Revolution the term and the mental pictures it engenders are maligned and irreconcilable terms that are used in both the social and physical sciences today. Meaning nothing more than dramatic or drastic change, the term is bandied about with violent connotations that have little to do with the phenomenon itself.1 One of the clearest test cases of the historical term "revolution", and one of the most social events in the modern world, the French Revolution has implications beyond geographic or political boundaries. In fact, the term "Revolutionary Age" has taken on a broader meaning, becoming synonymous with new and critical thinking in all aspects of the social milieu. For some it gave rise to new concepts of man's ability to free himself. Others found only the devastating effects of war and the results of man's inhumanity to man, in the bloody tirades that occurred during the period. While the French Revolutionary period itself has been pegged by many historians as the period from 1789 to 1799, the term Revolutionary Age is far broader and may be extended back into the past to 1760 and forward to the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
The age itself, however, must be looked upon as a product of the Enlightenment, in which more and more of both the
1 See Richard Luttwak, Coup d'Etat, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 19 28.
intellectual and common classes were debating the manner by which people should exist within the world system itself. The Frenchman Rousseau proclaimed that "everything depended fundamentally on politics," yet failed to consider that before political patterns could exist, the phenomenology within the social and artistic life of the country must take primacy.2
In this sense, it is easy to place various social and artistic activities within the very realm of the political not simply as interpreters of the Enlightenment and resulting revolutionary spirit, but clearly as so...