IN THIS CHAPTER
Summary: Between 1789 and 1799, the Kingdom of France experienced a revolution that challenged the social and political structure of Europe.
Key Ideas
• In 1789, the bourgeois leaders of the Third Estate attempted to force King Louis XVI to curb the power and privilege of the clergy and the nobility by withholding taxes and threatening violence.
• In 1791, the radicalized leadership of Paris's urban working class seized control of the revolution and attempted to create a more egalitarian society and a more equitable distribution of wealth.
• By 1 794, the radicals had all been consumed by their own reign of terror, and the bourgeois moderates reasserted themselves.
• By 1 799, the bourgeois moderates had come to rely so heavily on the military that they were powerless to stop a military coup.
Key Terms
Thermidor
bourgeoisie
Ancien Régime
Estates General
cahiers
National Assembly
Tennis Court Oath
Bastille
August Decrees
the Great Fear
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
March to Versailles
the Civil Constitution of the Clergy
sans-culottes
the flight to Varennes
Girondins
Jacobins
National Convention
Law of the Maximum
Committee of Public Safety
Reign of Terror
Directory
Introduction
Between 1789 and 1799, the Kingdom of France underwent a political revolution that unfolded in three phases:
• a moderate phase (1789—1791), in which the politically active portions of the bourgeoisie or merchant class attempted to curb the power and privilege of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the clergy, and create a limited constitutional monarchy similar to that which existed in Britain
• a radical phase (1791—1794), in which the politicized urban working class of Paris seized control and attempted to create a democratic republic and a more materially and socially egalitarian society
• an end phase known as Thermidor (1794—1799), in which the moderate bourgeois faction reasserted itself and concentrated simply on restoring order
By 1799, the Thermidorian government, known as the Directory, was totally dependent on the military for its ability to govern. In November of that year, a military general, Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, and embarked on an ambitious campaign to create a French Empire that spanned most of Europe. Upon his defeat in 1815 by a coalition of European powers, the French monarchy was restored and the kingdom of France was returned to its traditional boundaries.
The Ancien Régime in Crisis
The phrase Ancien Régime, or Old Regime, refers to the traditional social and political hierarchy of eighteenth-century France. It was composed of three “Estates”:
1. the First Estate, made up of the clergy, which included all ordained members of the Catholic Church in France
2. the Second Estate, made up of the nobility, which included all titled aristocrats
3. the Third Estate, made up of the citizenry, which included every one who was neither clergy or nobility and whose membership accounted for 96 percent of the population of France
Together, the clergy and the nobility wielded enormous power and enjoyed tremendous privilege, while the various groups that made up the Third Estate bore the tax burden.
The Catholic Church in France functioned as a branch of the government bureaucracy. It registered births, marriages, and deaths; collected certain kinds of agricultural taxes; and oversaw both education and poor relief. The Church owned approximately 10 percent of land in France but paid no taxes to the government; instead, it made an annual gift to the crown in an amount of its own choosing. The clergy who populated the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church in France ranged from poor, simple parish priests to the powerful cardinals who were connected to the pope in Rome, and who often served as chief advisors in the government of the French king.
The nobility were the traditional land-owning elite of France, though by this period they often supplemented their fortunes through banking and commerce. They owned somewhere between 25 and 33 percent of the land in France, but were exempt from most taxes, despite the fact that they still collected various types of manorial dues from peasant farmers. Members of the nobility held most of the high offices in the French government and army, and the Church.
