The 1789 French Revolution

Lessons

Senior 3 · History and Citizenship

The 1789 French Revolution

4 lessons

Lesson 4 of 4

Effects of the Revolution and its legacy for democracy

25 min

One sentence, three centuries

Compare these three sentences, written 234 years apart.

Year	Document	Words
1789	Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Article 1	"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
1948	Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations), Article 1	"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
2023	Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda, Article 16 (1)	"All Rwandans are born and remain equal in rights and freedoms."

Analysing the sources. The idea and even the shape of the sentence ("born … free and equal … in rights") passed from 1789 to the United Nations in 1948 and to Rwanda's Constitution. Notice what changed: "men" became "all human beings", and "dignity" was added after the horrors of the Second World War. A revolution in one country became part of the language of rights everywhere. That is the clearest single effect of the French Revolution.

The whole Revolution in one diagram

Figure 1. Cause, course and effect of the French Revolution, 1789 to 1799.

Definition

Nationalism: the belief that people who share a language, history and culture form a nation and should govern themselves in their own state.

Liberalism: the political belief in individual rights, equality before the law, a constitution and elected government.

Napoleonic Code (Civil Code of 1804): the French code of civil law, covering property, contracts and the family, which applied the same written law to all citizens.

Metric system: the decimal system of measurement based on the metre and the kilogram, introduced by revolutionary France in the 1790s.

Effects in France

The end of absolute monarchy. Power now had to rest on a constitution and on the nation. Even Napoleon, crowned emperor in 1804, claimed his power from the people through plebiscites (popular votes).
The end of the three estates and feudal privileges (4 August 1789): all citizens paid taxes and could, in principle, hold any post.
A new state. France was divided into departments (1790), the Church lost its lands and its tithe, and civil registers of births, marriages and deaths passed to the state.
The metric system, adopted in the 1790s. When you measure in metres and kilograms in Rwanda today, you use a system born in revolutionary France.
The Napoleonic Code of 21 March 1804: one written law for all. Napoleon's armies carried it to much of Europe. Belgium kept it after 1815, and Belgian colonial law brought the civil-law tradition to Rwanda.
The costs: the Terror, the civil war in the Vendée, and the loss of the Church's role in schools and care for the poor.

Effects in Europe

Revolutionary and Napoleonic France was at war almost without a break from 1792 to Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Its armies abolished feudal privileges and spread the Civil Code in the lands they conquered, but they also looted and ruled as occupiers. Both results produced nationalism: Italians and Germans admired French ideas but wanted to govern themselves. The ideas of liberalism (constitutions, rights and elected assemblies) returned in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Kings who remembered 1793 feared revolution for decades.

Case study: Africa, the Caribbean and the end of slavery

The Revolution's words raised a question it had not planned to answer: were enslaved Africans in France's colonies "men born free and equal"? In the richest colony, Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, several hundred thousand enslaved Africans worked on sugar and coffee plantations. In August 1791 they rose in revolt. Their most important leader became Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man, and they fought French, Spanish and British forces. On 4 February 1794 the National Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies.

Napoleon reversed this. In 1802 he restored slavery in French colonies such as Guadeloupe and sent an army to retake Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture was captured and died in a French prison in 1803, but the army was defeated by the revolutionaries and by yellow fever. On 1 January 1804 Saint-Domingue became independent as Haiti, the first state founded by formerly enslaved Africans. France abolished slavery for good only in 1848.

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 had a different effect: his soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799, which allowed Jean-François Champollion to read Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, a story you met in the Senior 1 unit on Egypt.

The limits: who was left out

In September 1791 the writer Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, rewriting the 1789 Declaration to include women. The revolutionaries ignored it. She opposed the execution of the king and was herself executed on 3 November 1793. French women won the right to vote only in 1944. So the Revolution announced universal rights but applied them, at first, to men, and until 1794 to free men only.

Olympe de Gouges (1748 to 1793), playwright and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791). Pastel portrait by Alexander Kucharski, late eighteenth century, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Worked example: assessing a legacy

Question: Assess the importance of the French Revolution for the development of democracy. (8 marks)

Contributions. It declared that sovereignty belongs to the nation (Article 3 of the Declaration), replaced an absolute king with written constitutions, held elections by almost all adult men in 1792, and set out rights such as equality before the law and free speech that were copied in 1948 and in constitutions such as Rwanda's.

Limits. Women were excluded, slavery was abolished only in 1794 and restored in 1802, the Terror trampled rights, and the decade ended with a general seizing power.

Judgement. Its practice of democracy in the 1790s was brief and flawed, but its principles were very important: they became the standard by which later generations, including African nationalists, judged every government. It was more important for the ideas it spread than for the democracy it achieved.

Tip

Sort effects by place and time. A strong answer on effects has three boxes (France, Europe, the wider world) and separates short-term effects (1790s) from long-term ones (1804 to today).

Warning

Haiti was not "given" freedom. The Convention abolished slavery in 1794 after the enslaved of Saint-Domingue had already risen and were fighting for their freedom, and they had to defeat Napoleon's army in 1803 to keep it. Give the enslaved their place as actors in the story.

Crash Course World History #30, "Haitian Revolutions" (CrashCourse channel, 13 minutes). Watch for how events in Paris and in Saint-Domingue pushed each other, and why the narrator says the Haitian Revolution matters. It describes the cruelty of slavery plainly.

Discuss

Which effect of the French Revolution do you think matters most to a Rwandan student today: human rights declarations, the metric system, the civil-law tradition, or the idea of the nation? Give a reason and an example from your own life.

✦

Practice

Give three effects of the French Revolution in France.
What was the Napoleonic Code, and when was it issued?
How did the Revolution encourage nationalism in Europe?
What happened on 4 February 1794, and why?
When did Haiti become independent, and why was this independence special?
Who was Olympe de Gouges, and what does her story show about the Revolution?
Compare Article 1 of the 1789 Declaration with Article 16 (1) of Rwanda's Constitution: one similarity, one difference.
"The French Revolution failed, because it ended with Napoleon." Do you agree?

Show answersHide answers

Any three: the end of absolute monarchy; the end of the three estates and feudal privileges; equality before the law; departments; state civil registers; the metric system; the Napoleonic Code; the Church lost its lands and tithe.
The Civil Code of the French, a single written code of civil law (property, contracts, family) for all citizens, issued on 21 March 1804.
French armies spread ideas of the nation and of rights, but also ruled as occupiers; Italians and Germans came to want their own national governments.
The National Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies, after the enslaved of Saint-Domingue had risen in revolt in 1791 and in line with the principle that men are born free and equal in rights.
On 1 January 1804. Haiti was the first state founded by formerly enslaved Africans, who had defeated Napoleon's army.
A French writer who published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791 and was executed in 1793. Her story shows that the Revolution's "rights of man" did not include women.
Similarity: both say people are "born and remain … equal in rights". Difference: the 1789 text speaks of "men", Rwanda's of "all Rwandans", and adds "freedoms".
Partly. It ended with a general in power and Napoleon made himself emperor in 1804. But many of its changes lasted: no return to feudal privileges, equality before the law, the Civil Code, the metric system, and ideas of rights and national sovereignty that spread worldwide. It failed as a democracy in the 1790s but succeeded in changing society and ideas.

1One sentence, three centuries

2The whole Revolution in one diagram

3Effects in France

4Effects in Europe

5Case study: Africa, the Caribbean and the end of slavery

6The limits: who was left out

7Discuss