Intellectuals such as Voltaire, Roseau, and Montesquieu rejected the idea of a society divided among social classes and promoted his works through the concepts of liberty, fraternity and equality; concepts that later would guide the ideals of the French Revolution. The Spirit of the Laws introduced Montesquieu’s philosophy of the way a government should be run . He argued that no one form of government would suit everyone in the world. In his mind, to run any country, its size, population, customs, traditions and climate would all have to be thought of before choosing the adequate way of governing it. Montesquieu also believed in having a system to separate the powers of the government in a way that no one branch would become too powerful. Furthermore, Montesquieu argued that political laws had to vary because not every law could apply to every person at every time. The idea of having separation of powers, most likely influenced others around him and drew a pattern for France and other countries in the world to create laws that varied from city to city or from state to state. The Spirit of the laws helped to lay the foundations for the subsequent democratic process that began with the French …show more content…
In 1789, over five thousand women rallied together and marched from Paris to the Palace of Versailles with hopes of fighting the unfair high prices of bread. Hungry and tired of the royal banquets and the food waste, the women arrived demanding the king to come out and listen to them. The guards could not contain the angry crowd that did not yield in their demands. Louis XVI finally came out of the palace and headed to the women’s demands. Offering bread to the multitude and apologizing for the scarce conditions in which people lived; Luis promised accompanying the people back to Paris. In a last attempt to win the confidence of the people, Luis went to Paris without imagining that he would never return to Versailles. The march of the women on Versailles marked the first time that women participated actively in a revolutionary process. Years later, in 1791, Olympe de Gouges composed the Declaration of Rights of Women demanding women be treated as equally as men . Olympe de Gouges based the declaration in the need for women to be treated with the same principles of equality and sovereignty that men demanded. The Declaration of Rights of Women greatly influenced the need for women’s rights in the eighteenth century by declaring women as equal citizens of French. Olympe de Gouges showed a perfect example of how the human beings asserted their rights in the democratic change brought about