http://www.whitehouse.

gov/history/presidents/

Chronological Order: Chronological Order:

1789 to 1889 1889 to Present
Washington, George Harrison, Benjamin
1789-97 1889-93

Adams, John Cleveland, Grover

1797-1801 1893-97

Jefferson, Thomas McKinley, William

1801-09 1897-1901

Madison, James Roosevelt, Theodore

1809-17 1901-09

Monroe, James Taft, William H.

1817-25 1909-13

Adams, John Wilson, Woodrow

1825-29 1913-21

Jackson, Andrew Harding, Warren

1829-37 1921-23

Van Buren, Martin Coolidge, Calvin

1837-41 1923-29

Harrison, William Henry Hoover, Herbert

1841 1929-33

Tyler, John Roosevelt, Franklin D.

1841-45 1933-45

Polk, James Truman, Harry

1845-49 1945-53

Taylor, Zachary Eisenhower, Dwight

1849-50 1953-61

Fillmore, Millard Kennedy, John F.

1850-53 1961-63

Pierce, Franklin Johnson, Lyndon

1853-57 1963-69

Buchanan, James Nixon, Richard

1857-61 1969-74

Lincoln, Abraham Ford, Gerald

1861-65 1974-77

Johnson, Andrew Carter, Jimmy

1865-69 1977-81
 Grant, Ulysses S. Reagan, Ronald
1869-77 1981-89

Hayes, Rutherford B. Bush, George H.W.

1877-81 1989-93

Garfield, James Clinton, William J.

1881 1993-2001

Arthur, Chester Bush, George W.

1881-85 2001-present

Cleveland, Grover
1885-89

[ Presidents by Name ]

The President biographies presented here are from the book The Presidents of
the United States of America written by Frank Freidel and Hugh S. Sidey
(contributing author), published by the White House Historical Association
with the cooperation of the National Geographic Society.
Millard Fillmore

In his rise from a log cabin to wealth and the White House, Millard Fillmore demonstrated that
through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the
American dream come true.

Born in the Finger Lakes country of New York in 1800, Fillmore as a youth endured the
privations of frontier life. He worked on his father's farm, and at 15 was apprenticed to a cloth
dresser. He attended one-room schools, and fell in love with the redheaded teacher, Abigail
Powers, who later became his wife.

In 1823 he was admitted to the bar; seven years later he moved his law practice to Buffalo. As
an associate of the Whig politician Thurlow Weed, Fillmore held state office and for eight years
was a member of the House of Representatives. In 1848, while Comptroller of New York, he
was elected Vice President.

Fillmore presided over the Senate during the months of nerve-wracking debates over the
Compromise of 1850. He made no public comment on the merits of the compromise proposals,
but a few days before President Taylor's death, he intimated to him that if there should be a tie
vote on Henry Clay's bill, he would vote in favor of it.

Thus the sudden accession of Fillmore to the Presidency in July 1850 brought an abrupt political
shift in the administration. Taylor's Cabinet resigned and President Fillmore at once appointed
Daniel Webster to be Secretary of State, thus proclaiming his alliance with the moderate Whigs
who favored the Compromise.

A bill to admit California still aroused all the violent arguments for and against the extension of
slavery, without any progress toward settling the major issues.

Clay, exhausted, left Washington to recuperate, throwing leadership upon Senator Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois. At this critical juncture, President Fillmore announced in favor of the
Compromise. On August 6, 1850, he sent a message to Congress recommending that Texas be
paid to abandon her claims to part of New Mexico.

This helped influence a critical number of northern Whigs in Congress away from their
insistence upon the Wilmot Proviso--the stipulation that all land gained by the Mexican War
must be closed to slavery.
Douglas's effective strategy in Congress combined with Fillmore's pressure from the White
House to give impetus to the Compromise movement. Breaking up Clay's single legislative
package, Douglas presented five separate bills to the Senate:

1. Admit California as a free state.

2. Settle the Texas boundary and compensate her.

3. Grant territorial status to New Mexico.

4. Place Federal officers at the disposal of slaveholders seeking fugitives.

5. Abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

Each measure obtained a majority, and by September 20, President Fillmore had signed them
into law. Webster wrote, "I can now sleep of nights."
Some of the more militant northern Whigs remained irreconcilable, refusing to forgive Fillmore
for having signed the Fugitive Slave Act. They helped deprive him of the Presidential nomination
in 1852.

Within a few years it was apparent that although the Compromise had been intended to settle
the slavery controversy, it served rather as an uneasy sectional truce.

