Chapter 18: French Revolution
Things you should know:
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Starters:
- How was the Estates General transformed into the National Assembly?
- How does the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen reflect the social and political values of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment?
- How were France and its government reorganized in the early years of the revolution?
- Why has the Civil Constitution of the Clergy been called the greatest blunder of the National Assembly?
- Who were the sans-culottes, and how did they become a factor in the politics of the period?
- What were the causes of the Terror? How did the rest of Europe react to the French Revolution and the Terror?
Terms:
- Louis XVI
- Estates General
- National Assembly
- Tennis Court Oath
- Fall of the Bastille
- Great Fear
- Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
- Civil Constitution of the Clergy
- Chapelier Law
- Assignats
- Declaration of Pillnitz
- Legislative Assembly
- The Convention
- Committee of Public Safety
- Robespierre
- Levee en Masse
- Republic of Virtue
- Reign of Terror
- Marie Antoinette
- Cult of Reason
- Sans-culottes
- Danton
- Cult of Supreme Being
- Jacobins
- Thermidorian Reaction
- The Directory
Review Questions:
- Why has France been called a rich nation with an impoverished government? Explain how the financial weaknesses of the French monarchy lay the foundations of the revolution of 1789.
- What were Louis XVI’s most serious mistakes during the French Revolution? Had he been a more able ruler, could the French Revolution have been avoided or a constitutional monarchy could have succeeded?
- What was the revolution of 1792 and why did it occur?
- How influential were the san-culottes during the Terror in particular?
- What were the benefits and drawbacks for France of fighting an external war in the midst of a domestic political revolution?
- A motto of the French Revolution was “equality, liberty, and fraternity.” How did the revolution both support and violate this motto?
- Did the French women benefit from the revolution? How? Did French peasants benefit from it? How?