I | INTRODUCTION |
French
Revolution, major transformation of the society and political system of
France, lasting from 1789 to 1799. During the course of the Revolution, France
was temporarily transformed from an absolute monarchy, where the king
monopolized power, to a republic of theoretically free and equal citizens. The
effects of the French Revolution were widespread, both inside and outside of
France, and the Revolution ranks as one of the most important events in the
history of Europe.
During the ten years of the Revolution, France
first transformed and then dismantled the Old Regime, the political and social
system that existed in France before 1789, and replaced it with a series of
different governments. Although none of these governments lasted more than four
years, the many initiatives they enacted permanently altered France’s political
system. These initiatives included the drafting of several bills of rights and
constitutions, the establishment of legal equality among all citizens,
experiments with representative democracy, the incorporation of the church into
the state, and the reconstruction of state administration and the law code.
Many of these changes were adopted elsewhere
in Europe as well. Change was a matter of choice in some places, but in others
it was imposed by the French army during the French Revolutionary Wars
(1792-1797) and the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). To later generations of
Europeans and non-Europeans who sought to overturn their political and social
systems, the French Revolution provided the most influential model of popular
insurrection until the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
II | CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION |
From the beginning of the 20th century until
the 1970s, the French Revolution was most commonly described as the result of
the growing economic and social importance of the bourgeoisie, or middle
class. The bourgeoisie, it was believed, overthrew the Old Regime because that
regime had given power and privilege to other classes—the nobility and the
clergy—who prevented the bourgeoisie from advancing socially and politically.
Recently this interpretation has been replaced by one that relies less on social
and economic factors and more on political ones. Economic recession in the 1770s
may have frustrated some bourgeois in their rise to power and wealth, and rising
bread prices just before the Revolution certainly increased discontent among
workers and peasants. Yet it is now commonly believed that the revolutionary
process started with a crisis in the French state.
By 1789 many French people had become
critical of the monarchy, even though it had been largely successful in
militarily defending France and in quelling domestic religious and political
violence. They resented the rising and unequal taxes, the persecution of
religious minorities, and government interference in their private lives. These
resentments, coupled with an inefficient government and an antiquated legal
system, made the government seem increasingly illegitimate to the French people.
The royal court at Versailles, which had been developed to impress the French
people and Europe generally, came to symbolize the waste and corruption of the
entire Old Regime.
A | Parlements and Philosophes |
During the 18th century, criticism of the
French monarchy also came from people who worked for the Old Regime. Some of the
king’s own ministers criticized past practices and proposed reforms, but a more
influential source of dissent was the parlements, 13 regional royal
courts led by the Parlement of Paris. The parlements were empowered to register
royal decrees, and all decrees had to be registered by the parlements before
becoming law. In this capacity, the parlements frequently protested royal
initiatives that they believed to threaten the traditional rights and liberties
of the people. In widely distributed publications, they held up the image of a
historically free France and denounced the absolute rule of the crown that in
their view threatened traditional liberties by imposing religious orthodoxy and
new taxes.
These protests blended with those of
others, most notably an influential group of professional intellectuals called
the philosophes. Like those who supported the parlements, the philosophes
did not advocate violent revolution. Yet, they claimed to speak on behalf of the
public, arguing that people had certain natural rights and that governments
existed to guarantee these rights. In a stream of pamphlets and treatises—many
of them printed and circulated illegally—they ridiculed the Old Regime’s
inefficiencies and its abuses of power.
During this time, the parlementaires and
the philosophes together crafted a vocabulary that would be used later to define
and debate political issues during the Revolution. They redefined such terms as
despotism, or the oppression of a people by an arbitrary ruler;
liberty and rights; and the nation.
B | Fiscal Crisis |
The discontent of the French people might
not have brought about a political revolution if there had not been a fiscal
crisis in the late 1780s. Like so much else in the Old Regime, the monarchy’s
financial system was inefficient and antiquated. France had neither a national
bank nor a centralized national treasury. The nobility and clergy—many of them
very wealthy—paid substantially less in taxes than other groups, notably the
much poorer peasantry. Similarly, the amount of tax charged varied widely from
one region to another.
Furthermore, the monarchy almost always
spent more each year than it collected in taxes; consequently, it was forced to
borrow, which it did increasingly during the 18th century. Debt grew in part
because France participated in a series of costly wars—the War of the Austrian
Succession (1740-1748), the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), and the American
Revolution (1775-1783). Large existing debts and a history of renouncing earlier
ones meant that the country was forced to borrow at higher interest rates than
some other countries, further adding to the already massive debt. By 1789 the
state was forced to spend nearly half its yearly revenues paying the interest it
owed.
B1 | Attempts at Reform |
Financial reform was attempted before
1789. Upon his accession to the throne in 1774, Louis XVI appointed the
reform-minded Anne Robert Jacques Turgot as chief finance minister. Between 1774
and 1776 Turgot sought to cut government expenses and to increase revenues. He
removed government restrictions on the sale and distribution of grain in order
to increase grain sales and, in turn, government revenue. Jacques Necker,
director of government finance between 1777 and 1781, reformed the treasury
system and published an analysis of the state of government finance in 1781 as a
means to restore confidence in its soundness. But most of these reforms were
soon undone as the result of pressure from a variety of financial groups, and
the government continued to borrow at high rates of interest through the
1780s.