As the Whig Party disintegrated in the 1850's, Fillmore refused to join the Republican Party; but,
instead, in 1856 accepted the nomination for President of the Know Nothing, or American,
Party. Throughout the Civil War he opposed President Lincoln and during Reconstruction
supported President Johnson. He died in 1874.

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce became President at a time of apparent tranquility. The United States, by virtue
of the Compromise of 1850, seemed to have weathered its sectional storm. By pursuing the
recommendations of southern advisers, Pierce--a New Englander--hoped to prevent still another
outbreak of that storm. But his policies, far from preserving calm, hastened the disruption of the
Union.

Born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, in 1804, Pierce attended Bowdoin College. After
graduation he studied law, then entered politics. At 24 he was elected to the New Hampshire
legislature; two years later he became its Speaker. During the 1830's he went to Washington,
first as a Representative, then as a Senator.

Pierce, after serving in the Mexican War, was proposed by New Hampshire friends for the
Presidential nomination in 1852. At the Democratic Convention, the delegates agreed easily
enough upon a platform pledging undeviating support of the Compromise of 1850 and hostility
to any efforts to agitate the slavery question. But they balloted 48 times and eliminated all the
well-known candidates before nominating Pierce, a true "dark horse."

Probably because the Democrats stood more firmly for the Compromise than the Whigs, and
because Whig candidate Gen. Winfield Scott was suspect in the South, Pierce won with a
narrow margin of popular votes.

Two months before he took office, he and his wife saw their eleven-year-old son killed when
their train was wrecked. Grief-stricken, Pierce entered the Presidency nervously exhausted.

In his Inaugural he proclaimed an era of peace and prosperity at home, and vigor in relations
with other nations. The United States might have to acquire additional possessions for the sake
of its own security, he pointed out, and would not be deterred by "any timid forebodings of evil."

Pierce had only to make gestures toward expansion to excite the wrath of northerners, who
accused him of acting as a cat's-paw of Southerners eager to extend slavery into other areas.
Therefore he aroused apprehension when he pressured Great Britain to relinquish its special
interests along part of the Central American coast, and even more when he tried to persuade
Spain to sell Cuba.

But the most violent renewal of the storm stemmed from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which
repealed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the question of slavery in the West. This
measure, the handiwork of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, grew in part out of his desire to
promote a railroad from Chicago to California through Nebraska. Already Secretary of War
Jefferson Davis, advocate of a southern transcontinental route, had persuaded Pierce to send
James Gadsden to Mexico to buy land for a southern railroad. He purchased the area now
comprising southern Arizona and part of southern New Mexico for $10,000,000.

Douglas's proposal, to organize western territories through which a railroad might run, caused
extreme trouble. Douglas provided in his bills that the residents of the new territories could
decide the slavery question for themselves. The result was a rush into Kansas, as southerners
and northerners vied for control of the territory. Shooting broke out, and "bleeding Kansas"
became a prelude to the Civil War.

By the end of his administration, Pierce could claim "a peaceful condition of things in Kansas."
But, to his disappointment, the Democrats refused to renominate him, turning to the less
controversial Buchanan. Pierce returned to New Hampshire, leaving his successor to face the
rising fury of the sectional whirlwind. He died in 1869.

James Buchanan

Tall, stately, stiffly formal in the high stock he wore around his jowls, James Buchanan was the
only President who never married.

Presiding over a rapidly dividing Nation, Buchanan grasped inadequately the political realities of
the time. Relying on constitutional doctrines to close the widening rift over slavery, he failed to
understand that the North would not accept constitutional arguments which favored the South.
Nor could he realize how sectionalism had realigned political parties: the Democrats split; the
Whigs were destroyed, giving rise to the Republicans.

Born into a well-to-do Pennsylvania family in 1791, Buchanan, a graduate of Dickinson College,
was gifted as a debater and learned in the law.

He was elected five times to the House of Representatives; then, after an interlude as Minister
to Russia, served for a decade in the Senate. He became Polk's Secretary of State and Pierce's
Minister to Great Britain. Service abroad helped to bring him the Democratic nomination in 1856
because it had exempted him from involvement in bitter domestic controversies.

As President-elect, Buchanan thought the crisis would disappear if he maintained a sectional

balance in his appointments and could persuade the people to accept constitutional law as the
Supreme Court interpreted it. The Court was considering the legality of restricting slavery in the
territories, and two justices hinted to Buchanan what the decision would be.

Thus, in his Inaugural the President referred to the territorial question as "happily, a matter of
but little practical importance" since the Supreme Court was about to settle it "speedily and
finally."

