The+ideology+of+the+French+Revolution

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**THE IDEOLOGY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION **

Culturally, the French Revolution provided the world with its first meaningful experience with political ideology. The word, and the concept it expressed, were revolutionary in origin.

Ideology directed the French Revolution, and it soon grew, like roses on a bush or the heads of hydra--a matter of outlook, of course--to provide the nineteenth century with an unusual number of competing theoretical social systems. What was ideology? It was and remains a system of ideas that are usually goal- directed. Thus, it is a theoretical explanation of the world's situation and a prescription for improvement or radical change of that situation. In this sense, ideology is rooted in historical consciousness, in an awareness of mankind's progress through time and how that progress might be redirected toward an alternate objective. Most ideologies are, therefore, fundamentally political, bright descriptions of the means and methods by which the instruments of revolution, party, or government ought be used for the purpose of social change.

The introduction of ideology into the modern world was one major effect of the new secular spirit of the eighteenth century. Once society was deemed to be man- made--and here the influence of the Enlightenment is noticeable--then it could be changed. Ideology was the prescription for that change. And the force of ideology was felt throughout the modern era.

In sum, the French Revolution did many things, unleashed new forces, destroyed old ideas, offered new promises. Not the Revolution itself, of course, but the people who made it.

Many historians have described the French Revolution as the encounter of competing classes. In such an appraisal the Revolution is seen to begin with aristocratic protest against the absolute monarchy bequeathed by Louis XIV, then to enlarge in scope as a bourgeois movement seeking fundamental political change, and, finally, to take on popular dimensions with working-class participation, particularly in Paris.

From 1787 to 1789, there was a debate between monarchy and aristocracy over the financing of the state and the political authority which each claimed to enjoy and exercise. It was the near bankruptcy of the state, largely caused by aid to the American revolutionaries, that served as the immediate provocation for aristocratic opposition in 1787, when an Assembly of Notables (consisting of aristocrats), called by the king and his finance minister, demanded political authority in return for tax reform. This assembly achieved nothing but further aggravation between monarch and aristocracy. However, if the aristocracy now presumed to speak in the name of the "nation," it certainly made no request to extend the political base of the nation.

Such an extension was demanded and obtained by the bourgeoisie, who ushered in the major phase of the French Revolution. In the words of Georges Lefebvre, "The Revolution of 1789 restored the harmony between fact and law." The fact was that the bourgeoisie were the most significant economic element within France. The wealth they generated and the professions they filled were far more important than the political role they were allowed by tradition and law to play. Through revolutionary ideology and institutional change, the bourgeoisie gained a political authority not known before in any European country. In this sense, the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. The abolition of aristocratic privileges, the confiscation of church and aristocratic lands and their purchase by the bourgeoisie, and the removal of internal obstacles to trade and commerce allowed the middle class greater economic and social mobility.

In rhetoric and institution, the French Revolution was a liberal revolution, in which the liberty of the individual was proclaimed, private property was respected.

Yet it should not be assumed that revolutionary practice directly followed revolutionary principle. The exigencies of the time--war, counterrevolution, factionalism within the various governments--combined to tempt the revolutionary leaders to shelve most of the ideals until peace and calm were restored. The most influential factor in this decision was the war which the French began, out of fear of foreign invasion, on April 20, 1792. As the "Declaration of Revolutionary Government," issued on October 10, 1793, succinctly stated: "The provisional government of France is revolutionary until the peace." Put otherwise, revolutionary times required revolutionary, not democratic, government. The now familiar arguments about "national security" were then new, but no less disturbing.

The problem of war against France--England had joined Prussia and Austria in April of 1793--and the problem of provisioning the home population with sufficient staples--again the issue of "bread"--complicated government and allowed another social element to play an important role in the Revolution. This element was the multitude, variously called the "crowd," "the mob," or the "rabble."

The so-called "mob" was composed primarily of lower middle-class artisans, that their initial behavior was no more disorderly than that of protest movements we witness with great frequency in our own age. Far from wishing to be part of a "spontaneous anarchy," as a French contemporary saw the situation, the Parisian crowds were set upon relieving the unsatisfactory living conditions they felt had resulted from a government both mismanaged and insensitive.

This urban crowd was made up of the sans-culottes, the craftsmen, skilled and semi-skilled workers who wore no knee breeches (culottes ), hence who enjoyed few of the benefits of the wealthy and the aristocratic. They were interested in having their immediate grievances righted; high-flung ideological considerations were of no concern to them.

