1 The Legacy of the French Revolution

• In the first part of the 19th century, Europe was in the shadow of the French Revolution.
• The upheaval's remarkable accomplishments, as well as its destructiveness and shocking cruelties, influenced every European country and left many unfinished agendas: on the left, altruistic hopes and dreams, and on the right, bitter resentments and fears.

• France had a strong influence over the rest of Europe in the century before 1789.
• French literature, art, and fashions were in demand everywhere because the ruling orders of many countries spoke French in preference to their native tongues.
• Prussia's population was under 4 million, Britain's around 8 million, the Habsburg Empire's around 11 million, and Russia's around 20 million.
• Paris was seen as the cultural and intellectual capital of Europe.

• The rest of Europe was bound to be affected by any development in such an influential nation.
• France sneezed in the summer of 1789.
• It overthrew its existing institutions and executed its king and queen with a new guillotine.
• The armies of Europe's leading powers were routed in a series of military campaigns.
• France created French-dominated states along the frontiers that it annexed.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• France had ruled for two decades over a large percentage of Europe's population after the French Revolution.
• The laws and institutions of the French Revolution were adopted by those not formally annexed into the French Empire.
• The Revolution's legacy was enduring.
• In areas that never experienced direct French rule, the revolutionary legacy was significant, in part because the leaders of most countries found it necessary to copy at least some French institutions in order to survive.

• The revolutionary period, 1789-1815, is one of the most complex periods in history.
• Three constitutions were already adopted by 1795.
• The Third Estate, which made up 95 percent of the total population, was replaced by the First Estate, which made up the majority of the population.

• The first years were marked by a lot of confusion and uncertainty, but the beginning of a long- lasting administrative system was being put into place, one that sought to rationalize and centralize the tottering maze of the Old Regime's administration.
• The agenda of reform included a new system of weights and measures, a new calendar with ten-day weeks, and a new monetary system.
• Most innovations took some time to be implemented.
• The new calendar was so confusing and unpopular that it was abandoned after a few years.
• The events of the Revolution are recorded in the way that the new months are remembered.
• The political terms "right," "left," and "reactionary" all came from this period.

• The legacy of the French Revolution usually includes ideals, goals, visions, and nightmares.
• The intellectual elite of Europe was gripped by the revolutionary mystique.
• The vision of a transformed human condition affected some Europeans in ways that recall the messianic dreams of the past.
• The heroic revolutionary was a model for many parts of the restless youth of Europe, in ways similar to the idealized Christian saint or crusading knight.
• Many believed that the Revolution's failures would be fixed in revolutions to come.
• The use of the term "revolution" was reminiscent of so many religious terms, oddly vague and inclusive, referring not only to measurable political events but also to a vast historical process, beginning in 1789 and marching ever onward.

• The lives of Europe's common people will eventually be freer and more secure as a result of revolutionary reforms, though not immediately.
• Revolution had a ghastly dark side.
• The vilest instincts of the human heart were awakened by political revolutions, both in revolutionaries and in their opponents.
• From the guillotine of the French Revolution to the concentration camps of the Soviet Union, political revolutions have produced oceans of blood and unimaginable human suffering.

• There was a similarity between the mystique of revolution and the mystique of religion.
• The carnage of the wars of religion in the 17th century turned many, especially among the educated elites, away from religious faith and toward a belief in the power of reason, a belief that seemed to bear fruit by the early twentieth century.

• The French Revolution turned against organized religion, the Catholic Church in particular, and against most Christian dogma.
• Revolutionaries wanted to replace the bigotry and superstition of the Church with more tolerant and rational beliefs.
• The Church's lands were expropriated and used to help finance the Revolution.

• A large part of the general population held on to its Christian faith and remained firmly attached to traditional ways of doing things.

• The ideals of the Enlightenment were the explicit goals of all revolutionaries, which meant abolishing the privileged or "feudal" estates, considered corrupt, unjust, and inefficient.
• The slogan for revolutionaries was the revolutionary trinity: liberty, equality, Fraternity.
• Each was full of promise.

• The goal was vague and the unity associated with it was fragile because of hopelessly conflicting and self-serving definitions of liberty among the various ranks of the French population.
• The Estates General, a legislative assembly of France's "estates" or branches of feudal society, was called for the first time in 1614 after the king's will had been successfully challenged.
• A series of poorly coordinated and conflicting protests against the king's efforts to reform taxation led to the emergence of the Revolution.

• The process of a chain reaction began when the Estates General met in 1789.
• Expectations were awakened by the king's indecisiveness and incompetence.
• A potent mix of angry urban mobs, panic in the countryside, and intellectuals intoxicated by Enlightened ideals - soon intensified by the fear of invasion by foreign powers - produced a series of changes that are astonishing in their scope and ambition.

