UNIT SIX
FRENCH REVOLUTION
Introduction
The American Revolution excited and inspired Enlightenment thinkers everywhere, but nowhere more than in France. Frenchmen were very aware of what was happening in America because the Americans sought French help and because the French gave this help. American documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were read avidly and then discussed by Enlightenment thinkers. Because of the discussion of these documents, they were pretty generally known about by most Frenchmen.
Frenchmen in the late 1700’s had a good many things to be discontented about. Their government was falling apart, their government’s financial situation was desperate, their society was still feudal and full of inequalities, their political system was archaic. They wanted change. Yet to change things in France would mean more than just changing a government. Change meant to destroy and then rebuild government and society, which was such a scary thought that it had never been undertaken. The Frenchmen were inspired by the Americans; if the Americans had taken the risk of defying Britain to build this new society and government, maybe they could take the risk of redoing their own government and society.
The immediate cause of the French Revolution was economic and financial. Put simply, the government was bankrupt. After decades of financial mismanagement, the government found itself with no money! To get some money required changing ancient feudal traditions. The steps the king took to do this is what initiated the revolution.
Before we begin the study of the story of the revolution we need to see what deeply rooted causes there were for it. We can divide these for study into political, social, economic and philosophical causes; you have to remember, though, in real life, these causes were not neatly divided as they are in this outline. Often, the causes overlapped.
The Causes of the Revolution
Political
France in 1789 had an absolute monarchy. An absolute monarchy is a government in which the king has all power. France’s most famous absolute monarch, Louis XIV, once remarked about himself, "L’etat, c’est moi!" which means, "The state (government)? It is I!" This comment sums up absolute monarchy in a nutshell. There was no executive, legislative, and judicial branch setup in such a government as Louis had. He was all three branches in one, and made all the decisions that each branch would make in a government like America’s. In addition to having all power, French absolute monarchs believed their power came from God; that he had chosen them to rule; therefore, no one on this earth had the right to stop them from doing anything they decided to do. They called this belief the divine right of kings. French kings believed they need not listen to anyone if they did not want to; they had ministers who gave them advice, but they didn’t have to do anything about it, and if they did not like the advice, they could fire the minister! Naturally, in a situation like this, few ministers were willing to take the risk of giving French monarchs bad news! There was no representative body like the British Parliament which could stop the king by holding up on his money. He received all the tax money, and he spent it as he pleased.
It has been shown many times in history that it is not a good idea to give any one individual all power. Humans seem to need something or someone who can "put on the brakes", that is, stop them when they get carried away. The French system had no provision for this. The French king was "above the law". He didn’t have to obey the laws he himself made! You can understand the enormity of this if you will think about a President of the United States and what our government would do about him if he decided he did not have to obey the laws of the land or if he broke the Constitution in some way.
When the king was a competent, educated individual who enjoyed the privileges of leadership and had some understanding of his duty to his people, absolute monarchy wasn’t too bad. It was at least efficient, as you didn’t have to wait for some legislative body to discuss and debate what you were going to do about an issue. The last French king, though, in those times, to be that type of king was Louis XIV, and even he got carried away at the end of his life. The French, though, still admired Louis XIV. They called him "the Sun King". He had made France what it was in the late 1700’s: the intellectual and cultural capital of the world. Louis had built an enormous palace for the French kings to live in; even in those days, it cost 13 million dollars to build. The name of this palace was Versailles.
The king in 1789, King Louis XVI, was no Louis XIV. He was not only not very bright; he was also shy and clumsy and the last thing he would have chosen on earth to do was be king. He would have made a good mechanic. He loved to fix things and spent his spare time tinkering with locks. He was honest, but he also found it hard to make up his mind, and he listened far too much to other people. Once he did make up his mind, he became stubborn and refused to change it. He probably would not have chosen his wife either. He was married to Marie Antoinette, the youngest of the Empress Maria Theresa’s sixteen children. Maria Theresa was the Empress of Austria when Marie was born, and she was a Hapsburg. Hapsburgs and Austrians weren’t real popular in France right then. Marie had been engaged to Louis when she was about 2 or 3 years old, and she grew up knowing she would marry Louis. Her education was designed to make her conversant with French history and culture, and naturally she learned French and French ways. But, the problem was, Marie (or Maria Antonia as she was named at birth) was spoiled. She was a pretty, flirtatious little girl, and she had many older siblings whom she wrapped around her finger with her charming little ways, and she flirted with her daddy until he gave everything she wanted, and she could usually talk her tutors out of teaching her what she was supposed to learn. She loved learning to dance, however, and she loved parties. She grew up into a spoiled, petulant, whiny adult who could never get enough of this world’s goods, and basically cared for nobody but herself. She was married to Louis when she was fifteen and he sixteen. The marriage was not a particularly happy one, and Marie soon found other outlets, like lovers, parties, masked balls, and decorating "le petit Trianon", the little palace that Louis had given her for a coronation present. Louis found the best way to deal with her was to give in to her, especially when it came to how much money she spent. Given the poverty in which many Frenchmen lived, that Marie should spend the tax money on dresses and diamonds was almost obscene. The French resented it, more than resented it. It made them fighting mad. The French called her "L’Autrichienne"(the Austrian Woman) behind her back, and they said it between their teeth like people do when they really hate someone. Her unpopularity reflected on Louis, and the French people, not knowing what a pushover he was, wondered why he did not stop her from spending so much money. Both Louis and Marie were much too isolated from their subjects; Louis would have been surprised to know how his people felt about him.
The French government was falling apart under Louis. He had no real interest in it, and he didn’t particularly listen to his ministers. If he did, he was not likely to carry through on their advice, especially if the advice was unpopular with Marie! Louis couldn’t get a finance minister to stay on the job. They all told him, repeatedly, that the French government (which, remember, is Louis!) must STOP spending money. Louis never listened. If the ministers said something unpleasant enough, they got fired. That the government hung together at all was because local administrators called intendants went on doing their jobs, Louis or no Louis.
The entire legal and judicial system of France needed to be reformed. The law needed to be codified to get rid of things left over from medieval times, and to end the overlapping of the two legal systems - Roman and feudal - that still prevailed in France. The courts needed to be made swift, fair and inexpensive. Judges and lawyers needed to get their jobs because they were good enough to deserve the job, not because they were nobles or because they could pay for the job. Many judges and lawyers had bought their jobs and then used the job to become rich or to climb up in society. Louis XV had permitted his ministers to attack the strongholds of these people, the parlements, that existed in Paris and other cities. He had abolished the parlements and had replaced them with new high courts of his own appointees. Louis XVI undid his father’s work and restored the parlements.