Charles Alexandre de Calonne was
appointed minister of finance in 1783, and three years later he proposed a new
general plan resembling Turgot’s. He wanted to float new loans to cover
immediate expenses, revoke some tax exemptions, replace older taxes with a new
universal land tax and a stamp tax, convene regional assemblies to oversee the
new taxes, and remove more restrictions from the grain trade.
B2 | Assembly of Notables and Estates-General |
To pressure the parlements into
accepting the plan, Calonne decided to gain prior approval of it from an
Assembly of Notables—a group of hand-picked dignitaries he thought would
sympathize with his views. But Calonne had badly miscalculated. Meeting in
January 1787, the assembly refused to believe that a financial crisis really
existed. They had been influenced by Necker’s argument that state finances were
sound and suspected that the monarchy was only trying to squeeze more money from
the people. They insisted on examining state accounts. Despite a public appeal
for support, Calonne was fired and replaced by Loménie de Brienne in April
1787.
Brienne was also unable to win the
support of the assembly, and in May 1787 it was dismissed. Over the summer and
early fall, Brienne repeatedly tried to strike a compromise with the Parlement
of Paris. But the compromise fell through when the king prevented the Parlement
from voting on proposed loans, an act that was seen as yet more evidence of
despotism. In May 1788 the government abolished all the parlements in a general
restructuring of the judiciary.
Public response to the actions of the
king was strong and even violent. People began to ignore royal edicts and
assault royal officials, and pamphlets denouncing despotism inundated the
country. At the same time, people began to call for an immediate meeting of the
Estates-General to deal with the crisis. The Estates-General was a consultative
assembly composed of representatives from the three French estates, or legally
defined social classes: clergy, nobility, and commoners. It had last been
convened in 1614. Under increasing political pressure and faced with the total
collapse of its finances in August 1788, the Old Regime began to unravel.
Brienne was dismissed, Necker reinstated, and the Estates-General was called to
meet on May 1, 1789.
III | BEGINNING OF REVOLUTION |
Almost immediately contention arose
regarding voting procedures in the upcoming Estates-General. In its last
meeting, voting had been organized by estate, with each of the three estates
meeting separately and each having one vote. In this way the privileged classes
had combined to outvote the third estate, which constituted more than 90 percent
of the population. In registering the edict to convene the Estates-General, the
Parlement of Paris, which had been reinstated by the monarchy on September 23,
1788, ruled in favor of keeping this form of voting. The Parlement probably did
this more to prevent the monarchy from potentially exploiting any new voting
system to its advantage than to preserve noble privilege. However, many
observers read this decision as a betrayal of the third estate. As a result, a
flood of pamphlets appeared demanding a vote by head at the Estates-General—that
is, a procedure whereby each deputy was to cast one vote in a single chamber
composed of all three estates. This method would give each estate a number of
votes that more accurately represented its population and would make it more
difficult for the first two estates to routinely outvote the third. Now two
battles were being waged at the same time: one to protect the nation’s liberty
against royal despotism, and the other over how the nation would be represented
in the Estates-General.
During the early months of 1789, the three
estates prepared for the coming meeting by selecting deputies and drawing up
cahiers des doléances (lists of grievances). These lists reflected
overwhelming agreement in favor of limiting the power of the king and his
administrators and establishing a permanent legislative assembly. In an effort
to satisfy the third estate, the monarchy had agreed to double the number of
their representatives but then took no firm stand on whether the voting would
proceed by estate or by head.
When the Estates-General assembled at
Versailles in May 1789, the monarchy proposed no specific financial plan for
debate and left the voting issue unsettled. As a result, the estates spent their
time engaged in debate of the voting procedure, and little was
accomplished.
A | National Assembly |
Five wasted weeks later, the third
estate finally took the initiative by inviting the clergy and nobility to join
them in a single-chambered legislature where the voting would be by head. Some
individual members of the other estates did so, and on June 17, 1789, they
together proclaimed themselves to be the National Assembly (also later called
the Constituent Assembly).
When officials locked their regular
meeting place to prepare it for a royal address, members of the National
Assembly concluded their initiative was about to be crushed. Regrouping at a
nearby indoor tennis court on June 20, they swore not to disband until France
had a constitution. This pledge became known as the Tennis Court Oath.
B | Storming of the Bastille |
On June 23, 1789, Louis XVI belatedly
proposed a major overhaul of the financial system, agreed to seek the consent of
the deputies for all new loans and taxes, and proposed other important reforms.
But he spoiled the effect by refusing to recognize the transformation of the
Estates-General into the National Assembly and by insisting upon voting by
estate—already a dying cause. Moreover, he inspired new fears by surrounding the
meeting hall of the deputies with a large number of soldiers. Faced with
stiffening resistance by the third estate and increasing willingness of deputies
from the clergy and nobility to join the third estate in the National Assembly,
the king suddenly changed course and agreed to a vote by head on June 27.
Despite much rejoicing, suspicions of the
king’s intentions ran high. Royal troops began to thicken near Paris, and on
July 11 the still-popular Necker was dismissed. To people at the time and to
many later on, these developments were clear signs that the king sought to undo
the events of the previous weeks.
Crowds began to roam Paris looking for
arms to fight off a royal attack. On July 14 these crowds assaulted the
Bastille, a large fortress on the eastern edge of the city. They believed that
it contained munitions and many prisoners of despotism, but in fact, the
fortress housed only seven inmates at the time. The storming of the Bastille
marked a turning point—attempts at reform had become a full-scale revolution.
