Why the old regime broke

Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774 inheriting a state that was rich but bankrupt: France's wealth could not be taxed, because the privileged orders were largely exempt and the parlements blocked reform.

• Finance: reforming ministers — Turgot (1774–76), Necker (1777–81), Calonne (1783–87) — each failed. Intervention in the American War of Independence (1778–83), funded by borrowing, made the debt unsustainable: by the late 1780s a very large share of revenue went on servicing debt.
• Political deadlock: Calonne's reform package was rejected by the Assembly of Notables (1787); the parlement of Paris insisted only the Estates-General could consent to new taxes. It was summoned for May 1789 — the first since 1614.
• Ideas: the Enlightenment did not cause the Revolution, but it supplied a vocabulary — sovereignty, the nation, citizenship — with which to name the crisis. Sieyès's pamphlet What is the Third Estate? (January 1789) is the sharpest example.
• Immediate crisis: the 1788 harvest failure pushed bread prices to their peak in July 1789. Political crisis and subsistence crisis coincided.

Causation, layered: long-term (fiscal structure, privilege), medium-term (war debt, failed reform), short-term (harvest, the voting dispute in the Estates-General). Do not choose one — rank them and justify the ranking.

The fiscal trap

From Estates-General to Declaration

Compress 1789 and you lose the marks. The sequence is the argument.

• 17 June 1789: the Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly. On 20 June comes the Tennis Court Oath — a vow not to disperse until France has a constitution. Sovereignty has changed hands, on paper.
• 14 July 1789: the storming of the Bastille — a Parisian crowd, fearing a royal military coup, arms itself. The king's ability to coerce Paris collapses.
• The Great Fear (July–August): rural panic and attacks on seigneurial records. In response the August Decrees (4–11 August 1789) abolish feudal privilege.
• 26 August 1789: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen — liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression; the nation as the source of sovereignty. It is both a founding document and an unexploded charge under everything the Revolution later did.
• October Days (5–6 October 1789): the market women march to Versailles and bring the royal family to Paris. The monarchy is now a hostage.

Why the monarchy could not be saved

The Revolution of 1789 was constitutional monarchist. Three developments destroyed that possibility.

• The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790) and the clerical oath (November 1790) split France in two. Condemned by Pope Pius VI in 1791, it turned a large part of Catholic France against the Revolution — and gave the counter-revolution a mass base.
• The Flight to Varennes (20–21 June 1791): the king's attempted escape destroyed the fiction that Louis accepted the Revolution. Republicanism became respectable overnight.
• War, declared on Austria in April 1792, was demanded by the Brissotins/Girondins and it changed everything. Military defeat produced the storming of the Tuileries (10 August 1792), the September Massacres, the abolition of the monarchy (22 September 1792), and the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793.

The single most examinable claim in 2H: war radicalised the Revolution. Foreign invasion, federalist revolt and the rising in the Vendée (March 1793) created the emergency in which the Terror became conceivable. Argue it — and then test whether ideology would have produced Terror anyway.

The oath that split France

Emergency, virtue and the guillotine

The machinery: the Committee of Public Safety (April 1793), the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Law of Suspects (September 1793), the levée en masse, and the Maximum on prices.

• Robespierre joined the Committee in July 1793. The Terror consumed first the Girondins, then the Hébertistes and Dantonists (March–April 1794) — it turned inward.
• The Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) stripped away defence counsel and left the Tribunal only acquittal or death: the Great Terror.
• 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794): the Convention turned on Robespierre; he was executed the next day. The Thermidorian reaction dismantled the Terror and, in the Constitution of Year III (1795), created the Directory — a republic of property-owners, defended by the army.

The central interpretative fight. Was the Terror a circumstantial response to civil war and invasion — the classic position of Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul — or was it latent in the ideology of 1789 itself, as François Furet argued in Interpreting the French Revolution (1978)? Simon Schama's Citizens (1989) went further: violence was not the Revolution's regrettable by-product but its motor. You must be able to argue all three.

Which phase of the Revolution?

Tap a development, then the phase it belongs to.

Napoleon: heir or gravedigger?

