a thesis for the french revolution

119 French Revolution Essay Topics & Research Examples

French Revolution essay is a popular task in colleges and universities. As such, you should know what you are expected to write when given this topic. For example, discuss the worldwide context in which the Revolution took place.

🏆 Best French Revolution Topics

📑 good research topics about french revolution, 🎓 simple french revolution essay topics, 📌 interesting french revolution research topics, ❓ french revolution essay questions.

Before the French Revolution, Europe was a land where monarchy was a dominant mode of government. It was supported by religious figures, with their propositions such as the divine mandate and the general illiteracy of the population. However, the Enlightenment changed the situation as more and more people became educated and interested in state affairs.

The consequences of the Revolution, locally and internationally, are a significant matter for discussion. By covering these ideas and following The French Revolution essay requirements, you will create powerful work. You can discuss the dynamics of power in its execution and how pragmatic leaders eventually replaced idealistic ones.

Napoleon Bonaparte is an important figure, as he emerged as the ultimate victor of the Revolution. France began as a monarchy and ended as an empire under dictatorial rule, showing the issues inherent in revolutions.

Try to concentrate on a specific topic instead of discussing everything you can think of. Use side topics as arguments in support of your thesis. If you find yourself struggling, visit IvyPanda to find a variety of useful, professionally written samples!

Napoleon Bonaparte’s Role in the French Revolution Despite the outstanding development, Napoleon stayed in the position of the second lieutenant for six years; it was not until the beginning of the French Revolution that he was able to advance his career in […]
Music and the French Revolution They also wanted to do away with the Christianity as well as the old method of days of the week and naming the years from the birth of Christ.
French Revolution: Role of Propaganda and Music The history of propaganda is based on three interweaving fundamentals: first, the mounting need, with the growth of civilization and the rise of nation-state, to win the battle for people’s minds; second, the increasing sophistication […]
History of French Revolution The whole French terrorism was a means of dealing with the rivals of the bourgeoisie that is feudalism and absolutism. In the estates general, there was the clergy, nobility and the rest of the people.
The French Revolution: Romanticism Period Romanticism was anchored in the work of the poets which was evident in the daily lives of the society. Besides, the role of women in romantic literature was significant, thus; they were greatest poets and […]
Comparison of American and French Revolution Both the revolutions were for a cause, the American Revolution took place because the Americans wanted to free themselves from the enslavement of the British and similarly the French revolution took place because the rich […]
Industrialization, Enlightenment, French Revolution Human history has been shaped greatly by three periods: The industrial revolution, the period of enlightenment, the French revolution, and finally the period of protest and revolution 1815-1850.
How Revolutionary Was the French Revolution? The French Revolution was the most revolutionary era in the history of France as the country underwent radical reforms. One of the greatest landmark revolutions was the spread of the Napoleonic culture and some of […]
A Tale of Two Cities: A Balanced Portrayal of the French Revolution The novel paints a vivid picture of the French Revolution, the fervor and radicalism of the revolutionaries and the terror and bloodshed spread by the revolutionaries.
Food Scarcity Factor in French Revolution Many writings and works devoted to the investigation of European history in the 18th century have captured the chronicles of a long-term hunger that was spread across France on the eve of the Revolution.
French Revolution: Liberal and Radical Portions Of course, a hope that the presence of revolution promoted certain changes and made the government to think about the improvement of citizens’ lives and wellbeing was inherent to the French.
“The Old Regime and the French Revolution” by Alexis De Tocqueville Consequently, in chapter 2, Tocqueville explains that the Church was targeted by the anti-elitist and semi-anarchist aims of the Revolution due to being a part of the feudal system.
Enlightenment Ideas During the French Revolution Period This happened due to the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which was approved on the 26th of August 1789 and which promised legal equality and liberty to every […]
Restoring Justice Through the French Revolution However, the role of breakthroughs, which spurred the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie with its intentions to change order within the country, led to the French Revolution, which restored justice.
The French Revolution in Its Historical Context The French Revolution was a series of events that marked the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy and the rise of a democratic republic in France.
Society and Cultural Changes in the West During the French Revolution The main influence on the development of the political life of Western countries in the second period of New History was the French Revolution, which put forward the ideas of freedom, equality, and fraternity.
The French Revolution and National Regeneration The ideas presented by the interpretations of the effects and consequences of the revolution are important in offering knowledge of new political ideologies.
The Nationalism Role During the French Revolution One of the most developed variants of this concept is the nationalism of the era of the French Revolution. In 1789, with the outbreak of the French Revolution, the idea of nationalism spread throughout France, […]
Why the French Revolution Led to War Between France and Prussia & Austria To understand why the French Revolution led to war between France on the one side and Prussia and Austria on the other in 1792, one should briefly recall the essence of this revolution.
Origins of the French Revolution Tired of the current situation and raring for change, the French people had to find a reason to revolt. She was convicted and executed of the same.
The Role of Napoleon Bonaparte in the French Revolution The aftermath of the revolutionary actions was disastrous and the society would have faced the need to readjust to more alternations in political orders.
French Revolution: Women Studies French revolution was first witnessed in the year 1789.in the year 1792 June a number of women demonstrated towards the legislative chambers of the king1. The government was against this and women were banned from […]
Print Making During the French Revolution Print making entails the use of originality in the creation of prints as opposed to the reproduction of a painting using photographic means.
French Revolution Main Events The year 1789 was marked by celebrations of the centenary of the glorious revolution in Britain. There was much travel between Britain and France and the individuals who supported events in France started to dress […]
French Revolution in World History The French revolution, in this part of the world at least, was the inspiration for all subsequent uprisings and revolts throughout Europe in the nineteenth century and its ideals, in part, are visible in many […]
Women During the French Revolution: Olympe de Gouges As a move to fight for the women rights, I wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the citizens in 1791.
Western Civilization: The French Revolution 1789-99 One of the most popular theories includes the idea that the fall of the monarchy was simply a result of the fall of the social class with which it was most closely associated, that of […]
French Revolution and the European Music For instance many of the ideas of democracy taken for granted in many parts of the world today like the freedom and impartiality of individuals, the importance of written establishments in supervision of a country, […]
French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars: Idea of Nation While studying the French Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815, I was challenged by the question of their impact on the ideas of nations.
The French Revolution and Its Factors The French revolution is seen as a period of both social and political upheavals in the History of Europe and France. It was the French revolution that was seen to overthrow this old regime to […]
French Revolution, Its Social Causes and Legacies The French revolution owes its occurrence, foremost, to the significant increase of the French population throughout the eighteenth century. The implication of this stratification was the lumping of a majority of the population into the […]
Robespierre’s Influence During the French Revolution Besides, the title of the article does not directly capture the interest of the reader since it approaches the focus of the reader from a broad perspective; The Economic Terror of the French Revolution.
French Revolution and Societal Transformation The French Revolution was a period of political and social instabilities in France, which lasted between 1789 and 1799, and was partially planned and carried out by Napoleon in the course of the French Empire […]
French Revolution and War Periods The themes of the songs before the French Revolution of 1848 and shortly before and during the time of the Paris Commune in 1871 were mostly political and revolutionary.
The French Revolution Role in the History The French Revolution was a major event not only in the history of the French Empire but also in the history of the world.
Neoclassicism in French Revolution As a matter of fact, the roles played by art in the social realms could not be ignored during the revolution years. The cruel nature of the French regime was depicted in the Marat’s figure […]
French Revolution and Napoleonic Era Subsequently, rebellion and a spirit of revolution began to ferment among the commoners, the nobility and the clergy as well as the wider French society.
Edmund Burke: Reflection on Liberty and the French Revolution One of the things that Burke seems not to appreciate is the fact that freedom and liberty are not a one-time achievement.
Industrial and French Revolutions In addition, people from the middle classes were the greatest beneficiaries while peasants and the poor were the losers in the revolutions.
French revolution and the Napoleon era The enlightenment era consisted of quite a number of ideas that changed the French society in addition to growing wave of civilization in the West.
The French Revolution and Napoleon’s Governance Like any substantial change in the political life of any country, the French Revolution consisted of several stages of the dramatic transformation of the state system, political and social life in France. During the decade […]
The effect of the French Revolution on Lazare Carnot The period of the French revolution was celebrated with a lot of enthusiasm and it can be perceived to have laid the groundwork and the birth of the new world socio-political order.
How Did the French Revolution Impacted the Issue of Slavery and the History of Santo Domingo? The French Revolution led to the spread of revolutionary ideas. After the French Revolution, the law prohibited slavery and abolished in Santo Domingo.
Origins and trajectory of the French Revolution The Second Estate consisted of the nobility, another privileged group which held the highest positions in the government, the Church and the army.
The French Revolution Movie The movie by the name Marie Antoinette tells the story of the Austrian-born queen and the events leading to the collapse of the monarchy in France.
Liberty and Nation: The French Revolution This paper will discuss the role of the French Revolution in shaping the concept of nation, freedom, and citizenship. This author argued that people of the Third Estate constituted the bulk of the French nation […]
Major social groups in France prior to the French revolution The First Estate consisted of the clergy; the second one was nobility while the third estate was known as the commoners. The major goal of the commoners was to attain more power and independence from […]
The American vs. French Revolution: Ideals Matter The development of the first Heliocentric theory of the universe and the Pythagorean system had profound revolutionary implications on man’s conception of the universe and natural law.
What Caused the French Revolution? The American Revolution: In 1775-1783, America experienced a revolution and the government of France sent its troops and navy to help the rebelling colonists. This consequently led to the rise of hunger and high prices […]
Absolutism in French Revolution It means that the contemporaries of Louis XIV did not use this term, but preferred to use the word-combination “absolute power of the crown”, which they understood as the “concentration of sovereign authority in the […]
An Analysis of a Document Written by an Anonymous French Sugar Planter Who Escaped the French Revolution by Going to Saint Domingue
An Analysis of French Revolution Differ in American Revolution
An Analysis of Political Upheavals of the French Revolution
A History of the French Revolution and the Origin of Totalitarianism
An Analysis of the Significance of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution
An Analysis of the Significance of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars to Modernity
An Analysis of the Causes and Impact of the French Revolution in the 16th Century
Age of Enlightenment and French Revolution
An Overview of the Preliminary Stage in Politics and the Causes of the French Revolution
A Biography of Maximilien Robespierre, a Famous Leader of the French Revolution
An Analysis of the Goals of the French Revolution Produced by the Enlightenment
An Analysis of the Specific Themes in Charles Dickens’ Novel A Tale of Two Cities Regarding the French Revolution
An Overview of A True Revolution in French Revolution and the Brutality
An Analysis of the Primary Causes of Social and Political Upheaval in the French Revolution
A Description of the French Revolution as a Significant Milestone in European History
A Look at France and England During The French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
An Analysis of the Beginning of Time on the Concept of Revolution and the Principles Behind the French Revolution in Europe
An Analysis of the Investigation on Napoleon’s Betrayal in the French Revolution
A Better Understanding of the Causes of the French Revolution in the 1700’s
A Description of Both Conservatism and Liberalism Which Were Both Born in the French Revolution
A Look at the French Revolution and the Killings During the Devolution
An Analysis of the Ideological Connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution
An Analysis of the Great Changes in the Society and Government of France Brought By The French Revolution
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and His Relevance to the French Revolution
An Examination of the Estates General: The First Step to the French Revolution
Advantages And Disadvantages Of The French Revolution
An Overview of the French Revolution as a Major Theme of Change in the 18th Century
An Examination of the Influence of French Revolution on the Society of Europe
An Analysis of the Causes of the French Revolution: the Financial Debt of the Government and the Long-Standing Political Differences in the Government
An Analysis of Queen Marie Antoinette’s Involvement in the French Revolution
A History of the Fall of Bastille and the French Revolution
Assess the View That the Enlightenment Had Been the Main Cause of the French Revolution
An Analysis and an Introduction to Revolutionary Leaders and the Effects of the French Revolution
A Comparison between the American Revolution and the French Revolution
An Evaluation of the French Revolution, Social Injustice, Love and Compassion in Les Miserables, a Play by Victor Hugo
A Discussion of the Creation of Conservatism and Liberalism During the French Revolution
A Look at the Major Revolutions and the Differences in the French Revolution
An Analysis of the Essential Cause for the French Revolution in the End of 18th Century
An Analysis of the Three Main Views Interpreted in the French Revolution
How Far Was Christianity Seriously Threatened by the French Revolution Between 1789 and 1815?
Was Napoleon the Son or the Enemy of the French Revolution?
How and Why Did the French Revolution Affect Ireland?
How Much Does Napoleon Owe to the French Revolution?
Did Marie Antoinette Play a Decisive Role in the French Revolution?
How Did American Revolution Serve as the Inspiration for the French Revolution?
Did Napoleon Abuse the Ideas of the French Revolution?
How Did the Enlightenment Influence the French Revolution?
Did the American Revolution Help Spur the French Revolution?
How Did the French Revolution Impact Western Civilization?
How Did the French Revolution Become More Radical in 1789-1793?
Did the French Revolution Have Occurred Without the Enlightenment?
How Did the French Revolution Both Support and Violate the Motto – “Equality, Liberty and Fraternity”?
Was Napoleon Bonaparte the Saviour or the Destroyer of the Ideals of the French Revolution?
How Did the French Revolution Enter a New Phase After the Storming of the Bastille?
Was the French Revolution a Class War?
How Did the French Revolution Lead to the Unification of Germany and Italy?
Was the French Revolution Successful?
How Did the French Revolution Undermine Democracy?
Was the French Revolution Necessary?
How Did the Social Upheaval of the French Revolution Influence the Beliefs of the Romantic Poets?
Was the French Revolution Preventable?
How Effectively Did Pitt Deal With the External Threats of the French Revolution?
Was the French Revolution the Birth of Modernity?
How Far Did Napoleon Maintain the Aims of the French Revolution Till 1815?
What Are the Four Main Causes of the French Revolution?
How Far Was Louis XVI to Blame for the French Revolution in 1789?
What Caused and Sustained the Second French Revolution?
How Important Was the Part Played by the Third Estate in the French Revolution up to 1793?
How Important Were Economic Causes of the French Revolution?
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The French Revolution (1789–1799)

