Western Civilization II / Unit 7 WC2 0633 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Causes of the Revolution: Sorting Financial, Social, Intellectual, and Contingent
The idea
The exam asks which factor caused the Revolution and offers four kinds: the state's finances, the society of orders, Enlightenment ideas, and the accidents of seventeen eighty-eight and eighty-nine. The anchor's answer is that the first was immediate, the second structural, the third enabling, and the fourth the trigger, and a question is answered by asking which kind it names.
In practice
Five cases. Interest consuming sixty percent of revenue after a century of war: financial, the immediate cause. Nobles holding a third of the land and every senior post while paying few taxes: social, the structure that blocked repair. Readers who had learned from Locke that legitimacy rests on consent and from Beccaria that law must be the same for all: intellectual, the language the grievances used. Two bad harvests and bread prices doubling in the spring of the election: contingent, the trigger that put crowds in the streets. The American war, a victory with no economic return that emptied the treasury: financial again, the last straw.
Where people slip
The exam may ask what was not a cause, and the answer is usually an industrial one: France in seventeen eighty-nine had no factory proletariat, and unit 09 explains why. Keep the anchor's ranking, finances first, and keep the figures as the anchor's.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
- 0602A Century of War, Sixty Percent to Interest, and a Tax System That Could Not Reach the Wealth
- 0603Two Hundred Thousand Nobles and a Third of the Land
- 0604The American War: The Victory That Bankrupted France
- 0606The Election of 1789, the Cahiers, and the Price of Bread
- 0527Why the Enlightenment Was Disruptive Despite Its Elites
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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