Question:easy

Whose teaching inspired the French Revolution?

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Look for the writer of The Social Contract, whose line about man being born free became a slogan in France.
Updated On: Jul 17, 2026
  • Rousseau
  • Locke
  • Hegel
  • Wagner
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The Correct Option is A

Solution and Explanation

To answer this, place each thinker on a timeline and ask whether his ideas were available in France before 1789 and whether the revolutionaries actually used them. The French Revolution began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille.

  1. Rousseau: He published The Social Contract in 1762, well before the Revolution. His central claim is that legitimate power flows from the general will of the people, not from a king. French pamphleteers and later Jacobin leaders quoted him constantly, and his phrase about man being born free became a slogan of the age. He is the answer.
  2. Locke: An English writer of the previous century whose Two Treatises of Government defended life, liberty and property and the right to remove a government that breaks its trust. His work fed the English settlement of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776. He is a real Enlightenment influence but not the name the French Revolution is credited to.
  3. Hegel: Born in 1770, he was about nineteen when the Bastille fell. He wrote on the Revolution later as a philosopher of history, so the influence runs the other way, from the event to him.
  4. Wagner: A composer of operas in the 1800s. He has nothing to do with eighteenth century French politics and can be dropped at once.

Only Rousseau clears both tests. His work was in print decades before the Revolution and the revolutionaries treated it as their handbook. His attack on absolute monarchy and on inherited privilege matched exactly what the third estate wanted to end.

Let us summarize:

  • Rousseau's The Social Contract of 1762 gave the Revolution its idea of popular sovereignty.
  • Locke shaped England in 1688 and America in 1776, which makes him the near miss here.
  • Hegel and Wagner both come after the Revolution in time or in field.

The correct answer is option (A), Rousseau.

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