviewed the draft, and the Legislative Body enacted its titles as separate laws through 1803 and early 1804 — which is what left 36 statutes needing to be bound together.

21 October 1805: two columns, bearing down

At daylight on 21 October 1805 the British and combined Franco-Spanish fleets sighted each other west of Cape Trafalgar. Nelson ordered his 27 ships of the line to bear down in two columns against Villeneuve's 33 — about 18,000 British men and 2,148 guns against nearly 30,000 men and 2,632 guns.

At 11:45 a.m. Victory made the signal "England expects that every man will do his duty." Firing began shortly before noon.

Through the line

Nelson's and Collingwood's columns broke through the combined line and forced close-range actions, leaving the allied van initially unengaged while British force concentrated on the centre and rear. Villeneuve's flagship Bucentaure was disabled and Villeneuve himself captured.

Nelson was struck by a musket ball aboard Victory at about 1:15 p.m. and died at about 4:30; Collingwood succeeded to command. Firing ceased around 5:30 p.m., with the Royal Navy in control of the water off southwestern Spain.

Seventeen prizes, then the gale cost Britain most of them

By the close of the action 17 allied ships had been captured and the French Achille was a burning wreck. No British ship was lost — which is not the same as a bloodless day: the National Maritime Museum's tally records 449 British killed and 1,217 wounded, against 4,408 French and Spanish dead, 2,545 wounded and about 20,000 prisoners.

The victory did not survive the weather intact. A gale immediately put both fleets and the captured ships in danger, and the British had to abandon most of their prizes.

2 December 1805, west of Austerlitz

On 2 December 1805 Napoleon's Grande Armée fought the combined Russian and Austrian army west of Austerlitz in Moravia, near present-day Slavkov u Brna.

Following Franz von Weyrother's plan, Allied columns came down off the Pratzen Heights toward Napoleon's deliberately weak-looking right wing. There, Davout's arriving III Corps helped hold the villages along the Goldbach.

The centre, emptied and then taken

Napoleon sent Saint-Hilaire's and Vandamme's divisions of Soult's IV Corps against the thinned Allied centre. They captured the Pratzen Heights and split the Allied army.

It was not a one-corps battle. French Guard cavalry beat the Russian Guard cavalry, Lannes drove back Bagration's wing, and French forces encircled Allied troops around Sokolnitz. Kutuzov, the nominal Allied commander, was slightly wounded in the fighting for the Pratzen position.

The bulletin, and what was in the ponds

By nightfall the French held the field and the battered Allied army was retreating eastward. One explicitly sourced modern accounting summarised by the U.S. Army puts Allied losses near 27,000 — roughly 15,000 dead and 12,000 prisoners — against 1,305 French killed, 6,940 wounded and 573 captured, with 180 guns and 50 colours taken. Published totals vary with which returns are counted.

Napoleon's bulletin claimed 20,000 Allied soldiers had drowned in the frozen ponds. When the ponds were later drained, the evidence recovered amounted to two or three human bodies and about 150 dead horses.

24 June 1812, near Kovno

The first formations of Napoleon's Grande Armée crossed the Neman near Kovno — modern Kaunas, Lithuania — on 24 June 1812, opening the invasion of the Russian Empire. Jean-Baptiste Eblé's bridging troops had put three pontoon bridges across the river.

Napoleon watched and reviewed the troops as they crossed, then crossed himself and set up headquarters at Kovno. Two days earlier he had told his soldiers, in a proclamation, that the "Second Polish War" had begun.

Not one day, and not one nation

The date marks the start of the crossing, not its completion. About 380,000 troops came over between 22 June and 1 July, at this and other points.

Nor was the army French in any simple sense — the Grande Armée was a multinational coalition. In Russia's contemporary Julian calendar, the day was 12 June.

A frontier breached without a battle

Alexander I and Barclay de Tolly, commanding the 1st Western Army, were at headquarters near Vilna and received news of the crossing late that evening.

Russian corps were ordered to begin withdrawing on 26–27 June. They evacuated Vilna, and the French occupied it on 28 June.