Enlightenment and Revolution

Olympe de Gouges

• Revolutionary and strong advocate for women’s rights

• 1791: published the Declaration of Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen

• 1793: she was executed because of her activism and proximity to Marie Antoinette\

• Paradigm shift: Revolutionary leaders stilled her voice, but were unable to suppress demands for human rights for ALL.

Enlightenment beginnings

• Developed in France

• Sir Isaac Newton idea: rational analysis of human behavior and institutions could lead to fresh insights about the human as well as the natural world

• Enlightenment: modern scientists abandoned traditionally recognized believes and ideas, instead, sought to subject the human world to purely rational analysis

• Thinkers/Philosophe:

• John Locke (English, worked to discover natural laws of politics); personal rights to life, liberty, and property; rulers derived their consent from those whom they governed (popular sovereignty)

• Adam Smith (Scottish, law of supply/demand);

• Baron de Montesquieu (French, fostered political liberty/ science of politics)

• Voltaire: championed individual freedom and attacked any institution sponsoring intolerant or oppressive policies, wrote essays under his pseudonym, waged long literary campaign against the Roman Catholic church: “ecrasez l’infame” - crush the damned thing

• Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, deeply resented the privileges of the elite classes

Enlightenment & Revolutionary ideas:

• Notion of divinely ordained division between ruler and ruled ceased to exist

  • politically activated masses saw participating in government as their inherent right

• Revolutions encouraged the consolidation of national states as the principal form of government

  • pushed nationalist ideas that inspired people to work toward the foundation of states that would advance the interest of the national community

• Deism: believe in the existence of a god bur denied the supernatural teachings of Christianity; this god was like a watchmaker who did not need to interfere constantly in the workings of his creation, because it operated by itself according to rational and natural laws

• Natural science would lead to: greater human control over the world, rational sciences of human affairs would lead to individual freedom and the construction of a prosperous, equitable society

• Ideas encouraged the replacement of Christian values which were the foundations of Europe for more than a millennium

  • reason > revelation

• Religious tolerance and freedom of expression were rights philosophes fought for

• Thinkers called for equality and condemned the legal and social privileges enjoyed by aristocrats

• Most Enlightenment thinkers were of common birth but comtortable means. Although seeking to limit the prerogatives of ruling and aristocratic classes, they did not envision a society in which they would share political rights with women, children, peasants, laborers, slaves, or people of color.

French Revolution

• Ancient regime: sought to replace it with new political, social, and cultural structures. But, unlike their American counterparts, French revolutionaries lacked experience with self-government.

• Estates General: 3 estates that represent the entire French population (1. Roman clergy, 2. Nobles, 3. Everyone else)

  King Louis XVI sought to increase taxes in the French nobility

• National Assembly: the third estate took the dramatic step of seceding from the Estates General and proclaiming themselves to be the National Assembly.

  stormed the Bastille, a royal jail and arse-nal, in search of weapons.

  The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which the National Assembly promulgated in August 1789, articulated the guiding principles of the program. Reflecting the influence of American revolutionary ideas, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Cutzen proclaimed the equality of all men, declared that sovereignty resided in the people, and asserted individual right to liberty, property, and security.

  the Assembly abolished the old social order along with the many fees and labor services that peasants owed to their landlords. by seizing church lands, abolishing the first estate, defining clergy as civilians,

  France became a constitutional monarchy

• The convention: a new legislative body elected by universal manhood suffrage, which abolished the monarchy and proclaimed France a republic.

  levée en masse ("mass levy"), or universal conscription that drafted people and resources for use in the war against invading forces.

  Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) and the radical Jacobin party dominated the Convention.

  The Jacobins believed passionately that France needed complete restructuring, and the unleashed a campaign of terror to promote their revolutionary agenda.

  They sought to eliminate the influence of Christianity in French society. "cult of "reason" and reorganized the calendar

  use of gillotine a lot

  reign of terror

  July 1794, the Convention arrested Robespierre and his allies, sent to the gillotine

• The directory: A group of conservative men of property then seized power and ruled France under a new institution

  the Directory were unable to resolve the economic and military problems that plagued revolutionary France.

  November 1799 when a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d'état and seized power.

• Napoleon Bonaparte;

  France in 1799, overthrew the Directory, and set up a new government, the Consulate.

  he crowned himself emperor in 1802.

  Brought political stability and freedom of religion and peace with the Roman Catholic Church

  civil code: 1804; the political and legal equality of all adult men and established a merit-based society, protected private property, restored patriarchal authority

  French civil law became the model for the civil codes of Quebec Province, Canada, the Netherlands, Taly. Spain, some Latin American republics, and the state of Louisiana

  limited free speech and routinely censored newspapers and other publications. use of propaganda to manipulate public opinion. He ignored elective bodies

  Napoleon's armies conquered the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, occupied the Netherlands, and inflicted humiliating defeats on Austrian and Prussian forces.

  fall of napoleon:

  after humiliating Russian defeat, coalition of British, Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies converged on France and forced Napoleon to abdicate his throne in April 1814.

  he came back and For a hundred days he ruled France again before a British army defeated him at Waterloo in Belgium

women and the enlightenment

• Parisian women were the leaders of the crowd that marched to Versailles, protested high food prices, and forced the king and queen to return to Paris in October 1789.

• Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women possessed all the rights that Locke had granted to men.

• During the revolution, women had increased rights but lost them during the directory and napoleon's rule