A Level History: Modern Europe 1750-1921 — Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, in the style and at the standard of the examination. They are not reproduced past-paper questions — examination boards hold copyright in their own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available free from your board.

Related: Modern Europe 1750-1921 revision notes

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Section A

1. State three long-term causes of the French Revolution. [3]

2. Name the three estates of the Ancien Régime and state one grievance of the Third Estate. [4]

Section B

3. Explain the significance of the following in the French Revolution: the Estates-General of 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Terror. [9]

4. Assess the extent to which Napoleon consolidated rather than betrayed the Revolution. [12]

5. Explain three causes of the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia. [9]

6. Explain why the Bolsheviks were able to seize power in October 1917. [9]

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Answers

1. Any three: the fiscal crisis caused by war debts, particularly from supporting the American Revolution, and a tax system that exempted the privileged [1]; the inequality of the estate system, in which the Third Estate paid the taxes but had no political voice [1]; Enlightenment ideas of natural rights, popular sovereignty and criticism of absolutism [1]; the weakness of Louis XVI’s leadership and his failure to push through reform against noble resistance [1].

2. First Estate — the clergy [1]. Second Estate — the nobility [1]. Third Estate — everyone else, from wealthy bourgeois to peasants [1]. Grievance: they paid nearly all the taxation while enjoying no privileges, and were consistently outvoted two to one by estate [1].

3. The Estates-General (1789) — the first meeting since 1614 [1]; the dispute over voting by estate rather than by head led the Third Estate to declare itself the National Assembly [1], which transferred sovereignty from the king to the nation — the decisive constitutional break [1]. The Declaration of the Rights of Man — proclaimed liberty, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty [1]; it abolished privilege in principle and became the foundational text of the Revolution [1], though its silence on women and slaves showed the limits of its universalism [1]. The Terror — the Committee of Public Safety used mass execution and emergency powers against internal and external enemies [1]; it arguably saved the Republic militarily [1] but discredited revolutionary idealism, and its collapse in Thermidor opened the way to conservative and ultimately military rule [1].

4. Consolidated: the Code Napoléon entrenched equality before the law, secure property rights and the abolition of feudal privilege, and outlasted him across Europe [1] [1]. Careers open to talent — promotion by merit in the army and administration — was a genuine revolutionary principle he sustained [1]. He preserved the land settlement, confirming peasants in possession of church and émigré land, which is why the settlement endured [1]. The Concordat ended the religious civil war on terms favourable to the state [1]. Betrayed: he destroyed political liberty — plebiscites were manipulated, the press censored, and he crowned himself Emperor in 1804, restoring hereditary monarchy in all but name [1] [1]. He created a new imperial nobility, reintroducing the very hierarchy of titles the Revolution had abolished [1]. He reintroduced slavery in the colonies in 1802, reversing the abolition of 1794 — the clearest betrayal of the Declaration [1]. The Code reduced the legal status of women, subordinating wives to husbands [1]. Judgement: he consolidated the Revolution’s social and legal gains while destroying its political ones [1] [1]. The bourgeoisie, who gained security of property and career, had reason to regard him as its heir; republicans and slaves had reason to see him as its gravedigger [1]. Which verdict one reaches depends on which of the Revolution’s several aims is treated as its essence [1].

5. Any three, 3 marks each: The war — catastrophic casualties, poor supply and the Tsar’s decision to take personal command in 1915 meant defeats were now blamed directly on him [1] [1] [1]. Economic collapse — inflation, the diversion of transport to the front and acute bread and fuel shortages in Petrograd in a bitter winter brought crowds onto the streets [1] [1] [1]. The discredited autocracy — Nicholas’s absence left government to the Tsarina and Rasputin, whose influence produced a collapse of confidence even among the nobility and the Duma [1] [1] [1]. The loss of the army’s loyalty — when the Petrograd garrison refused to fire on demonstrators and joined them, the regime lost its last instrument of coercion [1] [1] [1].

6. The Provisional Government made two fatal errors: it continued the war, so the grievances of February persisted [1] [1], and it postponed land reform until a Constituent Assembly, while peasants were already seizing land [1]. Dual power meant it could not act without the Petrograd Soviet, so it was weak from the outset [1]. Lenin’s April Theses gave the Bolsheviks a simple, uncompromising programme — “Peace, Bread, Land” and “All Power to the Soviets” — which no other party matched [1] [1]. The Kornilov affair in August was decisive: Kerensky armed the Bolsheviks to defend Petrograd, which restored their credibility after the July Days and left them armed and organised [1] [1]. Trotsky’s chairmanship of the Petrograd Soviet and the Military Revolutionary Committee gave them the machinery to take power almost bloodlessly in October [1].

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Where marks are usually lost

• Narrating the Revolution chronologically rather than assessing significance.
• Treating Napoleon as simply a dictator or simply an heir, without weighing both.
• Explaining February 1917 solely through the war.
• Underestimating the Kornilov affair in the Bolshevik seizure of power.