FRENCH REVOLUTION

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

This chapter of the research tends to develop an understanding and identify the reasons for conducting a research onto the identified topic. However, in the context of this paper this chapter would inculcate the notions related to French Revolution.

Background of the Problem

An explanation offered for some wars, especially revolutionary wars, is ideology. Ideology refers to a set of linked beliefs that make up a descriptive world-view but are also normative and constitute, as Lenin put it, a guide to action. All governments and would be governments, no matter their type, need to structure and justify their rule. A political ideology will focus on the proper nature and form of government, the social and economic ordering of society, and the relations between people and states. When different states hold conflicting ideologies, this has been an important source of international conflict (Tucker, 2009). Ssometimes this conflict is between different political ideologies, Mussolini claimed that "Between democracy and totalitarianism there can be no compromise' and similar things have been said about monarchy and republicanism or democratic capitalism and communism.

At other times, the conflict is religious. The European Wars of Religion and the India- Pakistan conflict are often attributed to such hatred. Additionally, some ideologies are seen as more aggressive than others, their tenets more prone to lead to conflict. In the case of revolutionary wars, this explanation is commonly given, although there is disagreement over who is to blame. Crane Brinton is one of those who blame the revolutionary state, seeing the fanatical drive of the extremists to export their ideology as the primary culprit.

The period labelled "the pre-revolution" by French historian Jean Egret, which begins with the convocation of the first Assembly of Notables in February 1787, marked the beginning of a process leading to the collapse of the French Old Regime and its replacement by a new revolutionary order in the summer of 1789.1 Such a process, this chapter argues, was central in the advent of a generational consciousness among young commoners in western France and in the elaboration of a discourse legitimizing their participation in provincial and national politics. As the French monarchy set in motion a vast and ancient mechanism of popular consultation, the Estates General, to resolve its financial crisis, it also initiated a new regime of historicity, to use the words of François Hartog,3 that would find its full expression in the tabula rasa of the Revolution(Cassels, 2006). With the preparation for the Estates General a spirit of national regeneration was growing in France, fuelled by the explosion of newspapers and other printed texts that followed the abolition of censorship in July 1788.

This public conversation on the form and objectives of the Estates General, and on the national regeneration that would ensue, generated an unprecedented level of expectation for a better and brighter future, a future that seemed within reach though it had yet to be constructed. In pre-revolutionary Brittany, the implications of this, new relationship between the past, present and future were ...