The French Revolution Essay -- essays research papers

The French variation (1789-99) violently transformed France from a monarchical state with a rigorous genial hierarchy into a modern nation in which the social structure was loosened and power passed increasingly to the middle classes. There is healthy controversy over the causes of the Revolution. Marxist scholars emphasize material factors as the community increased, food supplies grew short land had become divided into such itsy-bitsy parcels that most Frenchmen lived close to the subsistence level and after 1776 agricultural recession strained property owners to exploit their sources of revenue. Marxists also maintain that commercial prosperity had ablaze the growth of a monied middle class that threatened the specify of the established landed aristocracy. Other social historians emphasize the importance of the maturation discrepancy between reality and the wakelessly defined social structure, which elevated men by hereditary or acquired rank and recognized embodied rather than individual rights. They also emphasize, however, the complexity of French society and mind the importance of capitalism.The first phase of the Revolution was marked by honourable and physical violence. The National Assembly established a new jural structure by abolishing privileges, venality, and "feudal" obligations (August 4) formulating a Declaration of Rights (August 26) and specifying basic innate principles that left the king as the chief executive officer except deprived him of any legislative power except a nail-biting veto. In 1789-91, a comparatively peaceful period, the National Assembly did lots to modernize France. Despite the Declaration of Rights, the reformed franchise still excluded the hapless but the public maintained its faith in freedom and unity. In 1791 the call for a clerical oath of loyalty crystallized the skirmish between the new sovereignty and traditional loyalties and split the whole country. In 1791-92 the hard-won constitut ion collapsed. On Apr. 20, 1792, the new Legislative Assembly declared warfare on Austria, which it believed to be instigating counterrevolutionary agitation and thus launched the French rotatory Wars. Born of this second revolution and briefly favored by array victory, the National Convention horrified Europe by establishing a commonwealth (Sept. 22, 1792), inaugurating a policy of revolutionary war, and sendin... ...utions were nonetheless steadily eroded until the origination of the First Empire (1804-15) ended the revolutionary period.The most concrete results of the French Revolution were probably achieved in 1789-91, when land was freed from customary burdens and the old collective society was destroyed. The great reforms of 1789-91 nevertheless established an enduring administrative and legal system, and much of the revolutionaries work in humanizing the law itself was subsequently incorporated in the napic Code. Politically, the revolution was more signifi rottert than successful. Since 1789 the French government has been either parliamentary and constitutional or based on the plebiscitary system that Napoleon inherited and developed. The Revolution nevertheless freed the state from the trammels of its medieval past, releasing such unprecedented power that the revolutionaries could defy, and Napoleon conquer, the rest of Europe. Moreover, that power acknowledged no restraint in 1793 unity was imposed on the nation by the Terror. Europe and the world have ever since been learning what infringements of liberty can issue from the concepts of national sovereignty and the will of the people.