French Revolution
1787-99
also called Revolution of 1789
Main
the revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and
reached its first climax there in 1789. Hence the conventional term
“Revolution of 1789,” denoting the end of the ancien régime in France
and serving also to distinguish that event from the later French
revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
Although historians disagree on the causes of the Revolution, the
following reasons are commonly adduced: (1) the increasingly prosperous
elite of wealthy commoners—merchants, manufacturers, and professionals,
often called the bourgeoisie—produced by the 18th century’s economic
growth resented its exclusion from political power and positions of
honour; (2) the peasants were acutely aware of their situation and were
less and less willing to support the anachronistic and burdensome feudal
system; (3) the philosophes, who advocated social and political reform,
had been read more widely in France than anywhere else; (4) French
participation in the American Revolution had driven the government to
the brink of bankruptcy; and (5) crop failures in much of the country in
1788, coming on top of a long period of economic difficulties, made the
population particularly restless.
Aristocratic revolt, 1787–89
The Revolution took shape in France when the controller general of
finances, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, arranged the summoning of an
assembly of “notables” (prelates, great noblemen, and a few
representatives of the bourgeoisie) in February 1787 to propose reforms
designed to eliminate the budget deficit by increasing the taxation of
the privileged classes. The assembly refused to take responsibility for
the reforms and suggested the calling of the Estates-General, which
represented the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate (the
commoners) and which had not met since 1614. The efforts made by
Calonne’s successors to enforce fiscal reforms in spite of resistance by
the privileged classes led to the so-called revolt of the “aristocratic
bodies,” notably that of the parlements (the most important courts of
justice), whose powers were curtailed by the edict of May 1788. During
the spring and summer of 1788, there was unrest among the populace in
Paris, Grenoble, Dijon, Toulouse, Pau, and Rennes. The king, Louis XVI,
had to yield; reappointing reform-minded Jacques Necker as the finance
minister, he promised to convene the Estates-General on May 5, 1789. He
also, in practice, granted freedom of the press, and France was flooded
with pamphlets addressing the reconstruction of the state. The elections
to the Estates-General, held between January and April 1789, coincided
with further disturbances, as the harvest of 1788 had been a bad one.
There were practically no exclusions from the voting; and the electors
drew up cahiers de doléances, which listed their grievances and hopes.
They elected 600 deputies for the Third Estate, 300 for the nobility,
and 300 for the clergy.
Events of 1789
The Estates-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789. They were
immediately divided over a fundamental issue: should they vote by head,
giving the advantage to the Third Estate, or by estate, in which case
the two privileged orders of the realm might outvote the third? On June
17 the bitter struggle over this legal issue finally drove the deputies
of the Third Estate to declare themselves the National Assembly; they
threatened to proceed, if necessary, without the other two orders. They
were supported by many of the parish priests, who outnumbered the
aristocratic upper clergy among the church’s deputies. When royal
officials locked the deputies out of their regular meeting hall on June
20, they occupied the king’s indoor tennis court (jeu de paume) and
swore an oath not to disperse until they had given France a new
constitution. The king grudgingly gave in and urged the nobles and the
remaining clergy to join the assembly, which took the official title of
National Constituent Assembly on July 9; at the same time, however, he
began gathering troops to dissolve it.
These two months of prevarication at a time when the problem of
maintaining food supplies had reached its climax infuriated the towns
and the provinces. Rumours of an “aristocratic conspiracy” by the king
and the privileged to overthrow the Third Estate led to the Great Fear
of July 1789, when the peasants were nearly panic-stricken. The
gathering of troops around Paris and the dismissal of Necker provoked
insurrection in the capital. On July 14, 1789, the Parisian crowd seized
the Bastille, a symbol of royal tyranny. Again the king had to yield;
visiting Paris, he showed his recognition of the sovereignty of the
people by wearing the tricolour cockade.
In the provinces, the Great Fear of July led the peasants to rise
against their lords. The nobles and the bourgeois now took fright. The
National Constituent Assembly could see only one way to check the
peasants; on the night of August 4, 1789, it decreed the abolition of
the feudal regime and of the tithe. Then on August 26 it introduced the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming
liberty, equality, the inviolability of property, and the right to
resist oppression.
The decrees of August 4 and the Declaration were such innovations
that the king refused to sanction them. The Parisians rose again and on
October 5 marched to Versailles. The next day they brought the royal
family back to Paris. The National Constituent Assembly followed the
court, and in Paris it continued to work on the new constitution.