Faced with this insurrection, the monarchy backed down. The troops were
withdrawn, and Necker was recalled.
IV | THE MODERATE REVOLUTION |
In the year leading up to the storming of
the Bastille, the economic problems of many common people had become steadily
worse, largely because poor weather conditions had ruined the harvest. As a
result, the price of bread—the most important food of the poorer
classes—increased. Tensions and violence grew in both the cities and the
countryside during the spring and summer of 1789. While hungry artisans revolted
in urban areas, starved peasants scoured the provinces in search of food and
work. These vagrants were rumored to be armed agents of landlords hired to
destroy crops and harass the common people. Many rural peasants were gripped by
a panic, known as the Great Fear. They attacked the residences of their
landlords in hopes of protecting local grain supplies and reducing rents on
their land.
Both afraid of and politically benefiting
from this wave of popular violence, leaders of the revolutionary movement in
Paris began to massively restructure the state. On the night of August 4, 1789,
one nobleman after another renounced his personal privileges. Before the night
was over, the National Assembly declared an end to the feudal system, the
traditional system of rights and obligations that had reinforced inherited
inequality under the Old Regime. The exact meaning of this resolution as it
applied to specific privileges, especially economic ones, took years to sort
out. But it provided the legal foundation for gradually scaling back the feudal
dues peasants owed to landlords and for eliminating the last vestiges of
serfdom, the system that legally bound the peasants to live and work on
the landlords’ estates.
At the end of August, the National Assembly
promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Conceived
as the prologue to a new constitution that was not yet drafted, the declaration
was a short, concise document ensuring such basic personal rights as those of
property, free speech, and personal security. It left unresolved the rights of
women and the limits of individual rights in relation to the power of the newly
emerging state. But by recognizing the source of sovereignty in the people, it
undermined the idea that the king ruled by divine right (see Divine Right
of Kings).
A | Restructuring the State |
As these developments unfolded, Louis XVI
once again failed to act decisively. The queen, Marie-Antoinette, feared
catastrophe if events continued on their current course and advocated a hard
line. But power was quickly slipping away from the king, as revolutionaries
began to organize political clubs and an influential periodical press. Having
lost control of events, Louis was forced to yield to them. He gave in so
reluctantly—for example, taking months to approve the August 4, 1789, decrees
and the Declaration of Rights—that hostility to the crown only increased.
When rumors circulated that guests at a
royal banquet had trampled on revolutionary insignia, a crowd of many thousands,
most of them women who were also protesting the high cost of bread, marched to
Versailles on October 5. They were accompanied by National Guards, commanded by
the Marquis de Lafayette. The Guards were barely able to prevent wholesale
massacre, and the crowd forced the royal family to leave Versailles for Paris,
never to return. The king and his family were now, in effect, prisoners, forced
to inhabit the Tuilerie Palace along with the National Assembly, which moved
there as well. Paris had replaced Versailles as the center of power, and the
government was now more vulnerable than ever to the will of the restless, and
occasionally violent, people of the city.
A1 | Political Change: Constitutional Monarchy |
The National Assembly next focused on
writing a new constitution, a process that took more than two years. Although it
was agreed that France would remain a monarchy, the Assembly decided almost
immediately that the constitution would not simply reform the old order, as the
more moderate deputies wanted. Instead, it transformed the political system of
the Old Regime, but preserved the monarchy.
The new constitution was designed to
prevent the return of despotism by making all government officials subject to
the rule of law. It proclaimed France as a united, sovereign kingdom, dissolved
the entire system of royal administration, and adopted a system of federalism
that shifted authority from Paris to the localities. France was divided into 83
districts called departments, each of which would elect administrators to
execute laws, maintain public order, levy taxes, and oversee education and poor
relief.
The powers of the national government
were divided among separate, independent branches. The chief executive was to be
the king, who would continue to inherit his office, but his powers were to be
limited, particularly in legislative matters. The king was allowed only a
suspensive veto, whereby he could at most delay the laws passed by the assembly.
As the only law-making body, the single-chambered Legislative Assembly was the
heart of the state, enjoying wide powers. Although the right to vote was
extended to more than half the adult male population—called active
citizens—election to the assembly was made a complex process. Very
restrictive qualifications made only about 50,000 men (out of about 26 million
French people) eligible to serve as deputies. Like the administration of the
departments, the judiciary was also decentralized. Legal procedure was
streamlined, and torture banned.
A2 | Social Change: Equal Rights |
In addition to reconstituting the state,
the National Assembly made many changes to the existing social order. Among the
most notable changes were the elimination of the nobility as a legally defined
class and the granting of the same civil rights to all citizens; the elimination
of guilds and other organizations that monopolized production, controlled prices
and wages, or obstructed economic activity through strikes; the extension of
rights to blacks in France and to mulattoes in France’s Caribbean colonies,
though not the outright abolition of slavery; and the granting of full civil
rights to religious minorities, including Protestants and Jews.
A3 | Religious Change: Civil Constitution of the Clergy |
Political and social restructuring on
this scale raised complicated issues regarding the Catholic Church. The clergy
had enjoyed extensive property rights and special privileges under the Old
Regime and had long been a target of criticism. The National Assembly
incorporated the church within the state, stripping clerics of their property
and special rights. In return, the state assumed the large debts of the church
and paid the clergy a salary. Dioceses were redrawn to correspond to
departments. A presiding bishop would administer each diocese, with local
priests beneath him. Since active citizens would elect the bishops and the
priests, a Protestant, Jew, or atheist might be chosen to fill these positions.