• A number of observers, including Karl Marx, argued that the Revolution was the expression of conflict between social classes, with an emerging class of bourgeois capitalists defeating the feudal nobility in the process establishing a new legal order.
• The Marxist concept of social class tends to fall apart under rigorous analysis, which is why recent historians have substantially qualified or flatly rejected the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution.
• Providing a more satisfactory general theory to explain how and why it all happened has proven to be a continuing challenge.
• By 1789, practices and beliefs that had been acceptable in 1614 were considered unjust and irrational.
• One idea that had spread into large parts of the population was the idea of sovereignty, or the right to rule, which was derived from the consent of the people rather than from God's will.
• The Old Regime's intricate network of special rights and corporate privileges was losing much of its popularity.

• The American Revolution had evoked a lot of discussion in France and Europe because of its focus and model of rationality.
• The British colonies in North America fought against British tyranny.
• The ideals of the Enlightenment were expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
• The Americans adopted a constitution that put those ideals into action.
• The revolutionaries in America seemed to have shown that a constitutional republic based on popular sovereignty and the protection of individual rights was feasible, in stark opposition to the prevailing belief in Europe that the republican form of government was possible only in a citystate or very small country.
• The legitimacy of the violent opposition to tyranny gained increasing support, though that notion had roots in Christian political philosophy, itself looking back to the thought of the Greeks and Romans.

• The extent to which the American precedent was relevant for France remained open to question.
• The British colonies in North America had a small population of about 2 million by the last years of the 18th century and were culturally and linguistically diverse.
• Civil equality, or the equality of the individual citizen under a single legal system, was the meaning that seemed most widely agreed upon in 1789, but Feudalism violated not only individual liberty but also the second element of the revolutionary trinity: equality.
• That notion was fundamentally different from the Old Regime's recognition, and sanctification, of legal or civil inequality, according to membership in a hierarchy of corporate entities, involving often great differences in material wealth, social prestige, and political power.

• The Old Regime, which was supported by Christian universalism, did recognize equality in one major regard - that is, equality before God, or the equal worth of the human soul in God's eyes - even if such equality found only the faintest expression in the legal rights of the lowest.
• The universalism of the Enlightenment was most famously expressed in Thomas Jefferson's "all men are created equal" but it was not meant to imply a belief in the desirability of creation.
• "equality" did not mean physical or intellectual equality for Jefferson since he harbored doubts about the equality of those members of the human family coming from Africa.

• Civil equality introduced by the French Revolution had definite and revealing limits.
• The qualification of "active" and "passive" citizenship was introduced by the constitution of 1791, with wealth determining who was eligible for active citizenship.
• Only a small percentage of males voted.

• Only a small percentage of people enjoy the right to hold public office.
• The electoral procedures of the Old Regime engaged a wider part of the population than the first revolutionary constitution did.

• When the Revolution moved in a more egalitarian direction, few revolutionaries contemplated measures designed to encourage economic or social equality.
• When Francois Babeuf plotted to seize power and introduce a regime that would actively pursue economic equality by distributing private wealth, price controls were introduced as a way to protect the poor.
• During the years of the Revolution, there were very few defenders of the idea of giving equal rights to women.
• The ideal of equality, even more than that of liberty, remained uncertain in meaning and application, an unfulfilled legacy for the following years, one that radical leftists believed "the Revolution" would clarify in the direction of greater social and economic equality.

• The Revolution's benevolent and optimistic universalism stood out because it wasn't just the rights of French citizens that were proclaimed.
• Revolutionaries generally opposed the enslavement of black Africans, and non Europeans born in France could become citizens in principle.

• The issue of the status of the Jews, a non-European group, attracted a lot of attention.
• The debate over whether Jews should be granted civil equality was the source of an extended and rancorous debate.
• The Jews of the day were ruled by separate laws and customs.
• Unlike the Protestant population in France, the Jews were not considered European and were not part of Christendom.

• Jews in France were thought to be physically and psychically different in many ways, consistent with their foreign origin, different religious beliefs, distinct culture, and separate language.
• Civil equality was granted to Jews after a year of deliberations.
• The majority in favor of this inclusion was slim, and the nature of the lengthy debates made it clear that even those who supported granting Jews civil equality did so out of an ideological attachment to the concept of human equality and adaptability, not out of respect for the Jews in their present state.
• Civil equality of Jews would come up again for serious consideration under Napoleon, after angry dissent in regard to the suitability of Jews as citizens was repeatedly expressed.

