Lot-et-Garonne
Lot-et-Garonne is a department in the southwest of France named after the Lot and Garonne rivers. Lot-et-Garonne is one of the original eighty-three departments created on March 4, 1790, as a result of the French Revolution, it was created from part of the province of Gascony. Several of the original southeastern cantons in the arrondissements of Agen and Villeneuve-sur-Lot were separated from it in 1808 to become a part of the newly created department of Tarn-et-Garonne. Lot-et-Garonne is part of the current region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine and is surrounded by the departments of Lot, Tarn-et-Garonne, Landes and Dordogne; the north of the department is composed of limestone hills. Between Lot and Garonne, there is a plateau carved by many valleys. In the west of the department, the Landes forest is planted in sand. It's composed of maritime pines. Between the forest and Agen, there is the Albret, a hilly country. Food-processing and pharmaceuticals are all major industries of the department; the inhabitants of the department are called Lot-et-Garonnais.
Cantons of the Lot-et-Garonne department Communes of the Lot-et-Garonne department Arrondissements of the Lot-et-Garonne department Roman Catholic Diocese of Agen Prefecture website General Council website Lot-et-Garonne at Curlie Chamber of Commerce and Industry website
La République En Marche!
La République En Marche!, sometimes called En Marche!, is a centrist and social-liberal political party in France. It was founded on 6 April 2016 by Emmanuel Macron, a former Minister of Economy and Digital Affairs, elected President of the French Republic in the 2017 election with 66.1% of the second-round vote. Macron considers La République En Marche! to be a progressive movement, uniting both the left and the right. The party ran candidates in the 2017 legislative elections including dissidents from the Socialist Party, The Republicans, as well as minor parties, it won an absolute majority in the National Assembly. Its ally, the Democratic Movement, secured 42. La République En Marche! is a pro-European movement that accepts globalization and wants to modernize and moralize French politics. The movement accepts members from other parties at a higher rate than other political parties in France and does not impose any fees on members who want to join; the party is seen as the most pro-European party in France, but it is not part of any European parliamentary group.
La Gauche Libre, the think tank for the movement, was declared as an organization on 1 March 2015. Afterwards, lesjeunesavecmacron.fr was registered as a domain on 23 June 2015. Two Facebook pages were created and an extra domain registered. Another organization was created by Macron, declared as L'Association pour le renouvellement de la vie politique and registered as a micro-party in January 2016; this was following en-marche.fr being claimed as a domain. L'Association pour le renouvellement de la vie politique was registered as EMA EN MARCHE in March. En Marche! was founded on 6 April 2016 in Amiens by Emmanuel Macron aged 38, with the help of political advisor Ismaël Emelien. The initials of the name of the party are the same as the initials of Macron's name; the announcement of En Marche! was the first indication by Macron that he was planning to run for President, with Macron using En Marche! to fundraise for the potential presidential run. The launch of the party was covered throughout the media and media coverage continued to peak as tensions rose among Macron and other government ministers as his loyalty was questioned.
In the weeks following the creation of En Marche!, Macron soared in the opinion polls to be seen as the main competitor on the left. The creation of En Marche! was welcomed by several political figures including Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Pierre Gattaz, though it was criticised by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Christian Estrosi. In an attempt to create the party's first platform that it would launch into a campaign with and head of operations Ludovic Chaker recruited 4,000 volunteers to conduct door-to-door surveys to 100,000 people and they would use the information gained to create a programme closer to the French electorate. Only a quarter of the 100,000 surveys handed out were completed. La République En Marche! Ran candidates in most constituencies. At least half its candidates came from civil society, the other half having held political office and half were women. No double investitures were permitted, though Macron waived the original requirement of prospective candidates to leave their previous political party on 5 May 2017.
In addition to those parameters, Macron specified in his initial press conference on 19 January that he would require that candidates demonstrate probity, political plurality and efficacy. Those wishing to seek the endorsement of République En Marche! had to sign up online and the movement received nearly 15,000 applications. When dealing with nominations sought by those in the political world, the party considered the popularity and media skills of applicants, with the most difficult cases adjudicated by Macron himself. To present themselves under the label of La République En Marche!, outgoing deputies had to leave the Socialist Party or The Republicans. Macron said the legislative candidates would have to leave the PS before they could join République En Marche! in the election. However La République En Marche! Spokesperson Christophe Castaner said they could stay in the PS as long as they supported Macron. Moreover, spokesperson Jean-Paul Delevoye said the members of civil society could be mayors or members of regional councils and departmental councils.