Finally, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 required all priests and
bishops to swear an oath of loyalty to the new order or face dismissal.
Almost half the parish priests and
bishops (called the refractory clergy) refused to take the oath. This
marked an important turn of events. Before the Civil Constitution, opposition to
the Revolution had remained a scattered affair. It had been led by an
ineffective group of high nobles called the émigrés, who had fled
the country beginning in July 1789 and had been conspiring from abroad ever
since. More than anything else, the Civil Constitution and the oath solidified
resistance to the Revolution by giving the resistance a religious justification
and publicly designating a group of influential individuals—the refractory
clergy—as enemies of the new state.
Although there were many reasons for the
Civil Constitution, financial considerations were some of the most important.
The government’s fiscal problems continued well past 1789. The assembly had
assumed the Old Regime’s debts, but tax collections had been interrupted by
administrative disorders and simple refusals to pay. To cover expenditures, the
assembly issued bonds, called assignats; then to repay the
assignats, it confiscated and sold the church’s considerable property
holdings. The government justified this practice by saying that church property
belonged to the nation.
B | Growing Factionalism |
All these measures were vigorously debated
inside and outside the assembly. The assembly had been divided from the start
into a conservative right that wanted to limit change and a radical left that
wanted major social and political reforms. The assembly therefore lacked a
unified voice. As head of state, the king was expected to provide this unifying
influence, even if his power was formally limited. However, hopes that the king
would step in and fill this role were dashed in June 1791 when the royal family
fled Paris in disguise, leaving behind a manifesto denouncing nearly all the
Revolution had accomplished since 1789. Poorly planned and executed, the effort
ended with the royal family’s arrest at the border town of Varennes. From there
they were returned to Paris under heavy guard, now more prisoners than
ever.
Because so much had been expected of the
king, the Varennes fiasco proved more of a shock than could be absorbed all at
once. In an attempt to recover, assembly leaders announced that the incident had
been a case of kidnapping, not an escape, and in mid-July the assembly voted to
clear the king of all responsibility for what had happened. But these fictions
were hardly convincing, and once they collapsed, so did the likelihood of ending
the Revolution and establishing a stable government. On the left, moderate
revolutionaries who sought to keep the monarchy, called Feuillants, split
from the more radical revolutionaries, known as the Cordeliers and the
Jacobins, who now began to talk openly about replacing the monarchy with
a republic.
The king reluctantly approved the new
constitution on September 14, 1791. Alarmed by the radical direction the
Revolution was taking, more nobles began to cross the border to become émigrés.
Pressured by these émigrés and concerned about the potential effects of the
Revolution on their own kingdoms, the Austrian emperor and Prussian king issued
the Declaration of Pillnitz on August 27. In this declaration they announced a
rather vague willingness to intervene militarily on behalf of the French
monarchy. Unclear as it was, the declaration provoked fears of an invasion.
It was under these threatening
circumstances that the new constitution took effect and the Legislative Assembly
first met on October 1, 1791. At first, the assembly got along remarkably well
with the king, but this situation changed when the assembly proposed retaliatory
actions against the émigrés and the refractory clergy. On November 9 it passed
legislation requiring that the émigrés return to France or face death and the
loss of their estates. On November 29 it required the refractory clergy to take
the oath to the constitution or fall under state surveillance and lose their
pension rights.
V | RADICAL REVOLUTION |
The émigrés and their efforts to mobilize
foreign powers against France created the pretext for France’s entry into war in
April 1792. In reality, Austria and Prussia had shown little interest in
intervention on behalf of the French king. However, radical political figures,
most notably Jacques Pierre Brissot, persistently exaggerated the threat of an
Austrian invasion of France and the subversion of the revolutionary government
by a conspiracy of Austrian sympathizers called the Austrian Committee.
Expecting that a conflict with Austria would weaken the king to their political
advantage, Brissot and his colleagues pressed for a declaration of war. Many of
the king’s advisors, though at first not the king himself, also advocated the
war option. They believed a victory would strengthen royal power and a defeat
would crush the Revolution. Persuaded, the king appointed a ministry dominated
by Brissot’s associates on March 10, 1792, and on April 20 the assembly declared
war on Austria, which was soon joined by Prussia. Thus began the series of
conflicts known as the French Revolutionary Wars.
A | End of the Monarchy |
The wars profoundly altered the course of
the Revolution, leading to the end of the monarchy and raising fears of
reprisals against the revolutionaries in the event of a defeat. The French had
few successes on the battlefield. The French army was in the middle of a major
reorganization and was not prepared for war. In addition, Brissot’s ministry
proved incompetent and disorganized. During the spring of 1792, the French army
lurched from defeat to defeat. Someone, it seemed, was to blame; and the Brissot
faction (called Brissotins) blamed the king, who in turn fired the
Brissotin ministers on June 13.
On June 20 a mob, alarmed at the worsening
military situation and rising bread prices caused by the declining value of the
assignats, stormed the Tuilerie Palace. Coached by the Brissotins, the mob
demanded that the king reinstate the Brissotin ministers. Louis courageously
refused to do so. But military disasters continued during the summer, and the
political situation deteriorated further when a Prussian commander, the duke of
Brunswick, issued a manifesto in which he threatened to execute anyone who
harmed the royal family.
