Lesson video

Hello and welcome back to history at the Oak National Academy.

My name is Mr. Arscott and hopefully recognise me because it's our fourth lesson of four into our inquiry whether the French Revolution was enlightened.

So far we found out about what France was like before the revolution, the Ancien regime.

We then found out about the events of 1789, where it looked like France is going to have a new and exciting enlightened form of government.

And then last lesson we looked at how there's an event known as the reign of terror, turned the revolution into very violent and quite scary time to live.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to try to pull everything together and try to answer our big inquiry question, was the French Revolution enlightened? Now in order to do that, you're going to need a piece of paper, a pen and also a ruler for today's lesson.

So you might want to pause the video now and get those things.

Once you've got them unpause the video, We'll be ready to begin.

And when you're ready to begin, I'll get my head of the way.

Today, we're going to try to answer our big inquiry question, was the French Revolution enlightened? Now we're thinking back all the way to our lessons on the Enlightenment back in lesson one, lesson two, we're trying to think about this question as well as the more recent lessons.

So as a brief recap, the Enlightenment was all about using reason to discover new knowledge.

This picture on the left, this painting on the left, that gives a bit of an idea of this.

People were experimenting with things, thinking hard about things in a hope to acquire new knowledge.

This gave people a lot of excitement because they thought they could achieve new things.

Now, when they thought about that in terms of politics, they started come up with some great new ideas and these were ideas about how to make society better because they're going to base society on reason.

Now, this is in contrast to just doing things the way they always had been done.

To try to create better new societies based on reason rather than tradition.

So some of these new exciting ideas were things like, trying to make everyone equal rather than having a very rigid kind of structure for who's better than who, like in the Ancien Regime, and also giving people more freedom.

And these were ideas that excited people before the French and the American Revolutions.

Now what we'll see on the right, we get image of the French Revolution, and we're going to try to work out today whether or not that revolution was enlightened, whether it was influenced by Enlightenment ideas, whether it was shaped by Enlightenment ideas.

Now, no doubt one of the things that we've picked up in the last few lessons is that the French Revolution was complicated.

People find it very complicated, they find it very difficult to understand, but hopefully we've made some sense there.

That's complicated for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there are some things that are done by the Bourgeoisie, who the leaders of the revolution and they do that in the revolutionary parliaments.

So they do things like passed new laws, they create the decoration of rights of man, and they try to guide the revolution from the revolutionary parliament.

There also the actions of the normal people on the street, the sans-culottes.

So you've got two different things going on at once, and it's also complicated because things changed during the revolution, but a start it's quite hopeful and optimistic.

And by the end it's become more radical.

And we can see one of these radical scenes, the picture on the right with the Execution of Louis the 16th, the French King, and after he was executed, or just before he was executed, France became a Republic.

So a new system of government without a King or Queen.

So we're going to try to work out today, wherever those events of the French Revolution, whether they can be said to be enlightened or not.

Now, before we start to work that out for ourselves, let's do a brief recap on the story so far.

So there are four statements A to D, and I'm going to ask you to write A to D on the margin of your piece of paper, And then I'm going to ask you to read through these statements and work out whether you think they are true or false and next to each letter on your piece of paper, just write true or false, depending on which one you think is which.

Kay, you might want to pause the video now whilst you do that, when you unpause, we'll go through the answers.

Right, welcome back.

So well done, if for the first one you put false in 1789, the French Revolution ended France's, not constitutional monarchy as written there, but it ended Francis absolute monarchy.

So before the revolution, France was an absolute monarchy where the Louis the 16th had, was able to rule without a parliament, but after 1789, France became a constitutional monarchy.

And then as we just found out, it changed later again into a Republic.

Well done for sentence B if you wrote true, the sans-culottes did use violence to support the revolution through the Storming of the Bastille and the women's March on Versailles.

And both those events happened early in the revolution in 1789.

Well done for C if you put false, it's not true that Louis the 16th escaped France and led the aristocrats in a war against the revolution.

He tried to do that, or we think he was trying to do that.

But when he and his wife, Marie Antoinette tried to escape, they were caught in a town called Varennes and this becomes known as the flight to Varennes.

