d****g
发帖数: 7460 | 1 好比昨天我去查法国大革命为什么重要。那美国人真是有理有据。可不是背诵政治宣传
材料。
https://www.quora.com/Why-was-the-French-Revolution-so-important
This question comes with an implicit assumption, namely, that the French
Revolution was important. And while we usually think of events that have the
word "revolution" in their names as important, historical revisionism will
come into play at some point. For example, with the American Revolution,
sure, the US became independent, but many historians have pointed out that
the social order of the former colonies didn't drastically change because of
the Revolution[1] - and the US didn't become a great power for having
become independent, either. So the American Revolution might have set the
groundwork for American greatness later on, but, well, there's a reason the
American Civil War gets a whole lot more ink than the American Revolution.
There's also the related question of precisely what we mean by "the French
Revolution."[2] This definition is vitally important, and also tricky to
nail down. Still, if we go with what has taken hold in the popular
imagination as the definitive bits of the French Revolution, what we end up
with is a period of time from 1789, when Estates-General was called and the
Bastille was stormed, to 1794, when the Reign of Terror ended with the
Thermidorian Reaction. When the French Revolution is defined as this five
year stretch of time, we actually see that it is an extremely important
event in world history for a variety of reasons.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, an intellectual movement in Europe
called "the Enlightenment" took hold. The Enlightenment's most fundamental
idea was that European epistemology - how Europeans viewed what knowledge
was and how it could be acquired - was in need of overhaul. Previously, the
dominant approach to epistemology in Europe had been "ask the Church."[3][4]
Of course, when you re-evaluate how you gain knowledge, you start re-
evaluating everything you thought you knew. So, for example, does the
sovereign power of a government stem from a divine mandate or a popular one?
And if it's the latter, what does that mean regarding a government's
obligations to its people? Or another example: is there a divine reason to
respect your social superiors - or do you even have social superiors?
These were deep questions - and in much of Europe, they didn't really go too
far. I mean, sure, you had your eastern European monarchs surrounding
themselves with prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment and talking about
enlightened despotism, but so far as substantive reform went? Not much. And
while the leaders of the American Revolution were certainly inspired by
Enlightenment political thinkers such as John Locke, when they said such
things as "all men are created equal," they very obviously didn't mean it.[5
] And also, more importantly, the Thirteen Colonies were exactly that:
colonies. They were a backwater who managed independence mostly through the
intervention of the French and being able to take enough punches to make the
British go into too much debt to make the whole effort worthwhile. Point
being, they weren't really considered thought leaders by too many people and
since they were an ocean away, nobody really had to think about them if
they didn't want to.
From 1789 to 1791, the French Revolution wasn't really all that
revolutionary, either. For France itself, sure, it mattered a great deal
that feudalism was abolished and that a constitution was set up. It was
certainly an extremely short time for such substantive reforms to go through
. However, for all of that, you were still dealing with a constitutional
monarchy and an aristocracy. It looked a decent bit like the Kingdom of
Great Britain.[6]
But in 1791, King Louis XVI decided he didn't like the changes, didn't like
the idea of more changes and also that he was going to bolt the country.
This decision ended up being a bad one - he failed, and for having tried,
the Estates General took a big swing to the revolutionary direction and had
him guillotined the next year. In 1792, the French First Republic was
declared.
And this is when things get interesting, because it's here where that
fundamental Enlightenment idea of "but is that actually true?" really comes
into play massively. I mean, it's one thing to say "all men are created
equal," but it's quite another to say "no, really, we don't just mean all
rich men are created equal" and it's an even more radical step to say "that
means all men, not just the rich ones, should maintain the same rights, and
those who oppose that principle should be punished."
Which is to say that it's in the French Revolution that we see the ideas of
the Enlightenment give birth to the idea of class struggle. Sure, you'd seen
peasant revolts before, but what you hadn't seen was large scale success in
those revolts. The French Revolution, on the other hand, saw the lower
classes throw off the shackles that had been placed on them by the upper
classes. Of course, this also resulted in the massacre of the aristocracy
through the use of the guillotine[7] and the disestablishment of the
Catholic Church in France in an unsuccessful bid to avoid going back.