The citizenry can be roughly divided into three social groups:
• the bourgeoisie, including merchants, manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, and master craftsmen
• the peasantry, including all agricultural laborers ranging from very prosperous land owners to poor sharecroppers and migrant workers
• urban laborers, including journeymen craftsmen, mill and other small-scale manufacturing workers, and all wage laborers that populated the cities and towns of France
By 1787, the government of King Louis XVI was in financial crisis. When he took the throne in 1774, Louis XVI had inherited a huge and ever-increasing national debt, most of it incurred by borrowing money to finance wars and to maintain an army. With interest on the debt mounting and bankers refusing to lend the government more money, Louis and his ministers attempted to reform the tax system of France and to pry some of the vast wealth out of the hands of the nobility. When the nobility resisted, he was forced to do something that had not been done since 1614; he called into session the Estates General. The Estates General was the closest thing to a legislative assembly that existed in eighteenth-century France. Members representing each of the three Estates met to hear the problems of the realm and to hear pleas for new taxes. In return, they were allowed to present a list of their own concerns and proposals, called cahiers, to the Crown. When the representatives arrived in Versailles, the palace of Louis XVI, in April of 1789, the representatives of the Third Estate presented a series of proposals that were revolutionary in nature.
The Moderate Phase of the French Revolution (1789-1791)
The representatives of the Third Estate, in reality all members of the bourgeoisie, demanded that the number of representatives for the Third Estate be doubled in order to equal the number of representatives in the other two orders combined and that representatives of all three Estates meet together and vote by head rather than by Estate. These demands were designed to give the Third Estate a chance to pass resolutions by persuading a single member of the nobility or clergy to side with them. The demands of the Third Estate posed a dilemma for Louis: granting the demands would give the Third Estate unprecedented power, but that power would come at the expense of the nobility and the clergy and could perhaps be used to get the tax reforms Louis and his ministers needed to solve France’s financial crisis.
Demand for a New Constitution
While Louis considered his options, the representatives of the Third Estate grew bolder. Arguing that they were the voice of the nation, they declared themselves, on 17 June 1789, to be the National Assembly of France. When they were locked out of their meeting hall three days later, they pushed their way into Louis’s indoor tennis court and vowed that they would not disband until a new constitution had been written for France. This proclamation became known as the Tennis Court Oath. On 27 June Louis decided in favor of the Third Estate, decreeing that all members should join the National Assembly.
Fear Causes Parisians to Storm the Bastille
While the bourgeois leaders of the new National Assembly worked on writing a constitution for France, the uncertainty of the situation created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. Nervous nobles began to demand that Louis break up the new Assembly, which in turn demanded an explanation for the arrival of new regiments of mercenary troops in Versailles. By July of 1789, much of the urban population of Paris, which now looked to the Assembly as its champion, believed that the nobility and, perhaps, the king intended to remove the Assembly by force. Their fears focused on the infamous Bastille, a prison fortress in Paris which they wrongly believed housed the guns and ammunition that would be needed for the job.
On 14 July, an angry crowd marched on the Bastille. The nervous governor of the Bastille ordered the crowd to disperse; when they refused, he had his guard fire into the crowd. The crowd responded by storming the Bastille. When it was over, 98 people had been killed and 73 wounded. The governor and his guard were killed and their heads were paraded on pikes through the city. In the aftermath, Louis’s advisors urged him to flee Versailles and raise an army to crush the Assembly and restore order to Paris. Louis decided to try to soothe the city instead, and he promised to withdraw the mercenary troops.
Rural Unrest Emboldens the Assembly
While order was restored in Paris, it was disintegrating in the countryside where peasants, aware that the nobility had been weakened and fearful that they would soon reassert their power with a vengeance, seized the opportunity and raided graneries to ensure that they had affordable bread and attacked the chateaus of the local nobility in order to burn debt records. In the context of that rural unrest, sometimes known as the Great Fear, the Assembly passed the August Decrees in which most of the traditional privileges of the nobility and the clergy were renounced and abolished. In an attempt to assure all citizens of France of their intention to bring about a new, more just society, the Assembly adopted, on 27 August 1789, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” a document that espoused individual rights and liberties for all citizens.
