France's National Constituent Assembly adopts a declaration of liberty, equality and national sovereignty, a founding document of the French Revolution.
Parisians storm the Bastille fortress-prison, an iconic moment of the French Revolution.
Enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rise up, beginning the only successful slave revolution in history.
The revolutionary government dominated by the Committee of Public Safety carries out mass repression, with tens of thousands executed; it ends with the fall of Robespierre.
Condemned by the National Convention, the former king Louis XVI is guillotined at the Place de la Révolution in Paris.
Britain signs a treaty with the United States in Paris, formally ending the American Revolutionary War and recognizing American independence.
Edward Jenner inoculates the boy James Phipps with cowpox material, pioneering vaccination against smallpox.