However, you could not reform the government of France, especially the legal and judicial systems, without tearing down the society of France, which was still feudal. We will now look at the society of France.
Social
France had a feudal society made up of nobles, clergy, middle class businessmen and professional people, peasants and laborers. In France, society was divided into three estates: the First Estate which was the clergy, the Second Estate which was the nobles, and the Third Estate which were the businessmen, craftsmen, professional people, and the peasants and laborers, everybody else, in other words. We need to look at each estate in turn.
The First Estate
The first estate was the clergy. They occupied a place of conspicuous importance in France. Although they comprised only .5% of the population, they owned 15% of the land in France! As a special feudal privilege, the church paid no taxes on this land. Instead they were supposed to voluntarily give the government a "free gift" every year, but they decided the amount of this gift, and the government would probably have made more money had the government been allowed to tax the land. The clergy paid no tax on their income either. The clergy performed many essential tasks such as the education of children, keeping records of vital statistics, and giving relief to the poor. The French church, though, was divided. The lower clergy were not part of the first estate; rather, they were from the third estate. They were poor, hardworking, humble and earnest. The higher clergy were usually all nobles to begin with. They had a noble class outlook which made them act in a superior manner to those "beneath" them. Some of the higher clergy took the job seriously, but many did not. Many considered being a bishop, abbot or cardinal as a way to beef up their income. Some clergy simply appointed someone else to do the real work while they took the money and went to live in Paris or Versailles.
The taxpayers of France resented the fact that the church still collected the tithe, or ten percent, of their income. This, on top of what they owed the government, really took quite a bite out of their income. It made them even more angry to see the higher clergy use the money for luxurious living. There were many social services that needed to be done in the cities and the clergy weren’t doing them, nor would they let anyone else do them. The peasants were still pretty devout Catholics, and they were fond of and respected their parish priests, but the middle class people of the cities were pretty turned off by religion just from watching the behavior of the higher clergy. Instead of remaining faithful, many of them took on the anti-clerical beliefs of the philosophes (Enlightenment thinkers).
The Second Estate
The second estate was the nobles. There were three kinds of nobles. There were the real nobles, who had titles going back to feudal times. They were known as the "nobles of the sword". These guys dreamed of the day that they’d be ruling France again like they did in the Middle Ages. Then there were the other nobles, called "nobles of the robe", who had usually bought their titles at times when kings, short of cash, had been willing to sell them. These kings were extremely short sighted when they did this; they seemed not to realize that it was a great deal for a middle class businessman! Put out $25,000 for a title, and you get to pay no taxes for the rest of your life, and your kids would never have to pay any, and the grandkids wouldn’t pay any.........! The nobles of the sword, however, looked down on the nobles of the robe. They thought of them as "common", called them "nouveau riche" and sneered down their noses at them. The third kind of nobles was called "hobereaux". They were the impoverished nobles who had to live on their country estates because they couldn’t afford the high life in Paris. They were financially pinched by rising prices, and they were jealous of their more fortunate counterparts in Paris. In an attempt to keep at least part of their traditional status, they insisted on meticulous collection of every penny of every feudal fee and manorial tax they could think of. They even researched old documents to find more things they could charge the peasant for. Peasants paid these fees with whatever money they got from selling part of the little bit of the crop they were allowed to keep. Paying all the fees often meant that the peasants would not have enough to eat through the winter. For charging him all this money, the peasant cordially hated the noble.
Nobles comprised less then 2% of the population, yet they owned 20% of the land in France. Like the clergy, it was their ancient feudal privilege to pay no taxes! on their land or their income. They got all the really good jobs. They got to be ambassadors, judges, generals, admirals, ministers in the government, and higher clergymen. They monopolized these jobs, so that other people were never considered. Many times they did not merit these jobs; they’d done nothing to deserve them, that is; sometimes, they weren’t even prepared for them.
The Third Estate
The first two estates contained only a fraction of the nation as a whole. The third estate comprised 97% of the population. Most of these commoners were peasants. Peasants in France were a little better off than peasants in other places in Europe. Three out of four adult peasants probably held a little bit of land, whereas in Eastern Europe at that time, no peasants held land. Nevertheless, life was hard for the peasant. France’s many wars, of which there had been about six since Louis XIV, had cost the nation a lot of money, and that made the taxes get higher and higher. The peasants did not understand why the wars were necessary, but they were willing to believe that they were. However, they did not see the necessity of the nobles’ and clergy’s living in such luxury when they lived at the subsistence level. (That means that you have barely enough to get along, certainly no extra) This happened because the peasant had little surplus that he could sell. Because they had no surplus to sell, the peasant had a hard time making ends meet, and he could not save for emergencies, like years when the crop didn’t grow well. There was no surplus partly because of the old fashioned methods of farming that the peasant used. There was also no surplus because more people were living longer and the food was consumed. There was a shortage of land now that the population was growing so quickly.
Financially, the peasant saw himself in decline. Inflation hurt the peasants; the upward trend of prices brought prosperity to merchants and manufacturers, but the peasants, who found that they did not get enough for what they sold to buy all that they needed, did not share in the prosperity. The peasants had a lot of money to pay out: the tithe to the church, feudal and manorial dues and fees, land taxes, income taxes, the taille, which was a poll tax, and the tax on salt. The peasants were really very angry; they were in a rebellious mood. They wanted relief from taxes, an end to the feudal and manorial dues, and more land.
Another group of people in the third estate was the factory workers in the cities. Nearly every major city in France had these discontented wage earners and apprentices who weren’t paid enough to keep up with rising prices. This was especially true of day laborers who were not allowed to organize into unions. Apprentices and journeymen found it harder and harder to get to the master craftsman stage, and often journeymen could not find work. They took to badly run strikes. There were more and more unemployed people living in the streets of Paris. The working class people were beginning to think of themselves as one big group since they seemed to have similar problems, regardless of whether they were unskilled laborers, manual laborers or technically trained workers. In time, these working people, known as sans-culottes because they didn’t wear the fancy breeches that were the style at the time for men, were united in a common fear that they would not be able to buy bread and that they would starve.
