In “Voltaire, Selections from the Philosophical Dictionary,” the philosophe calls for (in Enlightenment fashion) Europeans to leave the Chinese and the Indians in peace, due to the antiquity of their cultures.
Per Professor Popkin, the weakness of the French crown most responsible for precipitating the Revolution was its inability to balance its income and expenses.
The French peasantry:
Which of the following is true regarding the French tax system?
The extravagant lifestyle of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the court of Versailles was the single greatest consumer of the royal tax revenue.
The Catholic Church in Ancien Régime France:
“Privileges” in Ancien Régime France included not just those given by social grouping, but by towns, trades, and provinces.
France’s intervention on the side the American colonies in their war for independence led to a decisive French victory which increased the country’s territory and wealth, easing its economic and financial problems.
In France, those who prospered in trade could obtain noble status through the purchase of bureaucratic offices.
In The Social Contract, what did Jean-Jacques Rousseau argue about liberty?
According to Professor Donna Donald, France’s social structure became more unsettled in the eighteenth-century because the bourgeoisie were attaining political power as well as wealth.
What were the parlements?
According to Jeremy Popkin, “absolute monarchy” meant that the king’s powers inlcuded:
The Physiocrats were economic reformers who hoped to revive French prosperity through strict government controls on the economy.
The philosophes were thinkers who criticized the political, religious, and social institutions of Ancien Régime France.
In the selection, Rousseau, The Social Contract, what does he argue about the “general will?”
The philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau championed the right of the individual to oppose majority opinion.
The means of spreading Enlightenment ideas throughout France included:
While the upper bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with the nobility, ordinary shopkeepers and artisans lived like most pre-Revolutionary French urban workers, who had little prospect of advancement.
In his influential work, De l’esprit de lois (The Spirit of the Laws), Montesquieu said which of the following:
According to Professor Christopher Smith, how had the three Estates of medieval French society (the clergy, aristocracy, and the peasants) changed by the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries?
Reform measures by various French ministers before 1789 included all of the following EXCEPT:
The Enlightenment did little to foster in growth of “public opinion” in the years before the Revolution.
bourgeoisie
The reading “The Sentence against Damiens (1757)” describes the brutal punishment inflicted on the would-be assassin of Louis XV. What was the purpose behind such treatment?