The French Revolution - Essay Example

FRENCH REVOLUTION The French Revolution was one of the most significant historical events in the history of the world. One of its major accomplishments was to change the political order in France which had dominated for so many years. Change was in the air with the American Revolution having recently taken place across the Atlantic. There was a new way of looking at the role everyone could or should play in a political system that many thought was corrupt and dominated by the monarchy. How was this change effected?

To begin with, in 1789, the National Constituent Assembly abolished feudalism in France. They also cancelled all the special privileges of the many nobles and clergymen they felt were clogging up the system. They then looked at what the Americans had done with their Declaration of Independence from the U.K. in which they had tried to give equal rights to everyone. The French basically copies a lot of this and the Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This didn’t have any legal effect, but it was supposed to guide the government in making a new constitution.

In the new document, all citizens are supposed to be guaranteed the rights of “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” The Declaration argues that the peoples’ need for laws comes from the fact that “.the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights.” So the declaration sees law as a kind of “expression of the general will,” intending to promote equality of rights and to stop “actions harmful to society.

” This was popular with many groups of people who had been disenfranchised under the old system and were looking for a big change which would give them more political power and reduce their tax rate. Previously the nobles had all the power and all the money; people were fed up and wanted things to be more equal. They felt they were a group that could no longer be trampled on by the upper classes, and that they had individual rights and should be able to be active French citizens. Two branches of politics can be seen to come out of this period.

In the first—the American model—we can see people respecting individual rights and power devolved from government. In the second model we can see a sort of radicalism that destroys the old order and replaces it with a new radical order that wants everyone to be completely equal. This is the basis and foundation of Communism—many of whose revolutions took their inspiration from the French Revolution. Works consultedFuret, Francois (1995). Revolutionary France, 1770-1880. Blackwell Publishing.

Hibbert, Christopher (1980). The Days of the French Revolution. New York: Quill, William Morrow. Lefebvre, Georges (1971). The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793. Columbia University Press. Neely, Sylvia (2008). A Concise History of the French Revolution. Rowman & Littlefield. Rude, George (1991). The French Revolution: Its Causes, Its History and Its Legacy After 200 Years. Grove Press