However, it was the French middle class that focused the discontent and ultimately provided the leadership. The French middle class was called the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie included merchants, bankers, professional people such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, and artists, craftsmen, and business owners. The bourgeoisie had a lot of grievances on their list. They were, in the first place, frustrated by the lack of social mobility in France. There was no way they could ever be nobles, no matter how much they worked or how much money they earned. They were kept out of the good jobs and the good schools. They could not circulate in the lively noble social life; the parties and the balls were not for them, no matter what they did. It was as if your teachers had decided that only a certain 3% of the class were going to make A’s; they’d get those A’s whether they earned them or not, and no matter how hard you tried, if you weren’t in the 3%, you would not get an A. Naturally, they were angry at a system that permitted this kind of thing to go on. To add to their frustration over this, they also ended up paying most of the taxes in France! They had the same obligations as the peasant, except the feudal and manorial dues. While the taxes didn’t hurt them as badly, they still resented the unfairness of it. Leftover feudal restrictions and fees on commerce also prevented free trade, so they couldn’t make as much money as they might have if France had gotten rid of some of these feudal leftovers. They resented the nobles’ attitude toward them, which was an attitude of condescension and snobbery. Since they were better educated than peasants, and since they were wealthier and didn’t have to give every spare moment to earning a living, the bourgeoisie wrote their grievances down in notebooks, which will come into the story a little later.
In conclusion, France had an out of date society that needed reorganization. Feudal privileges and restrictions needed to be done away with. In the meantime, we have all the ingredients here for massive class war. The peasants hate the nobles; the wage earners hate their bourgeois employers; the bourgeoisie hate the nobles; everyone has negative feelings about everybody else. This is going to have a profound influence on the French Revolution when it does happen, and this will explain why it was so bloody.
Philosophical
France was the home of the Enlightenment and of the philosophes. The ideas of the Enlightenment made people want change. As you will recall, they were very positive ideas in that they suggested that by the use of his reason, man could make changes for the better and create a better world. The ideas of the Enlightenment were idealistic; that is, they described a perfect world. The gap between the picture of what society could be painted by the philosophes and what was real in France at that time just was too great. By the time of the French Revolution, the ideas had been around for awhile, and they were pretty well known by everyone except, perhaps, the peasants, who did not come into contact with people from the cities very much. The program for change put forward for the philosophes translated resentment into demands for reform, and when the reform did not happen, into the potential for revolution. Belief in the ideas of the Enlightenment gave the bourgeoisie, especially, unity and gave them something to work for.
Economic
The government of France was bankrupt. This situation had not happened overnight. Years of fiscal mismanagement lay behind the situation, and the fact that as long as certain feudal privileges remained, there was no way the government could collect enough taxes to pay the bills. However, in spite of the fact that the government needed money, the nobles and the clergy jealously guarded their feudal right to pay no taxes, and refused to pay their share. The other classes, taxed to the hilt, resented this, and wanted the nobles and clergy to pay. They also resented the fact that the government was so inefficient that it couldn’t collect the taxes that were owed; that there was graft and corruption among the officials that were supposed to collect the taxes, so that the taxes never got to the government. Anger at inequitable taxation and inefficient government grew steadily among the peasantry, the workers and above all, the bourgeosie.
The Story of the Revolution
The Financial Emergency, 1774-1788
The French monarchy had had chronic economic difficulties for a long time, but they got increasingly worse in a big hurry between 1774 and 1788. Between 1774 and 1788, the government debt tripled. If you will look at the dates, you will realize that part of that debt came from helping the Americans win their independence; while that turned out well for the United States, it didn’t particularly help France. The budget for 1788 had to give half the money taken in from taxes to paying interest on debts the government already had. It also showed a deficit because, of course, after all that interest on the debts was paid, there was not enough money left to pay for the other expenses. In 1786, the bankers of France, seeing how things were going, cut off the credit of the French government! That meant no more loans, since foreign countries had stopped lending money to France years ago since she could never pay it back. The French monarchy was now stuck. They had procrastinated and borrowed until they could do so no longer. In the hopes of getting the nobles and clergy to pay taxes, an Assembly of Notables was called in 1787. The Notables said, "No way!" and went home. In 1788, a new finance minister told Louis to levy a tax on all landed property owners without regard to the social status of the owner. This caused serious trouble and the clergy reduced their "free gift" for the year. The Parlement of Paris (membership of which was all noble) declared the new tax law illegal and told Louis that if he wanted the nobles to pay taxes, he’d have to call the Estates General. The king then tried to shift judicial authority to new royal courts. That didn’t work either, and the king dismissed the minister, gave in and called the Estates General. It would meet in May, 1789.
The Estates General
The Estates General was the old representative body of France, just as Parliament was the representative body of Britain. The Estates General, however, never got for itself the power to control the king’s power to tax and spend as Parliament had. This meant that, when Louis XIV found it tiresome, he could just send it home and never call it again, which is exactly what had happened. The three estates, regardless of the difference in the size of each estate, received equal representation and equal voting power. That meant that no matter what, the clergy and the nobles always won every vote. The clergy and the nobles knew this, which was one reason they told Louis he had to call it to get them to pay taxes. They also knew it had been 175 years since it last met; that it would take time to research how it worked, and that all that time they would not have to pay taxes! When it met, they would easily vote down any suggestion that they should pay taxes. Therefore, they’d never pay taxes, and make Louis look like a fool as well. So we might say that the French Revolution began as the old familiar nobles against king routine. While all the details were being worked out, Louis asked for suggestions! The third estate sent lots, in little notebooks called cahiers.
The Estates General of 1789 met under unique circumstances. The meetings took place in an atmosphere of crisis as more and more landless peasants drifted into the cities, where they became homeless street dwellers. Inflation continued as the prices rose at about twice the rate of wages. The harvest of 1788 had not been good, and the winter of 1788-89 was so cold that the Seine froze over at Paris, and food could not reach the city. By the spring of 1789, the price of bread had doubled, for the wheat to make the flour for it was scarce. Bread was a mainstay of the poor person’s diet. Workers normally spent about half their wages on bread for themselves and their families; now they would have to spend all their wages, and many could not afford to do that. They faced starvation. Starving peasants begged, borrowed and stole. They went onto the nobles’ land and stole game. There began to be bread riots in the cities. These riots added to the atmosphere of crisis.
