Aftermath: Women, Slavery and the Legacy of the Revolution

Imagine doing half the work on a winning team but being left off the trophy photo. That is how French women felt after the revolution. This lesson covers the role of women in the French Revolution: what they did, what rights they demanded, how the revolution both helped and betrayed them, and the long road to the vote.

Definition: A passive citizen, under the revolutionary constitution, was a person who enjoyed civil protection but was denied political rights — especially the right to vote or hold office. Women were classed as passive citizens.

Women as active participants

From the very beginning, women were active participants in the revolution — not bystanders. Most working women earned their own living: as seamstresses, laundresses, market sellers, domestic servants and flower-sellers. Their lives were hard, wages were low, and they could not access education or job training as easily as men. So they had a direct, personal stake in changing French society.

Women took to the streets in some of the revolution's most decisive moments. The most famous was the march to Versailles in October 1789, when thousands of women — angry over the price and shortage of bread — marched to the royal palace and forced the king to return to Paris. Bread was a women's issue because they ran the household and faced the empty markets first-hand.

Why it matters: This corrects a common gap in how history is taught — the revolution was not made by men alone. Women's protests over bread and prices were among the events that actually pushed the revolution forward at critical turning points.

Organising for political rights

Women did not stop at marching. To press their interests, they started their own political clubs and newspapers. The most famous was the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Around sixty women's clubs sprang up across French cities.

Their central demand was equal political rights — above all, the right to vote, to be elected to the Assembly, and to hold political office. They also wanted access to education and to professions so they could earn a living with dignity, and they demanded equality in marriage.

But the new Constitution disappointed them. It treated women only as passive citizens. They were given civil protection but could not vote or stand for election. The revolution that proclaimed "liberty and equality" had drawn that circle of equality around men only.

Olympe de Gouges and the demand for equality

Definition: The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen (1791) was a document by Olympe de Gouges arguing that women are born free and equal to men and must enjoy the same natural and political rights.

Olympe de Gouges was one of the most important political activists of the revolution. She protested that the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen applied only to men, and in 1791 she wrote her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen to insist that women too were entitled to liberty, property, and a voice in government.

Her courage came at a terrible cost. During the Reign of Terror, the government cracked down on independent political activity. It shut down women's clubs and banned their activities. Olympe de Gouges was arrested, tried and executed by guillotine in 1793 for criticising the revolutionary government. Her death showed how narrowly the revolution's leaders defined who deserved a political voice.

Real gains, and the long wait

Even though women were denied the vote, the revolution did bring genuine improvements to their lives. The state made schooling compulsory for girls, so education was no longer a privilege only for the rich. Forced marriage — fathers marrying off daughters without consent — was banned, and the legal age of marriage was raised. Divorce was made legal and could be sought by both women and men. Women could also now train for jobs and run small businesses more freely.

Still, the biggest demand — the vote — went unanswered for generations. During the nineteenth century, women across many countries waged long struggles for the right to vote, often facing imprisonment. In France itself, full voting rights for women came only in 1946 — more than 150 years after the revolution began.

Real-world example: It is like dedicated fans who fill the stadium every match, buy the tickets, and power the whole team — yet are not allowed to vote for the captain. They are essential to the victory but recognised far later than they deserve.

Common misconception: Many students think women gained little or nothing from the revolution. In truth, they won real reforms — compulsory education for girls, legal divorce, and an end to forced marriage — even though their central demand, the vote, was refused.

Common misconception: It is also wrong to think Olympe de Gouges was an obscure figure. She was a prominent published activist whose Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen directly challenged the male-only revolution, which is exactly why the Terror saw her as a threat.

Slogans like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" sound great — but did France apply them to everyone? At first, no. This lesson covers slavery and its abolition during the French Revolution: how the colonial economy depended on enslaved Africans, how the triangular trade worked, why the revolutionaries hesitated, and the back-and-forth road to final abolition.

Definition: The triangular slave trade was a three-cornered trade route linking Europe, Africa and the Americas, in which European traders exchanged goods for enslaved Africans, shipped them across the Atlantic to colonial plantations, and carried back plantation produce to Europe.

The colonial economy built on slavery

A large part of France's wealth in the eighteenth century came not from France itself but from its colonies in the Caribbean — the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and San Domingo (today's Haiti). These colonies were enormously profitable because they produced highly demanded commodities: sugar, coffee and indigo.