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LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION

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Intellectual History and the Causes of the French Revolution

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Jack R Censer, Intellectual History and the Causes of the French Revolution, Journal of Social History , Volume 52, Issue 3, Spring 2019, Pages 545–554, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shy082

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From the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, historians, politicians, and even the interested public believed radical ideas to be at the bottom of this upheaval. Upstaged by social explanations, particularly in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, intellectual accounts have regained prominence, as recent scholarship has reiterated that ideas mattered. But what ideas? This essay focuses on those ideas that became evident at and around the outbreak of the revolution in 1788–89. For this period, a new wave of scholarship emphasizes not the idea of equality but rather historic rights and patriotism. In these accounts, Enlightenment notions of natural law provided the central justification for radicalizing the revolution as the decade proceeded. Beyond patriotism and rights, this essay also examines other competing discourses, especially those that challenged the church.

Many histories of the French Revolution, beginning with those written in the era itself, assumed, almost axiomatically, that the ideas of the philosophes had caused the “coming” of the event. 1 As social and other historians undermined that theory, intellectual historians moved in new directions, particularly toward the social history of ideas. Most visibly, in the 1960s, Robert Darnton and François Furet showed how subversive (even if not actually revolutionary) ideas had seeped into political culture through pornography and porous state borders. 2 Jürgen Habermas enlarged this vision by arguing that a “public sphere” had emerged in France that allowed subversive ideas and practices in various milieus, such as Freemasonry, the growing periodical press, and learned societies. 3 Still, few scholars claimed a direct link between these ideas and revolution.

Nonetheless, scholarly interest in ideas radically sharpened after the publication of François Furet’s Penser la revolution française in 1978, which opened up a new approach to intellectual history. 4 The first half of the book lambasted the Marxist explanation for the Revolution, which Furet labeled a “catechism” with class struggle at its absolute, immutable center. The twentieth-century Marxists who advocated this view saw themselves as the obvious heirs to the founding of the French republic, but Furet dismissed the Marxist interpretation as sheer fabrication.

Having pushed aside class conflict as the Revolution’s central dynamic, Furet succinctly posited his own theory that even before 1789 the monarchy was toothless. Into that power vacuum, sailed Rousseau’s Social Contract , a tract so powerful that its message eclipsed other ideologies and installed a potent logic—the absolute dominance of popular sovereignty. Yet, activating popular sovereignty required an advocate, an individual who could claim to embody the people’s will. Robespierre filled this role admirably, but he also created the potential for individual tyranny far more potent than that of a king whose authority was inherent in his body but surely did not represent the France of millions of people. From this fatal flaw eventually followed the Committee of Public Safety and the Terror. Furet’s theory was novel: by reducing the Revolution to the Terror, and blaming all of it on the logic of popular sovereignty derived from Rousseau, he tied the philosophe directly to the Revolution. Furet’s approach, drawn sharply to make a criticism of the Revolution as well as a scholarly point, was more specific than those that more generally connected the Enlightenment to the Revolution.