And so they were stopped from being able to carry out this war against the revolution.

Okay, and D well done if you got true.

During the terror enemies of the revolution were executed by guillotine.

Now that wasn't the only way people were killed.

Sometimes people killed using mob violence, but the official deaths, which were accepted and agreed upon by the leaders of the revolution, the Bourgeoisie members of the revolution parliament, those ones were killed by guillotine.

This painting on the right, on the right, that gives a bit of an idea about what guillotine looked like.

Has two Sans-culottes on the side, who seemed very happy about the deaths.

So, so far we've considered the views of these two historians when we're trying to work out, whether the French Revolution was enlightened, we got Davidson on the left and he thinks that the French Revolution was enlightened.

He might say something like this, "Yes, the Enlightenment provided the revolutionaries with the ideas they needed to imagine a new society." But we also have been looking at historical disagrees and thinks the French Revolution was not enlightened.

So Simon Sharma, his picture is on the right.

He said, " No, the revolution was carried out by mob violence." So he used mob violence as a contrast to Enlightenment ideas.

Now, what we're going to try to do today is we're going to try to help you understand either which one you agree with more or make up your own mind about whether the French Revolution was enlightened.

So we don't need to just repeat what some historians say, we're going to allow you to make your own choice.

Now to do that, we're going to start by trying to collect all the possible bits of evidence we can.

So what I'm going to ask you to do is to use a whole side of a four to create a really big table, which can have three columns in it.

On one side examples of enlightened changes, in the middle something I'm going to call mixed examples, I'll explain what they are shortly, and on the right examples of mob violence.

So please pause the video now and copy out this table, making it cover the whole side of a fold.

Please pause the video now.

Okay.

Right, hopefully you've managed to get those table written down Now already, you might be able to think of some examples of things we could put in any of the columns.

So examples of things that happened during the French Revolution which showed an enlightened change.

Showed the way that French division changed French society to make it more inspired by Enlightenment ideas, or you might thought of as some examples of when mob violence was used Now, for mixed examples, I'm thinking about things which might've been violent, but weren't necessarily completely unenlightened.

Okay, so what are you going to have to do? So I've written down at the bottom, a whole bunch of things that happened during the French Revolution Now these are all the things that happened.

We've learned about lots of events and actions too, but this is a good, good range of some things.

And what I want you to do is I want you to have a go at trying to work out which of the three columns they could go in.

So are these things which are really good examples of changes inspired by Enlightenment, or are they good examples of changes carried out by mob violence.

So things done by the sans-culottes.

Now in that middle column, I want you to put down any examples of things that you think might show violence that might not necessarily have been carried out by the sans-culottes and might in some way be enlightened.

Now that middle column is very kind of what we say controversial, it's difficult to work out what should go in there.

So if you're stuck, don't worry about putting in, we'll go through the answers afterwords.

Now, any of these that you don't know exactly where to put them, don't worry about that, Just leave it, and then when we go through it, you'll know where to place them.

But for all the ones you do think you know where to place, put them in now.

In fact, I'll give you one example first, So, Storming of the Bastille.

That's a really good example of mob violence and that's because it was carried out by the sans-culottes.

And they used violence to attack that famous prison in central Paris, and then they killed the, governor.

And they actually tried to then cut his head off with a pen knife and parade it through the streets of Paris.

So that's a really good example of the mob, the sans-culottes, using violence to try to further the revolution.

So now you got one example, I want you to pause the video and try to put the other examples in your table.

Unpause please, when you are done.

Right, welcome back.

Let's have a look at where some of these could have gone.

So here we got a table which I've done where I've copied out those things from the purple box and put them into the table.

So the Declaration of the Rights of Man, I put it as an example of an Enlightenment change, and that's because it was inspired by Enlightenment ideas and it made all French people, or all French men at least equal.

And that was a big change from before.

I also put the Tennis Court Oath as an example of an Enlightenment change.

This where members of the third estate said they were sovereign rather than the King, and that's a big Enlightenment idea.

The idea that the people are sovereign, that kind of comes from Rousseau.

And I put one of the changes was religious toleration, where they made it acceptable to be a member of a minority religion.

