1792Paris storms the Tuileries and the French monarchy falls
Three years into the French Revolution, Louis XVI was still king, but he was trusted by almost no one. France had gone to war with Austria in April 1792, the queen, Marie Antoinette, was the Austrian emperor’s aunt, and many Parisians suspected the court of hoping for a foreign victory. In late July the Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto threatening Paris with destruction if the royal family were harmed, and it had exactly the opposite effect.
Before dawn on 10 August 1792 an insurrectionary Commune took over the Hôtel de Ville, and armed crowds and volunteer units from the provinces marched on the Tuileries palace. The royal family fled to the nearby Legislative Assembly, but fighting broke out at the palace and hundreds of the Swiss Guards defending it were killed. That day the Assembly suspended the king and called elections for a new National Convention. The monarchy was abolished the following month, and Louis was executed in January 1793.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: French Revolution, counterrevolution, regicide and the Reign of Terror ↗
1628The warship Vasa sinks minutes into her maiden voyage
King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden was at war around the Baltic and wanted a warship that would overawe his enemies. The Vasa, built at the royal shipyard in Stockholm, carried 64 guns on two gun decks and was covered in hundreds of painted and gilded carvings. But her tall, heavy upper works sat on too little hull below the waterline, and her centre of gravity was dangerously high.
On 10 August 1628 crowds lined the quays to watch her sail for the first time, and some of the crew had brought their families aboard. Within minutes a gust heeled her over, water poured in through the open gunports and she sank in the harbour, taking 30 to 50 people with her. Found again in the 1950s, she was raised almost intact in 1961 and is now the centrepiece of the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Vasa Museum: The disaster ↗
1680The Pueblo peoples of New Mexico rise against Spanish rule
Spain had ruled New Mexico since 1598. Pueblo villages were forced to hand over labour and crops to colonists, Franciscan friars suppressed their ceremonies, and religious leaders were flogged or hanged. In 1680 Po’pay, a Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh, organised a secret alliance of pueblos that spoke different languages and lived hundreds of miles apart. Runners carried knotted cords to each village; one knot was untied each day to count down to the rising.
The attack was set for 11 August, but the Spanish captured two messengers on 9 August, so the leaders struck a day early. On 10 August 1680 the pueblos rose together, killing hundreds of colonists and many of the friars and burning churches. Warriors then besieged Santa Fe, and the Spanish governor and the survivors retreated south to El Paso. The Pueblo peoples governed themselves for 12 years before the Spanish returned in 1692.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Library of Congress, In Custodia Legis: 1680, the Pueblo Revolt ↗
1809Quito’s patriots form a junta: the ‘first cry’ of independence
In 1808 Napoleon forced the Spanish king Ferdinand VII off his throne, and across Spanish America local leaders began to ask who now had the right to govern them. In Quito, the capital of a Spanish audiencia in what is now Ecuador, a group of Creole aristocrats, lawyers and doctors met secretly on the night of 9 August 1809 at the house of Manuela Cañizares.
In the early hours of 10 August 1809 they removed the Spanish president of the audiencia, the Count Ruiz de Castilla, and set up a governing junta led by Juan Pío Montúfar, Marquis of Selva Alegre. The junta claimed to rule in the name of the captive Ferdinand, and it collapsed within months; many of its leaders were killed in prison in August 1810. Ecuador won its independence only in 1822, but it remembers 10 August as its first cry of independence, a national holiday.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador: 206 años del Primer Grito de la Independencia ↗
1920The Allies impose the Treaty of Sèvres on the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire had fought on the losing side in the First World War, and by 1920 Allied troops occupied Constantinople and much of the empire. On 10 August 1920, in the showroom of the porcelain factory at Sèvres near Paris, delegates of Sultan Mehmed VI’s government signed the peace treaty the victors had drawn up.
Its terms were severe. The Ottomans gave up their Arab lands and North Africa, and the straits were placed under international control. The treaty provided for an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan, and it gave Greece eastern Thrace and the administration of Smyrna. Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal rejected it and fought on; only Greece ratified it, and after the nationalists’ victory it was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Treaty of Sèvres ↗
