From the very beginning, the French Revolution was recognized, by its participants as a momentous event of the age. One can say that politically, the modern world begins with this event. On the surface, it seems like a common rebellion against authority, hardly something new in world history. But the revolution was entirely new, because while in all previous history peoples have overthrown a king or a tyrant, they have always replaced the removed authority with a new authority. The people could decide who should not rule them, but not who should. Even the right of self-government of the ancient republics, or of the English colonists in America, was traditional, in contrast to the goals of the French revolution. For in both those cases, in order to rule, one had to be born a ruler, a free-born man in antiquity or a free born European in America. In Europe one had to be a member of the nobility to rule, and while it was not uncommon for subjects to rise up against their rulers, no one had conceived of a change so radical that the subjects became rulers themselves (9).
The revolution brought fundamental political advances: the idea of universal human rights, regardless of class or race or religion; the idea of politics being guided by the voice of the people. The very idea of equality as we understand it, that every person is born equal by the very fact of being born, in other words that equality is a birthright, was utterly unknown before the French Revolution.
In social terms, after the revolution, the productive classes came to the fore, displacing the ruling elites who had too often been exploiters. The church influence on society was also limited, important because the doctrines of the church often kept people in ignorance and mired in superstition. The revolution declared and advanced the emancipation of mankind from self-imposed chains, as Kant once said of the Enlightenment.
On the other hand, the revolution also had a dark side. As opposition to the goals of the revolution mounted, the revolution radicalized and militarized itself in the name of protecting the advances made. Inevitably one party took over, claiming to have all the revolutionary virtues and the monopoly on ideas. This party eventually began to exclude everyone else who didn't agree, and ended in a paranoia, killing the very children it had fathered. The movement of conservatism, as a reaction to the excesses of the revolution, dates from this period, as does the structure of the political spectrum, from left to right.
Although France experienced an increase in economic growth in the 18th century, its wealth was not evenly distributed. The long term causes of the Revolution must be sought therefore in the economic and social conditions of French society: before the revolution, French society was grounded in the inequality of rights or the idea of privilege. The population of 27 million was divided, as it had been since the Middle Ages, into three orders or estates.
The first estate consisted of the clergy and numbered about 130,000 people. The church owned approximately 10% of the land. Clergy were exempt from the taille, France's chief tax, although the church had agreed to pay a "voluntary" contribution every five years to the state. The clergy were also divided between the higher clergy, usually of aristocratic origin and the parish priests, who were usually commoners.
The second estate was the nobility, composed of no more than 350,000 people who nevertheless owned about 25 to 30 percent of the land. As a group, the nobility sought to expand their privileges at the expense of the monarchy, and to maintain their monopoly of positions in the army, church and government.
Although there were many poor nobles, on the whole, the fortunes of the wealthy aristocrats outstripped those of the others in French society. Generally, the nobles tended to marry within their own ranks making themselves a closed group. Although their privileges varied from region,. just having privileges was a hallmark of nobility. Common to all were tax exemptions, especially from the taille.
The Third Estate, or the commoners of society, constituted the overwhelming majority of the French population. They were divided by vast differences in occupation, level of education and wealth. The largest segment were the peasants, perhaps 75-80%. They owned between 35 and 40% of the land, though over half of them had little or no land to live on, as their estates became divided into ever smaller particles. Although peasants were not serfs, they still owed many "feudal obligations" to the lords, such as payment of fees for use of village facilities like the flour mill, an oven or a winepress. Salt was very important for preserving food and the peasants had to pay a heavy salt tax to get it. They also owed tithes (10% of wealth) to the clergy. The peasants greatly resented these obligations as well as the attempts by noble landowners in the 18th century to enclose open fields and divide village common lands, since enclosure eliminated the open pastures where poor peasants grazed their livestock.
