The French Revolution was a 1789 revolution which began the modern era. In a sequence of upheavals, it saw the downfall of King Louis XVI, rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror, a chaos wherein thousands were guillotined for political differences.
Radicals saw the Catholic Church as the enemy and promoted in its place a Cult of Reason. The Revolution emerged in part from the rationalism of the Enlightenment which distrusted all established institutions. It inspired fear into European monarchs and aristocrats as well as conservative intellectuals like Edmund Burke in Britain, who moved to fight the Revolution, and finally succeeded in 1815.