Di Giacomo Mario Menegola
The Revolution started as the third state- what the french of the 18th century would call people who didn’t belong in the ranks of nobility or clergy- screamed for the king to do away with the enormous amount of privileges that nobility and clergy had at the time, leaving them to pay the majority, if not the entirety, of the taxes imposed by the government. In response, King Louis XVI opened the General states, a parliament-like assembly used by french monarchs to legitimize their decisions, especially in economic matters. As the representatives of the third state swore not to accept any decision made by the other two states until the General states would become a constituent Assembly, the situation quickly escalated into what we now know as the French Revolution.On July 14th 1789 the people of Paris broke into the Bastille fortress and destroyed it, leaving only a trace of its perimetral walls and an open space today called “Place de la Bastille”. This was the event that marked the beginning of the French Revolution, a revolution that brought not only to political upheaval, but also to the introduction of principles that changed politics, law and society forever.
On August 26th 1789, after abolishing the privileges of the first two states and making political offices accessibles to almost everyone- of course, for the time being this is referred to male citizens-, the Assembly made the first step into modern era by promulgating the first Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in which they established the principles of modern democracy: liberty, equality, private property and popular sovereignty are just the main ones.
During those trying times in the Assembly also happened something that changed forever political language: there were defined, for the first time in HIstory, the main differences between political right and political left and there started developing the modern concept of political party.
After the Revolution had reached its climax and, on January 21st 1793, King Louis XVI had been executed, France started a war that would bring Napoleon to the fore and many countries under his power. However, as bad as the situation was, his conquests also brought advantages: in fact it was Napoleon who exported the Civil Code throughout all Europe and his ones still remain the basis of the ones there are today in many european countries.
Not only the French Revolution has marked the passage from the Early modern period to the Late modern period of human History, but it also completely changed the way we see the world, it has brought new concepts, new principles that revolutionized not only western society but the entirety of human society. In many ways today’s world was founded by the french Revolution.
However, we mustn’t think that only the principles of the Revolution have spread throughout the world: in fact, revolution has come with them. Let’s just think about european History in the last two centuries: the revolutions of 1848 started the process of democratization that led many ancient monarchies to decline and brought to the birth of new countries and democracies later on; examples of this process are the italian unification, which occurred in 1861, but was only completed in 1918, at the end of the Great War, and the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which ended the tyranny of the tsar and established a short-lived republic led by liberal ideals.
Even if the process has taken the last two hundred years, it is still alive and the ideals of the Revolution keep acting a major role on social progress all around the world: in 1989 the hunger for democracy tore the Berlin Wall down, it led the protests in Hong Kong last year and now it’s leading those in Myanmar.
The French Revolution and its ideals and principles have inspired and forged today’s world and, as we can see, the process is far from over.