Western Civilization

French revolution

One characteristic of the early days of the French Revolution was the boundless optimism that aroused much of the French nation. Even some scholars said that henceforth there would be no story because the goal had been achieved. The past was the hard road, strewn with struggles and sufferings, which talks culminated in a widespread awareness aimed at changing society and create paradise here, and horn is obvious, paradise has no history. Somehow the past with its horrors had been defeated and only belonged to the memory. In a famous quotation by the illustrious Marquis de Condorcet, an apostle of the idea of ??progress summed up the prevailing optimism with the following words which deserve to be transcribed:

All around us we have proclaimed that one of the greatest revolutions of the human species. Is there something more suitable to enlighten us on what to expect from this revolution, to procure a safe guide in the midst of these movements, a study of the revolutions that preceded and prepared it? The current state of human enlightenment guarantees that this revolution will be a happy revolution.

A few months after writing this, Condorcet, besieged by militants, died in a prison outside Paris. The Revolution had turned around and began some of the blackest pages in the history of France. "The long banquet table that ended in the gallows", wrote Victor Hugo half a century later. It was the time when enlightened reason appeared to abandon the revolution. With political and social turbulence out of control, instead of the passions, resentments and retaliation, took itself to heights. How to reconcile the ideas of tolerance, compassion and humanity of the picture with the massacres of peasants, with the massacres of September or the time of the Terror? For two centuries the French have polemics about this historical phenomenon, evidence that the French Revolution remains a lively and controversial issue, which contrasts starkly with other similar historical events that have already been invested with the reverence afforded indifferent the past dead and buried.

One of the first to point out the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the social crisis affecting France was an Englishman, Edmund Burke, who in 1790 published his famous book entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France, which eloquently showed the abyss that separated the ideas that had caused the revolution that is perpetrating acts against human dignity. The ruins of France, said that work on the monument "sad but instructive" the reckless and destructive ideas that emerged from a period of peace and tolerance. The bleak picture he painted of the Revolution was the proof that it had already come into collision with the European world and its hopes for reform were not going to be tight to the borders of France. But also opened discussion on the influence of Enlightenment ideas about the Revolution, a debate that continues today. Thus, from the early decades of the nineteenth century historians like Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Tocqueville, Taine, ...