So to be a Protestant or a Jewish person, you would no longer be persecuted in France after Enlightenment.

Now I'm going to go all the way over to examples of mob violence before going back to these confusing mixed examples.

So we've already talked about the Storming of the Bastille, The March of the Women on Versailles was the time when ordinary women went to the palace of Versailles and dragged the King and Queen back to Paris.

So they were violent when they did it, it was done by force, and it wasn't inspired by an enlightened idea.

We also have the prison massacres and it's something we learned about last lesson during the reign of the terror, where sans-culottes broke in to the prisons and they killed anyone they thought was an enemy of the people.

Often, these were anyone who was from the aristocracy.

Now in the middle, I put some things called mixed examples.

Now you might have put them in different places and that doesn't mean you're necessary wrong.

These are quite difficult to know where to put them.

I put legalising terror, and that was because members of the revolutionary parliament, they passed laws to make it acceptable to execute people with very little evidence during the terror.

In fact, anyone who's accused of being an enemy of the revolution could be executed.

Now that wasn't the mob carrying out some violence, that was the members of the parliament passing a law, but it is itself very violent because it allows people to die.

So it's a bit of a confusing mixed example, and similarly executing enemies of the revolution.

Now, that again is a bit of a mixed example because people are dying and it's as a tragedy, there's people are dying, but it's being done in an official legal way.

So it's not done being done carried out by the mob.

So it's a bit of a mixed example, of whether or not the French Revolution was enlightened.

Okay, well done for competing that table.

If there's any bits you haven't quite got right add to your table now you might pause the video whilst you do this.

Now we have a really exciting opportunity because before this lesson I interviewed one of the leading history teachers in the country who specialises in the French Revolution.

It's called Ms Hollis, and in this interview I'm going to ask her why does Schama and Davidson disagree? Why can two historians, you can see there front covers their two books on the right, why did they disagree whether the French Revolution was enlightened? And that might help you form your own opinion.

Now also during the interview, Ms. Hollis is going to say loads of really useful things that you could add to your tables.

So some of the things we haven't yet included in our tables, so what would be a good idea is whenever she says something new that you think you could put in your table, pause the video, write it into a table, then unpause it when you're done.

Right, let's start the interview.

Which events during the French Revolution, do you think is the best evidence of the Enlightenment having an influence on how the revolution turned out? Yeah, that's interesting.

I would probably say it's not actually an event.

It's more a series of things that the revolutionaries do to change French law between sort of 1790 and 1792.

And I think what you've got there, you've got the French Revolutionaries doing things, for example, like they abolished, torture, and they also abolish what they call inhumane death penalties like hanging, and they're sort of doing this mainly response to criticisms that Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire have made in the past.

I mean, you've even got, at one point, there's actually a movement to abolish the death penalty altogether, which no other country is even imagining at this point.

It's led by Robespierre, which is a bit ironic because he really changed his mind about that a little bit later on.

And in addition to that, you've also kind of got them passing laws that remove discrimination.

So they abolished discrimination against illegitimate children, and also kind of religious minorities, like Protestants and Jews, who have previously been seen as sort of second class citizens in France.

And again, the reason they're doing this, kind of the thinking behind it, is that they see these, discriminatory like practises and laws and things like that as based on superstition rather than reason.

And that's a real big Enlightenment theme.

And I think it's, that's a good example, those kinds of changes are a good example because they actually outlast the revolution.

They stay enforced as laws.

And so you've kind of got, you've got a legacy being sort of, the revolution that continues even after it's sort of over and therefore kind of a legacy of Enlightenment ideas from.

Excellent, thank you.

That's very helpful.

Okay, So the flip, flip side then what do you think is the best evidence of the revolution being led by popular violence? Okay, let me think.

Um, no, so I've got a good example here and it's actually an event this time.

Um, so a good example of that I think is the De-Christianization campaign, which happens in October, 1793 onwards.

And so what I mean, what's happening there is you've got lots of sans-culottes throughout Paris and in other parts of France as well, and they're effectively going around, smashing up churches.

So you see them, they attack Notre Dame.

