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The Revolution resulted from multiple long-term and short-term factors, culminating in a social, economic, financial and political crisis in the late 1780s. [3] [4] [5] Combined with resistance to reform by the ruling elite and indecisive policy by Louis XVI and his ministers, the result was a crisis the state was unable to manage. [6] [7]
By the late 1780s, 87% of the sugar, 95% of the coffee, and 76% of the indigo imported to Bordeaux from the Caribbean was being re-exported. [22] Cádiz was the commercial hub for export of French printed fabrics to India, the Americas and the Antilles (coffee, sugar, tobacco, American cotton), and Africa (the slave trade), centered in Nantes. [23]
Prior to the revolution, France was a de jure absolute monarchy, a system that became known as the Ancien Régime. In practice, the power of the monarchy was typically checked by the nobility, the Roman Catholic Church, institutions such as the judicial parlements, national and local customs and, above all, the threat of insurrection.
Spain and Portugal entered the anti-French coalition in January 1793. Britain began military preparations in late 1792 and declared that war was inevitable unless France gave up its conquests, notwithstanding French assurances they would not attack Holland or annex the Low Countries. [14]
Vergennes, foreign minister of France, worried that a war over the Bavarian succession would upset his plans against Britain. Ever since the Seven Years' War, France's Foreign Ministers, beginning with Choiseul, had followed the general idea that the independence of Britain's North American colonies would be good for France and bad for Britain, and furthermore that French attempts to recover ...
The Attack on Feudalism in Eighteenth-century France (Routledge, 2013) Markoff, John. Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (Penn State Press, 2010) Scott, H. M. (2005). The Birth of a Great Power System 1740–1815. Stewart, John Hall, ed. A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (1951) pp. 106–12
The changes in France were enormous; some were widely accepted and others were bitterly contested into the late 20th century. [8] Before the Revolution, the people had little power or voice. The kings had so thoroughly centralized the system that most nobles spent their time at Versailles, and played only a small direct role in their home ...
But events in France made the prospect of return to their former way of life uncertain. In November 1791, France passed a law demanding that all noble émigrés return by January 1, 1792. If they chose to disobey, their lands woul be confiscated and sold, and any later attempt to reenter the country would result in execution. [2] [4]