In the elections for deputies to the Estates General, almost all male Frenchmen over the age of 25 could vote. Middle class lawyers and government administrators won control of the third estate’s delegation. The reforming deputies of the third estate found some sympathizers in the second estate and even more in the first estate’s delegation, where there were a number of discontented poorer priests in the group. The king, responding to the suggestions he’d received, gave what he thought was a "gift" to the third estate: he told them they could have twice as many delegates as the other two estates. What Louis failed to understand here was that the number of deputies didn’t matter! Each estate only got one vote, regardless of the number of people in the estate. The gift only made the third estate angrier as they now suspected Louis of trying to trick them. The only thing that would help them would be for the manner of voting to change, and that did not seem likely to happen, even though that had been the subject of many of the suggestions.
In all past meetings of the Estates General, the estates had met separately, debated and deliberated separately and then voted separately. Each estate had one vote. For a measure to pass, two of the three estates had to vote yes. Then the king had to say it was o.k. Since the first two estates had the same interests and were often the same class (most higher clergy were already nobles), they always voted the same way on things, so the third estate never had a chance. For example, if the proposed bill was that the first two estates would pay taxes, the third estate would say ‘yes’, but the other two estates would say ‘no’ so the bill wouldn’t pass. The nobles and clergy had known this already about the Estates General, which is why they had wanted it called. In 1789, the king, the nobles, and the clergy wanted to have the Estates General meet the old way and vote the old way. The third estate demanded to have the estates meet together and have each deputy have one vote, at least on the matter of taxes.
The Estates General meets, May, 1789
The question of how the estates would meet and vote became crucial when the Estates General convened May 5, 1789 at Versailles. Emmanuel Sieyes, a priest, and Count Honore Mirabeau, a nobleman, both deputies of the third estate, led the campaign for meeting together and having everyone have one vote. The king then dictated that the estates had to meet and vote the old way. The third estate interpreted this as a sell-out of the king to the nobles and clergy, as it was traditional for the king to side with the third estate against the nobles and clergy. This action of Louis caused the third estate to distrust him. On June 17, the third estate accepted Sieyes’ invitation to proclaim itself a "National Assembly". The third estate invited the other deputies to join, and some of them did, mainly parish priests. The other deputies refused. At this point, Louis got a little concerned about the way this was going, and thought he’d stop the third estate and friends from meeting by locking the door to their meeting room! They simply went somewhere else. The new meeting place was an indoor tennis court! (Versailles was a HUGE palace and had all manner of entertainment, including sports, available) On June 20, 1789, the assembled delegates on the tennis court took what they called the "Tennis Court Oath": they swore not to disband until they had written a constitution. Louis responded to this move by ordering them to go back to their old estates and meet properly. The third estate, now the National Assembly, disobeyed and stayed right where they were. Louis at this point would have needed the royal troops to disperse them and he couldn’t, at that point, trust the royal troops, so he let the National Assembly stay on the tennis court. Then he directed the other two estates to join the new National Assembly. The nation, through its representatives, had successfully challenged the king, and now sat ready to reform French society and give France a constitution. The Revolution had officially begun.
The Fall of the Bastille, July 14, 1789
The National Assembly had barely settled down to serious work when a wave of rioting swept over France. Economic difficulties grew worse in the summer of 1789, unemployment increased, and bread seemed likely to remain scarce, which would keep the price of it high, until after the harvest. Meanwhile the commoners suspected that Louis and the first and second estates might plan a counterrevolution. These fears seemed to be confirmed when large concentrations of troops arrived in Paris in early July. Louis said they were to protect the National Assembly. The people didn’t believe him; he had lost his credibility with them. Suspicion deepened when a finance minister, Jacques Necker, who was popular with the people, was dismissed. (Jacques was not popular with Marie Antoinette, however. He told Louis to put a lid on her spending $$$$$). Reaction to Necker’s dismissal was immediate. On July 12 and 13, Parisians formed a new city government, and a new militia, the National Guard, both loyal to the National Assembly. Crowds began roaming the streets, carrying little busts of Necker draped in black. The people decided to arm themselves just in case Louis did something with those troops. On July 14, the people formed a mob, and then hit every building they could think of that might have armaments. They found an arsenal in the Invalides, a military hospital, and they hoped to find another at the Bastille, which was a prison for political type prisoners in the eastern part of the city. It had seven people in it.
When the mob got to the Bastille, they were stopped by a guard. He talked to the leaders of the mob, and some of the mob went into the prison with him. When the leaders didn’t come out in what the mob thought was a reasonable time, the mob stormed the Bastille, killing part of the garrison, and suffering some injuries themselves. They tore the Bastille stone from stone; there was none of it left. The capture and destruction of the Bastille did much to ensure the destruction of the "Old Regime", as Louis and his government were called. It inspired more riots, of course; everybody was very excited and enthusiastic about the whole thing. July 14 in France to this day is a national holiday called Bastille Day in remembrance of it. Frenchmen celebrate Bastille Day much as Americans do Independence Day.
The Great Fear, Summer, 1789
Meanwhile, out in the countryside, the peasants were experiencing the "Great Fear", an extraordinary attack of mass delusion. A rumor went across the countryside that "the brigands were coming", aristocratic hired men who would destroy the almost ripe crops and force the National Assembly to maintain things as they were. There were, in fact, no brigands, only an occasional homeless and starving person trying to steal food. At any rate, the peasants decided they must be ready for the brigands, and to do this, they had to arm themselves. So they grabbed anything that resembled a weapon, from hoes and pitchforks to knives, and went after the manors. They attacked manor houses and broke into buildings they thought might have a little grain, or where the hated collection books for manorial fees might be found. Many manor houses were ruined or burnt down, and many nobles were forced to flee, some even to leave France. (Nobles who left France were called emigres and they are important a little later in this story, so you don’t want to forget about them.)The Great Fear ended as an uprising of the peasants against the nobles, their traditional oppressors.
‘The Night of August 4th’, August 4, 1789
The outline of the new government was already beginning to take shape before the October Days. Prompted by the violence happening in the countryside as a result of the "Great Fear", the National Assembly abolished feudalism on the "night of August 4". The deputies voted that everyone in France would pay taxes according to his income. The church would give up collecting the tithe. Feudal and manorial fees were abolished and the nobles’ game preserves were opened to everyone. The National Assembly also made it illegal to sell justice or judicial office, and decreed that all citizens were to be eligible for jobs regardless of social rank.