They're also just going around the streets and if there's a statue of a Saint or imagery, to do with royalty for example, they just sort of tearing it off buildings and throwing it down.

And the people who are sitting in the national convention, which is what the national assembly becomes, it's like the revolutionary parliament, if you want to talk about it that way, so these guys are the leaders of the revolution.

They absolutely hate what's going on here.

They can't stand it.

And the reason why they hate it is because whilst they're not particular fans of the church, they're operating from Enlightenment ideas, which sort of say, okay, you want the church to be out of government.

You don't want to influencing that.

You also want to make sure there's a religious toleration for people who have different kinds of faiths or from different denominations, but they don't want to destroy it entirely.

And I think there's a real difference here between them, and the sans-culottes who are acting out of fear.

They're attacking the church, not because they have Enlightenment ideas, but because they see the church is kind of in league with counter revolution, they've seen members of the clergy involved in rebellions against the revolution or members of the clergy leaving France during the revolution.

And so they kind of see them as the enemy and want to attack them.

And I think that's a good example of the revolution being driven by these kind of popular violence and its needs.

Because even though the people in the convention, the leadership of the revolution, dislike what's happening, they have, they're powerless to stop it.

There's nothing they can do because they are, at this point, so dependent on the sans-culottes for their own political power.

So I think that's kind of an example where you've got the popular violence of driving forward events rather than enlightened ideas.

Yeah, interesting.

So the sans-culottes are scared of revolution and the members of the convention are scared of sans-culottes.

Yes, yes, yes So nothing can be done- Okay, amazing.

Right, so I think something that my year that has been looking at these lessons might be confused by is that we've been looking at these two historians who, you know well, Simon Scharmer and Davidson, and they they're both good historians.

They've both done loads of research into the French Revolution, but for some reason they come up with different conclusions to our question, why, was the French Revolution enlightened? So can you help us out? Why did they, or how did they come up with these different conclusions? That's yeah, that's a really interesting question.

And it's certainly a big feature of like historians with French Revolution are always fighting over lots of different things.

So I think one of the really interesting things about history in general is that you often have two different historians will look at a similar kind of body of evidence, similar, similar kinds of sources of information and evidence, and they'll come to like completely different conclusions on it.

And why does that happen? Well, what often happens, and I think this is the case here, is that historians often come to the evidence with different things on their minds, different kinds of questions they want to answer, or in some places there someone's reacting against what previous historians have said.

So if you take Scharma for example, I mean, right at the start of his book, he says, he thinks that his previous historians haven't paid enough to kind of like the twists and turns of what's going on in the streets the day to day events.

And because he's interested in that, he's therefore going to kind of look at a lot of evidence that will tell him about those things.

And that will probably sort of steer him in the direction of making the kind of judgements about the importance of popular violence that he does.

And in if you take Davidson and in like a similar sense, though he's not as open about it as Scharma, a lot of historians of the French Revolution in the past, So before Scharma and Davidson are writing, have downplayed the role of the Enlightenment quite a bit, they've sort of said it's less important as a cause of the revolution than like the economy, or big sort of social changes in France and Davidson, you know, might be sort of thinking, okay, I'm not sure if that's the right approach.

I'm not sure I agree with those judgements.

So I'm going to look at the evidence and see what I think I can find out about the role of the Enlightenment.

And that again, might sort of steer him in a particular direction.

So to sort of summarise, I think the important thing here is that historians don't just come to a bits and evidence with no ideas in their head, like a blank, they sort of often have particular questions or things they want to find out.

And that often sort of shapes what kind of conclusions they come to, what they take from the evidence in front of them.

Okay, I'll after that brilliant interview with Ms. Hollis, we're now in a really good position for you to give your own answer to the question was the French Revolution enlightened.

So on this slide here, I've put down four possible answers you could give to answer this question.

Now these are basically conclusions.

Things that you might say at the end of an essay where you were after you justified your opinion.

So what I want you do, is I want you to read through these four options and decide which one you agree with most based on the lessons we've had so far and the table you've created and what you've watched in that interview.

So please pause video now and just work out which one you agree with most than unpause it when you're done.

Okay, welcome back.

Hopefully you've got an opinion.

