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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The French Revolution was a crucial event considered in the context of Western history, but was also, perhaps the single most crucial influence on British intellectual, philosophical, and political life in the nineteenth century. In its early stages it portrayed itself as a triumph of the forces of reason over those of superstition and privilege, and as such it waswelcomed not only by English radicals like Thomas Paine and William Godwin and William Blake, who, characteristically, saw it as a symbolic act which presaged the return of humanity to the state of perfection from which it had fallen away but by many liberals as well, and by some who saw it, with its declared emphasis on "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," as being analogous to the Glorious Revolutionof 1688: as it descended into the madness of the Reign of Terror, however, many who had initially greeted it with enthusiasm. Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, who came to regard their early support as, in Coleridge's words, a "squeaking baby trumpet of sedition" had second thoughts.
The old regime in England, on the other hand, had from the first allied itself closely with Locke and Newton,those great advocates of reason and order, and Edmund Burke could denounce the Revolution in 1790 in his great Reflections on the Revolution in France, elegantly bound copies of which George III, who was not renowned for his intellect, gave to all his friends, saying that it was a book "which every gentleman ought to read." Burke maintained that the radicals who had begun the Revolution byreleasing the enormous pent-up quasi-religious energies of the common people of France were interested first in the conquest of their own country and then in the conquest of Europe and of the the rest of the world, which would be "liberated" whether it wished to be or not. Tom Paine's great response to Burke's work,The Rights of Man, appeared in 1791, and the debate between conservatives and radicalsraged on for many years, and certainly influenced, directly or indirectly, the thought and the work of every major English author for the remainder of the century and beyond.
The Revolution: the causes

France was stricken by financial problems for over a century. The wars of Louis XIV caused debts who grew when wars were fought in the 18th century. These debts were not exceptional as GreatBritain had the same debts. Why did these debts cause a bankruptcy in France but not in Great Britain? The cause laid in the tax system. In Britain everyone, clergy, nobles and citizens paid taxes. In France, where society was dominated by status, clergy and nobility were exempted from taxation. Because of this system government couldn't levy enough taxes to fill up the deficit. Citizens were upsetbecause they were the thriving spirit of the nation. The nobles did nothing but were exempted. Peasants who had pieces of land just enough to feed themselves had the heaviest tax weight of all.

The second problem was food scarcity. Different crop failures in the 1780s caused these shortages, which of course led to high prices for bread. The peasants were double stricken by the economical andagricultural problems.

Under the reign of Louis XV and Louis XVI different ministers tried to tax the nobles. This measures encoutered much resistance from the parliaments (law courts), which were dominated by the nobility. When in 1788 all attempts were failed, the King decided to summon the Estates-General, the first since 1614, which would met in May 1789. The King tried to make the Estates meetin a modern way but the parliaments decided that the Estates-General would meet in the same way as it met in 1614: in different chambers for every class. But society had changed. The bourgoisie had grown in the last 200 years and were the persons who had the money. Now they had the chance to seize the power they wanted to have.
The French Revolution
For centuries, the quality of life in Europe...