Causes of The French Revolution - Enlightenment Ideas

Enlightenment Ideas

Note that there is controversy about how deeply, by 1787, Enlightenment ideas had been able to penetrate the various classes of French society. There is also disagreement as to the degree to which these ideas were adopted simply as high-minded cover for bourgeois self-interest. The idea that the Revolution was a mechanism that enabled an experiment in democratic ideas is the most commonly accepted one.

For example, shortly after the Revolutions of 1848, Karl Marx wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung that in both the English Revolution of 1648 and in the French Revolution:

... the bourgeoisie as a class headed the movement. The proletariat and the non-bourgeois strata of the middle class had either not yet evolved interests which were different from those of the bourgeoisie or they did not yet constitute independent classes or class divisions. Therefore, where they opposed the bourgeoisie, as they did in France in 1793 and 1794, (that is to say, during the Reign of Terror) they fought only for the attainment of the aims of the bourgeoisie, albeit in a non-bourgeois manner. The entire French terrorism was just a plebeian way of dealing with the enemies of the bourgeoisie: absolutism, feudalism and philistinism.