The French Revolution I
The pivotal event of European history in the eighteenth century
was the French Revolution. From its outbreak in 1789, the Revolution
touched and transformed social values and political systems in
France, in Europe, and eventually throughout the world. France's
revolutionary regime conquered much of Western Europe with its
arms and with its ideology. But not without considerable opposition
at home and abroad. Its ideals defined the essential aspirations
of modern liberal society, while its bloody conflicts posed the
brutal dilemma of means versus ends.
The revolutionaries advocated individual liberty, rejecting all
forms of arbitrary constraint: monopolies on commerce, feudal
charges laid upon the land, vestiges of servitude such as serfdom,
and even (in 1794) black slavery overseas. They held that political
legitimacy required constitutional government, elections, and
legislative supremacy. They demanded civil equality for all, denying
the claims of privileged groups, localities, or religions to special
treatment and requiring the equality of all citizens before the
law. A final revolutionary goal was expressed by the concept of
fraternity, which meant that all citizens regardless of social
class, region, or religion shared a common fate in society, and
that the well-being of the nation sometimes superseded the interests
of individuals. The resounding slogan of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
expressed social ideals to which most contemporary citizens of
the Western world would still subscribe.
I. Origins
Those who made the Revolution believed they were rising against
tyrannical government, in which the people had no voice, and against
inequality in the way obligations such as taxes were imposed and
benefits distributed. Yet the government of France at that time
was no more tyrannical or unjust than it had been in the past.
On the contrary, a gradual process of reform had long been underway.
What, then, set off the revolutionary upheaval? What had changed?
An easy answer would be to point to the incompetence of King Louis
XVI (1774-1792) and his queen, Marie Antoinette. Good-natured
but weak and indecisive, Louis was a man of limited intelligence
who lacked self-confidence. Worse yet, his young queen, a Hapsburg
princess, was frivolous, meddlesome, and tactless. But even the
most capable ruler could not have escaped challenge and crisis
in the late eighteenth century. The roots of that crisis, not
its mismanagement, claim the principal interest of historians.
The philosophes
In eighteenth-century France, as we have seen, intellectual
ferment preceded political revolt. For decades the philosophes
had bombarded traditional beliefs, institutions, and prejudices
with devastating salvos. They undermined the confidence that traditional
ways were the best ways. Yet the philosophes were anything but
revolutionaries. Nor did they question the fact that elites should
rule society, but wished only that the elites should be more enlightened
and more open.
Indeed, the Enlightenment had become respectable by the 1780s,
a kind of intellectual establishment. Diderot's Encyclopedia,
banned in the 1750s, was reprinted in a less expensive format
with government approval in the 1770s. Most of France's 30 provincial
academies_learned societies of educated citizens in the larger
towns had by that time been won over to the critical spirit and
reformism of the Enlightenment, though not to its sometimes extreme
secularism. Among the younger generation, the great cultural hero
was Rousseau (see picture), whose Confessions (published
posthumously in 1781) caused a sensation. Here Rousseau attacked
the hypocrisy, conformity, cynicism, and corruption of high society's
salons and aristocratic ways.
Though he had not exemplified this in his personal life, Rousseau
came across in his novels and autobiography as the apostle of
a simple, wholesome family life; of conscience, purity, and virtue.
As such, he was the great inspiration to the future generation
of revolutionaries, but the word "revolution" never
flowed from his pen.
Underground literature
More subversive perhaps than the writings of the "high
enlightenment" was the underground literature that commanded
a wide audience in France. The monarchy's censorship tried vainly
to stop these "bad books," which poured in across the
border through networks of clandestine publishers, smugglers,
and distributors. What was this fare that the reading public eagerly
devoured?
Alongside a few banned works by the philosophes, there was a mass
of gossip sheets, pulp novels, libels, and pornography under such
titles as Scandalous Chronicles and The Private Life of Louis
XV. Much of this material focused on the supposed goings-on in
the fashionable world of Paris and Versailles. Emphasizing scandal
and character assassination, this literature had no specific political
content or ideology. But indirectly, it portrayed the French aristocracy
as decadent and the French monarchy as a ridiculous despotism.
II. Fiscal Crisis
When he took the throne in 1774, Louis XVI tried to conciliate
elite opinion by recalling the Parlements or sovereign law courts
that his father had abolished in 1770. This concession to France's
traditional "unwritten constitution" backfired, however,
since the Parlements resumed their defense of privilege in opposition
to reforms proposed by Jacques Turgot, Louis, new controller general
of finances. Turgot, a disciple of the philosophes and an experienced
administrator, hoped to encourage economic growth by the policy
of nonintervention or laissez-faire. When agitation against him
mounted at Versailles and in the Paris Parlement, Louis took the
easy way out and dismissed his troublesome minister.
