Such events, added to the tumultuous crisis being lived in France, led to the conformation of the National Assembly. Luquiens (2010) states that representatives of the nation gathered to bind the monarchy power and to assure that common people were to decide about national issues. In the year 1791, a Legislative Assembly was formed. Luquiens (2010) concludes that “it was empowered to enact laws and raise taxes, determine public expenditure, ratify treaties and declare war” (p.1). The role of the king was also restricted as he could not dissolve the assembly nor disable its statutes for more than two years.
One of the most outstanding acts passed by the National Assembly and undoubtedly one of the pillars for the declaration of the Human Rights was the creation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 (see Appendix 1, picture 3).
As Goldman (2008) notes, the purpose of this declaration was to ensure the equality and uniformity of human rights to any French citizen as well as their duties towards the country. Through seventeen articles, the act stated that all French civilians were to have the same rights as regards political association, freedom of expressing opinions and ideas openly, economical administration and the power to choose their own representatives in society.
Another momentous event took place in 1792. As claimed by Chavis (2009), a National Convention was elected with the purpose of writing a new constitution; however, the adoption of such was decided to be shelved until the country was at peace.
What the National Convention first dictated was the overthrow of the monarchy and the declaration of France as a Republic. Nevertheless, the new French Republic was soon turned into a dictatorship, with Maximilien Robespierre at the head. The Reign of Terror period commenced.
One of its first victims was the former king Louis XVI. According to Eye Witness to History [EWH] (1999), the National Convention tried Louis in 1792 for betraying his own people. The following year, on January 20th, Louis XVI’s sentence was read: the king had to die. On the next morning, Louis was taken to the execution place, where the guillotine was awaiting him. Once the blade was down, the last king of France had ceased to exist (see Appendix 1, picture 4). No sooner had nine months passed than his wife, Marie Antoinette (see Appendix 1, picture 5), was condemned to death. She made her way to the blade on October 16th, 1793.
Betts (2000) remarks that thousands of French people were beheaded at the guillotine. Not only did this government send to death whoever was against it, but several revolutionaries as well, in a time when “the Revolution devoured its own” (p.3); insomuch that the Reign of Terror is said to have finished when Robespierre himself was executed in 1794. And the bloodbath came to an end.
Consequences
As Gascoigne (2009) explains, at the time that Louis XVI was in danger, Austria and Prussia officially claimed to protect the French king with military help, and later they called for allies to attack France. In turn, the latter declared war on Austria.
After the first confrontation, the French Republican army emerged victorious. Stimulated by a series of successes, the Republican leaders announced their willingness to aid anyone who wished to plan an insurrection against their repressive political systems.
Such enthusiasm led to the French people voluntarily joining the army, it becoming larger than previous military forces. Furthermore, in 1793, the French Republic introduced the national conscription, an unparalleled measure up to that moment.
It is this course of action which allowed the French armies to outnumber the regiments of their enemies. In addition, the First Coalition, as the alliance of France’s adversaries is known, failed to collaborate efficaciously, therefore enabling the Republican army to have equal opportunities to triumph.
Another major point to mention is the characteristics of the Post-Revolutionary France. Morrell (1998) notes that the Republican France of the first half of the nineteenth century was a more notably social nation, which adhered to tenets such as righteousness, freedom, egalitarianism and humanity.
The fundamental objective of the Revolution was that the French people could hold their future in their own hands, and rule the country themselves, which they could eventually achieve. Additionally, Morrell (1998), using the words of Garraty and Gay, writes that:
Yet the most revealing measures enacted by the republicans were no so much the political and economic as social and cultural. Believing in human dignity, equality, and fraternity, the republicans tried to make these beliefs part of the fabric of the French life... in this spirit the republicans abolished slavery in the French colonies as well as imprisonment for debt. They proclaimed their faith in free public education. They discouraged the use of aristocratic words...(p.3).
Regarding England, Schultz (1968) reports that the British welcomed the news of the French Revolution heartily and even proudly, since they felt their own Glorious Revolution of 1688 had served as a model for the French insurrection. However, as noted by Richards and Hunt (1950), there were some other people who saw the French Revolution as the beginning of the breakdown of the political systems of the civilised world.
According to Philp (2009), Edmund Burke (see Appendix 1, picture 6), a conservative leading Whig, undoubtedly believed that the revolution was dismantling the French government and was thus afraid it would reach England. Burke countered with his Reflections of the Revolution in France (1791), in which, as Schultz (1968) concludes, he predicts that the French revolutionary precepts would drastically change the principles and the integrity of western civilisation, were they not hindered.
On the other hand, Kreis (2009) accounts for Thomas Paine’s answer to Burke. In his The Rights of Man, Paine (see Appendix 1, picture 7) puts forward a republican government, with elected representatives, in contrast to the starkly sharp monarchies which “had done nothing but hide truth and dispense falsehood. Monarchy is the engine of human misery and oppression. Monarchy is the supreme evil. It is the obstacle to human improvement –it is hocus pocus” (p. 6).
What is more, as Philp (2009) observes, some associations of working people, for instance, the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) and the London Corresponding Society (LCS), reawoke, while new ones were created, to diminish the power of the well-to-do and to confer their prerogative to strive for parliamentary revision.
This popular demand met the government’s refusal and worsened the tensions among Whigs, which ended in the division of the party.
Conclusion
At the apex of the eighteenth century, the most established and glorious monarchy in Europe faced its most implacable enemy: its own people. The French Revolution meant the birth of a new republic. But it was born with the death of the king. Thereafter, what began as a time of hopeful changes, became the bloodiest tragedy known until that moment
Nonetheless, the French Revolution constituted a social and political milestone in western history, changing forever the development of most nations far and wide.
References
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