Defintions 1: French Revolution and Napoleon Flashcards
Edmund Burke
Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker prominent in public life from 1765 to about 1795 and important in the history of political theory.
Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the statee. He is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his staunch opposition to the French Revolution.
He championed conservatism in opposition to Jacobinism in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society and condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro–French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox.
Austerlitz
The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805), also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important and decisive engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. It is widely regarded as the greatest victory achieved by Napoleon, the Grande Armée of France defeated a larger Russian and Austrian army led by Emperor Alexander I and Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. Austerlitz brought the War of the Third Coalition to a rapid end, with the Treaty of Pressburg signed by the Austrians later in the month. The battle is often cited as a tactical masterpiece.
Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a naval engagement between the Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies during the War of the Third Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars. As part of Napoleon’s plans to invade England, the French and Spanish fleets combined to take control of the English Channel and provide the Grande Armée safe passage. French Admiral Villeneuve sailed from Cádiz and encountered the British fleet under Admiral Lord Nelson in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Trafalgar.
Nelson was outnumbered, with 27 to 33 ships, and sailed his fleet directly at the allied battle line’s flank, hoping to break it into pieces. The tactic exposed the leading ships in the British lines to intense fire from multiple ships as they approached the Franco-Spanish lines. The ensuing battle resulted in 22 allied ships being lost, while the British lost none. The victory confirmed the naval supremacy Britain had established during the eighteenth century.
Jena
The battle of Jena (14 October 1806) was one of two simultaneous battles won by the French on the same day and saw Napoleon with most of the Grand Armée defeat the Prussian flank guard at Jena while Marshal Davout defeated the main Prussian force further north at Auerstädt.
In the battle, Napoleon smashed the outdated Prussian army inherited from Frederick II the Great, which resulted in the reduction of Prussia to half its former size at the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807.
Frederick William III of Prussia prepared for war after signing a secret alliance with Russia in July 1806. In early October the Prussian-Saxon army, under Charles William Ferdinand, duke of Brunswick, moved slowly westward through Saxony in an attempt to threaten Napoleon’s communications to the west. Napoleon advanced northward rapidly through the eastern end of the Thuringian Forest to cut the Prussians off from the Elbe River and engage them before their Russian allies could join them. The Prussians had to face about to meet this attack from their rear. Frederick William III placed 63,000 men under Duke Charles William Ferdinand at Auerstädt and about 51,000 under Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen on a 15-mile (24-kilometre) front between Weimar and Jena.
The double victory of the French cost them about 12,000 casualties to about 24,000 Prussian and Saxon casualties and about 20,000 more captured. Napoleon completed his conquest of Prussia within six weeks, before Russia could act to aid its ally.
Marengo
Battle of Marengo (14 June 1800) between French forces under the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte and Austrian forces in Italy. Near the end of the day, the French overcame Austria’s surprise attack, driving the Austrians out of Italy and consolidating Napoleon’s political position in Paris as First Consul of France in the wake of his coup d’état the previous November.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
On 26 August 1789, the French National Constituent Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which defined individual and collective rights at the time of the French Revolution. Some delegates at the Assembly had expressed their admiration for Magna Carta and other constitutional documents, such as the United States Declaration of Independence, but ultimately the Déclaration rejected appeals to ancient charters of liberties, based on the principle that the rights of man were natural, universal and inalienable.
The Déclaration nonetheless echoed Magna Carta in certain key statements, such as by subordinating the monarch to the rule of law (clause 3); by maintaining that, No person shall be accused, arrested or imprisoned except in those cases established by the law; clause 7; and by ensuring that taxation could only be raised by common consent (clause 14). Marquis de La Fayette (1757-1834), the principal author of the Déclaration, collaborated with Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who had been influenced in turn by Magna Carta. Jefferson’s influence is clearly discernible in clause 1, which declares that Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.
Jacobins
The Jacobin Club (The Society of the Friends of the Constitution) was ounded in 1789 by anti-royalist deputies from Brittany but grew into a nationwide republican movement, with a membership estimated at a half million or more. The Jacobin Club was heterogeneous and included both prominent parliamentary factions of the early 1790s, The Mountain and the GirondinsIn May 1793 the leaders of the Mountain faction led by Maximilien Robespierre succeeded in sidelining the Girondin faction and controlled the government until July 1794. Their time in government featured high levels of political violence, and for this reason the period of the Jacobin/Mountain government is identified as the Reign of Terror.
In October 1793, 21 prominent Girondins were guillotined. The Mountain-dominated government executed 17,000 opponents nationwide, as a way to suppress the Vendée insurrection and the Federalist revolts and to deter recurrences. In July 1794 the National Convention pushed the administration of Robespierre and his allies out of power and had Robespierre and 21 associates executed. In November 1794 the Jacobin Club closed.
Thomas Malthus
Malthus was as an English cleric, scholar and influential economist in the fields of political economy and demography.n his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation’s food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level.
Malthus criticized the Poor Laws for leading to inflation rather than improving the well-being of the poor. He supported taxes on grain imports (the Corn Laws).
