Encyclopædia Britannica
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime 1789:
the convergence of revolutions
The juridical revolution Louis XVI's decision to convene the
Estates-General in May 1789 became a turning point in French
history. When he invited his subjects to express their opinions and
grievances in preparation for this event—unprecedented in living
memory—hundreds responded with pamphlets in which the liberal
ideology of 1789 gradually began to take shape. Exactly how the
Estates-General should deliberate proved to be the pivotal
consciousness-raising issue. Each of the three Estates could vote
separately (by order) as they had in the distant past, or they could
vote jointly (by head). Because the Third Estate was to have twice
as many deputies as the others, only voting by head would assure
itspreponderant influence. If the estates voted by order, the clergy
and nobility would effectively exercise a veto power over important
decisions. Most pamphleteers of 1789 considered themselves
“patriots,” or reformers, and (though some were nobles themselves)
identified the excessive influence of “aristocrats” as a chief
obstacle to reform. In his influential tract Qu'est-ce que le tiers
état? (1789; What is the Third Estate?) the constitutional theorist
Emmanuel-Joseph Abbé Sieyès asserted that the Third Estate really
was the French nation. While commoners did all the truly laborious
and productive work of society, he claimed with some exaggeration,
the nobility monopolized its lucrative sinecures and honours. As a
condition of genuine reform, the Estates-General would have to
change that situation.
A seismic shift was occurring in elite public opinion. What began in
1787–88 as a conflict between royal authority and traditional
aristocratic groups had become a triangular struggle, with “the
people” opposing both absolutism and privilege. A new kind of
political discourse was emerging, and within a year it was to
produce an entirely new concept of sovereignty with extremely
far-reaching implications.
Patriots were driven to increasingly bold positions in part by the
resistance and bad faith of royal and aristocratic forces. It is not
surprising that some of the Third Estate's most radical deputies
came from Brittany, whose nobility was so hostile to change that it
finally boycotted the Estates-General altogether. Hoping that the
king would takethe lead of the patriot cause, liberals were
disappointed at the irresolute, business-as-usual attitude of the
monarchy when the Estates opened at Versailles in May 1789. While
the nobility organized itself into a separate chamber (by a vote of
141 to 47), as did the clergy (133 to 114), the Third Estate refused
to do so. After pleading repeatedly for compromise and debating
their course of action in the face of this deadlock, the Third
Estate's deputies finally acted decisively. On June 17 they
proclaimed that they were not simply the Third Estate of the
Estates-General but a National Assembly, which the other deputies
were invited tojoin. A week later 150 deputies of the clergy did
indeed join the National Assembly, but the nobility protested that
the whole notion was illegal.
Now the king had to clarify his position. He began by closing the
hall assigned to the Third Estate and ordering all deputies to hear
a royal address on June 23. The deputies, however, adjourned to an
indoor tennis court on the 21st and there swore a solemn oath to
continue meeting until they had provided France with a constitution.
Two days laterthey listened to the king's program for reform. In the
“royalsession” of June 23 the king pledged to honour civil
liberties, agreed to fiscal equality (already conceded by the
nobility in its cahiers, or grievance petitions), and promised that
the Estates-General would meet regularly in the future.But, he
declared, they would deliberate separately by order. France was to
become a constitutional monarchy, but one in which “the ancient
distinction of the three orders will be conserved in its entirety.”
In effect the king was forging an alliance with the nobility, who
only a year before had soughtto hobble him. For the patriots this
was too little and too late.
In a scene of high drama, the deputies refused to adjourn to their
own hall. When ordered to do so by the king's chamberlain, the
Assembly's president, astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–93),
responded—to the official's amazement—that “the assembled nation
cannot receive orders.” Such defiance unnerved the king. Backing
down, he directed the nobles several days later to join a National
Assembly whose existence he had just denied. Thus the Third Estate,
with its allies in the clergy and nobility, had apparently effected
a successful nonviolent revolution from above. Having been elected
in the bailliages (the monarchy's judicial districts which served as
electoral circumscriptions) to represent particular constituents to
their king, the deputies had transformed themselves into
representatives of the entire nation. Deeming the nation alone to be
sovereign, they as its representatives claimed sole authority to
exercise that sovereignty. This was the juridical revolution of
1789.
Parisian revolt
In fact, the king had by no means reconciled himself to this
revolutionary act. His concession was a strategic retreat until he
could muster the military power to subdue the patriots. Between June
27 and July 1 he ordered 20,000 royal troops into the Paris region,
ostensibly to protect the assembly and to prevent disorder in the
restive capital. Theassembly's pleas to the king to withdraw these
menacing and unnecessary troops fell on deaf ears. For all their
moral force, the deputies utterly lacked material force to counter
the king's obvious intentions. The assembly was saved from likely
dissolution only by a massive popular mobilization.
During the momentous political events of 1788–89 much of the country
lay in the grip of a classic subsistence crisis. Bad weather had
reduced the grain crops that year by almost one-quarter the normal
yield. An unusually cold winter compounded the problem, as frozen
rivers halted the transport and milling of flour in many localities.
Amidst fears of hoarding and profiteering, grain and flour reserves
dwindled. In Paris the price of the four-pound loaf of bread—the
standard item of consumption accounting for most of the population's
calories and nutrition—rose from its usual 8 sous to 14 sous by
January 1789. This intolerable trend set off traditional forms of
popular protest. If royal officials did not assure basic food
supplies at affordable prices, then people would act directly to
seize food. During the winter and spring of 1789 urban consumers and
peasants rioted at bakers and markets and attacked millers and grain
convoys. Then, in July, this anxiety merged with the looming
political crisis at Versailles. Parisians believed that food
shortages and royal troops would be used in tandem to starve the
people and overwhelm them into submission. They feared an
“aristocratic plot” to throttle the patriot cause.
When the king dismissed the still-popular finance minister Jacques
Necker on July 11, Parisians correctly read this as a signal that
the counterrevolution was about to begin. Instead of yielding,
however, they rose in rebellion. Street-corner orators such as
Camille Desmoulins stirred their compatriots to resist. Confronting
royal troops in the streets, they won some soldiers over to their
side and induced officers to confine other potentially unreliable
units to their barracks. On July 13, bands of Parisians ransacked
armourers' shops in a frantic search for weapons. The next day a
large crowd invaded the Hôtel des Invalides and seized thousands of
rifles without resistance. Then they moved to the Bastille, an old
fortress commanding the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which had served as
a notorious royal prison earlier in the century but was now
scheduled fordemolition. Believing that gunpowder was stored there,
thecrowd laid siege to the Bastille. Unlike the troops at the
Invalides, the Bastille's tiny garrison resisted, a fierce
battleerupted, and dozens of Parisians were killed. When the
garrison finally capitulated, the irate crowd massacred several of
the soldiers. In another part of town two leading royal officials
were lynched for their presumed role in the plot against the people.
Meanwhile the electors of Paris, who had continued to meet after
choosing their deputies to the Estates-General, ousted the royal
officials of the city government, formed a revolutionary
municipality, and organized a citizens' militia or national guard to
patrol the streets. Similar municipal revolutions occurred in 26 of
the 30 largest French cities, thus assuring that the capital's
defiance would not be an isolated act.
By any standard, the fall of the Bastille to the Parisian crowd was
a spectacular symbolic event—a seemingly miraculous triumph of the
people against the power of royalarms. The heroism of the crowd and
the blood of its martyrs—ordinary Parisian artisans, tradesmen, and
workers—sanctified the patriot cause. Most importantly, the elites
and the people of Paris had made common cause,despite the inherent
distrust and social distance between them. The mythic unity of the
Third Estate—endlessly invoked by patriot writers and orators—seemed
actually to exist, if only momentarily. Before this awesome material
andmoral force Louis XVI capitulated. He did not want civil war
inthe streets. The Parisian insurrection of July 14 not only saved
the National Assembly from dissolution but altered the course of the
Revolution by giving it a far more active,popular, and violent
dimension. On July 17 the king traveled to Paris, where he publicly
donned a cockade bearing a new combination of colours: white for the
Bourbons and blue andred for the city of Paris. This tricolour was
to become the new national flag.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
1789: the convergence of revolutions
Peasant insurgencies
Peasants in the countryside, meanwhile, carried on their own kind of
rebellion, which combined traditional aspirationsand anxieties with
support of the patriot cause. The peasantrevolt was autonomous, yet
it reinforced the urban uprising to the benefit of the National
Assembly.
