Lesson video

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

My name is Mr. Arscott, and this is our second lesson looking into our inquiry of what the French Revolution mean to Britons.

So if you haven't done the first lesson, make sure you do that one because this lesson and the next few lessons won't make any sense without doing that one first.

If you have done that one already, brilliant, you're in exactly the right place.

Now for today's lesson, you're going to need a piece of paper and a pen, and we're going to be looking at an event that's so famous that lots of landmarks and places in Britain are named after it.

We're going to be looking at the Battle of Waterloo, and then the Napoleonic Wars, which happened just before it.

So I'm going to get my head of the way so you can get down to today's title and then we'll begin.

So let's start by looking at this cartoon.

Now there's lots going on in it, and most of it, when you look carefully, is pretty shocking.

This cartoon was made by a British cartoonist, and it gives us an idea about how British people in the 18th century reacted to the French Revolution.

So I'm going to ask you to pause the video, and I want you to try to find five shocking details in this cartoon.

Un-pause it once you found five.

Okay, welcome back.

I wonder what you managed to spot.

Maybe it was the baby being roasted by the fire, or maybe it was the people at the table eating a human body, or maybe it was people using dead bodies or treasures as seats.

Now, did you have a guess about who these people were, once you were looking at the details? Now, these people were meant to represent the sans-culottes of the French Revolution.

Now it's worth thinking about what can this cartoon tell us about the French Revolution and what the French Revolution meant in Britain? Well, as a cartoon, it was meant to be exaggerated.

So this is not meant to be a realistic sketch of what life was like for the sans-culottes during the French Revolution.

But even if it is exaggerated, we can still understand a bit about how this British cartoonist saw the French Revolution.

So clearly here so did the French Revolution with the sans-culottes violence.

We also get a bit of impression that this cartoonist thought that the French Revolution was chaotic and maybe lead to unnecessary and excessive violence.

We can see that this seems to have led to a breakdown in normal behaviour, acceptable ways to behave.

Now, anarchy, which is word I put on the slide there, is a really good word we can use to describe this kind of descending into chaos or the normal social relationships breaking down, or people behaving in shocking new ways.

And this cartoonist shows that he thinks the French Revolution has led to anarchy because he shows cannibalism.

He shows the sans-culottes eating human flesh.

Now I want you to have a go at trying to describe this source now.

So I want you to try to analyse this source by answering this question.

What can you see? Now in order to answer that really well, I put two sentence starters to help you.

I'm going to ask you to pause the video whilst you try to answer that question and then un-pause it when you're done.

Welcome back.

Okay, maybe you put something a bit like this.

In this cartoon I can see sans-culottes eating human flesh.

I think the message of the cartoon is the revolution has led to anarchy.

That'd be a good answer you put there.

You might've done something even better than me and put some details from the source.

So you might have pointed out how in the cartoon, you can see that eating the eye of the head on the table or something like that.

Now today and the next few lessons, we're going to think about this question.

How did people in Britain react to the French Revolution? And these two individuals that I've put on the screen, they are two of the most intelligent and well-educated people in Britain at the time.

Both of them knew loads about the French Revolution and also knew loads about the Enlightenment.

In fact, Mary Wollstonecraft, on the right, she even went to live in Paris during the revolution in order to experience it.

Now interestingly, even though they both knew lots about the French Revolution, and knew lots about the Enlightenment, they had very different reactions to the French Revolution.

So Mary Wollstonecraft had a very positive view of the French Revolution, especially at the beginning.

And I put a quote from her at the top.

So she said, "The revolution is a glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe." That's a quite complicated quote in 18th century language, but what she means is that the French Revolution is a really good opportunity for humans to achieve things they haven't been able to achieve before.

And she hopes the French Revolution will lead to happier societies, so people can live in a better and happier way.

Now Edmund Burke, you can see his painting on the left.

He had a very negative view of the French Revolution, and here's something that he said.

"The French had shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world." Now, again, it's in complicated 18th century language, but what he's trying to say is that during the French Revolution, the French showed that they were capable of destroying everything that was good that they previously created.

He thinks that during the short years of the French Revolution, especially during the period of terror, the French were able to ruin the good system of government they had before, and he particularly dislikes this idea of the anarchy that we saw in that party before.

Now, it's really interesting that these two disagreed, and in fact, it tells us that lots of people in Britain at the time did disagree.

So over the next few lessons, I want us to try to answer this question.

What did the French Revolution mean in Britain? Now we did look at this question at the very end of our last lesson, but we're going to keep returning to it over and over again.

So I put four different options there about how, what the French Revolution might've meant in Britain.

So it might've led to in option one excitement, people might've thought it a really good idea.

