rigidity of the class system—not to mention the religious unease which followed—if you are struggling with this question, it might be better to focus on France, where the effects of the Revolution were much more clearly felt.

In terms of choosing an area where the effects would have been most extreme, it might be easier to focus on either the working or aristocratic class. The French Revolution saw a surge in the middle class in France, as social mobility became increasingly possible and the merchant class profited. However, the position of a person who was an aristocrat before the Revolution, provided that he or she survived the ordeal, would have been radically different after the execution of the King and Queen, and life over the next sixty years would have been a continuous period of adjustment. The same would be true for a person who had known absolute monarchy at the time of his or her birth into poverty but was now experiencing the radical overhaul of society.

Importantly, the time period defined in the question is bookended by two revolutions: the first French Revolution, and the February Revolution of 1848. A person who was a young adult in 1789 would have experienced the following:

1. Ten years of fighting and political turmoil, culminating in the overthrow of the French monarchy (to 1799), resulting in a secular society which had thrown out its Catholic roots and driven significant social change.

2. The expansion of the French Empire under Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars, with Napoleon as Emperor of France (1804–1815).

3. The restoration of the monarchy in 1814 but under different constraints to the original French monarchy. This monarchy was constitutional only—during this period, industrialization began in earnest in France and an economic recovery from the wars began.

4. The overthrow of Charles X by Louis Philippe in 1830, which saw a massive rise in the importance and political clout of the wealthy upper-middle class, plus colonial expansion for the French alongside many other European states.

5. Numerous revolts against the July monarchy, which ultimately resulted in the 1848 revolution. This created the Second Republic, which was driven by working-class opposition to the increasingly conservative monarchy.

That is an unprecedented amount of change in a very short period of time. It is part of what is often called France's long nineteenth century. As a member of a working-class family, how would all of these events and social changes have affected your life? Under the first monarchy, you would have effectively been a serf, probably an agricultural worker, undoubtedly a Roman Catholic, and at the bottom of the social pecking order with no political power. Over this period, you might find yourself fighting for Napoleon, becoming a factory worker and moving to a big city for work as industrialization picked up, or becoming politicized and joining a revolution (or several).

If you had been born into an aristocratic family, meanwhile, your circumstances would also have undergone radical change over this period. You might have seen members of your family executed, been forced to go into hiding, and watched society become increasingly secular. Society shifted from viewing the king as being ordained by God to a point where the power of the working classes could end monarchies (more than once). That is a busy life for anyone.

I hope this gives you a place to start!

To a certain degree, this feels like an exercise in creative writing (albeit one which would require knowledge as to the political contexts in which these events would unfold). I would say, when speaking about this period in general, the key crux lies in the events of the French Revolution itself and the extreme instability unleashed in the time period. But there remains a multitude of ways in which your imagined personality could have experienced and been impacted by these events.

Consider a French aristocrat, for example. While you could easily paint the French aristocracy as primarily Royalist leaning, (and indeed, many of them did flee France during the Revolution), there was at the same time a significant movement within the French nobility that had been liberalized by the Enlightenment and played a key role in shaping the revolution of 1789 (notable among them would be someone like Mirabeau, for example). You could easily write this assignment from the perspective of an émigré opposed to the Revolution from the very beginning, or from the perspective of one of the more liberal aristocrats that were by and large marginalized (often facing the risk of execution) as the Revolution turned increasingly radical. As you move past the Revolution, especially as you move past the age of Napoleon and look towards the Restoration, you'd still be dealing with the repercussions of these events, and the turmoil and instability unleashed by the Revolution. Similar questions to think about would be matters of religion and even location (the experience of a citizen of Paris, for example, would be very different from the experience of someone living in a place like Lyon, which took part in the Federalist Revolts against Paris and faced severe repression by the Revolutionary armies).

If you're speaking from an Austrian or British perspective, you might want to keep in mind how the Revolution might have been perceived, based on your own background and political leaning, and also based in the military context of the war against France (and later, the Napoleonic conquests). As you move past the Revolution, and into the Restoration, you'll still need to grapple with the memory of the Revolution and what it would have represented. In all cases, there is a wide range of avenues through which you can explore this topic, and (so long as the context is properly understood), I don't think this kind of question has a clear right or wrong answer.