In 1789, France was widely considered a nation to be envied. It was the center of the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. French scientists, such as François Lavoiser (1743-1794), the Father of Modern Chemistry, and Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who did initial work on how forms of life adjust to the environment, led the world, French books were read everywhere, and French was the international language spoken among the educated and aristocratic circles of many countries. With a population of about 25.5 million, France was the most populous nation in Europe and Paris, and although smaller than London, was the cultural center of Europe. French exports to Europe were greater than those of Great Britain. Nearly half of the gold pieces circulating in Europe, at the time, were French.
Despite its power and appearance of wealth, France had deep-rooted problems. The French government had become corrupt and ineffective, clinging to an outdated social structure that carried over from the Middle Ages. Under this old order or Ancien Régime (Old Regime), there were three estates, or orders, in society. The structure of this old order no longer corresponded to the real distribution of power or the influence among the French. The government was also heavily in debt and unable to balance its budget or deal with the crisis of doing so.
Efforts to reform the country led to a series of events that ultimately ended in the bloody French Revolution that destroyed the Old Regime. As the French Revolution progressed from its moderate stage to its more radical phase known as the “Reign of Terror,” other European nations became concerned because the Revolution’s slogan of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” threatened the established social order of the nineteenth century. The monarchs of England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, therefore, formed the Grand Alliance to stop the spread of the Revolution. The forming of this Alliance led to war with France.
The French Revolution also led to the rise of the legendary leader, Napoleon. In 1799, Napoleon, who called himself a “son of the Revolution,” seized control of France. From 1800-1815, Napoleon dominated the European continent. He was a military genius who established a French empire that controlled every European country except England. He was an efficient administrator who instituted a number of Enlightenment reforms that captured the support of the people. He spread the idea of the French Revolution throughout Europe, but his ambition and repression of liberty contributed to his downfall. After losing many troops in the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Nations in 1813 by a coalition of European forces.
In 1814, the European nations met at the Congress of Vienna in an effort to undo the effects of the French Revolution and to turn back the clock to the way the world was prior to 1789. The representatives also sought to establish a policy of a balance of power to ensure that one person or country such as Napoleon or France would never dominate the European continent. This balance of power led to a hundred years of peace and prosperity in Europe. During this time, Europe became a powerful force in the world and extended its control over the areas of Asia and Africa.
In 1789, the structure of French society, which fostered great inequalities among the people, led to a revolt against Louis XVI. The French Revolution led to a period of reform, chaos, and conservative reaction. Historians, such as Crane Brinton, acknowledge that democratic revolutions, such as the English Puritan Revolution of 1689, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution, may have a set of individual characteristics that are different from each other but follow a sequel of events that are similar to all democratic revolutions.
The political, economic, and social conditions of eighteenth-century France was called the Old Regime. The class structure of France was divided along the following lines:
The First Estate: The clergy of the Catholic Church represented about 1% of the population but owned about 10-15% of the land. They paid no direct taxes to the government except for a voluntary tax every five years. The Roman Catholic clergy of the First Estates included bishops and abbots, but not the parish priests who were often as poor as their parishioners.
The Second Estate: Nobles and landowners in France consisted of less than 2% of the population and owned about 20% of the land. They also were exempt from taxes. Like the First Estate, the Second Estate was a privileged class. It collected feudal dues from the peasants, and its members held the best government jobs and army positions.
The Third Estate: The middle class (bourgeoisie), urban lower classes, and peasant farmers, who comprised 98% of France’s total population and owned about 40% of the land. Although the middle class had grown in France, the majority of the Third Estate was the peasants who lived on the lands. The bulk of the taxes fell on the Third Estate. The most burdensome taxes were the taille (a tax on agricultural goods such as produce), capitation (poll tax), a tithe (a church tax of about 10%), a gabelle (a salt tax), a vingtieme (an income tax), and dues to the local lord for the use of his mill (wine press, and so on). The bourgeoisie, the rising commercial and professional classes, paid less taxes than the peasants but felt unjustly treated. They were denied good jobs and wanted to reform a system that was outdated and did not give them the political and social rights on par with their economic conditions.
The absolutism of the king denied the people both a voice in the government and a way for them to make their grievances known. By using lettres de cachet (letters bearing the royal seal), the king was able to put his opponents into jail indefinitely without charges, bail, or trial.
