Tentative answer: (for Nikhil)

1. It is 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 American revolution hinged on freeing the States from British colonialism and absolving any allegiance to the British Crown. Extinguishing the political relationship with the British would allow the Americans a Free and Independent nation, a power to levy war, establish commerce, and contract alliances. The primary objective was understood through Americans’ effort to overthrow a foreign entity. The French Revolution, however, emerged through disruptions within the national entity that was France. With a social structure hierarchically arranged along 3 estates, France’s greatest inequalities sliced across the French national identity. The Third Estate was represented primarily by peasantry - overly taxed, underrepresented in government, and yet the largest estate in the nation. With Abbe Sieyes’ efforts of “identifying the unprivileged Third Estate with the nation”, the revolution gained traction as an effort of the lower class to ascend productively in society and to end the privilege of the nobility’s sloth. Through the Third Estate’s appeal to man’s natural rights, private property, representative government, and constitutional monarchy, the French Revolution was obviously a political one, but in that it emerged within French society from the underprivileged class against the noblest, the French Revolution also exercised a social influence for centuries to follow. It provoked questions on class and equality within society, whereas the American revolution was defined by its political freedom of one society from another foreign one.