Skip to main content

How did Jean Jaques Rousseau help produce the French Revolution of 1789? Or, conversely, did the French Revolution proceed with little of his...

Rousseau (1712-1778) helped inspire the French Revolution. He had already died by the time the French Revolution broke out in 1789, but his ideas about freedom inspired the revolutionaries. Rousseau believed that people should choose their own government, and he was revered during the French Revolution. In fact, he was reburied in the Pantheon in 1794, and he was celebrated as a hero.


In particular, Rousseau's idea of the general will (though first formulated by others, such as Diderot and Montesquieu), inspired Jacobins to demand reforms that would create greater equality in France, such as land reform. Rousseau's idea of "general will" meant that a nation should be governed by the rule of law, not by the decisions of an arbitrary leader. Robespierre was also influenced by Rousseau's ideas, including Rousseau's focus on the government's power to promote the common good. The professed egalitarianism of the leaders during the French Revolution was inspired by Rousseau, who believed in religious equality, and this focus on egalitarianism was behind ideas such as Deism as the new religion of the country during the French Revolution.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more