The "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen"
On August 26, 1789, the National Assembly produced the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen". Clearly the idea for this document came from the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Like those American documents, it is a document based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. It stated that "men were created and should remain free and equal in rights"; that these rights were "liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression". Property was a "sacred and inviolable right". Liberty was the "exercise of the natural rights of each man within the limits of the law". "Law", the Declaration stated, is "the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part, either directly or by their representatives, in its formulation."
The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a middle class document, showing clearly the concerns of middle class people. The fact that property is mentioned and is considered "sacred" and that "social distinctions should be based on usefulness" shows that the people who wrote it were assuming that property would exist, and that people would work, and that some social distinctions would exist; there’s not going to be any classless society here. It committed the French to constitutional government in the same way as the American Declaration of Independence and the subsequent American constitution did. It incorporated the ideals of the Enlightenment: natural rights, the general will and separation of powers. The problem was that the National Assembly had had no experience in government the way the British had and the Americans had. Therefore, they didn’t know how to translate ideals into practice.
The October Days - The March on Versailles, October 5, 1789
The October Days, the last crisis of 1789, showed again that Louis couldn’t cut it, and what an aroused mob can do. The harvest of 1789 was good, but there was a new problem: there was a drought and there wasn’t enough water to run the mills so the wheat couldn’t be ground into flour. The result of this was that there still wasn’t enough bread in Paris; the people were still lining up for it, and the price was still high. The troops were still there, stationed near the city.
It occurred to the people of Paris at that point that the royal family must have bread; surely, they weren’t doing without? On top of this, the people of Paris were incensed by a remark the queen was supposed to have made regarding the starving people of Paris. When told the people of Paris had no bread, she was supposed to have remarked flippantly, "Let them eat cake", showing a complete lack of caring. While the remark was in character for her, she had not said it, but the people of Paris didn’t know that. Their newspapers said she had. On October 5, 1789, the women of Paris marched on Versailles. In this group were fishwives, milliners, marketwomen and some "ladies with hats", middle class women. They were determined to get bread. They disrupted the National Assembly and broke into Versailles. The next day they marched back to Paris with the king and queen in tow and the National Assembly moved to Paris, where it stayed until it finished the constitution. Louis and Marie were put under a sort of "house arrest" in their palace, the Tuileries.
The National Assembly confiscates the Church’s Land, November, 1789
Their economic legislation was a case in point. Belief in a theory of equal taxation didn’t solve the financial crisis that was still there. The National Assembly was not a legal government and it could not tax and expect to collect it. The peasants refused to pay, for example, and there was no way to make them. The National Assembly had no army. Again, the National Assembly borrowed until they could borrow no more and their credit was cut off. In November of 1789, in desperation for money, the National Assembly confiscated the church’s land. Lest they look like complete hypocrites, (remember, they had just affirmed the right to property in the Declaration of Rights of Man) they claimed that the church was not an individual, so they didn’t have to worry about the church’s ‘inviolable right to property’.
By taking the church land, the National Assembly got for themselves assets worth about two million livres (French dollars at the time). Based on the fact they had this as collateral (backup), the National Assembly issued some paper money called "assignats" with which they paid the governments’ debts, and that eased the financial crisis for awhile. They then sold the church land at auction. As they sold it, they should have taken that amount of assignats out of circulation. For example, if they sold a piece of land and got $5000.00 for it, they needed to take $5000.00 worth of assignats out of circulation. They did not, and as a result, they created a monstrous inflation. At one point, an assignat was only worth 5% of its face value.
The National Assembly sold the land to anyone who could buy it. Some peasants were able to buy a little, and many bourgeoisie took the opportunity to increase their land holdings. The poor and the landless, however, did not benefit since they had no money to buy land with, and the National Assembly didn’t see its way clear to help them. The National Assembly abolished the guilds and the tolls and tariffs on trade within France. Regarding the few simple organizations of labor and restrictions on trade, they abolished them.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, June, 1790
Once the National Assembly had taken the church land, they suddenly realized that they had taken the church’s main income away. They had also, you will remember, abolished the tithe! Because they had done this, now the National Assembly figured out that they would have to agree to pay the churchmen their salaries. This arrangement had in it the seeds of real trouble, because, if the government were going to pay the clergy, then the clergy would be subject to government regulation. This was traveling on new and unbroken ground for the National Assembly and they weren’t going to be likely to get by with it without an uproar, and indeed, they didn’t.
To deal with this situation, the National Assembly wrote the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy redrew the ecclesiastical map of France, reducing the number of bishoprics and making the number of dioceses equal to the number of administrative units. It made priests and bishops employees of the state. They were to be elected by the people of the parish (in the case of priest) or the diocese (in the case of bishops). Both Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics could participate in these elections. A new bishop would be required to take an oath of loyalty to the state, and he was not allowed to apply to the Pope for confirmation.
These provisions stripped the Pope of effective authority over the French clergy and ran against the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church as an independent ecclesiastical monarchy. As you might expect, the Pope denounced the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. When that happened, the National Assembly got themselves in deeper by requiring French clergy to take a special oath supporting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Fewer than half the Roman Catholic clergy in France took this oath. This made the National Assembly mad, but they couldn’t really force the issue, so they didn’t. That meant that from that time on, there were two sets of Catholic clergy in France: those loyal to the National Assembly and those loyal to the Pope. French Catholics now found their loyalty divided. If they supported the National Assembly, they went against their church; if they supported the Pope, they went against the National Assembly. Most Catholic Frenchmen preferred the Pope - most of them weren’t ready to take a chance with their souls! For the National Assembly, their action with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had undermined (taken away) the support the people had for them. They had now gotten the Pope mad and he would be on their case, and he was going to see now what he could do about a little foreign intervention to stop the revolution. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was a major mistake.
The Constitution of 1791
The major undertaking of the National Assembly was the Constitution of 1791. It reorganized France into departments. The departments were further divided into districts and communes (cities). Each department was made so that its chief town or city could be reached in a day. In the communes and departments there was considerable self-government.
