The causes of the French Revolution, according to Felipe Fernandez Armesto, were primarily the government trying to seize too much control over its citizens, mainly because it lost touch of those it ruled, which then led to the rebellion of the middle and lower classes. France endured a transformation in the way people should live in humanity. Significant writers like “Voltaire and Rousseau, began to question the old traditions of total obedience to the monarchy and the Church,” leading to an intellectual movement that emphasized reason and science in philosophy and in the study of human culture and the natural world called Enlightenment. Along with the corrupt government, the country of France was also in great debt due to military expenditures and a parasitic aristocracy subsequent to aiding the American Revolutionary War which ended in 1783, just six years before the French Revolution took place. Louis XVI had succeeded his grandfather in 1774. The adolescent king was smart but apathetic and was dominated by his wife, Marie Antoinette, whose limited political vision and influence over her husband increased his already difficult predicaments. The consequence of this lapse of leadership was a political near-breakdown, followed by an outburst of popular turmoil and anxiety with the crown. Finally, as a result of all of the outbursts, the Estates General renamed itself the National Assembly which ratified the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, making the privileges of man universal. But, in the Reflections by Edmund Burke, he argues that the French Revolution would end disastrously, because its theoretical fundamentals, supposedly reasonable, ignored the complexities of human character and culture. Nevertheless, Burke was afraid and somewhat disdainful of the Enlightenment led by intellectuals such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Turgot. These men who question Divine Moral Order and Original Sin, said that society should be handled like a living creature, that people and society are infinitely difficult to understand, thus leading Burke to conflict with Thomas Hobbes‘s declaration that political affairs might be reducible to a deductive system similar to math.
After Louis XVI was executed and “the revolutions unleash[ed] chaos”, citizens looked to Napoleon Bonaparte as the First Consul of the Republic who overthrew the Directorate in 1799. The reason they looked to Napoleon was attributable to “his military genius and the skill and strength of his armies turned Europe into a playground for his political experiments” (Armesto: 759). In some ways he ruled a barbarian kingdom, at times a Roman emperor, and others he had himself painted among the primordial pagan German gods. Even though Napoleon was considered the cause of Enlightenment, it gave artists of all kinds the opportunities to display their attitude toward the government (mainly Napoleon’s way of running the empire) so keen on keeping under their rule; such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Francisco Goya, and Etienne Robert Gaspard. This powerful authority led to only the highest positions making the utmost amount of money maintaining the most important figure in the economy, determining the fate of the less gifted by means of money. The new way the government was run, with money leading all decisions, changed the worlds’ history to come by the Western civilizations’ influence.
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. “The French Revolution and Napoleon.” The World: A History. Ed. Charlyce Jones Owen,
et al. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Dorling Kindersley, 2007. 757- 763. Print.
Gilbert, Adrian. The French Revolution: History Topics. illustrated ed. N.p.: Black Rabbit Books, 2004. N. pag. Google
Books. Web. 12 Apr. 2010. <http://bit.ly/d1afyM>.
