“This country,” wrote Gouverneur Morris from France on July 31, 1789, “is at present as near to anarchy as society can approach without dissolution.”28 Merchants controlling the market turned shortages of grain to their profit by raising the price; barges carrying food to the towns were attacked and pillaged en route; disorder and insecurity disrupted transportation. Paris was running riot with criminals. The countryside was so subject to marauding robbers that in several provinces the peasants armed themselves in their “Great Fear” of these lawless hordes; in six months 400,000 guns were acquired by the alarmed citizens. When the Great Fear subsided, the peasants decided to use their weapons against tax collectors, monopolists, and feudal lords. Armed with muskets, pitchforks, and scythes, they attacked the châteaux, demanded to be shown the charters or title deeds that allegedly sanctioned the seignorial rights and dues; if shown them, they burned them; if resisted, they burned the château; in several instances the owner was killed on the spot. This procedure, beginning in July, 1789, spread till it reached every part of France. In some places the insurgents carried placards claiming that the King had delegated to them full powers in their districts.29 Often the destruction was indiscriminate in its fury; so the peasants on the lands of the Abbey of Murbach burned its library, carried off its plate and linen, uncorked its wine casks, drank what they could, and let the remainder flow down the drain. In eight communes the inhabitants invaded the monasteries, carried off the title deeds, and explained to the monks that the clergy were now subject to the people. “In Franche-Comté,” said a report to the National Assembly, “nearly forty châteaux and seignorial mansions have been pillaged or burned; in Langres three out of five; in the Dauphiné twenty-seven; in the Viennois district all the monasteries; … countless assassinations of lords or rich bourgeois.”30 Town officials who tried to stop these “Jacqueries” were deposed; some were beheaded. Aristocrats abandoned their homes and sought safety elsewhere, but almost everywhere they encountered the same “spontaneous anarchy.” A second wave of emigration began.
On the night of August 4, 1789, a deputy reported to the Assembly at Versailles: “Letters from all the provinces indicate that property of all kinds is a prey to the most criminal violence; on all sides châteaux are being burned, convents destroyed, and farms abandoned to pillage. The taxes, the feudal dues are extinct, the laws are without force, and the magistrates without authority.”31 The remaining nobles perceived that the revolution, which they had hoped to confine to Paris and to quiet with minor concessions, was now national, and that feudal dues could no longer be maintained. The Vicomte de Noailles proposed that “all feudal dues shall be redeemable … for a money payment or commuted at a fair valuation…. Seignorial corvées, serfdom, and other forms of personal servitude shall be abolished without compensation”; and, ending class exemptions, “taxes shall be paid by every individual in the kingdom in proportion to his income.”
Noailles was poor, and would suffer quite tolerably by these measures, but the Duc d’Aiguillon, among the richest of the barons, seconded the proposal, and made a startling admission: “The people are at last trying to cast off a yoke which has weighed upon them for many centuries past; and we must confess that—though this insurrection must be condemned … an excuse can be found for it in the vexations of which the people have been the victims.”32 This avowal moved the liberal nobles to enthusiastic support; they crowded one another in coming forward to relinquish their questioned privileges; and after hours of enthusiastic surrender, at two o’clock on the morning of August 5, the Assembly proclaimed the emancipation of the peasantry. Some cautious clauses were later added, requiring the peasants to pay, in periodic installments, a fee in redemption of certain dues; but resistance to these payments made their collection impracticable, and effected the real end of the feudal system. The signature of the King to the “great renunciation” was invited by Article XVI, which proclaimed him, thereby, the “Restorer of French Liberty.”33
The wave of humanitarian sentiment lasted long enough to produce an other historic document—a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 27, 1789). It was proposed by Lafayette, who was still warm with the impressions left upon him by the Declaration of Independence and the bills of rights proclaimed by several of the American states. The younger nobles in the Assembly could support the notion of equality because they had suffered from the hereditary privileges of the oldest son, and some, like Mirabeau, had borne arbitrary imprisonment. The bourgeois delegates resented aristocratic exclusiveness in society, and the noble monopoly of the higher posts in civil or military service. Almost all the delegates had read Rousseau on the general will, and accepted the doctrine of the philosopher that basic rights belonged to every human being by natural law. So there was little resistance to prefacing the new constitution with a declaration that seemed to complete the revolution. Some articles can bear repetition:
Article 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights….
Article 2. The aim of all political association is the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression….
Article 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can be determined only by law….
Article 6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its formation…. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities….
Article 7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases, and according to the forms, prescribed by law….
Article 9. As all persons are held innocent until they have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.
Article 10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
Article 11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law….
Article 17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.34
Even in this affirmation of democratic ideals some imperfections remained. Slavery was allowed to continue in the French Caribbean colonies until the Convention abolished it in 1794. The new constitution restricted the ballot, and eligibility to public office, to payers of a specified minimum of taxes. Civil rights were still withheld from actors, Protestants, and Jews. Louis XVI withheld his agreement to the declaration on the ground that it would stir up further unrest and disorder. It remained for the Parisian populace to force his consent.