July 28 in History

Maximilien Robespierre, the incorruptible architect of the Reign of Terror, was dragged to the guillotine on July 28, 1794, his jaw shattered by a bullet wound from the previous night. The crowd that watched the blade fall had cheered just as loudly for his victims over the preceding sixteen months. Robespierre, a provincial lawyer from Arras, had risen to dominance in the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety through sheer ideological conviction and political skill. He believed that virtue and terror were inseparable instruments of republican government: virtue without terror was impotent, and terror without virtue was destructive. Under this philosophy, the Committee sent an estimated 16,594 people to the guillotine between September 1793 and July 1794, with thousands more dying in prisons or in mass drownings at Nantes. By the summer of 1794, the Terror had consumed so many that even Robespierre's allies feared they might be next. The military threat that had originally justified emergency measures was receding, as French armies won victories on every front. Robespierre's increasingly erratic behavior, including a speech on July 26 hinting at a new purge without naming its targets, terrified the Convention. Every deputy wondered if his name was on the list. On July 27, the ninth of Thermidor by the revolutionary calendar, a coalition of moderates and threatened radicals shouted Robespierre down when he tried to address the Convention. Declared an outlaw, he retreated to the Hotel de Ville with loyal supporters. That night, soldiers stormed the building. Robespierre was found with a gunshot wound to his jaw, whether self-inflicted or fired by a soldier remains disputed. The following afternoon, Robespierre and twenty-one supporters were executed without trial. The Thermidorian Reaction that followed dismantled the machinery of terror, freed thousands of prisoners, and began France's slow, unsteady journey toward a more stable republic. The revolution had devoured its most devoted child.

Former slaves became citizens of the United States on July 28, 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was declared ratified, overturning the Supreme Court's infamous ruling that Black Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." No other amendment has done more to shape American law. The amendment emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and the political battles of Reconstruction. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, Southern states passed Black Codes that effectively re-enslaved freed people through vagrancy laws, labor contracts, and restrictions on movement. Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens and John Bingham, drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to constitutionalize the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and place them beyond the reach of future hostile Congresses. The amendment's first section packed four revolutionary clauses into eighty-one words. The Citizenship Clause overturned Dred Scott by declaring all persons born or naturalized in the United States to be citizens. The Privileges or Immunities Clause was intended to protect fundamental rights, though the Supreme Court gutted it within five years. The Due Process Clause prohibited states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without legal process. The Equal Protection Clause required every state to treat people within its borders equally under law. Ratification was coerced. Congress required former Confederate states to ratify the amendment as a condition of regaining representation. Southern legislatures initially rejected it, then ratified under military pressure. Secretary of State William Seward's certification on July 28, 1868, came amid genuine legal uncertainty about whether the ratifications were valid. The amendment lay dormant for decades as the Supreme Court hollowed out its protections and Jim Crow segregation flourished. Only in the twentieth century did the Fourteenth Amendment become the constitutional engine its framers intended, anchoring Brown v. Board of Education, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states, and nearly every major civil rights decision since.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, firing the first shots of a conflict that would kill seventeen million people, destroy four empires, and reshape every border in Europe. What began as a regional dispute over a political assassination became the catastrophe that defined the twentieth century. One month earlier, Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist, had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie during a state visit to Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary, determined to crush Serbian-backed nationalism in the Balkans, drafted an ultimatum deliberately designed to be unacceptable. Serbia agreed to nearly all the demands but balked at allowing Austrian officials to conduct investigations on Serbian soil, a condition that would have effectively ended Serbian sovereignty. The declaration of war set off a cascade of treaty obligations and mobilization orders that no government could control. Russia began mobilizing to defend its Serbian ally. Germany, bound by treaty to Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia and then on France. When German armies violated Belgian neutrality to execute the Schlieffen Plan, Britain entered the war. Within a week, most of the major powers of Europe were at war. Belgrade, the Serbian capital, came under Austrian artillery bombardment on July 29, the day after the declaration. The small Serbian army, battle-hardened from the Balkan Wars, initially repelled the invasion and inflicted humiliating defeats on the Austro-Hungarian forces. Serbia would not be conquered until 1915, when Bulgaria joined the Central Powers and attacked from the east. The war that Austria-Hungary started to preserve its empire instead destroyed it. By November 1918, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and the German Empire had all ceased to exist, replaced by a patchwork of new nations and a peace settlement so punitive that it guaranteed another world war within a generation.

