THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
I. Fundamental Causes: There is no consensus about the causes of the French revolution--even the government’s attitude toward religion would play a part (Kagan 693).
1. Feudalism (idea of privilege): serfdom had ended and French peasants were better off than those in E. Europe (Austria, Prussia, Russia, Poland), but “French peasants still had obligations to their local landlords that they deeply resented. These ‘relics of feudalism,’ survivals from an earlier age, included the payment of fees for the use of village facilities, such as the flour mill, community over, and winepress, as well as tithes to the clergy. The nobility also maintained the right to hunt on peasants’ land” (Spiel. 4th Ed. 556). In addition, the nobles held many of the leading positions in the government, the military, the law courts, and the higher church offices and they want to maintain their monopolistic hold over positions in the military, church, and government. “Common to all were tax exemptions, especially from the taille” (Spiel. 4th Ed. 556).
2. Social: Three estates or classes. First Estate (only about 130,000 people) was divided between upper clergy (bishops and archbishops) who were exempt from taxation and the parish priests who sympathized with peasants. Second Estate (2-3% of population or about 350,000, who owned 25-30% of the land) included the nobles of the robe who derived their status from office holding (a pathway that had often enabled commoners to attain noble rank. the newer nobility created by the monarchy to weaken old nobility and included many former bourgeoisie) and nobles of the sword (descendants of the original medieval nobility; the old aristocracy that included many officers in the royal army). Third Estate (96% of the population) composed of bourgeoisie (lawyers, bankers, merchants, doctors, etc. who had much in common with aristocracy and even intermarried). They constituted about 8% or 2.3 million people who owned about 20-25% of the land. “They had their own set of grievances because they were often excluded from the social and political privileges monopolized by the nobles. These resentments of the middle class were for a long time assumed to be a major cause of the French Revolution. But although these tensions existed, the situation was not a simple case of a unified bourgeoisie against a unified noble class. As is evident, neither group was monolithic. Nobles were separated by vast differences in wealth and importance. A similar gulf separated wealthy financiers from local lawyers in French provincial towns” (Spiel.4th Ed. 556-7). In addition, “Viewed in terms of economic function, many members of the bourgeoisie and nobility formed a single class. Finally, the new and critical ideas of the Enlightenment proved attractive to both aristocrats and bourgeoisie. Members of both groups shared the common world of liberal political thought” (Spiel.4th Ed. 557). Peasants ( 75-80% of the population who owned 35-40% of the land) and urban laborers (rising rents and bread prices are creating severe hardships on them; inflation = 62% from 1785-1789 while wages rose only 22%!). “As access to the nobility and the higher offices in the land became increasingly more difficult by the end of the 18th c., the bourgeoisie came to resent a social system that valued birth more than talent.” So the bourgeoisie provide leadership for Revolution! (Had no say in government -Estates general not called since 1614).
3. Administrative: 1) too many incompetent office holders; 2) no common, single code of law (justice arbitrary: 360 codes of law that a judge could choose from).
4. Financial: “The immediate cause of the French Revolution was the near collapse of government finances” (Spiel.4th Ed. 557). France was practically bankrupt by 1789: interest and payments on the debt were just over 1/2 the entire budget (Kagan 690).
5. Religious: Church land (10-20% of France) couldn’t be taxed or sold; church censored books and collected tithes; concerned more with wealth and power than its spiritual duties.
6. Political: executive supremacy of crown; people wanted share of power (French were the most enlightened on continent due to the influence of philosophes since France had become the center of the Enlightenment. “The activists of the Third Estate and reform-minded individuals among the First and Second Estates had common ties in their youth, urban background, and hostility to privilege” (Spiel. 4th Ed. 558).
IMMEDIATE CAUSE: bad harvest of 1788.
II. Limited Monarchy (1789-1792) “moderate stage”
1. National Assembly (1789-1791). To solve the financial crisis Louis XVI attempted tax reform that met with resistance from the first and Second Estates (but even bourgeoisie of 3rd Estate were not paying their fair share), so he called the Estates General in July 1788 (hadn’t met since 1614). “ The cahiers de dolences or statements of local grievances [2nd Estate insisted on preservation of manorial rights and honorific privileges; 3rd Estate only represented bourgeoisie because of using old system of elections in cities and stressed guarantees of property rights and talk of constitution like U.S.--balance of powers], which were drafted throughout France during the elections to the Estates-General, advocated a regular constitutional government that would abolish the fiscal privileges of the church and nobility as the major way to regenerate the country.