Another part of the third estate consisted of skilled artisans, shopkeepers and other wage earners in the cities. In the 18th century consumer prices rose faster than wages, with the result that these urban groups experienced a noticeable decline in purchasing power. In Paris, for example, income lagged behind food prices and esp. behind a 140% rise in rents for working people in skilled and unskilled trades. The economic discontent of these workers led them to play an important part in the revolution, esp. in the city of Paris. One historian has charted the ups and downs of revolutionary riots in Paris by showing their correlation to changes in bread prices. Sudden increases in the prices of bread, which constituted 3/4 of an ordinary person's diet, and cost 1/3 to 1/2 of an ordinary person's income, immediately affected public order. People expected bread prices to be controlled. They grew desperate when prices rose, and often had recourse to mob action to try and change the situation. .
About 8% or 2.3 million people constituted the bourgeoisie or middle classes who owned about 20 to 25% of the land. This group included merchants, industrialists and bankers who controlled the resources of trade, manufacturing and finance and benefited from the economic prosperity after 1730. The bourgeoisie also included professional people - lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers. These people had their own set of grievances because they had been blocked by the nobility from rising in social status even though they often had great wealth or power.
An older theory of the revolution saw the middle classes as one bloc opposed to the nobility and the revolution was a victory of a unified middle class against a unified nobility. But this is not a true picture. Remarkable similarities existed at the upper levels between the wealthy bourgeoisie and the nobility. The middle classes bought their way into the nobility and the nobility were much engaged in commerce and capitalism. Moreover both groups were greatly influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Both groups, long accustomed to a new socio-economic reality based on wealth and economic achievement, were increasingly frustrated by a monarchical system resting on privileges and on an old and rigid social order based on the concept of estates. The opposition of these elites to the old order ultimately led them to take drastic action against the monarchical regime, although they soon split over the question of how far to proceed in eliminating traditional privileges. In a real sense, the Revolution had its origins in political grievances on all sides.
Besides these long term causes, the failure of the French monarchy was exacerbated by specific problems of the 1780s and the beginnings of a manufacturing depression resulting in food shortages, rising prices for food and other necessities and unemployment in the cities. The number of poor, estimated at around 1/3 of the population, reached crisis proportions on the eve of the revolution. One English traveler noted in his diary about the poor in the countryside; "All the country girls and women are without shoes or stockings, and the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor stockings to their feet. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity."
The immediate cause of the French Revolution was the near collapse of the government finances. French government expenditures continued to grow due to costly wars (like the American War of Independence) and royal extravagance (like the expenses incurred by Marie Antoinette). Since the government responded by borrowing, by 1788 the interest on the debt alone constituted half of the government's spending. The King's finance ministry wrestled with the problem but met with resistance. In 1787 an Assembly of Notables was convened to deal with the problem, but they refused to cooperate with each other. As a result, on the verge of complete financial collapse, the government was finally forced to call a meeting of the Estates-General, the French parliamentary body that had not met since 1614. By calling this body, the government was virtually admitting that the consent of the nation was required to raise taxes.
The Estates General consisted of representatives from the three order of society. In the elections to the EG, the government ruled that the Third Estate should get double representation (it did after all constitute 97% of the population). Thus while the First estate and the Second had about 300 delegates each, the commoners had almost 600 representatives. Two thirds were lawyers, and three fourths were from towns. Of the 282 nobles, around 90 were liberal minded and influenced by the Enlightenment. A similar number of the clergy were also open to the ideas of reform and enlightenment. The problem was that each of the estates had one vote, so that the conservative nobles and clergy together could always outvote the more numerous commoners and their enlightened supporters.
The Estates General opened at Versailles on May 5, 1789. From all over the country delegates came with lists of specific problems that people thought needed attention. The meeting was divided at the start by the question whether voting should be by order or by head count. As it was, each order had veto power over the other two, which meant that deadlocks were certain to arise, particularly because of vetoes by the nobility.
The failure of the government to assume the leadership at the opening of the Estates General gave the Third Estate an opportunity to push for its demands for voting by head. Since it had double representation, with the assistance of liberal nobles and clerics, it could turn the three estates into a single-chamber legislature that would reform France in its own way.
One representative, the Abbey Sieyes, issued a pamphlet in which he asked "What is the Third Estate?" Everything. What has it been thus far in the political order? Nothing. What does it demand? To become something.
