The French Revolution

Abstract

Preceded by the American Revolution, and to some extent inspired by it, the French Revolution was an epoch-making upheaval by which, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the old order in France was overthrown and such forces as democracy, nationalism and socialism were set in motion throughout Europe. Rousseau’s doctrine of the sovereignty of the people as the only legitimate foundation of government directly challenged the right to exist of every monarchy in Europe. The French Revolution was the consequence of a moral, financial, economic and social crisis. The authority of the French King, an absolute monarch of divine right, was questioned by the eighteenth-century French philosophes Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, whose Encyclopédie (published between 1751 and 1772) was a war machine pointed at the ancien régime. Masonic lodges were instrumental in propagating the new ideas of the age of Enlightenment among the middle classes. The French monarchy was criticised all the more because of the enormous deficit sustained by the royal finances due to inflation and ever-increasing expenditure. The year 1788 marked the beginning of a severe economic crisis for France: the bad harvest of 1788, followed by a bitter winter, led to a tremendous rise in prices, and resuscitated the spectre of famine; French textile industries, unable to meet competition from Great Britain, were hit by unemployment.