But these crops were grown on plantations under brutal conditions, and the labour was done almost entirely by enslaved Africans. There were too few local workers willing to toil in the deadly heat of the sugar fields, so plantation owners relied on a forced labour system. The comforts that Europeans enjoyed — sweetened coffee, fine dyed cloth — rested directly on the suffering of enslaved people thousands of miles away.

Why it matters: This is essential for understanding the revolution honestly. The same France that proclaimed universal human rights was simultaneously profiting from the denial of those rights to enslaved Africans. It exposes the gap between revolutionary ideals and revolutionary practice.

How the triangular trade worked

The slave trade ran in a triangle across the Atlantic Ocean, with each leg feeding the next.

First, European merchants sailed from ports like Bordeaux and Nantes carrying manufactured goods to Africa — cloth, guns, metal tools, alcohol. Second, on the African coast they exchanged these goods for enslaved men, women and children, who were branded, packed into ships, and carried across the Atlantic in horrific conditions (the journey known as the Middle Passage, during which many died). Third, in the colonies the survivors were sold to plantation owners, and the ships were loaded with sugar, coffee and indigo to bring back to Europe — completing the triangle at a large profit.

This circular flow made port cities rich, kept the plantations supplied with forced labour, and fed Europe's growing appetite for tropical goods. It was a system designed entirely around money, with human beings treated as cargo.

Why the revolutionaries hesitated

You might expect the revolutionaries — champions of liberty and equality — to abolish slavery at once. They did not. For years, the National Assembly was oddly silent on the question.

The reason was money and politics. France's port cities and merchants had grown wealthy on the slave trade, and the colonial plantations were a major source of national income. The revolutionary leaders did not want to anger rich businessmen and traders whose support they needed. So they avoided the issue, leaving the contradiction at the heart of the revolution unresolved.

What finally forced change was pressure from below — including a massive uprising of the enslaved people in San Domingo themselves, who rose up to claim their own freedom. Their revolt made it impossible to keep ignoring the question.

Abolition, reversal, and final freedom

In 1794, the Convention abolished slavery in the French colonies — a genuinely bold act that, for the first time, extended the revolution's ideals to enslaved Africans. It declared that all men, regardless of colour, living in the colonies were free citizens.

But this freedom did not last. Ten years later, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in 1804, bowing to the demands of plantation owners who wanted their profitable labour system back. It was a bitter reversal of the revolution's promise.

Slavery in French colonies was finally abolished in 1848, this time for good. So the path was not a straight line but a struggle: abolished, revived, and only permanently ended decades later.

Real-world example: It is like a popular brand that publicly preaches fairness and ethics, while quietly profiting from unfair labour behind the scenes — and only changes its ways when it is finally called out and pressured into reform.

Common misconception: Students often assume the French Revolution abolished slavery immediately as a matter of principle. In fact, the revolutionaries stayed silent for years to protect rich merchants, and abolition came only in 1794 — and even then it was reversed by Napoleon.

Common misconception: Another error is thinking abolition in 1794 was permanent. Napoleon brought slavery back in 1804; it was not finally and lastingly abolished in French colonies until 1848.

Some ideas, once released, never go back in the box — they spread worldwide, like a trend that never dies. This lesson covers Napoleon Bonaparte and the lasting legacy of the French Revolution: how Napoleon rose to power and reformed France, why he ended up an invader, and how the revolution's ideas of liberty and democracy outlived him to inspire the world — including India.

Definition: The Napoleonic Code (Civil Code of 1804) was Napoleon's uniform set of laws that abolished birth-based privilege, guaranteed equality before the law, and secured the right to private property — replacing the tangled patchwork of old feudal laws.

Napoleon: from general to Emperor

After the unstable Directory collapsed, France turned to its most successful general. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France — famously taking the crown and placing it on his own head, signalling that his authority came from himself and his achievements, not from the Pope or any old dynasty.

Napoleon saw himself not as a king restoring the past, but as a moderniser completing the revolution's practical work. He brought order to a France exhausted by a decade of turmoil. He protected private property, an idea the middle classes cherished, and introduced a standard system of weights and measures (the basis of the metric system) so that trade and administration could run smoothly and fairly across the whole country.