Competition over the ownership and the use of land had intensified
in many regions. Peasants owned only about 40 percent of the land
(see above Agricultural patterns), leasing or sharecropping the rest
from the nobility, the urban middle class, and the church.
Population growth and subdivision of the land from generation to
generation was reducing the margin of subsistence for many families.
Innovations in estate management—the grouping of leaseholds,
conversion of arable land to pasture, enclosure of open fields,
division of common land at the lord's initiative, discovery of new
seigneurial dues or arrears in old ones—exasperated peasant tenants
and smallholders. Historians debate whether these were capitalistic
innovations or traditional varieties of seigneurial extraction,but
in either case the countryside was boiling with discontent over
these trends as well as over oppressive royal taxes and food
shortages. Peasants were poised between great hopes for the future
raised by the calling of the Estates-General and extreme
anxiety—fear of losing land, fear of hunger (especially after the
catastrophic harvest of 1788), and fear of a vengeful and mighty
aristocracy.
In July peasants in several regions sacked the castles of nobles and
burned the documents that recorded their feudal obligations. This
peasant insurgency eventually merged into the movement known as the
Great Fear. Rumours abounded that these vagrants were actually
brigands in the pay of nobles, who were marching on villages to
destroy the new harvest and coerce the peasants into submission. The
fear was baseless, but hundreds of false alarms and panics stirred
up hatred and suspicion of nobles, led peasants to arm themselves as
best they could, and set off widespread attacks on chateaus and
feudal documents. The peasant revolt suggested that the unity of the
Third Estate against “aristocrats” extendedfrom Paris to villages
across the country. The Third Estate truly seemed invincible.
The abolition of feudalism
Of course the violence of peasant insurgency worried the deputies of
the National Assembly; to some it seemed as if the countryside were
being engulfed by anarchy that threatened all property. But the
majority was unwilling to turn against the rebellious peasants.
Instead of denouncing their violence, they tried to appease peasant
opinion. Liberal nobles and clergy began the session of August 4th
by renouncing their ancient feudal privileges. Within hours the
Assembly was propelled into decreeing “the abolition of feudalism”
as well as the church tithe, venality of office,regional privilege,
and fiscal privilege. A few days later, to besure, the Assembly
clarified the August 4th decree to assure that “legitimate”
seigneurial property rights were maintained. While personal feudal
servitudes such as hunting rights, seigneurial justice, and labour
services were suppressed outright, most seigneurial dues were to be
abolished only if the peasants paid compensation to their lords, set
at 20 to 25 times the annual value of the obligation. The vast
majority of peasants rejected that requirement by passive
resistance, until pressure built in 1792–93 for the complete
abolition of all seigneurial dues without compensation.
The abolition of feudalism was crucial to the evolution of a modern,
contractual notion of property and to the development of an
unimpeded market in land. But it did not directly affect the
ownership of land or the level of ordinaryrents and leases.
Seigneurs lost certain kinds of traditional income, but they
remained landowners and landlords. While all peasants gained in
dignity and status, only the landowning peasants came out
substantially ahead economically. Tenant farmers found that what
they had once paid for the tithe was added on to their rent. And
theAssembly did virtually nothing to assure better lease terms for
renters and sharecroppers, let alone their acquisition of the land
they tilled.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
The new regime
By sweeping away the old web of privileges, the August 4thdecree
permitted the Assembly to construct a new regime. Since it would
take months to draft a constitution, the Assembly on August 27
promulgated its basic principles in a Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen. A rallying point for the future, the
declaration also stood as the death certificate of the ancien
régime. The declaration's authors believed it to have universal
significance. “In the new hemisphere, the brave inhabitantsof
Philadelphia have given the example of a people who reestablished
their liberty,” conceded one deputy, but “France would give that
example to the rest of the world.” At the same time the declaration
responded to particular circumstances and was thus a calculated
mixture of general principles and specific concerns. Its concept of
natural rightsmeant that the Revolution would not be bound by
history and tradition but could reshape the contours of society
according to reason—a position vehemently denounced by Edmund Burke
in England.
The very first article of the declaration resoundingly challenged
Europe's old order by affirming that “men are born and remain free
and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common
utility.” Most of its articles concerned individual liberty, but the
declaration's emphasisfell equally on the prerogatives of the state
as expressed through law. (Considering how drastically the erstwhile
delegates to the Estates-General had exceeded their mandates, they
certainly needed to underscore the legitimacy of their new
government and its laws.) The declaration, and subsequent
revolutionary constitutions, channeled the sovereignty of the nation
into representative government, thereby negating claims by
parlements, provincial estates, or divine-right monarchs as well as
any conception of direct democracy. Though the declaration affirmed
the separation of powers, by making noprovision for a supreme court,
it effectively left the French legislature as the ultimate judge of
its own actions. The declaration defined liberty as “the ability to
do whatever does not harm another . . . whose limits can only be
determined by law.” The same limitation by positive law was attached
to specific liberties, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest,
freedom of expression, and freedom of religious conscience. The men
of 1789 believed deeply in these liberties, yet they did not
establish them in autonomous, absolute terms that would insure their
sanctity under any circumstances.
Restructuring France
From 1789 to 1791 the National Assembly acted as a constituent
assembly, drafting a constitution for the new regime while also
governing from day to day. The constitution established a limited
monarchy, with a clear separation of powers in which the king was to
name and dismiss his ministers. But sovereignty effectively resided
in the legislative branch, to consist of a single house, the
Legislative Assembly, elected by a system of indirect voting.(“The
people or the nation can have only one voice, that of the national
legislature,” wrote Sieyès. “The people can speak and act only
through its representatives.”) Besides failing to win a bicameral
system, the moderate Anglophile, or monarchien, faction lost a
bitter debate on the king's vetopower: the Assembly granted the king
only a suspensive or delaying veto over legislation; if a bill
passed the Legislative Assembly in three successive years, it would
become law even without royal approval.
Dismayed at what he deemed the ill-considered radicalism of such
decisions, Jean-Joseph Mounier, a leading patriot deputy in the
summer of 1789 and author of the Tennis Court Oath, resigned from
the Assembly in October. In a similar vein, some contemporary
historians (notably François Furet) have suggested that the
Assembly's integralconcept of national sovereignty and legislative
supremacy effectively reestablished absolutism in a new guise,
providing the new government with inherently unlimited powers. Nor,
they believe, is it surprising that the revolutionaries abused those
powers as their pursuit of utopian goals encountered resistance. In
theory this may well be true, but it must be balanced against the
actual institutions created to implement those powers and the spirit
in which they were used. With a few exceptions—notably the religious
issue—the National Assembly acted in a liberal spirit, more
pragmatic than utopian, and was decidedly more constructive than
repressive.
The revolutionaries took civil equality seriously but created a
limited definition of political rights. They effectively transferred
political power from the monarchy and the privileged estates to the
general body of propertiedcitizens. Nobles lost their privileges in
1789 and their titles in 1790, but as propertied individuals they
could readily join the new political elite. The constitution
restricted the franchise to “active” citizens who paid a minimal sum
in taxes, with higher property qualifications for eligibility for
public office (a direct tax payment equivalent to three days' wages
for voting and 10 days' wages for electors and officeholders). Under
this system about two-thirds of adult males had the right to vote
for electors and to choose certain local officials directly.
Although it favoured wealthier citizens, the system was vastly more
democratic than Britain's.