Two days later Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Dred Scott decision, asserting that
Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights in slaves in the
territories. Southerners were delighted, but the decision created a furor in the North.

Buchanan decided to end the troubles in Kansas by urging the admission of the territory as a
slave state. Although he directed his Presidential authority to this goal, he further angered the
Republicans and alienated members of his own party. Kansas remained a territory.

When Republicans won a plurality in the House in 1858, every significant bill they passed fell
before southern votes in the Senate or a Presidential veto. The Federal Government reached a
stalemate.
Sectional strife rose to such a pitch in 1860 that the Democratic Party split into northern and
southern wings, each nominating its own candidate for the Presidency. Consequently, when the
Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, it was a foregone conclusion that he would be elected
even though his name appeared on no southern ballot. Rather than accept a Republican
administration, the southern "fire-eaters" advocated secession.

President Buchanan, dismayed and hesitant, denied the legal right of states to secede but held
that the Federal Government legally could not prevent them. He hoped for compromise, but
secessionist leaders did not want compromise.

Then Buchanan took a more militant tack. As several Cabinet members resigned, he appointed
northerners, and sent the Star of the West to carry reinforcements to Fort Sumter. On January
9, 1861, the vessel was far away.

Buchanan reverted to a policy of inactivity that continued until he left office. In March 1861 he
retired to his Pennsylvania home Wheatland--where he died seven years later--leaving his
successor to resolve the frightful issue facing the Nation.

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow
countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not
assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall
have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the
Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on
the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four
remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five
months before receiving his party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:

"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia,
of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my
tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ... removed from Kentucky to ...
Indiana, in my eighth year.... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in
the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still
somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all."

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for
fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War,
spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law
partner said of him, "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858
Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with
Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President
in 1860.

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he
rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the
Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated
most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from
the earth."
Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his
planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay
down their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on
one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: "With malice toward none; with charity
for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.... "

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by
John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite
was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

http://www.ukans.edu/history/VL/USA/

Chronological Periods
America Before the Europeans
Discovery and Exploration 1492-1650
Colonial Era 1650-1765
Boone & Crockett's America
Revolutionary Era 1765-1783
Constitutional Era 1783-1800
Early National Period 1800-1830
The Age of Jackson 1830-1855
The Coming of the War 1850-1860
The Civil War 1860-1865
Reconstruction 1865-1876
Dodge City History: American West Town
The Gilded Age, 1876-1900
20th Century
1900-1909   1910-1919   1920-1929   1930-1939   1940-1949   1950-1959   1960-1969   1970-1979  
1980-1989   1990-1999   2000-2009
WWW-VL: History: Internet & W3

http://www.britannia.com/history/euro/1/2_2.html

Europe In Retrospect
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS

by Raymond F.Betts

CHAPTER TWO
The French Revolution
The Ideology of the French Revolution
Culturally, the French Revolution provided the world with its first
meaningful experience with political ideology. The word, and the concept
it expressed, were revolutionary in origin. Indeed, it was Napoleon, a man
who had no truck with idle thought, who called the intellectual system-
makers of the late eighteenth century ideologues, abstractionists, or, as
we have heard in recent years, "eggheads." The father of the DuPont who
founded the famous American chemical company was called an ideologue
by Napoleon. And this Pierre-Samuel DuPont de Nemours (1739-1817)
spent half a lifetime drawing up constitutions, writing letters, while also
finding time to offer a learned paper to the American Philosophical Society
on the language of ants, and to inform his son that gout was the disease
of the intellectual.
However, DuPont was not a brilliant mind, and Napoleon was an
opinionated soul. Despite these two figures, ideology triumphed; it
directed the French Revolution, and it soon grew, like roses on a bush or
the heads of hydra--a matter of outlook, of course--to provide the
nineteenth century with an unusual number of competing theoretical social
systems.

What was ideology? It was and remains a system of ideas that are usually
goal- directed. Thus, it is a theoretical explanation of the world's situation
and a prescription for improvement or radical change of that situation. In
this sense, ideology is rooted in historical consciousness, in an awareness
of mankind's progress through time and how that progress might be
redirected toward an alternate objective. Most ideologies are, therefore,
fundamentally political, bright descriptions of the means and methods by
which the instruments of revolution, party, or government ought be used
for the purpose of social change.

Ideology is, in a way, the secular equivalent of theology. It directs the

believer's attention to a perfected future when present woes will have
dissipated and social harmony will reign. The future, therefore, holds the
promise for the ideologue that heaven holds for the devout, religious-
minded individual.