Although Furet’s interpretation did much to supplant Marxist and more traditional intellectual interpretations, it was criticized by scholars who contended that Rousseau’s fame had sprung far more from his sentimental writings than from the Social Contract . More recently, however, some scholars have resuscitated Rousseau’s influence. 5 Nonetheless, Furet provided no explanation for the revolutionaries’ acceptance of Rousseauian ideas other than the political vacuum and the rigorous logic springing from Rousseau’s belief that equality had no limits. How could these specific ideas hijack the mindset of a population?

Keith Baker articulated a parallel but different explanation for the acceptance of revolutionary ideology. 6 He put forth the abstract concept that every individual lives in an environment with discourses—ideational resources—that compete for attention. Facing these choices, people rather unconsciously pick and assemble notions that provide concrete solutions to material problems. In 1789, as governmental problems abounded, the elite—particularly dissatisfied elites—adopted three somewhat disparate discourses to frame their response. Baker labeled these three languages justice (opposition to despotism), reason (opposition to political views accepted because of their antiquity), and will (the right to implement enlightened concepts). The discourse of will approximated Furet’s notion of the role of equality and popular sovereignty. Yet Baker departed from Furet’s understanding of the way that ideology worked, adopting a more complex explanation for the creation of revolutionary ideology that included both chance and an alignment with material conditions. Nonetheless, Furet and Baker generally agreed on the important role of ideas or, more precisely, cultural change as a logic for revolution. 7

Continued work by Keith Baker, now collaborating with Dan Edelstein, remains highly visible, thanks in part to the impressive development of Stanford’s Digital Archive. 8 The architecture of the website springs from Edelstein’s and Baker’s priorities, which reflect their own understanding of the Revolution’s origins. Now, with a twenty-first century digital toolbox, Baker, Edelstein, and others at Stanford oversee technologists who are able to create algorithms that help scholars discover word associations, the building blocks for political discourse, on a far grander scale than what was possible even a few years ago. Still more important in extending their view of the power of ideas has been their new book Scripting Revolution , whose introduction confidently asserts that a revolution only assumes that form after being named a revolution. In practice, this theory implies that the French Revolution did not actually begin after the elections and the seizure of the Bastille in 1789 but instead only commenced later that year when Louis-Marie Prudhomme’s periodical Révolutions de Paris published a contemporary history of the events that labeled them revolutionary. Although Baker’s essay on the eighteenth-century use of the term “revolution” indicated the necessity of naming or “scripting,” he asserted this stronger point after Pierre Rétat pointed out Prudhomme’s essay. But what Rétat had begun in a fairly obscure article (that Baker carefully acknowledged and credited), Baker emphatically embraced and applied to all subsequent revolutions. In short, events called for the label; then, the label “revolution” defined subsequent actions. 9

Despite the significant achievements of Furet and Baker in reconceptualizing the intellectual origins of the Revolution, a new paradigm—classical republicanism—has exerted significant influence since 2000, at least in the English-speaking wing of the field. Baker would hardly contest this, it seems to me, since the convergence between the newer notion and his own arguments is considerable. In fact, he and his former student Johnson Kent Wright have done much to introduce this perspective to explain the French Revolution. 10 What neither they nor anyone else has provided is a standard definition of classical republicanism. For the purposes of this essay, one might assert that the essence of the term lies in the Greek and Roman defense of virtue and personal liberty against an empire. In the eighteenth century, according to this view, resistance fell to the nobility, which, motivated by honor, defended a populace that was itself only motivated by interest and largely incapable of taking up this necessary battle.

The ascendance of classical republicanism in accounts of the events of 1788–89 has tended to relegate the emphasis on natural rights (that Baker links to the language of “will”) to the subsequent radicalization of the Revolution. But this relationship was never quite settled, as Rousseau’s Social Contract advocated both republicanism and natural rights. Furthermore, advocates of classical republicanism also had their eye on equality, although they conceived of it more as the ennobling of all rather than leveling. In short, the equality born of natural law was minimized in 1788–89. Equality had proved difficult to accommodate consistently, much less realize, in the early part of revolutionary struggle driven by classical republicanism. 11

Worth noting as an aside is the prescience of two of the canonical works from a previous generation of scholars. Peter Gay clearly recognized the philosophes’ interest in the ancients but focused on their views that castigated religion, while Robert R. Palmer’s “intermediate bodies” are congruent with the resistance of elites, though clearly he imagined a social elite wider than the nobility of classical republicanism. 12

Evidence for how broad has been the reach of classical republicanism as an explanation for revolution are two distinguished studies in the related fields of fiscal policy and the economy. John Shovlin’s book, The Political Economy of Virtue details the debates beginning in the 1740 s between those who favored “virtuous” small producers over the wealthier, parasitic echelons of society. 13 His study depicts a battle between producers on one side and financiers and the comfortable on the other. Contemporaries believed that luxury and profit were derived from the exploitation of honest workers. Shovlin follows this division through the decades of the eighteenth century; though positions evolved, the rich and the oppressed remained opposed. To be sure, the author sometimes resorts to fancy footwork, as some entrepreneurial activities dropped by the rich and adopted by the poor apparently change from despicable to honored simply by virtue of who performed the work. He praises profit well earned by the hands of the poor and attacks that when the rich become the recipients.

During the revolutionary crisis, Shovlin argues, the advocates for the peasantry and the workers seized the upper hand. Dealing with the deficit, their representatives came to believe that piecemeal reforms would not do and the problem at bottom was an excess of luxury. At the center of this attack was Mirabeau, who argued that “speculation creates a false wealth which undermines real sources of riches in agriculture and in commerce.” 14 Further, Shovlin states that patriotism had influenced and shaped how ordinary citizens understood political economy. Although the author seldom acknowledges the link between patriotism and classical republicanism, the rhetoric he uncovers fits neatly with the broader theory of classical republicanism. 15

In his valuable work Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth Century France , Michael Kwass analyzes the resistance to royal taxation that boiled over in the Old Regime and into the Revolution and directly points out the immediate relevance of classical republicanism to the debate. Kwass notes that the contemporary meaning of classical republicanism included a king and “representative bodies” that coexisted in a milieu where a “vigilant” mistrust of authority and hostility to finance were augmented by the embrace of an authentic rustic existence in which virtue reigned. Watchfulness was necessary, even though somewhat powerless against the encroachment of the sovereign. But Kwass believes that Mireabeau, in the long term struggle of this scenario, articulated in 1750–51 the possibility of coexistence. Morally, the king was obliged toward restraint. Royal taxation had produced crises; only an end to arbitrary rule and its replacement could be successful. 16

Decades later, according to Kwass, Jacques Necker mobilized a similar rhetoric. Brought into government to address the deficit, Necker appealed to patriotism rather than duty to the king, whom he advised to encourage public involvement. As Kwass notes: “By publicizing the working of the state . . . both patriotism and public opinion would emerge to guide the nation to reform, stability, and fiscal strength.” 17 Such remarks were more than just a rhetorical similarity to classical republicanism, as shown by a popular engraving, which linked the minister and his fiscal plan to antiquity. Hallmarks of this classical allusion are the cupids who crowned Necker and his policies with garlands. Central to the piece is a monument labeled as a pyramid, whose lettering indicated that taxes linked to the king were to be eliminated, replaced by charity, equity, and abundance. 18

Although classical republican ideals were thus supposed to inhabit the economy and fiscal policy, they were, compared to the rhetoric of the political sphere, limited at best. Jay M. Smith’s provocative Nobility Reimagined asserts that the revolutionaries desired but failed to construct a republic based on the antique values of honor and virtue. The study describes the nobles’ hostility to Louis XIV’s absolutism and their desire to base society on patriotism and political virtue. As Smith notes, the French were familiar with ancient authors such as Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch and “the ‘civic humanism’ idiom that served as an important vehicle for transmitting the values of the ancient republics to the early modern Atlantic world.” 19 The embrace of antiquity fueled the pride of nobles but also reminded them of family heritage and their disproportionate political and economic power. This cauldron yielded a compensatory embrace of virtue.

According to Smith, an increased interest in adding equality to the mix of values emerged at mid-century. In particular, commerce, premised on equality in moral and physical goods, was widely considered valuable. The publication in 1756 of Gabriel-François Coyer’s La Noblesse commerçante , which elevated the dignity of the merchant’s profession, furthered change. The contemporary Pierre Jaubert claimed even more as he asserted that “virtue, valor, zeal for the patrie , probity, ability, talent, experience, scorn for dangers, the honor of becoming a martyr for one’s patrie . . . in short, personal merit, are always hereditary in families.” 20 Smith claimed that such attributes were intended to incorporate commoners into the elite. Antique republicanism was socially expansive. In fact, by the 1760 s, the French had turned to ennobling the nation.

