Web4/09/ · What Caused the French Revolution? The American Revolution: In , America experienced a revolution and the government of France sent its troops WebThe extent to which the philosophy of the 18th century impacted the French Revolution has occupied the historian ever since the days of the Revolution itself. It has proved to be WebThe French revolution had a variance of significance in many nations of the world. It represented a crucial event that made history in the western world. It hammered the
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The execution of Robespierre and his accomplices, 17 July 10 Thermidor Year II. Robespierre is depicted holding a handkerchief and dressed in a brown jacket in the cart immediately to the left of the scaffold, essays on the french revolution. Photo courtesy the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence? The French Revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale. The legacy of the French Revolution is not found in physical monuments, but in the ideals of liberty, equality and justice that still inspire modern democracies. More ambitious than the American revolutionaries ofthe French in were not just fighting for their own national independence: they wanted to establish principles that would lay the basis for freedom for human beings everywhere.
Much more openly than the Americans, the French revolutionaries recognised that the principles of liberty and equality they had articulated posed fundamental questions about such issues as the status of women and the justification of slavery. In France, unlike the US, these questions were debated heatedly and openly. As the revolution proceeded, however, its legislators took more radical steps. Women achieved so much influence in the streets of revolutionary Paris that they drove male legislators to try to outlaw their activities. Black men were seated as deputies to the French legislature and, bythe black general Toussaint Louverture was the official commander-in-chief of French forces in Saint-Domingue, which would become the independent nation of Haiti in But the French Revolution is not just important today because it took such radical steps to broaden the definitions of liberty and equality.
The movement that began in also showed the dangers inherent in trying to remake an entire society overnight. The revolution saw the first full-scale attempt to impose secular ideas in the face of vocal opposition from citizens who proclaimed themselves defenders of religion. Inessays on the french revolution, revolutionary France became the first democracy to launch a war to spread its values. A major consequence of that war was the creation of the first modern totalitarian dictatorship, the rule of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror. Napoleon also abolished meaningful elections, ended freedom of the press, and restored the public status of the Catholic Church. T he relevance of the French Revolution to present-day debates is the reason why I decided to write A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolutionthe first comprehensive English-language account of that event for general readers in more than 30 years.
Having spent my career researching and teaching the history of the French Revolution, however, I know very well that it was more than an idealistic crusade for human rights. If the fall of the Bastille remains an indelible symbol of aspirations for freedom, the other universally recognised symbol of the French Revolution, the guillotine, reminds us that the movement was also marked by violence. It is hard to avoid concluding that there was a relationship between the radicalism of the ideas that surfaced during the French Revolution and the violence that marked the movement. Nowadays, we would call the Père Duchêne a meme. Once the revolution began, a number of journalists began publishing pamphlets supposedly written by the Père Duchêne, in which essays on the french revolution demanded that the National Assembly do more to benefit the poor.
Holding a hatchet over his head, with two pistols stuck in his belt and a musket at his side, the Essays on the french revolution Duchêne was a visual symbol of the association between the revolution and popular violence. The elites had enriched themselves at the expense of the people, and needed to be forced to share their power. Although his crude language and his constant threat to resort to violence alienated the more moderate revolutionaries, the Père Duchêne was the living embodiment of one of the basic principles incorporated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
Like present-day populists, the Père Duchêne had a simple political programme. The elites who ruled France before had enriched themselves at the expense of the people, essays on the french revolution. They needed to be forced to share their power and wealth. Their tone was vindictive and vengeful; they wanted to see their targets humiliated and, in many cases, sent to the guillotine. The most successful Père Duchêne journalist, Jacques-René Hébert, built a political career through his success in using the media, essays on the french revolution. Using the same smear tactics that the Père Duchêne had perfected, they accused Hébert of dubious intrigues with foreigners and other questionable activities. Like many bullies, Hébert quickly collapsed when he found himself up against serious opponents determined to fight back; the crowd that cheered his dispatch to the guillotine in March was larger than for many of the executions that he had incited.
But he and the other Père Duchênes, as well as their female counterparts, the Mère Duchênes who flourished at some points in the revolution, had done much to turn the movement from a high-minded crusade for human rights into a free-for-all in which only the loudest voices could make themselves heard. In the more than years since the storming of the Bastille, no one has formulated the human yearning for freedom and justice more eloquently than the French revolutionaries, and no one has shown more clearly the dangers that a one-sided pursuit of those goals can create.
The career of the most famous of the radical French revolutionaries, Robespierre, is the most striking demonstration of that fact. Yet no one remains more associated with the violence of the Reign of Terror than Robespierre. The most unbearable of all, that of the rich, essays on the french revolution. The majority of the population was not ready to embrace a radical secularist movement. Robespierre was no innocent, and in the last months of his short political career — he was only 36 when he died — his clumsy confrontations with his colleagues made him a dangerous number of enemies.
Unlike the Essays on the french revolution Duchêne, however, Robespierre never embraced violence as an end in itself, and a close examination of his career shows that he was often trying to find ways to limit the damage caused by policies he had not originally endorsed. The revolution had not begun as an anti-religious movement. Many Catholic clergy, especially underpaid parish priests who resented the luxury in which their aristocratic bishops lived, supported the expropriation of Church property and the idea that the government, which now took over the responsibility for funding the institution, had the right to reform it, essays on the french revolution. Others, however, saw the reform of the Church as a cover for an Enlightenment-inspired campaign against their faith, and much of the lay population supported them.
