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The National Assembly meant well. It really did.

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It set out to get rid of all the things that had been keeping Jean le Six-Pack down, like titles and taxes,

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so that the French could enjoy a bright, shiny new government that could turn on a dime and had all the special features, like freedom, equality, heated seats, and a sunroof.

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But then France's revolutionaries decided that their

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goals couldn't be fulfilled until every country in Europe had embraced révolution.

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So, they went to war with Austria.

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Seriously, why fix your own government when you can fight Hapsburgs instead?

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This war signaled the beginning of a terrible time

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in France, aptly named the Reign of Terror.

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Huh. Wonder if that was unanimous, or if there was some guy trying to sell "Reign of Butterflies and Rainbows."

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From September 1793 to July 1794,

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tens of thousands of people across France were executed.

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Supposedly, they were all enemies of the revolution, but really, Robespierre just didn't like them.

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Robespierre, the first name Maximilien,

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middle name Stupidjerkface,

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was a leader of the revolution and

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an architect of the Reign of Terror.

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In his expert opinion, the only way French politics could really ditch the old and ring in the new was with a rousing rendition of Kumbaya.

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No, wait. That was the "Reign of Butterflies and Rainbows" guy suggested. Yeah.

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Robespierre said the actual only way was mass murder.

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Fortunately for the people of France, karma saw to it that Robespierre got his before he could send every citizen to the guillotine.

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So, yeah. Life was bonkers in France.

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There were uprisings and insurrections,

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and inflation was a rising problem.

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The bourgeoisie stepped into the breach after Robespierre's execution and formed

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the Directory, which was a bicameral, or two-housed, legislature that did absolutely nothing to quell France's troubles.

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Enter the world's most power-hungry short person.

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Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military leader with victories against

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the Austrians, the Italians, and the Ottomans under his belt,

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when he engineered a coup d'état in 1799.

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The next fifteen years or so were very hairy for the rest of Europe.

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Partly because waxing wasn't in vogue yet, but mostly because Napoleon looked at all this

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lovely territory and thought it should all be his.

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It took the Quadruple Alliance of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Britain working together to finally put Napoleon down permanently.

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In the months before Napoleon finally got his butt handed to him at the Battle of Waterloo,

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the Quadruple Alliance held a meet-up called the Conference of Vienna.

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Europe's leaders, except for Boney, obviously, were tired of

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war and they were tired of how much war was costing them.

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They figured that if they could just time-warp the continent

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back to how things were in 1799,

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before Napoleon ever waddled on to the scene,

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then everything would be just okay.

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So, the Conference of Vienna set about redrawing the

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boundaries of Europe's countries and doing the time warp again so that no one nation would ever be too powerful again.

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What the conference failed to account for was the surging nationalism that had sprung up when Bonaparte started gobbling up other countries for lunch.

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Nationalism is the feeling held by a group of people who share a history, culture, and/or language,

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that they should have their own free and independent country.

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Of course this emotion would pop up in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, given Bonaparte's war-mongering.

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However, when the Conference of Vienna redrew Europe's borders,

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it placed lines right smack dab in the middle of several nationalist movements.

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The conference also did its utmost to get rid of nationalism altogether

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and that whole desire for "equality and liberty" thing

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by putting their monarchies Bonaparte had kicked to the curb, back in power.

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This strategy did not work.

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Revolution was back in Europe by 1848, visiting every country, save Scandinavia, Russia, and Spain.

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And there you thought Bonaparte was going to have the last laugh on democracy.

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But it's hard to have the last laugh on anything when you're stuck on an island in the middle of the Atlantic.

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