Johann Sebastian Bach went blind in his final year, the result of two operations by an English traveling eye surgeon named John Taylor, who moved through Europe leaving a trail of blind patients behind him. Taylor had previously operated on Handel with similarly disastrous results. Bach died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750, ten days after the second surgery. He was 65. Born in Eisenach, Thuringia in 1685, Bach came from a family of musicians so prolific that in parts of Germany the word "Bach" was used as a synonym for "musician." He was orphaned at ten and raised by his eldest brother. He held a series of positions as organist and court musician before becoming Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1723, responsible for music at the city's principal churches. He held the position for twenty-seven years, until his death. He composed roughly a thousand works: cantatas, concertos, fugues, masses, partitas, passions, suites. The Well-Tempered Clavier demonstrated that a keyboard could be tuned to play in all twenty-four major and minor keys. The Art of Fugue pushed counterpoint to its mathematical limits. The Brandenburg Concertos displayed a range of instrumental combinations that nobody else attempted. His wife, Anna Magdalena, found 385 thalers in cash and no will. He left twenty children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Several became prominent composers in their own right, including Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was better known than his father for much of the eighteenth century. Bach's reputation during his lifetime was primarily as a virtuoso organist and a solid craftsman, admired locally but largely unknown outside central Germany. Felix Mendelssohn revived the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, seventy-nine years after Bach's death. The performance launched a rediscovery that took another generation to complete. Today he is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in Western musical history, but his posthumous fame would have astonished everyone who knew him.

Francis Crick and James Watson used someone else's X-ray photograph. Rosalind Franklin, working at King's College London, had taken Photo 51, an X-ray diffraction image of DNA's B-form that clearly showed a helical structure. Her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed the image to Watson without her knowledge or permission. Crick and Watson built their double helix model at Cambridge from this data and from Franklin's unpublished measurements. Their paper in Nature, published April 25, 1953, acknowledged Franklin's contribution in a single sentence. Born in Northampton, England on June 8, 1916, Crick had studied physics before switching to biology after the war, a transition he later described as moving from the boring to the fascinating. Watson, an American prodigy, had earned his Ph.D. at 22 and arrived at Cambridge eager to solve what both men called the secret of life. Their model was elegant: two sugar-phosphate backbones spiraling in opposite directions, connected by pairs of bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine. The base-pairing rule immediately suggested how DNA could replicate itself: unzip the double helix and each strand becomes a template for building its complement. The structure explained both the storage and transmission of genetic information. It was one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin died of ovarian cancer on April 16, 1958, at 37, almost certainly caused by exposure to the X-ray radiation she used in her research. She was four years too early to be eligible for the Nobel, which is not awarded posthumously. The extent to which her work was used without proper credit remained a point of controversy for decades. Crick spent the latter part of his career at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he turned to neuroscience and the study of consciousness. He published a book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, arguing that consciousness arises from the behavior of neurons. He died of colon cancer on July 28, 2004, at 88. A draft of a paper on consciousness was on his desk.

Thomas Cromwell knelt before the executioner's block on Tower Hill on July 28, 1540, and the man who had done more than anyone to reshape England was dispatched with several clumsy blows of the axe. On the same day, Henry VIII married Catherine Howard, his fifth wife, as if celebrating the disposal of the servant who had made his marital adventures possible. Cromwell had risen from nothing. The son of a Putney blacksmith and brewer, he educated himself across Europe, working as a soldier, merchant, and lawyer before entering the service of Cardinal Wolsey. When Wolsey fell from power for failing to secure Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Cromwell survived and thrived, becoming the king's chief minister by the early 1530s. Over the next eight years, he engineered the English Reformation, broke with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, and concentrated unprecedented power in the Tudor crown. His downfall came from matchmaking. After Jane Seymour died in 1537, Cromwell arranged Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves, a German Protestant princess, to forge an alliance against Catholic Europe. Henry found Anne physically repulsive and the marriage was never consummated. The king's humiliation became Cromwell's death sentence. His enemies at court, led by the Duke of Norfolk, seized the opportunity to bring charges of treason and heresy. Cromwell was arrested at a Council meeting on June 10, 1540, stripped of his honors, and sent to the Tower. He wrote desperate letters to Henry begging for mercy, addressing the king as "most gracious prince" and protesting his innocence. Henry never replied. Parliament passed a bill of attainder condemning Cromwell without trial, a legal instrument that Cromwell himself had perfected as a political weapon. Henry reportedly regretted the execution within months, complaining that his councilors had destroyed "the most faithful servant he ever had." The king's remorse came too late for the blacksmith's son who had transformed England.