French Revolution Catholic clergy of the established church. Some historians hold something similar to what Thomas Jefferson proclaimed: that France had "been awakened by our [American] Revolution." Demands for change were formulated in terms of Enlightenment ideals and contributed to the convocation of the Estates General in May 1789. During the first year of the Revolution, members of the Third Estate (commoners) took control, the Bastille was attacked in July, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was passed in August, and a group of women marched on Versailles that forced the royal court back to Paris in
French Revolution and the English Gothic Novel of Caleb Williams a critic wrote, "Fancy is a faculty which we should not have expected to find in the brain of a philosopher who had struck his hand upon his heart and felt it stone; yet fancy Mr. Godwin possesses in no common degree." Godwin's use of the fantastic in the form of the gothic novel again let him write about the philosophy of the French revolution without receiving the harsh backlash, because it was under the guise of the fantastic. French Revolution and the English Gothic Novel The French Revolution influenced the English gothic novel. The gothic novel