Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction by Jack A. Goldstone

Author:Jack A. Goldstone [Goldstone, Jack A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Philosophy, Political Freedom, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Revolutionary
ISBN: 9780199858507
Google: kHBVAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00HFW4P52
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-01-06T03:00:00+00:00

4. The storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789.

French armies then spread across Europe, fomenting republican revolutions near and far. After 1801, the French Revolution came under the control of the wildly popular and successful general Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon advanced himself from consul to emperor, and like the ancient Romans, commissioned triumphal arches (the Arc de Triomphe) to mark his conquests. The Vendôme Column in Paris, modeled after Trajan’s column in Rome, bears a statue of Napoleon wearing a toga and crowned with a laurel wreath.

Napoleon’s string of victories ended on the outskirts of Moscow, where he was turned back by the Russian winter and the stubborn resistance of Russian forces. After Napoleon was defeated by a coalition of European powers in 1814, he was exiled and the Bourbon kings were restored to the French throne.

By then the belief that government belonged in the hands of citizens, not kings, had become widespread. The French Revolution—with its popular attacks on aristocrats, revolutionary terror, creation of a new constitutional order, and military success and expansion under Napoleon—soon became the prototype of a revolution for succeeding generations.

Even in France’s sugar colony of Saint Domingue in Haiti, slaves and former slaves followed the proclamation that all men were equal and citizens, and rose up to demand their freedom from the plantation owners and from France. After years of struggle, led by Toussaint Louverture, a former slave turned prosperous plantation owner, Haiti won its freedom.

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