Social Injustice in France Essay

Social Injustice in France Essay

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Social injustice had always been an uncorrected shortcoming for France from the early 19th century to the present. While the social injustice that appeared in the form of French religious persecution was much more visible during the early 19th century than in the reasonably tolerant 21st century, as seen in the contrasting cases of the Anti-Sacrilege Act in 1825 and the About-Picard Law in 2001, social injustice was a ubiquitous presence in many religious institutions of France. In a different degree of paramountcy, the social injustice manifested in the style of French political inequalities remains to be a perennial prejudice against the “forgotten man”, one clear-cut case being the anti-Semitic and espionage controversy of the Dreyfus Affair in the modern 20th century. In the same way, the social injustice seen in the economic discrimination in France was so prominent that literary works such as Les Miserables by eminent novelist Victor Hugo and its more modern philosophical counterpart, La Misère Du Monde by prominent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu continually emphasized on the French economic inequalities between the inferior social classes and bourgeois-esque citizens. While religious persecution in France was more visible in the 1800s than that of recent times, the social injustice seen in the case of political inequalities and economic discriminations remained more or less the same throughout the 19th and 21st centuries.
The social injustice of religious persecution seen in France during the 19th Century was much more visible than that of the 21st Century. In the case of official state legislation, the Anti-Sacrilege Act passed by King Charles X in 1825 significantly defined the French policy of religious intolerance d...

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Jeanneney, Jean-Noël. ""Quand Le Sacrilège était Puni De Mort En France"" L'Histoire June-July 2006: 68-72. Web.
McKay, John P., Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler. A History of Western Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. Print.
Morrisson, Christian, and Wayne Snyder. "The Income Inequality of France in Historical Perspective." European Review of Economic History (2000): 59-83. Print.
"Paris burning: the price of social injustice."Age [Melbourne, Australia] 8 Nov. 2005: 14. Student Resources in Context. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
Randall, Vernellia. "Racial Discrimination: The Record of France." Racial Discrimination: The Record of France. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
Young, Arthur. "The Condition of the French People." The Library of Original Sources, Vol 7. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: University Research Extension Co., 1907. World Book Advanced. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.

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