In this week of the course you will be studying the French Revolution.  This is one of
the most complicated events of modern history, and it is often easy for students to get
bogged down in a bewildering array of dates, names, institutions, constitutions and
events, made even more unnerving by the fact that most of the names are in French,
thus sounding completely different than the way that they are spelled.  In reality, the
French Revolution really was a complicated historical event.

The revolution had its origins in the financial crisis that engulfed France in the late
eighteenth century.  As a result of the earlier policies of Louis XIV and his successors
who involved France in costly wars on the continent (the Seven Years War) and abroad
on the North American continent (the French and Indian Wars and the American
Revolution), France faced bankruptcy by the end of the century.  One of the
contributing factors to the fiscal crisis was the fact that the nobility in France did not pay
any taxes, and taxes fell most heavily on the peasantry.  The king's repeated efforts to
change the tax basis in France failed as he met solid opposition from the nobility
represented in a body known as the parlement of Paris.  

Frustrated, the king decided to call a general advisory meeting of the so-called three
estates of France.  This was an old medieval consultative body, rarely used and
essentially powerless, composed of representatives from the nobility, the clergy and
everybody else (the Third Estate).  The king hoped to break the log-jam over finances,
but the problem was that once called into session, the Estates General adopted a far
more revolutionary character and turned into a radical body that helped to create a
constitutional regime in France.

After 1789 and the initial convocation of the Estates General, the revolution gradually
became more radical in its character, eventually leading to the creation of a republic
and the execution of the king and queen.  Along with the radical nature of the political
revolution that occurred in France, there was also a concomitant social and economic
revolution that swept the country, evident, for example, in the renaming of days of the
week and the months of the year in an effort to modernize France.  Measures were
taken to destroy the power of the church and dispossess the church of its land holdings
in France, as the church was seen as a supporter of the old regime.  The radical nature
of the French Revolution also exerted itself in foreign policy as the new French republic
attempted to spread the revolution throughout Europe.  That led to a series of military
and foreign policy disasters, and in the wake of those disasters, coupled with internal
unrest, there arose a conservative reaction against the revolution.  This was the
so-called Thermidoran reaction, leading to counter-revolution and the eventual rise of
Napoleon as dictator, even though he only ever called himself emperor of France and
even though a plebiscite supported the assumption of that title.

What was interesting about France under Napoleon was that even though it was in
essence a dictatorship, Napoleon worked hard to retain the fiction of participatory
democracy.  For example, there was still a legislature and a free press, even though
the free press was heavily censored.  Thus, even under the conservative reaction there
was a fundamental limit as to how much of the earlier liberal, radical revolution the
conservative reaction could undo.

The entire sweep of the revolution lasted twenty-six years, from 1789 and the Estates
General to 1815 and Napoleon's final defeat on the battlefield at Waterloo.  That is one
of the reasons why students always find the French revolutionary era very complicated,
because of a long time period was involved, not to mention the complex issues and
personalities involved.