The French Revolution and the rise of XIX century social history

Abstract

From its shocking events, the French Revolution (1789) has brought an the awakening of the most diverse reactions and the most unimagined ways of interpreting them. During the early decades of the XIX century, the social problem, which flourished partly as a consequence of this "aurora of the world" determined a new way to contemplate this historical-universal event. Three top-ranking intellectual personalities. Lorenz von Stein Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, who came from three different poiitieal-social and academic worlds, faced evaluating the significance of the French Revolution from the light of the convulse events of their century Their peering looks not only emphasize the inerasabte prevalence of the events that derived from 89 to Napoleon, but also, discover a social horizon for history as a decisive mark. History stops being a history of events, data or dates, in the traditional sense of a chronicle, and even history is not contemplated any longer as a rational matter in illustrated tradition. The French Revolution, thanks to these three authors, overcomes its circumstantiality in time and it rises to the category of an immanent-sense structure. In other words von Stem. Marx and Tocqueville, contrasting with Leopold van Ranke, constructed a new sense for history, particularly from the unquestionable roots of the contemporary world.