If you haven't gotten opinion yet that doesn't matter.

We're going to just talk about what you're going to do next with it, and I'll give you another opportunity to see the slide afterwards.

Now what I want you to have a go at doing is something that historians do, which that they write up a long answer to try to justify that opinion.

Now they'll give their opinion in a conclusion, but they don't do that unless they've already looked at lots of different bits of evidence.

Now in the French Revolution, we've looked at examples of things which have Enlightenment thought and examples of things which show mob violence.

So we can't just say there's only one possible answer, and it's good for you to show an awareness of these different answers.

So what I've got here are the first sentences of some paragraphs that I'm going to want you to write before you give your own opinion.

So the first one, some historians argued the French Revolution was shaped by the Enlightenment.

For example, then what you're going to need to do is give an example from your table.

You might want to give them more than one, and then explain how that example shows Enlightenment influence.

Now to make that really good, you could then try to explain why some historians, say Davidson for example, hold the views they do about why the French Revolution was enlightened.

Then I want you to write a second paragraph where you talk about why other historians disagree.

So you could start with saying, other the historians disagree and argue to revolution with directed by mob violence, for example, and then you give an example from your table or from your own knowledge where during the French Revolution, mob violence was used.

Then if you want to really impress right, write a really impressive essay, you can to try to explain why a historian holds his views.

So Simon Sharma is a historian who thinks that the revolution was directed on mob violence, and you can try to use that interview with Ms. Hollis to explain why he holds those views.

Then you're in a really good position for you to give your conclusion.

Now let's show a sample paragraph first, before you have a go writing your own answer.

And that's the one that I've done.

I'm sure you can be able to do some much better.

So here we have an example paragraph and I'll read out.

Some historians argue the French Revolution was shaped by the Enlightenment.

For example, during the Tennis Court Oath the National Assembly, a National Assembly was created.

This shows Enlightenment thinking because the Third Estate were declaring sovereignty and forcing Louis to accept a constitutional monarchy.

So what I've done there is the first bit.

I give an example of an event which shows Enlightenment influence.

And I've tried to explain how that event shows Enlightenment thinking.

Now I'm going to show you how I do the next bit too.

So in fact, I've just talked through the highlighting first, so we can see the box to the side shows the steps of the paragraph.

So the orange, I'm giving an example for my table of Enlightenment thinking and the revolution, the bit in the purple pinky colour shows me explaining how that liking in thought and there's bit in blue shows how I link that to a historian.

So I'll read.

Davidson would agree that events like this show the revolution was enlightened.

He believes this is because he think, he believes this because he thinks the Enlightenment gave the revolutionaries the ideas they needed to challenge Lois' absolute control.

Okay, now that's not an straightforward and easy thing to do, but hopefully we can see that it is possible if you just go through these steps.

Now what I've written isn't, anything, isn't necessarily what you're going to write.

You're going to give your own opinion, choose own examples, try to explain it.

So let's briefly just relook at these four options for how you might answer the question.

So the thing that you might try to argue at the very end Now, what I want you to do this time is reread again, reread them again and then copy down the one that you agree with, because this is going to be your conclusion.

So pause the video now, whilst you're doing that, unpause it, once you copped it down.

Okay.

Welcome back.

So you're now in a really good position for you to have a go at writing your answer.

So I want you to use this structure.

You can pause screen, leave it up there.

And I want you at the very end, in your conclusion, to write out one of the options that you copied down from the screen before, and then maybe give one extra sentence where you explain it.

So you're going to be using your table that you created earlier in this screen, in order to write a really good extended piece of writing.

So have a go at doing that now.

Okay, excellent work today.

Hey, hope you have a great rest of the week and look forward to seeing you the week after.

Okay, well done.

You're really hard work today.

And in the last four lessons where you've done a really, really good job trying to answer this question was the French Revolution enlightened, which a really difficult question, but you've shown you can do it.

Now there's two things that you can do now.

Now you've got a really good answer to this question, you might want to take a picture of it and share it with your class teacher so they can see the amazing work that you've done.

The one final thing I want you to do, which is to have a go at the end of lesson quiz.

So please stop the video and do that now and then well done for today's work.