The introduction of ideology into the modern world was one major effect of
the new secular spirit of the eighteenth century. Once society was
deemed to be man- made--and here the influence of the Enlightenment is
noticeable--then it could be changed. Ideology was the prescription for
that change. And the force of ideology was felt throughout the modern
era.

In sum, the French Revolution did many things, unleashed new forces,
destroyed old ideas, offered new promises. Not the Revolution itself, of
course, but the people who made it.

Many historians have described the French Revolution as the encounter

of competing classes. In such an appraisal the Revolution is seen to begin
with aristocratic protest against the absolute monarchy bequeathed by
Louis XIV, then to enlarge in scope as a bourgeois movement seeking
fundamental political change, and, finally, to take on popular dimensions
with working-class participation, particularly in Paris.

Certainly a most notable development of eighteenth-century political life

was the reassertion of the French nobility. During the reign of Louis XIV it
had lost power and had become noticeable only in show, in attendance at
court and in participation in the elaborate rituals that Louis XIV seemed to
enjoy. After that monarch's death in 1715, the nobility mustered its forces,
with leadership now coming from the "nobility of the robe," the legal and
judicial sections, whose members wore the robes of magistrates, and who
raised matters of principle and law that reaffirmed the ancient rights of the
nobility and questioned the authority of the absolute monarchy.

In its first and nonactivist phase, from 1787 to 1789, the Revolution
therefore amounted to a legal debate between monarchy and aristocracy
over the financing of the state and the political authority which each
claimed to enjoy and exercise. It was the near bankruptcy of the state,
largely caused by aid to the American revolutionaries, that served as the
immediate provocation for aristocratic opposition in 1787, when an
Assembly of Notables (consisting of aristocrats), called by the king and his
finance minister, demanded political authority in return for tax reform. This
assembly achieved nothing but further aggravation between monarch and
aristocracy. However, if the aristocracy now presumed to speak in the
name of the "nation," it certainly made no request to extend the political
base of the nation.

Such an extension was demanded and obtained by the bourgeoisie, who

ushered in the major phase of the French Revolution. To quote again the
words of Georges Lefebvre, "The Revolution of 1789 restored the
harmony between fact and law." The fact was that the bourgeoisie were
the most significant economic element within France. The wealth they
generated and the professions they filled were far more important than the
political role they were allowed by tradition and law to play. Through
revolutionary ideology and institutional change, the bourgeoisie gained a
political authority not known before in any European country. In this
sense, the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. The abolition of
aristocratic privileges, the confiscation of church and aristocratic lands
and their purchase by the bourgeoisie, and the removal of internal
obstacles to trade and commerce allowed the middle class greater
economic and social mobility.

In rhetoric and institution, the French Revolution was a liberal revolution,

in which the liberty of the individual was proclaimed, private property was
respected. Later, when Napoleon announced his doctrine of "careers
open to talent," he was following revolutionary thought and also
anticipating the Horatio Alger theme of "pulling yourself up by your own
bootstraps." In truth, the ideology of the Revolution amounted to extended
praise of the "self-made man."

Yet it should not be assumed that revolutionary practice directly followed

revolutionary principle. The exigencies of the time--war, counterrevolution,
factionalism within the various governments--combined to tempt the
revolutionary leaders to shelve most of the ideals until peace and calm
were restored. The most influential factor in this decision was the war
which the French began, out of fear of foreign invasion, on April 20, 1792.
As the "Declaration of Revolutionary Government," issued on October 10,
1793, succinctly stated: "The provisional government of France is
revolutionary until the peace." Put otherwise, revolutionary times required
revolutionary, not democratic, government. The now familiar arguments
about "national security" were then new, but no less disturbing.

The problem of war against France--England had joined Prussia and

Austria in April of 1793--and the problem of provisioning the home
population with sufficient staples--again the issue of "bread"--complicated
government and allowed another social element to play an important role
in the Revolution. This element was the multitude, variously called the
"crowd," "the mob," or the "rabble." Thomas Carlyle, trying to paint a fiery-
bright picture of the Revolution, described Paris in the second week of
July 1789 as already a city in which "the streets are a living foam-sea....
Mad Paris is abandoned altogether to itself." From his mid-nineteenth-
century perspective, Carlyle viewed the crowd as an uncontrolled mob,
blood-thirsty and wild-eyed.

