Week 6

Chapter 19: A Revolution in Politics--the Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon

On the morning of JULY 14, 1789, a Parisian mob of eight thousand people in search of weapons streamed toward the Bastille, a royal armory filled with arms and ammunition. The Bastille was also a state prison, and although it now held only seven prisoners, in the eyes of these angry Parisians, it was a glaring symbol of the government’s despotic policies. The armory was defended by the Marquis de Launay and a small garrison of 114 men. The attack began in earnest in the early afternoon, and after three hours of fighting, de Launay and the garrison surrendered. Angered by the loss of ninety-eight of their members, the victorious mob beat de Launay to death, cut off his head, and carried it aloft in triumph through the streets of Paris. When King Louis XVI was told the news of the fall of the Bastille by the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, he exclaimed, ‘‘Why, this is a revolt.’’ ‘‘No, Sire,’’ replied the duc, ‘‘it is a revolution.’’ Historians have long assumed that the modern history of Europe began with two major transformations—the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Accordingly, the French Revolution has been portrayed as the major turning point in European political and social history, when the institutions of the ‘‘old regime’’ were destroyed and a new order was created based on individual rights, representative institutions, and a concept of loyalty to the nation rather than the monarch. This perspective does have certain limitations, however. France was only one of a number of areas in the Western world where the assumptions of the old order were challenged. Although some historians have called the upheavals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a ‘‘democratic revolution,’’ it is probably more appropriate to speak of a liberal movement to extend political rights and power to the bourgeoisie in possession of capital—citizens besides the aristocracy who were literate and had become wealthy through capitalist enterprises in trade, industry, and finance. The years preceding and accompanying the French Revolution included attempts at reform and revolt in the North American colonies, Britain, the Dutch Republic, some Swiss cities, and the Austrian Netherlands. The success of the American and French Revolutions makes them the center of attention for this chapter. Not all of the decadent privileges that characterized the old European regime were destroyed in 1789, however. The revolutionary upheaval of the era, especially in France, did create new liberal and national political ideals, summarized in the French revolutionary slogan, ‘‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’’ that transformed France and were then spread to other European countries through the conquests of Napoleon. After Napoleon’s defeat, however, the forces of reaction did their best to restore the old order and resist pressures for reform.