• Fraternity is the last element of the revolutionary trinity.
• This is the most difficult of the trinity to evaluate because of its practical expression in the 1790s and long-term legacy.
• Jews and non-Jews in France in the late 18th century did not think of one another as brothers.
• The lack of feelings of kinship within large parts of the population living in France was underscored by the Revolution.

• The 1790s were characterized by a sense of camaraderie in some parts of the population.
• This sense was part of the dynamics of revolution, as revolutionaries joined ranks in the struggle to retain power.

• The ideal of Fraternity was an enduring legacy of the Revolution and had implications far beyond French nationalism.

• Since a society of social and economic equals can be non-socialist, based on competitive individualism and private property, Fraternity may be even more essential to socialism than equality.
• The ideal of Fraternity was part of the Christian heritage.
• It looked to the past to see how premodern society emphasized mutual responsibilities and emotional ties.

• The gender bias of the day is linked to the gender bias of both Christianity and Judaism.
• Women were included in the emerging sense of the French people and nation, but their participation in politics and the public realm was restricted.
• They were not given equal political rights in any of the constitutions of the 1790s.
• French currency, postage stamps, and public statues would feature Liberty as a woman for the next two centuries after the Revolution.

• She was portrayed in a painting by Eugene Delacroix as "leading the people" on the barricades in 1830, and is featured on the cover of this volume.
• The Statue of Liberty was given to the United States by the French Republic in 1886.
• Female virtues were associated with higher levels of civilization.

• Liberty, equality, and Fraternity were potent ideals with some concrete implications but also with a mystical legacy allowing for different interpretations by generations.
• What was actually being fought for in France after 1789 is not easy to describe or comprehend.
• The concept of progress itself has so much emotionally laden ambiguity that it's hard to say whether the Revolution moved France forward or not.
• The Revolution achieved liberty, equality, and Fraternity, but it also threatened them in other ways.
• It is difficult to describe the Paris mob as a progressive force because most of its members were driven by immediate and often ugly resentments, and they often expressed themselves in brutally violent ways.
• Conservative fear of the Paris mob helped reformers get their measures passed.

• Since the mob was ambiguously a force for progress, Louis XVI cannot be described as simply against progress, since he and the French kings before him favored rational reform, which promised to increase the wealth, efficiency, and power of the state.
• The reforms of the Revolution, in centralizing the state and curtailing the power of the nobility and the Church, succeeded in achieving the centralizing and rationalizing goals that French kings had been working on for a long time.

• The principle of royal privilege was not progressive by Louis XVI.
• Privilege's strange and confusing meanings need to be carefully scrutinized.

• The range of meanings meshes at one extreme with the concept of "rights" and at the other extreme with the idea of "sinecure", a paid position involving minimal work or service.

• The king considered royal privilege to be a divine right.
• After their own privileges came up for scrutiny by revolutionaries, most nobles rallied to the king and to a general defense of the merits or sacred nature of privilege.
• The members of the bourgeoisie, or the middle spectrum of society, were scandalized when their own private property was denounced as an unacceptable privilege by those who represented the poor.

• Few could imagine a world like that.
• All of them would have their identities changed beyond recognition.

• The escalating claims were often incoherently presented and translated into more coherent and literate form by the lawyers and other intellectuals who wrote up the revolutionary constitutions.
• The intellectual elites were not speaking for the bourgeoisie.
• One can say that certain basic and interrelated notions were supported by a lot of people.
• Those included popular sovereignty, an end to the legal privileges of the older estates, and a reorganization of government to make it more efficient.

• The members of the initial national assembly were divided into "right" and " left" based on where they sat in the meeting hall.
• The left had a more critical attitude to tradition and privilege.
• The left believed in the possibility of improvement.

• In the meeting halls of the revolutionary assembly of the 1790s, those on the extreme right were forced out, often fleeing the country to avoid being sent to prison or to the guillotine, whereas those on the left were pushed to the side.
• The game of musical chairs began in the opposite direction, with those on the left pushed to emigrate, prison, or the guillotine, as the music stopped in the summer of 1794.

• Even though the left favored change based on Enlightened principles of rationality and utility, elements resembling the old religiosity and dogmatism came back in.

• The left's beliefs came down to a new kind of faith and convictions that were less rational than religious beliefs.
• Similar to those that are common to all religions, these eventually merged intosacred narratives.
• The left's vocabulary was filled with allusions to such events as the storming of the Bastille and the crucifixion of Christ, as well as the writing of a cleansing revolutionary blood in ways that recalled Christian notions of Christ's sacrifice.

• An excellent overview of the French Revolution can be found in 1995.