478 Ch. 12 • The French Revolution
Moreover, the Revolution did not expedite capitalism but may even have
retarded it, by launching France and Europe into a long series of costly wars.
Views critical of the “bourgeois revolution” thesis have also emphasized
that within France the complex nature of local political power, divided
among provincial Estates and parlements, and among various groups enjoy
ing formal privileges or monopolies and municipalities, limited the actual
prerogatives of absolute monarchy. Many historians now see the Revolution
as affirming the victory of men of property—a rubric that included both
nobles and bourgeois—over titled nobles born into status and power.
A related interpretation has seen the Revolution as part of an essentially
democratic “Atlantic Revolution” stretching across the Atlantic Ocean. By
this view, the American War of Independence was the first manifestation
of an essentially political quest for popular sovereignty. It influenced, in
turn, the French Revolution and subsequent attempts in other European
countries to gain political rights, as well as movements for independence in
Spain’s Latin American colonies early in the nineteenth century.
More recently, another revisionist school has argued that a new political
culture was already in place in the last decades of the Old Regime. An
extreme version of this interpretation sees the French monarchy as a state
well on the way to reforming itself through the collaboration of liberal
nobles before the Revolution interrupted this process. One view sees in the
1750s and 1760s the origins of this new, revolutionary political culture,
seen in the political and ideological opposition to Louis XV and particu
larly in the rhetorical violence of the Revolution’s first year.
None of these varying interpretations, however, diminishes the signifi
cance of the French Revolution in transforming the Western world by pro
viding its first modern European democratic experience. This is why its
origins and nature continue to generate excitement and debate today, well
more than 200 years after the fall of the Bastille.