The immediate cause of the French Revolution was financial. In 1789, France was sinking under a mound of debts. The French debt stood at four billion livres and it could not be carried because revenue fell short of expenditures. France was not poor, but tax exemptions and tax evasions by the wealthy, as described in the Estates list earlier, had led the country to a serious financial crisis. The extravagant cost of maintaining the Versailles Court and the debts incurred from the wars of Louis XIV as well as the money raised to support the War of American Independence against France’s rival, Britain, added to the problem. By 1789, half of the income tax went just to pay off the interest on this enormous debt. The French debt was being held by aristocrats, merchants, manufacturers, and financiers. However, the financial crisis was not due to national poverty.
However, France was not bankrupt. Louis XVI (b. 1754, ruled 1774-1792) was a weak and indecisive ruler whose unpopular wife, Marie Antoinette, was considered a foreigner (she was a Hapsburg from Austria) and a vain, frivolous person who refused to cut expenses. Louis appointed a number of advisers, such as Swiss financier Jacques Necker who proposed to abolish tax privileges, but they were forced to resign after they proposed taxing the First and Second Estates. The king was fearful that taxing the First and Second Estates would weaken his royal power because these Estates wanted to exert greater political influence in the government. By 1786, the depressed economy and the lack of public confidence made it increasingly difficult for the government to obtain new loans. Louis XVI had no other option but to raise taxes. His adviser, Calonne, convened an “Assembly of Notables” (composed of high-ranking nobles and clergy), hoping to gain endorsement for a general tax on all landowners. The nobles insisted that they wanted to share in the control of the government. A deadlock ensued and Louis dismissed his adviser. He tried to push the same program through the Paris Parlement (comprised of 13 regional royal courts). When the Paris Parlement refused to grant Louis XVI the power to raise taxes unless a meeting of the Estates-General was called, the king had run out of options. He was forced to reconvene the Estates-General (described in the next section), a legislative body that included the representatives from all three estates.
On May 5, 1789, the Estates-General met at Versailles. The Estates-General was first summoned in 1302 at Paris by Philip IV in order to obtain national approval for his anti-clerical program. The power of the Estates-General was never clearly defined, nor did that body ever obtain the financial control which made the English Parliament a powerful institution. The Estates-General did not meet as a single body but convened separately as regional units, and its power varied inversely with the power of the king. Thus, as royal absolutism gained greater control in France, the Estates-General became less significant. The Estates-General had not met since 1614 and people looked to the meeting with enthusiasm because conditions in the country were bad. Peasants were starving and there were riots in Paris. People looked to the Estates-General to save the country. The Estates-General was made up of the First (clergy), Second (nobles), and Third (middle class, workers, and peasants) Estate. Each Estate had drawn up a list of grievances called cahiers de doleances. As part of the electoral process of 1789, the cahiers were intended to inform and instruct the deputies of local views and authorize reform. There was general consensus among the three Estates that the royal power had to be limited, that the Estates-General had to meet regularly, and that the individual liberties had to be guaranteed by law. However, the middle class, especially the lawyers who primarily made up the Third Estate, placed a greater emphasis on protecting the citizens’ rights than the needs of the peasants. An immediate issue arose over the voting procedure.
The Estates-General voted by unit and not by individual members. Each Estate had one vote. Therefore, the privileged classes – the First and Second Estates combined – could outvote the Third Estate. On June 17, 1789, after six weeks of deadlock over voting procedures, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and was joined by much of the low-ranking clergy and some of the nobles. The renaming was effectively a claim that this new body was now sovereign.
Louis XVI locked the National Assembly’s members out of the meeting hall. In retaliation, they met at an indoor tennis court at Versailles and took the Tennis Court Oath (June 20, 1789) not to disband until they had written a constitution for France.
The Tennis Court Oath officially began the French Revolution because power was coming from the National Assembly and not the king. On June 27, 1789, the king rejected violence and ordered the delegates to meet with the National Assembly. The National Assembly had become the legal form of government without resorting to violence. This body was to function as the legislative branch of government until the end of September 1791 and charged itself with writing a constitution. To reflect this mission, it called itself the National Constituent Assembly where the voting would be per capita and not by unit.
In the summer of 1789, food shortages, rising bread prices, and rumors that the king had sent troops to Versailles to dissolve the National Assembly incited people to action. On July 14, Paris mobs, looking for weapons, stormed the Bastille, a fortress symbolic of the Old Regime. The crowd cut off the head of the commander and marched around Paris with his decapitated head. This was a foreshadowing of the future. Disorder spread throughout France and set off what became known as The Great Fear. Peasants rose up against the nobles, burned castles, and destroyed records of feudal dues.
