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French Revolution

The French Revolution has made an impact on global history. The revolution of 1789 was one of the most prominent elements in historical master narratives. On the one hand, it was presented as the origin of modern Western democracy and of a political culture based on human rights, the principle of people's sovereignty guaranteed by a constitution, and the centrality of private property. On the other hand, Marxist interpretations saw the event occurring between the storming of the Bastille and Maximilien Robespierre's Committee of Public Welfare, and concluded that it was an initial important step toward the definitive emancipation of humanity from exploitation and therefore a model for modern revolution. Not by accident, Bolsheviks in Russia view themselves as the Jacobins of the 20th century, and many more revolutionaries in the world since the French Revolution have made a reference to the ideals of 1789.

Diverse Perspectives on the Significance of the French Revolution

Because the French Revolution produced metaphors for subsequent political constellations, it is no wonder that the memory of 1789 was polarized politically for almost two centuries. François Furet, a French historian who declared in the 1980s that the peripety of revolutionary history in France was complete, found himself discredited by the enormous mobilization that characterized the anniversary in 1989. President François Mitterrand invited, on the eve of the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, his colleagues from Africa, Latin America, and Asia to demonstrate how alive the revolutionary message was. Correspondingly, many commentators took the revolutions of the same year as a new chapter in that history of freedom and democracy that was opened in 1789.

Positioning the French Revolution primarily at the origin of a diffusionist scenario is based on internal accounts; at the same time, the cause of the outbreak of the revolution was investigated mainly either from the short-term perspective regarding the food crisis at the time or from a long-term perspective that focused on gradually increasing forms of social confrontation. In both cases, the perspective is largely from within France. Accordingly, the former concerned the grain supply mainly in cities, whereas the latter considered the increasingly economically successful middle classes looking for political representation and a bigoted majority of nobles and clergymen unwilling to contribute to the country's expenses. The only attempt to overcome this limitation of French affairs was Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot's interpretation of an Atlantic revolution that linked the American and French revolutions into a larger international pattern. Whereas this portrayal was popular in the United States, it was never successful in France because it was seen as a discourse legitimatizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance, which was not very popular among French leftist intellectuals.

The Global Consequences of the French Revolution

Whereas the causation of the revolution was located in France's internal developments, the consequences of it were identified at a global level. The echo of the revolution was investigated by many scholars, and the most radical followers worldwide were seen as revolutionary Jacobins. Although these revolutionaries shared the agenda of the club in 1792, they were by no means as radical as the Robespierrists were in France from 1793 to 1794 owing to the fact that they never had the necessary popular support in their respective countries. Another consequence, directly related to the many contemporary comments on what was transpiring in France, is a new political language that allowed transforming the understanding and the communication of politics not only in France but almost all across the globe. Furthermore, the Napoleonic Wars play a central role within that narrative of global consequences of the revolution of 1789, resulting in Egypt, Saint-Domingue, Italy, Spain, and Russia being confronted by French troops and accompanying civilians representing the French ambition to measure the world for both intellectual and military purposes. In the course of Napoleon's expansionist campaigns, sister republics emerged in Switzerland, in the Rhineland, in the Netherlands, and in Italy, with Napoleon later offering his marshals and brothers parts of the occupied territories as dependent kingdoms of the French Empire. The expedition to Egypt in 1798 targeted not only the margins of the already weakened Ottoman Empire but was also part of a worldwide competition with Britain, a campaign that led Napoleon to attempt—and in the end fail—to block British products from entering the entire European continent. While some proto-industrial regions in Europe profited to a great degree from this temporary protectionism, France was not able to win the economic and military competition with Britain, even after 15 years of substantial transformation of European social and political landscapes.

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