But Sieyes did not represent the general feeling of 1789. Most delegates wanted to make changes within a framework of respect for the authority of the king. Indeed the members of the Third Estate hoped very much that the King would take their side against the greedy nobles. At this point they hoped that reform would come about by slow and incremental changes.
When the First Estate declared in favor of voting by order, the Third Estate felt it was time to make a move. On June 17, 1789, the Third state voted to constitute itself a National Assembly," and decided to draw up a constitution. 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'd produced a French Constitution. These actions of June 17 and 20th were significant, since they constituted a first step towards revolution: they had broken the law by acting as a political body representing the entire nation instead of just their order. This first step toward revolution was thwarted by the King, who unfortunately decided to side with the nobility, and threatened to dissolve the Estates General. Louis XVI now prepared to use force. The revolution of the lawyers (for they had come up with the idea of a national assembly) seemed doomed.
The intervention of the common people, the crowds (or the mob, to be less polite), however, in a series of urban and rural uprisings in July and August of 1789, saved the Third Estate from the king's attempt to stop the revolution. From now on, the people on the street and in the countryside would be used by both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary politicians and mobilized to support their interests. the common people had their own agenda as well and would use the name of the Third Estate to wage a war on the rich, claiming that the aristocrats were plotting to destroy the Estates General and retain its privileges. This was not actually what the deputies of the Third Estate had had in mind.
The most famous of these urban uprisings was the Fall of the Bastille. The king decided to beef up his arsenal of weapons and soldiers in order to have the military force to dissolve the Estates General. But these actions inflamed the passions of public opinion. Increased mob activity in Paris led the Parisian leaders to form a permanent committee to keep order. Needing arms, they organized a popular force to capture the Invalides, a royal armory, and on July 14 attacked the Bastille, another royal armory. But the Bastille had also been a state prison, and though it now contained only seven prisoners (five forgers and two insane people) its fall quickly became a popular symbol of triumph over despotism. Paris was turned over to the mob and Louis XVI was soon informed that the royal troops were unreliable. When told of this by an advisor, the king is supposed to have said, "but that's a revolt," No sire, his advisor replied, that's a revolution.
Louis XVI had to accept the fact that his royal authority had collapsed, he could no longer enforce his will. He confirmed the appointment of the Marquis de Lafayette as commander of a newly created citizens militia known as the national Guard. The fall of the Bastille had saved the National Assembly from extinction.
At the same time, independently of what was going on in Paris, popular revolutions broke out in numerous cities. And out in the countryside the peasants had gotten the word and were rising up against the hated feudal lords.
Among the peasants the entire seigniorial system with its fees and obligations, made worse by the economic and fiscal troubles of the great estate holders - whether noble or bourgeois - in the difficult decade of the 1780s, created the conditions for a popular uprising. The peasants were encouraged by the events in Paris and elsewhere to now take matters into their own hands. From July 19 to August 3, peasant rebellions occurred in five major areas of France. Patterns varied. In some place, they simply forced their lay and ecclesiastical lords (10).
to renounce dues and tithes; elsewhere they burned charters which listed their obligations. The peasants were not acting in blind fury. they knew what they were doing. many also believed that the king supported their actions.
The agrarian revolts served as a backdrop to the Great Fear, a vast panic that spread like wildfire through France between July 20 and August 6. Fear of invasion by foreign troops, aided by a supposed aristocratic plot, encouraged the formation of more citizen's militias and permanent committees. The greatest impact of the agrarian revolts and the Great Fear was on the National Assembly meeting in Versailles. We now turn to an examination of its attempts to reform France.
One of the first acts of the National Assembly, which was also called the Constituent Assembly because from 1789 to 1791 it was writing a new constitution, was to destroy the relics of feudalism or aristocratic privileges. On the night of August 4, 1789, (lasting until the wee hours of the 5th), the National Assembly in an astonishing session voted to abolish seigniorial rights as well as the fiscal privileges of nobles, clergy, towns and provinces.