After François Bayrou endorsed Macron in February, the Democratic Movement, which he leads, reserved 90 constituencies for MoDem candidates, of which 50 were considered winnable. On 15 May 2017, the secretary general of the presidency announced the appointment of Édouard Philippe, a member of LR, as Prime Minister. By winning an absolute majority in the National Assembly in the second round of the elections on 18 June 2017, La République En Marche! became France's party of power in support of the President. In the September 2017 senate elections, La République En Marche! lost seats, ending up with 21, seven fewer than before. While hoping to double its representatives in the senate, party officials have noted that due to the elections electoral system of indirect universal suffrage, where deputies and regional councilors elect senators, the party had a disadvantage due to being new. In the same month, the first party congress was announced to be held in Lyon; the first gathering of party adherents and representatives
Tarn-et-Garonne
Tarn-et-Garonne is a department in the southwest of France. It is traversed from which it takes its name; this area was part of the former provinces of Quercy and Languedoc. The department was created in 1808 by Napoléon Bonaparte, with territory being taken from the departments of Lot, Haute-Garonne, Lot-et-Garonne and Aveyron; the department is rural with fertile agricultural land in the broad river valley, but there are hilly areas to the south and north. The departmental prefecture is Montauban, some of the other large communes include Castelsarrasin, Molières, Valence-d'Agen and the medieval town of Lauzerte. Quercy was part of Aquitania prima under the Romans, Christianity was introduced during the 4th century. Early in the 6th century the area fell under the authority of the Franks, in the 7th century became part of the autonomous Duchy of Aquitaine. At the end of the 10th century its rulers were the powerful counts of Toulouse. During the hostilities between England and France in the reign of Henry II of England, the English placed garrisons in the county, by the 1259 Treaty of Paris lower Quercy came under the control of England.
The kings of both England and France around this time tried to curry favour by adding to the privileges of the towns and the district. In 1360, the Treaty of Brétigny was signed and the whole of Quercy passed to England. However, in the 1440s the English were expelled by the newly created army of Charles VII of France. In the 16th century Quercy was a stronghold of the Protestants, the scene of fierce religious conflicts; the civil wars of the reign of Louis XIII took place around Montauban. After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the monarchy was re-established in France, but the discredited Bourbon Dynasty was overthrown in the July Revolution of 1830, which established the constitutional July Monarchy, which lasted until 1848. During this time the divide between the rich and poor increased. Before the department's formation in the nineteenth century, the northern half formed part of the old province of Quercy and the southern half, part of Languedoc; the department was created on 4 November 1808 during the First French Empire by a decision of Napoleon.
The emperor had been invited to visit the town of Montauban, an important industrial and commercial centre at the time, whose populace thought the town was central enough and sufficiently important to be the capital of a new department. He was granted their request; the department was formed out of territories, part of neighbouring areas. More than half of the territory was taken from the Department of Lot, over one-third was taken from Haute-Garonne, the rest from the departments of Lot-et-Garonne and Aveyron; the first Prefect was Félix Le Peletier d'Aunay, installed in his post on 31 December 1808. Tarn-et-Garonne constitutes part of the Occitanie region in southern France, it borders on the departments of Lot to the north, Aveyron to the northeast, Tarn to the east, Haute-Garonne to the south, Gers and Lot-et-Garonne to the west. The capital of the department is Montauban. Montauban is situated on the right bank of the river Tarn at its confluence with the river Tescou, the Tarn is joined by the Aveyron about 10 km further downstream.
