Great Fear, French Grande Peur, (1789) in the French Revolution, a period of panic and riot by peasants and others amid rumours of an “aristocratic conspiracy” by the king and the privileged to overthrow the Third Estate. The gathering of troops around Paris provoked insurrection, and on July 14 the Parisian rabble seized the Bastille. In the provinces the peasants rose against their lords, attacking châteaus and destroying feudal documents. To check the peasants, the National Constituent Assembly decreed the abolition of the feudal regime and introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
The Downfall of Napoleon
On 20 June 1789, the members of the French Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath (French: Serment du Jeu de Paume) in the tennis court which had been built in 1686 for the use of the Versailles palace. The vote was not to separate and to reassemble wherever necessary until the Constitution of the kingdom is established. It was a pivotal event in the French Revolution.
The Storming of the Bastille (French: Prise de la Bastille [pʁiz də la bastij]) was an event that occurred in Paris, France, on the afternoon of 14 July 1789, when revolutionaries stormed and seized control of the medieval armory, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille. At the time, the Bastille represented royal authority in the center of Paris. The prison contained only seven inmates at the time of its storming, but was seen by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the monarchy's abuse of power; its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution.
On April 12, 1814, Napoleon was forced to abdicate his throne after allied Austrian, Prussian and Russian forces vanquished his army and occupied Paris. Banished into exile on Elba, he returned less than a year later to challenge the weak Bourbon king who had replaced him.