And Mary Wollstonecraft is one of those people that did have excitement about the revolutionary changes, and she hoped to see similar changes in Britain.

Option two.

Some people in Britain might've seen the revolution as an opportunity to increase British power and wealth.

And we might have seen that in the Haitian Revolution when Britain tried to get the colony of Saint-Domingue to join the British Empire.

Option three.

Seeing revolution as a threat to Britain's power or wealth.

So some people in Britain might've worried the revolution could challenge British power.

And option four.

Fear revolutionary changes in Britain.

So worrying that maybe the revolution in France could spread to Britain and lead to anarchy there.

And it's that idea in option four which the cartoon we looked at at the beginning, and possibly Edmund Burke as well, was worried about.

He thought that revolutionary changes might ruin the good system of government in Britain.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to first look at the big picture, and then we're going to try to come back to that question of how people in Britain reacted.

So I showed this timeline last lesson.

What we can see now is some of the key events of the Age of Revolutions.

The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and all of those happened after the Enlightenment, which gave the revolutionaries some of the key ideas.

And what we're going to look at today is this next part of the story, Napoleon and Napoleon being defeated at Waterloo.

And this event, the defeat at Waterloo, probably signals the end of the Age of Revolutions.

And people would stop talking about it at the Age of Revolutions.

So this is what we're going to try and cover today.

Now, let's start by going backwards a bit.

So at the point of the terror and just before, lots of countries in Europe started being at war with France.

Now there are different reasons why the different countries of Europe went to war with France.

Some, like Austria, might've been doing it to try to protect Marie Antoinette, the sister of the Austrian emperor.

But other countries had different reasons.

And I want us to think about Britain in particular.

Why did Britain go to war with France during its revolution? Well, one possible reason is that Britain and France had had a long-term rivalry.

They competed over colonies in different parts of the world, and so maybe Britain wanted to take advantage of the revolutionary changes, of the revolutionary chaos.

They thought whilst the French government was distracted by trying to have arguments with each other, the British might be able to maybe take some French colonies or maybe destroy some of the French Navy, that Britain would be in a stronger position afterwards.

Later on though, Britain and other European countries probably were fighting France because they feared the revolution spreading.

And this is especially the case after the execution of Louis XVI, that we can see in this picture on the right.

Once the French had shown they're willing to kill their king and establish a republic, the other things kings of Europe, and the other kings and queens of Europe were worried that the revolution might spread to their country.

And that became a key reason to fight France.

They want us to beat the revolutionaries and then turn the clock back so that France was no longer revolutionary.

We have all the countries of Europe fighting against France, it seemed very likely the French Revolution would fail.

Surprisingly though, fairly early on during these wars of the French Revolution, the French were able to start winning.

Now, this is very surprising because there are so many different European countries fighting in France.

But nevertheless, eventually the French starts to win.

And there's probably two possible reasons why the stuff's happened.

One was because of the morale of the French soldiers.

Now, morale means they felt a sense of self confidence, they felt happy about what they're fighting for.

And that was probably because the French Revolutionary soldiers were fighting to protect their revolution.

They thought the revolution was going to make their lives better, and therefore they wanted to defend it.

Now, if we think about the soldiers fighting in the other European armies, they weren't necessarily fighting because they were protecting their way of life.

Instead, they were fighting because a king or maybe a duke had told them they had to fight.

They were fighting for money or because they were forced to, rather than because they really believed in what they were fighting for.

So the French soldiers might've had a higher morale because of that.

Now the other important difference between the French armies and the other armies was that the French armies eventually started to get much better leadership.

And that was because the French armies were organised less traditionally.

In the other European armies, in order to be one of the leading generals, you need to be born from the aristocratic class.

Whereas in the French army, anyone who's a good soldier could be promoted.

And that meant that eventually the generals were the people that had shown they were really good at their job, so the French army starts to have better leadership.

And once that started happening, they started winning more battles.

So I'm just going to ask you to write down our key term of morale, 'cause it's going to be useful, especially when you get to the reading.

So you might want to pause the video now whilst you write that down.

Okay, welcome back.

Now, one of these particularly talented soldiers that emerges during the Revolutionary Wars was a man called Napoleon Bonaparte.

Now he quickly got promoted and he became an artillery officer.

So he was in charge of working out how to fire the cannons to properly support the rest of the army.

Now he was from a bourgeois background, so he was middle class.

He wasn't an aristocrat.

But because he was very talented, he quickly got promoted over and over again, and he became a bit of a revolutionary hero.

He was so successful as a commander that people started to talk about him in France and Paris, because he was so good at helping the revolutionary armies beat the enemies.

And he became increasingly famous.

Now, by 1799, the French government was in a bit of a, was in a bit of chaos itself.

They couldn't decide exactly what the best way to govern France was.