Recent scholarship has disputed and abandoned this view. Today we

know the so-called "mob" was composed primarily of lower middle-class
artisans, that their initial behavior was no more disorderly than that of
protest movements we witness with great frequency in our own age. Far
from wishing to be part of a "spontaneous anarchy," as a French
contemporary of Carlyle's saw the situation, the Parisian crowds were set
upon relieving the unsatisfactory living conditions they felt had resulted
from a government both mismanaged and insensitive.

This urban crowd was made up of the sans-culottes, the craftsmen, skilled
and semi-skilled workers who wore no knee breeches (culottes ), hence
who enjoyed few of the benefits of the wealthy and the aristocratic. They
were interested in having their immediate grievances righted; high-flung
ideological considerations were of no concern to them.

In a way, therefore, the revolutionary forces that disturbed France in the

summer of 1789 were coincidental: the coming together at a particular
time of people protesting their economic plight and people seeking
fundamental governmental reform. As many critics have asserted, it was
the weight of the urban crowds and the direction of the reform-minded
bourgeoisie that gave the French Revolution its force. At no time was the
importance of the sans-culottes more obvious than in the years 1792 and
1793, in that extended moment of transition from constitutional monarchy
to republican government. According to the eminent French historian
Albert Soboul, the sans-culottes were representative of popular
democracy. They disdained the aristocrats and viewed with contempt the
airs and manners of the rich and well-born. In a public display without
precedent in Paris, they strolled the fashionable boulevards where before
would have been seen only the knee-breechered gentleman with gold-
headed walking stick and fair-headed companion in hand.

As the Revolution became more popular in support, it also became more

intolerant; this dual situation occurring in the years 1793 and 1794, when
the Jacobin faction, that most closely identified with the people of Paris
and with democracy, was supreme. (The Jacobins were named after their
meeting place in a monastery in the rue St. Jacob.) In June 1793 the
Jacobins effectively removed their political opposition and proclaimed a
"republic one and indivisible," in which legislative power would be
predominant. The ascendancy of the legislative assembly had begun
earlier and had reached an important stage in April 1793, when the
Committee of Public Safety was established. This twelve-man group was,
as its title suggests, responsible for the well- being of the state. But by the
summer of 1793, when the Jacobins had reorganized the Committee and
effectively controlled the government, the revolutionaries were exhibiting a
political ruthlessness unlike any seen before. As they set out to eliminate
their enemies, they seemed to follow the cynical imperative coined at the
time: "Be my friend, or I will kill you."

It was during the Reign of Terror, 1793-1794, that revolutionary tribunals

meted out hasty justice. Opponents of the regime, revolutionaries
themselves, fell beneath the blade of the guillotine. This was the awful
period in which "the Revolution devoured its own." Some eleven thousand
individuals died as enemies of the state, and their deaths added up to a
new, horrendous activity of modern Western civilization: institutionalized
violence, the harsh elimination of political opposition by the state. Later,
Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany would cause the figures of the French
Revolution to seem small. Unfortunately, the mass age would also mean
mass annihilation.

The Terror was spent by the summer of 1794, when reaction against it set
in. The end was reached at the moment the individual most frequently
identified with the harshness of revolutionary retribution, Maximilien
Robespierre (1758-1794), was himself beheaded on July 28, 1794. It is
important to note that Robespierre came closest to being the revolutionary
"hero." A lawyer and one of the first declared republicans, Robespierre
was a man of determination, anxious to see the Revolution realized
according to his lights. Many say that Robespierre was Rousseau's
translator, taking the philosopher's ideas on equality and civil government
and making them public policy. Yet Robespierre's political behavior was
far from democratic. Elected to the Committee of Public Safety in July
1793, he soon came to dominate that group, hence dominate the
revolutionary government. He exhibited himself as a ruthless individual,
incorruptible, dictatorial, impersonal, and determined to sweep away all
who opposed the Revolution. He urged the war on against the
monarchical powers of France, and he encouraged the Reign of Terror.
He was feared and unloved. He was the image of the modern
revolutionary whose profession and passion are political.

But for all this, Robespierre was not of the heroic dimensions of a George
Washington or a V. I. Lenin. The French Revolution did not support such a
person. It almost seemed as if individuals followed the Revolution, did not
lead it. Some French historians of a romantic bent have insisted that the
real hero of the revolutionary decade was the French people, a collectivity
then acting with one mind, feeling with one heart.

Certainly, the French Revolution had a quality of spontaneity, of accident,

that later revolutions would not have. There was no clearly defined
revolutionary party or conspiratorial group that initially plotted the
Revolution, and the contending factions that followed after the Revolution
had occurred never gained a firm grip on the nation's imagination or its
institutions. The Jacobins came closest, but their unchallenged period of
rule was limited, lasting only a year.

