Short answers, pulled from the story.
The French Revolution began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the Coup of 18 Brumaire on the 9th of November 1799. That coup replaced the five directors with the French Consulate, made up of Napoleon Bonaparte, Sieyès, and Roger Ducos.
The French Revolution resulted from social, political, economic, and financial crises in the late 1780s. By 1788, half of state revenue went on servicing debt, while economic recession from 1785 and bad harvests in 1787 and 1788 drove up unemployment and food prices. Tax exemptions for the nobility and Church placed the burden mainly on the lower classes.
On the 14th of July 1789, a crowd attacked the Bastille, a royal fortress holding arms and ammunition. Its governor, Bernard-René de Launay, surrendered after fighting that cost 83 attackers their lives, then was killed and his head paraded on a pike. The fortress held only seven prisoners, and Bastille Day became the French national holiday.
Louis XVI was sentenced to death on the 17th of January 1793 for conspiracy against public liberty and general safety, with 361 deputies in favour and 288 against. The sentence was carried out on the 21st of January on the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde.
During the Reign of Terror, from September 1793 to July 1794, around 300,000 people were arrested and some 16,600 were executed on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. Another 40,000 may have died summarily or while awaiting trial, and over 4,000 were drowned in the Loire at Nantes.
Maximilien Robespierre was a radical Jacobin who led the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror. After accusing unnamed members of conspiracy on the 26th of July 1794, his opponents turned on him, and he was executed on the 28th of July with 19 colleagues following the Thermidorian Reaction.
The National Convention voted for the abolition of slavery in the colonies on the 4th of February 1794 and decreed that all colonial residents had the full rights of French citizens irrespective of colour. In 1789 there were about 700,000 slaves in the colonies, of which about 500,000 were in Saint-Domingue.