French Empire

Origins and formation

The French Revolution, on the encyclopedia page used here, runs from the Estates General of 1789 to the coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799. The Estates General met in May 1789 for the first time since February 1614. In June the Third Estate reconstituted itself as a National Assembly. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July was followed by the abolition of feudalism, state control of the Catholic Church in France, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. That is a sequence of political acts. It is not yet an empire, and it is not yet a world’s fair.^[2]

The declaration’s own text is narrower than the guide’s ability name. Yale’s Avalon copy says the National Assembly approved it on August 26, 1789. Article 1 says that men are born and remain free and equal in rights, and that social distinctions may be founded only on the general good. The guide names the ability Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité and lets the player pick celebration effects from any standard government of the age. The three-word motto is the game’s label. Article 1 is a sentence about freedom and equality in rights. This essay does not treat the motto as a quotation of that article, because the article does not use the three-word line.^{[1] [6]}

The guide’s opening paragraph stacks images on purpose: the guillotine, the revolutionary cockade, Napoleon’s cannon, the Belle Epoque as a “City of Light,” and the Eiffel Tower. It then says France rocked from monarchy to republic and back, and that the Third Republic brought avenues, industry, and salons. Napoleon is named in that paragraph. The published Napoleon essay is that life; this one does not retell his campaigns. The paragraph is evidence of how the game introduces the civilization. It is not a chronology in which the guillotine and the tower happen in one year.^[6]

Defining periods

Montesquieu’s book sits underneath one of the tradition names and outside the Revolution’s dates. The guide spells the tradition De L’Esprit Des Loix. The text read here is Esprit des lois, books I to V, in Paul Janet’s second edition, printed in Paris in 1892. Janet’s introduction calls it the great book of the eighteenth century. An 1892 printing of an eighteenth-century book is not a decree of 1789, and it is not a policy slot that produces happiness. The old spelling Loix on the guide points at the book. It does not turn the book into a unique government.^{[3] [6]}

The Third Republic is the regime the guide credits with avenues and salons, and it has dates of its own. Wikipedia places its start on 4 September 1870, when the Second Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War, and its end on 10 July 1940, after the fall of France and the formation of the Vichy government. The early republic kept fighting the war of 1870–1871 after Napoleon III’s fall. The Paris Commune came before the final defeat. The German Empire, proclaimed in the Palace of Versailles, annexed Alsace apart from the Territoire de Belfort and the northeastern part of Lorraine. Early governments discussed restoring a monarchy and could not agree who should wear the crown, so a regime imagined as provisional remained. Avenues and salons are in the guide. The annexation and the argument over a king are in this account.^{[5] [6]}

The tower belongs to that republic’s calendar and to the Revolution’s memory, not to the National Assembly’s summer. Gustave Eiffel’s company designed and built it from 1887 to 1889 as the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair and as a crown for the Revolution’s centennial. It stands on the Champ de Mars. Critics attacked the design. Later visitors made it a national image. A centennial looks back at 1789. Looking back is not the same thing as being the Estates General. The guide’s wonder uses the tower’s culture. The building history uses a fair and a hundred-year mark.^{[4] [6]}

Legacy and interpretation

The legacy is a chain of regimes that reuse France’s name. A revolution from 1789 to 1799 issues a declaration and abolishes feudalism. A coup ends that period. A book on the spirit of laws, already famous as an eighteenth-century work, is still being edited in 1892. An empire falls in 1870. A republic that expected to be temporary lasts until 1940 and spends its first years on defeat, a commune, and a lost border. The guide gathers liberty, the imperial guard, Jacobin names, and the tower into one playable civilization. The gathering is the design. The dates refuse to become one reign.^{[2] [3] [4] [5]}

Jacobin and imperial images are the sharpest mix on the unit list. The guide’s civilian is a random Jacobin, and the names include Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Desmoulins, Saint-Just, and also Barras and Brissot. Its military unit is the Garde Impériale. People associated with the Revolution’s factions and a guard named for an empire are not one staff. This essay does not assign each name a biography. It records that the list is random and that the two unit types point at different kinds of authority. A celebration effect does not decide which faction they belonged to.^[6]

The motto has a further trap. Players will hear liberty, equality, and fraternity as the summary of 1789. The sentence approved on August 26, 1789, says that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Fraternity is not in that article. Holding the motto and the article apart is the whole point of reading the text instead of the ability name.^{[1] [6]}

A closer look

Style Empire is a tradition about culture gained from constructing buildings. The name sounds like Napoleonic decoration. The page does not define the decorative arts, and this essay will not invent a catalogue of furniture. What can be said is that a building bonus called empire style is not the 1889 tower’s engineering account, and it is not Article 1. Three different uses of “style” and “liberty” are sharing a civilization screen.^{[1] [4] [6]}

The quarter and the buildings make the same point in urban form. The guide’s Avenue raises happiness on quarters. The Jardin à la Française and the Salon add culture and happiness by adjacency. The Third Republic page and the guide both talk about avenues and salons after the war of 1870. They do not say that a garden of that type was voted by the National Assembly in June 1789. A unique quarter is a kit of buildings. The world’s fair and the National Assembly of June 1789 are not in one kit unless a source puts them there. These sources do not.^{[2] [5] [6]}

In Civilization VII

The English guide names the ability Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Traditions on the page include Bataillon-Carré, Cocorico, De L’Esprit Des Loix, and Style Empire. The quarter is the Avenue. The buildings are the Jardin à la Française and the Salon. The civilian is the Jacobin, the military unit is the Garde Impériale, and the associated wonder is the Eiffel Tower. The simplified Chinese guide names the same slots in its own words. This essay keeps the English names and does not rewrite them into the Chinese ones. Yields and combat numbers stay on the guide. They are not copied here.^{[6] [7]}

The accessed guide does not identify an edition. The codex publishes the essay with that gap visible and keeps the civilization in the modern group. The published Napoleon essay is the consul and the emperor, not the tower. The published Lafayette essay is a person in the revolutionary years, not the tower and not the Third Republic. The first step back from the ability is to keep August 26, 1789, the coup of 9 November 1799, the republic that begins in 1870, and the tower built from 1887 to 1889, in that order.^{[1] [2] [4] [5] [6]}