Issues of the French Revolution

The question of the success or failure of the French Revolution depends on a multitude of factors. First, it must be determined when the Revolution ended. Second, one must decide whether to take a long view of the Revolution and consider its greater historical impact, or a short view assessing its impact on the citizens of France living at the time. Finally, one must consider what, if any, were the specific goals of the Revolutionaries. Each of these three issues are somewhat bound up with one another, but this paper will consider them individually in turn in order to draw a conclusion about the meaning of the French Revolution.

The question of when the Revolution ended is a disputed one among academics. Some argue that the institution of the Reign of Terror in 1793 marked the end, others date it to the execution of Robespierre and the end of the Terror in 1794. Some place the end date in 1799 with the coup of Napoleon, while others defer the date to 1804 when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Finally, some hold that the Revolution did not end until Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and the Bourbons were restored to the throne in 1815.

Furet (1978) claims that the date may in fact be later than 1815. Furet argues that the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were further extensions of the first Revolution. He also includes the rise of Napoleon III and his final defeat in 1870. "Only the victory of the republicans over the monarchists (in 1877) marked the definitive vict

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heir nation in mind. In France, there was little pre-revolutionary organizing of this type done. Consequently, there was nothing in place to fill the vacuum of monarchical authority. Tocqueville (1858) implied that the French Revolution was, in essence, less political than it was social. "No nation had ever before embarked on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to break with past," Tocqueville wrote (p. vii). The revolutionaries attempted to ensure that they would "import nothing from the past into the new regime, and saddled themselves with all sorts of restrictions in order to differentiate themselves in every possible way from the previous generation; in a word, they spared no pains in their endeavor to obliterate their former selves" (p. vii). For Tocqueville, then, the Revolution was less about political ideology than about a nation taking a particular path to modernization. Hunt (1984) describes how the lack of a group of "Founding Fathers" or "Founding Documents" has muddied the debate about the nature and meaning of the French Revolution. Hunt describes three broad theoretical approaches taken by historians in assessing the Revolution. One of these is the "modernization" approach pioneered by To

Category: History - I