Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
The war that had helped the American colonies become independent from Britain also cost the French crown dearly; so dearly in fact that the French king, Louis XVI, was forced to look for new ways to raise money to pay for the costs of the state. Specifically, the king was keen to end the tax exemptions that the Church (the First Estate) and the nobility (the Second Estate) had hitherto enjoyed. When they refused to pay any tax, Louis called the nearest thing France had to a parliament, the Estates-General, which included the Third Estate of peasants, the middle class and urban workers, who between them made up over 95% of the population. When the Estates-General, which had last met in 1614, finally met in May 1789, it aroused great hopes of reform; at the time, the majority of the taxes were falling on the growing middle classes who hoped the parliament would give them a greater voice.
However, things did not go according to plan for the king. When it became apparent that the nobles and clergy held an unfair monopoly on voting rights, those who represented the Third Estate broke away to form their own National Assembly, taking up the slogan ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ and swearing not to disperse until France had a constitution that gave them the recognition they felt they deserved. At the same time a series of bad harvests had caused the price of bread – the staple diet at the time – to rise. The general challenge to the old order that had grown through the writings of French enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century only fuelled the revolutionary zeal of the people.
At one point, alarmed by rumours of an army gathering near the residence of the king at Versailles, outside Paris, the mob was urged to arm itself for its own defence. In an effort to gain supplies of guns and gunpowder, the mob stormed the Bastille, the main prison in Paris, on 14th July. While the prison held only seven prisoners at the time, the event served as a symbolic attack on the king’s authority and the date is generally recognised as the beginning of the French Revolution.
The king vacillated and gave in to the people’s demands to replace his army with their own militia. When he and his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, were marched by the mob from Versailles to central Paris so that they could be more closely watched, they realised that it was in their interests to flee. They eventually did so in June 1791. However, despite disguising themselves, they were recognised when only 20km from the border and returned to Paris, where they were duly imprisoned. The newly formed French Republic eventually executed the king in January 1793, and the queen suffered the same fate in October of that year. From that point onwards, ‘the revolution in France had become war in Europe: not an old-fashioned, familiar kind of war between monarchs for territory, but a newer ideological war between peoples and kings for the ending of old institutions and the fulfilment of dreams of a new society’.86
The reaction in Europe was one of shock: a king had been murdered by his own people. What’s more, the revolution threatened to expand beyond the borders of France. When Austria, ruled by Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II, refused to return French émigrés whom France had accused of plotting against the revolution, France declared war. Fearful of the message of the revolution, nations across Europe joined forces in an alliance against France, beginning a war that would spread across the globe, cause terrible suffering and end only in 1815.
With the country surrounded by enemies, extremists rapidly gained power in France, and anyone who spoke against the revolution was declared an enemy of the people and sent to the guillotine. Ironically, Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, two of the leaders of this movement of terror, were both executed in this way in 1794.