Predictably, the franchise did not extend to women, despite
delegations and pamphlets advocating women's rights. The Assembly
responded brusquely that, because women were too emotional and
easily misled, they must be kept out of public life and devote
themselves to their nurturing and maternal roles. But the formal
exclusion of women from politics did not keep them on the sidelines.
Women were active combatants in local conflicts that soon erupted
over religious policy, and they agitated over subsistence
issues—Parisian women, for example, made a mass march toVersailles
in October that forced the king to move back to the capital. In the
towns, they formed auxiliaries to local Jacobin clubs and even a
handful of independent women's clubs, participated in civic
festivals, and did public relief work.
The Assembly's design for local government and administration proved
to be one of the Revolution's most durable legacies. Obliterating
the political identity of France's historic provinces, the deputies
redivided the nation's territory into 83 départements of roughly
equal size. Unlike the old provinces, each department would
haveexactly the same institutions; departments were in turn
subdivided into districts, cantons, and communes (the common
designation for a village or town). On the one hand, this
administrative transformation promoted decentralization and local
autonomy: citizens of each department,district, and commune elected
their own local officials. On the other hand, these local
governments were subordinated to the national legislatureand
ministries in Paris. The departments therefore became instruments of
national uniformity and integration, which is to say,
centralization. This ambiguity the legislators fully appreciated,
assuming that a healthy equilibrium could be maintained between the
two tendencies. That the revolutionary government of 1793 and
Napoleon later used these structures to concentrate power from the
centrewas not something they could anticipate.
The new administrative map also created the parameters for judicial
reform. Sweeping away the entire judicial systemof the ancien
régime, the revolutionaries established a civil court in each
district and a criminal court in each department. At the grass roots
they replaced seigneurial justice with a justice of the peace in
each canton. Judges on all these tribunals were to be elected. While
rejecting the use of juries in civil cases, the Assembly decreed
that felonies would be tried by juries; if a jury convicted, judges
would merely apply the mandatory sentences set out in theAssembly's
tough new penal code of 1791. Criminal defendants also gained the
right to counsel, which had beendenied them under the jurisprudence
of the ancien régime.In civil law, the Assembly encouraged
arbitration and mediation to avoid the time-consuming and costly
processes of formal litigation. In general, the revolutionaries
hoped to make the administration of justice more accessible and
expeditious.
Guided by laissez-faire doctrine and its hostility to privileged
corporations, the Assembly sought to open up economic life to
unimpeded individual initiative and competition. Besides proclaiming
the right of all citizens to enter any trade and conduct it as they
saw fit, the Assemblydismantled internal tariffs and chartered
trading monopoliesand abolished the guilds of merchants and
artisans. Insisting that workers must bargain in the economic
marketplace as individuals, the Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 banned
workers' associations and strikes. The precepts of economic
individualism extended to rural life as well. In theory, peasants
and landlords were now free to cultivate their fields as they
wished, regardless of traditional collective routines and
constraints. In practice, however, communal restraints proved to be
deep-rooted andresistant to legal abolition.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
The new regime
Sale of national lands
The Assembly had not lost sight of the financial crisis that
precipitated the collapse of absolutism in the first place. Creating
an entirely new option for its solution, the Assembly voted to place
church property—about 10 percent of the land in France—“at the
disposition of the nation.” This property was designated as biens
nationaux, or national lands. The government then issued
large-denomination notes called assignats, underwritten
andguaranteed by the value of that land. It intended to sell off
national lands to the public, which would pay for it in assignats
that would then be retired. Thus church property would in effect pay
off the national debt and obviate the need for further loans.
Unfortunately the temptation to print additional assignats proved
too great. Within a year the assignat evolved into a paper currency
in small and large denominations, with sharp inflationary effects.
As the national lands went on sale, fiscal needs took priorityover
social policy. Sales were arranged in large lots and at auction in
the district capitals—procedures that favoured wealthier buyers.
True, for about a year in 1793–94, after émigré property was added
to the biens nationaux, large lots were divided into small parcels.
In addition, small peasants acquired some of this land through
resale by the original buyers. But overall the urban middle classes
and large-scale peasants emerged with the bulk of this land, to the
intense frustration of small peasants. The French historian Georges
Lefebvre's study of the Nord department, for example, found that
7,500 bourgeois purchased 48 percent of the land, while 20,300
peasants bought 52 percent. But the top 10 percent of these peasant
purchasers accounted for 60 percent of the peasants' total. Whatever
the social origins of the buyers, however, they were likely to be
reliable supporters of the Revolution if only to guarantee the
security of their new acquisitions.
Seeds of discord
Security could not be taken for granted, however, because the
Revolution progressively alienated or disappointed important
elements of French society. Among the elites, opposition began
almost immediately when some of the king's close relatives left the
country in disgust after July 14,thus becoming the first émigrés.
Each turning point in the Revolution touched off new waves of
emigration, especially among the nobility. By 1792 an estimated
two-thirds of the royal officer corps had resigned their commissions
and most had left the country. A contentious royalist press bitterly
denounced the policies of the Assembly as spoliation and the
revolutionary atmosphere as a form of anarchy. Abroad, widespread
enthusiasm for the events in France among the general public from
London to Vienna was matched by intense hostility in ruling circles,
fearful of revolutionary contagion within their own borders.
After the first months of solidarity, long-standing urban-rural
tensions took on new force. Though peasants might vote in large
numbers, the urban middle classes predictably emerged with the
lion's share of the new district and departmental offices after the
first elections of 1790. Administrative and judicial reform gave
these local officials more powers for intrusion into rural society
than royal officials ever had, with battalions of armed national
guards to back them up. Peasants might easily view urban
revolutionary elites as battening on political power and national
lands. And, while the Assembly made the tax system more uniform and
equitable, direct taxes remained heavy and in formerly privileged
regions actually rose, whilenothing was done to relieve the plight
of tenant farmers. Later, when the revolutionary government sought
to draft young men into the army, another grievance was added to the
list.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
Seeds of discord
Religious tensions
But it was religious policy that most divided French society and
generated opposition to the Revolution. Most priests had initially
hoped that sweeping reform might return RomanCatholicism to its
basic ideals, shorn of aristocratic trappingsand superfluous
privileges, but they assumed that the church itself would
collaborate in the process. In the Assembly's view, however,
nationalization of church property gave the state responsibility for
regulating the church's temporal affairs, such as salaries,
jurisdictional boundaries, and modes of clerical appointment. On its
own authority the Assembly reduced the number of dioceses and
realigned their boundaries to coincide with the new departments,
while requesting local authorities to redraw parish boundaries in
conformity with population patterns. Under its Civil Constitution of
the Clergy (July 1790) bishops were to be elected by departmental
electoral assemblies, while parish priests were to be chosen by
electors in the districts. Clerical spokesmen deplored the notion of
lay authority in such matters and insisted that the Assembly must
negotiate reforms with a national church council.
In November 1790 the Assembly forced the issue by requiring all
sitting bishops and priests to take an oath of submission. Those who
refused would lose their posts, be pensioned off, and replaced by
the prescribed procedures. Throughout France a mere seven bishops
complied, while only 54 percent of the parish clergy took the oath.
Contrary to the Assembly's hopes, the clergy had split in two, with
“constitutional” priests on one side and “refractory” priests on the
other. Regional patterns accentuated this division: in the west of
France, where clerical density was unusually high, only 15 percent
of the clergy complied.
The schism quickly engulfed the laity. As refractories and
constitutionals vied for popular support against their rivals,
parishioners could not remain neutral. Intense local discord erupted
over the implementation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
District administrations backed by urban national guards intervened
to install “outsiders” chosen to replace familiar or even beloved
refractory priests in many parishes; villagers responded by
badgering or boycotting the hapless priests who took the oath.
Opinion on both sides tended to fateful extremes, linking either the
Revolution with impiety or the Roman Catholic church
withcounterrevolution.