The second largest commune in the department is Castelsarrasin which stands near the confluence of the Tarn and River Garonne. Montauban is connected to the Garonne via the 11 km Canal de Montech; the central part of the department is a broad river valley that does not exceed 150 m in altitude, but near the commune of Valence-d'Agen, in the extreme west of the department, the valley narrows as the hilly regions of Bas-Quercy to the north and Lomagne to the south draw closer together. In the northeast of the department is higher land in the form of limestone plateaus known as the Causses, part of the Massif Central; the highest point in the department, at 510 m, is the Pech Maurel, situated in the commune of Castanet. The economy of the department depends on agriculture but there is some industry, it benefits from its proximity to Toulouse; the commercial importance of Montauban is due to its trade in agricultural products, horses and poultry, but it does have some manufacturing industries, which include cloth-weaving, cloth-dressing, flour-milling, wood-sawing, the manufacture of furniture, silk-gauze and straw hats.
The surrounding countryside supports nursery-gardening, wine-making and the growing of maize and mulberries. This area is at the northern limit for the commercial production of the latter two crops because of the vagaries of the climate. Cantons of the Tarn-et-Garonne department Communes of the Tarn-et-Garonne department Arrondissements of the Tarn-et-Garonne department Prefecture of Tarn-et-Garonne website General council of Tarn-et-Garonne website Arkheia History Review of Tarn-et-Garonne website
Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion was a French scholar and orientalist, known as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in 1806, as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, spoke Coptic and Arabic fluently. During the early 19th-century, French culture experienced a period of'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there which brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone. Scholars debated the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, the degree to which the signs were phonetic or ideographic. Many thought that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, did not record historical information; the significance of Champollion's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong, made it possible to begin to retrieve many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.
Champollion lived in a period of political turmoil in France which continuously threatened to disrupt his research in various ways. During the Napoleonic Wars, he was able to avoid conscription, but his Napoleonic allegiances meant that he was considered suspect by the subsequent Royalist regime, his own actions, sometimes brash and reckless, did not help his case. His relations with important political and scientific figures of the time, such as Joseph Fourier and Silvestre de Sacy helped him, although in some periods he lived exiled from the scientific community. In 1820, Champollion embarked in earnest on the project of decipherment of hieroglyphic script, soon overshadowing the achievements of British polymath Thomas Young who had made the first advances in decipherment before 1819. In 1822, Champollion published his first breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs – the first such script discovered.
In 1824, he published a Précis in which he detailed a decipherment of the hieroglyphic script demonstrating the values of its phonetic and ideographic signs. In 1829, he traveled to Egypt where he was able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied, brought home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions. Home again he was given a professorship in Egyptology, but only lectured a few times before his health, ruined by the hardships of the Egyptian journey, forced him to give up teaching, he died in Paris in 1832, 41 years old. His grammar of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously. During his life as well as long after his death intense discussions over the merits of his decipherment were carried out among Egyptologists; some faulted him for not having given sufficient credit to the early discoveries of Young, accusing him of plagiarism, others long disputed the accuracy of his decipherments. But subsequent findings and confirmations of his readings by scholars building on his results led to general acceptance of his work.
Although some still argue that he should have acknowledged the contributions of Young, his decipherment is now universally accepted, has been the basis for all further developments in the field. He is regarded as the "Founder and Father of Egyptology". Jean-François Champollion was born the last of seven children, he was raised in humble circumstances. His father was a notorious drunk, his mother, Jeanne-Françoise Gualieu, seems to have been an absent figure in the life of young Champollion, raised by his older brother Jacques-Joseph. One biographer, Andrew Robinson speculated that Champollion was not in fact the son of Jacques Champollion's wife but the result of an extramarital affair. Towards the end of March 1801, Jean-François left Figeac for Grenoble, which he reached on the 27th of March, where Jacques-Joseph lived in a two-room flat on the rue Neuve. Jacques-Joseph was working as an assistant in the import-export company Chatel and Rif, yet taught his brother to read, supported his education.
His brother may have been part of the source of Champollion's interest in Egypt, since as a young man he wanted to join Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, regretted not being able to go. Known as the younger brother of better known Jacques-Joseph, Jean-François was called Champollion le Jeune; when his brother became the more famous of the two, Jacques added the town of his birth as a second surname and hence is referred to as Champollion-Figeac, in contrast to his brother Champollion. Although studious and self-educated, Jacques did not have Jean-François' genius for language. Given the difficulty of the task of educating his brother while earning a living, Jacques-Joseph decided to send his younger brother to the well-regarded school of the Abbé Dussert in November 1802, where Champollion would stay until the summer of 1804. During this period, his gift for languages first became evident: he started out learning Latin and Greek, but progressed to Hebrew and other Semitic languages such as Ethiopic, Arabic and Chaldean.