And Napoleon decided to use his fame to try to take over the government himself.

Now, no one had really expected this because France, after the revolution, it prided itself on being, on having elements of democracy, allowing the people to vote, but Napoleon decided he was going to take over himself.

Now, by doing that, he did end the phase of the revolution where France was democratic.

So some people think that he actually ended the revolution because he turned France back from being a kind of democracy into another kind of dictatorship where one person has power.

In other ways, Napoleon did preserve the revolution.

So he kept things, like everyone having equal political rights.

He kept things, like protecting people's freedom, particularly freedom of religion.

But other people, there's a big debate really about whether or not Napoleon was a defender of the revolution or was someone who ended it.

Now, one useful other bit of evidence for us is that it was Napoleon who made the decision to re-invade Saint-Domingue after they declared slavery was fully abolished.

So in some ways he did go back on earlier revolutionary changes.

Right, that's quite a lot of information to take in.

So I'm going to ask us to try to put it in order and make some sense of it.

So we've done this activity before.

On the right I've jumbled up some key events.

And what I want you to do is try to put them in the correct order.

So pause the video now whilst you write them out and then un-pause it when you think you've got the correct order.

Right, welcome back.

Let's see if you've got it right.

Well done if you put the French Revolution begins, the first event.

The next event was Louis XVI was executed.

The third event was the French start winning battles.

And the fourth event was Napoleon takes over the government.

Let's find out what happens next.

Now, Napoleon had been a successful military leader before he takes over the French government.

Once he's actually in charge of the French government, he becomes even more successful and France starts to develop a huge empire.

It becomes known as the Napoleonic Empire, as in the empire created by Napoleon.

Now this map on the right gives us a bit of an idea about the size of this empire.

So he, firstly, hugely increased the size of France itself, and the darker green shows everything that was directly ruled by Napoleon.

So that includes not just France itself, but large bits of northern Spain and northern Italy, and also Belgium and the Netherlands.

And actually, if you look across the other side of Italy, over here you can see they're in both French direct control of the country today is Croatia and Slovenia.

So France was massively increasing the amount of land it was controlling, but the light green bits are important too.

All of those are bits of countries we had called satellite states.

And what that means is countries, which although they are kind of independent, are effectively controlled by another country.

And so all the bits of the map which are in green in some way were under Napoleon's control.

Now, that actually still doesn't give us a complete idea about how powerful Napoleon was and how successful a leader he was.

Because lots of other countries in central Europe, so countries over here, like the Austrian Empire, and countries over here like Prussia, were allies to Napoleon at key points during his reign.

So it meant that Napoleon effectively controlled Europe, and no one had had this much power for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Now, one country that was not invaded by Napoleon and was constantly at war with Napoleon was Britain up here.

And Britain was very worried about how powerful Napoleon had become.

So what was the British reaction? Well, the British still had this fear of revolution spreading to Britain.

Under Napoleon, France would become less revolutionary.

It was less radical, but there was still this fear that the French way of doing things might inspire Britons to rise up against their government.

So the British wanted to stop Napoleon's rule in order to avoid revolution spreading to Britain.

But Britain was also worried that Napoleon's empire was a threat to British power.

Now this cartoon, if you look closely, you can see that Napoleon is in the blue and on the right.

And if you look carefully at what he's cutting from the globe, it's actually a map of Europe.

So it suggests that Napoleon is taking Europe for himself.

Now the man on the left is meant to represent Britain or the British Prime Minister Pitt.

And what he's doing is he's cutting the globe and he's taking the ocean.

Now, this actually gives us quite an interesting insight into what the British were doing during the Napoleonic War.

They were fighting Napoleon and they did worry about Napoleon becoming too powerful.

But they also used it as an opportunity to take over other parts of the world.

So Britain took over the colonies of lots of other European countries, especially the Dutch, during the time when Napoleon had taken over the Netherlands.

So Britain took over Sri Lanka and parts of South Africa, and they said at first they're protecting the Dutch colonies, but then they kept them for good.

So what was the British reaction to Napoleon in summary? Well, there's partly a state of revolution.

There's partly the worry that Napoleon was a threat to British power, especially Britain's ability to trade freely with other parts of the world.

But also it was an opportunity for Britain to take advantage of the fact that other European countries were invaded and to take over their colonies.

Now, Britain ultimately wanted to defeat Napoleon and it tried very hard to do it over and over again, but Britain couldn't do it alone.

Eventually by 1814, 1815, Britain had enough allies in Europe to be able to fight Napoleon.

And ally is a country that will work closely with another country.

So at a famous battle called Waterloo, Britain, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, who can see on the horse in the middle of this painting, some Dutch soldiers and some Prussian soldiers were able to finally defeat Napoleon.

