Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on August 15, 1769, to Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino. He was the second of eight children. When he was ten years old, Napoleon left the island of Corsica for the mainland France to study French at a religious school in Autun. Then, he started his military education at Brienne military academy and later in 1784 at the Military School (École Militaire) in Paris. Napoleon was a withdrawn and aloof student who spoke French with a strong Corsican accent. He was proficient at mathematics, science, history, and geography. In September 1785, he graduated and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in La Fère artillery regiment.

When the French Revolution broke out, he spent the first years in Corsica and supported the revolutionary Jacobin faction, gained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and command over a battalion of volunteers. He led a riot against a royalist French army in Corsica, convincing military authorities in Paris to promote him to captain in July 1792. Because of his military skills, Napoleon was rapidly promoted to higher ranks. In 1796, he was made commander of the French army in Italy, where he forced Austria and its allies to make peace. In 1798, Napoleon conquered Ottoman-ruled Egypt in an attempt to strike at British trade routes with India. He was stranded when his fleet was destroyed by the British at the Battle of the Nile. By this time, France faced a new coalition composed of Britain, Austria, and Russia. A political crisis in Paris forced Napoleon to return to the France where he overthrew the Directory in a coup d’etat in November 1799 and became First Consul. In 1800, he defeated the Austrians at Marengo and negotiated a general European peace which established French power on the continent. In 1802, he was made consul for life and two years later, he was crowned Emperor of France. He oversaw the centralization of government, the creation of the Bank of France, the reinstatement of Roman Catholicism as the state religion and law reform with the Code Napoleon.

In 1803, Britain resumed war with France, later joined by Russia and Austria. Britain inflicted a naval defeat on the French at Trafalgar (1805) so Napoleon abandoned plans to invade England and turned on the Austro-Russian forces, defeating them at Austerlitz later the same year. He gained much new territory, including annexation of Prussian lands which ostensibly gave him control of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, Holland and Westphalia created, and over the next five years, Napoleon’s relatives and loyalists were installed as leaders in Holland, Westphalia, Italy, Naples, Spain and Sweden. In 1810, he had his childless marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais annulled and married the daughter of the Austrian emperor in the hope of having an heir. A son, Napoleon, was born a year later.

Frederick II was born in Berlin, on January 24, 1712, to the King Frederick William I and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover. His father was a strict disciplinarian and the creator of the Prussian military machine. His grandfather on his mother’s side was King George I of Great Britain, who had succeeded Queen Anne in 1714. He had three brothers and two sisters. Aside from having a strict militaristic upbringing, Frederick was educated by a French woman, Madame de Montbail, and Huguenot governesses and tutors as he learned French since an early age. Thus he acquired a taste for the French culture and philosophy. Frederick’s years dedicated to the arts instead of politics ended in 1740, upon the death of Frederick William I and his inheritance of the Kingdom of Prussia.

Frederick the Great’s goal was to make the Prussian government as coherent as a system of philosophy, so that finance, policy, and the army were coordinated to the same end: the consolidation of the state and the increase of its power. Although he described himself as merely the first servant of this all-powerful state, Frederick ruled with such an autocratic hand that his ministers were little more than filing clerks. Upon assuming the throne in 1740, Frederick II broke his father’s pledge of nonaggression to the Austrian ruler Maria Theresa and launched a surprise attack on the Habsburg province of Silesia, known as the "Rape of Silesia", which led to an eight-year war with Austria, known as the War of the Austrian Succession, which in turn produced the Seven Years War, a conflict pitting Prussia against a coalition of powers which included Austria, France, Russia, and Spain. Thanks largely to Frederick II’s brilliant generalship, Prussia emerged more powerful than ever.

Honore Gabriel Riqueti, count of Mirabeau, was born on March 9, 1749, in Bignon-Mirabeau, France, to the economist Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau and his wife Marie-Geneviève de Vassan. He had four siblings and belonged to a wealthy family of merchants trading in Marseilles. When he was a young boy, he suffered from smallpox, which left his face a bit disfigure. At eighteen, Mirabeau entered at a military boarding school in Paris in the regiment of Berri-Cavaleria at Saints. In 1767 he received a commission in a cavalry regiment which his grandfather had commanded years before. At ninteen, he won the affection of a young woman to whom his colonel had long been devoted, and the scandal resulting therefrom caused the father to obtain a lettre de cachet, by authority of which the indiscreet young man was placed in confinement in the Isle of Rhe. After he was released, released, the young count obtained leave to accompany the French expedition to Corsica as a volunteer.

