The French Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789 brought the idea of political sovereignty down from kings and nobles to individual citizens and to the nation-state as a whole. The Declaration of the Rights of Man asserted that all citizens were equal, and it directly challenged the idea that some people deserved special privileges simply because of the family they were born into. This had very concrete effects: peasants who had been bound as serfs to feudal estates were freed from that bondage, and the many taxes they had owed to landlords and to the church were abolished. Citizens of the new republic were now, at least in principle, equal before the law, and the state was expected to respect a zone of private life -- the household -- into which its laws could not intrude. This is where our modern distinction between a 'public' sphere (increasingly including things like schooling) and a 'private' sphere (increasingly including religion and family life) begins to take shape. The nation-state itself was also redefined as a single sovereign entity with a centralised government, and the Revolution's own watchwords -- liberty, equality and fraternity -- became the ideals that modern states claimed to stand for. For sociology, the significance of this is that it made the individua …