11. The French Revolution

The French Revolution: Origins

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...

So begins the most famous work on the French Revolution written in the English language, Charles Dickens' classic masterpiece of fiction, A Tale of Two Cities. The events of 1789 - 1799 were truly the best of times and the worst of times and the world has never been the same since. The best of times because of the bright promise of a future free from injustice and arbitrary power; the worst of times because of the disruption and bloodshed caused as the future clashed with the past.

Between 1789 and 1799 France experienced a revolutionary upheaval that would change not only France but also Europe and the world forever. We recognize the term revolution as meaning change, usually rapid and significant. A true revolution is one in which the entire economic, social, and political structure of a society is changed. The French Revolution fits that description. The American Revolution does not. France in 1799 was profoundly different from the France of 1789. In those ten years its entire economic, political, and social system had been disrupted and reconstructed. The American experience between 1763 and 1789 witnessed the redressing of grievances in relation to rights we already had as English colonists. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution do not reflect significant change in our social structure or economic system. Politically, we replaced the English system of representative parliamentary government with one of our own. The French would go to the extreme of abolishing an absolute monarchy, an established church, an aristocracy, and a social system based on over a thousand years of tradition. On the background of foreign war and counterrevolution, they would struggle to implement the principles upon which they would identify themselves as a nation and people. The struggle was not without problems and crisis, nor without error in direction, but the concept of popular justice and the rights of man remained supreme throughout.

Background Conditions

There are several major background causes of the French Revolution. They lie in the political, social, and intellectual conditions of the Old Regime and were intensified by the frustration of seemingly unsolvable economic problems.

Political Conditions

The Kingdom of France was under the rule of King Louis XVI (1774 - 1792), Bourbon heir to the most powerful monarchy in Western Europe. Louis was an absolute monarch whose crown was believed bestowed upon him by the will of God. He was government. There was no separation of powers. His decisions made the law, administered the law, and interpreted the legality of the law. His power was exercised across the kingdom through a centralized system of royal ministers and intendants. However, unlike the days of Louis XIV, the officers of the royal government no longer came from the ranks of the middle class. During the reign of Louis XV (1715 - 1774), the crown had begun to appoint nobles to important offices of state; and by the time of Louis XVI, the nobility held all major positions of privilege and rank within the bureaucracy, the parlements (law courts), and Church hierarchy.

While a pleasant and well-meaning man who very much wanted to be and thought himself an enlightened monarch, Louis preferred the benefits of monarchy over its duties. He was happiest when hunting and was fascinated with locksmithing, a skill at which he was a master. One can just picture him going from room to room at Versailles changing the locks! His Queen was the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette. The royal couple had four children, two of whom had died by 1789. Beautiful, frivolous, spoiled, extravagant, and the constant subject of vicious rumors and of the hated Austrian Habsburgs, Marie Antoinette epitomized what was wrong with the French monarchy at the time. Rich, comfortable, and isolated at Versailles, it had lost its identity with the French people. On the momentous day in July 1789 when the Parisian revolutionaries stormed and seized the Bastille, Louis wrote but a single word in his diary, "Nothing."

Social Conditions

Ever since the Middle Ages, French society had been divided into three estates: the clergy, nobility, and commoners. These divisions, while not realistically reflective of the socioeconomic status of the French population in the 1700s, nonetheless remained the legal basis upon which Frenchmen were identified. They reflected the tremendous social and economic inequities that underlay the revolution.

The First Estate, the Roman Catholic Church, claimed a monopoly over French spiritual and intellectual life. Representing one percent of the population, it owned ten percent[1] of the landed wealth of the kingdom. It was the established Church and the only source of what formal education existed in France at the time. It exercised censorship and control over the publication of books and newspapers. A privileged estate, the clergy was exempt from royal taxation. Yet the Church had the power to collect its own taxes, fees for services, and fines for violations of canon law. In 1789 every bishop of the Church came from the ranks of the nobility.

