The Nature of the French Revolution Seguir blog

The Nature of the French Revolution

One of the common themes in human history is that social hierarchy causes more harm than good to the majority and benefits the few. This was the driving force behind the class conflict between the upper-middle bourgeoisie class and the lower working class, as Karl Marx and other like-minded people observed. Pre-revolutionary France is famous now for the peasants revolting against the royal family and overthrow the country’s feudal system. While that moment in Western European history was not exactly simplistic black-and-white as the propagandist phrase “let them eat cakes” where kings and queens do not care about pleasing peasants, but the actuality of that moment was much more complicated. The status quo of the country wanted to see the world to change, but not for the interest of the revolutionaries.

Reign of Terrors

The French Revolution was the chance where people can put Enlightenment ideas into the practice and have the state to empathize on human rights, freedom of thoughts, and reformation. People of the peasant class, or the third estate, now have a chance to reorganize the government to more democratic and functioned under the mass people’s interest. However, it did not go as they expected as it moves toward a more totalitarian regime and lived under the “Reign of Terrors” through beheading and executing dissents. This transitioned to another era when Napoleon became the new ruler and took over most of Europe. The promise of the Enlightenment has not fulfilled entirely throughout this period, but this pattern comes back the next century later with the World Wars. The revolution was the attempt to reform the French state through Enlightenment ideals like liberalism, democracy, and such, it only served the interest of the aristocratic people by using the resentment of the working class to overthrow the inefficient feudal regime.

Immanuel Kant

Since the early 18th century in Western Europe, people formed enlightenment thoughts and started to question the authority. Not only that, but the followers and listeners also began to question the position of authority in society. This not only happened in the kingdom like France but also in Prussia (now Germany) as well with Immanuel Kant wrote the essay that asks the question “What is Enlightenment?” and explored the idea of liberalism and freedom of thought. In the feudal society where peasants and farmers live in the lower class of the hierarchy whereas clerics, aristocrats, and bourgeoisie live in the higher class, the enlightenment found an appeal within the working class because it demanded for the institutional reformation. Francois Marie Arouet, or Voltaire, desired to make human institutions more equitable and just was admirable.

King Louis XVI

It’s not just high taxes, but also the frail reorganization of the government played a big factor in the revolution. King Louis XIV taxed people of the third estate, and the government went through a hard reorganization – even going from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, similar to the one in Britain at that time. However, those reorganizations have failed, and, partially inspired by the American revolution abroad, people marched to the Versailles palace to overthrow feudalism and established the new constitution. After the revolution, the Jacobins came to the power and executed King Louis XVI. They called for a republic and took over the new legislative assembly.

Maxmillian Robespierre

After the monarchism in France has ended, the dissident nobles took over the power, and the Reign of Terror began. The popular member of Jacobin by the name of Maxmillian Robespierre came to the power. Around this time, the quarrel between two different factions occurred and Robespierre killed anyone and any members of the Jacobin that disagrees with him. While he once believed that democracy and republic are the same, but he got himself distance away from his principles inspired by Jean-Jacque Rousseau. He stated that virtue and equality are “the soul of the Republic” and “the first rule of your political conduct should be to relate all your operations to the maintenance of equality and the development of virtue.” His vision of equality was far from the liberal definition in the final draft of the Declaration of rights, as he gave a narrow definition that the right of property “can prejudice neither the safety, nor the liberty, nor the existence, nor the property of our fellows.” He responded to the question about dealing with people who wanted neither the terror nor the virtue by stating that “the republican body must begin by subjecting within its own ranks all private passions to the general passion of the public”.

In other words, he would like to instill fears to the people and assert his dominance through using virtuous-sounding words and created the civil religion called the Cult of the Supreme Being as an alternative to the Catholicism and monarchy of the past era. As the chaos and massacre of random civilians continue, everyone in France agreed that Robespierre needs to be executed to end the Reign of Terror. Which it did, and the new regime began with the old aristocrats coming back to the power, and later Napoleon rose himself to the rank and conquered almost half of Europe.

Conclusion

The nature of the French Revolution was more of the bourgeoisie class attempt to reform the dying monarchist state to a more liberal democratic society, but they used their privilege status as a means to put fear and repression onto the people. Speaking of which, before the revolution, the Marquis de Sade wrote and published Juliette, which served as a sequel to his sadomasochistic novel Justine. The text is about the woman who goes out and makes many moral transgressions as much as she can and taking a good amount of pleasures out of them. In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Frankfurt School scholar Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer interpreted the titular antiheroine’s hedonistic journey as an allegory of the Enlightenment in Europe – especially the Enlightenment in the early 20th century.