Political Transformations: The French Revolution

There have been countless political transformations throughout the course of history. Some were achieved through violence, resulting in the deaths of many combatants while others were bloodless, achieved through diplomatic means. More often than not, political transformations that occurred up into the 18th century were bloody and violent. Perhaps the bloodiest political transformation of the 1700s was the French Revolution in which the monarchy in France was overthrown. However, history has seen a shift to bloodless revolutions and by the 20th century governments tend to be restructured or even deposed altogether without the loss of a single life. The rise of Adolf Hitler as Führer in the once democratic Germany as well as the fall of the Soviet …show more content…
Pre-revolutionary society was split up into three estates, the clergy in the First Estate, the nobility in the Second Estate, and everybody else in the Third Estate (@). All three estates had the same amount of power in the government despite the fact that the Third Estate contained eighty percent of the population of France (@). Recent poor harvests had decreased the income of the peasants and led to increased disdain for the government (@). Along with a disgruntled population, France had deep economic woes and when King Louis XVI proposed new taxes to be imposed on the nobility the path to a bloody revolution was underway (@). The Third Estate had declared itself the National Assembly corresponding to the central ideas of the time: that the government was granted its power by the people (@). Peasants ransacked manor houses and destroyed documents of their debt obligations (#). These revolts ended with the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which, among other things, guaranteed free expression of ideas, equality before the law, and a representative government (*). Fearing for their lives in the midst of an increasingly radical National Assembly, King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, attempted to flee the country but were quickly captured and executed (@). By the end of this bloody revolution in July 1794, forty-thousand people were executed or died in prison (@). Although this revolution did not end with a democratic government as many had originally hoped, the outcome of this revolution was the advent of a modern form of government: popular authoritarianism under the young French general, Napoleon Bonaparte