The Second Estate was the aristocracy. Numbering two percent of the population it owned some 25 - 30 % of the landed wealth of France. As with the clergy, the nobility was also exempt from royal taxes. By 1789 the nobility dominated the public life of the kingdom. Nobles held the important appointments in the royal government, military, and Church hierarchy. They continued to hold ancient “seigniorial rights” through which they exercised feudal authority over millions of peasants.

The Third Estate were the commoners, in other words, everyone else in France. In a nation of 26 million people in 1789, the third estate numbered 25.5 million - 97 % of the population. Of these, some 500,000 were the bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class of merchants, manufacturers, financiers, businessmen, lawyers and other professionals. The bourgeoisie owned some 8 % of the land. The Third Estate included two and a half million urban workers, the sansculottes, mostly lower middle class shopkeepers and unskilled laborers. Remaining were the 22.5 million peasants, half of whom were landless tenant farmers living and working on the lands of the nobility and Church. The peasants owned from 35 % to 40 % of the land yet were still subject to feudal obligations to the nobility.

The Third Estate was without privileges under law. It paid the full tax burden, which fell mostly on the poorest elements of the population. In 1789 the average tax obligation ranged from 55 to 70 percent of one's annual income. Taxes included the Church's tithe, a land tax, income tax, labor tax, and, among others, a salt tax (this was the gabelle, which required every Frenchman over the age of seven to buy seven pounds of government-produced salt a year). For peasants there was the hated corvée, that conscripted them for labor services on royal road-building projects and, beyond that, a whole variety of feudal dues and services owed their manor lords.

Intellectual Conditions

Another factor underlying the Revolution was intellectual. The 18^th century was the age of the Enlightenment. The ideas of Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Jefferson, and others expounding such concepts as the social contract theory of government, equality under law, separation of powers, freedom of speech and conscience, and the sovereignty of the general will all had a wide audience among the educated elements of the French population, especially among the nobility and bourgeoisie. Escaping or bypassing the censors, here were ideas that put new emphasis on man's rational power and ability to create a just society in conformity with natural law. A simple look across the Channel to Britain or across the Atlantic to the new United States or even across the border to the enlightened despotism in Prussia and Austria showed these principles in action. Revolutionary ideas and revolutionary precedents gave momentum for change in the France of the Old Regime.

Economic Problems

France on the eve of the Revolution was experiencing serious economic conditions. The already existing problems of the huge growing population and the unequal distribution of wealth were compounded by rapid inflation and growing urban unemployment. By 1789 half of the Parisian labor force was unemployed. The winter of 1788 - 1789 had been one of the earliest and worst on record and caused devastating crop losses. The unusual freezing of rivers and canals disrupted transport and caused serious shortages of food and fuel in Paris. By the spring of 1789 the great mass of the capital's population was disillusioned, angry, and anxiously watching events taking place at Versailles. There the King was meeting with an Estates-General to solve the crisis of the royal debt and deficit.

The Financial Crisis

The immediate cause of the French Revolution was the royal government's inability to solve the crisis of the royal debt and deficit. France was bankrupt. Foreign wars had proved too costly for royal revenues to finance and the government had borrowed heavily from private sources. By 1788 the royal debt was some four billion livres, and interest was annually increasing the amount by 50 million. In 1786 the kingdom's banking houses refused additional loans to the crown. The royal budget for 1789 anticipated total revenues of 503 million with a deficit of 128 million. Unless new sources of revenues could be found, the French government would collapse. Increasing taxes was out of the question, new loans were impossible.

There was only one realistic alternative and that was to tax the nobility. For two centuries the nobility had expressed willingness to be taxed but only if it were brought into royal decision-making. Fearing such an arrangement would lessen royal absolutism by making the crown dependent upon a parliamentary-type assembly of nobles (such as the English Parliament), the monarchy continued the tax-exempt privilege. Louis sought the advice of a series of new financial advisors, but their recommendations ultimately all included taxing the nobles.

