french revolution essays

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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French Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 12, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

The French Revolution was a watershed event in world history that began in 1789 and ended in the late 1790s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. During this period, French citizens radically altered their political landscape, uprooting centuries-old institutions such as the monarchy and the feudal system. The upheaval was caused by disgust with the French aristocracy and the economic policies of King Louis XVI, who met his death by guillotine, as did his wife Marie Antoinette. Though it degenerated into a bloodbath during the Reign of Terror, the French Revolution helped to shape modern democracies by showing the power inherent in the will of the people.

Causes of the French Revolution

As the 18th century drew to a close, France’s costly involvement in the American Revolution , combined with extravagant spending by King Louis XVI , had left France on the brink of bankruptcy.

Not only were the royal coffers depleted, but several years of poor harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor. Many expressed their desperation and resentment toward a regime that imposed heavy taxes—yet failed to provide any relief—by rioting, looting and striking.

In the fall of 1786, Louis XVI’s controller general, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, proposed a financial reform package that included a universal land tax from which the aristocratic classes would no longer be exempt.

Estates General

To garner support for these measures and forestall a growing aristocratic revolt, the king summoned the Estates General ( les états généraux ) – an assembly representing France’s clergy, nobility and middle class – for the first time since 1614.

The meeting was scheduled for May 5, 1789; in the meantime, delegates of the three estates from each locality would compile lists of grievances ( cahiers de doléances ) to present to the king.

Rise of the Third Estate

France’s population, of course, had changed considerably since 1614. The non-aristocratic, middle-class members of the Third Estate now represented 98 percent of the people but could still be outvoted by the other two bodies.

In the lead-up to the May 5 meeting, the Third Estate began to mobilize support for equal representation and the abolishment of the noble veto—in other words, they wanted voting by head and not by status.

While all of the orders shared a common desire for fiscal and judicial reform as well as a more representative form of government, the nobles in particular were loath to give up the privileges they had long enjoyed under the traditional system.

Tennis Court Oath

By the time the Estates General convened at Versailles , the highly public debate over its voting process had erupted into open hostility between the three orders, eclipsing the original purpose of the meeting and the authority of the man who had convened it — the king himself.

On June 17, with talks over procedure stalled, the Third Estate met alone and formally adopted the title of National Assembly; three days later, they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and took the so-called Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume), vowing not to disperse until constitutional reform had been achieved.

Within a week, most of the clerical deputies and 47 liberal nobles had joined them, and on June 27 Louis XVI grudgingly absorbed all three orders into the new National Assembly.

The Bastille 

On June 12, as the National Assembly (known as the National Constituent Assembly during its work on a constitution) continued to meet at Versailles, fear and violence consumed the capital.

Though enthusiastic about the recent breakdown of royal power, Parisians grew panicked as rumors of an impending military coup began to circulate. A popular insurgency culminated on July 14 when rioters stormed the Bastille fortress in an attempt to secure gunpowder and weapons; many consider this event, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution.

The wave of revolutionary fervor and widespread hysteria quickly swept the entire country. Revolting against years of exploitation, peasants looted and burned the homes of tax collectors, landlords and the aristocratic elite.

Known as the Great Fear ( la Grande peur ), the agrarian insurrection hastened the growing exodus of nobles from France and inspired the National Constituent Assembly to abolish feudalism on August 4, 1789, signing what historian Georges Lefebvre later called the “death certificate of the old order.”

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

IIn late August, the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ( Déclaration des droits de l ’homme et du citoyen ), a statement of democratic principles grounded in the philosophical and political ideas of Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau .

The document proclaimed the Assembly’s commitment to replace the ancien régime with a system based on equal opportunity, freedom of speech, popular sovereignty and representative government.

Drafting a formal constitution proved much more of a challenge for the National Constituent Assembly, which had the added burden of functioning as a legislature during harsh economic times.

For months, its members wrestled with fundamental questions about the shape and expanse of France’s new political landscape. For instance, who would be responsible for electing delegates? Would the clergy owe allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church or the French government? Perhaps most importantly, how much authority would the king, his public image further weakened after a failed attempt to flee the country in June 1791, retain?

Adopted on September 3, 1791, France’s first written constitution echoed the more moderate voices in the Assembly, establishing a constitutional monarchy in which the king enjoyed royal veto power and the ability to appoint ministers. This compromise did not sit well with influential radicals like Maximilien de Robespierre , Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, who began drumming up popular support for a more republican form of government and for the trial of Louis XVI.

