The French Revolution발음듣기
The French Revolution
This is Crash Course World History and today we're going to talk about the French Revolution.발음듣기
Admittedly, this wasn't the French flag until 1794, but we just felt like he looked good on stripes.발음듣기
As does this guy, huh? So, while the American Revolution is considered a pretty good thing, the French Revolution is often seen as a bloody, anarchich mess- Mr. Green, Mr. Green!발음듣기
Also, like a lot of revolutions, in the end it exchanged an authoritarian regime for an authoritarian regime.발음듣기
Even if the revolution was a mess, its ideas changed human history farm more, I will argue, than American Revolution.발음듣기
(lively music) Right, so France in the 18th century was a rich and populous country but it had a systemic problem collecting taxes because of the way its society was structured.발음듣기
For the most French people, it sucked, because the people with the money: the nobles and the clergy, never paid taxes.발음듣기
He even called for democracy on a local level but all attempts to fix it failed and soon France basically declared bankruptcy.발음듣기
This nicely coincided with hailstorms that ruined a year's harvest, thereby raising food prices and causing widespread hunger which really made the people of France angry because they love to eat.발음듣기
Meanwhile, the king certainly did not look broke as evidenced by his well-fed physique and fancy footwear.발음듣기
He and his wife Marie Antoinette also got to live in the very nice palace at Versailles thanks to God's mandate, but Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were challenging the whole idea of religion, writing things like:"The main point of Enlightenment "is of man's release from his self-caused immaturity, "primarily in matters of religion."발음듣기
So basically, the peasants were hungry, the intellectuals were beginning to wonder whether God could or should save the King, and the nobility were dithering about eating fois gras and songbirds, failing to make meaningful financial reform.발음듣기
In response to the crisis, Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General, the closest thing that France had to a national parliament which hadn't met since 1614.발음듣기
The Estates General was like a super parliament made up of representatives from the First Estate, the nobles, the Second Estate, the clergy and the Third Estate, everyone else.발음듣기
The Third Estate showed up with about 600 representatives, the First and Second Estates both had about 300 and after several votes everything was deadlocked and then the Third Estate was like, "You know what?발음듣기
When the new National Assembly left the room for a break, he locked the doors and he was like, "Sorry, guys, you can't go in there.발음듣기
Shockingly, the Third Estate representatives were able to find a different room in France this time an indoor tennis court where they swore the famous Tennis Court Oath and they agreed not to give up until a French constitution was established.발음듣기
Then Louis XVI responded by sending troops to Paris primarily to quell uprisings over food shortages but the revolutionaries saw this as a provocation.발음듣기
They responded by seizing the Bastille Prison on July 14th which coincidentally, is also Bastille Day.발음듣기
The Bastille was stormed ostensibly to free prisoners although there were only 7 in jail at the time, but mostly to get guns.발음듣기
The really radical move in the National Assembly came on August 4th when they abollished most of the Ancien Rasgime. feudal rights, tithes, privileges for nobles, unequal taxation, they were all abolished in the name of writing a new constitution.발음듣기
Then, on August 26th, the National Assembly proclaimed the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen which laid out a system of rights that applied to every person and made those rights integral to the new constitution.발음듣기
That's quite different from the American bill of rights, which was like, begrudgingly tacked on at the end and only applied to non-slaves.발음듣기
The DOROMAC, as I called it in high school, declared that everyone had the right to liberty, property and security.발음듣기
Rights that the French Revolution would do an exceptionally poor job of protecting but as noted last week, the same could be argued for many other supposedly more successful revolutions.발음듣기
Meanwhile, back at Versailles, Louis XVI was still king of France and it was looking like France might be a constitutional monarchy which might have meant that the royal family could hang on to their awesome house but then in October of 1789, a rumor started that Marie Antoinette was hoarding grain somewhere inside the palace.발음듣기
And in what became known as the Women's March, a bunch of armed peasant women stormed the palace and demanded that Louis and Marie Antoinete move from Versailles to Paris.발음듣기
And this is a nice reminder that to many people at the time, the French Revolution was not primarily about fancy enlightenment ideas, it was mostly about lack of food and a political system that made economic contractions hardest on the poor.발음듣기
Now, a good argument can be made that this first phase of the revolution wasn't all that revolutionary.발음듣기
They believed that the king was necessary for a functioning state and they were mainly concerned that the voters and office holders be men of property.발음듣기
First, the Jacobins had a huge petition drive that got a bit unruly which led troops controlled not by the King but by the National Assembly to fire on the crowd killing 50 people.발음듣기
That meant that the National Assembly which had been the revolutionary voice of the people, had killed people in an attempt to reign in revolutionary fervor.발음듣기
What looked like radical hope and change suddenly becomes "The Man" as increasingly radical ideas are embraced.발음듣기
