Abstract
El presente artículo trata sobre
uno de los mayores acontecimientos en la Historia Universal: la Revolución Francesa.
Las implicancias de este hecho la humanidad, de peculiares características,
hacen del mismo un vasto campo de estudio que podemos redescubrir
permanentemente a partir de diversas esferas del conocimiento.
Una comparación análoga con la Revolución
Gloriosa entre sus contemporáneos induce a los historiadores a concluir que las
influencias reciprocas de estos fenómenos conllevaron a una situación política,
social, cultural e intelectual y económica
nunca antes vista en Europa Occidental. Cabe
destacar que estas ideas circulaban entre la intelectualidad de la época pese a
la no menor diferencia de una siglo de distancia entre estas revoluciones; que
de fondo son estructuralmente diferentes ,pero en donde el espíritu ilustrado
comienza a estar presente ,hasta que se observará
en su punto más álgido y concretado en la Revolución Francesa.
El rol que cumplieron ciertos
intelectuales como por ejemplo Tom Paine y posteriormente Burke han influido a la intelectualidad del
resto del siglo ya que sus aportes han sido sumamente discutidos tanto por ingleses como europeos en general.
French Revolution
The French Revolution began in 1789 with the meeting of the States General
in May. On July 14 of that same year, the Bastille was stormed: in October,
Louis XVI and the Royal Family were removed from Versailles to Paris. The King
attempted, unsuccessfully, to flee Paris for Varennes in June 1791. A
Legislative Assembly sat from October 1791 until September 1792, when, in the
face of the advance of the allied armies of Austria, Holland, Prussia, and
Sardinia, it was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the
Republic. The King was brought to trial in December of 1792, and executed on
January 21, 1793. In January of 1793 the revolutionary government declared war
on Britain, a war for world dominion which had been carried on, with short
intermissions, since the beginning of the reign of William and Mary, and which
would continue for another twenty-two years.
The Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Tribunal were
instituted immediately after the execution of the King. The
Reign of Terror, during which the ruling faction ruthlessly exterminated all
potential enemies, of whatever sex, age, or condition, began in September of
1793 and lasted until the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794: during the last
six weeks of the Terror alone (the period known as the "Red Terror")
nearly fourteen hundred people were guillotined in Paris alone. The Convention
was replaced in October of 1795 with the Directory, which was replaced in turn,
in 1799, by the Consulate. Napoleon Buonaparte became Emperor in May of 1804.
The French Revolution was not only 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 was
welcomed 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 analgous to
the Glorious Revolution of 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 "sqeaking 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 by releasing 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 radicals raged 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.
Selected On-Line Texts and Related resources
- Oliver Pinel's site containing
a detailed chronology plus a list of all those executed in the Terror (in
French)
- Edmund Burke, Reflections
on the Revolution in France (text (Project Gutenberg)
- Thomas Paine, The Age
of Reason ((Project Gutenberg)
- Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man text (Project
Gutenberg)
- Jean-Paul Flahaut's Annuaire Histoire — Révolution
et Empires
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