Causes of French Revolution and a future British one?
From 2TK back to Rousseau.
Hail and welcome!
When you teach an IGCSE course (Public examination course taken at 16 year old/Year 11 in UK system) is not necessarily going to include a topic or theme or an Era that any one particular teacher may choose to pursue. You will have to prepare and think through many things that may not hitherto, interested you. That is the nature of working life.
Syllabus are set by schools and or their department heads. Perhaps also by convention and ease of materials available: which is why I have always personally suspected that ever since I pursued O Level History in 1982-1983, 20th Century history has dominated the history departments in all areas of the UK. It is convenient.
World Wars, revolutions, political and economic clashes! Ideological demarkations are all clear in such a pursuit of 20th century history. From Fascism to Nazism and onto to Communism contrasted with so called Liberal Democracies. It is a gallery full of recogniseable characters from Hitler to Stalin, Churchill and perhaps Franz von Pappen, Rosa Luxembourg and General Rommel, amongst a million still photographs of people killed in conflict and warfare. Images of the horrors of the Holocaust and its victims and aftermath. A language full of much currency still today. Many events that seem to mirror our own current 2025 preoccupations: like the creation and use of nuclear weapons for example in the ‘news’ at the moment vis a vis Iran. The almost endless misuse and misapplied word ‘holocaust’ another example.
If your lucky you might get to shape the IGSCE or even better A’ Level course to your strengths and wishes or at least be asked to contribute in such a way. Most courses are made up of 4 Units or so and you might have a Unit selection that contains a study that reflects or matches your particular ‘thing’ and even better, be allowed to pursue it and present it to students.
Take for example the Edexcel IGCSE syllabus. It has two exam papers. Each paper based on the studies of two units. This syllabus has no forbidden combinations. It is up to the school which four units it will deliver either in a modular format (exams at end of each year) or linear (at the end of second year). These are the choices for Paper 1:
1 The French Revolution, c1780–99
2 Development of a nation: unification of Italy, 1848–70
3 Germany: development of dictatorship, 1918–45
4 Colonial rule and the nationalist challenge in India, 1919–47
5 Dictatorship and conflict in the USSR, 1924–53
6 A world divided: superpower relations, 1943–72
7 A divided union: civil rights in the USA, 1945–74
8 South Africa: from union to the end of apartheid, 1948–94.
I was lucky to be setting this up. So I chose two that reflected an international Arab school student (and parents) cohort fed up with learning British history throughout KS3 and trying to balance that out with what I perceive as a heavily biased 20th century weighting. So I originally chose the French Revolution and the Indian Independence only to have to drop India in favour of Germany Dictatorship. Hitler really is interesting to my Arab students. Well, at least, I reasoned, we are not just doing 20th Century stuff. The French Revolution is pivotal in understanding much that has followed. So a compromise.
Now I am not an expert on the French Revolution. I read the course, the syllabi, the assessment objectives and read a couple of books to prepare. I have delivered this particular Unit twice now. I have to say I have enjoyed guiding students through the materials they need to succeed. I have also enjoyed examining the issues that are raised throughout the Unit. It is also possible to take it deeper as there is also an exam board offering the higher academic level with A’Level courses as well. That is in fact the text book I used in my preparations.
Teaching does give you rewards. The old adage that if you want to learn something, teach it does ring true. This has happened often across my career to date. For it turns out that my predilections for 5th (BC) Century Athens and the English Civil Wars of Parliament and King (17th Century AD) are neither well represented in most school curricular! Luckily for me, history is primarily not the content. It is an enquiry. So my mind is open to learning, enquiring into nearly any topic and content that exists.
I have been pondering the causes of the French Revolution recently on a personal level because as I am following the current British body politic, I have begun to feel uncomfortable with some of the parallels. I am not a fan, it has to be said, of the bloody mess that the French Revolution descended into. Yet it is precisely this bloody, terrible mess with all its strands creating a knot of facts and emotions and principles twisted into the yarn of the very fabric of modern day French Society that is interesting, I admit.
I am not always a fan of making parallels either or of allowing my mind to forage into that valley. It is to easy to read your own misgivings, your own search for validations of political points or social similarities into the past.