French Revolution Turns Radical

In April 1792, the newly elected Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria and Prussia, where it believed that French émigrés were building counterrevolutionary alliances; it also hoped to spread its revolutionary ideals across Europe through warfare.

On the domestic front, meanwhile, the political crisis took a radical turn when a group of insurgents led by the extremist Jacobins attacked the royal residence in Paris and arrested the king on August 10, 1792.

The following month, amid a wave of violence in which Parisian insurrectionists massacred hundreds of accused counterrevolutionaries, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the French republic.

On January 21, 1793, it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine ; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.

Reign of Terror

Following the king’s execution, war with various European powers and intense divisions within the National Convention brought the French Revolution to its most violent and turbulent phase.

In June 1793, the Jacobins seized control of the National Convention from the more moderate Girondins and instituted a series of radical measures, including the establishment of a new calendar and the eradication of Christianity .

They also unleashed the bloody Reign of Terror (la Terreur), a 10-month period in which suspected enemies of the revolution were guillotined by the thousands. Many of the killings were carried out under orders from Robespierre, who dominated the draconian Committee of Public Safety until his own execution on July 28, 1794.

Did you know? Over 17,000 people were officially tried and executed during the Reign of Terror, and an unknown number of others died in prison or without trial.

Thermidorian Reaction

The death of Robespierre marked the beginning of the Thermidorian Reaction, a moderate phase in which the French people revolted against the Reign of Terror’s excesses.

On August 22, 1795, the National Convention, composed largely of Girondins who had survived the Reign of Terror, approved a new constitution that created France’s first bicameral legislature.

Executive power would lie in the hands of a five-member Directory ( Directoire ) appointed by parliament. Royalists and Jacobins protested the new regime but were swiftly silenced by the army, now led by a young and successful general named Napoleon Bonaparte .

French Revolution Ends: Napoleon’s Rise

The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field.

On November 9, 1799, as frustration with their leadership reached a fever pitch, Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “ first consul .” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, during which France would come to dominate much of continental Europe.

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French Revolution. The National Archives (U.K.) The United States and the French Revolution, 1789–1799. Office of the Historian. U.S. Department of State . Versailles, from the French Revolution to the Interwar Period. Chateau de Versailles . French Revolution. Monticello.org . Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 

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Inventing the French Revolution : essays on French political culture in the eighteenth century

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French Revolution

By David Reader

The French Revolution of 1789 created political, social, and financial instability throughout Europe, prompting many terrified French aristocrats, businessmen, and intellectuals to flee to the United States. Philadelphia, with its cosmopolitan atmosphere, accessible port, and thriving commerce, attracted many of the French émigrés. Most settled along the Delaware River in the Mulberry district of Philadelphia (an area between modern day Market Street, Arch Street, Second Street, and Columbus Boulevard). Others spread over the region, across the Delaware into New Jersey, and across the Brandywine into Delaware.

The French Revolution’s declared ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity immediately appealed to Philadelphians in view of their own revolution. During the 1790s, as Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital, parades and celebrations welcomed French naval vessels and dignitaries, and many Philadelphians showed their support by singing the Marseillaise, wearing liberty caps, and commemorating Bastille Day. The emerging salon culture of Philadelphia gained greater legitimacy with the arrival of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838) in 1794. His reputation as a statesman and thinker contributed to the increasing intellectual influence of French émigrés on Philadelphia’s publishing houses, newspapers, schools and academic societies.

French émigrés established political societies and charitable organizations of their own. The Société Française de Bienfaisance de Philadelphie helped newly arriving French émigrés adjust to life in the city. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 , emigré physicians with the help of Stephen Girard (1750-1831), a wealthy French émigré who arrived in 1776, remained in Philadelphia at Bush Hill Hospital to administer to the sick. Their dedication and contributions to medicine challenged the prevailing understanding of fighting disease in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, the highly selective American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia admitted few French émigrés for their contributions in science, philosophy, and other academic fields.

The Francophile atmosphere of Philadelphia delighted Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who shared the positive outlook on the new republicanism of France. But President George Washington (1732-99) and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) were hesitant to support the French Revolution. Jefferson and Hamilton were at constant loggerheads over domestic and foreign policy issues. Philadelphia’s thriving newspaper industry exploited the division within the Washington administration. Philip Freneau’s (1752-1832) National Gazette and Benjamin Franklin Bache’s (1769-98) Aurora supported French republicanism while John Fenno’s (1751-1798) Gazette of the United States reinforced the views of the Federalists.

