What Are The Long Term Causes Of The French Revolution

One of the most remarkable events of Modern History that has impacted the way we still live today in the twenty-first century is, without a doubt, the French Revolution. The causes that led to its explosion in 1789 are divided into two main categories: long-term causes and short-term causes. The long-term causes were the language and the new way of thinking that the Enlightenment generated throughout the eighteenth century. The French phrase liberté, égalité et fraternité, which remains the official motto of France to this day, stressed the concepts of liberty, equality before the law and fraternity which changed the way people looked at the world and cast the monarchy in a bad light in the citizenry's perspective.

On the other hand, the short-term causes of the French Revolution were the financial crisis that hit France in the 1780s and the rise in population that made the already scarce resources insufficient to satisfy the basic needs of every individual. Because of the crisis, the economic conditions became particularly difficult and the prices increased significantly. On top of that, a series of bad harvests contributed as a burden to the lives of the lower classes, which eventually started resisting to taxation and protesting against the exceedingly high price of bread. The French government was

too weak to prevent this revolution from happening, since France had been at war with Great Britain and other European powers on and off for about a century, and that contributed to the higher taxation and the war debt. The debt also increased significantly because of the financial support that was given to the rebel colonists in the American War for Independence against Great Britain, whose successful victory was the ultimate motivation that pushed the French to rebel against their own despotic monarchy, like the Americans had done previously.
The spark of the Revolution was the meeting known as the Estates-General that Louis XVI convoked in 1789. It was a meeting between the king and the representative of each of the three French estates, which were the clergy, the nobility and the rest of the population, known as the third estate. Louis XVI had the intent to implement new taxes on the third estate, since both the clergy and the nobility were exempt from taxation. Each estate got a single vote on the issue, even if the third estate was the overwhelmingly majority of the French population, a solid 95%. This incremented the discontent of the citizenry towards the monarchy, and as a consequence, the third estate created the "National Assembly", a revolutionary congregation whose goal was to gain the same authority as the king, since the third estate claimed the be the true representative of the will of the French nation.
Perhaps the most important and symbolic moment in the entire French Revolution was the storming of the Bastille, which was essentially a successful attempt by the Parisian citizenry to attack the city's largest prison, la Bastille, in order to procure weaponry that could then be used for the revolution.

This event, which happened on July 14, 1789, was symbolic for the reason that, in the past, the monarchs would send multitudes of innocent people to prisons without a fair trial, or even a trial at all. Still, today, the assault on the prison is the most recognizable event of the French Revolution and is remembered currently as the French national day: Bastille

Day.
A couple of months after this major event the National Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a document that stressed the values of the aforementioned French motto in detail and had the goal of spreading the concepts of liberty and equality across France. Not only did the French use the American Revolution as a model for their own revolution, but they also used the American Declaration of Independence as an inspiration for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which reflected several points previously made by Thomase Jefferson, such as the doctrine of "natural right" and the concept that are all men are born and created equal.
Later on, a major division started to grow within the Assembly that set apart radicals, known as Jacobins, and moderates, known as Girondins. The Jacobins wanted the establishment of a French Republic, while the Girondins did not want to get rid of the monarchy completely; they just wanted to limit its powers and change the absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. Around this time, when there was not yet a clear majority between the Jacobins and the Girondins, the king tried to flee abroad in order to seek support from foreign countries against the revolution. The attempted escape of Louis XVI augmented the popular resentment against him and strengthened the idea of a republic, and as a consequence, the Jacobins became the majority, albeit they did not gain power yet. Meanwhile, the goal Louis XVI had in mind when he attempted to leave the country came true: neighboring countries feared that France revolutionary ideals would spread across its boarders and encourage other countries to revolt. Therefore, they tried to put the Louis XVI back in power, and this eventually led to a war between France and the two nations that intervened on behalf of the king, Austria and Prussia.
In January 1973, the revolutionaries established the National Convention to guide France through its current conflicts and the resolution of its revolution. Eventually it was discovered that Louis XVI was writing to the Austrian government to continue his plan to have them end the revolution outright. When this was discovered the convention swiftly trialed and subsequently executed Louis XVI thus ending the reign of the French monarchs and establishing the new republic. As a response to the ongoing war with Austria and Prussia, the National Convention created the Committee of Public Safety, an institution that had the goal of protecting the republic from outside military action, particularly from Austria and Prussia, as well as preventing internal conflicts.
This new government led by the Girondins, who had gained power within the French republic, was eventually overthrown by the Jacobins, which were led by Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre swiftly implemented measures known as the "Terror" to prevent counterrevolutionaries from gaining power in France. The Terror limited the rights of those accused of being disloyal to the republic and allowed the immediate trial of any armed insurgents. Indeed, the Jacobins were so intent on destroying the ways of the Old Regime that they created an entirely new ten-day week calendar. By the end of the Terror between 11,000 and 18,000 people were killed, as a result. As a result of the extreme policies of Robespierre's Terror, he was eventually executed in 1794.
Afraid to be executed by the Jacobin dictatorship, moderate Jacobins established a new government known as the Directory, which had the goal of ending the Terror. Although it succeeded at that, the Directory suffered a period of great political instability caused by ongoing wars and a time of economic depression. However, the Directory was successful in ending the war with Prussia. Though, by no means did this mean that the Directory was an effective government in France that was by now faced with bankruptcy, extreme inflation and a loss of control in parts of France. On the back of this lawlessness Napoleon Bonaparte successfully undertook a coup d'état that led to the appointment of Napoleon as consul of France, due to his popularity and the collapse of the directory at his hand. With this seizure of power, Napoleon effectively ended the era of the French Revolution and heralded the beginning of the Napoleonic Era.