Roots of the Contemporary World: Ancien Régime Crisis, French Revolution, Napoleon and Industrialisation
What this domain tests
This block runs from the fiscal breakdown of the Ancien Régime to the consolidation of industrial capitalism. The paper can ask you to link a primary source - a decree, a declaration, a parliamentary speech - with the structural changes behind it. You must handle three processes separately and then connect them: the crisis of absolutism, the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the Industrial Revolution, treating the Spanish and Catalan cases (war of 1808–1814, Cadis, early textile mechanisation) as part of the same wave.
Core content
- Ancien Régime: estate society, seigneurial dues, absolute monarchy, mercantilism. Fiscal crisis after the American war and the 1788 harvest failure forced Louis XVI to convene the Estates General in May 1789.
- 1789 sequence: the Third Estate declares itself National Assembly (June), Tennis Court Oath, Bastille (14 July), abolition of feudal privileges (4 August), Declaration of the Rights of Man (26 August).
- Phases: constitutional monarchy (1791 Constitution, census suffrage) → republic and Terror (1792–94, Louis XVI executed January 1793, levée en masse) → Directory → Consulate and Empire (1799–1815), Civil Code 1804, Continental System, Russian campaign 1812, Waterloo 1815.
- Vienna 1815: dynastic legitimacy, balance of power, Holy Alliance - the order broken by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
- Industrial Revolution: Britain first (enclosures, coal, colonial capital, cotton, Watt's engine, railways from 1830); second phase from 1870 (steel, electricity, chemicals). Social result: industrial bourgeoisie, proletariat, urbanisation, trade unionism, the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Worked example
Question: explain how the crisis of the Ancien Régime in Spain led to the Cortes of Cadis. Reasoning chain to write: (1) Godoy's fiscal exactions and the 1808 Aranjuez mutiny show royal authority collapsing; (2) the French occupation and the Bayonne abdications create a power vacuum; (3) juntas fill it and the Regency convenes the Cortes in 1810; (4) hence 1812 - national sovereignty, indirect male suffrage, abolition of seigneurial jurisdiction. Every step needs a named fact; the marker rewards the link, not the list.
Traps
Calling the 1791 settlement a republic; claiming Cadis established freedom of religion (it confirmed a confessional Catholic state) or a republic; dating the Cortes to 1812 instead of their opening in 1810; confusing Mendizábal (1836) with Madoz (1855); saying industrialisation began in France; reading the Vienna settlement as national rather than dynastic.