By the end of the summer of 1789, severe economic stress in the form of high bread prices and unemployment again prompted the people of Paris to take action on their own. Prompted by rumors that the nobility in Louis’s court were plotting a coup, and spurred on by an active tabloid press, the people of Paris rioted on 5 October 1789. The next day, a contingent of Parisian women organized an 11-mile march from Paris to the king’s palace at Versailles. Along the way, they were joined by the Paris Guards, a citizen militia, and together they forced their way into the palace and insisted that Louis accompany them back to Paris. He did; and within two weeks the National Assembly itself had relocated from Versailles to Paris. The March to Versailles, as it came to be known, demonstrated two important things.
First, the crowds of Paris did not yet look upon Louis XVI as their enemy; they had marched to Versailles to retrieve him because they believed that, if he were with them in Paris, rather than isolated in Versailles where he was surrounded by his aristocratic advisors, he would side with them and support the Assembly’s efforts.
Second, the crowd of Paris, and their willingness to do violence, had become a powerful political force.
The relocation of both the king and the National Assembly to Paris, within easy reach of the Parisian crowd, set the stage for the radical phase of the revolution.
The Radical Phase of the French Revolution (1791-1794)
The October Riot marked the beginning of a two-year period of relative calm. A gradual improvement in the economy eased the tension in Paris, and the Assembly’s most
determined aristocratic enemies either fled to the countryside or emigrated. The Assembly used the period of relative calm to complete the constitution and to draft and pass the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a piece of legislation that turned clergymen into employees of the government and turned Church property into property of the state. The Assembly soon sold off the confiscated property to pay part of the national debt, but the attack on the clergy and the Church turned many faithful Catholics against the Assembly.
When Louis XVI signed the new constitution into law on15 September 1791, the goals of the bourgeois leaders of the Assembly had been fulfilled: The power of the nobility and the Church had been broken and France was now a constitutional monarchy. Four developments conspired to send the revolution into a more radical phase, each of which is reviewed in the sections that follow this list:
• the king’s attempt to secretly flee Paris in June of 1791
• the outbreak of war with Austria and Prussia in April of 1792
• the division of the National Assembly into political factions
• the rise of a politicized laboring faction, known as the sans-culottes because of the long, work pants they wore
The King's Attempt to Secretly Flee Paris
The king’s attempt to flee Paris and head north to rally supporters, an event that came to be known as the flight to Varennes, was disastrous. He and the royal family were apprehended and forcibly returned to Paris. He was officially forgiven by the Assembly, but he had forever lost the trust of the people of Paris.
The Outbreak of War between France and Austria and Prussia
The war with Austria and Prussia came about partly because French aristocratic émigrés had been urging the Austrian and Prussian monarchies to come to the aid of the embattled Louis XVI. However, both Louis and the Assembly wanted the war, Louis because he believed that the country would have to turn to him to lead it in a time of war and the Assembly because they believed it would unite Frenchmen in a common cause. When the combined forces of the Austrian and Prussian Armies invaded France, the French army collapsed and the country went into a panic.
The Division of the National Assembly into Political Factions
The development of political factions within the Assembly revealed the differing opinions about the goals and aims of the revolution that had always lurked under the surface of their united front against the nobility and the clergy. An attempt, in October of 1791, to diffuse factional rivalries by dissolving the National Assembly and electing a new Legislative Assembly failed to solve the problem.
The Rise of a Politicized Laboring Faction: the Sans-Culottes
From the beginning, the Parisian crowd and its willingness to do violence had been a factor in the revolution, but it had been a force with essentially traditional and conservative aims, insisting that the king pay attention to and take proper care of his people. By 1792, the crowd was different; the working people (bakers, shopkeepers, artisans, and manual labors who were characterized by their long working pants—hence, sans-culottes, literally without short pants) now could be seen attending meetings of political clubs and discussing the reforms that were still needed, reforms that would bring about true equality.
Once the men and women of the sans-culottes began to assert themselves, political power belonged to whoever they would support. This fact became evident on 10 August 1792, when a crowd stormed first the royal palace and then the hall of the Assembly. Unable to resist the crowd, the leaders of the Assembly voted to depose and imprison the king and to immediately convene a new National Convention to deal with the crises facing the country.
