"Vive la révolution!" Topic

"If the French Revolution of 1789 was such an important event, visitors to France's capital city of Paris often wonder, why can't they find any trace of the Bastille, the medieval fortress whose storming on 14 July 1789 was the revolution's most dramatic moment? Determined to destroy what they saw as a symbol of tyranny, the ‘victors of the Bastille' immediately began demolishing the structure. Even the column in the middle of the busy Place de la Bastille isn't connected to 1789: it commemorates those who died in another uprising a generation later, the ‘July Revolution' of 1830.

The legacy of the French Revolution is not found in physical monuments, but in the ideals of liberty, equality and justice that still inspire modern democracies. More ambitious than the American revolutionaries of 1776, the French in 1789 were not just fighting for their own national independence: they wanted to establish principles that would lay the basis for freedom for human beings everywhere. The United States Declaration of Independence briefly mentioned rights to ‘liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness', without explaining what they meant or how they were to be realised. The French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen' spelled out the rights that comprised liberty and equality and outlined a system of participatory government that would empower citizens to protect their own rights…"
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