And once that happened Britain felt that it could rest easy again, and it didn't need to worry about this threat to British power.

Right, we're now in a really good position for you to answer some comprehension questions.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to shortly pause the video, go to the next page and read through the worksheet slides.

Once you've had a read through those, then you'll be in a good position to answer the comprehension questions.

So I'll read through the questions first, and then I'm going to ask you to pause the video.

One.

How were the sans-culottes often shown in British cartoons? Two.

What reasons did European kingdoms have for fighting revolutionary France? Three.

Why might the French soldiers have had higher morale than the soldiers in other armies? Question four.

Where did Napoleon experience his final defeat? Question five.

In what ways to Napoleon continue the French Revolution? So what I'm going to ask you to do is shortly pause the video, go to the next screen, read through the information, and then answer the comprehension questions.

And those comprehension questions are at the end of the worksheets, as well as on the slide I just showed you.

So please pause the video now and then restart the video once you finished.

Welcome back.

Let's go through your answers and see how many you got right.

All right, question one.

How were the sans-culottes often shown in British cartoons? So acceptable answers could be violent or savage.

A good answer in a full sentence is the sans-culottes were often shown to be violent and savage in British cartoons.

Savage is a nice word.

Kind of implying that they are animal-like.

Now, if you didn't get exactly what I read, it doesn't matter.

Look for common language and give yourself a tick.

Okay, question two.

What reasons did European kingdoms have for fighting revolutionary France? So acceptable answers could be things like stop revolution spreading or take over French lands.

A good answer which is fully explained would be the rulers of Europe's kingdoms had different reasons for fighting against France.

Some wanted to take advantage of France and steal French lands or colonies.

After France became a republic, many monarchs wanted to fight France to stop the revolution spreading.

Okay, question three.

Why might the French soldiers have had higher morale than the soldiers in other armies? So acceptable answer would be fighting to protect liberty, equality and fraternity.

A good answer in some full sentences, the French soldiers might have had high morale because they believed they were fighting to defend the revolution.

They wanted to protect their liberty, equality and fraternity, whereas soldiers in other armies might have felt they were fighting for a king rather than for themselves.

Question four.

Where did Napoleon experience his final defeat? An acceptable answer is Waterloo.

A good answer is Napoleon experienced his final defeat at Waterloo.

And question five, the challenge question.

In what ways did Napoleon continue the French Revolution? So acceptable answers would be religious toleration, equal rights.

There are things that he kept going.

A good answer which explains that in a bit more detail, although Napoleon ended French democracy, he did protect the revolution in some ways.

He maintained religious toleration and equal rights for all French citizens.

He then put these revolutionary ideas into practise in the countries he invaded.

Furthermore, he removed the aristocrats from power in many countries he took over.

Okay, brilliant work so far today.

Hopefully you've had an opportunity to get some really good answers down and then improve your answers based on what we've gone through.

Now, if you're running out of time, I suggest you stop the video at this point and then move on to the final quiz.

If you've got a bit of extra time though, it's a really good idea to have a go at our extension question.

Now, our extension question is, why were the British determined to defeat Napoleon? Now in order for us to answer that question, it's worth us thinking a bit about that question I asked earlier about British reactions, and I went through these four different reactions.

Now, in terms of trying to work out why were the British determined defeat Napoleon, option one isn't relevant.

The British definitely weren't determined to defeat Napoleon because they were excited about revolutionary changes.

Even though some Britons like Mary Wollstonecraft did like the revolutionary changes, that doesn't explain why the British government decided to defeat, decided to defeat Napoleon.

So have a look at the other three options.

And I want you to think about which one of these best explains why you think the British wanted to defeat Napoleon.

Right, let's have a go at working out how we could put this into a piece of extended writing.

So why were the British determined to defeat Napoleon? That's a bit of a tongue twister, that.

So I've put a couple of sentence starters on this screen view, and I want you to have a go at trying to write a paragraph where you could just, you explain two reasons, or sorry, two paragraphs where you explain why Britain was determined to defeat Napoleon.

So one reason Britain fought against Napoleon probably was, and then Britain might have also wanted to defeat Napoleon because.

Now, if it's helpful, you might want to go back in the video to look at those three options I gave you earlier in order to develop your ideas.

And on the right hand side, there's some key words I want you to try to put into your answers so that you'll make sure you're focused on the key bits of historical knowledge.

Alright, well done for your hardware today, looking at the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon, and we're starting to think a bit more about how people in Britain were reacting to the French Revolution.

In the next few lessons we're going to be looking at events in Britain, looking at how people in Britain responded to what was happening over the channel.

Right, one final thing to do before we finish is have a go at the end of lesson quiz, and then you're done.

Well done again for stage work.