REVOLUTION ... 1
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The French Revolution marked the beginning of modern revolutions for the overthrow of monarchical regimes. It ushered in an age of popular sovereignty, interrupted and continuing through the undulating course of history. The Napoleonic rise to power subsequently robbed the Revolution of its people's control over affairs but the Emperor carried on through his reforms of the existent system the essential principles of the Revolution and brought it closer to its eventual historical fruition.
The process of history is never a rectilinear propagation but is tortuous and meandering in its flow. Through a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions the course of history is set and so it was for the French Revolution. It affected world politics in a way like no other event ever since has and shaped European and world history in a manner that seized power from royalty, the nobility and the clergy to pass it on to the people. The French Revolution, thus, marks the turning point in modern history when man took control of his destiny from the powers by divine right that were and reshaped everything temporal by dint of reason and reformation thereof that were the legacy of the Enlightenment spearheaded by Voltaire, Rousseau and their revolutionary successors.
All was not well with the French Revolution as an entire system of monarchical tyranny was overhauled and replaced by people's rule. It entailed in turn a worse tyranny of revolution for the while when hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were snuffed out by the brutal hand of historical transformation. The Reign of Terror unleashed by Danton, Marat, Robespierre and their associates sent revolutionary France to despair as a disastrous purge was conducted internally to cleanse the emerging republic of all unwanted men by indiscriminate fear psychosis generated and senseless violence to give support to it. Through this deluge of blood the Bourbon dynasty was ended, royalty and the nobility uprooted, the clergy cleaned up and privilege ended and the path now lay for reform and reconstruction after the guillotine claimed its last victim in Robespierre, the very architect of revolutionary terror.
The Jacobin leader (Maximilien Robespierre) had enunciated his terrible dictum --- “Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue” --- which became the death-call of dissent, influenced future revolutions and dictatorial movements across the world and remains till date as the classical model of revolutionary terror whose replication in altered circumstance calls upon the bloody revolutionaries to wantonly kill political opponents and the citizenry to suit ideological imperatives and self-security in times of historical uncertainties when the forces released by cataclysmic changes in a polity go out of bounds and threaten the heads of the very leaders of revolution.
The French Revolution was enacted in the last years of the eighteenth century but its echoes can still be heard at this distance as they continue to fashion revolutionary thinking and keep on sowing the seeds of future upheavals in the minds of discontented men groaning under the tyranny of the times.
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo (source -- internet) : Maximilien Robespierre
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The French Revolution marked the beginning of modern revolutions for the overthrow of monarchical regimes. It ushered in an age of popular sovereignty, interrupted and continuing through the undulating course of history. The Napoleonic rise to power subsequently robbed the Revolution of its people's control over affairs but the Emperor carried on through his reforms of the existent system the essential principles of the Revolution and brought it closer to its eventual historical fruition.
The process of history is never a rectilinear propagation but is tortuous and meandering in its flow. Through a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions the course of history is set and so it was for the French Revolution. It affected world politics in a way like no other event ever since has and shaped European and world history in a manner that seized power from royalty, the nobility and the clergy to pass it on to the people. The French Revolution, thus, marks the turning point in modern history when man took control of his destiny from the powers by divine right that were and reshaped everything temporal by dint of reason and reformation thereof that were the legacy of the Enlightenment spearheaded by Voltaire, Rousseau and their revolutionary successors.
All was not well with the French Revolution as an entire system of monarchical tyranny was overhauled and replaced by people's rule. It entailed in turn a worse tyranny of revolution for the while when hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were snuffed out by the brutal hand of historical transformation. The Reign of Terror unleashed by Danton, Marat, Robespierre and their associates sent revolutionary France to despair as a disastrous purge was conducted internally to cleanse the emerging republic of all unwanted men by indiscriminate fear psychosis generated and senseless violence to give support to it. Through this deluge of blood the Bourbon dynasty was ended, royalty and the nobility uprooted, the clergy cleaned up and privilege ended and the path now lay for reform and reconstruction after the guillotine claimed its last victim in Robespierre, the very architect of revolutionary terror.
The Jacobin leader (Maximilien Robespierre) had enunciated his terrible dictum --- “Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue” --- which became the death-call of dissent, influenced future revolutions and dictatorial movements across the world and remains till date as the classical model of revolutionary terror whose replication in altered circumstance calls upon the bloody revolutionaries to wantonly kill political opponents and the citizenry to suit ideological imperatives and self-security in times of historical uncertainties when the forces released by cataclysmic changes in a polity go out of bounds and threaten the heads of the very leaders of revolution.
The French Revolution was enacted in the last years of the eighteenth century but its echoes can still be heard at this distance as they continue to fashion revolutionary thinking and keep on sowing the seeds of future upheavals in the minds of discontented men groaning under the tyranny of the times.
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo (source -- internet) : Maximilien Robespierre
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