Despite all of these signs of inclusivity, Smith also indicates that many nobles were uneasy with this change. With the Revolution opening the door to unimaginable equality, the nobles asserted their difference, particularly by refusing to double the number of commoner representatives to the Third Estate. This action gave rise to a bitter struggle that animated the Revolution. Despite the ultimate demolition of the ideal of classical republicanism in revolutionary France, the passions ignited in 1788–89 reveal its importance to contemporaries and its relevance to history.

The monarch’s multiple foreign policy failures, the subsistence crises of 1788–89, the credit crunch of the 1780s, and the institutional paralysis that undermined all royal efforts at reform would also need to be integrated into any comprehensive analysis of the causes of the Old Regime’s collapse in 1789. 21

Agreeing with Kwass, Smith argues that in the end, these events and discourses cannot be “easily separated.” 22 Thus, politics and circumstances led to a radical division in which the nobility and the king ended up as the opponents of republican morality. To judge by the work of Shovlin, Kwass, and Smith, the central role of ideas in the complex crises of the late 1780 s seems well established. These scholars have begun to connect classical republicanism to the actions taken during this key historical conjuncture.

Ushered by classical republicanism into a smaller space in the intellectual ferment, the role of natural law requires reevaluation. Scholars who focus on classical republicanism in the origins of the Revolution sometimes imply through offhand remarks that natural law exerted a major impact as the Revolution continued. More work needs to be done to chart natural law and connect it to revolutionary events. Historians’ use of these two separate logics undermines the fundamental coherence of revolutionary thinking and perhaps that of the Enlightenment itself. Whereas classical republicanism is premised on the historic resistance to central control, natural law focuses on human equality, yielding a contradiction—perhaps even a useful one—that still resonates throughout modern politics.

Largely outside the political maelstrom, other ideas flourished. Particularly impressive is the study by Darrin McMahon on the “counter enlightenment,” a group that absorbed some progressive notions. 23 Even more astonishing—as it certainly would have been to Voltaire—has been the work on the Catholic enlightenment. Important new books by Jeffrey Burson and Ulrich Lehner have revivified an effort whose roots lie in R. R. Palmer’s Catholics and Unbelievers , which illuminated the balance of tradition and change. 24 Also relevant in this vein are Alan Kors’s studies of the Catholic Church. In his earliest work on Baron d’Holbach, Kors focused on the loneliness of atheists. More recently, he produced two important books that unequivocally revealed that notions of atheism circulated far more widely than even he earlier imagined. In seeking to reject atheism, the Church amplified the reach of what it sought to repress. 25 A new book by Anton Matysin on scepticism and doubt takes a similar tack. 26 Nonetheless, John Robertson’s persuasive The Case for the Enlightenment concludes that the Enlightenment, linked as it was to critiquing religion, was fundamentally reformist. 27 Nevertheless, none of these books on religious doubt attempt to relate their subjects directly to the upheaval in 1789.

None of these recent approaches seems to have raised the importance of intellectuals to quite the level achieved in France’s sister rebellion in North America. Sophia Rosenfeld has chronicled how Tom Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense , highlighting the acuity and value of the thinking of the common man, galvanized public opinion and incited the North American Revolution. Scholars, including Rosenfeld herself, have found no similar impact on the French Revolution. In fact, counterrevolutionaries actually marshaled the notion of common sense to sway the people against the uprising. The complexity and abstractness of many revolutionary plans created an opportunity for reactionaries to argue that common sense did not embrace, or in fact even respect, revolutionary goals. 28

Nonetheless, scholars, including Jay Smith, have noted the pamphlet war preceding 1788–89, in which Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate? was most visible. 29 William Sewell’s work on Sieyès and Kenneth Margerison’s on pamphlets more generally provide additional evidence for the importance of these texts. 30 Doubtless, these publications could prove to be the most promising place to link the various prerevolutionary languages to the revolutionary plans enacted in Versailles, Paris, and throughout the country, though little evidence exists that the rural population knew much of this exchange among propagandists. Nonetheless, this explosion of print may provide fertile ground to examine the role of ideas.

Entering the crowded arena regarding the intellectual origins of the French Revolution has been Jonathan Israel, who approaches the role of ideas by postulating a direct connection between individual Enlightenment thinkers and specific views that would compete in the Revolution. In this way, Israel is rehabilitating the older approach that focuses not on languages or presuppositions but on on individuals and the power of ideas. Although his work (five books totaling four thousand pages published from 2001 to 2014) could be useful, its combativeness, the overemphases of its argument, and its length all undercut that potential contribution. In fact, his corpus has inspired the most acrimonious debate on the intellectual history of the Revolution in recent years. Largely because of the prominence of this debate, Israel’s work has somewhat obscured the previous decades of more sober, though still contentious scholarship. For this reason, both its arguments and the reactions it has provoked thus require a brief review. 31

To pursue the connection between ideas and the Revolution, Israel sorted the philosophes into two camps. Beginning in the seventeenth century with Spinoza, whose theory denied the spiritual and insisted on atheism, Israel focuses on Spinoza’s belief in “monism,” which held that only one substance (material not spiritual) made up the universe. The philosopher opposed “deists” and others—very prominently Rousseau—who posited a creator who fashioned the universe. From this sharp division, Israel finds two separate logics. The deists, believing in God, held that little could be done to improve on his perfection; monists, holding all matter to be equal, averred that everyone could participate in making life better. In this analysis, the atheists become the source of the moderate, incremental revolution, while the religious appear as political fanatics and authors of the Terror.

Israel presents his thesis forcibly, and the rebuttals have shown similar intensity. Although Furet attacked the Marxists and offended others by insisting that the Jacobin dictatorship was the logical end of the Revolution, even that of 1789, Israel undertakes a far larger, even compulsive effort to organize the Revolution around his Manichaean notion and refute other interpretations.

A storm of criticism greeted Israel’s work. 32 Kent Wright, Carolina Armenteros, Keith Baker, and Harvey Chisick found much to criticize and little to praise in the book. Israel seemingly found it impossible to acknowledge any of their critiques, which he completely rejected. For an example, consider the interchange between Baker and Israel. As author of the iconic biography of Condorcet, Baker had noted that that philosophe did not even include Spinoza in his narrative of human progress. Such a challenge to Israel’s linkages led the latter to remark condescendingly that this could “conceivably” be right, but nonetheless, the two philosophes still strongly shared goals. 33

Possibly, Israel’s resistance to criticism accounts for even more critical reviews that followed, by highly distinguished scholars Lynn Hunt, Jeremy Popkin, and David Bell. 34 In his review, Bell remarked that “Israel, in some remarkably cavalier pages, treats . . . popular actions almost with annoyance. . . . He takes no interest in the common people’s culture.” Israel’s unwillingness to engage with the work of other scholars piqued Lynn Hunt who derided his one-sided accounts: “Israel’s palette is too black and white for . . . subtleties. He is always right, and so are his heroes.” 35

Despite all its faults, Israel’s work does suggest the value in plumbing the ideas of individual intellectual predecessors of the French Revolution. Though few will follow his precise path, a focus on the use of ideas, from the Greeks to the physiocrats, could help illuminate the intellectual history of the revolutionary maelstrom. With this narrower focus, scholars just might be able to supplement the interplay of discourses and embedded presuppositions by seeing ideas at work among intellectuals.

The author wishes to thank Jane Turner Censer and Gary Kates for their advice and assistance.

See, for example, Edmund Burke’s early assertions in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; rept. ed., Garden City, NY, 1961), first published in 1790.

Over the last several decades, Robert Darnton and François Furet have published numerous works in this area. See especially, Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-revolutionary France (New York, 1995); and François Furet et al., Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1965–70), 2 vols.

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger (Boston, MA, 1993). See also Ran Halévi, Les Loges maçonniques dans la France d’Ancien Régime: Aux origins de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris, 1984).

François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution , trans. Elborg Forster (New York, 1981).

See for example, Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1986); and more recently, Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, & the French Revolution (Chicago, 2010). See below for a discussion of Jonathan Israel’s work.

Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990).

For an even more poignant criticism of the role of ideas, consult Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution , trans Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 67–91. Chartier argues that “books” do not make revolutions; rather it is the cultural act of reading that possesses power.

The website can be found at: https://frda.stanford.edu .

Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolution (Stanford, CA, 2015). See Rétat’s article, “Forme et discours d’un journal Révolutionnaire: Les Révolutions de Paris en 1789,” in Claude Labrosse, Pierre Rétat, and Henri Duranton, L’Instrument périodique: La function de la presse au XVIIIe siècle (Lyon, France, 1985), 139–66. One can see Baker’s use of the article in Scripting Revolution , 96–97. Baker was even more emphatic on this point in a discussion at a conference at Haifa University in 1989.