The Vote to End the French Monarchy
The membership of the National Convention, elected by universal manhood suffrage, was more radical than its predecessors. In September of 1792, it voted to abolish the monarchy and to proclaim France a republic. It also managed to reorganize the French army and push the invading Austrian and Prussian forces back across the border. When the Convention proclaimed the war an extension of the revolution and vowed to carry it anywhere where people yearned for liberty and freedom, the monarchies of Europe responded by forming a coalition to crush the revolution.
In January of 1793, the convention put Louis XVI on trial for treason. The debate that followed his conviction revealed a split between two powerful factions with the Convention. The Girondins, whose membership tended to come from the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie, were mostly opposed to executing him; the Jacobins, whose members came from the lower strata of the bourgeoisie, were adamant that he must die. The vote was close, but the Jacobins prevailed and Louis was sent to the guillotine on 21 January 1793.
A New Constitution and Robespierre's Reign of Terror
The execution of the king, combined with a decision to increase the number of men conscripted into the army, caused large anti-Convention uprisings throughout France. In Paris, the Jacobins used the revolt as an opportunity to purge the Girondins from the convention. In June of 1793, a Jacobin-led mob occupied the Convention hall and refused to leave until the Girondins resigned. Those Girondins that refused to resign were arrested. The purged Convention then passed the Law of the Maximum to cap the price of bread and other essentials and drafted a new constitution that guaranteed universal manhood suffrage, universal education, and subsistence wages. In order to secure the egalitarian, democratic republic espoused by the new constitution, the Convention created a 12-man Committee of Public Safety and invested it with almost total power in order that it might secure the fragile Republic from its enemies. Within the Committee, a young lawyer from the provinces, Maximilien Robespierre gained control through his ability to persuade both his fellow Jacobins and the sans-culottes crowd to follow him.
Under Robespierre’s leadership, the Committee instituted what has come to be known as the Reign of Terror. Arguing that, in times of revolution, terror was the necessary companion to virtue, Robespierre created tribunals in the major cities of France to try anyone suspected of being an enemy of the revolution. During the period of the Terror, between September of 1793 and July of 1794, between 200,000 and 400,000 people were sentenced to prison; between 25,000 and 50,000 of them are believed to have died, either in prison or at the guillotine.
Among the victims of the Terror were those who rivaled Robespierre for power. When, in April of 1794, Robespierre had the popular and influential Jacobin leader Georges-Jacques Danton arrested and executed for daring to suggest that it was time to reassess the Terror, he lost the support of both the Jacobins and the crowd. In July of 1794, Robespierre was arrested, tried, and executed by the same Terror machine that he had created. The execution of Robespierre marked the end of the radical phase of the revolution, as an exhausted Paris, devoid of its radical leaders, succumbed to a reassertion of power by the propertied bourgeoisie.
The Final Phase of the French Revolution: Thermidor and the Rise of Napoleon (1794-1799)
For several months following the execution of Robespierre, the revolutionary Terror was replaced by a terror of reaction as armed bands of men, hired by the wealthier bourgeois elites, roamed the cities hunting down and killing remaining Jacobins. In the Convention, the ascendant moderates wrote a new constitution that limited the right to vote for members of legislative bodies to wealthy property owners and removed price controls. The executive functions of the government were placed in the hands of a five-man board known as the Directory. Increasingly, the Directory relied on the military to keep order and to protect it from both the sans-culottes, who stormed the Convention in May of 1795, and from Royalists who attempted a coup five months later.
