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French Revolution
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The starting point of the French Revolution was the convocation of the States General by Louis XVI. They comprised three orders, nobility, clergy, and the third estate, the last named being permitted to have as many members as the two other orders together. The electoral regulation of 24 January, 1789, assured the parochial clergy a large majority in the meetings of the bailliages which were to elect clerical representatives to the States General. While chapters were to send to these meetings only a single delegate for ten canons, and each convent only one of its members, all the curés were permitted to vote. The number of the "order" of clergy at the States General exceeded 300, among whom were 44 prelates, 208 curés, 50 canons and commendatory abbots, and some monks. The clergy advocated almost as forcibly as did the Third Estate the establishment of a constitutional government based on the separation of the powers, the periodical convocation of the States General, their supremacy in financial matters, the responsibility of ministers, and the regular guarantee of individual liberty.
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At its core, the French Revolution was a political movement devoted to liberty. But what that liberty actually was and what was required to realize it remained open questions during the Revolution, as they have ever since. Some historians have suggested that what the revolutionaries’ liberty meant in practice was violence and a loss of personal security that pointed to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. This negative view had its roots in the ideas of many counter-revolutionaries, who criticized the Revolution from its beginning. These ideas gained new popularity during the period of reaction that set in after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, when the monarchy and its counter-revolutionary allies were restored to power.
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The ideals of the French Revolution, represented at their best by the Girondins, found many followers in Germany, among both the older and the younger generations. Klopstock (like Schiller declared an honorary French citizen), Schelling, Jean Paul, Hegel, Hölderlin, Herder, Wieland, Kant, Fichte, and Schiller were among those who welcomed the Revolution during its early stages. Goethe maintained from the first an attitude of caution and scepticism, which is reflected in his play Die natürliche Tochter. Like Schiller, many, though at first sympathetic, reacted decidedly against the Revolution after the King's execution. Some radicals, among them Georg Forster, went to Paris to witness the emergence of the Republic on the spot. Iffland and Kotzebue wrote burlesques on the Revolution, and a number of publications discussed the political implications.
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Prior to 1789, the year the French Revolution began, the only nations with any true understanding of the modern conception of human rights were Great Britain and its former colony, the United States. To those two nations, the most important rights were political and civil rights—the right to participate in government, freedom of expression, and equality before the law. Human rights ... encompass economic and social freedoms—the right to move out of the class into which one was born, for example, and to no longer be dependent on another’s whims for one’s livelihood (as was the case in the eighteenth century for French peasants whose income fluctuated not only due to each season’s crops but also to the number of payments their feudal lords decided to charge). During the last decades of the eighteenth century, two segments of French society—women and the Third Estate (France’s middle-class and poor)—sought to gain all of these rights—political, economic, and social—which had been largely withheld from them. Their efforts to transform France from a nation dominated by the king, clergy, and aristocrats into one that took into account the needs of the entire nation helped lead to the French Revolution. The revolution significantly altered French society, but only for a decade—unfortunately, by the turn of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon Bonaparte ascended to power, France had mostly reverted to its old ways.
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In the decades before the French Revolution, France was involved in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783)... known as the War of American Independence. The cost of these wars brought about a financial crisis. The French government did not have the money to pay for the wars, so borrowed large amounts of money at high rates of interest to finance them. By 1787 it was clear that the French monarchy and government was bankrupt, and King Louis XVI and his government were forced to seek new solutions to their problems.
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The defeat of the aristocracy and the overthrow of the monarchy by the second French revolution, the August insurrection of 1792, crystallised the class contradictions within the revolutionary camp. As the revolution advanced, the more vacillating element in the Convention moved sharply to the right while the Jacobins, under pressure of the masses, moved left. An open split became inevitable.
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French Revolution