As for the central government, the National Assembly applied the idea of separation of powers. They created, just as the United States had, three branches of government. However, unlike the United States, they did not make the power of each branch equal to the others, and there was no system of checks and balances as there was in the American government. The judicial branch was to consist of an independent, elected judiciary. The executive was King Louis, complete with new title, "King of the French", and limits on his power. As they did not trust him, the National Assembly had not wanted to give him very much power, so they didn’t. His decisions now needed the approval of his ministers. His ministers were not responsible to the legislature, however. The king could veto legislation, but the veto was only good for four years. The constitution created a one house legislative body called the Legislative Assembly. It would have 600 members, elected indirectly by electors somewhat like the original setup for presidential elections in the American constitution. There was no Bill of Rights.
Although the Constitution went a long way toward popular government in France, it stopped short of full democracy. Like the men at the Constitutional Convention in the United States, the National Assembly was afraid of "rule by the masses". They didn’t want to extend the vote to people they didn’t think were qualified to vote. The National Assembly, therefore, created two kinds of citizens, "active’ and ‘passive". The active citizens were those who paid taxes in the amount equal to at least three days’ wages for an unskilled laborer in their locality. Active citizens could vote. Passive citizens, numbering about one third of the population, could not vote since they didn’t meet the tax requirement. They did have the rights of citizens, however. The electors had to be men of considerable wealth and property.
The moderate majority suffered a fate often experienced by moderates who are not willing to do anything they need to do to get what they want. They were squeezed out by a minority that was willing to do what it needed to do to get what it wanted. The moderate majority failed to develop an effective party system and the minority did. The minority belonged to a group called The Society of Friends of the Constitution. Most of the time they were just called Jacobins, because they met in a Jacobin (Dominican) monastery. They had a network of political clubs, which extended throughout the provinces. Although they did not call themselves a party, they were the closest thing to a nationally organized political party that France had at that time. They operated like a political party in some ways. They wanted to abolish the monarchy altogether and set up a republic based on letting all men vote. Almost everywhere, in the elections that took place, Jacobins won control of the department and commune councils.
The ‘flight to Varennes’, June, 1791-Louis tries to escape
The defenders of the Old Regime unwittingly played into the hands of the Jacobins at this point. After the summer of 1789, many clergy and nobles had fled France, including the king’s brothers. These emigres had left rich estates to be confiscated. Most of them were now hanging out in the German Rhineland, scheming with the Austrians and the Russians to get help with starting a counter-revolution. In June of 1791, the king, disturbed over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, tried to escape to join the emigres in the Rhineland. He disguised himself as a valet and Marie Antoinette disguised herself as a governess, but they were recognized, stopped and brought back to Paris. After this abortive (failed) escape, the revolutionaries thought of Louis XVI as a potential traitor and kept him closely guarded.
The National Assembly completes its work, September, 1791
In September of 1791 the National Assembly announced the completion of the constitution. Their work done, they disbanded and went home. Before they went home, they made a rule that none of them could be elected to the new Legislative Assembly. Therefore, all the members of the Legislative Assembly were new and had had no political experience. They all wanted to make their mark on the revolution. We will see what happens.
The Legislative Assembly Convenes, October, 1791
In October of 1791, the Legislative Assembly convened for its first and only session. All the political clubs had been quite active during the elections for delegates to the Assembly; in fact, this was not a completely fair election. No one faction won a majority, although the Center had the most delegates. The Legislative Assembly met in a concert hall. You have to visualize in your mind something like Kennedy Center concert hall or even a stadium, but it would not have been that large. The delegates forming the center, or moderate viewpoint on things, sat in the seats that were down on the floor. Because that’s where they sat, they soon got the nickname of "the Plain". Those that supported the king, the conservatives, people not wanting much change, sat on the right of the speaker, but in the seats that are up over the ones on the floor. Those that wanted extreme action (for example, the Jacobins) sat on the left of the speaker, up above the people on the floor. They soon got the nickname of "the Mountain". Of the 755 delegates present, 400 were middle class lawyers; nearly all the delegates were from the bourgeoisie.
Until June 20, 1792, the most vigorous group in the legislature was the Girondins, named for the department of the Gironde, from which a lot of them came. They were all members of the Jacobin club, and most of them were involved in business and commerce. They controlled much of the money, commerce and foreign trade of France. They were used to considerable self-rule, and while they agreed with the Jacobins on most things, they wanted a more decentralized government than the rest of the Jacobins. They proposed a republic of largely self-governing states. They were also extremely nationalistic. They worried about what was to become of their country. Their leaders were Condorcet and Jacques Brissot, an ambitious lawyer, journalist, and champion of reform causes, including the emancipation of slaves.
The Legislative Assembly declares war, April, 1792
By now, the other countries around France were getting very concerned by what was happening there. The news was getting to them from the emigres, who were pleading with them for help; from the Pope who was still mad about the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; from the letters Marie wrote to her brother Joseph, who was emperor of Austria and from ordinary news reports. The ideals of the French Revolution, like those of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment, were highly exportable, meaning the people of other countries would be very interested. The other countries concerned had absolute monarchies like France had had. They didn’t want what was happening in France to spread to them. They didn’t know exactly what to do. These nations, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, did not particularly like each other, and the only thing they really had in common was being threatened by the events in France. They were being urged by the emigres and the Pope to do something so they made a declaration in common. It was called the Declaration of Pillnitz. This called for other rulers to join Austria and Prussia in restoring a monarchical from of government in France.
In France, both those who supported the king, the monarchists, and the Girondins wanted war. The Queen had repeatedly asked her brother and nephews to bring an army and save her, and the King had asked the rulers of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain and Sweden to collect an army and come restore him to his rightful powers. On February 7, 1792, Austria and Prussia signed an alliance against France. The Girondins specialized in nationalist oratory (speeches) so with the revelation of this news, the Girondins were able to picture France as the victim of a reactionary conspiracy engineered by the emigres, aided at home by the nonjuring clergy and the royal family, and helped by the a league of monarchs under the Austrian emperor and Prussia. The Girondins thought France should get the advantage by striking first. Accordingly, France declared war on Austria on April 20, 1792.
The war went badly at the outset, mainly because the French officer corps had all been nobles and so many of them had emigrated. Morale sagged when Louis fired the Girondin ministers he had appointed because they wanted to banish non-juring priests. Spirits rose again for the third annual Bastille Day celebration when Paris was thronged with national guardsmen on their way to the front. The contingent from Marseilles had brought along a new song, The Marseillaise. It caught on immediately and became the national anthem of republican France.