On August 4, 1789, at a stormy all-night session, the National Assembly took two preliminary legal steps to end the abuses of the Old Regime:
Abolished Feudalism: Abolition of feudal dues and tithes owed by the peasants; nobles were forced to give up special status and their exemption from taxes; all male citizens could hold government, army, or church office.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens: Issued by the Assembly on August 26, 1789, this document shows the influence of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke. It was modeled in part on the American Declaration of Independence, and contains the following decrees:
The principles of the Declaration were captured in the slogan of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” It became the symbol of the French Revolution.
In October, about 7,000 women marched to Versailles demanding bread. After protesting in front of an audience and the king, they eventually forced the royal family to return to the Tuileries, their palace in Paris. The royals were virtually prisoners there until their execution in 1793.
The National Assembly, fearful of the mob, returned to Paris. The Assembly now had a twofold function: solve the financial crisis and draw up a new constitution for France. The members, who were largely made up of the bourgeoisie class, addressed the following issues:
Financial Measures: To pay off the huge debt, they seized church property and sold the land to aid the government.
Religious Matters: The National Assembly abolished church titles. They seized the land of the church and religious freedom was granted to all groups. In 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved which subjected the Catholic Church to state control. The Civil Constitution declared the Church was independent from the pope and that the Catholic clergy was to be paid by the government and elected by the people. The Civil Constitution ended papal authority over the Church in France and dissolved monasteries and convents.
Pope Pius VI and a majority of the French clergy denounced the Civil Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Rights. This attack on the Catholic Church turned many people against the Revolution and made the Church the Revolution’s bitter enemy.
Legislative Matters: In 1791, the National Assembly (also called the Constituent for its work on the new constitution) completed its task by producing a constitution. The Constitution of 1791 provided for a constitutional monarchy, limited the powers of the monarch, and created a legislative assembly. The elected legislative assembly passed the nation’s laws, collected taxes, and decided on issues of war and peace. Members of the assembly had to be property owners and were elected by taxpaying citizens. The National Assembly also divided France into 83 departments ruled by local assemblies, thus eliminating the provincial system. The assembly also extended rights to Protestants and Jews, and abolished slavery in France.
Meanwhile, Louis XVI’s brother, who was a leader of the émigré nobles and had fled the country in order to actively restore the Old Regime, convinced the king to flee France. On June 20, 1791, the royal family was captured near the French border town of Varennes and was escorted back to Paris by a taunting mob.
News of the Revolution created excitement and fear in Europe. European liberals and radicals hoped that the Revolution would lead to a reordering of society everywhere. However, conservatives such as Edmund Burke of Great Britain, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), predicted that it would lead to chaos and tyranny. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) challenged Burke’s ideas in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft argued that it was time for women to demand equal rights, and her ideas were similar to those of the Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges (1745-1793). De Gouges was disappointed with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens because it did not grant equal rights for women.
In her Declaration of the Rights of Women, she asserted that “woman is born free and her rights are the same as those of man.” De Gouges was guillotined in 1793 in part because of her royalist policies and her criticism of Robespierre, the leader of the Reign of Terror. The works of Wollstonecraft and de Gouges marked the birth of the modern women’s movement for equal rights.
Some European monarchs were fearful that these revolutionary ideas would spread and endanger their countries. In August 1791, the king of Prussia and the emperor of Austria, the brother of Marie Antoinette, issued the Declaration of Pillnitz. They threatened to intervene if necessary to protect the French monarchy. In retaliation, France declared war on Austria in 1792. The Revolution entered a new stage.
The war went badly for the poorly equipped French soldiers. Prussia joined immediately with Austria, and by the summer of 1792, the two powers were on the verge of invading Paris. On July 25, Austria and Prussia issued the Brunswick Manifesto promising to destroy Paris if any harm came to the French king. The legislative assembly declared the country in danger. In Paris, the sans-culottes (which literally means “without breeches,” indicating their support of the trousers worn by the lower class), were committed to the working-class people and determined to push the Revolution in a more radical action. Many believed that the king was conspiring with the invading army and was responsible for the battle disasters of the French army. On August 10, 1792, the Paris mob stormed the Tuileries and slaughtered the king’s guard. In September, the sans-culottes, under the leadership of Georges Danton, who was the Minister of Justice and had organized the defense of Paris against the Prussians, carried out the September massacres. The mob attacked the prisons and killed over 1,000 people, including nobles and clergy who they believed were traitors to the cause of the Revolution. Danton subsequently was killed during the Reign of Terror.
The Radicals took control of the National Assembly and called for the election of a new legislative assembly – the National Convention – based on universal suffrage. Meeting for the first time in September 1792, the National Convention abolished the monarchy and proclaimed France a republic. All members of the National Convention were Jacobins and Republicans. However, there was a split in the convention between two competitive groups: the Girondists, named after a department in southwestern France, and the Mountains, so named because its members usually sat high in the hall. The Girondists favored a decentralization of power and were fearful of the powers of the sans-culottes. They supported voting rights based on property ownership.
