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French Revolution: French Enlightenment
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Did the French Revolution leave anything positive to posterity? Only the metric system, which admittedly grew out of the democratic predilection for eternal measuring and counting. What about then the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen? It was a purely anthropocentric document, a typically declamatory product of the first Enlightenment, which was conceived in 1789 and finally engrafted into the constitution of the Sadist-Republic in 1793. In the schoolbooks one reads about the period of the terror, "Le Terreur était terrible mais grande!" Even with all that a good number of moderates came under the blade too. Historically they had it coming because they hadn't considered what happened when one destroyed the old order.
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A legacy of the Age of Enlightenment, the motto "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" first appeared during the French Revolution. It was written into the 1958 Constitution and is part nowadays of the French national heritage.
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The relationship between the French Enlightenment and the Revolution is extremely complex. Burke blamed the Enlightenment, in which he included Rousseau, for the Revolution. But while the Enlightenment spread a sceptical rationalism, it did not propose the extremism or the political solutions adopted during the Revolution.
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Historians disagree about the the political and socioeconomic nature of the French Revolution. One interpretation is that the old aristocratic order of the Ancien Régime succumbed to the ambitions of a rising bourgeoisie, infected with the ideas of the Enlightenment, and allied with aggrieved peasants and wage-earners in the towns, particularly Paris and Lyons. Another interpretation sees various aristocratic and bourgeois attempts at political and economic reform spinning out of control and coinciding with popular movements of the new wage-earning classes and the provincial peasantry, but see any alliance between classes as contingent and incidental.
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French Enlightenment