What ideas were behind the French Revolution?
Who Holds the Steps?
What ideas were behind the French Revolution?
Picture France in the 1780s as a giant staircase. At the very top stood the king, draped in silk. On the steps below him sat nobles and church leaders. And way down at the bottom, holding up the whole staircase on their shoulders, stood almost everyone else. People started to ask a dangerous little question: "Who decided the steps go in that order?"
For a long time, kings claimed their power came straight from the heavens. A king was king because God said so — or so the story went. But a group of thinkers called the philosophes had a new, electric idea. Power, they argued, doesn't fall from the sky. It rises up from the people. Government is really just a deal: we agree to be governed, and in return the rulers must serve us.