Political tensions
The political life of the new regime was also proving more
contentious than the revolutionaries had anticipated. With courage
and consistency, the Assembly had provided that officials of all
kinds be elected. But it was uncertain whether these officials, once
the ballots were cast, could do their duty free from public pressure
and agitation. Nor was it clear what the role of “public opinion”
and the mechanisms for its expression would be. The spectacular
development of a free press and political clubs provided an answer.
Fearful that these extraparliamentary institutions could be abused
by demagogues, the Assembly tried to curbthem from time to time but
to no avail. Freed entirely from royal censorship, writers and
publishers rushed to satisfy the appetite for news and political
opinion. The first journalists included deputies reporting to their
constituentsby means of a newspaper. Paris, which had only four
quasi-official newspapers at the start of 1789, saw more than 130
new periodicals by the end of the year, most admittedly short-lived,
including 20 dailies. As the journalistJacques-Pierre Brissot put
it, newspapers are “the only way of educating a large nation
unaccustomed to freedom or to reading, yet looking to free itself
from ignorance.” Provincial publishers were as quick to found new
periodicals in the larger towns. Bordeaux, for example, had only one
newspaper in 1789, but 16 appeared within the next two years. While
some papers remained bland and politically neutral, many had strong
political opinions.
Like the National Assembly, revolutionary clubs also began at
Versailles, when patriot deputies rallied to a caucusof outspoken
Third Estate deputies from Brittany. This Breton Club, complete with
by-laws, minutes, committees, correspondence, and membership
requirements, began to call itself “The Society of the Friends of
the Constitution.” Soon it was known as the Jacobin Club, after the
Dominican convent where the club met when the assembly transferredto
Paris in October. Most prominent revolutionaries belonged to the
Jacobin Club, from constitutional royalists such as Mirabeau,
Lafayette, and Barnave to radicals like Brissot, Pétion, and
Robespierre. By mid-1791, however, moderates became uncomfortable at
the Jacobin Club, where Maximilien Robespierre was emerging as a
dominant figure.
The Jacobin Club was pushed from the left by the Cordeliers Club,
one of the neighbourhood clubs in the capital. The Cordeliers
militants rejected the Assembly's concept of representation as the
exclusive expression of popular sovereignty. They held to a more
direct vision of popular sovereignty as relentless vigilance and
participationby citizens through demonstrations, petitions,
deputations, and if necessary insurrection. In his newspaper L'Ami
du peuple (“The Friend of the People”) Jean-Paul Marat injected an
extreme rhetoric about alleged conspiracies and the need for
violence against counterrevolutionaries that exceeded anything heard
in the Assembly's political discourse.
Like the press, clubs quickly spread in the provinces. Building no
doubt on old-regime patterns of sociability—reading clubs,
Freemasonry, or confraternities—political clubs became a prime
vehicle for participation in the Revolution. More than 300 towns had
clubs by the end of 1790, and 900 by mid-1791. Later clubs spread to
the villages as well: a study has counted 5,000 localities that had
clubs at one time or another between 1790and 1795. Many clubs
affiliated with the Paris Jacobin Club, the “mother club,” in an
informal nationwide network. Most began with membership limited to
the middle class and a sprinkling of liberal nobles, but gradually
artisans, shopkeepers, and peasants joined the rolls. Initially the
clubs promoted civic education and publicized the Assembly's
reforms. But some became more activist, seeking to influence
political decisions with petitions, to exercise surveillance over
constituted authorities, and to denounce those they deemed remiss.
By 1791 the assembly found itself in a cross-fire between the
machinations of counterrevolutionaries—émigrés, royalist newspapers,
refractory clergy—and the denunciations of radicals. Its ability to
steer a stable course depended in part on the cooperation of the
king. Publicly Louis XVI distanced himself from his émigré
relatives, but privately he was in league with them and secretly
corresponded with the royal houses of Spain and Austria to enlist
their support. On June 21, 1791, the royal family attempted to flee
its “captivity” in the Tuileries Palace and escape across the
Belgian border. Rashly, Louis left behind a letter revealing his
utter hostility to the Revolution. At the last minute, however, the
king was recognized at the town of Varennes near the border, and the
royal party was forcibly returned to Paris.
A great crisis for the Revolution ensued. While the Assembly
reinforced the frontiers by calling for 100,000 volunteers from the
national guard, its moderate leaders hoped that this fiasco would
end Louis's opposition once and for all. In order to preserve their
constitutional compromise, they turned a blind eye to the king's
manifest treason by inventing the fiction that he had been
kidnapped. As Antoine Barnave put it: “Are we or are we not going to
terminate the Revolution? Or are we going to start it all over
again?” Outside the Assembly, however, Jacobins and Cordeliers
launched a petition campaign against reinstating the king. A mass
demonstration on July 17 at the Champ de Mars against the king ended
in a bloody riot, as the authorities called out the national guard
under Lafayette's command to disperse the demonstrators. This
precipitated vehement recriminations in the Jacobin Club, which
finally split apart under the pressure. The mass of moderate
deputies abandoned the club to a rump of radicals and formed a new
association called the Feuillant Club. Under the leadership of
Robespierre and Jérôme Pétion (who later became mortal enemies), the
purged Jacobin Club rallied most provincial clubs and emerged from
the crisis with a more unified, radical point of view. For the time
being, however, the moderates prevailed in the Assembly. They
completed the Constitution of 1791, and on the last day of September
1791 the National Assembly dissolved itself, having previously
decreed the ineligibility of its members for the new Legislative
Assembly.
When the newly elected Legislative Assembly convened in October, the
question of counterrevolution dominated itsproceedings. Jacobin
deputies like Brissot argued that only war against the émigré army
gathering at Coblenz across the Rhine could end the threat: “Do you
wish at one blow to destroy the aristocracy, the refractory priests,
and the malcontents: then destroy Coblenz.” Whereas the Feuillants
opposed this war fever, Lafayette saw a successful military campaign
as a way to gain power, while the king's circle believed that war
would bring military defeat to France and a restoration of royal
authority. On the other side, the Habsburg monarch, Leopold II, had
resisted the pleas of his sister Marie-Antoinette and opposed
intervention against France, but his death in March 1792 brought his
bellicose son Francis II to the throne and the stage was set for
war.
In April 1792 France went to war against a coalition of Austria,
Prussia, and the émigrés. Each camp expected rapidvictory, but both
were disappointed. The allies repulsed a French offensive and soon
invaded French territory. The Legislative Assembly called for a new
levy of 100,000 military volunteers, but, when it voted to
incarcerate refractory clergy, the king vetoed the decree. Though
manyFrenchmen remained respectful of the king, the most vocal
elements of public opinion denounced Louis and demonstrated against
him; but the Legislative Assembly refused to act. As Prussian forces
drove toward Paris, their commander, the Duke of Brunswick,
proclaimed his aim of restoring the full authority of the monarchy
and warned that any action against the king would bring down
“exemplary and memorable vengeance” against the capital. Far from
terrifying the Parisians, the Brunswick Manifesto enraged them and
drove them into decisive action.
Militants in the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government of
Paris set up by the capital's 48 wards or sections, gave the
Legislative Assembly a deadline in whichto suspend the king. When it
passed unheeded, they organized an insurrection. On Aug. 10, 1792, a
huge crowd of armed Parisians stormed the royal palace after a
fierce battle with the garrison. The Legislative Assembly then had
no choice but to declare the king suspended. That night more than
half the deputies themselves fled Paris, for theLegislative Assembly
too had lost its mandate. Those who remained ordered the election by
universal male suffrage ofa National Convention. It would judge the
king, draft a new republican constitution, and govern France during
the emergency. The Constitution of 1791 had lasted less than a year,
and the second revolution dreaded by the Feuillantshad begun.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The second revolution
The insurrection of Aug. 10, 1792, did not of course stop the
Prussian advance on the capital. As enthusiastic contingents of
volunteers left for the front, fear of counterrevolutionary plots
gripped the capital. Journalists like Jean-Paul Marat pointed to the
prisons bursting with vagrants and criminals as well as refractory
clergy and royalists and asked what would happen if traitors forced
open the jails and released these hordes of fanatics and brigands.