Keith Michael Baker, “A Script for a French Revolution: The Political Consciousness of the Abbé Mably,” in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); and Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, CA, 1997). See also Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester, England, 2010). For more on the mixture of natural law and the right to resist overweening monarchs in the Atlantic world, consult Jack R. Censer, Debating Modern Revolution: The Evolution of Revolutionary Ideas (London, 2016), 7–52.

Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right .

Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation , 2 vols. (New York, 1967, 1969); and R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 , 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1959, 1964).

John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2006). Marisa Linton, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (New York, 2001); Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY, 2008).

Shovlin, The Political Economy , 171.

Henry C. Clark, Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old Regime France (Lanham, MD, 2007) shows how resistance and accommodation limited at first the liberty of both producers and polity. However, it must be said that such values triumphed as the nineteenth century rolled along. In fact, James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2001) argues persuasively that already in the Directory (1795–99), both liberal economy and politics had revived, if only briefly before dominating in a later period.

Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000), 234–38.

Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation , 251.

Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation , 245.

Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 32.

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 133.

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 265.

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 266.

Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2001).

Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (South Bend, IN, 2010); Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (New York, 2016); and R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France (Princeton, NJ, 1939).

Alan Charles Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, 1976); Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge, 2016); and Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge, 2016).

Anton M. Matysin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD, 2016).

John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). In fact, in his The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2015), 116, Robertson goes farther to note that “the Revolution was the antithesis of Enlightenment.”

Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 255–57. Of course, Peter Gay found group solidarity in the eighteenth-century philosophes in his The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1964).

William H. Sewell, Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC, 1994); and Kenneth Margerison, Pamphlets & Public Opinion: The Campaign for a Union of Orders in the Early French Revolution (West Lafayette, IN, 1998).

Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006); A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010); Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011); and Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton, 2014).

H-France Forum 9, no. 1 (Winter 2014).

H-France Forum 9, no. 1, 80.

This paragraph is based on the following reviews and responses: David A. Bell, “A Very Different French Revolution,” New York Review of Books (July 10, 2014); Jonathan Israel, “The French Revolution: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books , October 10, 2014; Lynn Hunt, “Louis XVI Wasn’t Killed by Ideas,” New Republic , June 27, 2014; Jonathan Israel and Lynn Hunt, “Was Louis XVI Overthrown by Ideas?” New Republic , July 31, 2014; Jeremy D. Popkin, “Review of Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas,” H-France Review 15, no. 66 (May 2015); Jonathan Israel, “Response to Jeremy Popkin’s Review, H-France Review 15, no. 67 (May 2015).

Bell, “A Very Different French Revolution,” 2; Hunt, “Louis XVI,” 8.

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The execution of Robespierre and his accomplices, 17 July 1794 (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. Photo courtesy the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Vive la révolution!

Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence the french revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale.

by Jeremy Popkin + BIO

If the French Revolution of 1789 was such an important event, visitors to France’s capital city of Paris often wonder, why can’t they find any trace of the Bastille, the medieval fortress whose storming on 14 July 1789 was the revolution’s most dramatic moment? Determined to destroy what they saw as a symbol of tyranny, the ‘victors of the Bastille’ immediately began demolishing the structure. Even the column in the middle of the busy Place de la Bastille isn’t connected to 1789: it commemorates those who died in another uprising a generation later, the ‘July Revolution’ of 1830.

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 of 1776, the French in 1789 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. The United States Declaration of Independence briefly mentioned rights to ‘liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness’, without explaining what they meant or how they were to be realised. The French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ spelled out the rights that comprised liberty and equality and outlined a system of participatory government that would empower citizens to protect their own rights.

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. Initially, the revolutionaries decided that ‘nature’ denied women political rights and that ‘imperious necessity’ dictated the maintenance of slavery in France’s overseas colonies, whose 800,000 enslaved labourers outnumbered the 670,000 in the 13 American states in 1789.

As the revolution proceeded, however, its legislators took more radical steps. A law redefining marriage and legalising divorce in 1792 granted women equal rights to sue for separation and child custody; by that time, women had formed their own political clubs, some were openly serving in the French army, and Olympe de Gouges’s eloquent ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman’ had insisted that they should be allowed to vote and hold office. Women achieved so much influence in the streets of revolutionary Paris that they drove male legislators to try to outlaw their activities. At almost the same time, in 1794, faced with a massive uprising among the enslaved blacks in France’s most valuable Caribbean colony, Saint-Domingue, the French National Convention abolished slavery and made its former victims full citizens. Black men were seated as deputies to the French legislature and, by 1796, the 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 1804.

The French Revolution’s initiatives concerning women’s rights and slavery are just two examples of how the French revolutionaries experimented with radical new ideas about the meaning of liberty and equality that are still relevant. 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 1789 also showed the dangers inherent in trying to remake an entire society overnight. The French revolutionaries were the first to grant the right to vote to all adult men, but they were also the first to grapple with democracy’s shadow side, demagogic populism, and with the effects of an explosion of ‘new media’ that transformed political communication. 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. In 1792, 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. Five years after the end of the Terror, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had gained fame as a result of the war, led the first modern coup d’état , justifying it, like so many strongmen since, by claiming that only an authoritarian regime could guarantee social order.

The fact that Napoleon reversed the revolutionaries’ expansion of women’s rights and reintroduced slavery in the French colonies reminds us that he, like so many of his imitators in the past two centuries, defined ‘social order’ as a rejection of any expansive definition of liberty and equality. Napoleon also abolished meaningful elections, ended freedom of the press, and restored the public status of the Catholic Church. Determined to keep and even expand the revolutionaries’ foreign conquests, he continued the war that they had begun, but French armies now fought to create an empire, dropping any pretence of bringing freedom to other peoples.

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 Revolution (2020), the 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. The American Founding Fathers whose refusal to consider granting rights to women or ending slavery we now rightly question did have the good sense not to let their differences turn into murderous feuds; none of them had to reflect, as the French legislator Pierre Vergniaud did on the eve of his execution, that their movement, ‘like Saturn, is devouring its own children’.

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. In my book, I introduce readers to a character, the ‘Père Duchêne’, who came to represent the populist impulses of the revolution. Nowadays, we would call the Père Duchêne a meme. He was not a real person: instead, he was a character familiar to audiences in Paris’s popular theatres, where he functioned as a representative of the country’s ordinary people. Once the revolution began, a number of journalists began publishing pamphlets supposedly written by the Père Duchêne, in which they demanded that the National Assembly do more to benefit the poor. The small newspapers that used his name carried a crude woodcut on their front page showing the Père Duchêne in rough workers’ clothing. Holding a hatchet over his head, with two pistols stuck in his belt and a musket at his side, the Père 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. The sixth article of that document affirmed that ‘the law is the expression of the general will’ and promised that ‘all citizens have the right to participate personally, or through their representatives, in its establishment’. The fictitious Père Duchêne’s message to readers, no matter how poor and uneducated they might be, was that an ordinary person could claim a voice in politics.

Like present-day populists, the Père Duchêne had a simple political programme. The elites who ruled France before 1789 had enriched themselves at the expense of the people. They needed to be forced to share their power and wealth. When the revolution did not immediately improve the lives of the masses, the Père Duchêne blamed the movement’s more moderate leaders, accusing them of exploiting it for their own benefit. The journalists who wrote under the name of the Père Duchêne used colourful language laced with obscenities; they insisted that their vulgarity showed that they were ‘telling it like it is’. 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. At the height of the Reign of Terror, he pushed through the creation of a ‘revolutionary army’ controlled by his friends to intimidate enemies of the revolution, and seemed on the verge of taking over the government.

Maximilien Robespierre and his more middle-class colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety feared that Hébert’s populist movement might drive them from power. They decided that they had no choice but to confront Hébert and his followers, even if it meant alienating the ‘base’ of ordinary Paris residents, the famous sans-culottes . 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 1794 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.

T he ambivalent legacy of the French Revolution’s democratic impulse, so vividly brought to life in the figure of the Père Duchêne, underlines the way in which the movement begun in 1789 remains both an inspiration and a warning for us today. In the more than 200 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.

Robespierre is remembered because he was the most eloquent defender of the dictatorship created during the revolution’s most radical period, the months known as the Reign of Terror. Robespierre’s speech on the principles of revolutionary government, delivered on 25 December 1793, made an uncompromising case for the legitimacy of extreme measures to defeat those he called ‘the enemies of liberty’. Paradoxically, he insisted, the only way to create a society in which citizens could exercise the individual freedoms promised in the Declaration of Rights was to suspend those rights until the revolution’s opponents were conclusively defeated.

