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The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution

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The Rise and Fall of The French Revolution
By Rhiannon Collins

When starting this paper the question that was kept in mind was the French Revolution worth the price that was paid and was the revolution a success. My first answer was no due to the amount of violence and the amount of lives lost, also due to the fact that the monarchy in some sense, had been reestablished through Napoleon. Though there was tens of thousands of lives lost the French Revolution played an important role in history. Jeff Goodwin, a professor of sociology at New York University, defines revolution as," any and all instances in which a state or political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular extra constitutional and/or violent fashion". The sheer violence of the revolution was something that stood out to me. The French Revolutionary war was certainly violent, especially compared to our own American Revolution in 1775. It is quite possible that the French were encouraged by the American Revolution. They saw the colonies join together in revolt against an overseas king, so why could they not revolt in their own country, against their own monarch for their own rights. In the time leading up to the French Revolution, France was wealthy and extremely powerful. Through my perspective there were a few causes of the historic event of the French Revolution. Let us take a look at some of them. One causes I believe is the rise of the cost of food prior to the revolution. Right before the revolution there had been a few years of bad harvest for the French people. This in turn caused the price of food and other goods to rise. This also caused a rise in unemployment in a lot of cities. It could be said that another cause was that the people of the lower classes were becoming bitter and resentful of the high taxes that the monarch had unfairly

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