“The Estates-General consisted of representatives from the three orders of French society. In the elections for the Estates-General, the government had ruled that the Third Estate should get double representation (it did, after all, constitute 97 percent of the population). Consequently, while both the first Estate (the clergy) and the Second (the nobility) had about 300 delegates each, the commoners had almost 600 representatives. Two-thirds of the latter were people with legal training while three-fourths were from towns with over 2,000 inhabitants, giving the Third Estate a particularly strong legal and urban representation. Of the 282 representatives of the nobility, about 90 were liberal minded, urban oriented, and interested in the enlightened ideas of the century; half of them were under forty years of age. The activists of the third Estate and reform-minded individuals among the First and Second Estates had common ties in their youth, urban background, and hostility to privilege” (Spiel. 4thEd. 558).
Convened May 5, 1789 and arguments over procedure developed: the Third Estate wanted to convene in one great National Assembly of France (1st and 2nd Estates wanted to meet separately with each Estate getting one vote because the 3rd Estate would have as many votes as their two put together). “When the First Estate declared in favor of voting by order, the Third Estate felt compelled to respond in a significant fashion. On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate voted to constitute itself a `National Assembly’ and decided to draw up a constitution. [Many nobles and clergy joined them but...] Three days later, on June 20, the deputies of the Third Estate arrived at their meeting place, only to find the doors locked; thereupon they moved to a nearby indoor tennis court and swore (hence, the Tennis Court Oath) that they would continue to meet until they had produced a French constitution” (Spiel. 4th Ed. 558). The king demanded they separate into orders, but when a majority of the clergy and a large group of nobles joined the assembly, Louis capitulated and requested the First and Second Estates to meet with the National Assembly, where voting would occur by head rather than by order. Next Louis attempted to regain the political initiative by mustering royal troops near Versailles and Paris....On July 11, without consulting assembly leaders, Louis abruptly dismissed his minister of finance, Necker. These actions marked the beginning of a steady, but consistently poorly executed, royal attempt to undermine the assembly and halt the revolution. Most of the National Assembly wished to establish some form of constitutional monarchy, but from the start Louis’s refusal to cooperate thwarted that effort. The king fatally decided to throw his lot in with the conservative aristocracy against the wide spectrum of emerging political and social interests. A second factor was the populace of Paris. After several bread riots in the winter and spring of 1789 some Parisians began organizing a citizen militia and collection arms. They regarded the dismissal of Necker as the opening of a royal offensive against the National Constituent Assembly and the city. On July 14 [by July 1789 a Parisian laborer was spending 80% of income on bread!), somewhat more than 800 people, most of them small shopkeepers, tradespeople, artisans, and wage earners, marched to the Bastille (the symbol of absolutism) in search of weapons for the militia. This great fortress, with ten-foot-thick walls, had once held political prisoners. Through miscalculations and ineptitude on the part of the governor of the fortress, the troops in the Bastille fired into the crowd, killing ninety-eight people and wounding many others. Thereafter the crowd stormed the fortress and eventually gained entrance. They released the seven prisoners, none of whom was there for political reasons, and killed several troops and the governor (beheaded all six and paraded their heads on pikes through the city). They found no weapons” (Kagan 696). RESULT: 1) symbol of the Old Regime had fallen; 2) nobles hostile to the revolution flee the country; 3) Louis decided to remove troops from Paris and the National Assembly was saved!
The Great Fear: In the summer of ‘89, between July 20 and August 3, a vast panic spread through the countryside of France as a result of rumors that aristocrats were organizing brigands to attack peasants and steal their crops. Responding to worsening economic plight and encouraged by the storming of the Bastille the peasants began to burn feudal manors and records of their obligations. AUGUST DECREES: 1) On August 4 aristocrats surrendered their special privileges [“On the night of August 4, 1789, the National Assembly in an astonishing session voted to abolish seigneurial rights as well as the fiscal privileges of nobles, clergy, towns, and provinces” (Spiel.4th Ed. 561)]. THE FIRST GREAT REFORM: END OF FEUDALISM!