On July 25, the Prussian commander issued a statement called the Brunswick Manifesto. In it, the French, especially those in Paris, were threatened with severe punishment by the Prussians and Austrians if they did not submit to the king at once, and if the royal family were hurt in any way. The manifesto was a challenge to the Assembly and the people of Paris to abandon the revolution or to resist the invaders by whatever means and at whatever cost. This foolish manifesto only strengthened the resolve of the Girondins and other Jacobins to get rid of the monarchy.
Revolt against the Legislative Assembly, August, 1792
Through the early summer of 1792, the Jacobins had been planning a rebellion. They won the support of a formidable following - army recruits, national guardsmen, and Parisians who were angry about the assignats’ losing value and the high price and short supply of food. Paris was divided into 48 wards, and one by one they came under the control of Jacobins. Jacobins won these places by letting those who were not supposed to vote. The climax came August 9-10, 1792. On the night of August 9, and into the day on August 10, the Jacobins kicked out the regular city authorities and established a new and illegal Commune.
This revolution had immediate and momentous results. On August 10, the forces of the new Commune and the national guardsmen attacked the Tuileries and massacred the king’s Swiss guards. The servants of the king and queen were also killed. Quite a bit of damage was done to the palace, and the wine cellar was looted. Some of the men took the red suits of the dead Swiss guardsmen and made banners to wave in the air. The king and queen were saved by members of the Legislative Assembly for the moment. The uprising of August 10 sealed the doom of the monarchy. The violence had persuaded many of the delegates to the Assembly to stay away, so they were not there when the remainder of the Assembly voted to abolish the monarchy, imprison the king and queen, and to order the election of a new constitutional convention. Until this new body should meet, the government would be run by an interim ministry headed by Girondins and headed by Georges Danton, a radical and an exceptional speaker.
Georges Danton, as a leader, sacrificed everything to the end of preserving the revolution from foreign attack and internal chaos. For these purposes, he was willing to cooperate with anyone. He sometimes sided with one group, and then he’d side with another. No one could make him out. He labored to unite all the revolutionaries to throw back the foreign invaders. The Prussians had invaded northern France; there was no more time for talk, he said. Meanwhile, the assignats kept losing their value, and there were still shortages of food. Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin writer, kept the people of Paris stirred up. In this situation, Danton, in a stirring speech, called for boldness, ever more boldness; of course, he meant this boldness to be used to repel Prussians, not to have it used against the people of France.
The September Massacres, September 2-6, 1792
The September Massacres were mass killings that took place in Paris for four days, September 2-6, 1792. The Prussians had crossed the frontier into France and had taken Verdun; the people of Paris were hysterical with fear, which is probably why the killings happened. The Paris Commune was very anti-religious, and it didn’t want the Legislative Assembly to go on paying clergy to teach a "myth". The Paris Commune was able to convince the Legislative Assembly to pass new laws against the church, and to arrest all non-juring priests. You will remember that a non-juring priest was one who had refused to take the oath to support the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The Legislative Assembly did arrest a great number of non-juring priests, and had them in prisons all over Paris. On the days of the massacres, mobs moved from one prison to the other, holding fake trials and executing people. Although non-juring priests were the main victims, there were others, such as nobles. The crowning horror was the execution of the Princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s close personal friend and her maid of honor. Princess de Lamballe was beheaded and then mutilated. The story goes that a revolutionary tore out the heart from her body and ate it! Her head was put on a pike and paraded in front of the window of the Queen’s room in the royal prison, so that Marie Antoinette could see "how the people take vengeance on their tyrants". The revolutionaries justified the killings by saying they happened because of the threat of invasion of Paris. The total number killed was about 1368 people.
On September 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly held its last meeting. On that same day, the French won a minor victory at Valmy. They met the troops of the Prussians and the Austrians and beat them to a draw, which was a victory of sorts, since the Austrians and the Prussians retreated. However, the Austrians and the Prussians retreated because they had other things on their minds, not because of the French. Back in the 1770’s, the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians had each taken a hefty slice of Poland, which at one point had been a fairly powerful nation in Eastern Europe. She had fallen on hard times by the 1770’s, had gotten weak, and could not stop Austria, Prussia and Russia from taking her land. Now Russia was getting ready to take a larger slice, and Austria and Prussia didn’t want to be left out of the action. They got to quarreling about it, and had to cut down their involvement with fighting France while they figured things out. The story also goes that the Prussian soldiers at Valmy got massively sick on the French champagne which was made in that area. While the Austrians, Prussians and Russians were squabbling over Poland, the French actually had a few more successes. However, this did not last.
The National Convention convenes, September 20, 1792
In theory, the election of deputies to the National Convention was the beginning of political democracy in France. Virtually all male citizens were allowed to vote. Yet only 10% of the people actually did vote. The rest decided not to vote or were turned away by the watchdogs of the Jacobin clubs, ever looking for "counterrevolutionaries". The result of this rigged voting was the return of most of the radical leaders to the Assembly; Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Brissot and Condorcet were among the leaders returned to the National Convention from the Legislative Assembly. The Convention had 750 members; all but two were middle class; nearly all were lawyers. The 180 Girondins, organized, educated and eloquent, took the lead in legislation. There were more people in the Center, or "Plain", but they weren’t organized and didn’t know what they wanted, so it was easy for the other, more extremist types to get their way. Both Girondins and radicals had Jacobin ties, were steeped in the ideas of the Enlightenment, and regarded the lower classes with distrust.
National Convention declares France a republic, September 22, 1792
The Girondins and the other radicals (called the Mountain) united to declare France a republic on September 22, 1792. The Girondins at this point wanted a breathing spell in revolutionary legislation; they also wanted to be sure that Paris didn’t end up ruling France. They wanted a large measure of federalism - which meant a government that was decentralized and allowed more local self-government, and one which had many checks and balances. The details were written out in a draft constitution written by Condorcet and proposed early in 1793. This constitution called for the executive to be elected separately from the legislature, and for these two branches to be independent of each other. The results of elections would be adjusted according to the population in a system of proportional representation. Laws would be submitted to popular referendum - this meant that citizens would get to vote on laws directly instead of having representatives do it for them. Voters would be able to recall unworthy officials. However, the radicals of the Mountain didn’t like this constitution; they wanted one that had a more powerful central government, so they denounced it.
