what are the political and constitutional changes in wake of French revolution
Answers
Between 1789 and 1793, popular uprisings and resistance to taxation played havoc with the nine departments into which the National Assembly divided Languedoc. Counterrevolutionaries organized a series of military assemblies between 1790 and the spring of 1793. These challenges to the constitutional order dominated local politics. Wealthy merchants, lawyers, and former nobles who embraced the constitution of 1791 represented stability and won the support of property owners in elections. Yet in 1793 and 1794, as the internal challenges to the constitutional order diminished, the social composition of local government changed, and many members of the upper classes faced proscription in the period known as the Terror.
In the 1970s and 1980s, historians determined that class analysis failed to account for this period. Richard Cobb saw that the Terror was the first instance of popular government in French history but maintained that it was the work of militant coteries, not a social movement. Certain individuals had the talent and temperament to seize power on the local level and impose their vision of a revolutionary order. François Furet argued that the collapse of royal authority undid the social moorings of politics and permitted militants of clubs and electoral assemblies to rally a political community around the ideology of equality and pure democracy. The underside of this ideology was the contention that its expected enemies, the privileged orders, plotted against the people. Revolutionaries used terror against imagined opponents. Lynn Hunt finds that a "new political class" of merchants, artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, and ex-priests rose to power in towns throughout France in 1793 and 1794. It shared the fears of people across the Atlantic world that political organizing outside of pubic assemblies harbored malevolent plots. The French absolute monarchy had deprived its subjects of practical experience in politics. When these subjects undertook an unprecedented project of transforming political language, rituals, and organizations, they therefore had a particularly difficult time tolerating the emergence of political organizations.[1]