In a way, therefore, the revolutionary forces that disturbed France in the summer of 1789 were coincidental: the coming together at a particular time of people protesting their economic plight and people seeking fundamental governmental reform. As many critics have asserted, it was the weight of the urban crowds and the direction of the reform-minded bourgeoisie that gave the French Revolution its force. At no time was the importance of the sans-culottes more obvious than in the years 1792 and 1793, in that extended moment of transition from constitutional monarchy to republican government. According to the eminent French historian Albert Soboul, the sans-culottes were representative of popular democracy. They disdained the aristocrats and viewed with contempt the airs and manners of the rich and well-born. In a public display without precedent in Paris, they strolled the fashionable boulevards where before would have been seen only the knee-breechered gentleman.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 130%;">As the Revolution became more popular in support, it also became more intolerant; this dual situation occurring in the years 1793 and 1794, when the Jacobin faction, that most closely identified with the people of Paris and with democracy, was supreme. (The Jacobins were named after their meeting place in a monastery in the rue St. Jacob.) In June 1793 the Jacobins effectively removed their political opposition and proclaimed a "republic one and indivisible," in which legislative power would be predominant. The ascendancy of the legislative assembly had begun earlier and had reached an important stage in April 1793, when the Committee of Public Safety was established. This twelve-man group was, as its title suggests, responsible for the well- being of the state. But by the summer of 1793, when the Jacobins had reorganized the Committee and effectively controlled the government, the revolutionaries were exhibiting a political ruthlessness unlike any seen before. As they set out to eliminate their enemies, they seemed to follow the cynical imperative coined at the time: "Be my friend, or I will kill you."

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 130%;">It was during the Reign of Terror, 1793-1794, that revolutionary tribunals meted out hasty justice. Opponents of the regime, revolutionaries themselves, fell beneath the blade of the guillotine. This was the awful period in which "the Revolution devoured its own." Some eleven thousand individuals died as enemies of the state, and their deaths added up to a new, horrendous activity of modern Western civilization: institutionalized violence, the harsh elimination of political opposition by the state. Later, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany would cause the figures of the French Revolution to seem small.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 130%;">The Terror was spent by the summer of 1794, when reaction against it set in. The end was reached at the moment the individual most frequently identified with the harshness of revolutionary retribution, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), was himself beheaded on July 28, 1794. It is important to note that Robespierre came closest to being the revolutionary "hero." A lawyer and one of the first declared republicans, Robespierre was a man of determination, anxious to see the Revolution realized according to his lights. Many say that Robespierre was Rousseau's translator, taking the philosopher's ideas on equality and civil government and making them public policy. Yet Robespierre's political behavior was far from democratic. Elected to the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793, he soon came to dominate that group, hence dominate the revolutionary government. He exhibited himself as a ruthless individual, incorruptible, dictatorial, impersonal, and determined to sweep away all who opposed the Revolution. He urged the war on against the monarchical powers of France, and he encouraged the Reign of Terror. He was feared and unloved. He was the image of the modern revolutionary whose profession and passion are political.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 130%;">Certainly, the French Revolution had a quality of spontaneity, of accident, that later revolutions would not have. There was no clearly defined revolutionary party or conspiratorial group that initially plotted the Revolution, and the contending factions that followed after the Revolution had occurred never gained a firm grip on the nation's imagination or its institutions. The Jacobins came closest, but their unchallenged period of rule was limited, lasting only a year.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 130%;">It must be remembered that the French Revolution was the first major social revolution, of far greater dimensions and of deeper purpose than the American Revolution that had preceded it. Only the Russian Revolution of November 1917, the one that ushered in modern Communism, would rival in world importance what occurred in France between 1789 and 1799. Underlying this extended dramatic development was the new belief that revolution was the most effective means to achieve political and, consequently, social change. Not reform from within, but overthrow from without appeared to be the new law of political physics.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 130%;">The ten years of the French Revolution have since been reviewed in terms of the old historical concern with change and continuity. At the basis of the debate over what the French Revolution could and did accomplish is to be found the nineteenth-century concern with liberalism and conservatism. To sweep away the old and begin the new was the liberal solution; it was predicated upon the assumption that human nature was essentially good, mankind essentially rational, and the purpose of life the "pursuit of earthly happiness." To respect the past, to work within the social structure that now exists so that it is modified, not destroyed, was the conservative solution; it was predicated upon the assumption that human nature was weak, mankind essentially selfish, and the purpose of life the search for social stability and order.

<span style="color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 130%;"> Equally enduring as a historical problem was the position of the French Revolution on the time scale: was the Revolution the end of one era or was it the beginning of another? It seems to have been both: it ended a world based on tradition, on blood-right, on fixed social status. In principle and by legislation, it made the individual citizen the center of a new social order. The social order should, therefore, be designed to maximize this freedom, this personal liberty.

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<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">1) What is //ideology//? Explain the meaning in **your own** words. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">2) Explain in **your own** words Lefebvre's phrase: "The Revolution in 1789 restored the harmony between fact and law." <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">3) Why is it said that the French Revolution was a //liberal// revolution? Explain it in **your own** words. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">4) Explain the importance of the participation of the //sans-culottes// in the revolutionary process. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">5) "Be my friend, or I will kill you". Why was this phrase popular during the period of the Terror? Explain your answer using the source (text) and your knowledge. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">6) Make two lists providing: a) evidence that supports the idea that Robespierre was democratic, and b) evidence that supports that he wasn't democratic.

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">**Essay task** <span style="font-family: Tahoma,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">To What Extent, In What Ways Was French Revolution 1789-1794 An Attempt To Create A Government Based Enlightenment Ideals?