Age of Enlightenment

France, in the 1700s, was a very powerful country compared to all the other countries in Europe. With the new king, Louis XVI, France was falling in power because Louis XVI was not a smart King, and did was not able to make decisions on his own. In France, there was an uprising from the Estates, or groups of people, that want to fix the problem of low amounts of money. There are three main groups of people and one person by himself, that make up the groups of people. The lower class is…

Insulting his intelligence in her essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft responds belligerently to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. She solidifies her counterargument against Burke, by building upon the ideas of Thomas Paine, while adding her own criticisms of Burke’s writing. Wollstonecraft does not respond directly to all of Burke’s ideas, naming them incomplete, and criticizing his intellect and writing skills. In the Reflections on the…

“Common Sense”, a pamphlet wrote by Thomas Paine, first showed up in January 1776. “Common Sense” was a short argument on why Thomas Paine wanted Americans to fight for complete freedom from the British instead of just fighting to be free from all the unfair taxation the British were trying to enforce. In “Common Sense” Thomas talks about the problems that come from having a monarchy and all the economic and social crimes against the Americans. Thomas Paine was a boy who grew up in Britain and…

period was known as the Enlightenment and is more clearly defined as an international intellectual movement that emphasized the use of reason and the application of the laws of nature to human society. This period came about when the bourgeoisie, a social class consisting of a variety of professions such as merchants, lawyers, skilled artisans and shopkeepers began criticizing the aristocracy. It can be said that the aristocracy was part of the fuel that fed the Enlightenment but events and…

Beginning in 1789 and ending in the late 1790s, the French revolution was an uprooting of centuries old institutions such as absolute monarchy and the feudal system. Although the French revolution can be attributed to a myriad of causes, they weigh heavily on the failure of Louis XVI to effectively manage France’s finances and institute necessary reforms. This failure, in turn attributed heavily towards many wars, famine and depression in France. As a result, the people of France inevitably…

century was a period of revelation. The enlightenment in the late 18th and early 19th century started a domino effect of different ideologies that challenged the conservative order that was currently in place. Society and culture was bound to be rewrote. Heading into the 19th century, the world and ideologies that came with it shifted. Liberalism, Feminism, and Marxism are all different ideologies that dominated society during the 19th century. The enlightenment was a philosophical and…

Revolution, the significant imbalance of power held a prominent role in French Society and incited the uprising of the third, commoner estate through the corruption it caused. Consequently, as the Enlightenment philosophies began to flourish, deconstruction arose as a key component of the French enlightenment ideals. Therefore, the French revolutionaries pursued not an initiative of chaos, but the purposeful goal of deconstructing the corrupt centralized structures of French society utilized to…

In the 1790’s men were granted participatory citizenship in France, but women on the other hand were not. Women believed they should be regarded equally by themselves and by others. In 1792 in response to the French Revolutionary Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote an essay challenging this fact of nature. Wollstonecraft juxtaposes the goals of both genders, employs a hostile but compassionate tone, and asks rhetorical questions to convey her argument that…

Annotated Bibliography Secondary Sources Andress, David. The French Revolution and the People. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Andress?s publication provides the perspective of the people and the revolution. In a three-pronged review of the influences of the French revolution, the history of the people, the documentation by the philosophers, and the history of the monarchs are equally important. Birmingham, David. Switzerland: A Village History. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire:…

The book begins in 1775 with the words, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” (1) to show that there is a great divide between the rich and the poor in France. Jarvis Lorry goes to Paris with Lucie Manette to get Dr. Manette, her father. He has been locked up for 18 years in the Bastille. When asked about his reason of travel, he explained that he was going to dig up someone who has been long dead, and had the same…