On August 10 a crowd again stormed the
Tuilerie Palace in the Revolution’s bloodiest eruption to date. This time,
however, the mob was not allied with the Brissotins, who still favored a
monarchy. Instead it supported the more radical Jacobins who, under the
leadership of the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, now demanded the creation of a
republic. While the royal family hid in the Assembly hall, the mob hacked to
death some 600 Swiss guards, while itself suffering heavy losses. More than
lives were lost; so was the monarchy. The Legislative Assembly immediately
suspended the king from his duties and voted to hold a convention. The
convention, to be elected by nearly universal manhood suffrage, was to write a
new, republican constitution.
B | First French Republic |
Between August 10, 1792, and the meeting of
the convention on September 20, revolutionary furor grew. Power shifted from the
Legislative Assembly, now a lame duck, to the Paris Commune. The Commune was a
city assembly made up of representatives elected from 48 neighborhood districts
called sections. Because nearly universal male suffrage had taken effect on
August 10, the sections and the Commune became increasingly dominated by the
sans-culottes, a group composed mostly of artisans and shopkeepers
fiercely devoted to the Revolution and direct democracy.
In this unstable period, Georges Jacques
Danton, who had probably helped organize the massacre of August 10, became a
dominating political figure. Danton, who was appointed minister of justice by
the assembly, encouraged fears that counter-revolutionary forces loyal to the
king were undermining the Revolution. He used these fears to promote further
measures against counter-revolutionaries. On August 17 a special court was
created to try political suspects, but it did not convict enough defendants to
satisfy the sans-culottes.
Fearing military defeat and believing that
counter-revolutionary prisoners were about to break out and attack patriots like
themselves, sans-culotte mobs attacked Parisian jails from September 2 to 7.
They murdered and mutilated more than 1000 inmates—most of whom were guilty of
nothing more than having enjoyed some privilege or committing ordinary crimes.
These September Massacres were so gruesome that no revolutionary leader, not
even those with bloody agendas of their own, claimed responsibility for
them.
B1 | The National Convention |
The National Convention first met on
September 20, 1792, the same day the French army won a major victory against
Prussian forces at Valmy in northeastern France. The convention was composed of
three major political groups: the Jacobins, a fairly well disciplined radical
minority; the former Brissotins, now called Girondins, a less disciplined
group of moderates; and a large group of individuals called the Plain who
were not associated with either party. On September 21 the convention voted to
establish a republic in place of the monarchy. The founding of the first French
Republic represented so important a milestone that, when the convention adopted
a new revolutionary calendar, it made September 22, 1792, the first day of Year
I (see French Republican Calendar).
The convention took much longer to
decide the fate of the king, who was now imprisoned with the royal family in an
old fort just outside Paris. The more moderate Girondins maneuvered to keep
Louis a prisoner. The Jacobins, who were allied with the sans-culottes, argued
that the people had already judged Louis guilty of treason when they had stormed
the palace on August 10. The convention compromised, deciding that it would try
the king.
On January 15 the convention
overwhelmingly found Louis guilty, and then voted (by a margin of one vote) for
immediate execution. Louis was executed on the new invention for beheading
called the guillotine on January 21, 1793, protesting his innocence. If
ever there was a point of no return in the Revolution, this was it, for enemies
of the Revolution now sought to avenge the king’s death more vigorously than
they had tried to preserve his life.
Executing the king did little to solve
the convention’s other problems, the main one being the war. The convention
declared war on Britain and the Netherlands in early February and on Spain in
March, thus adding to France’s military burdens. The French forces were on the
defensive through most of 1793, and in April France was stunned by the desertion
of one of its chief commanders, General Dumouriez, to the Austrians. Facing loss
after loss, the convention voted to raise an army of 300,000 men. It sought
volunteers, but instituted a draft to provide additional soldiers. The draft
touched off rebellion in western rural areas, notably Brittany and the Vendée.
Many people in these areas already opposed the Revolution because of the church
reorganization and the clerical oath. Pacifying them would take years and cost
an estimated 100,000 lives.
Revolts also occurred in other areas,
particularly the large cities. These revolts protested the domination of the
local affairs by Paris and the Jacobins. Local elites favored federalism,
a policy that would have allowed them to maintain power over their own regions.
Meanwhile, prices rose because of a poor harvest and the declining value of the
assignats, which fell to half their stated value in January and then fell
further. Higher bread prices led the sans-culottes and associated women’s groups
to demand state-imposed price controls, a demand that the Jacobins could not
refuse because they depended on the political support of the sans-culottes. In
May the convention fixed maximum prices for grain and bread.
B2 | Reign of Terror |
In this general crisis, revolutionary
leaders began to turn on each other. The Girondins, who favored federalism,
fought a battle to the death with the Jacobins, who denounced the Girondins for
lacking revolutionary zeal and for aiding, intentionally or not,
counter-revolutionary forces. The Jacobins already dominated the convention, but
on June 2, pressured by the sans-culottes, they consolidated their power by
arresting 22 Girondin leaders.