Crowd Welcomes French Minister

In 1793, Philadelphia welcomed French Minister Edmond-Charles Genet (1763-1834) with residents and émigrés lining the streets from Grays Ferry to the City Tavern. Citizen Genet’s mission was to rally support for the war developing between Great Britain and France. The conflict had weakened trade and threatened to pull the United States into a European war. President Washington had issued a proclamation to maintain a policy of neutrality, placing a priority on avoiding entanglement in the European war despite U.S. treaty obligations to France that were negotiated during the American Revolution.  (Citizen Genet’s controversial decisions and the changing political landscape in France led to his removal in 1794, but divisions over U.S. relations with France continued.)

The Reign of Terror, a period of radical republicanism in France from 1793 to 1794, alienated Philadelphians who were repulsed by the executions of King Louis XVI (1754-93) and his wife Marie Antoinette (1755-93). They feared that the excesses of the French Revolution were infecting Americans in their chants for democracy and distrust of Federalists.  Nevertheless, many Philadelphians flocked to guillotine demonstrations, dressed in the French fashion of the sans-culottes, and attended celebrations dedicated to Reason.

When the Reign of Terror ended, many of the French émigrés returned home. The political influence of the French émigré community in Philadelphia began to decline with the election of John Adams (1735-1826) to the presidency in 1796 and the break in Franco-American relations that came with the wars of the French Revolution during the late 1790s, but the cultural legacy of the French remained in the arts and sciences.  At the same time, a residual, but profound, effect of the French Revolution was its part in stirring rebellion in the French colony of St. Dominque (later Haiti), which led to a slave revolt that overturned French power there, caused the flight of Francophone slaveholders and others to Philadelphia and other American seaport cities, and invigorated local Afro-Caribbean culture in the region.

David Reader teaches history at Camden Catholic High School and as an adjunct at Saint Joseph’s University. He was the recipient of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship in 2007. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2012, Rutgers University

Stephen Girard

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

French émigrés established political societies and charitable organizations such as the Société Française de Bienfaisance de Philadelphie, which helped the French adjust to life in the city. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, émigré physicians with the help of Stephen Girard (1750-1831), a wealthy French émigré who arrived in 1776, remained in Philadelphia to administer to those who were suffering at Bush Hill Hospital.

The Scene in France

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Serment du jeu de paume , known in English as the Tennis Court Oath, was a monumental moment at the beginning of the French Revolution. The oath, signed by almost all members of the Third Estate, marked the French people’s first formal opposition to Louis XVI’s rule. The oath galvanized forces on both sides of the revolution, causing rioting in the French countryside by left-leaning citizens, while those who sought to keep the monarchy intact felt threatened by the Third Estate’s actions. The oath was heavily inspired by the Declaration of Independence and predates the storming of the Bastille, the most famous event of the Revolution, by just three weeks. This etching by Pierre-Gabriel Berthault depicts the lively reading and signing of the oath, and even includes the lone dissenter, Joseph Martin-Dauch, sitting still in the lower right hand corner. (Complete Collection of Historical Pictures of the French Revolution)

Related Topics

• Philadelphia and the World
• Cradle of Liberty

Time Periods

• Nineteenth Century to 1854
• Capital of the United States Era
• American Revolution Era
• Center City Philadelphia
• U.S. Congress (1790-1800)
• Philadelphia and Its People in Maps: The 1790s
• Yellow Fever
• France and the French
• Spanish-American Revolutions
• Haitian Revolution
• Red City (The)

Related Reading

Branson, Susan. These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture In Early National Philadelphia . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Childs, Frances Sergeant. French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790-1800: An American Chapter of the French Revolution . Baltimore:  John Hopkins University Press, 1940.

Earl III, John L. “Tallyrand in Philadelphia, 1794-1796.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography  91 (July 1967): 282-98. ( PDF )

Hebert, Catherine. “The French Element in Pennsylvania in the 1790s: The Francophone Immigrants’ Impact.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 (October 1984): 451-69. ( PDF )

__________. “French Publications in Philadelphia in the Age of the French Revolution: A Bibliographical Essay.” Pennsylvania History 58 (January 1991): 37-61. ( PDF )

Newman, Simon P. Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Weigley, Russell F, ed.,   Philadelphia: a 300-Year History . New York:  W.W. Norton, 1982.

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• Historical Society of Pennsylvania 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia.

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Connecting Headlines with History

• Amid French shock and mourning, Philadelphia's Bastille Day celebrates 'power to the people' (WHYY, July 17, 2016)
• Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution
• Alliance Francaise de Philadelphia
• Consular Agency of France in Philadelphia and Wilmington

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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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French Revolution Essay - History

Home — Essay Samples — History — American Revolution — Compare And Contrast The American And French Revolution

Compare and Contrast The American and French Revolution

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The French Revolution Role in the History Essay

Introduction.

