The Destruction of the Bastile as 'The Destruction of the Bastille' and 'Monody on the Death of Chatterton' behind him". The Destruction of the Bastile The Destruction of the Bastile was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1789. The poem describes Coleridge's feelings of hopes for the French Revolution as a catalyst for political change. When the Bastille was overrun during the French Revolution and destroyed in July 1789, many political liberals within Britain celebrated. The schoolboy Coleridge, in particular, leaned towards radical views and would later become more and more radical although his views within "The Destruction of the Bastile" are more moderate. Although
Historiography of the French Revolution all its ideal promises – as when the legislators of 1793 made suffrage universal for all French men, but also established the dictatorship of the Terror. The dominating approach to the French Revolution in historical scholarship in the first half of the 20th century was the Marxist, or Classic, approach. This view sees the French Revolution as an essentially 'bourgeois' revolution, marked by class struggle and resulting in a victory of the bourgeoisie. Influenced by socialist politician Jean Jaurès and historian Albert Mathiez (who broke with his teacher Aulard regarding class conflict), historians on the left led by Georges Lefebvre