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Enlightenment impact on french revolution
Short note on French revolution
The effects of the enlightenment on France
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The French Revolution was a drastic time for the people of France. In 1789, the majority of people were living in poverty and dealing with terrible conditions. People were split into three estates: the first, second, and third, the first being the wealthiest. Political, economic, and social situations were what contributed to people’s desire for change. The three main, or biggest causes of the French Revolution, were taxes, inequality, and lack of reform.
The French Revolution of 1789 marks a watershed in the political development of France and its role in European history. Many events contributed to the adversity that France was already facing before the revolution had even begun. The nation’s intervention in the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, and their already problematic taxation system, ultimately caused it to go into state debt. This, combined with France’s rapidly growing population, is what most of France’s economic crisis revolved around. The French population had actually grown by about 8 million people from 1700 to 1789, making it Europe’s most populous state.
The French Revolution was caused by the French government’s inability to unite their people as one nation and address the people’s demand for reformation of unjust taxation and citizen equality causing uprisings and revolts among middle and lower class people. The French government was already unstable after their assistance in the United States with their fight for independence, which put France in tremendous debt. Since the nobles and the clergymen were favored by the government, taxes were forced upon the Third Estate resulting in even more unrest. All citizens were not equal under the law, and the government was too occupied by their financial situation to focus on fixing the inequality and lack of representation among their own citizens.
This all in all led up to the French Revolution after years of inequality and unfairness in the country. Although the French Revolution had come from many different elements built up over time, the primary cause of it was ideas from
The French Revolution of 1789 is still today considered one of the most controversial Revolutions and can be seen as a decade of progressive societal and political development. There are several factors that are thought to have contributed to the revolution, including social, economic and political factors. Some historians such as William Doyle argue that the main cause of the Revolution was the economic state of France at the time which led to a financial crisis. Doyle specifically argues that the state’s heavy taxation on the peasantry and the growing debt of Louis XVI were the most significant factors that fueled the county’s resentment of the government that led to the demand for reform. As well as this
The Enlightenment brought many new ideas to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and lead to changes in society. The people of this time started to question everything that was in their lives and they looked to the philosophers. Many scientists began to discover new things and they learned about how things really worked. The people started to focus more on secular ideas and not spiritual ideas. Mostly everyone started thinking about why they wanted and focusing more on making the world better.
The Enlightenment was the era that followed the Scientific Revolution, and it was heavily influenced by the revolution. It did this by “extending its ideas to new disciplines such as demography, the science of man, and anthropology; by transforming chemistry, the life sciences (biology), and the study of electricity; and by vastly developing the power of mathematics as the language of science” (Reill & Wilson). Lastly, the Scientific Revolution, along with the Enlightenment, helped to pave the way for science as is known to this
I agree that the Enlightenment was force for positive change in society. The Enlightenment was one was the most important intellectual movements in History, as it dominated and influenced the way people thought in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries. We will look at how it ultimately influenced the American and French Revolution which is still strongly governed by these ideas and principles today. The Age of Enlightenment was a European movement which emphasizing reasoning and individualism in preference to tradition.
The Enlightenment was a period of time that stressed the importance of reason and individual ideas. Many philosophers published works criticizing a country’s monarch or divulging the flaws they saw in a system within the government, such as the justice system. The Enlightenment also stressed the importance of education, and as a result of this, literacy rates experienced a major upward trend. Now able to read the philosopher’s works, a larger sum of people now were educated on the corruptions within their government. This caused a questioning of traditional practices, and people began to believe they could revise their government.
At the end of the 18th century, Shelley, her family, and the rest of Europe watched as French peasants, tired of social inequality, broke into the royal prison, the Bastille, in a sign of defiance against King Louis XVI. Shortly afterwards, this rebellion turned into a revolution, King Louis XVI and his wife were imprisoned and later executed, and the French monarchy collapsed (Marcuse). Because of the French Revolution, which ushered in the First French Republic, French laws and philosophy began to align with enlightenment ideals, which emphasizes equality. On the 26th of August, 1789, the French National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which most notably states, “Men are born and remain free and equal in
Peasants were required to pay a 10% tax to the Church, 5% property tax, and 7% tax on their land and family. All these taxes would just fill up the money tank for the wars that France was fighting. The lower classes were angry when they realized this, but couldn’t anything about it. Farmers around the capital ate essentially what they grew, so they did not leave the city that much. King Louis XVI would give minimal money to the lower classes for food, so they were on their own.
This completely challenged Frances current system of an absolute monarchy. France also suffered through several years of poor harvests further increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. The years before the French Revolution would trouble both financially and socially, influenced by many more factors than the decisions of King Louis
One of the three major problems during the French Revolution was the financial problems. In France, where society was dominated by status, clergy and
Within this 18th century Enlightment document, I anticipate to analyze a lot of new content. The Enlightenment is the duration inside the history of western notion and culture, stretching more from the mid-many years of the 17th century thru the eighteenth century, characterised by means of dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics. I believe the enlightenment idea culminates traditionally inside the political upheaval of the French Revolution, wherein the traditional hierarchical political and social orders were violently destroyed and changed through a political and social order informed by means of the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all. The Enlightenment begins with the clinical revolution of the
“God, who has given the world to men in common, has also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience” (Locke, 35). The Scientific Revolution concentrated on understanding the physical world through astronomical and mathematical calculations, or testable knowledge. The Enlightenment focused more on “Spreading of faith in reason and in universal rights and laws” (Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 535). While the Scientific Revolution preceded the Enlightenment, both time periods sought to limit and challenge the power of the Church, through the spread of science, reason and intellect, and political philosophies. The Scientific Revolution began with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1542) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) wanting to understand the movement of the planets beyond what they authorities had told them.