Going even further, many of the fundamentals of the French Revolution are
outlined in the hugely influential 1848 German language pamphlet published
in England - The Communist Manifesto. Class struggle, religion as the opiate
of the masses, all of that is really presaged by the French Revolution and
its successes in overthrowing the old order.[8] Before the French Revolution
, you occasionally had someone preaching anarchism or some such idea, but
after, when it was shown that the old order actually could be overthrown and
anarchism, communism and socialism weren't just pie-in-the-sky messianic
utopianism,[9] these ideas flourished.
They might have been limited to France but for one thing: while every other
government in Europe loathed what was coming out of France,[10] they proved
completely powerless to stop it. The Austrians were particularly hostile to
France, with the result being the War of the First Coalition. In this war,
which lasted from 1792 to 1797, the French actually managed rather more than
holding onto their republic - they gained control of what we now call
Belgium and set up client states in Italy. This second part is really
important, because while the French had been interfering in Italian politics
for centuries, they'd never really managed to take the peninsula. Post-
revolutionary France, as it turned out, was stronger than pre-revolutionary
France, which further legitimized the political left[11] globally.
Additionally, the terms of the Treaty of Campo Formio, which ended the War
of the First Coalition, made a follow-up war all but inevitable. This would
subsequently lead to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the explicit
exportation of many of the ideas of the French revolution during his reign
over France - most notably, the legal system that still underpins a good
amount of continental European law.
This also sets the scene for the dominant political conflict of the
nineteenth century, that between conservatives, who previously held all the
power, and liberals, who previously had very little. It wasn't just France
that had multiple revolutions in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914),
but it was because of France that these took place. The French Revolution
smashed a barrier, and most of the political discourse in the nineteenth
century in Europe was an argument, frequently a bloody argument, over
whether or not that barrier should be reconstructed and to what degree. This
kept going back and forth - Napoleon gave way to the Congress of Europe, a
system which was profoundly altered by the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, and
so on and so forth.
Because of this, it's really quite impossible to imagine what the nineteenth
century in Europe would have looked like without the French revolution. It'
s highly unlikely that the states of eastern Europe would have been wracked
by revolution as they were, and the conflict between liberals and
conservatives wouldn't have been the dominant theme of the century.
Similarly, whether or not Italian or German nationalism would have become
strong political movements is unsure - much of their rise had to do with
France stomping flat the various German and Italian states during the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. And yes, going back to the earlier
paragraph, whether or not an ideology such as Marxism would have even come
into existence let alone whether or not it would have caught on but for the
French Revolution is completely unknown.
This is to say that not only did the French Revolution have profound
repercussions over the course of the nineteenth century, but it had deep
repercussions in the twentieth as well, and its impact is yet to still be
completely felt.
[1] Remember, the Whigs in Parliament at the time were very supportive of
the Colonists.
[2] If I were being incredibly irritating, I could ask "which one?" After
all, France had several, among them revolutions in 1830, 1832, 1848, 1851
and 1871. Still, speaking of "the French Revolution" without further
qualification means the one Dickens was writing about with A Tale of Two
Cities.
[3] Obviously, it wasn't the only way people went about things, but it was
the big one.
[4] There was the matter of the Reformation, wherein a bunch of people
stopped asking the Catholic Church. But, of course, most people continued to
continue to frame knowledge in a religion-centric context.
[5] Slavery is the obvious example of their insincerity, but it's not as
though elections in the early going of the Republic saw universal suffrage
or a particularly democratic process.
[6] The UK didn't exist yet.
[7] Itself a democratic invention - everyone was executed the same way, and
that method was designed to be as painless as possible.
[8] Commonly referred to as the Ancien Regime.
[9] Or more accurately, that the initial steps of getting to those end
states weren't impossible. Whether or not these are utopian ideals that
cannot be practically accomplished is a debate that continues to this day -
but nobody doubts that you can completely chuck the old order.
[10] Some British parliamentarians did support the French Revolution, most
notably Whig leader Charles James Fox, but they were the ones in opposition,
not the majority.
[11] The terms "political left" and "political right" actually come from the
French revolution. The royalist party sat on the right side of the hall
where the Estates General met, the republican party sat on the left.
21.3k Views · 50 Upvotes · Answer requested by
Kyle Murao
Upvotes50Downvote
Comment |
|
