Revolutionary civil war: the French civil war.

We arrive finally at revolutionary civil war, the rarest type of revolution in the states and society of early modern Europe. It contains the conflicts that stand out from nearly all the others of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by their scope and duration and includes what many historians would probably regard as preeminently the “great” revolutions of the age. It was these that plunged states into the lengthiest and severest violence, split their political order the most deeply, and defied and defeated, temporarily or for good, the greatest monarchies. But far above and far as sight endures Like whips of anger With lightning's danger There runs the quick perspective of the future. Whether by their success or failure or by their ultimate fruitfulness or sterility, these struggles loom up to retrospective vision beyond most of the rest. They appear not merely as events of cataclysmic strife but also as symbols that intimate some destiny in their countries' history. Four revolutions belong to this category: the French civil war, or wars of religion, between 1562 and 1598; the revolt of the Netherlands from 1566 to 1609; the English revolution of 1640-60; and the Fronde in France from 1648 to 1653. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]