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How Is The French Revolution A Class Struggle

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Is the French Revolution best understood as a ‘class struggle’, or were the major divisions instead about attitudes to monarchy, privilege and religion?

The French Revolution has been studied since its end in an attempt to determine and understand the causes of it and its duration. Different schools of history attempt to provide different explanations, such as Marxist schools examining whether the French Revolution amounted to a class struggle or the ‘maximalist’ school in which the cultural transformation of French society is examined, including attitudes about monarchy, privilege and religion. This essay will contend that fundamental divisions of attitudes towards privilege began the revolution, with disagreements about religion and the Catholic Church making the revolution longer in duration. Monarchy is linked to privilege as the King was part of the privileged Second Estate. Thus, the revolution as a …show more content…

This change signalled a shift in the methods of production from a smaller scale on close to self-sufficiency for peasants to peasants only producing commercial crops and goods such as grain and wine and using profits from this to buy what they needed and did not produce. In addition, in some way the peasants were aware of their class and their subordinate position even within their own Estate as a result of the creation of the cahiers de doléances and their subsequent politicisation. However, I do not believe this is equivalent to Marx’s class consciousness. This is because Marx’s idea of class consciousness revolved around the fact that the proletariat became aware of their exploitation and thus created a revolution. I do not believe that the peasants were aware of their exploitation or whether Marxian exploitation existed in France, therefore they did not posses a ‘class consciousness’, indicating that the Revolution cannot be understood as a ‘class

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