French Revolutionary State (1789–1799)

Class card for the French Revolutionary polity from the convening of the Estates General (5 May 1789) through the Coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) and the proclamation of the Napoleonic Consulate. The machine traverses four constitutional forms in a decade: National Assembly (1789–91), Legislative Assembly (1791–92), National Convention / First Republic (22 September 1792–1795), Directory (1795–1799) — each a rapidly mutating attempt to operationalize the novel principle of popular sovereignty. Foundational output events: Bastille (14 July 1789) dissolves the Ancien Régime coercive apparatus; Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (26 August 1789) encodes universalist legal equality as constitutional semiotic; Levée en masse (23 August 1793) constitutes the citizen-soldier form (seeds machine:military- conscript-levee-1793); Reign of Terror (Sept 1793 – July 1794, Robespierre / Committee of Public Safety) marks peak legislative-executive fusion; Thermidorian Reaction (27 July 1794) ends Terror and begins Directory drift toward oligarchic stabilization; Brumaire (9 Nov 1799) terminates the machine via military coup. Conceptual output: the machine constructs three linked political primitives that cross-era successors inherit and rework — (1) nation-as-political-subject (the people as locus of sovereignty, not the monarch); (2) universalist legal equality (Rights of Man as portable export doctrine); (3) state-as-pedagogical-apparatus (the Convention's role in forming new citizen-subjects via festivals, conscription, revolutionary calendar, metric system). These primitives are operationalized downstream by the Napoleonic Code (1804), diffused to European rivals by the revolutionary wars, and re-articulated in Ottoman Tanzimat (1839) and Bismarckian popular-sovereignty appropriation (German Empire 1871). Long-arc cross-era inheritance flows to EU legal-equality architecture (GDPR 2018) and internet multistakeholder governance templates (ICANN/IETF/W3C 1998). Plasticity flag: the machine is the most rapidly form-shifting polity in early- modern European history — four constitutional orders in ten years, motor constant as revolutionary push. This is canonical plastic behavior (§3.3 PlasticityType). The machine terminates at Brumaire. The Napoleonic Code (1804) is downstream but constitutes a new card (different machine_type of semiotic-codification apparatus, different coupling typology, different motor/motor). Constraint §2 of the task brief: successor_of=[], preceded_by=[machine:napoleonic-code-1804], identity_lineage_id=null (standalone card; Napoleonic Code is downstream output, not lineage successor in the schema sense — the Revolutionary State does not have the Code as a successor_of entry because the Code is a separate entity spawned by the State, not the State's own lineage next-node).