Question

Evaluate the role of print in the French Revolution.

Hint:

Build the answer on three points, the spread of enlightenment ideas, the new culture of public debate, and the literature that mocked the monarchy. End by noting that print opened the possibility of thinking differently rather than dictating what to think.

Answer 1

Concept:

• The contribution of print is clearest if we ask what a French reader of the 1780s could do that a reader a century earlier could not.
• Three new abilities appeared, and each of them weakened the old order.

Step 1: A reader could now judge authority by reason.
Cheap printed books carried the arguments of the enlightenment thinkers, who attacked tradition, superstition and despotism and insisted that everything be tested by reason. The works of Voltaire and Rousseau reached a wide public.
Once custom alone stopped being a good enough answer, the claims of an absolute monarch became open to challenge.

Step 2: A reader could now argue in public.
Printed matter created a culture of dialogue and debate in which values, norms and institutions were re-examined openly. Coffee houses, salons and street corners became places where the same books were discussed.
An opinion that once stayed private could now become a shared opinion, and a shared opinion can act.

Step 3: A reader could now see the rulers mocked.
From the 1780s a flood of cheap literature, cartoons and caricatures ridiculed the morality of the royal family and showed the monarchy lost in pleasures while ordinary people suffered. It circulated underground, beyond the reach of censors.
Respect for the crown, once taken for granted, could not survive this.

Step 4: State the limit of the argument.
Print did not hand people a ready made revolution. Readers met many kinds of writing and accepted, rejected or reinterpreted what they read. What print gave them was the chance to think differently, and that chance was enough.

Final Answer: Print let ordinary people judge authority by reason, argue about it in public, and see their rulers ridiculed. None of this forced a revolution, but it created the climate in which one became possible.