Why it matters: Napoleon is a complicated figure precisely because he was both. He destroyed the Republic and made himself emperor — yet he also locked in many of the revolution's gains, especially legal equality and uniform administration, which spread far beyond France.

Reforms that outlived the empire

Napoleon's most durable achievement was the Napoleonic Code. It swept away the confusing maze of old feudal and regional laws and replaced them with one clear code for all of France. Its principles were revolutionary in spirit: equality before the law and the abolition of privileges based on birth. A noble and a commoner were now, in the eyes of the civil law, equal.

He carried these reforms into the many territories he conquered. Across Europe, the Napoleonic Code abolished the feudal system, freed peasants from serfdom in some regions, removed restrictions on guilds, and improved transport and communication. For a time, people in conquered lands welcomed these changes.

From liberator to invader

Napoleon's downfall came from his endless wars. He conquered much of Europe, and initially he was seen as a liberator who brought freedom from old monarchies and feudal lords. But the longer his armies stayed, the more they behaved like occupiers — raising taxes, conscripting young men into French armies, and imposing French control. So in the eyes of many Europeans, Napoleon eventually became an invader rather than a liberator.

His ambition finally outran his strength. After a disastrous invasion of Russia and mounting opposition, he was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 by a coalition of European powers led by Britain and Prussia. He was exiled, and the age of Napoleon ended.

The lasting legacy of the revolution

Here is the deepest point of the whole topic: empires rise and fall, but ideas can spread without armies. The most lasting legacy of the French Revolution was not Napoleon's conquests — it was its ideas of liberty and democratic rights.

The notions that all people are born free and equal, that sovereignty belongs to the nation and not a king, and that government should rest on the consent of citizens — these spread from France to the rest of Europe and beyond throughout the nineteenth century, inspiring movements against unjust and absolute rule everywhere.

The echo in India

These ideas reached far beyond Europe — including colonial India. Indian reformers and thinkers such as Raja Rammohan Roy drew inspiration from the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality, and Tipu Sultan of Mysore engaged with revolutionary France in his resistance to the British. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the language of rights and freedom helped shape India's own struggle against colonial rule.

The slogan Liberty, Equality, Fraternity still echoes in constitutions worldwide — including India's. The Preamble to the Indian Constitution explicitly promises justice, liberty, equality and fraternity to all citizens, a direct descendant of the ideals first proclaimed in revolutionary France.

Real-world example: It is like a song that goes viral worldwide long after the artist is gone. Napoleon's empire collapsed, but the revolution's "tune" of liberty kept playing — crossing oceans and inspiring people who had never set foot in France.

Common misconception: Students sometimes think Napoleon simply ended the revolution. In truth he was a mixed figure — he ended the Republic and made himself emperor, yet preserved and exported key revolutionary reforms like legal equality and the abolition of feudal privilege.

Common misconception: It is also a mistake to think the revolution's influence stayed in Europe. Its ideas spread globally and directly fed into anti-colonial and reform movements, including in India.

The French Revolution is often told as a story of men in assemblies — but women marched, debated and died for its ideals, and enslaved Africans in distant colonies were caught up in its promise of liberty. This lesson covers the role of women, the abolition (and reversal) of slavery, and the lasting legacy of the Revolution.

Definition: Abolition means the official ending of a practice or institution by law — here, the ending of slavery, the system in which human beings were owned, bought and sold and forced to work without freedom or pay.

Women in the Revolution

Women were active participants in the Revolution from the very start. Most women of the third estate had to work for a living — as seamstresses, laundresses, sellers of fruit and vegetables, flower-girls or domestic servants — while also running their households, raising children and fetching food on low and uncertain wages. They had little access to education or job training, and what they earned was usually far lower than men's wages for similar work.

To discuss and voice their interests, women began their own political clubs and newspapers — about sixty women's clubs sprang up across French cities. The most famous was The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in Paris. Their core demand was bold and simple: the same political rights as men, including the right to vote, to be elected to the Assembly, and to hold political office.

A leading voice was Olympe de Gouges. She protested that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had ignored women entirely, and in 1791 she wrote her own "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen," insisting that women are born free and equal to men and must enjoy the same rights.