It must be remembered that the French Revolution was the first major
social revolution, of far greater dimensions and of deeper purpose than
the American Revolution that had preceded it. Only the Russian
Revolution of November 1917, the one that ushered in modern
Communism, would rival in world importance what occurred in France
between 1789 and 1799. Underlying this extended dramatic development
was the new belief that revolution was the most effective means to
achieve political and, consequently, social change. Not reform from within,
but overthrow from without appeared to be the new law of political
physics.

The ten years of the French Revolution have since been reviewed in
terms of the old historical concern with change and continuity. To the
revolutionary demand for a "new secular order" came the conservative
response that society can never be built anew. According to this
interpretation, we are all inescapably part of our own age-- historically
determined, hence socially indebted to previous generations. The usual
analogy made to support this argument was that of a house: the present
occupant can renovate, alter, add new wings; but if an attempt is made to
remove the foundation, the whole structure will collapse.

At the basis of the debate over what the French Revolution could and did
accomplish is to be found the nineteenth-century concern with liberalism
and conservatism. To sweep away the old and begin the new was the
liberal solution; it was predicated upon the assumption that human nature
was essentially good, mankind essentially rational, and the purpose of life
the "pursuit of earthly happiness." To respect the past, to work within the
social structure that now exists so that it is modified, not destroyed, was
the conservative solution; it was predicated upon the assumption that
human nature was weak, mankind essentially selfish, and the purpose of
life the search for social stability and order.

Equally enduring as a historical problem was the position of the French

Revolution on the time scale: was the Revolution the end of one era or
was it the beginning of another? It seems to have been both: it ended a
world based on tradition, on blood-right, on fixed social status. In principle
and by legislation, it made the individual citizen the center of a new social
order. The social order should, therefore, be designed to maximize this
 freedom, this personal liberty.

http://www.bartleby.com/65/fr/FrenchRe.html
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.  2001.
 
French Revolution
 
 
political upheaval of world importance in France that began in 1789.    1

 
Origins of the Revolution
Historians disagree in evaluating the factors that brought about the Revolution. To some    2

extent at least, it came not because France was backward, but because the country’s
economic and intellectual development was not matched by social and political change.
In the fixed order of the ancien régime, most bourgeois were unable to exercise
commensurate political and social influence. King Louis XIV, by consolidating absolute
monarchy, had destroyed the roots of feudalism; yet outward feudal forms persisted and
became increasingly burdensome.
France was still governed by privileged groups—the nobility and the clergy—while the    3

productive classes were taxed heavily to pay for foreign wars, court extravagance, and a
rising national debt. For the most part, peasants were small landholders or tenant
farmers, subject to feudal dues, to the royal agents indirect farming (collecting) taxes, to
the corvée (forced labor), and to tithes and other impositions. Backward agricultural
methods and internal tariff barriers caused recurrent food shortages, which netted
fortunes to grain speculators, and rural overpopulation created land hunger.
In addition to the economic and social difficulties, the ancien régime was undermined    4

intellectually by the apostles of the Enlightenment. Voltaire attacked the church and
absolutism; Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie advocated social utility and attacked
tradition; the baron de Montesquieu made English constitutionalism fashionable; and the
marquis de Condorcet preached his faith in progress. Most direct in his influence on
Revolutionary thought was J. J. Rousseau, especially through his dogma of popular
sovereignty. Economic reform, advocated by the physiocrats and attempted (1774–76)
by A. R. J. Turgot, was thwarted by the unwillingness of privileged groups to sacrifice
any privileges and by the king’s failure to support strong measures.
The direct cause of the Revolution was the chaotic state of government finance. Director    5

general of finances Jacques Necker vainly sought to restore public confidence. French
participation in the American Revolution had increased the huge debt, and Necker’s
successor, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, called an Assembly of Notables (1787),
hoping to avert bankruptcy by inducing the privileged classes to share in the financial
burden. They refused in an effort to protect economic privileges.
 