Robespierre’s colleagues on the all-powerful Committee of Public Safety chose him to defend their policies because he was more than just a spokesman for harsh measures against their opponents. From the time he first appeared on the scene as one of the 1,200 deputies to the Estates General summoned by Louis XVI in May 1789, his fellow legislators recognised the young provincial lawyer’s intelligence and his unswerving commitment to the ideals of democracy. The renegade aristocrat the comte de Mirabeau, the most prominent spokesman of the revolutionary ‘patriots’ in 1789 but an often cynical pragmatist, quickly sized up his colleague: ‘That man will go far, because he believes everything he says.’ Unlike the Père Duchêne, Robespierre always dressed carefully and spoke in pure, educated French. Other revolutionary leaders, like the rabblerousing orator Georges Danton, were happy to join insurrectionary crowds in the streets; Robespierre never personally took part in any of the French Revolution’s explosions of violence. Yet no one remains more associated with the violence of the Reign of Terror than Robespierre.

To reduce Robespierre’s legacy to his association with the Terror is to overlook the importance of his role as a one of history’s most articulate proponents of political democracy. When the majority of the deputies in France’s revolutionary National Assembly tried to restrict full political rights to the wealthier male members of the population, Robespierre reminded them of the Declaration of Rights’ assertion that freedom meant the right to have a voice in making the laws that citizens had to obey. ‘Is the law the expression of the general will, when the greater number of those for whom it is made cannot contribute to its formation?’ he asked. Long before our present-day debates about income inequality, he denounced a system that put real political power in the hands of the wealthy: ‘And what an aristocracy! The most unbearable of all, that of the rich.’ In the early years of the revolution, Robespierre firmly defended freedom of the press and called for the abolition of the death penalty. When white colonists insisted that France could not survive economically without slavery, Robespierre cried out: ‘Perish the colonies rather than abandon a principle!’

The majority of the population was not ready to embrace a radical secularist movement

Explaining how Robespierre, the principled defender of liberty and equality, became in just a few short years the leading advocate of a system of revolutionary government that foreshadowed the 20th century’s totalitarian dictatorships is perhaps the greatest challenge in defending the legacy of the French Revolution. 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 Père 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. In 1792, when most of his fellow Jacobin radicals embraced the call for a revolutionary war to ensure France’s security by toppling the hostile monarchies surrounding it, Robespierre warned against the illusion that other peoples would turn against their own governments to support the French. ‘No one loves armed missionaries,’ he insisted, a warning that recent US leaders might have done well to heed.

When radicals such as Hébert started a campaign to ‘de-Christianise’ France, in order to silence opposition to the movement’s effort to reform the Catholic Church and sell off its property for the benefit of the revolution, Robespierre reined them in. He recognised that the majority of the population was not ready to embrace a radical secularist movement bent on turning churches into ‘temples of reason’ and putting up signs in cemeteries calling death ‘an eternal sleep’. Robespierre proposed instead the introduction of a purified and simplified ‘cult of the Supreme Being’, which he thought believers could embrace without abandoning their faith in a higher power and their belief in the immortality of the soul.

Robespierre knew that many of the revolution’s bitterest opponents were motivated by loyalty to the Catholic Church. The revolution had not begun as an anti-religious movement. Under the rules used in the elections to what became the French National Assembly in 1789, a fourth of all the deputies were clergy from the Catholic Church, an institution so woven into the fabric of the population’s life that hardly anyone could imagine its disappearance. Criticism that the Church had grown too wealthy and that many of its beliefs failed to measure up to the standards of reason promoted by the Enlightenment was widespread, even among priests, but most hoped to see religion, like every other aspect of French life, ‘regenerated’ by the impulses of the revolution, not destroyed.

The revolutionaries’ confrontation with the Church began, not with an argument about beliefs, but because of the urgent need to meet the crisis in government revenues that had forced king Louis XVI to summon a national assembly in the first place. Determined to avoid a chaotic public bankruptcy, and reluctant to raise taxes on the population, the legislators decided, four months after the storming of the Bastille, to put the vast property of the Catholic Church ‘at the disposition of the nation’. 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. 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. In one region of France, peasants formed a ‘Catholic and Royal Army’ and revolted against the revolution that had supposedly been carried out for their benefit. 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 of 1792, justified 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 that fuelled the Reign of Terror. Awash in a sea of ‘fake news’, political leaders and ordinary citizens lost any sense of perspective, and became increasingly ready to believe even the most far-fetched accusations. Robespierre, whose personal honesty had earned him the nickname ‘The Incorruptible’, was particularly quick to suspect any of his colleagues who seemed ready to tolerate those who enriched themselves from the revolution or had contacts with foreigners. Rather than any lust for power, it was Robespierre’s weakness for seeing any disagreement with him as a sign of corruption that led him to support the elimination of numerous other revolutionary leaders, including figures, such as Danton, who had once been his close allies. 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.

Although the toxic politics of its most radical phase did much to discredit the revolution, the ‘Reign of Terror’, which lasted little more than one year out of 10 between the storming of the Bastille and Napoleon’s coup d’état , was also a time of important experiments in democracy. 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, 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 before.

Among the men from modest backgrounds who rose to positions they could never have attained before 1789 was a young artillery officer whose strong Corsican accent marked him as a provincial: Napoleon. A mere lieutenant when the Bastille was stormed, he was promoted to general just four years later, after impressing Robespierre’s brother Augustin with his skill in defeating a British invasion force on France’s southern coast. Five years after the overthrow of Robespierre on 27 July 1794 – 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. Napoleon’s seizure of power has been cited ever since as evidence that the French Revolution, unlike the American, was essentially a failure. The French revolutionaries, it is often said, had tried to make too many changes too quickly, and the movement’s violence had alienated too much of the population to allow it to succeed.

To accept this verdict on the French Revolution is to ignore a crucial but little-known aspect of its legacy: the way in which the movement’s own leaders, determined to escape from the destructive politics of the Reign of Terror after Robespierre’s death, worked to ‘exit from the Terror’, as one historian has put it, and create a stable form of constitutional government. The years that history books call the period of the ‘Thermidorian reaction’ and the period of the Directory, from July 1794 to November 1799, comprise half of the decade of the French Revolution. 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 of 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. In death, Robespierre was built up into a ‘tiger thirsty for blood’ who had supposedly wanted to make himself a dictator or even king. All too aware that, in reality, thousands of others had helped to make the revolutionary government function, however, Robespierre’s successors found themselves under pressure to bring at least some of the Terror’s other leaders to justice. At times, the process escaped from control, as when angry crowds massacred political prisoners in cities in the south during a ‘white terror’ in 1795. On the whole, however, the republican leaders after 1794 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.

For five years after Robespierre’s execution, France lived under a quasi-constitutional system, in which laws were debated by a bicameral legislature and discussed in a relatively free press. On several occasions, it is true, the Directory, the five-man governing council, ‘corrected’ the election results to ensure its own hold on power, undermining the authority of the constitution, but the mass arrests and arbitrary trials that had marked the Reign of Terror were not repeated. The Directory’s policies enabled the country’s economy to recover after the disorder of the revolutionary years. Harsh toward the poor who had identified themselves with the Père Duchêne, it consolidated the educational reforms started during the Terror. Napoleon would build on the Directory’s success in establishing a modern, centralised system of administration. 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. 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; by 1798, he had been named the governor of the colony. His power was so great that the American government, by this time locked in a ‘quasi-war’ with France, negotiated directly with him, hoping to bring pressure on Paris to end the harassment of American merchant ships in the Caribbean.

The post-Robespierre French republic was brought down, more than anything else, by the disloyalty of its own political elite. Even before Napoleon unexpectedly returned from the expedition to Egypt on which he had been dispatched in mid-1798, many of the regime’s key figures had decided that the constitution they themselves had helped to draft after Robespierre’s fall provided too many opportunities for rivals to challenge them. What Napoleon found in the fall of 1799 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.

One cannot simply conclude, then, that the history of the French Revolution proves that radical attempts to change society are doomed to failure, or that Napoleon’s dictatorship was the inevitable destination at which the revolution was doomed to arrive. 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 privileged elites but also many ordinary men and women – could resist those ideas, and how dangerous the impatience of their own supporters could become. Robespierre’s justification of dictatorial methods to overcome the resistance to the revolution had a certain logic behind it, but it opened the door to many abuses.

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 1789.

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The French Revolution, Essay Example

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French Revolution refers to a strenuous period of drastic social and political changes, which occurred in France. It was a period where France as a country underwent social, political, and economic cataclysms. These changes resulted in an aggravated leadership of a long existent monarch. It all began in 1789 with a meeting of the generals of state in May took place. During the same year, there was a planned attack on Bastille. The royal family together with Louis suffered ejections from Versailles to Paris. A legislative council held several meetings grounded on curbing the storming unrest in the country. However, this was an unsuccessful venture. This legislative council was later replaced by the national convention through an allied army of Holland, Prussia, Australia, and Sardinia. The national convention took hold of and reclaimed the republic. What followed was the capture and execution of the king in 1793. Because of this, the revolutionary government went on war with Britain. This war is presumed to have started, reignited and was presumed to continue for several years.