In response Parisians took the law into their own hands with an orgy
of mass lynching.
On their own initiative, citizens entered the prisons, set up
“popular tribunals” to hold perfunctory trials, and summarily
executed between 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners out of a total of 2,800,
stabbing and hacking them to death with any instruments at hand.
These prison massacres were no momentary fit of frenzy but went on
for four days. At the time no one in authority dared try to stop the
slaughter. Officials of the provisional government and the Paris
Commune “drew a veil” over this appalling event as it ran itscourse,
though soon political rivals were accusing each otherof instigating
the massacres. In a different vein, Robespierreamong others
concluded that popular demands for vengeance and terror had to be
channeled into legal forms; to prevent such anarchy, the state
itself must become the orderly instrument of the people's punitive
will.
The next two weeks brought this period of extreme uncertainty to a
close. On September 20 the French army turned back the invaders at
the Battle of Valmy, and in November at the Battle of Jemappes it
won control of the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium). On September
21 the National Convention convened, ending the vacuum of authority
that had followed the August 10 insurrection. Its first major task
was to decide the fate of the ex-king. The Convention's trial of
Louis became an educational experience for the French people in
which the institution of monarchy was to be completely desacralized.
Hard evidence of Louis's treason produced a unanimous guilty
verdict, but the issue of punishment divided the deputies sharply.
In a painstaking and solemn debate each deputy cast his vote
individually and explained it. At the endthe Convention voted the
death sentence, 387 to 334. A motion for reprieve was defeated (380
to 310), and one to submit the verdict to a national referendum was
rejected (425 to 286). This ill-considered proposal left the
impressionthat certain deputies were frantic to save the king's
life, andtheir Jacobin opponents were quick to raise vague
accusations of treasonous intent against them. In any event, the
former King Louis XVI, now known simply as “Citizen Capet,” was
executed on Jan. 21, 1793, in an act of immense symbolic importance.
For the deputies to the National Convention, now regicides, there
could be no turning back. Laws to deport the refractory clergy, to
bar the émigrés forever upon pain of death, and to confiscate their
property rounded out the Convention's program for eliminating the
Revolution's most determined enemies.
A republic in crisis
By the spring of 1793, however, the republic was beleaguered. In the
second round of the war, the coalition—now reinforced by Spain,
Piedmont, and Britain—routed French forces in the Austrian
Netherlands and the Rhineland and breached the Pyrenees. Fighting on
five different fronts and bereft of effective leadership, French
armies seemed to be losing everywhere. Even General Charles-François
Dumouriez, the hero of the first Netherlands campaign, had gone over
to the enemy in April after quarreling with the Convention.
Meanwhile, civil war had broken out within France. Rural
disaffection in western France, especially over the religious
question referred to earlier, had been building steadily, leaving
republicans in the region's cities and small towns an unpopular and
vulnerable minority. Rural rage finally erupted into armed rebellion
when in March 1793 the Convention decreed that each department must
produce a quota of citizens for the army. In four departments south
of the Loire River the Vendée rebellion began with assaults on the
towns and the massacre of patriots. Gradually royalist nobles
assumed theleadership of the peasants and weavers who had risen on
their own initiative. Forging them into a “Catholic and Royalist
Army,” they hoped to overthrow the republic and restore the
Bourbons.
The Convention could take no comfort from the economic situation
either. An accelerating depreciation of the assignats compounded
severe shortages of grain and flour in1793. Inflation, scarcity, and
hoarding made life unbearable for the urban masses and hampered
efforts to provision therepublic's armies. In reaction to such
economic hardships and to the advance of antirepublican forces at
the frontiers and within France, Parisian radicals clamoured
relentlessly for decisive action such as price controls and the
repressionof counterrevolutionaries.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
Girondins and Montagnards
The Convention, however, was bitterly divided almost to the point of
paralysis. From the opening day, two outspokengroups of deputies
vied for the support of their less factional colleagues. The roots
of this rivalry lay in a conflictbetween Robespierre and Brissot for
leadership of the Jacobin Club in the spring and summer of 1792. At
that time Robespierre had argued almost alone against the war that
Brissot passionately advocated. Later, when the war went badly and
the Brissotins, anxious to wield executive power, acted equivocally
in their relations with the king, the Jacobins turned on them.
Brissot was formally expelled fromthe club in October, but his
expulsion merely formalized a division that had already crystallized
during the elections tothe Convention in the previous month.
The Paris electoral assembly sent Robespierre, Marat,
Georges-Jacques Danton, and other stalwarts of the Paris Commune and
the Jacobin Club to the Convention, while systematically rejecting
Brissot and his allies such as the former mayor of Paris, Pétion.
The Parisian deputies and their provincial supporters, numbering
between 200 and 300 (depending on which historian's taxonomy one
accepts),took seats on the Convention's upper benches and came to be
known as the Montagnards, or the Mountain.
Supported by a network of journalists and by politicians suchas
Interior Minister Jean-Marie Roland, however, the Brissotins
retained their popularity in the provinces and were returned as
deputies by other departments. In the Convention the Brissotin group
included most deputies fromthe department of the Gironde, and the
group came to be known by their opponents as the Girondins. The
inner core of this loose faction, who often socialized in
Jeanne-Marie Roland's salon, numbered about 60, and with their
supporters perhaps 150 to 175.
At bottom the Girondin-Montagnard conflict stemmed from a clash of
personalities and ambitions. Over the years, historians have made
the case for each side by arguing that their opponents constituted
the truly aggressive or obstructive minority seeking to dominate the
Convention. Clearly most deputies were put off by the bitter
personal attacks that regularly intruded on their deliberations. The
two factions differed most over the role of Paris and the best way
to deal with popular demands. Though of similar middle-class
background as their rivals, the Montagnards sympathized more readily
with the sansculottes (the local activists) of the capital and
proved temperamentally bolder in their response to economic,
military, and political problems. United by an extreme hostility to
Parisian militance, the Girondins never forgave the Paris Commune
for its inquisitorial activity after August 10. Indeed, some
Girondins did not feel physically secure in the capital. Theyalso
appeared more committed to political and economic liberties and
therefore less willing to adopt extreme revolutionary measures no
matter how dire the circumstances. Ready to set aside similar
constitutional scruples, the Montagnards tailored their policies to
the imperatives of “revolutionary necessity” and unity.
While the Girondins repeatedly attacked Parisian militants—at one
point demanding the dissolution of the Paris Commune and the arrest
of its leaders—the Montagnards gradually forged an informal alliance
with the sansculottes. Similarly, the Montagnards supported deputies
sent on mission to the departments when they clashed with locally
elected officials, while the Girondins tended to back the officials.
The Montagnards therefore alienated many moderate republicans in the
provinces. As deputies of the centre, or “Plain,” such as Bertrand
Barère, vainly tried to mediate between the two sides, the
convention navigated through this factionalism as best it could and
improvised new responses to the crisis: a revolutionary tribunal to
try political crimes; local surveillance committees to seek out
subversives; and a Committee of Public Safety to coordinate measures
of revolutionary defense. By the end of May 1793 a majority seemed
ready to support the Mountain.
Believing that the Girondins had betrayed and endangered the
republic, the Paris sections (with the connivance of theMontagnards
and the Paris Jacobin Club) demanded in petitions that the
Convention expel the “perfidious deputies.” On May 31 they mounted a
mass demonstration and on June 2 forced a showdown by deploying
armed national guards around the convention's hall. Backed by a huge
crowd of unarmed men and women, their solid phalanxof fixed bayonets
made it impossible for the deputies to leave without risking serious
violence. Inside, the Montagnards applauded this insurrection as an
expression of popular sovereignty, akin to that of July 14 or August
10. When the people thus spoke directly, they argued, its deputies
had no choice but to comply. Centrists did everything they could to
avoid a purge but in the end decided that only this fateful act
could preserve the Revolution's unity. Barère composed a report to
the French people justifying the expulsion of 29 Girondins. Later
120 deputies who signed a protest against the purge were themselves
suspended from the Convention, and in October the original Girondins
stood trial before the revolutionary tribunal, which sentenced them
to death. The Montagnard ascendancy had begun.
