LYCOS RETRIEVER 
French Revolution: Beginning
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These few reflections on the French Revolution do scant justice to the subject. But if these articles serve to whet the reader's appetite to delve more deeply into the history of the Revolution, and to draw the necessary conclusions, the effort will not have been in vain.
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The French Revolution began in the domain of philosophy and social theory. French materialist philosophy, social theory and socialist ideas were significant influences on the development of Communism and major contributors to Marx’s ideas. The following writers of Pre-Revolutionary France are significant:
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In the years before the revolution, French women enjoyed virtually no civil or economic rights. As Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson explain in the introduction to Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795: “By and large, women were legally totally subservient to their husbands or fathers in virtually all areas of marriage contracts, inheritance laws, property and tax laws, and child custody arrangements. Marriages were indissoluble.” Noblewomen were not permitted to rule on disputes on properties they held. Meanwhile, working women lacked economic rights and protections; many were concerned about the entrance of men into traditionally female occupations such as seamstress and embroiderer. These women feared that unless such employment was restricted to females, the “fairer sex” would have to look for less respectable jobs.
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Certainly, the French Revolution had a quality of spontaneity, of accident, that later revolutions would not have. There was no clearly defined revolutionary party or conspiratorial group that initially plotted the Revolution, and the contending factions that followed after the Revolution had occurred never gained a firm grip on the nation's imagination or its institutions. The Jacobins came closest, but their unchallenged period of rule was limited, lasting only a year.
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Talfourd recognized the religious, apocalyptic nature of the enthusiasm and hopes evoked by the early years of the revolution; he recognized ... however, that the essential featureof the French Revolution as a cultural influence was that it had failed. The greatest poetry of the age was written not in the mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the mood of revolutionary disenchantment and despair, after the succession of disasters that began with the Reign of Terror in 1793–94. A number of the major Romantic poems, however, did not break with the formative past, but set out to salvage grounds for hope in a new and better world. That is, Romantic thought and imagination remained apocalyptic in form, but with a radical shift from faith in a violent outer transformation to faith in an inner moral and imaginative transformation — a shift from political revolution to a revolution in consciousness — to bring into being a new heaven and new earth.
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[E]nduring as a historical problem was the position of the French Revolution on the time scale: was the Revolution the end of one era or was it the beginning of another? It seems to have been both: it ended a world based on tradition, on blood-right, on fixed social status. In principle and by legislation, it made the individual citizen the center of a new social order. The social order should, therefore, be designed to maximize this freedom, this personal liberty.
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