Quote:Don't you think the values of the people of the time played a role in the values of they created for the culture/society, though?
The constitution was not written by "the people." It was written by the elite who were largely deists and products of the Enlightenment.
France had been a catholic country for a millennium before the revolution yet somehow they came out with this:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp
Quote:Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
The church, then as now, was always about money.... and they came down on the side of the monarchists.
http://www.historytoday.com/gemma-betros...lic-church
Quote:The Church’s revenue in 1789 was estimated at an immense – and possibly exaggerated – 150 million livres. It owned around six per cent of land throughout France, and its abbeys, churches, monasteries and convents, as well as the schools, hospitals and other institutions it operated, formed a visible reminder of the Church’s dominance in French society. The Church was also permitted to collect the tithe, worth a nominal one-tenth of agricultural production, and was exempt from direct taxation on its earnings. This prosperity caused considerable discontent, best illustrated in the cahiers de doléances, or ‘statements of grievances’, sent from throughout the kingdom to be discussed at the meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789. Calls for the reform or abolition of the tithe and for the limitation of Church property were joined by complaints from parish priests who, excluded from the wealth bestowed upon the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy, often struggled to get by. When crowds began to gather in Paris on 13 July 1789, the religious house of Saint-Lazare and its neighbouring convent were among the first places searched for supplies and weapons. The Catholic Church may have been the church of the majority of the French people, but its wealth and perceived abuses meant that it did not always have their trust. - See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/gemma-betros...LCPlf.dpuf