When the war against the European coalition began to go badly, conservative factions within the Convention conspired with the ambitious and popular army general Napoleon Bonaparte to overthrow the Directory. On 9 November 1799, the conspirators staged a successful coup and Napoleon acquired the powers necessary to govern as “first consul.” By 1804, Napoleon had rid himself of his co-conspirators and had France proclaimed an “Empire” and himself emperor. He governed France with a mixture of reform and traditionalism and oversaw the military expansion of the French Empire until his defeat at the hands of coalition forces at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
• Rapid Review
When Louis XVI was forced by financial difficulties to call the little-used Estates General into session in 1789, the bourgeois representatives of the Third Estate launched a revolution aimed at curbing the power and privilege of the nobility and the clergy, and they attempted to turn France into a constitutional monarchy. Supported by the Paris crowd, the leaders of the newly formed National Assembly nearly succeeded, but foreign intervention, persistent resistance from the nobility, the indecisiveness of Louis, and the development of factions within the Assembly allowed new, more radical leaders to win over the sans-culottes that now made up the Parisian crowd and set the revolution on a more radical course. Besieged by a coalition of the European powers and beset with factional strife, the radicals resorted to a Reign of Terror, which eventually consumed them.
By 1794, the propertied bourgeoisie had reasserted itself and concentrated on restoring order and repealing the gains of the radicals. In 1799, their executive organ known as the Directory was overthrown by a military general, Napoleon Bonaparte. He gradually assumed dictatorial powers and attempted to create a European-wide French Empire. Upon his defeat in 1815 by coalition forces, the French monarchy was restored, and the Kingdom of France was restored to its prerevolutionary boundaries.
• Chapter Review Questions
1. The main obstacle to solving France’s financial problems was
(A) the extravagant lifestyle of Louis XVI
(B) the unwillingness of the Third Estate to pay more
(C) the fact that both the nobility and clergy were exempt from most taxes
(D) foreign wars
(E) a bad economy
2. The significance of the storming of the Bastille was that
(A) it put ammunition into the hands of the Paris crowd
(B) it marked the beginning of a radical phase of the revolution
(C) it freed important leaders from prison
(D) it demonstrated that the crowd could be an important ally for the Assembly
(E) it demonstrated that the crowd was tired of monarchy
3. The Great Fear of the summer of 1789
(A) politicized the urban workers of Paris
(B) catalyzed a European coalition against the French revolution
(C) put greater pressure on the Assembly to enact more radical legislation
(D) strengthened the position of the nobility
(E) demonstrated the desperation of an overtaxed peasantry
4. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy
(A) allied the clergy with the Assembly
(B) curbed the power of the clergy but alienated many Catholics
(C) brought the Assembly greater support among the Catholic population
(D) reaffirmed the central place of the Church in the French government
(E) made Catholicism illegal in France
5. All of the following precipitated the radical turn of the revolution EXCEPT
(A) the rise of the sans-culottes
(B) the flight of the king
(C) the division of the Assembly into factions
(D) the execution of the king
(E) the outbreak of war with Austria and Prussia
6. The Reign of Terror
(A) was necessary, according to Robespierre, to establish a democratic republic
(B) was opposed by the Parisian crowd
(C) was aimed only at the nobility
(D) was anticlerical
(E) was worst in the countryside
7. In Thermidor
(A) the nobility reasserted its power
(B) France was defeated by the European coalition
(C) the French monarchy was restored
(D) the sans-culottes chose to govern France directly
(E) the moderate portion of the propertied bourgeoisie reasserted its power
8. The Directory turned to the military because
(A) it lost the support of the sans-culottes
(B) it lost the support of the nobility
(C) it was threatened by both Jacobin and Royalist opposition
(D) it feared it would lose the next election
(E) it was overthrown by a general
• Answers and Explanations
1. C. It was the tax exempt status of the nobility and the clergy that prevented the government from gaining access to the majority of wealth in the French economy and, therefore, from solving its financial problems. Choice A is incorrect because, although Louis’s lifestyle was a drain on government resources, there was sufficient wealth in France to cover its national debt. Choice B is incorrect because the various classes in the Third Estate were already taxed beyond what they could bear. Choice D is incorrect because, although Louis’s foreign wars were a drain on France’s finances, there was sufficient wealth in the economy to pay for them. Choice E is incorrect because there were sufficient amounts of wealth in the French economy to deal with all of France’s financial difficulties.
