Did The French Revolution end when Napoleon took power? And if so why?

by SSSabercat

Also Did The French Revolution Positively impact Europe in a whole?

Thanks

bandswithgoats

Whether the Revolution ended at this point or another is mostly a question of definition. The Coup of 18th Brumaire (that is, the one that swept Napoleon into power) is a popular point for the end because it's the end of the First French Republic. Though the Consulate that followed bore outward resemblance to to a Republic with division of power, power was concentrated in the hands of the First Consul and it was only a matter of a few years until Napoleon took the crown.

If one had to pick another moment, I think it would have to be the Thermidorian Reaction, and then you're left with the task of explaining why the subsequent reign of the Directory doesn't count. There are certainly arguments to be made. Politics swung hard to the right under the Directory and the new constitution would be less ambitious even than the Constitution of 1791, let alone that of the civil rights love-fest in the never-implemented Constitution of 1793. So if you tend to think of the Revolution strictly as leftward movement, the expansion of civil rights (at least in theory if frequently not in practice), the erosion of class distinctions, and the War of the First Coalition (which would briefly look like it was coming to an end the year after Thermidorians took control with the Peace of Basel), then Thermidor is arguable.

I don't think the dispute has a lot of purpose, though. There's agreement about what happened when. From there, the argument seems to be solely about where we put the word "revolution," and I don't think that really enlightens anyone.

Whether the Revolution had a positive impact on Europe is a question filled with an impossible amount of "ifs" and "depends." There's a famous apocryphal story about Richard Nixon visiting China in 1972 and asking what Zhou Enlai thought of the French Revolution, to which Zhou remarked it was "too early to tell." It turns out that in all likelihood they were speaking past each other and Zhou was responding about the situationist riots in Paris in May 1968. But the story lives on because it's unintentionally emblematic of just how much an impact the Revolution had. If you ask what the most important event/series of events in modern Western history is, I'd wager the French Revolution is in basically every historian's top 2. It was in a lot of ways a watershed moment in western philosophy affecting the world at large. Enlightenment thought had its time in the American Revolution but the disputes were ultimately about taxes and the difficulty of managing colonies across an ocean. Enlightenment thought was more of a window dressing to the American Revolution. We didn't see abolition of slavery or the establishment of Deism as the dominant religious tradition or much similar that signaled that this was more than a fight over who has the authority to issue taxes.

Compare that to France, which saw violent dechristianization, two attempts at the establishment of sort of an official deism, radical experiments with economics (including prototypes of what we'd now consider communism and left-anarchism), abolition of slavery and of many class distinctions. It laid a lot of groundwork for the ideologies of the modern left and right (and in fact the terms left and right to refer to political tendencies.) Danton and later Babeuf pioneered revolutionary methods that would later be implemented by Lenin and other insurrectionists around the world. The Muscadins were sort of a prototype for fascist youth violence that would become instrumental in Italy.

I think perhaps the best demonstration of the impact of the French Revolution is to look at the Constitution of 1793, which makes many guarantees we now consider vital to a functioning liberal democracy, but even more guarantees that are in many countries a political third rail. I think with an eye toward just how big that impact was, you can start to ask your own questions about whether the Revolution was good or bad. And you can start with "well how do I feel about the present day?"