Effects of the French Revolution in Britain and Europe

 why was French revolution impact on Britain and whole Europe? And how to French revolution impact on Britain and whole Europe?

The opening stages of the French Revolution had been generally welcomed in Britain. Her constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, her unique system of parliamentary monarchy and her early industrial development made her particularly sympathetic to the revolutionary idea.

The people in Britain got the impression shortly after the outbreak of the Revolution that France was trying to establish a parliamentary government on the lines of that in their own country and this they considered a flattering compliment to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Shey were glad that the old Regime in France was being ended. The Declaration of rights of Man appealed to the youth of Britain.

In Europe as a Whole

The rulers of the countries of Europe outside of France were neither shocked nor, at first, alarmed by the French Revolution; revolts were misfortunes to which states were liable, and they looked only for the effects of the Revolution on the balance of power. They saw in the weakness of the monarchy in France the impending dissolution of a hitherto powerful neighbour, and they consequently turned with greater sense of security to their mutual rivalries and their own national ambitions. But they were soon to be disillusioned. As far as the people in those countries were concerned, they were greatly impressed by the example of what the people of France had achieved in knocking down the pride and privileges of the  aristocracy which held them by the throat, and the lesson was not to be lost on future generation in those countries.

By and large, the following effects of the French Revolution were discernible in Europe as a whole. 

Feudalism was abolished in the sates of southern Germany along the Rhine, and in the kingdom of Naples, giving way to civic equality. Much time, however, had to pass before feudalism was abolished in other states also. But a big stride towards its abolition in Europe was certainly taken as a result of the French Revolution. Besides, many states of Europe after the fashion of France introduced religious toleration, thus ending religious in greater part of Europe. A better system of administration was in evidence in many states of Europe. As an eminent historian has aptly put it ''No country that had been touched by French influence became ever again quite what it had been before.

Though the political, economic and intellectual developments which made the emergence of nationalism possible were taking place in the past in different countries of Europe, the French Revolution considerably contributed to the  evolution of modern democracy In Europe by enunciating the principle and working out the implication of popular sovereignty.

Another factor must be emphasized that by virtue of the French Revolution proclaiming as it did an innate right of an individual to a more unfettered life and an equality of opportunity to enjoy it, he had come to the dawn of a new era. His horizon had become wider and he was socially, economically and spiritually a new being. The great upheaval had the natural and inevitable effect of accustoming the future was full of promise.

In short, what the Renaissance was to the 15th century and the Reformation to the sixteenth, the French Revolution was to the 18th. Like these two great earlier movements, it affected all the countries of Europe despite their different national developments.

Let us conclude by quoting A. Goodwin, ''In our time the French Revolution of 1789 has been overshadowed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its ideals were temporarily dimmed or distorted by the Fascist and Nazi revolutions. Critics inside France have spurned its emphasis upon the primary of the individual in relation to society and the State , while foreign observers have asked whether it was, after all, 'a mistake and whether the price which France had to pay for its conquest of liberty and equality was too great. Historians are more disposed to bring the Revolution of 1789 into focus by comparative studies of other revolution and by emphasizing that its essential contribution to the evolutions of modern democracy was that it enunciated the principle and worked out the French Revolution be regarded as the source of modern totalitarianism, for the Jacobin dictatorship and the 'revolutionary government' of 1793 were merely security and its essentially liberal ideas contributed.