After the execution of the president, there were several committees established as the committee of the revolutionary tribunal and safety to the public. In 1793, the reign of terror came into action. This followed a period of ruthless operations by the ruling splinter group. All these actions were objected to exterminate every probable enemy to the nation. It was a merciless action as enemies were exterminated irrespective of their age, sex and any other condition whether meritorious or awful. This lasted up to 1794. During this period of the red terror, several people were guillotined. For instance, about fourteen hundred people underwent this action in Paris alone. The national convention was later subsequently replaced by other parties as the directory and the consulate. What followed was the ushering in of Napoleon Bonaparte who took over in 1804.

The 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 British governments in various perspectives as in the field of intellect, political life, and philosophical establishments. All these activities took place and formed the history of the nineteenth century being studied today. It had other notable significance that extended to the outside leaders as the English radicals. They perceived the French revolution as a fight for power between the superstitious and leaders of reason. It was a triumph for leaders of reason. What English leaders perceived was the return of humanity to a state that had been swayed away by a belief in perfection. Forces of liberals were also felt because they condemned the act based on actions against equity, fraternity, and liberty.

The French revolution also had its significance being responded to by other nations. Existing regimes in England had previously allied themselves to the leaders of reason as Locke and Newton. Publications were made and spread across Europe for people to read every reason for and against this revolution. It received enthusiastic reflections from other leaders of the world as George the third. According to Burke, the leaders who had participated in the genesis of this war had several hidden agendas. They wanted to start a conquest among themselves, which would later extent to the borders and cross to Europe. Moreover, this conquest had been planned to conquer the entire world, hence benefiting them. Responses to these connotations kept arising, hence raging the subconscious of the entire world to date. Parties in confute were the conservatives and the radicals (Carlyle 1857).

Sociological perceptions

The French revolution left a variance of legacies to many societies in the world. It left enormous amounts of attentions on history and development of human societies. The public together with scholars and academics benefit a lot from the study and exploration of the French revolution. Several human groups elicit varied perceptions and reflections on the French revolution. For instance, historians lean towards ideological perceptions of the revolution. However, this is contrary to the real development of revolution in the old France. According to Alexis de Tocqueville, social importance was a serious issue concerning the French revolution. The prosperous middle class had realized its importance and contributions to the present human society. According to Edmund Burke, the revolution emerged because of selfish intentions by the few individuals. They took advantage of the weaknesses portrayed by the masses and decided to benefit themselves by starting the conquest. Moreover, other thinkers had their thoughts narrowed to social exemplifications that could only benefit the society.

In conclusion, French revolution is one of the world’s memorable conquests that touch on socialism. Historically speaking, French revolution is perceived as a stepping-stone that marked an end to the old human era and ushered in the modern one. Democratic ideals emerged and spread throughout Europe. The Russian resolution benefited from the ordeals that oscillated around French revolution. Moreover, genesis of a modern society can be perceived as a replication of the French revolution.

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How Did the American Revolution Influence the French Revolution?

By: Julie Marks

Updated: June 13, 2023 | Original: May 1, 2018

When American colonists won independence from Great Britain in the Revolutionary War , the French, who participated in the war themselves, were both close allies and key participants.

Several years after the revolt in America, French reformers faced political, social and economic hardships that mirrored the colonists’ struggles. While the French Revolution was a complex conflict with numerous triggers and causes, the American Revolution set the stage for an effective uprising that the French had observed firsthand.

The Revolutions Shared Similar Causes

Although the French and American people had several distinct and differing motives for revolting against their ruling governments, some similar causes led to both revolutions, including the following:

Economic struggles: Both the Americans and French dealt with a taxation system they found discriminating and unfair. Additionally, France’s involvement in the American Revolution, along with extravagant spending practices by King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette , left the country on the verge of bankruptcy.

Monarchy: Although the American colonists had lived in a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system, they revolted against the royal powers of King George III just like the French rose up against Louis XVI.

Unequal rights: Like the American colonists, the French felt that specific rights were only granted to certain segments of society, namely the elite and aristocrats.

Enlightenment Philosophy Was a Major Influence

Many experts believe that the same ideologies that sparked the American Revolution had long percolated through French culture.

During the war in North American colonies, some allied Frenchmen fought side by side with soldiers of the Continental Army, which allowed for the exchanging of values, ideas and philosophies.

One key ideological movement, known as the Enlightenment , was central to the American uprising. Enlightenment stressed the idea of natural rights and equality for all citizens.

The ideas of the Enlightenment flowed from Europe to the North American continent and sparked a revolution that made enlightened thought all the more popular back across the Atlantic.

The Declaration of Independence Became a Template for the French

The French who had direct contact with the Americans were able to successfully implement Enlightenment ideas into a new political system.

The National Assembly in France even used the American Declaration of Independence as a model when drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789.

Much like the American document, the French declaration included Enlightenment principles, such as equal rights and popular sovereignty.

Americans' Victory Encouraged the French

The Americans’ victory over the British may have been one of the greatest catalysts for the French Revolution.

The French people saw that a revolt could be successful—even against a major military power–and that lasting change was possible. Many experts argue that this gave them the motivation to rebel. The newly-formed government of the United States also became a model for French reformers.

Ideas that were once just abstract thoughts—such as popular sovereignty, natural rights, constitutional checks and balances and separation of powers—were now part of an actual political system that worked.

What Was the Extent of America’s Influence?

Though most historians agree that the American Revolution influenced the French Revolution, which lasted from 1789-1799, some scholars debate the significance and extent of its impact.

France, a country on the verge of financial collapse with an outdated feudal system and a wildly unpopular monarchy, was a powder keg waiting to explode, with or without the American war to serve as an example.

Other political, social and religious factors also activated the French people’s appetite for change.

Though there were clear differences between the motives for each revolt and how the two wars were fought, most experts believe that the war in America at least partly paved the way for France’s own uprising. The Americans provided a working model of revolutionary success that cannot have been lost on the French.

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University of Kentucky

University of Kentucky ®

The Revolution Will Be Digitized: One-of-a-Kind French Revolution Publications Now Available Through ExploreUK

University of Kentucky Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center is home to a remarkable collection that may drive Kentuckians to defend – or decapitate – a king.

The French Revolution Publications Collection consists of nearly 5000 political bulletins, printed from the beginning of the long and bloody French Revolution through the ascendancy of Napoleon Bonaparte, which have been recently digitized and made accessible to researchers around the world.

An unknown curator who lived during the period collected these bulletins and bound them into 27 volumes, grouping them by title and arranging them chronologically during the years 1790-1802, as reflected in a magnificent handwritten index . The full set contains 28 volumes, though one was missing when UK Libraries purchased the collection in the 1990s.

“Whoever did the initial curating represented all sides of the conflict – which is very unusual,” said Library Imaging Specialist Crystal Heis , who oversaw the digitization of the bulletins and meticulously created metadata for each of them last year. “And as a collection, it is absolutely one-of-a-kind.”

Prior to Heis’s work, the 27 volumes had only been cataloged at the collection level. By creating metadata for each of the individual bulletins within each volume, they are now far more discoverable to researchers.

Before the Revolution, only a handful of official newspapers and journals could circulate in France, but within a year of the explosive events of 1789, with the royal censorship system in disarray, that number had ballooned to 300. Over the next ten years, some 1,600 different newspapers would be established – most of which were operated by single or small groups of individuals and in existence for a very short time.

It is these short-lived, limited-run publications that make UK Libraries’ collection so unique.

While creating metadata for the individual titles in the collection, Heis looked for guidance to other libraries and archives who might have similar publications. “To my great surprise, I could not find records for many of these bulletins in other institutions, including in the French National Library ,” she said. “It’s possible that additional copies of some of these bulletins exist in small private archives, but these are likely the only remaining copies of what would have been small issues of ephemeral papers. The SCRC is certainly the one place in which they are publicly accessible.”

In consultation with Rare Books Librarian Colleen Barrett , Heis labored through the thousands of pages in the collection, creating metadata for each bulletin in all 27 volumes, a process which took nearly a year.

Produced in a time of remarkable social chaos – passing through multiple insurrections, the abolition of the monarchy and the beheading of King Louis XVI, the bloody Reign of Terror, and finally the military coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte – the bulletins reflect the chaos that they capture in ways that pose a peculiar challenge to orderly cataloging.

For example, the collection contains two bulletins titled "Le Véridique” (“The Truthful’), printed across overlapping dates, but which are clearly two different publications.