Women, who found in the cult of Mary and female saints a source of psychological support, were often in the forefront of this religiously inspired resistance to the revolution. To supporters of the revolution, this religious opposition to their movement looked like a nationwide conspiracy preventing progress. The increasingly harsh measures taken to quell resistance to Church reform prefigured the policies of the Reign of Terror. The plunge into war in the spring ofjustified in part to show domestic opponents of the revolution that they could not hope for any support from abroad, allowed the revolutionaries to define the disruptions caused by diehard Catholics as forms of treason. Suspicions that Louis XVI, who had accepted the demand for a declaration of war, and his wife Marie-Antoinette were secretly hoping for a quick French defeat that would allow foreign armies to restore their powers led to their imprisonment and execution.
A ccusations of foreign meddling in revolutionary politics, a so-called foreign plot that supposedly involved the payment of large sums of money to leading deputies to promote special interests and undermine French democracy, were another source of the fears essays on the french revolution fuelled the Reign of Terror. Other, more cynical politicians joined Robespierre in expanding the Reign of Terror, calculating that their own best chance of survival was to strike down their rivals before they themselves could be targeted. While thousands of ordinary French men and women found themselves unjustly imprisoned during the Terror, thousands of others — admittedly, only men — held public office for the first time.
The same revolutionary legislature that backed Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety took the first steps toward creating a modern national welfare system and passed plans for a comprehensive system of public education. Revolutionary France became the first country to create a system of universal military conscription and to promise ordinary soldiers that, if they proved themselves on the battlefield, essays on the french revolution, there was no rank to which they could not aspire. The idea that society needed a privileged leadership class in order to function was challenged as never essays on the french revolution. Among the men from modest backgrounds who rose to positions they could never have attained before was a young artillery officer whose strong Corsican accent marked him as a provincial: Napoleon.
Five years after the overthrow of Robespierre on 27 July — or 9 Thermidor Year II, according to the new calendar that the revolutionaries had adopted to underline their total break with the past — Napoleon joined with a number of revolutionary politicians to overthrow the republican regime that had come out of the revolution and replace it with what soon became a system of one-man rule. They provide an instructive lesson in how a society can try to put itself back on an even keel after an experience during which all the ordinary rules essays on the french revolution politics have been broken. The post-Robespierre republic was brought down by the disloyalty of its own political elite.
One simple lesson from the post-Terror years of the revolution that many subsequent politicians have learned is to blame all mistakes on one person. On the whole, however, the republican leaders after succeeded in convincing the population that the excesses of the Terror would not be repeated, even if some of the men in power had been as deeply implicated in those excesses as Robespierre. Harsh toward the poor who had identified themselves with the Père Duchêne, it consolidated the educational reforms started during the Terror. He himself was one of the many military leaders who enabled France to defeat its continental enemies and force them to recognise its territorial gains.
Although legislative debates in this period reflected a swing against the expanded rights granted to women earlier in the revolution, the laws passed earlier were not repealed. Despite a heated campaign waged by displaced plantation-owners, the thermidorians and the Directory maintained the rights granted to the freed blacks in the French colonies, essays on the french revolution. Black men from Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe were elected as deputies and took part in parliamentary debates. In Saint-Domingue, the black general Louverture commanded French forces that defeated a British invasion; byhe had been named the governor of the colony. The post-Robespierre French republic was brought down, more than anything else, by the disloyalty of its own political elite.
What Napoleon found in the fall of was not a country on the verge of chaos but a crowd of politicians competing with each other to plan coups to make their positions permanent. He was able to choose the allies who struck him as most likely to serve his purposes, knowing that none of them had the popularity or the charisma to hold their own against him once the Directory had been overthrown. But neither can one simply hail the French movement as a forerunner of modern ideas about liberty and equality. In their pursuit of those goals, the French revolutionaries discovered how vehemently some people — not just essays on the french revolution elites but also many ordinary men and women — could resist those ideas, and how dangerous the impatience of their own supporters could become.
Despite all its violence and contradictions, however, the French Revolution remains meaningful for us today. To ignore or reject the legacy of its calls for liberty and equality amounts to legitimising authoritarian ideologies or arguments for the inherent inequality of certain groups of people. If we want to live in a world characterised by respect for fundamental individual rights, we need to learn the lessons, both positive and negative, of the great effort to promote those ideals that tore down the Bastille in History of science. For hundreds of years, essays on the french revolution, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars, essays on the french revolution. Then came the new cosmologists. Stephen Case. Global history, essays on the french revolution.
The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence. Harold James. Stories and literature. Often vilified as a weapon of male supremacy, pornography in fact has much to tell us about ourselves and our culture. Kathleen Lubey. The ancient world. The Roman Empire enabled an early version of globalisation that offered travellers adventure, novelty and opportunity. Fabio Fernandes. War and peace. Disturbing and inhaling radioactive dust, in their haste Russian soldiers unburied the wrecked, undead Earth itself. Michael Marder. The gifts we exchange are both generous and yet fraught with social rules and obligations.
Marcel Mauss explained why. Gili Kliger. Vive essays on the french revolution révolution! The elites had enriched themselves at the expense of the people, and needed to be forced to share their power Although his crude language and his constant threat to resort to violence alienated the more moderate revolutionaries, the Père Duchêne was the living embodiment of one of the basic principles incorporated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Courtesy Musée Carnavalet, Paris Like present-day populists, the Père Duchêne had a simple political programme. To inaugurate the new state religion, Robespierre declared 8 June 20 Prairial Year II to be the Festival of the Supreme Being.
Ten Minute History - The French Revolution and Napoleon (Short Documentary)
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WebThe extent to which the philosophy of the 18th century impacted the French Revolution has occupied the historian ever since the days of the Revolution itself. It has proved to be Web4/09/ · What Caused the French Revolution? The American Revolution: In , America experienced a revolution and the government of France sent its troops Web“The French Revolution was a period of time from to where France was politically instable. It began on 14th of June 14th when the Bastille, a symbol of the power of
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