No event in modern history so completely shocked the world as did the French Revolution - - a revolution in which the radical cry of LIBERTY!  EQUALITY!  FRATERNITY! for the masses challenged the protected interests of the privileged few.  The effects were profound, for Europe and the world would never be the same again.

It began as an attempt by the leaders of the industrial and commercial classes to sweep aside the injustices and abuses of the Old Regime, but it soon swept away the French monarchy and allied all of Europe against the rising tide of French republicanism.  In the process of fighting the coalitions of foreign armies, the newly formed citizen armies of France - - the first in modern history - - inagurated modern warfare.  As against the cautious maneuvering of small professional armies, transporting hundreds of tents and baggage for their officers, along with bread wagons and flour wagons to supplement the full ration of the soldier, the new warfare was a rapid movement of large armies carrying small supplies and living off the land.

A great wave of enthusiasm for France and the Republic swept the French people.  There was to be no compromising of republican principles at home or abroad.  At home, the hated royalists were to be stamped out, and abroad France would become the protector and backer of all revolutionaries, for all Europe and all the world would become republican.  These citizen armies gave the common man - - formerly a “nobody” among the despised lowly masses - - the opportunity to take to the battlefield on the side of justice, and the youth of France poured into the Republican armies - - spurred on by the stirring “Marseillaise.”  Before that chant, and the columns of bayonet-wielding French infantrymen supported by massive artillery, the foreign professional armies were rolled back and French armies penetrated far beyond the farthest advance of Louis XIV’s troops.

Then, with the excesses of the Reign of Terror at home, and a lack of capable and responsible leadership, French national morale faltered.  The monarchical powers formed new coalitions to suppress the upstart Republic and French armies were rolled back, their momentum stopped as they were placed on the defensive.  The cause of republicanism seemed lost. 

It was at this crucial period of time that Napoleon Bonaparte - - acknowledged by both critics and idolizers  as the world’s greatest military genius - - appeared.  Calling himself the “Son of the Revolution,”  he relentlessly sought fame on the battlefield and through the formation of the First French Empire.  While being accused of the betrayal of the Republic, he in fact saved France from the forces of monarchical reaction for some twenty years, and in the process the revolutionary theme of the French Revolution was carried to all corners of Europe.

While the social utopia which the early intellectuals had dreamed of did not come into being, the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes were successful in making far-reaching changes.  They founded the new tradition of liberty, with religious toleration being granted to Protestants, Jews, and freethinkers, and new political and economic rights for the rising middle class and the oppressed peasants of France.  The inaugurated a new meaning to equality, with the Code Napoleon burying forever the worst legal and social inequalities of the Old Regime, and spreading throughout Latin America.  They promoted fraternity by making all Frenchmen equal before the law and by introducing a new nationalism in which all Frenchmen shared the emotional conviction of France’s superiority to all other nations.  In the process, there was a total mobilization of the entire French nation against Europe.  Before the banners of Napoleon’s legions the path was opened for the development of the two cardinal features of nineteenth-century Europe, liberalism and nationalism, by which the middle class would become dominant.

Overview of the American Revolution

We will devote little classroom time to the discussion of the American Revolution since it was covered in great detail in your American History course.  However, you should recognize that the French and American Revolutions were the most important political events of the eighteenth century.  They were a dramatic conclusion to the Enlightenment, and both revolutions, taken together, formed a major turning point in human history.

The text authors see the immediate origins of the American Revolution in the British effort to solve the problem of war debts, which was turned into a political struggle by the American colonists, who already had achieved considerable economic and personal freedom.  The American Revolution stimulated reform efforts throughout Europe.