Currently the Honors Western Civilization students are about to start discussing the course of events that culminated in the horrors of the French Revolution. In the current state of affairs in the world that we live in today and the anxiety that permeates the political climate of our nation, the relevance of the pitfalls and futility of violence is something that is relevant now as well as across history. In looking at the causes of the revolution in France our students are analyzing and begging the question of the true state of human nature, and how factionalism tears people apart from uniting upon common ground, and how absolute power can corrupt human beings absolutely. The call is then for all students to analyze the question of when violence is and is not necessary?

To accomplish these questions the students will be working on a project in which they are to journal and reflect on the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era from multiple perspectives, in which they will be playing the role of an eyewitness to events that have unfolded during the revolution. Students will be tasked with writing from the first, second, or third, estate and put themselves in the shoes of people who lived during this time in history. They are tasked with creatively aging their paper in a way that makes it look like it survived the French Revolution and can be an original source that we as historians could use today.