The king then turned to a Protestant banker from Geneva with a
reputation for financial wizardry, Jacques Necker. A shrewd man
with a strong sense of public relations, Necker gained wide popularity.
To finance the heavy costs of France's aid to the rebellious British
colonies in North America, Necker avoided new taxes and instead
floated a series of large loans at exorbitant interest rates as
high as 10 percent. Short of a complete overhaul of the tax system,
little improvement in royal revenues could be expected, and the
public would bitterly resist any additional tax burdens that the
monarchy simply imposed.
Facing bankruptcy and unable to float any new loans in this atmosphere,
the king recalled the Parlements, reappointed Necker, after tarying
several other ministers, and agreed to convene the Estates General
in May 1789.
III. Estates General to National Assembly
The calling of the Estates General created extraordinary excitement
across the land. When the king invited his subjects to express
their opinions about this great event, hundreds did so in the
form of pamphlets, and here the liberal or "patriot"
ideology of 1789 first began to take shape.
The Third Estate
While the king accorded the Third Estate twice as many delegates
as the two higher orders, he refused to promise that the delegates
would vote together ("by head") rather than separately
in three chambers ("by order"). A vote by order meant
that the two upper chambers would outweigh the Third Estate no
matter how many deputies it had.
It did not matter that the nobility had led the fight against
absolutism. Even if they endorsed new, constitutional checks on
absolutism and accepted equality in the allocation of taxes, nobles
would hold vastly disproportionate powers if the Estates General
voted by order. In the most influential of these pamphlets, Abbé
Emmanuel Joseph Sieye posed the question, "What is the Third
Estate?" and answered flatly, "Everything." The
enemy was no longer simply absolutism but privilege as well.
Unlike reformers in England, or the Belgian rebels against Joseph
II, or even the American revolutionaries of 1776, the French patriots
did not look back to historical traditions of liberty that had
been violated. Rather they contemplated a complete break with
a discredited past. As a basis for reform, they would substitute
reason for tradition.
Cahiers
For the moment, however, the patriots were far in advance of
opinion at the grass roots. The king had invited citizens across
the land to meet in their parishes to elect delegates to district
electoral assemblies, and to draft grievance petitions (cahiers)
setting forth their views. Highly traditional in tone, the great
majority of rural cahiers complained only of particular local
ills and expressed confidence that the king would redress them.
Only a few cahiers from Iarger cities, including Paris, alluded
to the concepts of natural rights or popular sovereignty that
were appearing in patriot pamphlets. Very few demanded that France
must have a written constitution, that sovereignty belonged to
the nation, or that feudalism and regional privileges should be
abolished.
Elections
Virtually every adult male taxpayer was eligible to vote for
electors, who, in turn, chose deputies for the Third Estate. The
electoral assemblies were a kind of political seminar, where articulate
local leaders emerged to be sent by their fellow citizens as deputies
to Versailles. These deputies were a remarkable collection of
men, though scarcely representative of the mass of the Third Estate.
Dominated by lawyers and officials, there was not a single worker
or peasant among them. In the elections for the First Estate,
meanwhile, democratic procedures assured that parish priests rather
than Church notables would form a majority of the delegates. And
in the elections to the Second Estate, about one third of the
delegates could be described as liberal nobles or patriots.
"National Assembly"
Popular expectation that the monarchy would provide leadership
in reform proved to be ill-founded. When the deputies met on May
5, Necker and Louis XVI spoke to them only in generalities, and
left unsettled whether the estates would vote by order or by head.
The upper two estates proceeded to organize their own chambers,
but the deputies of the Third Estate balked. Inviting the others
to join them, on June 17 the Third Estate took a decisive revolutionary
step by proclaiming its conversion into a "National Assembly."
A few days later 150 clergymen from the First Estate joined them.
The king, who finally decided to cast his lot with the nobility,
locked the Third Estate out of its meeting hall until a session
could be arranged in which he would state his will. But the deputies
moved to an indoor tennis court, and there swore that they would
not separate until they had given France a constitution.
Ignoring this act of defiance, the king addressed the delegates
of all three orders on June 23. He promised equality in taxation,
civil liberties, and regular meetings of the Estates General at
which, however, voting would be by order. France would be provided
with a constitution, he pledged, "but the ancient distinction
of the three orders will be conserved in its entirety." He
then ordered the three orders to retire to their individual meeting
halls. This, the Third Estate refused.
When the royal chamberlain repeated his monarch's demand, the
deputies, spokesman dramatically responded: "The assembled
nation cannot receive orders." Startled by the determination
of the patriots, the king backed down. For the time being, he
recognized the National Assembly and ordered deputies from all
three estates to join it. Thus the French Revolution began as
a nonviolent, "legal" Revolution.