The response was brutal. During the Reign of Terror, women's clubs were banned and many activists arrested. Olympe de Gouges was executed in 1793 for daring to criticise the revolutionary government. Despite this, women won some real gains over time — state schooling became compulsory for girls, marriage became a civil contract entered into freely, and divorce was made legal. But political equality remained out of reach for a very long time: French women finally won the right to vote only in 1946.

Why it matters: The Revolution proved that ordinary women could organise, write and demand power. Even though they were denied the vote, they planted an idea — that political equality is a right women can claim — which later generations across the world used.

Common misconception: Many students assume the Revolution gave French women equal rights. It did not give them the vote; that came over 150 years later, in 1946. What the Revolution gave was the language of equality, which women then used to keep fighting.

Slavery in the French colonies and its abolition

While Paris debated liberty, the French economy depended heavily on slavery in its colonies — islands such as Martinique, Guadeloupe and San Domingo (modern Haiti). These colonies supplied highly profitable goods to Europe: sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton and indigo, all grown on plantations using the forced labour of enslaved Africans.

The system worked through a brutal triangular slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas: traders sailed from French ports to Africa, bought enslaved people from local dealers, branded and packed them onto ships across the Atlantic in horrific conditions, and sold them to plantation owners. There was almost no public criticism of slavery in France for most of the eighteenth century.

The Revolution's ideals finally reached the colonies. After fierce slave revolts (especially in San Domingo) and debate in Paris, the Convention abolished slavery in the French colonies in 1794 — a genuine, world-changing application of the ideals of liberty and equality. But the gain was fragile. Napoleon Bonaparte reintroduced slavery in 1804 to please plantation owners who wanted cheap labour back. Slavery was finally abolished in French colonies in 1848.

Real-world example: San Domingo's enslaved people, inspired partly by revolutionary ideals of liberty, rose up and eventually won independence as Haiti in 1804 — the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people who had freed themselves. This shows how the Revolution's ideas escaped France's control and took on a life of their own.

Common misconception: The abolition of slavery in 1794 was not permanent or smooth. Napoleon reversed it in 1804, and true, lasting abolition came only in 1848 — showing that rights, once won, can still be taken away.

Everyday life and the spread of ideas

The Revolution also transformed daily life. Censorship was abolished, so people could freely print and read what they wished. Ideas spread rapidly through pamphlets, newspapers, books, plays, songs and cartoons that were read aloud and discussed in cafés and markets, reaching even those who could not read. This explosion of public debate is itself part of the Revolution's legacy.

The legacy of the Revolution

The most important outcome of the French Revolution was the idea that sovereignty belongs to the people, and that all individuals possess liberty and equality as natural rights. These ideas outlived the violence of the Terror and Napoleon's empire.

They spread across Europe and the world during the nineteenth century, inspiring struggles against monarchy, against slavery, and against colonial rule. In India, leaders and thinkers such as Raja Rammohan Roy and Tipu Sultan are recorded as responding with great interest to the news from France, and the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity later echoed in India's own freedom movement — making the French Revolution a true turning point in modern world history.

Worked example of historical evaluation:

Question: Did the Revolution live up to its promise of equality for women and the enslaved?
Solution:
Step 1: It declared equality a natural and inalienable right of all.
Step 2: For women, it gave schooling and civil rights but denied the vote until 1946.
Step 3: For the enslaved, it abolished slavery in 1794 but Napoleon reversed it in 1804; true abolition came in 1848.
Conclusion: The Revolution did not fully deliver equality, but it created the idea of equality as a right — a powerful tool later groups used to claim what they had been denied.

"Liberty, equality, fraternity" is one of history's most famous slogans — but did the French Revolution actually deliver it to everyone? This lesson teaches you how to take a big concept like "equality" and test it carefully against real evidence, using the cases of women and enslaved people.

Definition: To apply a concept in history means to take an abstract idea (like "equality") and test it against specific evidence, instead of just accepting or rejecting the idea in general terms. You weigh what was promised against what actually happened.

The question we are analysing

The French Revolution promised "liberty, equality and fraternity." Using the cases of women and enslaved people, we will evaluate whether these ideals were fully achieved during the revolutionary period. Notice the key word: fully. A good answer must avoid two lazy extremes — "yes, completely" and "no, not at all" — and instead weigh the evidence on both sides.