The French population participated actively in the new political
culture created by the Revolution. Dozens of uncensored newspapers kept
citizens abreast of events, and political clubs allowed them to voice
their opinions. Public ceremonies such as the planting of “trees of
liberty” in small villages and the Festival of Federation, held in Paris
in 1790 on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, were
symbolic affirmations of the new order.
The new regime
The National Constituent Assembly completed the abolition of
feudalism, suppressed the old “orders,” established civil equality among
men (at least in metropolitan France, since slavery was retained in the
colonies), and made more than half the adult male population eligible to
vote, although only a small minority met the requirement for becoming a
deputy. The decision to nationalize the lands of the Roman Catholic
church in France to pay off the public debt led to a widespread
redistribution of property. The bourgeoisie and the peasant landowners
were undoubtedly the chief beneficiaries, but some farm workers also
were able to buy land. Having deprived the church of its resources, the
assembly then resolved to reorganize the church, enacting the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, which was rejected by the pope and by many
of the French clergy. This produced a schism that aggravated the
violence of the accompanying controversies.
The complicated administrative system of the ancien régime was swept
away by the National Constituent Assembly, which substituted a rational
system based on the division of France into départements, districts,
cantons, and communes administered by elected assemblies. The principles
underlying the administration of justice were also radically changed,
and the system was adapted to the new administrative divisions.
Significantly, the judges were to be elected.
The National Constituent Assembly tried to create a monarchical
regime in which the legislative and executive powers were shared between
the king and an assembly. This regime might have worked if the king had
really wanted to govern with the new authorities, but Louis XVI was weak
and vacillating and was the prisoner of his aristocratic advisers. On
June 20–21, 1791, he tried to flee the country, but he was stopped at
Varennes and brought back to Paris.
Counterrevolution, regicide, and the Reign of Terror
The events in France gave new hope to the revolutionaries who had
been defeated a few years previously in the United Provinces, Belgium,
and Switzerland. Likewise, all those who wanted changes in England,
Ireland, the German states, the Austrian lands, or Italy looked upon the
Revolution with sympathy.
A number of French counterrevolutionaries—nobles, ecclesiastics, and
some bourgeois—abandoned the struggle in their own country and
emigrated. As “émigrés,” many formed armed groups close to the
northeastern frontier of France and sought help from the rulers of
Europe. The rulers were at first indifferent to the Revolution but began
to worry when the National Constituent Assembly proclaimed a
revolutionary principle of international law—namely, that a people had
the right of self-determination. In accordance with this principle, the
papal territory of Avignon was reunited with France on September 13,
1791. By early 1792 both radicals, eager to spread the principles of the
Revolution, and the king, hopeful that war would either strengthen his
authority or allow foreign armies to rescue him, supported an aggressive
policy. France declared war against Austria on April 20, 1792.
In the first phase of the war (April–September 1792), France suffered
defeats; Prussia joined the war in July, and an Austro-Prussian army
crossed the frontier and advanced rapidly toward Paris. Believing that
they had been betrayed by the king and the aristocrats, the Paris
revolutionaries rose on August 10, 1792, occupied Tuileries Palace,
where Louis XVI was living, and imprisoned the royal family in the
Temple. At the beginning of September, the Parisian crowd broke into the
prisons and massacred the nobles and clergy held there. Meanwhile,
volunteers were pouring into the army as the Revolution had awakened
French nationalism. In a final effort the French forces checked the
Prussians on September 20, 1792, at Valmy. On the same day, a new
assembly, the National Convention, met. The next day it proclaimed the
abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic.
In the second phase of the war (September 1792–April 1793), the
revolutionaries got the better of the enemy. Belgium, the Rhineland,
Savoy, and the county of Nice were occupied by French armies. Meanwhile,
the National Convention was divided between the Girondins, who wanted to
organize a bourgeois republic in France and to spread the Revolution
over the whole of Europe, and the Montagnards (“Mountain Men”), who,
with Robespierre, wanted to give the lower classes a greater share in
political and economic power. Despite efforts made by the Girondins,
Louis XVI was judged by the Convention, condemned to death for treason,
and executed on January 21, 1793; the queen, Marie-Antoinette, was
guillotined nine months later.