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. this charter owed much to the ideas of the enlightenment and to the American declaration of independence and American state constitutions. The declaration began with a ringing affirmation of the "rights of man" to "liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. It went on to affirm the destruction of aristocratic privileges and equal rights for all men, and access to public offices based on talent. The monarchy was restricted and all citizens were to have a right to take part in the legislative process. Freedom of speech and press were coupled with the outlawing of arbitrary arrests.
In the meantime, Louis XVI remained inactive and sulking at Versailles, prodded on by his wife and her sycophants to do something. early in October, a Parisian crowd, initiated by several thousand women upset by scarcity of bread in the capital, but soon taken over by lafayette's National Guard, marched to Versailles and forced the king to accept the constitutional decrees and to change his residence to Paris. The King and his family became virtual prisoners in Paris.
Because the Catholic Church was viewed as an important pillar of the old order, reforms soon overtook it. Because of the need for money, most of the lands were confiscated. the Church was also secularized - a new civic constitution of the clergy was put into effect. Both bishops and priests of the Catholic Church were to be elected by the people and swear allegiance to the constitution. Since the pope forbade it, only 54% of the Parish clergy took the oath while the majority of bishops refused. This was an important development because the Catholic Church was still a very important institution in French life, and it now became the sworn enemy of the Revolution, causing great soul-searching on the part of ordinary citizens. This has often been viewed as a serious tactical blunder on the part of the National Assembly for it gave the counter-revolution a popular base from which to operate.
By 1791, the National Assembly had finally completed a new constitution that established a limited monarchy, which ruled over a legislature that had the most power to discuss and pass laws. The National Assembly also undertook an administrative restructuring of France that divided France into 83 departments, roughly equal in size and population.
By 1791, France had moved into a revolutionary reordering of the Old Regime that had been achieved by a revolutionary consensus that was largely the work of the wealthier bourgeoisie. By mid 1791, however, this consensus faced growing opposition by clerics angered by the civil constitution, the lower classes hurt by the rise in the cost of living and peasants who were still upset by the fact that some dues had still not been abolished. Some political clubs came to the surface, that offered more radical solutions to the nation's problems. The most famous were the Jacobins, who got their name from their gathering place, an old Jacobean convent in Paris. Jacobin clubs also formed in the provinces where they served primarily as discussion groups. Eventually all these groups formed together to form an extensive correspondence network of over 900 clubs.
The government was also facing severe financial difficulties because of massive tax evasion. Despite all their problems, the bourgeois politicians in charge remained relatively unified on the basis of their trust in the King. But Louis XVI disastrously undercut them. Quite upset with the whole turn of events, he sought to flee France in June 1791 and almost succeeded before being recognized, captured at Varennes (on the Belgian border) and brought back to Paris. While radicals called for the king to be deposed, the members of the National Assembly, fearful of the popular forces in Paris calling for a republic, chose to ignore the king's flight and pretended that he had been kidnapped. In this unsettled situation, with a discredited and seemingly disloyal monarch, the new Legislative Assembly held its first session in October 1791.
The clerics and nobles were now largely gone from the assembly. Most of the representatives were men of property, many were lawyers. Most had gained their political experience through the National Guard or political clubs. The King made now what seemed to be a genuine effort to work with the new Legislative Assembly, but France's relations with the rest of Europe soon led to Louis's downfall.
Over a period of time, 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 Pillnitz, which invited other European monarchs to help out the King of France. Although the other European monarchs were too suspicious of each other to undertake such a plan, the declaration put pressure on the revolutionaries to consolidate their forces.
On April 20, 1792, the legislative Assembly declared war on Austria, suspecting that the Hapsburgs were going to invade France. An army based on volunteers was raised and put into the field. The French fared badly at first and soon people began looking for a scapegoat. Many suspected that the King and the generals were betraying the revolution. Many of the political clubs began agitating against the king. In August 1792 a mob attacked the royal palace and the legislative assembly, took the king captive, and forced the Legislative Assembly to call for a National Convention, chosen on the basis of universal male suffrage, to decide on the future form of the government. The French Revolution was now about to enter a more radical stage as power passed from the assembly to the new Paris Commune composed of many who proudly called themselves the sans-culottes, ordinary patriots without fine clothes. It was in this situation that Robespierre and Danton emerged from obscurity to lead the revolution into its next phase. In fact the sans-culottes weren't the working poor, they were often merchants or better off artisans who were often the elite of their neighborhoods and trades.
