Whose rights were defended in the Declaration of the Rights of Man?
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Whose rights were defended in the Declaration of the Rights of Man?
In order the answer that question we have to think first of all about the most radical idea associated with the French Revolution, which was equality. Why was equality so radical? Well, in a traditional society in France, before 1789, the essence of the social order was hierarchy; everybody was different. And the idea of equality was so radical that even its defenders felt obliged to erect all sorts of qualifications and reservations about its use.
Take the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is the founding document, kind of the rough draft of the constitution that the revolutionaries set out to write in 1789. They had just declared themselves representatives of the nation. Now, the nation as a new political ideal was a challenge to the authority of the monarchy. The monarch was sovereign in the old regime and the revolutionaries were proposing a new kind of sovereign body: the nation. This nation was the collectivity of these citizens who were all members of that nation in the same way. This is a kind of fundamental equality.
However, if you look closely at the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, it says, "All men are born free and equal in rights." It then goes on to say, "Social distinctions may only be based upon common utility." In other words, everybody is born free and equal, a kind of universal declaration of citizenship. But at the same time, we're not going to get rid of social distinctions completely.
As a result, the revolution itself was marked by intense debate over what kinds of differences would continue to be meaningful under this new regime of citizenship. There were debates about Jews, about Protestants, about slaves, about women and their participation in the public realm. All of these kinds of difference were posed as problems by the declaration of equality. Some historians have gone so far as to claim that the modern notion of racism is only possible once the regime of equality has been declared as the aspiration.
Were the Napoleonic wars the first "total war"?
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Were the Napoleonic wars the first "total war"?
When people use the expression, Total War, I think what comes to mind most often is the First World War, a war in which industrialized nations brought unprecedented power to the battlefield, resulting in unprecedented slaughter. But in important ways, historians have noted that the transition occurred much earlier than that, around the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
The argument here goes something like this: That the creation of a nation of citizens transformed the idea that people had about conflict during this period and made it something much more profound and, ultimately, something much more violent. How do they justify this? They point out that prior to the French Revolution, the wars that took place in Europe were generally of short duration. The armies were much smaller. The officers who led these conflicts were aristocrats who were chosen by birth and were not particularly professionalized; some were good, others not so good. And these aristocrats who led the armies tended to view each other as members of a similar caste who were due the respect and dignity that went along with being an aristocrat.
After the French Revolution when the nation at-arms was called in 1792 as the revolution was being threatened from without, a citizen army was created and a different kind of war emerged in which nations went after each other. This meant that the fundamental threat was much more menacing, much deeper, and demanded unrestrained violence in order to defend oneself. The aristocratic officers fell by the wayside as a new school of military officers emerged - Napoleon himself came from the artillery where birth mattered much less than merit - and constituted the beginnings of a much more professional officer class. Most importantly, you have a sense of national conflict, which is literally to the death. Survival is at stake in this in ways that simply did not exist before.
Now, you can overdraw this argument. There are examples of horrific wars before the Napoleonic Wars. The Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century is a good example of a terrifically devastating conflict. And, of course, even the Napoleonic Wars didn't match the scale of the conflict in the First World War. But at the same time, this conceptual shift that creates a nation at-arms produces a different kind of conflict, one whose potential is really realized in the coming decades.