2) “On August 26, the assembly provided the ideological foundation for its actions and an educational device for the nation by adopting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” (Spiel. 4th Ed. 561). THE SECOND GREAT REFORM: SOCIAL. This was a bourgeoisie document: all mankind created equal; stressed sacredness of property rights; aim of gov’t as preservation of natural rights of liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression. BUT court still at Versailles and Louis XVI still divine right monarch.
OCTOBER DAYS. October 5, crowds of Parisian women (second uprising of Parisians) march to Versailles protesting the lack of bread “armed with broomsticks, lances, pitchforks, swords, pistols and muskets” (Spiel.
4th Ed. 562). Louis promises them grain supplies from Paris, but when the Parisian National Guard follows their lead, the king and his family are forced to return with the crowd to Paris where they are put up in the old palace and Louis finally approves the august decrees. The National Assembly also moves to Paris.
THIRD GREAT REFORM: ADMINISTRATIVE. Before the end of October, they abolished all the old local and provincial divisions and divided France into 83 departments for taxes and judicial districts.
FOURTH GREAT REFORM: FINANCIAL. Nov. 2, church property is seized; tithes ended; internal tolls and duties ended; guilds eliminated.
FIFTH GREAT REFORM: RELIGIOUS. “The church was also secularized. In July 1790, a new Civil Constitution of the Clergy was put into effect. Both bishops and priests of the Catholic church were to be elected by the people and paid by the state. All clergy were also required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Civil Constitution. Since the pope forbade it, only 54 percent of the French parish clergy took the oath while the majority of bishops refused. This was a critical development because the Catholic church, still an important institution in the life of the French people, now became an enemy of the Revolution. This has often been viewed as a serious tactical blunder on the part of the National Assembly for it gave counterrevolution a popular base from which to operate” (Spiel.4th Ed. 562).
SIXTH GREAT REFORM: POLITICAL. September 1791, Constitution of 1791: “By 1791, the National Assembly had finally completed a new constitution that established a limited, constitutional monarchy” (Spiel.4th Ed. 562-3).
2. LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY (1791-1792)
France was now a constitutional monarchy, though Louis XVI was virtually a prisoner. They created a one house legislature of elected property owners (none of members of National Assembly could be part of legislature in order for others to participate; but all were bourgeoisie). One had to pay at least a certain amount of taxes to vote--so rather than birth, wealth now gave one privileges. “By ending absolutism, striking at the privileges of the nobility, and preventing the mass of people from gaining control over the government, the National Assembly consolidated the rule of the bourgeoisie” (Perry 430). But, remember, the Declaration of rights addressed to all--liberty and equality for all. The Privilege of wealth” was taking the places of a “privilege of birth. Reactionaries (nobles, and churchmen) challenged the reforms; so did the sans-culottes (sahn koo lohts)--”without breeches,” derived from the long trousers that, as working people, they wore instead of aristocratic knee breeches--who had supported the storming of the Bastille and October march to Versailles but gained little. They wanted government to narrow the gap between rich and poor by 1 increasing wages, 2) controlling food prices, 3) ending food shortages, 4) punishing food speculators, 5) redistributing the land.
In June 1791 Louis XVI attempted to flee France but he was recognized, captured at Varennes, and brought back to Paris. Meanwhile, “some European countries had become concerned about the French example and feared that revolution would spread to their countries. On August 27, 1791, Emperor Leopold II of Austria and King Frederick William II of Prussia issued the Declaration of Pilnitz, which invited other European monarchs to take `the most effectual means...to put the king of France in a state to strengthen, in the most perfect liberty, the bases of a monarchical government equally becoming to the rights of sovereigns and to the well-being of the French Nation.’ But European monarchs were too suspicious of each other to undertake such a plan, and in any case French enthusiasm for war led the Legislative Assembly to declare war on Austria on April 20 1792” (Spiel.4th Ed. 564).