Thanks, Thought Bubble. Meanwhile, France's monarchical neighbors were getting a little nervous about all these republic business especially Leopold II, who in addition to being the not holy, not Roman and not imperial Holy Roman Emperor, was Marie Antoinette's brother.발음듣기
I should note by the way, that at this point, the Holy Roman Empire was basically just Austria.발음듣기
Also, like a lot of monarchs, Leopold II liked the idea of monarchies and he wanted to keep his job as a person who gets to stand around wearing a dress pointing at nothing, owning winged lion monkeys made out of gold.발음듣기
Who can blame him? He and King William Frederick II of Prussia together issued the Declaration of Pillnitz which promised to restore the French monarchy.발음듣기
The idea was to plunder Austria's wealth and maybe steal some Austrian grain to shore up French food supplies and also, you know, spread revolutionary zeal.발음듣기
Then Louis encouraged the Prussians which made him look like an enemy of the revolution which of course, he was.발음듣기
As a result, the Assembly voted to suspend the monarchy, have new elections in which everyone could vote as long as they were men, and create a new republican constitution.발음듣기
Soon, this convention decided to have a trial for Louis XVI who was found guilty and by one vote, sentenced to die via guillotine.발음듣기
Dr. Joseph Guillotine, the inventor of the guillotine envisioned it as an egalitarian way of dying.발음듣기
They said the guillotine was humane and it also made no distinction between rich or poor, noble or peasant. It killed equally.발음듣기
I mean, if you can kill the king, you can kill pretty much anyone which is what the government did under the leadership of the Committee of Public Safety.발음듣기
The terror saw the guillotining of 16,000 enemies of the revolution including Marie "I never actually said let them eat the cake" Antoinette and Maximilien Robespierre himself, who was guillotined in the month of Thermidor in the year 2.발음듣기
Right, while France was broke and fighting 9 wars, the Committee of Public Safety changed the measurements of time because the traditional measurements are so irrational and religion-y.발음듣기
They renamed all the months and decided that each day would have 10 hours and each hour 100 minutes.발음듣기
Then after The Terror, the revolution pulled back a bit and another new constitution was put into place this one giving a lot more power to wealthy people.발음듣기
At this point, France was still at war with Austria and Britain wars that France ended up winning largely thanks to a little corporal named Napoleon Bonaparte.발음듣기
The war was backdrop to a bunch of coups and counter coups that I won't get into right now because they were very complicated but the last coup that we'll talk about in 1799, established Napoleon Bonaparte as the First Consul of France.발음듣기
When he was declared First Consul of France, Napoleon proclaimed, "Citizens, the revolution is established on the principles with which it began.발음듣기
It is over." By which he presumably meant that France's government had gone all the way from here to here to here.발음듣기
As with the American revolution, it's easy to conclude that France's revolution wasn't all that revolutionary.발음듣기
I mean, Napoleon was basically an emperor and in some ways, he was even more of an absolute monarch than Louis XVI had been.발음듣기
Gradually, the nobles came back to France although they had mostly lost their special privileges.발음듣기
The Catholic Church returned too although much weaker because it had lost land and the ability to collect tithes.발음듣기
When Napoleon himself fell, France restored the monarchy and except for a 4-year period between 1815 and 1870, France had a king who was either a Bourbon or a Bonaparte.발음듣기
Now, these were no longer absolute monarchs who claimed that their right to rule came from God.발음듣기
They were constitutional monarchs of the kind that the revolutionaries of 1789 had originally envisioned.발음듣기
The fact remains that France had a king again and a nobility and an established religion and it was definitely not a democracy or a republic.발음듣기
Some argue the revolution succeeded in spreading enlightenment ideals even if it didn't bring democracy to France.발음듣기
Others argue that the real legacy of the Revolution wasn't the enhancement of liberty but of state power.발음듣기
Regardless, I'd argue that the French Revolution was ultimately far more revolutionary than its American couterpart.발음듣기
I mean, in some ways, America never had an aristocrasy but in other ways it continued to have one.발음듣기
The French enlightenment thinker, Diderot, felt that Americans should fear a too unequal division of wealth resulting in a small number of opulent citizens and a multitude of citizens living in misery.발음듣기
What made the French Revolution so radical was its insistence upon the universality of its ideals.발음듣기
I mean, look at Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen:"Law is the expression of the general will.발음듣기
Every citizen has a right to participate personally or through his representative, in its foundation.발음듣기
Those are radical ideas that the laws come from citizens not from kings or gods and that those laws should apply to everyone equally.발음듣기
That's a long way from Hammurabi and in truth, it's a long way from the slave holding Thomas Jefferson.발음듣기
In the 1970s, the Chinese President Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought the affects of the French Revolution had been and he said, "It's too soon to say."발음듣기
The French Revolution asked new questions about the nature of people's rights and the derivation of those rights.발음듣기
We're still answering those questions and sorting through how our answers should shape society today.발음듣기
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