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Dordogne
Dordogne is a department in Southwestern France, with its prefecture in Périgueux. The department is located in the region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine between the Loire Valley and the Pyrenees and is named after the river Dordogne that runs through it, it corresponds with the ancient county of Périgord. It had a population of 416,909 in 2013; the county of Périgord dates back to. It was home to four tribes; the name for "four tribes" in the Gaulish language was "Petrocore". The area became known as the county of Le Périgord and its inhabitants became known as the Périgordins. There are four Périgords in the Dordogne; the "Périgord Vert", with its main town of Nontron, consists of verdant valleys in a region crossed by many rivers and streams. The "Périgord Blanc", situated around the department's capital of Périgueux, is a region of limestone plateaux, wide valleys, meadows; the "Périgord Pourpre" with its capital of Bergerac, is a wine region. The "Périgord Noir" surrounding the administrative center of Sarlat, overlooks the valleys of the Vézère and the Dordogne, where the woods of oak and pine give it its name.
The Petrocores took part in the resistance against Rome. Concentrated in a few major sites are the vestiges of the Gallo-Roman period-–the gigantic ruined tower and arenas in Périgueux, the Périgord museum's archaeological collections, villa remains in Montcaret, the Roman tower of La Rigale Castle in Villetoureix; the earliest cluzeaux can be found throughout the Dordogne. These subterranean refuges and lookout huts were large enough to shelter entire local populations. According to Julius Caesar, the Gauls took refuge in these caves during the resistance. After Guienne province was transferred to the English Crown under the Plantagenets following the remarriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, Périgord passed by right to English suzerainty. Being situated at the boundaries of influence of the monarchies of France and England, it oscillated between the two dynasties for more than three hundred years of struggle until the end of the Hundred Years' War in 1453; the county had been torn apart and, as a consequence, that modeled its physiognomy.
During the calmer periods of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Castillon plain on the banks of the Dordogne saw a development in urban architecture. The finest Gothic and Renaissance residences were built in Périgueux and Sarlat. In the countryside, the nobility erected the majority of the more than 1200 chateaux and country houses. In the second half of the 16th century, the terrors of war again visited the area, as the attacks and fires of the Wars of Religion reached a rare degree of violence in Périgord. At the time, Bergerac was one of the most powerful Huguenot strongholds, along with La Rochelle. Following these wars, Périgord, fief of Henry of Navarre, was to return to the Crown for good and would continue to suffer from the sudden political changes of the French nation, from the Revolution to the tragic hours of the Resistance. We encounter the memory of the region's most important literary figures: Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, Michel de Montaigne, Étienne de La Boétie, Brantôme, Maine de Biran, Eugene Le Roy, André Maurois.
A number of ruins have retained the memory of the tragedies. Several of the castles and châteaux are open to visitors. In addition to its castles, churches and cave fortresses, the Périgord region has preserved since centuries past a number of villages that still have their market halls, bories, churches and castles. Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère, Saint-Jean-de-Côle, La Roque-Gageac, many others contain important and visually interesting architectural examples; the old quarters of Périgueux or Bergerac have been developed into pedestrian areas. A number of small towns, such as Brantôme, Issigeac and Mareuil, have withstood the changes of modern times. A special mention should be made in this respect to its Black Périgord area. Dordogne is one of the original 83 departments created on 4 March 1790 during the French Revolution, it was created from the former province of the county of Périgord. Its borders continued to change over subsequent decades. In 1793 the communes of Boisseuilh, Coubjours, Génis, Saint-Cyr-les-Champagnes, Saint-Mesmin, Savignac, Saint-Trié and Teillots were transferred from Corrèze to Dordogne.