Before the National Convention met, the Paris Commune dominated the political scene. Led by the newly appointed minister of justice. George Danton, the sans-culottes sought revenge on those who aided the king and resisted the popular will. Thousands of presumed traitors were arrested and then massacred as ordinary Parisian tradesmen and artisans solved the problem of overcrowded prisons by mass executions of their inmates. In Sept. 1792, the newly elected National Convention began its sessions. Although it was called only to draft a new constitution, it also acted as the sovereign ruling body of France.
The Convention's first major step was to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic. But that was as far as the Convention could agree and soon the delegates split into factions concerning the fate of the king. The two most important were the Girondins and the Mountain. Both were members of the Jacobin Club.
Representing primarily the provinces, the Girondins came to fear the radical mobs in Paris and were disposed to keep the King alive as a hedge against further eventualities. The Mountain, on the other hand, represented the interests of the city of Paris and owed much of its strength to the radical and popular elements of the city, although they themselves were middle class. The Mountain won out at the beginning of 1793 when the Jacobins passed a decree condemning Louis XVI to death, although be a very narrow margin. On January 21, 1793 the King was executed and the destruction of the Old Regime was complete. Now there could be no turning back. But the death of the king meant that new enemies were created and the old enemies strengthened in their resolve to destroy the revolution.
Within Paris, the local government was controlled by the Commune, which drew a number of its leaders from the working classes. The Commune favored radical change and put pressure on the National Convention, pushing it to ever more radical positions. At the end of May and the beginning of June 1793, the Commune organized a demonstration, invaded the National Convention, and forced the arrest of the leading Girondins, thus leaving the Mountain in control of the Convention. But the Convention itself did not rule all of France. Its authority was repudiated in Western France, particularly in the department of the Vendee, by peasants who revolted against the military draft. The Vendee Revolt soon escalated into a full scale counter-revolution, supporting the monarchy and the priests. Some of the provincial cities, including Lyons and Marseilles, also began to break away from central authority. These cities rejected being controlled and administered from Paris, and wanted a decentralized republic, not a monarchy.
Domestic crisis was paralleled by 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. Carried away by their own successes and their own rhetoric, the French welcomed the struggle. Danton exclaimed to the Convention:
"They threaten you with Kings! You have thrown down your gauntlet to them, and this gauntlet is a king's head. the signal of their coming death."
Grossly overextended, the French armies began to experience reverses, and by late spring some members of the anti-French coalition were poised for an invasion of France. If successful, both the revolution and the revolutionaries would be destroyed and the Old Regime re-established. The revolution, in other words, had reached a decisive moment - do or die!
To meet these crises, the program of the National Convention became one of curbing anti-revolutionary tendencies at home, while attempting to win the war by a great national mobilization. To administer the government, the convention gave broad powers to an executive committee known as the Committee for Public Safety, which was dominated by Danton. But Maximillian Robespierre eventually became one of its most important members. For a 12 month period, from the summer of 1793 to the summer of 1794, virtually the same 12 members were re-elected and ruled the country as virtual dictators.
In August, 1793, full mobilization was ordered. In less than a year, the French revolutionary government had raised an army of 650,000 men. By Sept. 1794 it numbered almost 1.2 million. This was the largest army ever seen in European history. It now pushed the allies across the Rhine and even conquered the Austrian Netherlands. By May 1795, the anti-French coalition of 1793 was breaking up.
Historians have focused on the creation of the French revolutionary army as an important step in the creation of modern nationalism. Previously wars had been fought between governments or ruling dynasties by relatively small armies of professional soldiers. Now this was people's army and a "people's war." The entire nation was involved. But when the people became involved, this meant that wars increased in ferocity and determination. Carnage was appalling at times. The wars of the French Revolutionary era opened the door to the total war of the modern world.
(9) see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963).
(10) Since the Church owned much land in pre-revolutionary France, the priests were also landlords (ecclesiastic), in contrast to the aristocratic and bourgeois landowners (lay).