The French Revolution: A Rupture with Medieval Religiopolitical Ideology

Abstract

This work examines the French Revolution as fundamentally a rupture with the entrenched religiopolitical ideology of the Ancien Régime — a system rooted in Catholic Trinitarian theology, divine-right monarchy, and rigid social hierarchy. The paper traces how centuries of internal tensions within French society, including widespread economic exploitation by the Church and nobility, intersecting with the intellectual currents of the French Enlightenment, eroded the theological foundations of absolutism. It argues that the Revolution was not merely a political or socioeconomic upheaval but an ideological transformation, driven in part by the appropriation of Deistic, Unitarian, and republican ideals drawn from both radical domestic thinkers and prolonged Franco- Ottoman cultural exchange. By examining the influence of Islamic thought and Ottoman governance on French philosophes, the paper offers a global perspective on the Revolution's intellectual origins, situating it as the culmination of a centuries-long challenge to Constantinian Christianity and the dawn of a more rational, egalitarian political order.