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
Historiography of the French Revolution the 1789 revolution in a "long" history of 19th century revolutionary France. Another seminal figure in the revisionism debate is the Francophile Englishman Richard Cobb, who has produced a number of immensely detailed studies of both provincial and city life, avoiding the revisionism debate by "keeping his nose very close to the ground". "Les armées révolutionnaires" (1968, translated as "The People's Armies" in 1987) is his most famous work. William Doyle, professor at Bristol University, has published "The Origins of the French Revolution" (1988) and a revisionist history, "The Oxford History of the French Revolution" (2nd edition 2002). Another recent