To browse Academia. The research focuses on the evolution of nonviolent protest methods during the French Revolution, highlighting the significance of political demonstrations as a critical mode of collaboration between citizens and political elites. It emphasizes that these demonstrations were key to establishing participatory democracy in France, as they mobilized common citizens to voice their demands through organized, peaceful actions rather than through violent confrontations.
The study aims to shed light on the overlooked aspect of nonviolent protest within the context of the broader revolutionary movement. Based upon a wide reading of Parisian newspapers, pamphlets, correspondence and other contemporary sources, this article highlights conciliatory aspects of Revolutionary protest and posits the existence of more peaceful alternatives to physical violence.
Set in a wider context, where the overwhelming majority of Parisian street protests during the Revolution did not resort to physical violence, full-scale insurrection appears to have been only a secondary strategy, often adopted reluctantly.
Perhaps the least self-evident right of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was that of " resistance to oppression. Following the Bastille's fall and the contestations of the early to mid-Revolution, resistance to oppression would come to suggest a general right to protest against measures violating human rights. Indeed, the revised Declaration of Rights enshrined insurrection as " the most sacred of duties " le plus saint des devoirs.
Based upon a broad reading of debates in the National Assemblies and printed public sphere, this article examines how revolutionaries attempted to grapple with both the possibilities and limitations of protest as they attempted to construct a democratic regime. Without crowds of lower-class people, there would have been no fall of the Bastille, no overthrow of the monarchy, no arrest of the Girondins, no spectacle of the guillotine.