Why it matters: Exams reward students who can argue with evidence, not just recall facts. Learning to test a claim is a skill you can apply to any "to what extent…" question.

Step 1 — What was promised

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) is our starting point. It called rights such as equality before the law "natural and inalienable" — rights you are born with that cannot be taken away. It declared that men are born free and equal.

But read that last line carefully: it says "men." Already, in the very wording of the promise, there is a clue that "equality" may not have been meant for everyone equally. A careful historian notices the limits hidden inside the promise itself.

Step 2 — Test it against women

Women did everything that should have earned them equal citizenship. They fought in the Revolution, formed about sixty political clubs, ran newspapers, and demanded the vote and the right to hold office. Olympe de Gouges even wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) to expose the gap.

Yet the 1791 Constitution treated women as "passive citizens" with no political rights — no vote, no seat in the Assembly. Worse, during the Reign of Terror women's clubs were banned and Olympe de Gouges was executed for her demands. French women would not win the vote until 1946.

Conclusion of this test: For women, "equality" did not include political equality. The ideal failed this case.

Step 3 — Test it against the enslaved

Now apply the same idea to enslaved people in France's colonies (Martinique, Guadeloupe, San Domingo), who produced sugar, coffee and indigo under brutal forced labour.

Here the evidence is more positive — at first. The Convention abolished slavery in 1794, a genuine and dramatic application of revolutionary ideals: liberty extended even to enslaved Africans thousands of miles away. This was a real achievement.

But the gain proved fragile and reversible. Napoleon reintroduced slavery in 1804 to satisfy plantation owners. So while the ideal was applied for a time, it was not secure; lasting abolition came only in 1848.

Conclusion of this test: For the enslaved, the ideal was partly achieved but then reversed — a victory that did not hold.

Step 4 — Weigh the evidence

Now we combine the two tests into a balanced judgement. On one hand, the Revolution expanded rights far beyond anything that came before — it spoke openly of equality, abolished slavery (briefly), and gave women new civil rights in education and marriage. On the other hand, it applied those rights unevenly, mainly to tax-paying men, while excluding women from politics and allowing slavery to return.

A strong answer holds both truths at once: the Revolution was revolutionary in its ideals but incomplete in its practice.

Common misconception: Students often write "The Revolution failed because it didn't free everyone." That is too simple. It is more accurate to say the Revolution established the principle of equality while failing to apply it fully — and that distinction is exactly what earns marks.

Conclusion

The Revolution did not fully achieve equality for all. But — and this is the crucial point — it established the idea that equality is a right that belongs to every human being. Later generations of women and colonised peoples used that very idea to claim the rights they had been denied. The ideal outran the reality, but by stating the ideal, the Revolution gave future struggles a powerful weapon.

Worked example of structuring an evaluation answer:

Question: "To what extent did the French Revolution achieve equality?" How should you structure your answer?
Solution:
Step 1: State the promise (Declaration of Rights, 1789).
Step 2: Test it against one case (women — denied the vote).
Step 3: Test it against a second case (the enslaved — freed in 1794, re-enslaved in 1804).
Step 4: Weigh both sides — major expansion of rights, but uneven application.
Conclusion: Argue a balanced judgement — equality established as an idea, not fully achieved in practice.

This is your one-stop revision lesson for the whole French Revolution chapter — the full story from an absolute monarchy in 1789 to a republic, the Terror, Napoleon, and ideals that changed the world. Use it to lock in the sequence of events, the must-know dates, and the key vocabulary that examiners love to test.

The story in one flow

In 1789, France was an absolute monarchy under Louis XVI, who had become king in 1774. Society was rigidly divided into three estates: the clergy (First Estate) and the nobility (Second Estate), who enjoyed privileges and paid almost no tax, and the third estate — about 90% of the people (peasants, workers, merchants, professionals) — who did all the productive work and bore the entire burden of taxes (the taille to the state, the tithe to the church, plus feudal dues).

A deep financial crisis — caused by costly wars (including helping America against Britain), royal extravagance, and a bad-harvest subsistence crisis that sent bread prices soaring — forced Louis XVI to call the Estates General in May 1789 to approve new taxes. A bitter dispute broke out over voting: the king wanted each estate to have one vote (so the two privileged estates could always outvote the third), but the third estate demanded voting by head. When refused, the third estate walked out and declared itself the National Assembly, vowing in the Tennis Court Oath not to disband until they had drafted a constitution.

