Which statement best sums up the impact of the French Revolution on South American revolutions?
South American revolutionaries wanted to reenact the success of the overthrow of their oppressive monarch.
The French Enlightenment thinkers inspired revolutionaries to overthrow their oppressors.
When Napoleon invaded Spain, it gave the South American revolutionaries the chance to challenge the power of the crumbling
Spanish colonialist government.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen emboldened the South American revolutionaries to make their own Declaration
of Independence.

The correct answer is When Napoleon invaded Spain, it gave the South American revolutionaries the chance to challenge the power of the crumbling Spanish colonialist government.

The French Revolution marked the rise of the bourgeoisie as a dominant social class, overcoming the landowning aristocracy, as well as the creation of new institutions and new ways of organizing the economic, political and social life that would expand throughout the planet.

With the French Revolution, capitalism broke through the feudal political obstacles that still prevailed in Western Europe, joining the economic transformations unleashed with the Industrial Revolution.

These changes had been prepared since the 17th and 18th centuries, with the development of Enlightenment rational thought. For the Enlightenment, reason could assist all men in explaining the phenomena of nature and the way in which society is organized.

Not that the Illuminists were essentially revolutionaries. But the Enlightenment ideas served, along with the use of reason to interpret the world, for the French revolutionaries questioned the sacred character of power, defended by kings, aristocracy and the Church.

All men could exercise power. But for that, it was necessary to create institutions that would guarantee this exercise. In this sense, the Republic was the main one of these institutions. It represented the end of the privileges of the aristocracy and the liberation of peasants from the bonds of serfdom that bound them to the nobility and the clergy. In the cities, feudal corporations that limited the business of the bourgeoisie ended.

But even before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment ideals had already made it possible for English settlers in North America to achieve Independence from the USA and also to build a Republic. But the biggest boost was even given by the French Revolution, thanks to the power of the French state.

The French Revolution also influenced other processes of independence on the American continent. In 1794, the enslaved Africans who worked in the sugar cane fields of Haiti managed to end slavery after a bloody war of independence. It was the first country on the continent to end slavery.