Robespierre and Danton
A divisive figure during his lifetime, Robespierre remains controversial to this day. To some, Robespierre was the Revolution’s principal ideologist and embodied the country’s first democratic experience, marked by the often revised and never implemented French Constitution of 1793. To others, he was the incarnation of the Terror itself. As a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for universal manhood suffrage and the abolition both of celibacy for the clergy, and slavery. Robespierre played an important part in the agitation which brought about the fall of the French monarchy on 10 August 1792 and the summoning of a National Convention. His goal was to create a one and indivisible France, equality before the law, to abolish prerogatives and to defend the principles of direct democracy. As one of the leading members of the Paris Commune, Robespierre was elected as a deputy to the French Convention in early September 1792 but was soon criticised for trying to establish either a´ dictatorship. Robespierre is best known for his role as a member of the Committee of Public Safety as he signed 542 arrests, especially in the spring and summer of 1794.
Georges Jacques Danton was a French lawyer and a leading figure in the French Revolution. He became a deputy to the Paris Commune (1789-1795)In August 1792 he became French Minister of Justice and was responsible for inciting the September Massacres. After the Insurrection of 31 May - 2 June 1793 he changed his mind on the use of force and lost his seat in the committee; Danton and Robespierre became rivals. In early October, 1793, he left politics but was urged to return to Paris to plead, as a moderate, for an end to the Terror. Danton’s continual criticism of the Committee of Public Safety provoked further counter-attacks. At the end of March 1794, Danton made a speech announcing the end of the Terror. Within a week he became embroiled in a scandal concerning the bankruptcy proceedings of the French East India Company and was guillotined by the advocates of revolutionary terror after accusations of conspiracy, venality and leniency toward the enemies of the Revolution.
Continental System
Continental System, in the Napoleonic wars, the blockade designed by Napoleon to paralyze Great Britain through the destruction of British commerce. The decrees of Berlin (1806) and Milan (1807) proclaimed a blockade: neutrals and French allies were not to trade with the British. The blockade caused little economic damage to the UK, although British exports to the continent dropped from 55% to 25% between 1802 and 1806. As Napoleon realized that extensive trade was going through Spain and Russia, he invaded those two countries. His forces were tied down in Spain—in which the Spanish War of Independence was occurring simultaneously—and suffered severely in, and ultimately retreated from, Russia in 1812. The loss of Britain as a trading partner also hit the economies of France and its allies. Angry governments gained an incentive to ignore the Continental System, which led to the weakening of Napoleon’s coalition
The Terror
The Reign of Terror, commonly called The Terror (French: la Terreur), was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervour, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety.
The Vendée
The War in the Vendée was a counter-revolution from 1793 to 1796 in the Vendée region of France during the French Revolution. the spring of 1793, peasants and farmers in the Vendée region of western France took up arms against the National Convention. Never much interested in the revolution, they were appalled by the revolutionary government’s treatment of both the king and the church. The Vendée uprising became the largest and best known counter-revolutionary movement of the French Revolution. It had some success but was eventually crushed by government troops in late 1793. What followed in the Vendée was a campaign of recriminations that bordered on genocide. Under the direction of représentants en mission from Paris, Republican forces began slaughtering Vendean royalists, irrespective of their age, gender or activities.
The National Convention, having already sanctioned the Reign of Terror, authorised the formation of 12 army divisions called the Colonnes Infernales (‘Infernal Columns’). Under the command of General Louis Marie Turreau, these columns swept through the Vendée in the first half of 1794. They crisscrossed the province, tearing down buildings, burning crops and leaving death and destruction in their wake.
The instruments of the Terror were then focussed on the Vendée, where more than 6,000 people – including 400 children – were executed. Some were guillotined but most were shot, stabbed, bayoneted or forcibly drowned. Farms, crops and forests were burned across the Vendée, affecting the innocent as well as the rebels.
Action against the potentially rebellious residents of the Vendée would continue as late as 1796.
The Coup of 18 Brumaire
The Coup of 18 Brumaire brought General Napoleon Bonaparte to power as First Consul of France and ended the French Revolution. This bloodless coup d’état overthrew the Directory, replacing it with the French Consulate. Lucien Bonaparte falsely persuaded the Councils that a Jacobin coup was at hand in Paris and induced them to depart for the safety. Three of the five Directors were pressured to resign on day one of the coup which prevented a quorum and thus practically abolished the five-man Directory. This occurred on 9 November 1799, which was 18 Brumaire, Year VIII under the short-lived French Republican calendar system.
The Consulate was established and the adoption of a constitution under which the First Consul, a position Bonaparte was to hold, had the most power in the French government. It was effectively the start of the Napoleonic Empire.
Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Franco-Swiss philosopher of Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism. Rousseau believed modern man’s enslavement to his own needs was responsible for all sorts of societal ills, from exploitation and domination of others to poor self-esteem and depression. Rousseau believed that good government must have the freedom of all its citizens as its most fundamental objective.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith: the Scottish economist laid basis is generally regarded as the father of modern economics. His opus magnum “Wealth of Nations” was a first description of the slowly emerging capitalist system and rejecting therefore the former predominant system mercantilism. At the core of his thesis lays the self-interest of every individual and that this tendency results in the wealth of nations. The freedom to produce and sell trades (across borders) would bring more prosperity than governmental regulations like tariffs imposed in mercantilism. Regulations are not necessary, because the market like an “invisible hand” directs and “governs” trade and economy.
