After nearly 200 years of not meeting, a meeting of the estates general was called. All of the people of France could vote for their own representatives except for the people of Paris. The People of Paris could only vote indirectly for their representative. That made the Parisians furious. That was not changed in the next election. That made the people of Paris even madder. They did not like being treated like second class citizens.
A mob from Paris walked to Versailles, seized the legislature and the king, and brought them back to Paris. Then the Paris Mob took over the government. The mob appointed 12 men to "The committee of public safety." That committee functioned like a communist Politburo. Those 12 men could kill anyone they wished. They could pass any law they wanted. For a little over a year they killed their enemies, both real and perceived. Without the rule prohibiting Parisians from participating in direct elections, there may not have been a Paris Mob.

In the meantime, a number of other changes had occurred. Both the guilds and serfdom had ended. The church lost its power. The nobility lost all feudal rights. The worship of science replaced a lot of religion. One result was the metric system of measurement.

It ended in the month of Thermador when the mob killed Robespiere. People celebrated their freedom. Women uncovered their breasts demonstrating their difference from the creatures the revolution had demanded they become.

The wholesale destruction of Catholicism had been far from the minds of the nation’s representatives in 1789, but financial concerns, when combined with external and internal threats, eventually made a full-scale attack on the Church and all connected with it a necessity for a Revolution that demanded absolute loyalty. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett see the French Revolution as ‘a watershed for Catholicism not just in France but in Europe more generally’. The French Revolution saw the Gallican Church transformed from an autonomous institution that wielded significant influence to one that was reformed, abolished, and resurrected by the state. In this extension of state control, as well as in the targeted destruction of the Church and religious practice, the Revolution represents a key development in the secularisation that would stretch across Europe. But both revolutionary governments and Napoleon were unprepared for the resentment that met state incursion into spiritual matters and the turn to Rome that followed it. The removal of Catholic institutions and their personnel simply forced religious worship into the private sphere and increased the involvement of the laity, trends that would also mark the religious revival that took place in France in the nineteenth century. The consequences of this drastic experiment in the transformation of church-state relations would reverberate in France until the 1905 separation of church and state and are still felt today as states continue to negotiate the sensitive relationship between church, state and religious belief.