French_revolution

Summary Experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself. - Alexis de Tocqueville The year is 1789, and you are the King of France. You’d rather be tinkering around in your workshop, but instead you are stuck in this meeting of the three estates and no one seems to be very happy. You inherited the kingdom from your grandfather Louis XV at nineteen years of age. He died a deeply unpopular monarch and left you a kingdom with tremendous financial problems. Still, change is in the air. The Enlightenment has filled France with new ideas; the old world is dying and something new is being born, though it is hard to picture what it will be. There is a lot of criticism of the monarchy these days, and it is coming from both the nobility and the masses. You have often welcomed reform, but there is a right and natural way things are meant to be. Push too hard and something might break. This is why you’ve often retracted unpopular edicts. People call that indecisive, but you’ve always held that public opinion is never wrong. Now here you sit in the middle of the first Estates General in over one hundred and fifty years, listening to everyone air their grievances against the kingdom you rule. A flicker of intuition, a growing sense of doom, as a possibility begins to present itself. You might be the last link in a chain of kings that reaches back one thousand years. ...

This book was largely a response to a response to the French Revolution by Edmund Burke. The French Revolution started in 1789. The aristocracy of England was starting to see the writing on the wall and the French Revolution made them that much more uneasy. So, one of monarchy’s most vocal proponents (Edmund Burke) wrote a book entitled “Reflections on the Revolution of France”. If that book was a Facebook status a good chunk of this book was a comment on Burke’s Facebook status. Paine rips the idea of monarchy to shreds. To summarize his argument in a couple sentences I would say Paine’s main point was this: Government should be formed to protect the existing rights of man and not be looked to as a definition of human rights. Furthermore, that any formal document that is written in order to form a government is a limitation on those rights of man. Therefore, it should be the individuals themselves that define the contract that does so limit each man’s individual freedom. The book itself is a little rant-y hence my Facebook reference. But it would probably be one of the best, and most informed Facebook responses you will ever read. I did not realize that the French revolution was in such close proximity to our own. This makes me interested to contrast the two. One seemed very ‘gentlemanly’ and the other seemed sort of ‘barbaric’. Not sure if this is due to my own ignorance or not.