Though the deadlock in the Convention was now broken, the balance of
forces in the country was by no means clear. The Parisian
sansculottes might well continue to intimidate the convention and
emerge as the dominant partner in their alliance with the
Montagnards—just as Girondin orators had warned. Conversely,
provincial opinion might rebel against this mutilation of the
National Convention by Paris and its Montagnard partisans. Purged of
the Girondins,the Convention itself could reach consensus more
readily, but the nation as a whole was more divided than ever.
At first it seemed as if the expulsion of the Girondins would indeed
backfire. More than half of the departmental directories protested
against the Convention's purge. But, faced with the pleas for unity
and the threats from the Convention, most of this opposition
subsided quickly. Only 13 departments continued their defiant
stance, and only 6 of these passed into overt armed rebellion
against the Convention's authority. Still, this was a serious threat
in a country already beleaguered by civil war and military
reversals. The Jacobins stigmatized this new opposition as the
heresy of federalism—implying that the “federalists” no longer
believed in a unified republic. Jacobin propaganda depicted the
federalists as counterrevolutionaries. In fact, most were moderate
republicans hostile to the royalists andcommitted to constitutional
liberties. They did not intend to overthrow the republic or separate
from it. Rather they hoped to wrest power back from what they deemed
the tyrannical alliance of Montagnards and Parisian sansculottes.
In Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, and Bordeaux, bitter conflicts between
local moderates and Jacobins contributed decisively to the
rebellion. Uprisings in Lyon and Marseille (France's second- and
third-largest cities) began in late May when moderates seized power
from local Jacobin authorities who had threatened their lives and
property—Jacobins like the firebrand Marie-Joseph Chalier in Lyon
who was supported by Montagnard representatives-on-mission. The
expulsion of the Girondins was merely the last straw. Whatever its
causes, however, “federalist” rebellion did threaten national unity
and the Convention's sovereign authority. Royalists, moreover, did
gain control of the movement in Toulon and opened that port to the
British. Holding out no offer of negotiation, the Convention
organized military force to crush the rebellions and promised the
leaders exemplary punishment. “Lyon has made war against liberty,”
declared the Convention; “Lyon no longer exists.” When the
republic's forces recaptured the city in October, they changed its
name to “Liberated City,” demolished the houses of the wealthy, and
summarily executed more than 2,000 Lyonnais, including many wealthy
merchants.
The Reign of Terror
After their victory in expelling the Girondins, Parisian militants
“regenerated” their own sectional assemblies by purging local
moderates, while radicals like Jacques-René Hébert and Pierre-Gaspard
Chaumette tightened their grip on the Paris Commune. On Sept. 5,
1793, they mounted another mass demonstration to demand that the
Convention assure food at affordable prices and “place terror on the
order of the day.” Led by its Committee of Public Safety, the
Convention placated the popular movement with decisive actions. It
proclaimed the need for terror against the Revolution's enemies,
made economic crimes such as hoarding into capital offenses, and
decreed a system of price and wage controls known as the maximum.
The Law of Suspects empowered local revolutionary committees to
arrest “those who by their conduct, relations or language spoken or
written, have shown themselves partisans of tyranny or federalism
and enemies of liberty.” In1793–94 well over 200,000 citizens were
detained under this law; though most of them never stood trial, they
languished in pestiferous jails, where an estimated 10,000 perished.
About 17,000 death sentences were handed down by the military
commissions and revolutionary tribunals of the Terror, 72 percent
for charges of armed rebellion in the two major zones of civil
war—the federalist southeast and the western Vendée region.
One-third of the departments, however, had fewer than 10 death
sentences passed on their inhabitants and were relatively tranquil.
To help police the maximum and requisition grain in the countryside,
as well as to carry out arrest warrants and guardpolitical
prisoners, the Convention authorized local authorities to create
paramilitary forces. About 50 such armées révolutionnaires came into
being as ambulatory instruments of the Terror in the provinces.
Fraternizing withpeasants and artisans in the hinterland, these
forces helped raise revolutionary enthusiasm but ultimately left
such village sansculottes vulnerable to the wrath of the wealthy
citizens whom they harassed.
Back in June the Convention had quickly drafted a new democratic
constitution, incorporating such popular demands as universal male
suffrage, the right to subsistence, and the right to free public
education. In a referendum this Jacobin constitution of 1793 was
approved virtually without dissent by about two million voters.
Because of the emergency, however, the Convention placed the new
constitution on the shelf in October and declared that “the
provisional government of France is revolutionary until the peace.”
There would be no elections, no local autonomy, no guarantees of
individual liberties for the duration of the emergency. The
Conventionwould rule with a sovereignty more absolute than the old
monarchy had ever claimed. Nor would serious popular protest be
tolerated any longer, now that the Jacobins had used such
intervention to secure power. The balance in the alliance between
Montagnards and sansculottes gradually shifted from the streets of
Paris to the halls and committee rooms of the Convention.
From the beginning a popular terrorist mentality had helped shape
the Revolution. Peasants and townspeople alike had been galvanized
by fear and rage over “aristocratic plots” in 1789. Lynchings of
“enemies of the people” punctuated the Revolution, culminating in
the September massacres, which reflected an extreme fear of betrayal
and an unbridled punitive will. Now the Revolution's leaders were
preempting this punitive will in order to control it: they conceived
of terror as rational rather than emotional and as organized rather
than instinctive. Paradoxically they were trying to render terror
lawful—legality being an article of faith among most
revolutionaries—but without the procedural safeguards that
accompanied the regular criminal code of 1791.
For the more pragmatic Montagnards that deviation was justified by
the unparalleled emergency situation confronting France in 1793:
before the benefits of the Revolution could be enjoyed, they must be
secured against their enemies by force. (“Terror is nothing other
than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible . . . . Is force made only
to protect crime?” declared Robespierre.) For the more ideologically
exalted Jacobins like Robespierre and Saint-Just, however, the
terror would also regenerate the nation by promoting equality and
the public interest. In their minds a link existed between terror
and virtue: “virtue,without which terror is fatal; terror, without
which virtue is powerless.” Whoever could claim to speak for the
interests of the people held the mantle of virtue and the power of
revolutionary terror.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The Jacobin dictatorship
The Convention consolidated its revolutionary government in the Law
of 14 Frimaire Year II (Dec. 4, 1793; for a discussion of the
Revolutionary calendar, see below). To organize the Revolution, to
promote confidenceand compliance, efficiency and control, this law
centralized authority in a parliamentary dictatorship, with the
Committee of Public Safety at the helm. The committee already
controlled military policy and patronage; henceforthlocal
administrators (renamed national agents), tribunals, and
revolutionary committees also came under its scrutiny and control.
The network of Jacobin clubs was enlisted to monitor local
officials, nominate new appointees,and in general to serve as
“arsenals of public opinion.”
Opposed to “ultrarevolutionary” behaviour and uncoordinated actions
even by its own deputies-on-mission, the committee tried to stop the
dechristianization campaigns that had erupted during the anarchic
phase of the Terror in the fall of 1793. Usually instigated by
radical deputies, the dechristianizers vandalized churches or closed
them down altogether, intimidated constitutional priests into
resigning their vocation, and often pressured them into marrying to
demonstrate the sincerity of their conversion. Favouring a diestic
form of civil religion, Robespierre implied that the atheism
displayed by some dechristianizers was a variant of
counterrevolution. He insisted that citizens must be left free to
practice the Roman Catholic religion, though for the time being most
priests were not holding services.