2. D. The storming of the Bastille showed the members of the Assembly that the Parisian crowd could be used as a threat of further violence if its demands were not met. Choice A is incorrect because, despite its reputation, the Bastille did not contain much ammunition. Choice B is incorrect because, although the storming of the Bastille was surprisingly violent, it did not signal radical aims. Choice C is incorrect because, despite the Bastille’s reputation, it did not contain many prisoners. Choice E is incorrect because the storming of the Bastille did not signify a loss of faith in the king.
3. E. The Great Fear was a traditional peasant uprising; the peasants protested high bread prices and burned records of taxes that they could not pay. Choice A is incorrect because the Great Fear was an uprising that took place in rural areas of France, not the urban areas. Choice B is incorrect because the Great Fear had no effect on France’s foreign relations. Choice C is incorrect because, although the rural violence seems to have emboldened the Assembly, the pressure was applied to the king, Church, and nobility as the traditional sources of authority. Choice D is incorrect because the nobility’s inability to deal with the financial crisis undermined their authority.
4. B. The Civil Constitution on the Clergy required clergy to take an oath of loyalty to the state, something that their faith prohibited them from doing.
The action alienated many French Catholics, who sided with their priests over the National Assembly. Choice A is incorrect because, although the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, in theory, made the clergy government employees and therefore subordinate to the Assembly, the conflict it caused further alienated the clergy. Choice C is incorrect because the Civil Constitution of the Clergy angered most Catholics and made them hostile to the Assembly. Choice D is incorrect because the Civil Constitution of the Clergy sought to subordinate the Church and make it less central in the government of France. Choice E is incorrect because Catholicism remained the dominant religion in France.
5. D. The execution of the king was an effect of the radicalization, not a precipitant or cause. Choice A is incorrect because the rise of the sans-culottes led to a shift to more radical aims because the sansculottes’ hopes of a more egalitarian and economically fair society were more radical than those of the bourgeois members of the Assembly. Choice B is incorrect because the flight of the king eroded the people’s confidence in him and forced them to consider a more radical path. Choice C is incorrect because the development of factions within the Assembly meant that each faction had to compete for the support of the Paris crowd and, therefore, be more willing to listen to their radical demands. Choice E is incorrect because the war with Austria and Prussia created an air of crisis in which bolder action seemed required.
6. A. Robespierre justified the terror by arguing that a virtuous, democratic republic could only be established and flourish once the tyrannical enemies of the revolution could be eliminated. Choice B is incorrect because the reign of terror was supported by the crowds in big cities such as Paris and Lyon. Choices C and D are incorrect because no one was safe from the accusation of being and “enemy of the revolution”; the terror was not aimed at either the nobility or the clergy. Choice E is incorrect because the terror was mostly an urban phenomenon.
7. E. In Thermidor, bourgeois moderates reasserted their power after the great leaders of the radical ph ase had been consumed by their own terror tribunals. Choice A is incorrect because the nobility were largely absent from Paris by the time of Thermidor, having had the resources to flee the terror. Choice B is incorrect because France was not defeated by the coalition until 1815. Choice C is incorrect because the French monarchy was not restored until after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Choice D is incorrect because the sans-culottes had exhausted their energies by Thermidor and succumbed to the counter-terror of the bourgeois elites.
8. C. The Directory, being a government of bourgeois moderates, turned to the military to protect it from threats posed by both the more radical Jacobins and the more conservative Royalists. Choice A is incorrect because the Directory never had the support of the sansculottes. Choice B is incorrect because the Directory never had the support of the nobility. Choice D is incorrect because the new constitution written by the moderates limited voting rights to the propertied classes who supported the Directory, thus they had no fear of elections. Choice E is incorrect because, although the Directory was eventually overthrown by a general, Bonaparte, they had by that time already been dependent on the military for several years.