The Estates-General and the National Assembly
Étienne Charles Loménie de Brienne succeeded Calonne. His attempts to procure money    6

were thwarted by the Parlement of Paris (see parlement), and King Louis XVI was
forced to agree to the calling of the States-General. Elections were ordered in 1788, and
on May 5, 1789, for the first time since 1614, the States-General met at Versailles. The
chief purpose of the king and of Necker, who had been recalled, was to obtain the
assembly’s consent to a general fiscal reform.
Each of the three estates—clergy, nobility, and the third estate, or commons—presented    7
its particular grievances to the crown. Innumerable cahiers (lists of grievances) came
pouring in from the provinces, and it became clear that sweeping political and social
reforms, far exceeding the object of its meeting, were expected from the States-General.
The aspirations of the bourgeoisie were expressed by Abbé Sieyès in a widely circulated
pamphlet that implied that the third estate and the nation were virtually identical. The
question soon arose whether the estates should meet separately and vote by order or
meet jointly and vote by head (thus assuring a majority for the third estate, whose
membership had been doubled).
As Louis XVI wavered, the deputies of the third estate defiantly proclaimed themselves    8

the National Assembly (June 17); on their invitation, many members of the lower clergy
and a few nobles joined them. When the king had their meeting place closed, they
adjourned to an indoor tennis court, the jeu de paume, and there took an oath (June 20)
not to disband until a constitution had been drawn up. On June 27 the king yielded and
legalized the National Assembly. At the same time, however, he surrounded Versailles
with troops and let himself be persuaded by a court faction, which included the queen,
Marie Antoinette, to dismiss (July 11) Necker.
 
The Revolution of 1789
Parisians mobilized, and on July 14 stormed the Bastille fortress. Louis XVI meekly    9

recalled Necker and went to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where he accepted the tricolor
cockade of the Revolution from the newly formed municipal government, or commune.
The national guard was organized under the marquis de Lafayette. This first outbreak of
violence marked the entry of the popular classes into the Revolution. Mobilized by
alarm over food shortages and economic depression, by hopes aroused with the calling
of the States-General, and by the fear of an aristocratic conspiracy, peasants pillaged and
burned châteaus, destroying records of feudal dues; this reaction is known as the grande
peur [great fear].
On Aug. 4, the nobles and clergy in the Assembly, driven partly by fear and partly by an    10

outburst of idealism, relinquished their privileges, abolishing in one night the feudal
structure of France. Shortly afterward, the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen. Rumors of counterrevolutionary court intrigues circulated,
and on Oct. 5, 1789, a Parisian crowd, aroused by rising food prices, marched to
Versailles and brought the king and queen, “the baker and the baker’s wife,” back to the
Tuileries palace in Paris. The Assembly also removed to Paris, where it drafted a
constitution. Completed in 1791, the constitution created a limited monarchy with a
unicameral legislature elected by voters with property qualifications.
Of gravest consequence were the Assembly’s antireligious measures. Church lands were    11

nationalized (1789), religious orders suppressed (1790), and the clergy required (July,
1790) to swear to adhere to the state-controlled Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Only a
bare majority (52%) of all priests took the oath; disturbances broke out, especially in W
France; and Louis XVI, though forced to assent, was roused to action. Numerous princes
and nobles had already fled abroad (see émigré); Louis decided to join them and to
obtain foreign aid to restore his authority. The flight (June 20–21, 1791) was halted at
Varennes, and the king and queen were brought back in humiliation. Louis accepted the
constitution.
 
Factionalism and War
On Oct. 1, 1791, the Legislative Assembly convened. Some members joined the various    12

political clubs of Paris, such as the Feuillants and Jacobins. Most deputies were middle-
of-the-roaders, swayed by the more radical clubs and by the Girondists. Jacobinism was
gaining in this period; “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” became a catch phrase.
Meanwhile abroad, early sympathy for the Revolution was turning to hatred. Émigrés    13

incited the courts of Europe to intervene; in France, war was advocated by the royalists
as a means to restore the old regime, but also by many republicans, who either wished to
spread the revolution abroad or hoped that the threat of invasion would rally the nation
to their cause. The Feuillant, or right-wing, ministers fell and were succeeded by those
later called Girondists. On Apr. 20, 1792, war was declared on Austria, and the French
Revolutionary Wars began. Early reverses and rumors of treason by the king again led
Parisian crowds to direct action.
 
The Revolution of 1792
An abortive insurrection of June 20, 1792, was followed by a decisive one on Aug. 10,    14

when a crowd stormed the Tuileries and an insurrectionary commune replaced the
legally elected one (see Commune of Paris). Under pressure from the commune, the
Assembly suspended Louis XVI and ordered elections by universal manhood suffrage
for a National Convention to draw up a new constitution. Mass arrests of royalist
sympathizers were followed by the September massacres (Sept. 2–7), in which frenzied
mobs entered jails throughout Paris and killed approximately 2,000 prisoners, many in
grisly fashion.
 
