How the French Revolution Redefined Modern Politics
The Etymological Shift of Revolution
Only with the French Revolution did the concept of "revolution" take on its modern meaning. This etymological fact signals a larger truth about the grouping of events in world history. For many centuries prior to the 1500s, "revolution" referred to astronomical cycles.
During the period of the English upheavals from 1640 to 1688, "revolution" was used to refer to fundamental political changes, yet it still retained the sense of cycling back to a previous state of affairs. By the time of the French Revolution, however, "revolution" came to connote a sudden, fundamental, and innovative departure in a nation's social and political life—and the term has retained this connotation down to the present day.
Impact on Social and State Structures
Since 1789–1799 in France, such massive social revolutions have punctuated modern world history. In part fueled by widespread revolts from below, social revolutions have recurrently brought basic changes in:
- Class relations
- State structures
- Hegemonic ideologies
Furthermore, they have transformed power balances and ideological models within the international system of nations.
The French Revolution as a Global Prototype
Modern social revolutions have been tied together in both practical politics and academic scholarship. In practical politics, the actors in the social revolutions that followed the French Revolution often understood their own roles by reference back to what had happened in France; the obsession of the Bolsheviks with preventing a "Thermidorian reaction" in Russia is a case in point.
Academic Analysis and Reinterpretation
Similarly, the French Revolution has served as a prototype for the academic analysis of succeeding revolutions. Yet later revolutions have also changed scholars' sense of what was interesting about the French case. Periodic reinterpretations of the French upheavals have been inspired not only by political or academic shifts within France; they have also depended on scholars' sense of how subsequent revolutions compare to, or build on, the great French precedent.
Legacy and the World-System
The French Revolution did not change France very much. It did, however, change the world-system very much. The world-scale institutional legacy of the French Revolution was ambiguous in its effects. The post-1968 questioning of this legacy requires a new reading of the meaning of the popular thrusts that crystallized as the French revolutionary turmoil.