“The French fared badly in the initial fighting, and loud recriminations were soon heard in Paris....Defeats in war coupled with economic shortages in the spring reinvigorated popular groups that had been dormant since the previous summer and led to renewed political demonstrations, especially against the king. Radical Parisian political groups, declaring themselves an insurrectionary commune, organized a mob attack on the royal palace and Legislative Assembly in August [10] 1792 [and] took the king captive” (Spiel.4th Ed. 564).
SEPTEMBER MASSACRES. “Early in September the Parisian crowd again made its will felt. During the first week of the month, in what are known as the September Massacres, the Paris Commune summarily executed or murdered about 1,200 people who were in the city jails. Many of these people were aristocrats or priests, but the majority were simply common criminals. The crowd had assumed that the prisoners were all counterrevolutionaries. The Paris Commune then compelled the Legislative Assembly to call for the election by universal manhood suffrage of a new assembly to write a democratic constitution. That body, called the Convention after its American counterpart of 1787, met on September 21, 1792” (Kagan 709).
III. First French Republic (1792-1799)
1. National Convention (1792-1795)
RULE OF THE GIRONDINS (1792-1793). “Socially, the composition of the National Convention was similar to its predecessors. Dominated by lawyers, professionals, and property owners, it also included for the first time a handful of artisans. Two-thirds of the deputies were under forty-five, and almost all had had political experience as a result of the revolution. Almost all were also intensely distrustful of the king and his activities. It was therefore no surprise that the conventions’ first major step on September 21 was to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic” (Spiel.4th Ed. 565). At this point the more moderate faction of the Jacobins (so-called because they first met at the Jacobin monastery of the Dominicans outside Paris), the Girondins (so called because most were from the department of the Gironde), were in power. In order to appease the radical Jacobins, in December 1792 the Girondins placed on trial and executed him January 21, 1793.
RULE OF THE JACOBINS (1793-1794). Yet this was not enough. Constant pressure was placed on the National Convention for more radical action. The Republic was suffering from internal as well as external threats (foreign invasions, internal insurrection, and economic crisis) that resulted in a change of leadership to the Jacobins who were willing to support the demands of the sans-cullottes with temporary governmental controls of the economy. “At the end of May and the beginning of June 1793, the Commune organized a demonstration, invaded the National Convention, and forced the arrest and execution of the leading Girondins, thus leaving the Mountain in control of the convention. The National Convention itself still did not rule all France” (Spiel.4th Ed. 565). This new government was still faced with internal and external threats. Other parts of France rejected the ascendancy of Paris and favored a decentralized republic. “Domestic turmoil was paralleled by a foreign crisis. By the beginning of 1793, after the king had been executed, much of Europe--an informal coalition of Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Dutch Republic--was pitted against France” (Spiel. 690).
“To administer the government, the convention gave broad powers to an executive committee known as the Committee of Public Safety, which was dominated initially by Danton. Maximilien Robespierre eventually became one of its most important members. For a twelve-month period, from 1793-1794, virtually the same twelve members were reelected and gave the country the leadership it needed to weather the domestic and foreign crises of 1793” (Spiel.4th Ed. 566).
A new Constitution of 1793 was written that gave the vote to all adult males, abolished slavery, abolished imprisonment for debt, fixed prices on bread and other essential goods, etc., but it was never put into effect because of the war. To fight foreign invaders, the Jacobins instituted a draft of all unmarried males 18-25 and eventually equipped a 1,169,000 men army, the largest ever seen in European history as they declared war on Great Britain, Holland and Spain. The rise of French Nationalism occurs as the Jacobins convinced this army that they were fighting not for money or king but for the Nation!
Meanwhile Robespierre (1758-1794), a deist who held to the ideals of the philosophes and envisioned an ideal Republic of Virtue, pursued its establishment religiously by executing Girondins, counterrevolutionary priests and nobles and their peasant supporters and profiteers who hoarded food. Somewhere between 40,000-50,000 people would perish (“The bulk of the Terror’s executions took place in the Vendee and in cities such as Loyons and Marseilles, places that had been in open rebellion against the authority of the National Convention” (Spiel.4th Ed. 567).