When Louis XVI decided to summon the Estates-General, Mirabeau went to Provence, and offered to assist at the preliminary conference of the nobility of his district, but was rejected. He then appealed to the Third Estate and was elected to both for Aix and for Marseilles, deciding to sit for Aix. Naturally an enthusiast, he was present (May 4, 1789) at the opening of the States-General, but with excellent sagacity he entered that body as an independent. To the end of his life, twenty-three months later, he maintained that independence. Mirabeau was a leader of magnificent power, enthusiastic in the advocacy and support of his convictions; a statesman who would not speak, write or do, in politics, anything not in accord with his estimate as to what was right. True, he was accused of treason for speaking in support of the king’s right to proclaim war or peace, but three days thereafter he defended himself against the charge, and with overwhelming success. He was a leader who worked prodigiously. In addition to his duties as a member of the Assembly, he was also publisher and editor of a paper first called the Journal des États-Généraux, later the Lettres à mes Constituants, and at last the Courrier de Provence.

Jacques Hebert was born on November 15, 1757 at Alençon, France. His father was a goldsmith and former judge. He studied law at the College of Alençon and practiced as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. Then, he moved to Paris where he went through a difficult financial period before he began writing pamphlets. By 1790, Hebert had become a succesful pamphleteer who stirred up antagonisms toward the nobility and the clergy. After the flight of the King, he attacked the Crown as the enemy of the Revolution. In 1792 Hebert founded the Revolutionary newspaper Le Père Duchesne, which became his vehicle for expressing his radical political ideas of proletarian interests and for venting his own personal frustrations. That year he had married Marie Goupil (born 1756), who was a 37-year-old nun who left convent life at the "Sisters of Providence" convent.

The polemic articles he wrote were written with wit, but were also violent and abusive, and purposely couched in foul language in order to appeal to the sans culottes, who were the radical militants of the lower classes, typically urban laborers. Since he was a member of Cordeliers club, he had a seat in the revolutionary Paris Commune where on the 9th and 10th of August, 1792, he was sent to the Bonne-Nouvelle section of Paris. As a public journalist, he supported the September Massacres. During 1793 Hébert became the advocate of sansculottism, which demanded all-out war against the enemies of the people. These enemies included the Church, counter revolutionaries, profiteers, and political moderates.

In June 1793, encouraged by the "enragés" (enraged ones) Jacques Hebert and Jacques Roux, Paris sections took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread, and a limitation of the electoral franchise to sans-culottes alone. With the backing of the National Guard, they convinced the Convention to arrest 31 Girondin leaders, including Jacques Pierre Brissot. After these arrests, the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety on June 10, installing the revolutionary dictatorship. Hebert’s base of power was the Commune and the influence it wielded on the Committee of Public Safety.

Camille Desmoulins was born at Guise, Aisne, in Picardy, France, on March 2, 1760, to Jean Benoit Nicolas Desmoulins, who was a lawyer and lieutenant-general of the bailliage of Guise. His father obtained a scholarship for him to enter the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In 1789, when the French Revolution broke out, the Count of Mirabeau, a powerful political figure within the Estates-General who positioned himself as a bridge between the aristocracy and the emerging reformist movement, briefly enlisted Desmoulins to write for his newspaper at this time, strengthening Desmoulins’ reputation as a journalist. He denounced the French aristocracy and the paper became very popular. By this time, Desmoulins had also joined the Jacobins Club and was opposed to the Girondists, and more particularly to Jean-Pierre Brisot.

On July 16, 1791, Desmoulins appeared before the Paris Commune as the head of a group petitioning for the deposition of Louis XVI, who had, in June of that year, briefly fled Paris with his family before being captured and escorted back to the city. In 1792, when the war against Austria broke out, Desmoulins, like Robespierre, opposed this war. However, he changed his mind and joined the ideas of Danton and Marat. In 1792, France was at war with Austria. At first, Desmoulins, like his friend Robespierre, opposed this war. Then he changed his mind and joined the ideas of Danton and Marat. After the downfall of the Monarchy on August 10th, 1792 Desmoulins became the secretary of Danton, the Justice Minister. On September 8, 1792, he was elected deputy in the National Convention and belonged to the "Montagnards" group. At the beginning he was close to Robespierre, however, he took some distance from him after the condamnation of the Girondists group in October 1793.