The Directory (1795–1799) survived by annulling elections and leaning on the army. It made a general's coup thinkable.

• Coup of Brumaire, 9–10 November 1799: Napoleon Bonaparte, with Sieyès, overthrew the Directory. The Constitution of Year VIII made him First Consul; a plebiscite ratified it.
• Consolidation: the Concordat (1801) healed the religious wound of 1790 on Napoleon's terms; the Code Napoléon (1804) entrenched civil equality, property rights and the abolition of feudalism — but also the legal subordination of women.
• Consul for Life (1802); Emperor of the French, December 1804. Meanwhile: censorship, the secret police under Fouché, the abolition of elective politics, a new nobility.

The Napoleon question, precisely put. He preserved 1789's social settlement (equality before the law, careers open to talent, the land transfer) while destroying 1789's political settlement (sovereignty of the people, representative government, free press). 'Heir or betrayer' is a false either/or — the strong answer says which parts he kept, and asks at what price.

What the Code entrenched

Why the Empire fell

Napoleon's Empire was built on victory — and could not survive its absence.

• The peak: Austerlitz (2 December 1805) destroyed the Third Coalition; Jena–Auerstedt (1806) broke Prussia; the Treaties of Tilsit (1807) made Russia an ally.
• The fatal choice: unable to beat British sea power after Trafalgar (21 October 1805), Napoleon turned to economic war — the Continental System (Berlin Decree, 1806). It hurt Britain, but it hurt his own satellites more and forced him into ever-wider conquest to enforce it.
• Spain (from 1808): the Peninsular War became an unwinnable insurgency, sustained by British intervention — the 'Spanish ulcer'.
• Russia (1812): the invasion destroyed the Grande Armée. Leipzig (October 1813) — the Battle of the Nations — ended German dominion. Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, returned for the Hundred Days, and was finally beaten at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

The examinable link: the Continental System, Spain and Russia are one causal chain, not three separate failures. Nationalism — awoken in Spain, Germany and Russia by French occupation — is the Revolution's own weapon turned against its heir.

Build the revolutionary spine

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

Marxist, revisionist, and the cultural turn

No historiography is more politically charged. Know the camps and their evidence.

How to score: when an extract sounds Furet-ish, do not just label it. Test it: the Terror's chronology tracks military crisis closely (it eases after Fleurus, June 1794) — which is a real problem for a purely ideological reading. That sentence is a Level 5 sentence.

Interpretation → historian

Tap an argument on the left, then the historian most associated with it.

Testing an extract on the Terror

The depth paper

AQA Component 2 is 80 marks, 2 hours 30 minutes, 40% of the A-level.

• Section A (30 marks): one compulsory question on three historical extracts — modern historians, not primary sources. You must evaluate the arguments: what is each claiming, on what evidence, and how convincing is it in the light of what you know?
• Sections B and C (25 marks each): two essays from three, each demanding a judgement.

The extract question is where 2H is won or lost. Do not summarise the three extracts and rank them by tone. For each: identify the argument, identify the criteria it uses, deploy your own precise knowledge for and against, then judge how convincing it is. Naming the school it belongs to — Marxist, revisionist, cultural — is the fast route to that.

The Directory's fatal weakness

The balance sheet of 1789–1815

A depth study demands a verdict. Here is the material for one.

• Irreversible: the abolition of feudalism and seigneurial dues; legal equality and careers open to talent; the transfer of land from Church and émigrés to peasants and bourgeois buyers; a centralised, professional administration; the metric system; and the idea of the nation as sovereign.
• Reversed: the republic, representative government, a free press, and — for a generation — any hope of constitutional liberty. The Bourbons returned in 1814–15.
• Exported by conquest: the Code, the abolition of feudal privilege, and — unintentionally — nationalism, which was the weapon that destroyed Napoleon in Spain, Germany and Russia.

The examiner's dream sentence: the Revolution's social settlement proved permanent while its political settlement collapsed — and Napoleon is the man who guaranteed the first by destroying the second. Everything in 2H can be hung on that frame.

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the whole of AQA 2H — and the historiographical quarrel that makes it an A-level topic rather than a story. Press Finish to see your score.