“In its attempt to create a new order, the National Convention also pursued a polity of dechristianization. The word ‘saint’ was removed from street names, churches were pillaged and closed by Revolutionary Armies, and priests were encouraged to marry” (Spiel.4th Ed. 570). A new republican calendar was adopted on October 5, 1793. “Years would no longer be numbered from the birth of Christ but from September 22, 1792, the day the French Republic was proclaimed....The calendar contained twelve months; each month consisted of three ten-day weeks (decades)with the tenth day of each week a rest-day (decadi). This eliminated Sundays and Sunday worship services and put an end to the ordering of French lives by a Christian calendar that emphasized Sundays, saints’ days, and church holidays and festivals....The months were given names that were supposed to evoke the seasons, the temperature, or the state of the vegetation: Vendemiaire (harvest--the first month of thirty days beginning September 22), Brumaire (mist), Frimaire (frost), Nivose (snow), Pluviose (rain), Ventose (wind), Germinal (seeding), Floreal (flowering), Prairal (meadows), Messidor (wheat harvest), Thermidor (heat), and Fructidor (ripening)” (Spiel.4th Ed. 570-1). [Napoleon would abandon this unpopular calendar on January 1, 1806.]
The Jacobins did all this to save the republic and they were successful--without them the Republic probably would have collapsed from foreign invasion or domestic anarchy.
THERMIDOREAN REACTION (1794-1795). After having military success and since fear of the collapse of the Republic had waned, on the 9th of Thermidor (July 27, 1794) Robespierre was arrested and then guillotined on July 28. Now Jacobins were massacred. “Throughout the country, people who had been involved in the Reign of Terror were attacked an often murdered” (Kagan 722). But soon “The Terror began to abate. The National Convention curtailed the power of the Committee of Public Safety, shut down the Jacobin club, and attempted to provide better protection for its deputies against the Parisian mobs. Churches were allowed to reopen for public worship while a decree of February 21, 1795, gave freedom of worship to all cults. Economic regulation was dropped in favor of laissez-faire policies, another clear indication that moderate forces were again gaining control of the Revolution. In addition, a new constitution was created in August 1795 that reflected this more conservative republicanism or a desire for a stability that did no sacrifice the ideals of 1789” (Spiel. 4th Ed. 572).
2. DIRECTORY (1795-1799). Next the Constitution of 1793 was declared void (never really put into effect) and the new Constitution of 1795 was adopted August 22, 1795. “To avoid the dangers of another single legislative assembly, the Constitution of 1795 established a national legislative assembly consisting of two chambers: a lower house, known as the council of 500, whose function was to initiate legislation, and an upper house of 250 members, the Council of Elders, composed of married or widowed members over forty, which accepted or rejected the proposed laws. The 750 members of the two legislative bodies were chosen by electors who had to be owners or renters of property worth between 100 and 200 days’ labor, a requirement that limited their number to 30,000, and even smaller base than the “constitution of 1791 had provided. The electors were chosen by the active citizens, now defined as all male taxpayers over twenty-one. The Council of elders elected five directors from a list presented by the Council of 500 to act as the executive authority or Directory” (Spiel.4th Ed. 572). France was safe and didn’t need the sans-culottes; the bourgeoisie are in full control. “On October 5, 1795--13 Vendemiaire--the sections of Paris led by the royalist rose up against the Convention. The government turned the artillery against the royalist rebels. A general named Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) commanded the cannon, and with a ‘whiff of grapeshot’ he dispersed the crowd” (Kagan 724).
IV. RESULTS
1. ended feudalism by ending the dominance of the landed aristocracy and reducing the church to merely a spiritual community.
2. bourgeoisie advanced the principle of careers open to talent rather than privilege of birth.
3. hastened the growth of the modern state (national--loyalty not to province or king but to “fatherland”; liberal--rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, freedom of religion, speech and press; secular--no divine right of king; no special position for church; rational--based on reason rather than tradition). The end of the Old Regime’s dynastic state. 4. unleashed 2 potentially destructive forces: total war and nationalism. These forces would contribute to the shattering of the humanist vision of the Enlightenment that had inspired it. Nationalism became the new religion!