In 1794 Dordogne ceded Cavarc to Lot-et-Garonne. In 1794, Dordogne gained Parcoul from Charente-Inférieure. Following the restoration, in 1819, the commune of Bonrepos was suppressed and merged with the adjacent commune of Souillac in Lot. In 1870, shortly after France fought against Prussia in a war that the enemy was winning, a young aristocrat called Alain de Monéys was savagely tortured and burned by a crowd of between 300 and 800 people for two hours on 16 August in a public square in the village of Hautefaye in the north-west of the department. Details of the incident remain unclear: the leading participants appear to have been drunk, before the introduction of mass education most of the witnesses would have been unable to write down
Estuary
An estuary is a enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, with a free connection to the open sea. Estuaries form a transition zone between river environments and maritime environments, they are subject both to marine influences—such as tides and the influx of saline water—and to riverine influences—such as flows of fresh water and sediment. The mixing of sea water and fresh water provide high levels of nutrients both in the water column and in sediment, making estuaries among the most productive natural habitats in the world. Most existing estuaries formed during the Holocene epoch with the flooding of river-eroded or glacially scoured valleys when the sea level began to rise about 10,000–12,000 years ago. Estuaries are classified according to their geomorphological features or to water-circulation patterns, they can have many different names, such as bays, lagoons, inlets, or sounds, although some of these water bodies do not meet the above definition of an estuary and may be saline.
The banks of many estuaries are amongst the most populated areas of the world, with about 60% of the world's population living along estuaries and the coast. As a result, many estuaries suffer degradation from a variety of factors including: sedimentation from soil erosion from deforestation and other poor farming practices; the word "estuary" is derived from the Latin word aestuarium meaning tidal inlet of the sea, which in itself is derived from the term aestus, meaning tide. There have been many definitions proposed to describe an estuary; the most accepted definition is: "a semi-enclosed coastal body of water, which has a free connection with the open sea, within which sea water is measurably diluted with freshwater derived from land drainage". However, this definition excludes a number of coastal water bodies such as coastal lagoons and brackish seas. A more comprehensive definition of an estuary is "a semi-enclosed body of water connected to the sea as far as the tidal limit or the salt intrusion limit and receiving freshwater runoff.
This broad definition includes fjords, river mouths, tidal creeks. An estuary is a dynamic ecosystem having a connection to the open sea through which the sea water enters with the rhythm of the tides; the sea water entering the estuary streams. The pattern of dilution varies between different estuaries and depends on the volume of fresh water, the tidal range, the extent of evaporation of the water in the estuary. Drowned river valleys are known as coastal plain estuaries. In places where the sea level is rising relative to the land, sea water progressively penetrates into river valleys and the topography of the estuary remains similar to that of a river valley; this is the most common type of estuary in temperate climates. Well-studied estuaries include the Severn Estuary in the United Kingdom and the Ems Dollard along the Dutch-German border; the width-to-depth ratio of these estuaries is large, appearing wedge-shaped in the inner part and broadening and deepening seaward. Water depths exceed 30 m.
Examples of this type of estuary in the U. S. are the Hudson River, Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay along the Mid-Atlantic coast, Galveston Bay and Tampa Bay along the Gulf Coast. Bar-built estuaries are found in place where the deposition of sediment has kept pace with rising sea level so that the estuaries are shallow and separated from the sea by sand spits or barrier islands, they are common in tropical and subtropical locations. These estuaries are semi-isolated from ocean waters by barrier beaches. Formation of barrier beaches encloses the estuary, with only narrow inlets allowing contact with the ocean waters. Bar-built estuaries develop on sloping plains located along tectonically stable edges of continents and marginal sea coasts, they are extensive along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the U. S. in areas with active coastal deposition of sediments and where tidal ranges are less than 4 m. The barrier beaches that enclose bar-built estuaries have been developed in several ways: building up of offshore bars by wave action, in which sand from the sea floor is deposited in elongated bars parallel to the shoreline, reworking of sediment discharge from rivers by wave and wind action into beaches, overwash flats, dunes, engulfment of mainland beach ridges due to sea level rise and resulting in the breaching of the ridges and flooding of the coastal lowlands, forming shallow lagoons, elongation of barrier spits from the erosion of headlands due to the action of longshore currents, with the spits growing in the direction of the littoral drift.