During the following months, the
government put down the federalist revolts, sometimes with great severity. A new
democratic constitution was drawn up but never implemented: In Robespierre’s
view, constitutional government would have to wait until fear and repression had
eliminated the enemies of the Revolution. The Jacobins operated through the
existing convention and agencies responsible to it. They used the Committee of
Public Safety, composed of 12 men led by Robespierre, to provide executive
oversight; the Committee of General Security, to oversee the police; and the
Revolutionary Tribunal to try political cases. Additionally, the Jacobins sent
representatives from the convention with wide-ranging powers to particular areas
to enforce Jacobin policies.
The most urgent government business was
the war. On August 17, 1793, the convention voted the levée en masse
(mass conscription), which mobilized all citizens to serve as soldiers or
suppliers in the war effort. To further that effort, the convention quickly
enacted more legislation. On September 5 it approved the Reign of Terror, a
policy through which the state used violence to crush resistance to the
government. On September 9 the convention established sans-culotte paramilitary
forces, the so-called revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain
demanded by the government. On September 17 the Law of Suspects was passed,
which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined
“crimes against liberty.” On September 29 the convention extended price-fixing
from grain and bread to other essential goods and fixed wages. On December 4 the
national government resumed oversight of local administration. On February 4,
1794, it abolished slavery in the colonies.
Beyond these measures, the convention
and sympathetic groups like the sans-culottes began to create and spread a
revolutionary and republican culture. These groups sponsored the use of
revolutionary and republican propaganda in the arts, public festivals, and modes
of dress. In this way, they gradually began to spread and gain acceptance for
their ideals among the common people.
The most notable achievement of the Reign
of Terror was to save the revolutionary government from military defeat. The
government feared invasion, which might have allowed counter-revolutionary
forces to undertake a terror of their own. To preserve the Revolution, it
reorganized and strengthened the army. The Jacobins expanded the size of the
army and replaced many aristocratic officers, who had deserted and fled abroad,
with younger soldiers who had demonstrated their ability and patriotism. The
revolutionary army threw back the Austrians, Prussians, English, and Spanish
during the fall of 1793 and expelled the Austrians from Belgium by the summer of
1794.
The military success of the Jacobin-led
government was undeniable. However, the repressive policies of the Reign of
Terror that enabled the government to form and equip its large army did so at
the expense of many French citizens’ security: about 250,000 people were
arrested; 17,000 were tried and guillotined, many with little if any means to
defend themselves; another 12,000 were executed without trial; and thousands
more died in jail. Clergy and nobles composed only 15 percent of the Reign of
Terror’s approximately 40,000 victims. The rest were peasants and bourgeois who
had fought against the Revolution or had said or done something to offend the
new order. The Reign of Terror executed not only figures from the Old Regime,
like the former queen Marie-Antoinette, but also many revolutionary leaders.
Some victims of the Reign of Terror, like Georges Danton, seemed too moderate to
Robespierre and his colleagues, while others, like the sans-culotte leader
Jacques René Hébert, seemed too extreme.
The Reign of Terror was the most radical
phase of the Revolution, and it remains the most controversial. Some have seen
the Reign of Terror as a major advance toward modern democracy, while others
call it a step toward modern dictatorship. Certain defenders of the Revolution
have argued that the Reign of Terror was, under the circumstances, a reasonable
response to the military crisis of 1793. Others have rejected this idea,
pointing out that the military victories of early 1794, far from diminishing the
intensity of the Reign of Terror, were followed by the Great Terror of June and
July 1794, in which more than 1300 people were executed in Paris alone. The
Reign of Terror, they have argued, resulted from an ideology already in place by
1789 that put national good above personal rights. To this argument, others have
replied that in 1789 no revolutionary leader seriously imagined establishing
anything like the Reign of Terror.
VI | SEARCH FOR BALANCE |
The Jacobin government lasted barely a year.
Although effective in the short term, in the long run it destroyed itself—in
part because no one really controlled it. Victory on the battlefield had removed
the pretext for maintaining the Reign of Terror. At the same time, the killing
frenzy of the Great Terror convinced people—even allies of the Jacobins—they
might be next on the guillotine. Furthermore, by killing off the likes of Danton
and Hébert, Robespierre’s faction had narrowed its base of support and had no
one to lean on when challenged. Thus the end was simply a matter of time.
A | The Thermidorean Reaction |
As it happened, the coup against
Robespierre and his associates was led by a group of dissident Jacobins,
including members of the Committee of Public Safety. They had supported the
Reign of Terror but feared Robespierre would turn on them next. On July 27, 1794
(9 Thermidor, Year II, in the revolutionary calendar), Robespierre and his close
followers were arrested on the convention floor. During the next two days,
Robespierre and 82 of his associates were guillotined.
Although the conspirators of 9 Thermidor,
who came to be known as Thermidoreans, could hardly have known it, the
removal of the 83 Robespierrists represented a major turning point in the
Revolution. Ever since 1789, counter-revolutionaries, who enjoyed support from
many peasants, had tried to reverse the Revolution. But it had continued to
become more and more extreme in nature, due to the increasing participation of
urban radicals with whom the Jacobins had formed political alliances. Only after
9 Thermidor did the Revolution reverse its radical direction, and more moderate
politicians came to dominate the government.
While these moderates wanted to preserve
the Revolution’s achievements and tried to repress counter-revolutionaries, they
also feared and repressed the radical groups on whose backs the Jacobins had
ridden to power. In order to maintain control over both the radical left and the
counter-revolutionary right, the Thermidoreans consolidated their power and
began to limit democracy. These limitations led eventually to the dictatorship
of Napoleon Bonaparte (see Napoleon I).
