French Revolution, also called Revolution of , the revolutionary movement that shook France between and and reached its first climax there in.
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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 assembly. 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.
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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 countryside.
Revolting against years of exploitation, peasants looted and burned the homes of tax collectors, landlords and the seigniorial elite. 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.
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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 , retain?
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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. 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, 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, , 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. In June , 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.
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They also unleashed the bloody Reign of Terror la Terreur , a 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, 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.
By the late s, 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. We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Outcomes of the French Revolution, Stronger, further centralized state with a larger, more effective and more intrusive administration.
Creation and extension of new civil rights: Changes in ideas and political culture: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ; popular sovereignty: Conflicting Interpretations of the Revolution: The Influence of Ideas: Revolutionary ideology was the product, not the cause, of a political and social crisis of revolutionary proportions. A revolutionary situation emerged first and revolutionary thinking came out of that situation. The role of the people and violence: The French Revolution demonstrated the power of the common people in a manner that no subsequent government has ever allowed itself to forget --if only in the form of untrained, improvised, conscript armies, defeating the conjunction of the finest and most experienced troops of the old regimes.
When the common people did intervene in July and August of , they transformed conflict among elites into something quite different, if only by bringing about, within a matter of weeks, the collapse of state power and administration and the power of the rural ruling class in the countryside. This is what gave the Declaration of the Rights of Man a far greater international resonance than the American models that inspired it; what made the innovations of France--including its new political vocabulary--more readily accepted outside; which created its ambiguities and conflicts; and, not least, what turned it into the epic, the terrible, the spectacular, the apocalyptic event which gave it a sort of uniqueness, both horrifying and inspiring.
French Revolution - HISTORY
Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise , The Revolution as a tragedy vs. In other words it transformed men's outlook. The writers of the Enlightenment, so revered by the intelligentsia who made the Revolution, had always believed it could be done if men dared to seize control of their own destiny. The men of did so, in a rare moment of courage, altruism, and idealism which took away the breath of educated Europe. What they failed to see, as their inspirers had not foreseen, was that reason and good intentions were not enough by themselves to transform the lot of their fellow men.
Mistakes would be made when the accumulated experience of generations was pushed aside as so much routine, prejudice, fanaticism, and superstition.
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The generation forced to live through the upheavals of the next twenty-six years paid the price. Already by a million French citizens lay dead; a million more would perish under Napoleon, and untold more abroad. How many millions more still had their lives ruined?
Inspiring and ennobling, the prospect of the French Revolution is also moving and appalling: It represented an unprecedented effort to break with the past and to forge a new state and new national community based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. After the old government was replaced, differences over the meaning of those principles and the ways they were to be put into practice grew more salient and serious.
Thus the revolution continued until a stable state organization was consolidated, in part through the use of military force. Shaped and driven by passionate ideological differences, violence, and war, the revolution bequeathed to the French and to the World a new and enduring political vision: The French Revolution was, essentially, the invention of a new political culture: Nobles were able to return to their titles and to much of their land.