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The French Revolution and the Revolutionary War

  • Korean Review of French History
  • Abbr : KRFH
  • 2014, (30), pp.91~118
  • Publisher : KOREAN SOCIETY FOR FRENCH HISTORY
  • Research Area : Humanities > History

Park Youn Duk 1

1충남대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Revolution and war seems to go hand in hand. Modern-days revolutions usually start with the levy of heavy taxes to finance wars, and breaks out when the unsolvable tensions plaguing the existing system are turned into armed conflicts. Well aware of these facts, the Revolutionary France attempted to maintained its newly established system by abandoning conquest wars, and the revolutionary ideas of popular sovereignty as well as self-determination enabled France to protect the Revolution from the Counter-Revolutionary powers. Then, why did revolutionary wars break out? The revolutionary ideas were not necessarily the root cause of the wars between France and its neighboring countries. Europe have had the experience of different states systems―including, England’s constitutional monarchy, France’s absolute monarchy, and Switzerland’s Republic―coexisting on its land. The cause of the Revolutionary Wars is to be found in the fact that France, now equipped with its revolutionary ideas, was reemerging as a fully efficient and competitive country that would rival other European countries. Operating under the traditional mechanisms of balance of power and the fight for the hegemony of their own political system, France went into war with other European countries who saw France as a reviving threat.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.