Fear and anger spread to the streets. On 14 July 1789, a crowd in Paris stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison that symbolised royal tyranny. The Assembly then abolished feudalism, passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and completed a constitution in 1791 that made France a constitutional monarchy — limiting the king and giving lawmaking to an elected assembly (though only tax-paying "active citizens" could vote).

As Louis XVI plotted with foreign monarchs and tried to flee, the radical Jacobins under Robespierre rose to power. They stormed the Tuileries, and the Convention abolished the monarchy and declared a republic in 1792. Louis XVI was executed in 1793, and the Reign of Terror (1793–94) followed — mass arrests and guillotine executions of suspected enemies, ended when Robespierre himself was guillotined in 1794.

Meanwhile, women campaigned for equal rights but were denied the vote (won only in 1946). Slavery was abolished in 1794, reintroduced by Napoleon in 1804, and finally ended in 1848. Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor in 1804, conquered much of Europe, and was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. Though Napoleon fell, the Revolution's ideals of liberty and equality spread worldwide, inspiring struggles against monarchy, slavery and colonial rule — including India's freedom movement.

Why it matters: This single chapter explains the birth of modern ideas of citizenship, rights and democracy. Almost every later struggle for freedom borrowed its vocabulary from 1789.

Key dates

A handy way to remember the political core: '89 the people rise (Bastille), '91 the king is leashed (constitution), '92 the king is gone (republic), '93 the king is dead (execution + Terror), '94 the Terror dies (Robespierre).

Key terms

Definition: Estate — a social and legal group in Old Regime society, each with its own rights and duties (France had three estates).

Definition: Taille — a direct tax paid to the state, mainly by the third estate.

Definition: Tithe — a tax of about one-tenth of farm produce taken by the Church.

Definition: Subsistence crisis — a situation where the basic means of living are endangered, e.g. when bread becomes scarce and too costly for ordinary people.

Definition: Old Regime — the society and political institutions of France before the Revolution of 1789.

Definition: Guillotine — a machine for beheading people, named after Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who proposed it.

Definition: Jacobins — a radical revolutionary political club, led by Robespierre, drawing support from the less prosperous sans-culottes.

Definition: Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen — the 1789 charter proclaiming liberty, equality and other rights as natural and inalienable.

Common misconception: The Bastille was stormed not mainly to free prisoners (it held very few) but because it was a symbol of the king's despotic power and a source of gunpowder the crowd wanted.

Common misconception: Napoleon is often seen purely as a destroyer of the Revolution. In fact he both ended the republic (crowning himself emperor) and spread many revolutionary reforms — like a uniform legal code and the metric system — across Europe.

Worked example of exam recall:

Question: Put these in correct order and give the year: republic declared, Bastille stormed, Robespierre executed, Louis XVI executed.
Solution:
Step 1: Bastille stormed — 1789 (14 July).
Step 2: Republic declared — 1792.
Step 3: Louis XVI executed — 1793.
Step 4: Robespierre executed — 1794.
Conclusion: Order is Bastille (1789) → Republic (1792) → King executed (1793) → Robespierre executed (1794).

Cover the answer, recall, then check. 7 cards on the aftermath and legacy.

Q1. What role did women play in the French Revolution?
A1. They took active part in events and formed political clubs demanding equal rights, though they were initially denied the vote.

Q2. Name a well-known woman revolutionary who demanded equal rights.
A2. Olympe de Gouges, who wrote a declaration of the rights of woman.

Q3. When did French women finally get the right to vote?
A3. In 1946.

Q4. What did the revolution do about slavery in the colonies?
A4. Slavery in French colonies was abolished in 1794, though later reintroduced by Napoleon and finally abolished in 1848.

Q5. Who became ruler of France in 1804?
A5. Napoleon Bonaparte, who crowned himself Emperor.

Q6. Name one lasting legacy of the French Revolution.
A6. The ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the concept of democratic rights, which inspired movements worldwide.

Q7. What reforms did Napoleon introduce that outlasted him?
A7. A uniform system of laws (the Napoleonic Code), protection of property, and standardised weights and measures.