How Did The French Revolution Affect The Western World

The French Revolution is one of the most pivotal moments in recent history that has left an impact on the Western World. As Timothy Tackett stated in his introduction of the book The Coming of the French Revolution, most of the modern concepts we see today such as “liberalism, nationalism, republicanism, feminism, abolitionism, and de-Christianization” are influenced by this revolution that changed France forever. However, the cause of this revolution is still deeply examined to this day. There are many factors that contributed to the cause of the French Revolution, but historians from different time periods have different opinions and interpretations of how this revolution actually came to be. The earlier interpretations of the French Revolution were that of a Marxist approach, in which those historians saw the French Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution.” Among those interpretations is a historian by the name of Georges Lefebvre who emphasized that the cause of the French Revolution was the rise of the bourgeoise that resulted in a class struggle between them and the aristocracy. This, he states, eventually led to the overthrowing of the aristocratic ruling that has been a tradition for over a thousand years. In The Coming of the French Revolution, Timothy Tackett offers a brief glimpse into the theories and ideas Lefebvre held close to hear. Born in 1874, Lefebvre was nurtured by the social history of the revolution
Taylor, a revisionist historian questioned the argument put forth by Lefebvre and eventually undermined the Lefebvre paradigm. He said “to call the French Revolution a “bourgeois revolution” loses most of its interpretive value” because the revolution was that of a political nature, not a social one. He believed that the French Revolution was a political revolution that had social consequences. This differs from Lefebvre because he believed that the revolution was a social revolution that had political