The revolution exploded in France in the summer of 1789 after years of social agitation, simmering ideologies that questioned the authority of the social order and a weak monarch the throne. Thinkers of the Enlightenment such as Rousseau, urged that governments should promote the greatest good for all people, not just for the elite. Rousseau in The Social Contract (1769) argued against the divine rights of sovereigns and that only the people have the right to legislate., while in Diderot’s Encyclopaedia also insisted that “the good of the people must be the great purpose of the government” (Crocker, 144) under the definition of government. Before the Revolution, French society was grounded in the idea of privilege or an inequality of rights.
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It is questionable whether this would have occurred without the impetus provided by What is the Third Estate? and seems to be the greatest effect of the pamphlet. William Doyle disagrees in Aristocracy and its enemies in The Age of Revolution, saying that the importance of What is the Third Estate? “was to stoke up social resentment in advance of the elections by reiterating all the unmerited advantages enjoyed by the noble order at the expense of commoners, to envenom the atmosphere rather than to establish an influential plan of action”. As William H. Sewell Jnr points out language of exclusion that severed the nobility from the body of the nation, thereby avenging the thousands of petty acts by which the nobles had previously excluded the bourgeoisie from its rightful place of honor. …show more content…
In every country, the law specifies the character of those entitled to be electors and to be elected”. Therefore, under the Declaration that declared “freedom and equality” with the” rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression” did not countenance women’s public participation in politics despite the huge role women played in the revolution. However, civil and political rights were given to Jews and Protestants for the first time and slavery was eventually abolished in 1794, for a time anyway.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen expressed the liberal and universal goals of the philosophes. In proclaiming the inalienable right to liberty of person, freedom of religion and thought, and equal treatment under the law, the declaration affirmed the dignity of the individual. It asserted that government belonged not to any ruler, but to the people as a whole, and that its aim was the preservation of the natural rights of the
It is questionable whether this would have occurred without the impetus provided by What is the Third Estate? and seems to be the greatest effect of the pamphlet. William Doyle disagrees in Aristocracy and its enemies in The Age of Revolution, saying that the importance of What is the Third Estate? “was to stoke up social resentment in advance of the elections by reiterating all the unmerited advantages enjoyed by the noble order at the expense of commoners, to envenom the atmosphere rather than to establish an influential plan of action”. As William H. Sewell Jnr points out language of exclusion that severed the nobility from the body of the nation, thereby avenging the thousands of petty acts by which the nobles had previously excluded the bourgeoisie from its rightful place of honor. …show more content…
In every country, the law specifies the character of those entitled to be electors and to be elected”. Therefore, under the Declaration that declared “freedom and equality” with the” rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression” did not countenance women’s public participation in politics despite the huge role women played in the revolution. However, civil and political rights were given to Jews and Protestants for the first time and slavery was eventually abolished in 1794, for a time anyway.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen expressed the liberal and universal goals of the philosophes. In proclaiming the inalienable right to liberty of person, freedom of religion and thought, and equal treatment under the law, the declaration affirmed the dignity of the individual. It asserted that government belonged not to any ruler, but to the people as a whole, and that its aim was the preservation of the natural rights of the