Barrier beaches form in shallow water and are parallel to the shoreline, resulting in long, narrow estuaries. The average water depth is less than 5 m, exceeds 10 m. Examples of bar-built estuaries are Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. Fjords were formed where pleistocene glaciers deepened and widened existing river valleys so that they become U-shaped in cross s
French Revolution
The French Revolution was a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France and its colonies beginning in 1789. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy, established a republic, catalyzed violent periods of political turmoil, culminated in a dictatorship under Napoleon who brought many of its principles to areas he conquered in Western Europe and beyond. Inspired by liberal and radical ideas, the Revolution profoundly altered the course of modern history, triggering the global decline of absolute monarchies while replacing them with republics and liberal democracies. Through the Revolutionary Wars, it unleashed a wave of global conflicts that extended from the Caribbean to the Middle East. Historians regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history; the causes of the French Revolution are still debated among historians. Following the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution, the French government was in debt, it attempted to restore its financial status through unpopular taxation schemes, which were regressive.
Leading up to the Revolution, years of bad harvests worsened by deregulation of the grain industry and environmental problems inflamed popular resentment of the privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy and the Catholic clergy of the established church. Some historians hold something similar to what Thomas Jefferson proclaimed: that France had "been awakened by our 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 took control, the Bastille was attacked in July, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was passed in August, the Women's March on Versailles forced the royal court back to Paris in October. A central event of the first stage, in August 1789, was the abolition of feudalism and the old rules and privileges left over from the Ancien Régime; the next few years featured political struggles between various liberal assemblies and right-wing supporters of the monarchy intent on thwarting major reforms.
The Republic was proclaimed in September 1792 after the French victory at Valmy. In a momentous event that led to international condemnation, Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. External threats shaped the course of the Revolution; the Revolutionary Wars beginning in 1792 featured French victories that facilitated the conquest of the Italian Peninsula, the Low Countries and most territories west of the Rhine – achievements that had eluded previous French governments for centuries. Internally, popular agitation radicalised the Revolution culminating in the rise of Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins; the dictatorship imposed by the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror, from 1793 until 1794, established price controls on food and other items, abolished slavery in French colonies abroad, de-established the Catholic church and created a secular Republican calendar, religious leaders were expelled, the borders of the new republic were secured from its enemies. After the Thermidorian Reaction, an executive council known as the Directory assumed control of the French state in 1795.
They suspended elections, repudiated debts, persecuted the Catholic clergy, made significant military conquests abroad. Dogged by charges of corruption, the Directory collapsed in a coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. Napoleon, who became the hero of the Revolution through his popular military campaigns, established the Consulate and the First Empire, setting the stage for a wider array of global conflicts in the Napoleonic Wars; the modern era has unfolded in the shadow of the French Revolution. All future revolutionary movements looked back to the Revolution as their predecessor, its central phrases and cultural symbols, such as La Marseillaise and Liberté, fraternité, égalité, ou la mort, became the clarion call for other major upheavals in modern history, including the Russian Revolution over a century later. The values and institutions of the Revolution dominate French politics to this day; the Revolution resulted in the suppression of the feudal system, emancipation of the individual, a greater division of landed property, abolition of the privileges of noble birth, nominal establishment of equality among men.
The French Revolution differed from other revolutions in being not only national, for it intended to benefit all humanity. Globally, the Revolution accelerated the rise of democracies, it became the focal point for the development of most modern political ideologies, leading to the spread of liberalism, radicalism and secularism, among many others. The Revolution witnessed the birth of total war by organising the resources of France and the lives of its citizens towards the objective of military conquest; some of its central documents, such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, continued to inspire movements for abolitionism and universal suffrage in the next century. Historians have pointed to many events and factors within the Ancien Régime that led to the Revolution. Rising social and economic inequality, new political ideas emerging from the Enlightenment, economic mismanagement, environmental factors leading to agricultural failure, unmanageable national debt, political mismanagement on the part of King Louis XVI have all been cited as laying the groundwork for the Revolution.
Over the course of the 18th century, there emerged what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the idea of the "public sphere" in France and elsewhere
