The French Revolution was one of the most important events in the contemporary history of the West. It marked the end of the Modern Age and the beginning of the Contemporary Age, as stipulated by European historians. The reason for this was theFrench Revolution influencesin the world.
The French Revolution marked the rise of the bourgeoisie as the dominant social class, overcoming the land-owning aristocracy as well. as the creation of new institutions and new ways of organizing economic, political and social life that would expand to the entire planet.
With the French Revolution, capitalism broke the feudal political obstacles that still prevailed in Western Europe, joining the economic transformations unleashed with the Revolution Industrial.
These changes had been prepared since the 17th and 18th centuries, with the development of rational Enlightenment thought. For the Enlightenment, reason could help all men to explain the phenomena of nature and the form of organization of society.
Not that the Enlightenment was essentially revolutionary. But the Enlightenment ideas served, along with the use of reason to interpret the world, for the French revolutionaries questioned the sacred character of power, defended by kings, aristocracy and by the Church.
All men could exercise power. But for that, it was necessary to create institutions that would guarantee this exercise. In this sense, the Republic was the main one of these institutions. It represented the end of the privileges of the aristocracy and the liberation of peasants from the bonds of servitude that bound them to the nobility and clergy. In the cities, the feudal corporations that limited the business of the bourgeoisie ended.
But even before the French Revolution, Enlightenment ideals had already made it possible in America from the North, the British colonists carried out the independence of the USA and also built a Republic. But the biggest boost was actually given by the French Revolution, thanks to the power of the French state.
The French Revolution also influenced other processes of independence on the American continent. In 1794, enslaved Africans working in Haiti's sugar cane fields achieved the end of slavery after a bloody war of independence. It was the first country on the continent to end slavery. In Brazil, the Bahia Conjuration (or Revolt of the Tailors) of 1798 was also strongly influenced by the events of the French Revolution.
The historian Eric. J. Hobsbawm further claims that French revolutionaries symbolically influenced the emerging nations of nineteenth-century Europe with the tricolor flags.
The concept and vocabulary of nationalism, developed with universal education, and the recruitment of citizens of all classes into the army were yet another influence of the French Revolution.
The technical and scientific organization model, in addition to the metric system of measures (meter, centimeter, decimeter, etc.), was another contribution developed during this period.
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