I have however always felt closer to the American Revolution intellectually and politically. It seemed like the more natural outcome and pathway to the English Civil War settlement than what England actually pursued in the Restoration and then had to revisit sharply in the Glorious Revolution Settlement of 1688-89. That is for another time! Back to France in the 1780s!
One of the major causes of the French Revolution was the inability of the Ancien Regime to adapt. Groups like the Clergy and the Nobility were the beneficiaries of the system and simply would not engage in changing the system so that the vast majority of their fellow countrymen could live decent lives. No mechanism to listen to their wishes.
They squandered the opportunities of the Assembly of Notables (1787) and then were scared into calling the Estates General a year or two earlier than planned due to the Day of Tiles violence: even then proceeding once again to fail to readjust the French polity. The King, an Absolute Monarch, faced bankruptcy not just financially but of moral and political leadership.
Taxes were high and almost exclusively the burden of the third Estate (anyone not in the first two groups mentioned above from Doctors of Law and Medicine to peasant farmers, from merchants to their shop workers).
Simultaneously there were poor harvests preceding 1789. Result? Prices of food skyrocketed and most importantly the staple food of bread. People were starving.
So crushing debt and bankruptcy. Growing starvation amongst the lower orders whilst the elites thrived and cornered the market in grain. Yet also it seems to me that the elites of society were also bankrupt of ideas and practical policies that did not advance themselves, that is. The so called Enlightenment failing to change hearts and minds. Influential certainly. Contributing to the discourses, assuredly.
Yet self interest remained the ruling principle amongst those educated, enlightened elites of French Society. Like ancient Rome were people cheered and applauded Cato as he left the theatre one Spring Festival whilst watching the dance of the Maidens. Applauded, cheered even, at his leaving because the audience could then watch the maidens strip, without the presence of someone whose lifestyle and persona would invariably remind them of propriety.
The French Enlightenment thinker Rousseau uses the idea of a social contract and indeed wrote a book on this idea. Most famously and probably the most often quoted sentence being his observation that, ‘man is born free but is everywhere in chains’. This would certainly ring true to a casual Enlightened observer in 1789 France.
Yet that is just one point behind his restructuring of society. The perfected society is in fact the goal. That society (once created) is the guarantor of freedom. I can see how Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety are seeded in these ideas as they sought to implement their interpretation of Rousseau. They sought to perfect the French Revolution through terror against any that would block their obvious quest for the perfect society: monarchists, counter revolutionaries, conservatives and catholics. Rousseau’s inheritors being Marx in the 19th century and on into the 20th century through Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and other socialists like Hitler.
Edmund Burke on the other hand is writing about his social contract from a different principle: Tradition. A social contract between generations handing onto the next traditions of political discourses. Preferably peace and freedom that has been tried and tested and even amended through time as suitable to the national temperament. What used to be the British national character perhaps reflected through his ideals.
The rest of Rousseau principles applied later in the efficient blade of the Committee of Public Safety headed by Danton at first and then a student of Rousseau, Maximilian Robespierre. Passing the ‘Law of Suspects’. Abandoning trial by jury (a vital part of the early revolution with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen influenced by Thomas Jefferson in 1789) and instead opting for military style Tribunals uninterested in establishing factual guilt or innocence and backed up by the guillotine. The Revolution by 1793 off the rails and far from the hope of the Tennis Court Oath for example and that worthy Declaration.
My students were shocked to discover that the biggest single group killed in the Terror were not the previously ascendent elite groups of Clergy and Nobility. Rather, the peasants of the old Third Estate. The very folk who the Revolution was supposed to advance.
Thus it is I am shocked by the size of Britains debt. This week increased by the Chancellor. Tax rises. An ideology of open borders and mass immigration. None of which is supported by the populace.
This week the introduction of two tier justice. Freedom of speech curtailed with an online Safety Act (you cant be against being safe can you?) and the imminent reintroduction of special privileges for one religion and religious community seemingly soon to be above criticism.
Britain is being radicalised by its own version of a Jacobin Club focused on dividing by race, religion, colour and deciding on those bases the requirements for justice, speech, freedom.
Have a thoughtful week,
Yours,
Syre Byrd