French Revolution Dbq

Many hail the French Revolution as a beginning into a more equal society. But the Revolution is judged on its sentiments rather than its results. The French Revolution never established Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The ideals that the French Revolution was based upon were flawed and abstract to be put into action. The government used coercive violence and the power of fear to crush enemies of the State. The revolution must be looked at in terms of its inability to accomplish what it had originally set out to and the violence and destruction that ensued.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract, says “...the moment there is a master, there is no longer a sovereign.” Rousseau’s ideas of the “General Will” theorised that sovereignty

“A total of 16,597 executions took place in Paris between March 1793 and late August 1794. An additional 40,000 were executed without trial or died in prison and in excess of 200,000 died in the civil war in the Vendee during this time period. Over 98 percent of the executions were for alleged opposition to the National Convention, the ruling body in France from 1792 to 1795.” (Hugh Gough, The Terror in the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Press Inc., 1998) The ideals of liberte, egalite and fraternite quickly spun out of control and into state sponsored killings. The outbreaks of violence from the beginning of the revolution were criticised by the British Press. (Reactions of the British Press to the French Revolution, Rosemary Begemann, 1973) The Times and The World held the belief that the French were not yet ready of liberty. (British Press, Begemann) Talking about violence in his book Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama states “....it was not merely an unfortunate by-product of politics…..In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the Revolution itself.” Schama goes on to argue that the violence could be justified had it achieved some successful end. But this was not the case. Many areas of the country were in a state of civil war and while the artisans were free of hierarchy, they were even more nakedly exposed to economic inequities. (Schama, 1989) Schama condemns those who believe that the violence was undertaken to further the fruits of Revolution is