IV. The Convergence of Revolutions
The political struggle at Versailles was not occurring in isolation.
Simultaneously, the mass of French citizens, already aroused by
elections to the Estates General, were mobilizing over subsistence
issues. The winter and spring of 1788-1789 had brought severe
economic difficulties, as crop failures and grain shortages almost
doubled the price of flour and bread on which the population depended
for subsistence. Unemployed vagrants and beggars filled the roads,
grain convoys and marketplaces were stormed by angry consumers,
and relations between town and country were strained.
This anxiety merged with rage over the behavior of "aristocrats"
in Versailles. Parisians believed that food shortages and royal
troops would be used to intimidate the people into submission.
They feared an "aristocratic plot" against the Third
Estate and the patriot cause.
Bastille
When the king dismissed the still-popular Necker on July 11,
Parisians correctly assumed that the counter-revolution was about
to begin. Instead of submitting, they revolted. Protesting before
royal troops (some of whom defected to the insurgents), burning
the hated toll barriers that surrounded the capital, and seizing
grain supplies, Parisian crowds then began a search for weapons.
On the morning of July 14 they invaded the military hospital of
the Invalides where they seized thousands of rifles without incident.
Then they laid siege to the Bastille, an old fortress that had
once been a major royal prison, where gunpowder was stored. There
the small garrison did resist and a ferocious firefight erupted.
Dozens of citizens were hit providing the first martyrs of the
Revolution, but the garrison soon capitulated. As they left, several
were massacred by the infuriated crowd.
Meanwhile, patriot electors ousted royal officials of the Paris
city government, replaced them with a revolutionary municipality,
and organized a citizens militia or national guard to patrol the
city. Similar municipal revolutions occurred in 26 of the 30 largest
French cities, thus assuring that the capital's defiance would
not be an isolated act.
The Parisian insurrection of July 14 not only saved the National
Assembly from annihilation but also altered the course of the
Revolution by giving it a far more active, popular dimension.
Again the king capitulated. Removing most of the troops around
Paris, he traveled to the capital on July 17 and, to please the
people, donned a cockade bearing the colors of white for the monarchy
and blue and red for the city of Paris. This tricolor was to become
the flag of the new France.
The Great Fear
These events did not pacify the anxious and hungry people of
the countryside, however. The sources of peasant dissatisfaction
were many and long standing. Population growth and the parceling
of holdings were reducing the margin of subsistence for many families,
while the purchase of land by rich townspeople exerted further
pressure. Seigneurial dues and church tithes weighed heavily upon
most peasants. Now, in addition, suspicions were rampant that
nobles were hoarding grain in order to stymie the patriotic cause.
In July peasants in several regions sacked the castles of the
nobles and burned the documents that recorded their feudal obligations.
This peasant insurgency eventually blended into a vast movement
known as the Great Fear.
Rumors abounded that the vagrants who swarmed through the countryside
were actually "brigands" in the pay of nobles who were
marching on villages to destroy the new harvest and cow the peasants
into submission. The fear was baseless, but it stirred up hatred
and suspicion of the nobles, prompted a mass recourse to arms
in the villages, and set off new attacks on chÉteaus and
feudal documents. Peasant revolts and the Great Fear showed that
the royal government was confronting a truly nationwide and popular
revolution.
The night of August 4
Peasant insurgency worried the deputies of the National Assembly,
but they decided to appease the peasants rather than simply denounce
their violence. On the night of August 4, representatives of the
nobility and clergy vied with one another in renouncing their
ancient privileges. This set the stage for the Assembly to decree
"the abolition of feudalism" as well as the tithe, venality
of office, regional privilege, and social privilege.
Rights of Man and Citizen
By sweeping away the old web of privileges, the August 4th
decree permitted the Assembly to construct a new regime. Since
it would take months to draft a constitution, the Assembly drew
up a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to indicate
the outline of its intentions. A rallying point for the future,
the Declaration also stood as the death certificate of the old
regime. It began with a ringing affirmation of equality: "Men
are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions
may be based only on common utility."
The Declaration went on to proclaim the sovereignty of the nation
as against the king or any other group, and the supreme authority
of legitimate law. Most of its articles concerned liberty, defined
as "the ability to do whatever does not harm another . .
. whose limits can only be determined by law"; they specified
freedom from arbitrary arrest; freedom of expression and of religion;
and the need for representative government. The Declaration's
concept of natural rights meant that the Revolution would be based
on reason rather than history or tradition.
Send comments and questions to Professor
Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College. .