1789France’s revolutionaries adopt the Declaration of the Rights of Man
In the summer of 1789 France’s old order collapsed with startling speed. The Estates-General, summoned by Louis XVI to solve a financial crisis, turned itself into a National Assembly, the Bastille fell on 14 July, and on the night of 4 August the deputies voted away the privileges of the nobility and clergy. Before writing a new constitution, the Assembly decided to set out the principles it would rest on, drawing on Enlightenment thinkers and on the American example; the Marquis de Lafayette drafted an early version with advice from Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister in Paris.
The deputies debated and voted the text article by article from 20 August and completed it on 26 August 1789. In a preamble and 17 articles it declared that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’, named liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression as natural rights, and set out equality before the law, freedom of opinion and of the press, and the separation of powers. The king accepted it only in October, and it left out women, as Olympe de Gouges pointed out in 1791. Yet it became one of the founding texts of modern democracy, and it still forms part of France’s constitution today.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Élysée: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ↗
1071The Seljuq Turks crush a Byzantine army at Manzikert
By the 11th century the Seljuq Turks had built a great empire stretching from Central Asia to Baghdad, and Turkmen raiders were pushing ever deeper into the Byzantine provinces of eastern Anatolia and Armenia. In 1071 the emperor Romanus IV Diogenes, a soldier who had taken the throne to restore the empire’s defences, marched east with a large but divided army that included many foreign mercenaries.
On 26 August 1071, near the fortress of Manzikert, north of Lake Van in today’s eastern Turkey, he met the sultan Alp Arslan. Some of the emperor’s Turkic troops had gone over to the enemy, and when part of his army under Andronicus Ducas withdrew from the field, the rest was destroyed and Romanus, wounded, was taken prisoner. Alp Arslan freed him in return for a ransom and a treaty, but at home Romanus was deposed and blinded. Turkish settlers poured into Anatolia, the heartland of what would one day become Turkey, and Byzantium’s appeals for help in the following decades helped set off the First Crusade.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Manzikert ↗
1346English archers win the Battle of Crécy
Edward III of England claimed the crown of France through his mother, and in 1337 the quarrel grew into the conflict later called the Hundred Years’ War. In July 1346 Edward landed in Normandy with an army of about 10,000 men and marched across northern France, plundering as he went. Philip VI of France gathered a much larger army and caught up with him near the village of Crécy, in Picardy, where the English took up a strong position on a slope.
On the evening of 26 August 1346 the French attacked, led by hired Genoese crossbowmen. The English longbowmen could shoot far faster, and their arrows drove the Genoese back into the path of the French knights, who charged again and again into the hail of arrows and the dismounted English men-at-arms. Among the many French dead was the blind King John of Bohemia, who had himself led into the fight; Edward’s 16-year-old son, later known as the Black Prince, fought in the front line. The victory let Edward besiege and take Calais, and it showed Europe what disciplined archers could do against mounted knights.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Edward III ↗
1940Chad becomes the first French colony to join de Gaulle
When France fell to Germany in June 1940, its colonial empire had to choose between the new Vichy government of Marshal Pétain and the handful of ‘Free French’ who had followed Charles de Gaulle to London. In the vast colony of Chad, in central Africa, the governor was Félix Éboué, born in Cayenne in French Guiana and descended from enslaved Africans, and at the time the most senior Black official in the French colonial service.
Éboué had already made his choice. Two envoys of de Gaulle, René Pleven and Colonel Colonna d’Ornano, reached Fort-Lamy, today’s N’Djamena, on 24 August, and on 26 August 1940 Éboué and the military commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre Marchand, proclaimed that Chad was joining Free France. Cameroon and the French Congo followed within two days, giving de Gaulle his first real territory. Chad became the base from which Free French troops under Leclerc struck north into Libya. Éboué was made governor-general of French Equatorial Africa, and after his death in 1944 he became the first Black man to be buried in the Panthéon in Paris.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Fondation Charles de Gaulle: 26-28 August 1940, French Equatorial Africa rallies to Free France ↗
1988Aung San Suu Kyi speaks to half a million people at the Shwedagon Pagoda
Aung San Suu Kyi was the daughter of Aung San, the hero of Burma’s struggle for independence, who was assassinated in 1947 when she was two. She had spent most of her adult life abroad and was living in Oxford when, in April 1988, she flew home to Rangoon to nurse her dying mother. She arrived as the country rose against a quarter of a century of military-backed one-party rule: students led huge pro-democracy protests, and in August the army shot hundreds of demonstrators.
On 26 August 1988 she stepped into public life, speaking to a crowd estimated at half a million outside the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma’s holiest Buddhist shrine and the place where her father had once called for independence. She asked for a democratic government and urged the crowd to stay united, disciplined and peaceful. In September she helped found the National League for Democracy, and from July 1989 she was held under house arrest for much of the next two decades, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while still confined.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: The Nobel Prize: Aung San Suu Kyi, biographical ↗
