1. Why care about the French
Revolution?
- Caused by American ex., poverty of masses, bread
famine, aristocrats' abuse of power, legacy of Enlightenment
thinking (Rousseau)
- Origin of left / right politics, lessons in
revolution/civil wars
- Revolt in Haiti, abolition of slave trade
- First significant break from a vertical world
God > King > Clergy > Aristocracy >
everyone else
to a secular one with a burgeoning middle class
--> (Werther) How should people act like middle class
citizens (not peasant, not aristocratic, but something in
between)?
- Gave rise to Napoleon: Characters of the French Revolution (Romanticism / Genius)
- revolt vs. Catholic Church = revolt vs. institutions
of political, economic power
- Church property seized, but peoples' belief systems
did not necessarily change
- Nuns, priests guillotined
- New national holidays to supplant religious ones
- Civil marriage (and divorce) --> Catholicism did not totally disappear, although
its break w/religion is a notable part of its relationship
with the Church:
- ex. of proto-feminist revolution which incl. women
fighting in the conflict (both sides: royalist and republican)
· Stages a number
of plays about slavery, women warriors, and patriotism
- 17th c. debate of women as shrews/monsters vs. Strong Women (Femmes Fortes)
- Gouges and class (contradictions and paradoxes)
biological father
supported constitutional monarchy
Freemason and supporter of working people
Some notes on
Gouges and the French Revolution:
Girondists =
constitutional monarchy
Jacobins = right-wing
republicans
Catherine of Medici
benevolent father king
Le Bonheur primitif
de l'homme =
the Origin of Man's Happiness
Deism = God as clockmaker