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French Revolution: Violence
not primarily to liberate the prisoners… but to get arms… [T]he Bastille was a symbol of despotism.”
In 1789, the ‘French Revolution’ was a Revolution against feudalism. It turned peasants to being free landowners and essentially laid down the foundation towards Capitalism.
[T]his essential achievement of the years 1789 to 1792… [saw] the middle class [become] a privileged oligarchy in place of the hitherto privileged, the feudal aristocracy.
The Revolution arguably achieved its purpose in history. De Tocqueville would suggest that his “aim was to show [violence in] the Revolution as the natural conclusion to the long-term evolution of the ancien regime. While Marx suggests that:
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
The Revolution was complex in its guise, but demonstrated the French people’s desire/need for certain change. Be it through violence or oligarchy, change was inevitable and the will of the people and their efforts, beneath certain oppression and positive identifiable distractions achieved vast accomplishments.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arasse, Daniel, The Guillotine and the Terror, Penguin Books, England, 1991.
Aya, Roderick, Theories of Revolution Reconsidered: Contrasting Models of Collective Violence, Theory and Society, 8, 1, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam, (1979), pp. 39-79.
Cobban, Alfred, Historians and the Causes of the French Revolution, (3rd ed), The Historical Association, (1965).
De Tocqueville, Alex, (Quote) in Lockwood, David, Lecture given, 5th August 2002, History’s Killing Fields, Hist 1704.
Elton, Lord, The Revolutionary Idea in France 1789-1871, AMS Press Inc, New York, (1971).
Furet, Francois, Interpreting the French Revolution, translated by Elborg Forster, Cambridge University Press, (1981).
Gershoy, Leo, The Era of the French Revolution, 1789-1799: Ten Years That Shook the World, D. Van Nostrand Company, Canada, (1857).
Goodwin, A, The French Revolution, (5th Ed.), Hutchinson and Co, London, (1970).
Guerin, Daniel, Class Struggle in the First French Republic, Pluto Press, (1977).
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, Bourgeois and Proletarians, in Davies, C, James (ed), When Men Revolt and Why, The Free Press, New York, (1971), pp. 100-107.
The Standard English Desk Dictionary, Bay Books, Sydney, (1976), (Vol. A-L), p. 26.