Introduction.
The French Revolution was a period of ideological, political and social overturn in the political history of France and Europe as a whole, during which the French polity, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, suffered radical change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of republicanism, citizenship, and rights. These changes were accompanied by violent confusion, including executions and repression during the Reign of Terror, and warfare involving every other major European power.
The Revolution was originally a popular insurrection against the absolute power of the king and against the privileges and wealth of the elite, and was perpetrated in the name of liberty, …show more content…
Under one interpretation, the old aristocratic order of the Ancien Régime gave up to an alliance of the rising bourgeoisie, aggrieved peasants, and urban wage-earners. Another interpretation claims that the Revolution resulted when various aristocratic and bourgeois reform movements it spiraled of control. According to this model, these movements conform with popular movements of the new wage-earning classes and the provincial peasantry, but an alliance between classes was contingent and random.
“However, supporters of both models identify many of the same characteristics of the Ancien Régime as being among the causes of the Revolution. Among the economic factors were:
• The social and psychological burdens of the many wars of the eighteenth century, which in the era before the dawn of nationalism were exclusively the province of the monarchy. The social burdens caused by war included the huge war debt, made worse by the monarchy's military failures and inefficiency , and the lack of social services for war veterans.
• A poor economic situation and an unmanageable national debt, both caused and increased by the burden of a grossly inequitable system of …show more content…
Executive power would lie in the hands of a five-member Directory appointed by parliament. Royalists and Jacobins protested the new regime but were swiftly silenced by the army, now led by a young and successful general named Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field. On November 9, 1799, as frustration with their leadership reached a fever pitch, Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “first consul.” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, in which France would come to dominate much of continental
The French Revolution was a period of ideological, political and social overturn in the political history of France and Europe as a whole, during which the French polity, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, suffered radical change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of republicanism, citizenship, and rights. These changes were accompanied by violent confusion, including executions and repression during the Reign of Terror, and warfare involving every other major European power.
The Revolution was originally a popular insurrection against the absolute power of the king and against the privileges and wealth of the elite, and was perpetrated in the name of liberty, …show more content…
Under one interpretation, the old aristocratic order of the Ancien Régime gave up to an alliance of the rising bourgeoisie, aggrieved peasants, and urban wage-earners. Another interpretation claims that the Revolution resulted when various aristocratic and bourgeois reform movements it spiraled of control. According to this model, these movements conform with popular movements of the new wage-earning classes and the provincial peasantry, but an alliance between classes was contingent and random.
“However, supporters of both models identify many of the same characteristics of the Ancien Régime as being among the causes of the Revolution. Among the economic factors were:
• The social and psychological burdens of the many wars of the eighteenth century, which in the era before the dawn of nationalism were exclusively the province of the monarchy. The social burdens caused by war included the huge war debt, made worse by the monarchy's military failures and inefficiency , and the lack of social services for war veterans.
• A poor economic situation and an unmanageable national debt, both caused and increased by the burden of a grossly inequitable system of …show more content…
Executive power would lie in the hands of a five-member Directory appointed by parliament. Royalists and Jacobins protested the new regime but were swiftly silenced by the army, now led by a young and successful general named Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field. On November 9, 1799, as frustration with their leadership reached a fever pitch, Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “first consul.” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, in which France would come to dominate much of continental