The committee also felt strong enough a few months later tocurb the
activism of the Paris sections, dissolve the armées révolutionnaires,
and purge the Paris Commune—ironically what the Girondins had hoped
to do months before. But in this atmosphere no serious dissent to
official policy was tolerated. The once vibrant free press hadbeen
muzzled after the purge of the Girondins. In March 1794 Hébert and
other “ultrarevolutionaries” were arrested, sent to the
revolutionary tribunal, and guillotined. A month later Danton and
other so-called “indulgents” met the same fate for seeking to end
the Terror—prematurely inthe eyes of the committee. Then the
Convention passed the infamous law of 22 Prairial Year II (June 10,
1794) to streamline revolutionary justice, denying the accused any
effective right to self-defense and eliminating all sentences other
than acquittal or death. Indictments by the public prosecutor, now
virtually tantamount to a death sentence, multiplied rapidly.
The Terror was being escalated just when danger no longer threatened
the republic—after French armies had prevailed against Austria at
the decisive Battle of Fleurus on June 26 and long after rebel
forces in the Vendée, Lyon, and elsewhere had been vanquished. By
June 1794 the Jacobin dictatorship had forged an effective
government andhad mobilized the nation's resources, thereby
mastering the crisis that had brought it into being. Yet, on 8
Thermidor, Robespierre took the rostrum to proclaim his own probity
and to denounce yet another unnamed group as traitors hatching “a
conspiracy against liberty.” Robespierre had clearly lost his grip
on reality in his obsession with national unity and virtue. An
awkward coalition of moderates, Jacobin pragmatists, rival deputies,
and extremists who rightly felt threatened by the Incorruptible (as
he was known) finally combined to topple Robespierre and his closest
followers. On 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) the Convention ordered the
arrest of Robespierre and Saint-Just, and, after a failed resistance
by loyalists in the Paris Commune, they were guillotined without
trial the following day. The Terror was over.
The Army of the Republic
The Jacobin dictatorship had been an unstable blend of exalted
patriotism, resolute political leadership, ideological fanaticism,
and populist initiatives. The rhetoric and symbolism of democracy
constituted a new civic pedagogy, matched by bold egalitarian
policies. The army was a primary focal point of this democratic
impetus. Back in 1790 the National Assembly had opted for a small
military of long-term professionals. One-year volunteers bolstered
the line army after the outbreak of war, and in March 1793 the
convention called for an additional 300,000 soldiers, with quotas to
be provided by each department. Finally, in August1793 it decreed
the lévee en masse—a “requisition” of all able-bodied, unmarried men
between the ages of 18 and 25. Despite massive draft evasion and
desertion, within a year almost three-quarters of a million men were
under arms, the citizen-soldiers merged with line-army troops in new
units called demibrigades. This huge popular mobilization reinforced
the revolution's militant spirit. The citizen-soldiers risking their
lives at the front had to be supported by any and all means back
home, including forced loans on the rich and punitive vigilance
against those suspected of disloyalty.
Within the constraints of military discipline, the army became a
model of democratic practice. Both noncommissioned and commissioned
officers were chosen by a combination of election and appointment,
in which seniority received some consideration, but demonstrated
talent on the battlefield brought the most rapid promotion. The
republic insisted that officers be respectful toward their men and
share their privations. Jacobin military prosecutors enforced the
laws against insubordination and desertion but took great pains to
explain them to the soldiers and to make allowances for momentary
weakness indeciding cases. Soldiers received revolutionary
newspapers and sang revolutionary songs, exalting the
citizen-soldier as the model sansculotte. Meanwhile, needy parents,
wives, or dependents of soldiers at the front received subsidies,
while common soldiers seriously wounded in action earned extremely
generous veterans' benefits.
The Revolution's egalitarian promise never involved an assault on
private property, but its concept of “social limitations” on
property made it possible for the Conventionto abolish all
seigneurial dues without compensation, abolish slavery in the
colonies (where slave rebellions had already achieved that result in
practice), endorse the idea ofprogressive taxation, and temporarily
regulate the economyin favour of consumers. In 1793–94 the
Convention enacted an unprecedented national system of public
assistance entitlements, with one program allocating small pensions
to poor families with dependent children and another providing
pensions to aged and indigent farm workers, artisans, and rural
widows—the neediest of the needy. “We must put an end to the
servitude of the most basic needs, the slavery ofmisery, that most
hideous of inequalities,” declared Bertrand Barère of the Committee
of Public Safety. The Convention also implemented the Revolution's
long-standing commitment to primary education with a system of free
public primary schooling for both boys and girls. The Lakanal Law of
November 1794 authorized public schools in every commune with more
than 1,000 inhabitants, the teachers to be selected by examination
and paid fixed salaries by the government.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The Thermidorian reaction
With control passing from the Montagnards after Robespierre's fall,
moderates in the convention hoped to put the Terror and sansculotte
militance behind them while standing fast against counterrevolution
and rallying all patriots around the original principles of the
Revolution. But far from stabilizing the Revolution, the fall of
“the tyrant” on 9 Thermidor set in motion a brutal struggle for
power. Those who had suffered under the Terror now clamoured for
retribution, and moderation quickly gave way to reaction. As
federalists were released, Jacobins were arrested; as the suspended
Girondins were reinstated, Montagnards were purged; as moderates
could feel safe, Jacobins and sansculottes were threatened. Like the
Terror, the Thermidorian reaction had an uncontrollable momentum of
its own. Antiterrorism—in the press, the theatre, the
streets—degenerated into a “white terror” against the men of the
Year II. In the south, especially in Provence and the Rhône valley,
the frontier between private feuds and political reaction blurred as
law and order broke down. Accounts were settled by lynchings, murder
gangs, and prison massacres of arrested sansculottes.
Alongside this political reaction, Thermidor set off a new economic
and monetary crisis. Committed to free-trade principles, the
Thermidorians dismantled the economic regulation and price controls
of the Year II, along with the apparatus of the Terror that had put
teeth into that system. The depreciation of the assignats, which the
Terror had halted, quickly resumed. By 1795 the cities were
desperately short of grain and flour, while meat, fuel, dairy
products, and soap were entirely beyond the reach of ordinary
consumers. By the spring of 1795 scarcity was turning into famine
for working people of the capital and other cities. Surviving cadres
of sansculottes in the Paris sections mobilized to halt the reaction
and the economic catastrophe it had unleashed. After trying
petitions and demonstrations, a crowd of sansculottes invaded the
Convention on 1 Prairial Year III (May 20, 1795) in what was to
prove the last popular uprising of the French Revolution. “Bread is
the goal of their insurrection, physically speaking,” reported a
police observer, “but the Constitution of 1793 is its soul.” This
rear-guard rebellion of despair was doomed to fail, despite the
support of a few remaining Montagnard deputies, whose fraternization
with the demonstrators was to cost them their lives after the
insurgents were routed the following day.
Instead of implementing the democratic Constitution of 1793, the
Thermidorian Convention was preparing a new, more conservative
charter. Anti-Jacobin and antiroyalist, theThermidorians clung to
the elusive centre of the political spectrum. Their constitution of
1795 (Year III) established a liberal republic with a franchise
based on the payment of taxes similar to that of 1791, a two-house
legislature to slow down the legislative process, and a five-man
executive Directory to be chosen by the legislature. Within a
liberal framework, the central government retained great power,
including emergency powers to curb freedom of the press and freedom
of association. Departmental and municipal administrators were to be
elected but could be removed by the Directory, and commissioners
appointed by the Directory were to monitor them and report on their
compliance with the laws.
The Directory
The new regime, referred to as the Directory, began auspiciously in
October 1795 with a successful constitutional plebiscite and a
general amnesty for political prisoners. But as one of its final
acts the Convention added the “Two-thirds Decree” to the package,
requiring for the sake of continuity that two-thirds of its deputies
must sit by right in the new legislature regardless of voting in the
departments. This outraged conservatives and royalists hoping to
regain power legally, but their armed uprising in Paris was easily
suppressed by the army. The Directory also weathered a conspiracy on
the far left by a cabal of unreconciled militants organized around a
program of communistic equality and revolutionary dictatorship. The
Babeuf plot was exposed in May 1796 by a police spy, and a lengthy
trial ensued in which François-Noël (“Gracchus”) Babeuf, the
self-styled “Tribune of the People,” was sentenced to death.