The French Revolution was a major event not only in the history of the French Empire but also in the history of the world. The tumultuous events of the revolution resulted in the spread of ideas of liberty and equality, thereby helping to create a popular movement. This paper aims to discuss social transformations that the revolution sought to achieve.

Three Estates

The French Revolution came on the heels of the American Revolution of 1776 (Cole et al. 426). Many subjects of the French Empire were inspired by the success of the American uprising. However, unlike American society that was divided into proponents and opponents of British rule, its French counterpart was characterized by conflicts between many social groups. French society was comprised of three legally-recognized classes that were commonly referred to as Three Estates. Whereas the first two estates consisted of the clergymen and the nobility, the third group subsumed remaining social strata. Interestingly enough, legal distinctions between disparate members of the Third Estate were poorly defined.

The group was comprised of layers, entrepreneurs, laborers, and peasants among others (Cole et al. 427). Wealthy members of the Third Estate were unwilling to identify with manual workers whom they despised. Furthermore, legal distinctions between the nobility and rich entrepreneurs who were jealous of their position resulted in social tensions. Abbe Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, a distinguished politician of that time, understood the source of the social discontent and argued that the Third Estate contained “within itself everything needful to constitute a complete nation” (qtd. in Cole et al. 431).

Social Conditions

To better understand the change promised by the uprising, it is necessary to explore the social conditions of the constituents of the Third Estate. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other privileged members of the group criticized the government for a complicated tax code. They believed that undue regulations stifled the country’s economy and “interfered with the natural workings of the market” (Cole et al. 428). Peasants also had their fair share of grievances with the state. Residents of the countryside were subject to tithes, levies, fees, rents, and other forms of taxation. In addition to these financial obligations, peasants had to maintain public roads. Also, they were deprived of hunting privileges, which was a major source of discontent.

Before the revolution, the deterioration of economic conditions resulted in the corrosion of social cohesion. In the 1780s, the empire experienced a rapid increase in bread prices, which was caused by poor harvests (Cole et al. 428). Following the law of supply and demand, the production of manufactured goods rapidly decreased, thereby reducing the incomes of wealthy members of the Third Estate.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was issued by the National Assembly in 1789, was a perfect example of social transformations that the revolution attempted to achieve (Cole et al. 431). The document was based on the philosophical concept of natural rights and sought to guarantee liberty, freedom of speech, and equality before the law for all citizens of the future republic (Cole et al. 433). Due process of law was an extremely important aim of the French Revolution because, before the uprising, social distinctions between the country’s residents were associated with the unequal application of laws. The Declaration also introduced a concept of religious toleration, which helped to end the persecution of Jews (Cole et al. 432). Furthermore, the document intended to ban slavery in some regions of France, which was an enormous social change.

Women’s Rights

The women’s rights movement around 1790 was another instance of the transformation of French society that was facilitated by the revolution (Cole et al. 432). Even though not all prominent thinkers of the era supported the movement, many women wanted to assert their rights and fought to legalize divorce. Unfortunately, revolutionaries were opposed to the emergence of the political consciousness of French women; therefore, female organizations and clubs were forcefully shut down.

Another area of the social transformation was the church. The revolutionaries desired to deprive religious authorities of their lands, thereby solving the economic crisis. Moreover, the National Assembly wanted to institutionalize the church and make it free from the political interference of the pope. Unfortunately, this avenue of change was utterly divisive: many peasants who opposed the reform were forced to revolt. Even though revolutionary leaders espoused egalitarian principles, the Committee of Public Safety, which was formed to crack down on the opposition, gave rise to a reign of terror. In the period between 1792 and 1794, the revolutionary progress was drowned in dictatorial bloodshed (Cole et al. 436). Approximately 40, 000 people were murdered in that period (Cole et al. 436).

The paper has shown that the French Revolution was a popular uprising the aim of which was to introduce major social transformations. Despite the substantial progress of the revolutionaries, many peasants and laborers bore the brunt of the tumultuous events. The revolutionary progress was driven not only by the ideas of freedom and equality but also by tyranny and despotism.

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IvyPanda. (2024, January 27). The French Revolution Role in the History. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-french-revolution-role-in-the-history/

"The French Revolution Role in the History." IvyPanda , 27 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/the-french-revolution-role-in-the-history/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'The French Revolution Role in the History'. 27 January.

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IvyPanda . "The French Revolution Role in the History." January 27, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-french-revolution-role-in-the-history/.

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