Immediately after 9 Thermidor an
assortment of political groups began to use their influence to dismantle all
vestiges of the Reign of Terror. Although the convention continued in power
until October 1795, the teeth of the Reign of Terror were pulled one by one. To
limit their power, the committees of Public Safety and General Security were
restructured; the operations of the Revolutionary Tribunal were curtailed;
thousands of prisoners were released; and in November 1794 the Paris Jacobin
club was closed. People associated with the Reign of Terror were harassed in
Paris by reactionary youth groups known as the jeunesse d’orée (French
for “the gilded youth”) and even killed in strongly counter-revolutionary
regions.
The last major popular rising of the
Revolution occurred in the spring of 1795, when the near-total devaluation of
the assignats produced a price rise that devastated the poor. But this rising
was put down so effectively that the counter-revolutionaries imagined the
monarchy might soon be restored, and their activities escalated. In response,
the Thermidoreans now struck against the counter-revolutionaries, defeating and
executing a group of émigré soldiers landed by the English at Quiberon Bay in
Brittany during the summer of 1795.
B | The Directory |
To avoid a revival of either democracy or
dictatorship, the Thermidoreans put together and ratified a new constitution
that limited the right to vote to the wealthiest 30,000 male citizens and
dispersed power among three main bodies. Legislative authority was vested in two
legislative assemblies, the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred.
Executive power was lodged in a five-man Directory to be chosen by the Council
of Ancients from a list of candidates presented by the Council of Five
Hundred.
Fearing the results of a true referendum,
moderate republicans decreed that two-thirds of the first legislature had to be
made up of members of the former convention. As it turned out, the constitution,
which was ratified by popular vote and took effect in late October 1795, neither
protected the government from unfriendly popular forces nor prevented the
concentration of power.
Did the Directory have good reason to
fear that open elections would bring down the republic? Historians have
disagreed on this matter. Some argue that the Directory eventually failed
because it could not generate loyalty from either the left or the right. Other
historians believe the Directory failed because it distrusted democracy and did
not develop a strong centrist party.
Whatever the reason, for the next four
years the Directory lurched from making concessions to the right and
intimidating the left to making concessions to the left and intimidating the
right. In May 1796 the Directory easily crushed a conspiracy of former Jacobins
and agrarian radicals who intended to seize power and redistribute property. The
right triumphed at the elections in 1797 and was slowly preparing to take power.
Then in September, three members of the Directory, the triumvirate,
eliminated the two other members who had counter-revolutionary sympathies and
purged the legislature of nearly 200 opposition deputies. They did all this with
the backing of the army. The triumvirate was then joined by two new associates.
This new Directory proceeded to close down counter-revolutionary publications,
exile returning émigrés and uncooperative clergy, and execute many political
opponents.
This coup of Fructidor (the month of the
revolutionary calendar in which it occurred) allowed the Directory to
consolidate its power. As a result, it was able to take some bold new financial
initiatives, such as establishing a new metal-based currency and imposing a new
system of taxes on luxury goods and real estate. The coup also destroyed
whatever hopes counter-revolutionaries had to gain power through legal
means.
But Fructidor also unleashed the radical
left, which won an important electoral victory in May 1798. To neutralize this
threat, the Directory once again tampered with polling results by eliminating
more than 100 elected left-wing deputies in what became known as the coup of
Floréal. Whatever the short-term gains for the Directory, its continuing
rejection of election results stripped it of its last remaining shreds of
authority, as few could respect a regime that so routinely violated its own
constitution.
C | Foundations of Dictatorship |
The end came in 1799. Military reverses, a
domestic political crisis, and the ambitions of a military hero, Napoleon
Bonaparte, combined to give rise to the Revolution’s last major coup and the
creation of a dictatorship.
The military reverses occurred after
French armies had enjoyed five years of considerable success. Following the
victories of the Reign of Terror, the first coalition of European powers
fighting revolutionary France crumbled in 1795 and 1796. Prussia, Spain, the
Dutch Netherlands, and Tuscany (Toscana) signed peace treaties with France,
leaving England and Austria to fight alone. In October 1795 France annexed the
Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium). The Dutch Netherlands became the first of
many so-called French sister republics. France fitted it with a new, relatively
democratic constitution closely patterned on the Directory. France also forced
the Dutch Netherlands to pay it a large indemnity. In 1796 and 1797 French
armies swept into Italy and western Germany.
C1 | Napoleon |
It was in the course of the Italian
campaign that Napoleon Bonaparte first made himself known to the general public.
Born in 1769 to a poor but noble Corsican family, Bonaparte was trained as an
artillery officer and quickly advanced through the ranks during the early years
of the Revolution. A Jacobin associate during the Reign of Terror, Bonaparte was
briefly imprisoned after Thermidor, but once released, he made himself useful to
the new Directory by crushing a counter-revolutionary uprising in October 1795.
As commander of French forces in Italy, he won a series of brilliant victories,
established a new north Italian sister republic called the Cisalpine Republic,
and in October 1797 negotiated a treaty with Austria of his own design.