A group of editors had split from the original “Le Véridique,” explained Heis, and began printing their own paper – while using the same title and sending it to the same subscriber list. An indignant letter from the editor alerts his readers of this chicanery and urges them to remain faithful to the true "Le Véridique"

In other cases, titles of the same bulletin might change from one month to the next, only to change back again.

“We have to remember that this was a period of time in which harboring and publishing certain opinions could get you beheaded,” said Heis. "It was an extremely risky environment for publishers, and publication runs might end rather abruptly.” In one case an editor explained that he would no longer be publishing because his life had been threatened. “You will not know me,” he wrote, “I am the wind."

Another challenge to the cataloging process is that the French Revolution had its own dating system: the French Republican Calendar , made up of 12 months of 30 days each, with weeks lasting 10 days. The months have highly poetic names like Prairial (the Month of Meadows, May 20 to June 18), Brumiaire (the Month of Fog, Oct. 22 to Nov. 20) and Ventose (the Month of Wind, Feb. 19 to Mar. 20), and the year includes five “complementary days” in late September.

“Some publications listed the dates in both the Gregorian and the French Republican Calendars, and some were only dated in the latter. It poses a serious challenge – how do I best represent ‘22 Prairial Year II’ in our metadata?”

Though by no means a royalist, Heis opted for Gregorian dating – and after the year-long labor of love, translating dates, tracking changing titles, and teasing out complexities, it was an immense relief to see the collection go live.

“The function of the archives is two-fold: to save materials, and to make them accessible,” said Heis. “This collection can give scholars of the French Revolution access to materials that may have never been studied before. It’s a real joy to know that these are now available to a global audience, who can read opinions and viewpoints from everyday observers that were almost lost forever.”

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French revolution: cyclists now outnumber motorists in paris.

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Parisians rides their bicycles near the Eiffel Tower. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)

Official measurements have found that Paris is rapidly becoming a city of transportation cyclists. The survey of how people now move in Paris was conducted with GPS trackers by academics from L’Institut Paris Région, the largest urban planning and environmental agency in Europe.

The institute’s transportation report was published on April 4. It found that the way Parisians are now traveling from the suburbs to the city center, especially during peak periods, has undergone a revolution thanks in part to the building of many miles of cycleways.

Those cyclists now on the streets and roads of central Paris are not Spandex-clad professionals as seen on the Tour de France but everyday transportation cyclists.

L’Institut Paris Région carried out the survey for a consortium of fourteen public and private partners, including local government and rail companies.

Reporting on the institute’s survey , French TV channel 20 Minutes told viewers that the “capital’s cycle paths are always full.”

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Between October 2022 and April 2023, 3,337 Parisians aged 16 to 80 years old were equipped with GPS trackers to record their journeys for seven consecutive days. In the suburbs, where public transit is less dense, transport by car was found to be the main form of mobility. But for journeys from the outskirts of Paris to the center, the number of cyclists now far exceeds the number of motorists, a huge change from just five years ago. Most of the journeys recorded were commuter trips.

The city’s socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has pushed through a great many anti-motoring measures during her two administrations—such as reducing the number of parking places, restricting access by SUVs, and closing some major roads to motorists—and the latest survey will be validation for her policies, none of which have caused the kind of protests that the French capital has long been famous for.

In short, culling cars has been far more popular than her petrolhead critics predicted, with Paris becoming cleaner and healthier to boot.

Notably, and without the spread of conspiracy theories common outside of France, Paris is also putting into practice the home-grown concept of the “15-minute city,” creating urban areas where access to amenities is close and hence there’s less need to drive.

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119 French Revolution Essay Topics & Research Examples. French Revolution essay is a popular task in colleges and universities. As such, you should know what you are expected to write when given this topic. For example, discuss the worldwide context in which the Revolution took place.
PDF The Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution
The French Revolution of 1789 had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the legal and economic
French Revolution
The French Revolution (1789-1799) was a period of major societal and political upheaval in France. It witnessed the collapse of the monarchy, the establishment of the First French Republic, and culminated in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the start of the Napoleonic era. The French Revolution is considered one of the defining events of Western history.
French Revolution
French Revolution, revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and reached its first climax there in 1789—hence the conventional term "Revolution of 1789," denoting the end of the ancien régime in France and serving also to distinguish that event from the later French revolutions of 1830 and 1848.. Origins of the Revolution. The French Revolution had general causes ...
The French Revolution (1789-1799): Suggested Essay Topics
Suggested Essay Topics. 1 . To what extent was the French nobility responsible for the crisis that destroyed the ancien régime? 2 . What role did women play in the Revolution? Were they simply a reactionary force—as when bread shortages prompted a march on Versailles—or an active part of the revolutionary public? 3 .
The French Revolution
Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. This is one of the best studies of the impact of Rousseau's political philosophy on the French Revolution. de Tocqueville, Alexis. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert.
French Revolution: Timeline, Causes & Dates
The French Revolution began in 1789. Soon, the Bastille was stormed and the monarchy eliminated. After the Reign of Terror, France established a new government.
The French Revolution as a World-Historical Event
bourgeoisie. Ergo, the French Revolution is simply the moment 1 The so-called Atlantic thesis is an amalgam of these two perspectives, although it was presented initially prior to the revisionist work. The Atlantic thesis is that the French Revolution was both bourgeois and antidespotic. It is furthermore
Home · LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION
For a deeper, contextual understanding of the French Revolution as a whole, this site provides a series of essays and links to external resources that cover all the main developments from 1787-1815. Alongside summaries of the revolution's major periods, the essays also include more in-depth explorations of subjects ranging from women's ...
The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution
Abstract. This text offers a comprehensive overview of the varied historiographical landscape of the French Revolution. Contributions consider in detail the intersection of longstanding debates and recent groundbreaking research, ranging from the social, economic and demographic shifts underpinning the condition of France in the 1780s, through the varied international contexts of the ...
Nationalism in the French Revolution of 1789
Abstract. The French Revolution of 1789 was instrumental in the emergence and growth of. modern nationalism, the idea that a state should represent, and serve the interests of, a. people, or "nation," that shares a common culture and history and feels as one. But.
Inventing the French Revolution
Analyzing the new politics of contestation that transformed the traditional political culture of the Old Regime during its last decades, Baker revises our historical map of the political space in which the French Revolution took form. Some essays study the ways in which the revolutionaries' break with the past was prepared by competition ...
Intellectual History and the Causes of the French Revolution
Many histories of the French Revolution, beginning with those written in the era itself, assumed, almost axiomatically, that the ideas of the philosophes had caused the "coming" of the event. 1 As social and other historians undermined that theory, intellectual historians moved in new directions, particularly toward the social history of ideas. . Most visibly, in the 1960s, Robert Darnton ...
What can we learn from the French Revolution today?
The French Revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale. The execution of Robespierre and his accomplices, 17 July 1794 (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. Photo courtesy the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution: The French
4 Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution: The French Revolution and after; 5 Surviving military revolution: The U.S. Civil War; 6 The Prusso-German RMA, 1840-1871; 7 The battlefleet revolution, 1885-1914; 8 The First World War and the birth of modern warfare; 9 May 1940: Contingency and fragility of the German RMA
Tyranny Plagued the French Revolution
This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors College and Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at CCU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized ... Prior to the French Revolution of 1789 the government administration ruling over the country was referred to as the Ancien Regime ...
The French Revolution, Essay Example
French Revolution refers to a strenuous period of drastic social and political changes, which occurred in France. It was a period where France as a country underwent social, political, and economic cataclysms. These changes resulted in an aggravated leadership of a long existent monarch. It all began in 1789 with a meeting of the generals of ...
How Did the American Revolution Influence the French Revolution
Though most historians agree that the American Revolution influenced the French Revolution, which lasted from 1789-1799, some scholars debate the significance and extent of its impact. France, a ...
The Revolution Will Be Digitized: One-of-a-Kind French Revolution
Another challenge to the cataloging process is that the French Revolution had its own dating system: the French Republican Calendar, made up of 12 months of 30 days each, with weeks lasting 10 days. The months have highly poetic names like Prairial (the Month of Meadows, May 20 to June 18), Brumiaire (the Month of Fog, Oct. 22 to Nov. 20) and ...
DBQ FOCUS: The French Revolution
Historical Context: The French Revolution (1789-1814-including Napoleon's reign) was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France that had a lasting impact on French history and more broadly throughout Europe. Political, social, and economic conditions in. estate.
French Revolution: Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists In Paris
But for journeys from the outskirts of Paris to the center, the number of cyclists now far exceeds the number of motorists, a huge change from just five years ago. Most of the journeys recorded ...