1. Sometimes said that the French Revolution was a social revolution as well as a political one, while the American was only a political one. What would that mean?

1. Sometimes said that the French Revolution was a social revolution as well as a political one, while the American was only a political one. What would that mean?

The French Revolution has a distinct air of drastic social upheaval that the American Revolution lacks, as it constituted of a dissolution and reformation of the entire French ancien régime social order as opposed to a change in government and national status.  The French Revolution was an uprising against the domestic nobility, while the American Revolution was merely the ousting of a foreign noble power, a process that did not lead to a major reconstitution of America’s class structure or social fabric.  In “What Is the Third Estate,” Abbé Sieyés outlined the importance of the third estate in France’s political and social structures, areas that it had previously been excluded from, perhaps due to the remnants of feudal ideology that remained in French society until the post-revolutionary era.  The uprising of the third estate and its resistance to “the state of constraint and humiliation in which it [was] held” (Sieyés H-5) made the French Revolution a distinctly social uprising, as revolutionaries were not just fighting for the dissolution of the monarchy, but also for the third estate to “get back its nobility” (H-5).  In contrast, the American Revolution, although it did wrest control of the American colonies from the hands of the British monarchy, did not lead to such radical changes in the American social order.  Both revolutions were based on similar ideologies, as seen in the overlapping rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence (“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (1)) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (“men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights...these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression” (1)).  Despite similarities in the language of fundamental revolutionary documents, however, the American Revolution lacks the element of a working-class uprising—the wealthy British loyalists and officials who dominated pre-revolutionary American society were simply replaced with a new class of wealthy Americans, while, despite the emergence of the Napoleonic era, the volatility of French revolutionary society allowed for a brief ascension of the proletariat not present in America.