With a number of important secret
provisions that ceded almost two-thirds of Austrian territory along the Rhine
River to France, this Treaty of Campo Formio so expanded the French sphere of
influence that it did less to create peace than to provoke a new war. Imagining
themselves to be liberating Europe, French forces proceeded to impose new
political arrangements in western Germany; to establish additional sister
republics in Switzerland and Italy; to assist, unsuccessfully, an Irish revolt
against England; and to send an army under Bonaparte to Egypt to attack the
Ottoman Empire. Successful at first in Egypt, the French army was isolated after
the English navy won a victory at Abū Qīr Bay in August 1798, whereupon
Bonaparte left his troops and returned to France. He was welcomed as a great
hero despite his failure to capture Egypt and his loss to the English.
C2 | End of the Directory |
Perceiving in the French position both
weakness and a continuing threat, England, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and
Austria formed a new anti-French coalition. By the spring of 1799 the armies of
this second coalition forced France to retreat on all fronts, most dramatically
in Italy where they dislodged the French altogether and dismantled the sister
republics. Although the coalition was pushed back in September and began to
disintegrate, the French military position remained uncertain. Suddenly on the
defensive and rudely reminded of their vulnerability, the French nation lost
still more respect for the Directory. Gradually during 1799 the Directory lost
its political grip.
As the military situation darkened and
Austria threatened France, opponents of the Directory won an election and, for
once, were able to purge the Directory, rather than vice versa. The purge
enabled newly elected deputies to take radical measures to advance the war
effort. They imposed forced loans on the wealthy and persecuted the relatives of
émigrés, recalling the Reign of Terror. The primary beneficiary of the purge,
however, was Emmanuel Sieyès, who was appointed director. He began plotting to
radically revise the constitution to protect the regime from any further threats
from the radical left or the counter-revolutionary right. Needing a charismatic,
popular figure to lead the charge, Sieyès joined forces with Bonaparte.
At this point, fresh counter-revolutionary uprisings occurred in the
provinces and a radical movement to take over the republic became apparent. The
plotters then persuaded members of the Directory to resign. On November 9 (18
Brumaire) they asked the legislature to vest power in a provisional government
made up of Sieyès, Bonaparte, and Roger Ducos. When the legislature resisted,
soldiers loyal to Bonaparte chased resistors from the legislature and persuaded
the remaining deputies to approve the plan.
The Directory was dead, and with it
went the last revolutionary regime that could make any pretense to embody the
liberal parliamentary government intended by the revolutionaries of 1789. Under
Bonaparte, the Revolution, if it could be said to have remained alive at all,
did so in the form of a military dictatorship that had far more power than any
French king had ever possessed.
D | The Ambiguous Legacy of the Revolution |
At its core, the French Revolution was a
political movement devoted to liberty. But what that liberty actually was and
what was required to realize it remained open questions during the Revolution,
as they have ever since. Some historians have suggested that what the
revolutionaries’ liberty meant in practice was violence and a loss of personal
security that pointed to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. This
negative view had its roots in the ideas of many counter-revolutionaries, who
criticized the Revolution from its beginning. These ideas gained new popularity
during the period of reaction that set in after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815,
when the monarchy and its counter-revolutionary allies were restored to
power.
However, the majority of Europeans and
non-Europeans came to see the Revolution as much more than a bloody tragedy.
These people were more impressed by what the Revolution accomplished than by
what it failed to do. They recalled the Revolution’s abolition of serfdom,
slavery, inherited privilege, and judicial torture; its experiments with
democracy; and its opening of opportunities to those who, for reasons of social
status or religion, had been traditionally excluded.
One of the most important contributions of
the French Revolution was to make revolution part of the world’s political
tradition. The French Revolution continued to provide instruction for
revolutionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries, as peoples in Europe and around
the world sought to realize their different versions of freedom. Karl Marx
would, at least at the outset, pattern his notion of a proletarian revolution on
the French Revolution of 1789. And 200 years later Chinese students, who weeks
before had fought their government in Tiananmen Square, confirmed the
contemporary relevance of the French Revolution when they led the revolutionary
bicentennial parade in Paris on July 14, 1989.
Along with offering lessons about liberty
and democracy, the Revolution also promoted nationalism. Napoleon’s occupation
provoked nationalist groups to organize in Italy and Germany. Also influential
was the revolutionaries’ belief that a nation was not a group of royal subjects
but a society of equal citizens. The fact that most European countries are or
are becoming parliamentary democracies, along the lines set out by the French
Revolution, suggests its enduring influence.
Socially, the Revolution was also
important. Clearly, society in France and to a lesser extent in other parts of
Europe would never be the same. Once the ancient structure of privilege was
smashed, it could not be pieced together again. The Revolution did not
fundamentally alter the distribution of wealth, but that had not been the
intention of most of the revolutionaries. Insofar as legal equality gradually
became the norm in France and Europe, the revolutionaries succeeded.
The cultural impact is harder to assess.
The Revolution did not succeed in establishing the national school system it
envisioned, but it did found some of France’s elite educational institutions
that have produced some of that nation’s greatest leaders. Its attack on the
church had profound repercussions, making the status of the church a central
political issue, which even today divides France politically and
culturally.
As for economic development, the
Revolution probably hurt more than it helped. In the long term, the liberation
of the economy from royal controls, the standardization of weights and measures,
and the development of a uniform civil law code helped pave the way for the
Industrial Revolution. But the disruptive effects of war on the French economy
offset the positive effects of these changes. In terms of total output, the
economy was probably set back a generation.
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