In the spring of 1793, the war entered a third phase, marked by new
French defeats. Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain formed a coalition
(later called the First Coalition), to which most of the rulers of
Europe adhered. France lost Belgium and the Rhineland, and invading
forces threatened Paris. These reverses, as those of 1792 had done,
strengthened the extremists. The Girondin leaders were driven from the
National Convention, and the Montagnards, who had the support of the
Paris sansculottes (workers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers), seized power
and kept it until 9 Thermidor, year II, of the new French republican
calendar (July 27, 1794). The Montagnards were bourgeois liberals like
the Girondins but under pressure from the sansculottes, and, in order to
meet the requirements of defense, they adopted a radical economic and
social policy. They introduced the Maximum (government control of
prices), taxed the rich, brought national assistance to the poor and to
the disabled, declared that education should be free and compulsory, and
ordered the confiscation and sale of the property of émigrés. These
exceptional measures provoked violent reactions: the Wars of the Vendée,
the “federalist” risings in Normandy and in Provence, the revolts of
Lyon and Bordeaux, and the insurrection of the Chouans in Brittany.
Opposition, however, was broken by the Reign of Terror (19 Fructidor,
year I–9 Thermidor, year II [September 5, 1793–July 27, 1794]), which
entailed the arrest of at least 300,000 suspects, 17,000 of whom were
sentenced to death and executed while more died in prisons or were
killed without any form of trial. At the same time, the revolutionary
government raised an army of more than one million men.
Thanks to this army, the war entered its fourth phase (beginning in
the spring of 1794). A brilliant victory over the Austrians at Fleurus
on 8 Messidor, year II (June 26, 1794), enabled the French to reoccupy
Belgium. Victory made the Terror and the economic and social
restrictions seem pointless. Robespierre, “the Incorruptible,” who had
sponsored the restrictions, was overthrown in the National Convention on
9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794), and executed the following day.
Soon after his fall the Maximum was abolished, the social laws were no
longer applied, and efforts toward economic equality were abandoned.
Reaction set in; the National Convention began to debate a new
constitution; and, meanwhile, in the west and in the southeast, a
royalist “White Terror” broke out. Royalists even tried to seize power
in Paris but were crushed by the young general Napoleon Bonaparte on 13
Vendémiaire, year IV (October 5, 1795). A few days later the National
Convention dispersed.
The Directory and revolutionary expansion
The constitution of the year III, which the National Convention had
approved, placed executive power in a Directory of five members and
legislative power in two chambers, the Council of Ancients and the
Council of the Five Hundred (together called the Corps Législatif). This
regime, a bourgeois republic, might have achieved stability had not war
perpetuated the struggle between revolutionaries and
counterrevolutionaries throughout Europe. The war, moreover, embittered
existing antagonisms between the Directory and the legislative councils
in France and often gave rise to new ones. These disputes were settled
by coups d’état, chiefly those of 18 Fructidor, year V (September 4,
1797), which removed the royalists from the Directory and from the
councils, and of 18 Brumaire, year VIII (November 9, 1799), in which
Bonaparte abolished the Directory and became the leader of France as its
“first consul.”
After the victory of Fleurus, the progress of the French armies in
Europe had continued. The Rhineland and Holland were occupied, and in
1795 Holland, Tuscany, Prussia, and Spain negotiated for peace. When the
French army under Bonaparte entered Italy (1796), Sardinia came quickly
to terms. Austria was the last to give in (Treaty of Campo Formio,
1797). Most of the countries occupied by the French were organized as
“sister republics,” with institutions modeled on those of Revolutionary
France.
Peace on the continent of Europe, however, did not end revolutionary
expansion. The majority of the directors had inherited the Girondin
desire to spread the Revolution over Europe and listened to the appeals
of Jacobins abroad. Thus French troops in 1798 and 1799 entered
Switzerland, the Papal States, and Naples and set up the Helvetic,
Roman, and Parthenopean republics. Great Britain, however, remained at
war with France. Unable to effect a landing in England, the Directory,
on Bonaparte’s request, decided to threaten the British in India by
occupying Egypt. An expeditionary corps under Bonaparte easily occupied
Malta and Egypt, but the squadron that had convoyed it was destroyed by
Horatio Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of the Nile on 14 Thermidor, year
VI (August 1, 1798). This disaster encouraged the formation of a Second
Coalition of powers alarmed by the progress of the Revolution. This
coalition of Austria, Russia, Turkey, and Great Britain won great
successes during the spring and summer of 1799 and drove back the French
armies to the frontiers. Bonaparte thereupon returned to France to
exploit his own great prestige and the disrepute into which the military
reverses had brought the government. His coup d’état of 18 Brumaire
overthrew the Directory and substituted the consulate. Although
Bonaparte proclaimed the end of the Revolution, he himself was to spread
it in new forms throughout Europe.
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