Impact of the French Revolution on 19th century France

Résumé du document

It is quite difficult to discuss the impact of the French revolution on the French society for the country had difficulty accessing stability in the 19th century. Indeed the intervening decades witnessed four major upheavals: in the 1790s, 1830, 1848 and 1870, which brought a whole variety of regime in their wake: no less than three republics, 2 empires and three monarchies emerged. France became a vast political laboratory in which revolutionary ideas, inspired by the Enlightenment, had to fight their way through, experimenting with a dozen constitutions and modern doctrines such as liberalism, nationalism and socialism. If the revolution started a movement of democratisation and liberalisation that deeply influenced the French social structure during the 19th century, the change was quite brutal and therefore spread a feeling of animosity and refusal through a part of the population that is mostly victims of the revolution. Issues such as the place of the Church in the society weren't handled properly by the revolutionaries and led to a schism in the French society. The model inspired by the revolution therefore often failed to live up to expectations. During the first empire, Napoleon claimed to restore the order without abolishing revolutionary principles by setting up a meritocratic authoritarian regime: "la revolution est fixée aux principes qui l'ont commencée, elle est finie". But everyone will agree that an order is far more difficult to build than to destroy. Yet despite repeated revolutions, continuity can be seen as a striking feature of France's administrative, judicial, religious and educational structures. Despite appearances, political and social changes were graduate. This is what we will try to show in this essay.

Extraits

[...] The moral spirit behind the code illustrated the way men and women perceived class and gender relations in the 19th century. To end this essay, I would say that the revolution wasn't a punctual but a long-term event that shaked the French population during a whole century. Progressively, democratic institutions and mass education contributed to dampening enthusiasm for revolution. The revolution gave France access to democracy and helped it join the group of modern state-nations. But it also gave France most of its particularities: a strong bureaucratisation and centralised state, a certain respect for social rights and a particular relation with religion. [...]

[...] Aristocrats were persecuted for a while but in 1814 nobles still owned 20 per cent of the land in France, compared to 25 per cent in 1789. The richest and most influential families remained landed nobles. Both before and after 1830, a significant proportion of members of parliament held noble titles. And in per cent of voters and 73 per cent of parliamentary candidates listed themselves as landowners. Shocked by the Terror, aristocrats still considered urban workers as lawless and dangerous classes responsible for the upheavals. To them this sub-proletariat threatened the norms of civilised society and led to urban degradation. [...]

[...] Robert Owen dreamed of a consolidated union of all workers. Their ideas circulated through newspapers and pamphlets, in 1848, people obtained the "right to work" and workshops were organised for unemployed people. But those workshops implied new taxes and therefore led to many criticism, they were abolished in 1850. Trade unions were only legalised in 1884. According to socialism dignity should come through work and not through blood. The very term "working class" implied usefulness and productivity in opposition with the idle nobility. [...]

[...] According to revolutionaries, new laws were now to be adopted by the chambers representative of the national will. (Rousseau: "la loi est l'expression de la volonté générale"). Napoleon's civil and penal codes continued the process of codification started by the revolution in order to rationalise the state's relation to the people and to guarantee the legitimacy of people's rights and of judiciary sentences. The penal code, inspired by Beccaria, an Italian thinker, put an end to the "letter de cachet" that enabled the king to send who he wanted to prison without justification, in the name of his divine justice and authority. [...]

[...] Concerning peasants, they were often under the influence of nobles who led them to fear revolutionaries and they lacked of political independence. They retained a very traditional consciousness, unfamiliar with urban life and values, where social and political revolutionary changes had began Political polarisation of the society During the 19th century, as people gradually had access to political rights and progressively gained political interest in the matters of the nation, the political vocabulary was enriched by the usage of terms like Left and Right, from the places occupied by radical and conservative deputies in the Assembly. [...]