Apart from these conspiracies, the political life of the Directory
revolved around annual elections to replace one-third of the
deputies and local administrators. The spirit of the “Two-thirds
Decree” haunted this process, however, since the directors believed
that stability required their continuation in power and the
exclusion of royalists or Jacobins. The Directory would tolerate no
organized opposition. During or immediately after each election, the
government in effect violated the constitution in order to save it,
whenever the right or the left seemed to be gaining ground.
As a legacy of the nation's revolutionary upheavals, elections under
the Directory displayed an unhealthy combination of massive apathy
and rancorous partisanship by small minorities. When the elections
of 1797 produced a royalist resurgence, the government responded
with the coup of Fructidor Year V (September 1797), ousting two of
the current directors, arresting leading royalist politicians,
annulling the elections in 49 departments, shutting down the
royalist press, and resuming the vigorous pursuit of returned
émigrés and refractory clergy. This heartened the Neo-Jacobins, who
organized new clubs called “constitutional circles” to emphasize
their adherence to the regime. But this independent political
activism on the left raised the spectre of 1793 for the Directory,
and in turn it closed down the Neo-Jacobin clubs and newspapers,
warned citizens against voting for “anarchists” in the elections of
1798, and promoted schisms in electoral assemblies when voters
spurned this advice. When democrats (or Neo-Jacobins) prevailed
nonetheless, the Directory organized another purge in the coup of
Floréal Year VI (May 1798) by annulling all or some elections in 29
departments. Ambivalent and faint-hearted in its republican
commitment, the Directory was eroding political liberty from within.
But as long as the Constitution of 1795 endured,it remained possible
that political liberty and free elections might one day take root.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The Directory
Sister republics
Meanwhile the Directory regime successfully exported revolution
abroad by helping to create “sister republics” inwestern Europe.
During the Revolution's most radical phase, in 1793–94, French
expansion had stopped more or less at the nation's self-proclaimed
“natural frontiers”—the Rhine, Alps, and Pyrenees. The Austrian
Netherlands (now Belgium) and the left bank of the Rhine had been
major battlefields in the war against the coalition,and French
victories in those sectors were followed by military occupation,
requisitions, and taxation, but also by the abolition of feudalism
and similar reforms. In 1795 both areas were annexed to France, and
their territories were divided into departments, which would
henceforth be treatedlike other French departments.
Strategic considerations and French national interest were the main
engines of French foreign policy in the revolutionary decade but not
the only ones. Elsewhere in Europe native patriots invited French
support against theirown ruling princes or oligarchies. As the
historian R.R. Palmer has argued, Europe was divided not simply by a
conflict between Revolutionary France and other states but by
conflicts within various states between revolutionary or democratic
forces and conservative or traditional forces. Indeed, abortive
revolutionary movements had already occurred in the Austrian
Netherlands and in the United Provinces (Dutch Netherlands). The
ideals of liberty, equality, or popular sovereignty knew no borders.
By 1797 Prussia and Spain had made peace with France, but Austria
and Britain continued the struggle. In a new strategy the French
launched an attack across the Alps aimed at Habsburg Lombardy, from
which they hoped to drive north toward Vienna. Commanded by General
Napoleon Bonaparte, this campaign succeeded beyond expectations. In
the process northern Italy was liberated from Austria, andthe
Habsburgs were driven to the peace table, where they signed the
Treaty of Campo Formio on Oct. 17, 1797. An invasion of the
Netherlands, home base of British forces on the Continent, produced
a similar victory. In short order two “sister republics” were
proclaimed by native revolutionaries under French protection—the
Cisalpine Republic in northern Italy and the Batavian Republic
(formerly the Dutch Netherlands). These were later joined by the
Helvetic Republic in Switzerland, and twovery shaky republics—the
Roman Republic in central Italy and the Parthenopean Republic in the
south around Naples.All these republics were exploited financially
by the French, but then again their survival depended on the costly
presence of French troops. The French interfered in their internal
politics, but this was no more than the Directory was doing at home.
Because these republics could not defend themselves in isolation,
they acted as sponges on French resources as much as they provided
treasure or other benefits to France. France's extended lines of
occupation made it extremely vulnerable to attack when Britain
organized a second coalition in 1798 that included Russia and
Austria. But, when the battles were over, Switzerland, northern
Italy, and the Netherlands remained inthe French sphere of
influence.
The treasure coming from the sister republics was desperately needed
in Paris since French finances were in total disarray. The collapse
of the assignats and the hyperinflation of 1795–96 not only
destroyed such social programs as public assistance pensions and
free public schooling but also strained the regime's capacity to
keep its basic institutions running. In 1797 the government finally
engineered a painful return to hard currency and in effect wrote
down the accumulated national debt by two-thirds of its value in
exchange for guaranteeing the integrity of the remaining third.
Alienation and coups
After the Fructidor coup of 1797 the Directory imprudently resumed
the republic's assault on the Roman Catholic religion. Besides
prohibiting the outward signs of Catholicism such as the ringing of
church bells or the display of crosses, the government revived the
Revolutionary calendar. Instituted in 1793, the new calendar
featured a 10-day week called the décade , designed to swallow up
the Christian Sunday in a new cycle of work and recreation. While it
had fallen into disuse after the Thermidorian reaction, the
Directory ordered in 1798 that the décadi be treated as the official
day of rest for workers and businesses as well as public employees
and schoolchildren. Forbidding organized recreation on Sundays, the
regime also pressured Catholic priests to celebrate mass on the
décadi rather than on ex-Sundays. This aggressive confrontation with
the habits and beliefs of mostFrench citizens sapped whatever shreds
of popularity the regime still had.
French citizens were already alienated by the Directory's foreign
policy and its new conscription law. Conscription became a permanent
obligation of young men between the ages of 20 and 25 under the Loi
Jourdan of Sept. 5, 1798. To fight the War of the Second Coalition
that began in 1799, the Directory mobilized three “classes,” or age
cohorts, of young men but encountered massive draft resistance and
desertion in many regions. Meanwhile, retreating armies in the field
lacked rations and supplies because, it was alleged,corrupt military
contractors operated in collusion with government officials. This
war crisis prompted the legislature to oust four of the directors
(the Prairial coup of June 18, 1799) and allowed a brief resurgence
of Neo-Jacobinagitation for drastic emergency measures.
In reality the balance of power was swinging toward a group of
disaffected conservatives. Led by Sieyès, one of the new directors,
these “revisionists” wished to escape from the instability of the
Directory regime, especially its tumultuous annual elections and its
cumbersome separation of powers. They wanted a more reliable
structure of political power, which would allow the new elite to
govern securely and thereby guarantee the basic reforms and property
rights of 1789. Ironically, the Neo-Jacobins, or democrats, stood as
the constitution's most ardent defenders against the maneuvers of
these “oligarchs.”
Using mendacious allegations about Neo-Jacobin plots as a cover, the
revisionists prepared a parliamentary coup to jettison the
constitution. To provide the necessary military insurance, the
plotters sought a leading general. Though he was not their first
choice, they eventually enlisted Napoleon Bonaparte—recently
returned from his Egyptian campaign, about whose disasters the
public knew almost nothing. Given a central role in the coup, which
occurred on the 18th Brumaire Year VIII (Nov. 9, 1799), General
Bonaparte addressed the legislature, and when some deputies balked
at his call for scrapping the constitution, histroopers cleared the
hall. A rump of each house then convened to draft a new
constitution, and during these deliberations Bonaparte shouldered
aside Sieyès and emerged as the dominant figure in the new regime.
Brumaire was not really a military coup and did not at first produce
a dictatorship. It was a parliamentary coup to createa new
constitution and was welcomed by people of differing opinions who
saw in it what they wished to see. The image of an energetic
military hero impatient with the abuses of the past must have seemed
reassuring.