The last of these advisors was Charles-Alexandre de Calonne. Appointed in 1783, Calonne proposed the end of all tax exemptions for both the nobility and clergy, new mercantilist measures to increase overall national wealth, and establishing provincial assemblies in which all landowners, including those from the Third Estate, would be represented. To organize these reforms, Calonne persuaded Louis to allow him to pick an “Assembly of Notables” from all ranks of the population. As the “Notables” demanded a voice in government, the King was unreceptive. In 1786 Calonne was dismissed and the “Notables” were sent home. Louis then attempted to levy a new tax on all landed property, but the Parlement of Paris (France’s supreme court) ruled such a law illegal as only an Estates-General could approve a new tax. When Louis tried to revise the power of the Parlement to rule on tax laws, there was widespread outrage from all parts of the population. In the face of popular opposition, Louis retreated, despite the crown’s claim to God-given absolutism.

The Revolution Begins: From Estates-General to National Assembly

In 1788 the crisis forced the King's hand. He would have to meet with the nation. He issued a summons for the three estates to elect representatives to an Estates-General, the first such meeting in over 170 years. In addition to solving the financial crisis, the delegates were instructed to bring to Versailles cahiers, lists of grievances and conditions requiring royal attention and rectification. The drafting of these cahiers caused all elements of the population from the wealthiest landowner and bourgeois lawyer to the poorest peasant and city worker to expect significant change for the better.

As France responded to the king’s call for an Estates-General, the nation was swept by a flood of publications, most expressing the belief that the estate system was anachronistic. Among these was a pamphlet titled “What is the Third Estate?” by the Abbé (abbot) Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, a clergyman elected as a representative of the Third Estate. Sieyès condemned the traditional views that the crown and nobility were by right and privilege the natural leaders of society. The 25 million persons who were the French population, Sieyès wrote, were the nation. What is the Third Estate? Sieyès’ answer was simple yet profound: “Everything.” He called for the delegation of the Third Estate to the Estates-General to recognize itself as a national assembly.

The 1194 delegates to the Estates-General that met at Versailles in early May 1789 would never debate nor resolve the issues for which they were summoned. Rather, the meeting bogged down in a six-week long deadlock over voting procedures. The nobility and clergy insisted on the traditional means of voting: each estate would cast one vote. The bourgeois lawyers who dominated the Third Estate's representation wanted balloting by individual, which would assure a majority over the other two estates. (See the statistical breakdown of the Estates-General below.)

detail from Jacques Louis David's drawing of the Tennis Court Oath

On June 17^th, in frustration that the will of the great majority of the people of France was being ignored, the leaders of the Third Estate, Sieyès among them, proclaimed the Third Estate to be a National Assembly. On June 20th the king ordered them shut out of their meeting room until they agreed to retake their proper place within the Estates-General. In defiance, this newly-proclaimed National Assembly adjourned to a nearby indoor tennis court where, joined by liberal members of the nobility and clergy, they swore an oath pledging not to disband until France had constitutional government. Celebrated in art and literature, the Tennis Court Oath has become one of the most dramatic moments in Western history. With reluctant resignation, Louis ordered the other two estates to join the third as the National Assembly. By this order the crown gave legality to the National Assembly. With these events in late June, the French Revolution had its rather innocuous and moderate beginnings.

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The Estates-General of May - June, 1789

A look at the breakdown of the Estates-General shows how the three estates were represented. It is interesting to consider the make-up of the Estates-General in light of the realities of the French population. Notice that almost half of the delegates came from the first two estates. Remember also that of France’s 26 million people, 22.5 million were peasants. Are these three groups represented in proportion to their actual numbers?

First Estate Second Estate Third Estate

46 bishops 265 hereditary nobles 210 lawyers

55 abbots 20 nobility of the robe 150 judicial officers

9 monks 130 merchants, bankers

198 parish priests 25 municipal officers

____ ____ 20 royal officers

308 285 15 doctors

15 nobles (elected by commoners to represent them)

4 priests ( " )

40 peasants

12 persons of differing background

_____

621

statistical source: Ernest Knapton. Europe 1450 – 1815. New York: Scribners, 1958, 572.

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The illustrations are from Wikipedia sources.

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The list of sources for the French Revolution is at the end of 11.3, the “Conservative Phase” section.

[1] Understand that these figures and those that follow are estimates derived from historians’ study of demographic conditions in 18^th century France. Different sources may show different figures.