Great Western History - Essay Example

Western History 3 French society at the time of the Revolution was very similar to most European countries in that period of time. There was an absolute monarchy that ruled in much the same way established by Louis XIV in the early 1700s. The system included an aristocratic class which owned most of the status and wealth of the nation in a feudal-type system. There was also a merchant class called the bourgeoisie that, at times, held enough wealth to rival the nobles, but none of the political leverage. There was “a vast peasantry accounting for one in seven or one in eight of the population, most of whom were legally free but bound to their seigneur … by a myriad of services and obligations surviving from the medieval past. … And, in cities, … a great urban population of innumerable crafts and occupations, for the most part poor and depending for survival on cheap and plentiful bread” (Rude 1995). What made France different was the wealth of the French bureaucracy, enabling them to exist independent of the crown. Tension mounted as “the bourgeoisie wanted a higher social status and a share in government commensurate with their wealth” (Rude 1995) while the aristocracy was engaging in its historic struggle to regain political power lost in the time of King Louie XIV. These were the factors that led to the events of the French Revolution such as the revolte nobiliaire, the taking of the Bastille and the Great Fear, as well as the rise of Napoleon. With the country in financial ruin, the official start of the French Revolution was in May of 1787, with the ‘revolte nobiliaire.’ This event forced the king to convene the States General. “The country poor were … desperate and restless with riot and banditry; the urban poor were doubly desperate as work ceased at the very moment that the cost of living soared … They introduced the tremendous and earth-shaking idea of liberation from gentry and oppression. A riotous people stood behind the deputies of the Third Estate. … Counterrevolution turned a potential mass rising into an actual one” (Hobsbawm, 1969). It was the king’s counter-revolution that propelled the working people into open revolt. Tensions were already high in Paris in July of 1789 as the King continued to block initiatives proposed by the Estates-General and bread prices continued to skyrocket. Protesting the rising cost of bread, the staple of the French diet, crowds and the troops sent to disperse them seized the Bastille. A Bastille was “a state prison symbolizing royal authority, where the revolutionaries expected to find arms. In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols. … What is more to the point, the fall of the Bastille spread the revolution to the provincial towns and the countryside” (Hobsbawm 1969). As the rumors spread regarding the fall of the Bastille, people in twenty-eight of the largest thirty cities in France staged uprisings and hundreds of thousands of peasants in the rural areas attacked lords’ manors and destroyed other symbols of the seigneurialism system throughout the summer of 1789. This gave rise to a wide-spread wave of mass panic, known now as the “Great Fear”, in which the people pulled down the old system of French feudalism “and the state machine of royal France lay in fragments” (Hobsbawm 1969). This was the most important event of the revolution in terms of changing the structure of politics. The bourgeoisie drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen successfully limiting the King’s power. “Between 1789-1791, the victorious moderate bourgeoisie, acting through what had now become the Constituent Assembly, set about the gigantic rationalization and reform of France” (Hobsbawm 1969). Of most importance, the uncontrolled economic system that arose “accentuated the fluctuations in the level of food prices … The price of bread registered the political temperatures of Paris with the accuracy of a thermometer” (Hobsbawm 1969). In 1792, a group of Parisian artisans attacked the Tuileries Palace and arrested the royal family and dispersed the Legislative Assembly. This attack was followed a month later with a mass killing of thousands of political prisoners, referred to as the “September Massacres.” War with the rest of Europe and the establishment of the First French Republic marks the so-called “radical stage” of the revolution. “The sansculottes [a group of common workers] were organized … and provided the main striking-force of the revolution … they also formulated a policy combining respect for (small) private property with hostility to the rich, government-guaranteed work, wages and social security for the poor man, an extreme, egalitarian and libertarian democracy, localized and direct” (Hobsbawm 1969). The Sans-Culottes participated in the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, providing the necessary communication link between the working people and the new government. Yet it was this government that opened the way for Napoleon Bonaparte to rise to power. As France reeled between political leaders, Napoleon was about to start making his name as a military leader. After a number of successes for France in Italy, Austria and Egypt, Napoleon’s leadership was demanded to respond to almost certain destruction. “A group of countries had banded together to oppose France. Austrian and Russian forces had regained control of almost all of Italy. Then, in August 1798, the British destroyed French ships in the Battle of the Nile, leaving the French army cut off from its homeland” (Napoleon Bonaparte, 2010). Although he had to leave his army behind, Napoleon made his way back to France and took control of the situation. Threatened on all sides, French leaders willingly permitted Napoleon to take almost unlimited power which he used to good purpose. He brought Italy back under French control, made peace with England through treaty in 1802 and with the Roman Catholic Church. “He improved conditions within France as well by, among other things, establishing the Bank of France, reorganizing education and reforming France’s legal system with a new set of laws known as the Code Napoleon” (Napoleon Bonaparte, 2010). With control of the laws and his recent military successes, he was given the position of First Consul for life, which he soon changed to Emperor and which enabled him to retain power. This was further supported by his many military successes, eventually influencing all of continental Europe. Unfortunately, Napoleon’s ‘influence’ was quite heavy-handed. Many of those under his influence resented it and his greatest opposition, England, was beyond his reach across the English Channel. Although it can easily be argued that Napoleon, with all of his despotic ideas, betrayed the spirit of the French Revolution, there is some support to his claim that he “completed the Revolution.” The changes he attempted to force helped point the way to more democratic processes. “Georges Lefebvre wrote that the Emperor was ‘...a pupil of the philosophies, he detested feudalism, civil inequality, and religious intolerance.  Seeing in enlightened despotism a reconciliation of authority with political and social reform, he became its last and most illustrious representative.  In this sense he was the man of the Revolution.’” (Holmberg, 1998). Napoleon provided the still disorganized revolutionaries with an example of how to establish a more administrative government. Growing out of the Jacoban element of the revolutionary leadership, Napoleon said “he came to substitute and age of work for and age of talk ... he would create a methodical government based upon popular consent, and conceived in the interests not of any particular faction but of France as a whole" (cited in Holmberg, 1998). While his despotic leadership would seem a betrayal of the revolution’s ideals, the ideals he expressed and the administrative example he set helped finally define the revolution’s objectives and establish a means of making it reality. Works Cited “Napoleon Bonaparte.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. August 18, 2010 Hobsbawn, E.J. The Age of Revolution. New York: Praeger, 1969. Holmberg, Tom. “Napoleon and the French Revolution.” Napoleon Bonaparte Internet Guide. 1998. August 18, 2010 Rude, G. Ideology and Popular Protest. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Read More