The French Revolution began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille prison and it continued through 1799. It went through several political phases, of which the Reign of Terror was the bloodiest and the most well-known. Without the Reign of Terror, the French Revolution and its outcomes would likely have been very different for the people of France and for Europe in general. By 1789, France's King Louis XVI faced an economic crisis caused by a century of French foreign wars, empire building and the crown's fiscal irresponsibility forced his hand. The anger of the Parisian people and the growing popularity of Enlightenment-style civil liberties and democracy fueled the creation of the National Assembly. All of these forces and the Assembly's defiance of the king's orders served to create a rather chaotic France. Matters for both the king and the French people worsened when the Legislative Assembly fell to a popular riot in August 1792, with France at war with two central European powers, its own king imprisoned and the economic situation no closer to being ameliorated. By the fall of 1792, the direction in which France would proceed was anyone's guess. The Reign of Terror was a period of around a year during the French Revolution during which many people were executed for supposedly opposing the Revolution. Exactly when and how long was the Reign of Terror? Historians disagree on the exact answer to these questions because of ambiguity about the exact date when the period began. Different sources suggest different dates in 1793. It ended definitively on July 28th, 1794, with the execution of its most important orchestrator: Maximilien Robespierre.