The Mountains were led by Maximilien Robespierre, a middle-class lawyer who represented the sans-culottes, the working class of Paris. Robespierre favored a strong central government with the power to help the poor and control the economy. Known as “Mr. Incorruptible,” he wanted to create a “Republic of virtue” and accused the Girondists of sympathy towards the king.
In 1793, the National Convention put Louis XVI on trial. The trial split the convention. The Girondists wanted to imprison the royal family and exile him after the European powers had been defeated. The Mountains wanted to execute him. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was beheaded on the fast-falling blade of a brand-new guillotine (Dr. Joseph Guillotin, a member of the legislature, had introduced the device as a more humane method of beheading rather than the uncertainty of the axe) and later that same year Marie Antoinette was beheaded. The execution of Louis XVI sent shock waves throughout Europe. England, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, and Prussia united in the first coalition to stop the spread of these revolutionary ideas. This became known as the First Coalition.
By 1793, France faced even greater problems. Not only was the country at war with countries in opposition to the Revolution, but rising prices, unemployment, and in Vendee (the western part of France) a rebellion led by royalists and priests threatened the government. In the face of these problems, the sans-culottes joined with the Mountains to oust the Girondists from the National Convention in May 1793.
These Radical Jacobins centralized all control in a 12-man Committee of Public Safety, which had dictatorial powers. The goal of the Committee was to save the Revolution from foreign and domestic enemies. The Committee subjected the entire nation to compulsory military service, and the war against the Coalition became a national mission. Between August 1793 and September 1794, France raised an army of over 1.1 million men, the largest Europe had ever seen. Troops from the port city of Marseilles set the theme with the call for people to rally around the fatherland. The song sung by these troops would become “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of the French nation.
The French were victorious over the European Coalition because they had the ability to draw on the power of patriotic dedication to the nationalist state and a national mission. This was the foundation of modern nationalism, as citizens, reinforced by the ideas of democracy, were stirred by the danger of a common enemy. The Committee had turned the concept of a gentlemanly eighteenth-century game of war into a struggle between good and evil.
To protect the Revolution against domestic enemies, the Committee of Public Safety instituted a Reign of Terror, which lasted from late summer of 1793 to August 1794. The Committee arrested all persons suspected of treason and sentenced them to death. It is estimated that about 40,000 people lost their lives to the guillotine, to gunfire, or were drowned on barges set out to sea. The Reign of Terror had no respect for class origin. About 8% were nobles, 14% were bourgeoisie, mainly of the rebellious southern cities, 6% were clergy, and no less than 70% were of the peasant and working class.
The Committee of Public Safety also instituted price and wage controls, food rationing, monetary controls to stop inflation, the metric system, and censorship of all written material. In late 1793, Robespierre, who had become the chief architect of the Reign of Terror, proclaimed a Republic of Virtue. This was his bold scheme to de-Christianize France and to promote revolutionary values. He removed Christian symbols from public buildings, turned the Cathedral of Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason, and created a new non-Christian calendar. His actions alienated many people, especially the Catholic majority.
By 1794, the Reign of Terror had spiraled out of control and its horrors turned the French people against their actions. In March 1794, Robespierre executed Danton, one of the Jacobin Committee leaders, for arguing that it was time to end the Reign of Terror. Fearful that it may be next, the Convention decided to arrest Robespierre and he was guillotined on 8 Thermidor (July 28, 1794), one of the months of the new non-Christian calendar. The death of Robespierre began the Thermidorian Reaction. Tired of violence and virtue, the moderates regained control of the National Convention. A new constitution was written in 1795, which set up a republican form of government. The middle class was in control since only men of property could vote and hold office (women were not allowed to vote). The New National Convention set up two branches of the legislature: The Council of 500 (the lower house) and the Council of Elders (an upper house of 250 members over the age of 40). The Convention removed all economic controls, closed the Jacobin clubs, allowed Catholic services to be held again, and granted amnesty to those who were considered enemies during the Reign of Terror.
In 1795, the National Convention chose a five-member executive group that became known as the Directory. Attacked by the aristocracy and the sans-culottes, who were critical of the government economic policies, the Directory began to lose power. Unable to deal with the worsening inflation problem and fearful of a royalist uprising, it turned to the military for support. On October 5, 1795, a rebellion broke out in Paris and the Directory ordered a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to crush it. He saved the Republic, but the savior would ultimately be the destroyer of the government. Napoleon was rewarded for his loyalty with the command of the French army fighting the Austrians in Italy.