| | |
Time: 16 hours
Level: Intermediate
| | | | |
 Introduction Resource- This unit provides basic historical background to the French Revolution. It will show that the Revolution accelerated intellectual, cultural and psychological change, and opened up new horizons and possibilities....
| | | | | 1 Enlightenment, liberty and revolution
- 1 Enlightenment, liberty and revolution Resource
- The main aim of this unit is to provide you with basic historical background on the French Revolution, which marked a watershed in the history and culture of the period 1780–1830. The documents and illustrations...
| | | | | 2 Death of the Old Regime
- 2.1 The bankrupt monarchy Resource
- The immediate cause of the Revolution was that the French monarchy faced imminent bankruptcy. (This was partly because of the enormous sums it had spent assisting the American Revolution between 1778 and...
- 2.2 The Third Estate as the voice of the nation Resource
- Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) trained as a priest and became assistant to a bishop. He had no religious vocation, however, and his fame arose as the author of a highly influential pamphlet, What...
- 2.3 Fall of the Bastille, 14 July 1789 Resource
- In a similar mood of aggrieved self-righteousness and revolutionary exultation came the fall of the Bastille, the medieval fortress and prison of Paris, on 14 July 1789. A catastrophic harvest in 1788...
- 2.4 Enlightened reformism – dismantling the Old Regime Resource
- The National Assembly, the self-proclaimed and now de facto supreme representative and legislative organ of state, set to work on the constitution which it had sworn to introduce. Calling itself the Constituent...
- 2.5 Declaration of the Rights of Man Resource
- On 26 August 1789, the Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as the preamble to a constitution drawn up in 1791. (The Declaration also prefaced the later constitutions of 1793...
- Enlightenment, revolution and reform – the departments Resource
- Old Regime France was a confused welter of overlapping administrative, judicial and fiscal divisions and authorities (see Figure 2).
| | | | | 3 From 1789 to the flight to Varennes
- 3.1 The moderate reformers Resource
- 1789–92 was a period of relatively moderate reform in the spirit of the Enlightenment – moderate, that is, compared with what followed. It was certainly revolutionary in relation to what went before. The...
- 3.2 Popular violence and the Revolution Resource
- The deputies were concerned to protect property and maintain order (as the 1790 decree on the abolition of nobility suggests) in the face of a growing breakdown of public order; and their attitude to the...
- 3.3 The divide over the Church, 1790 Resource
- The revolutionaries of 1789 also aspired to reform the Catholic Church in France, though not to disestablish it, still less to de-Christianise the country. Many of the clergy themselves favoured reform....
- 3.4 Monarchy and the Revolution – the flight to Varennes, 1791 Resource
- The task of the moderates was further complicated by the ambiguous attitude of the royal family. From the first there were royalists who refused to compromise with the Revolution, including Louis XVI's...
| | | | | 4 Europe and the French Revolution
- 4.1 Intellectual, governmental and monarchical responses Resource
- There was much sympathy among intellectuals abroad for the Revolution, which seemed to be putting so many Enlightenment ideals into practice. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was among the first to...
- 4.2 Political polarization and the fall of the monarchy Resource
- By 1792 the liberal constitutionalists of 1789, men like Lafayette, found themselves increasingly on the defensive. There was growing hostility to the National Assembly, with its limited franchise and...
- 4.3 Birth of the republic: war, civil war and terror Resource
- After the church and monarchy, ‘war was the third great polarizing issue of the Revolution’ (Doyle, 2001, p. 50). With a declaration by the Assembly in July 1792 of la patrie en danger (the fatherland...
- 4.4 The guillotine Resource
- The new system of departments introduced in 1790 removed the many differing and often overlapping jurisdictions of Old Regime France and replaced them with a uniform system of justice. Each department...
- 4.5 The sans-culotte as revolutionary hero Resource
- Revolutionary symbolism (which we noted earlier with reference to the Declaration of the Rights of Man) extended to clothing: the wearing of the tricolour cockade was made compulsory for men by a decree...
- 4.6 The Terror in action Resource
- The year of authorised state terror from July 1793 to July 1794 was ‘the climactic year of the Revolution’ (Palmer, 1971, p. 113). Under the Committee of Public Safety, now including Robespierre, ‘revolutionary...
| | | | | 5 Enlightenment, universalism and revolution
- 5.1 Revolutionary calendar and metric system Resource
- We considered earlier the universalist principles of 1789 deriving from the Enlightenment that inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the redivision of France into departments. As the dominant...
- 5.2 The cult of the Revolution Resource
- With the suppression of aristocrats, royalists and counter-revolutionary priests came a cultural revolution against symbols and monuments of the Old Regime, the monarchy and the Catholic Church (see Figure...
- 5.3 The Marseillaise Resource
- During the Revolutionary Wars, as Robespierre insisted, ‘republican enthusiasm must be exalted by all means possible’. The Jacobins encouraged a revolutionary solidarity and patriotism, expressed in the...
| | | | | 6 The Thermidorian Settlement and the end of the Revolution
- 6 The Thermidorian Settlement and the end of the Revolution Resource
- In Thermidor (July) 1794 there was a further political coup, this time engineered by deputies in the Convention who felt that Jacobin fanaticism, mob violence and bloodshed had got wildly out of hand and...
| | | | |
- 7.1 The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Britain and Europe Resource
- Je suis tombé par terre,
- 7.2 The main consequences of the Revolution Resource
- What were the main consequences of the Revolution? Any answer demands so many qualifications that the question may be best answered in broad terms. ‘The Revolution’, says Norman Hampson, ‘put an end to...
- 7.3 The Great Nation Resource
- The expanded France, which styled itself the Great Nation, provoked a second European coalition against it, but by 1799 it had established itself as a force to be reckoned with: a military force in the...
| | | | | References and Acknowledgements | | |
| |
OPML Feed |
Contact OpenLearn |
Privacy |
Copyright |
Accessibility
Share on Facebook
Save to Del.icio.us
Stumble it!
Add to Onlywire