The Republic
On Sept. 21, 1792, the Convention held its first meeting. It immediately abolished the    15

monarchy, set up the republic, and proceeded to try the king for treason. His conviction
and execution (Jan., 1793) reinforced royalist resistance, notably in the Vendée, and,
abroad, contributed to the forming of a wider coalition against France. The Convention
undertook the foreign wars with vigor but was itself torn by the power struggle between
the Girondists and the Mountain (Jacobins and extreme left). The Girondists were
purged in June, 1793. A democratic constitution was approved by 1.8 million voters in a
plebiscite, but it never came into force.
 
The Reign of Terror
Instead of a democracy the Convention established a war dictatorship operating through    16

the Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security, and numerous
agencies such as the Revolutionary Tribunal. Known to history as the Reign of Terror,
this period represented the efforts of a few men to govern the country and wage war in a
time of crisis. Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre dominated the new
government, with Robespierre gradually gaining over Danton and others. Price and
wage maximums were unevenly enforced, and acceptance of the inflated paper currency,
the assignats, was made mandatory. A huge number of suspects were arrested;
thousands were executed, including Marie Antoinette. A revolutionary calendar, with
10-day weeks, was adopted.
The fanatic Jacques Hébert, who had introduced the worship of a goddess of Reason,    17

was arrested and executed in Mar., 1794, along with other so-called ultrarevolutionaries.
The next month Danton and his followers, the “Indulgents,” who advocated relaxation
of emergency measures, were executed. To counter Hébertist influence, Robespierre
proclaimed (June, 1794) the cult of the Supreme Being. France’s military successes
lessened the need for strong domestic measures, but Robespierre called for new purges.
Fearing that the Terror would be turned against them, members of the Convention
arrested Robespierre on July 27, 1794 (see Thermidor), and had him guillotined; a
majority of Commune members were also executed.
 
The Directory and the Coming of Napoleon
The Convention drew up a new constitution, setting up the Directory and a bicameral    18

legislature. The constitution went into effect after the royalist insurrection of
Vendémiaire (Oct., 1795) had been put down by armed force. The rule of the Directory
was marked by corruption, financial difficulties, political purges, and a fateful
dependence on the army to maintain control. Conflict among the five directors led to the
coup of 18 Fructidor (Sept. 4, 1797).
Discontent with Directory rule was increased by military reverses. In 1799 Napoleon    19

Bonaparte, the hero of the Italian campaign, returned from his Egyptian expedition and,
with the support of the army and several government members, overthrew the Directory
on 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9) and established the Consulate. Until the Restoration of the
Bourbons (1814), Napoleon (see Napoleon I) ruled France.
 
Effects of the Revolution
The French Revolution, though it seemed a failure in 1799 and appeared nullified by    20

1815, had far-reaching results. In France the bourgeois and landowning classes emerged
as the dominant power. Feudalism was dead; social order and contractual relations were
consolidated by the Code Napoléon. The Revolution unified France and enhanced the
power of the national state. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars tore down the
ancient structure of Europe, hastened the advent of nationalism, and inaugurated the era
of modern, total warfare.
Although some historians view the Reign of Terror as an ominous precursor of modern    21

totalitarianism, others argue that this ignores the vital role the Revolution played in
establishing the precedents of such democratic institutions as elections, representative
government, and constitutions. The failed attempts of the urban lower middle classes to
secure economic and political gains foreshadowed the class conflicts of the 19th cent.
While major historical interpretations of the French Revolution differ greatly, nearly all
agree that it had an extraordinary influence on the making of the modern world.
 
Bibliography
See the older works by Guizot, Jules Michelet, Alexis de Tocqueville, Louis Blanc,    22

Edgar Quinet, and H. A. Taine; the great modern studies by Alphonse Aulard, Albert
Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre; the diplomatic history by Albert Sorel; the socialist
interpretation of Jean Jaurès; P. Gaxotte, The French Revolution (1928), a royalist
account.
See also J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution (1945); G. Lefebvre, The French    23

Revolution (2 vol., tr. 1962–64); N. Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution
(1963); W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (1988) and The Oxford History of
the French Revolution (1989); R. Cobb, The French and Their Revolution (1999).
On the historiography of the French Revolution, see P. Farmer, France Reviews Its
Revolutionary Origins (1944, repr. 1963); D. Sutherland, France, 1789–1815:
Revolution and Counterrevolution (1986); and F. Furet and M. Ouzouf, A Critical
Dictionary of the French Revolution (tr. A. Goldhammer, 1989).