The chief spokesman for the Mountain was Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre was born in Arras, France, in 1758. His father disappeared into Germany and his mother died. He took a law degree at College Louis le Grand in Paris, practiced in Arras and won a reputation for his advocacy of reforms. He was five feet three inches tall, and had suffered from smallpox as a child, so his face was scarred from the pox; he was nothing particularly to look at. He defended democracy and the vote for all men, but he dressed as a member of the middle class, always in the blue tailcoat, knee breeches, silk stockings and the powdered hair - all of which were the latest fashion of the time. People of the time termed him the "Incorruptible" as he lived a very strict and moral life, and he could not be bribed. Apparently he was a good speaker, able to sway a crowd of people. He was intense and devoted to the cause of the revolution in France, a crusader in causes, and a person who felt it was his duty to make people a believer in his causes. He was completely self-absorbed; he didn’t care what people thought of him; he knew best what France needed; others didn’t know anything. To say he was single-minded would be another way to put this. People like Robespierre make good revolutionaries because of their absolute devotion to what they believe in. The problem with Robespierre, however, was that he would not, or could not, listen to anyone else. Robespierre claimed that HE alone knew what the "general will" of the people was: they wanted a "Republic of Virtue". If the French would not act in a free and virtuous manner, well, Robespierre was prepared to "force them to be free". HE knew what was best for them.
The death of the king, January 21, 1793
Robespierre and the Republic of Virtue triumphed. The Mountain won out over the Girondins. The first step was the decision to put Louis on trial for treason. The Mountain considered Louis a danger to the republic. After 100 hours of continuous voting, the Convention voted, by a very narrow majority, to sentence Louis to death by guillotine without delay. Louis died bravely January 21, 1793. Although most Frenchmen probably didn’t want this to happen to Louis, they did not control the Convention. Those who had voted to kill the king now had something in common - they were regicides (king-killers) and their voting from now on will reflect that. They could not permit any restoration of the monarchy, as they would be as good as dead if that happened. The Girondins had been split on the vote to kill Louis. Those who opposed the death penalty took a stand in defense of their reading of the humanitarian principles of the Enlightenment, but they also opened themselves to charges of being counterrevolutionaries. They were afraid, therefore, and moved through Paris in fear of their lives.
The end of the Girondins
Now events at home and abroad destroyed the divided Girondins. In February the Convention rejected Condorcet’s draft constitution. They declared war on Britain, Spain and the Netherlands. France now faced a formidable host of opponents: Prussia, Austria, Britain, Spain and the Netherlands. Not surprisingly, the French army suffered a few losses! in the Netherlands and its Girondin commander defected to the enemy. Marat now called all Girondins "traitors". The Girondins got back by saying that Marat needed to be impeached for advocating murder and dictatorship. Marat was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal and was triumphantly acquitted of the charges. In July, Marat was assassinated in his bathtub by a girl named Charlotte Corday who was a Girondin. (Marat had a skin disease which was helped by his soaking in bath water) Charlotte apparently thought she was a modern day Joan of Arc sent to save France from the radicalism of the Mountain.
The Girondins had now been weakened beyond recovery. As leaders of the Convention, they were blamed for all the things that were wrong with France at that moment: unemployment, high prices, depreciating assignats, lost battles, and shortages of food, soap and other necessities. They seemed to have little to offer in the way of something to do about these things. The sections or wards of Paris demanded requisitioning of food and price controls. They also wanted the Girondins kicked out of the Convention and the Jacobin clubs. Finally, on June 2, 1793, a mob of sans culottes attacked the Convention, forced their way in and demanded the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies. Backed by the armed sans culottes, the radicals of the Mountain intimidated the Plain, and the Convention voted to turn over the Girondin deputies to be killed for "treason". The Girondins as a political force were dead.
The Reign of Terror begins, June, 1793
The Terror was a mood as well as a specified period of time. It was probably the result of all the things going on that were extremely frightening to people. The war was going badly; the First Coalition(Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain and the Netherlands) had taken Mainz, had invaded Alsace, and had entered Valenciennes, only 100 miles from Paris; the French army wasn’t organized; on August 29, French royalists gave the British a French fleet. The revolution was falling apart in France; royalists and Catholics were fighting on the side of the enemies of France and predicting restoration of feudal rights and the monarchy. Economically, the price controls established because the people in Paris wanted them did not satisfy the rest of France; the peasants refused to grow price-limited food. That meant there were food shortages again. People in the cities feared famine and came near to overthrowing the government because of it. The bourgeoisie were denounced as traitors to the revolution and the workers were urged to take control from a negligent government. The Paris Commune demanded that an army go through France with a portable guillotine and kill every Girondin they could find and every peasant who was hiding and saving grain. It was against this atmosphere of disaster at home and the threat of invasion from abroad that the Terror was set up.
The setup of the Terror
The Convention now voted a democratic constitution, drawn up by the Mountain, giving the vote to all men, and giving all power, unhindered by any checks and balances, to a single legislative chamber. The constitution was approved by a huge majority, but its operation was deferred until "after the emergency". "After the emergency" never came. The constitution of 1792 was never used.
The actual government of the Terror was a group of twelve men who called themselves the "Committee for Public Safety". Robespierre and other extremists from the Mountain were the members of this committee. Though they were supposedly responsible to the Convention, the Committee of Public Safety acted as though it were independent and as a sort of war cabinet. It was never under the direction of a single member; it really functioned as a committee; the members called themselves "Twelve Who Rule". There was also a Committee of Public Security whose job it was to supervise police activities and to find traitors and counterrevolutionaries. A "Law of Suspects" was passed that allowed the Committee of Public Security to arrest any emigre, any relative of an emigre, any public official suspended and not reinstated, and anyone who showed the slightest sign of resistance to the revolution, on the spot. Lastly, there was a Revolutionary Tribunal that tried and killed the so-called traitors and counterrevolutionaries.
Victims of the Terror
The Terror took the lives of nearly 20,000 Frenchmen, including that of Marie Antoinette. Some were true criminals, but most were political dissidents accused of being traitors. The purpose of the Terror was to clear France of traitors, real and imagined, and to purge the Jacobin clubs of people who disagreed with the "party line" of the day. The Terror fell with greatest severity on the non-juring clergy, the nobles and the Girondins. Victims came from all over France, as the Committee for Public Security had sent out "deputies on mission" to find traitors in the countryside. Many victims came from the Vendee, a strongly Catholic and royalist area that had risen in revolt. In one case, the victims were chained and set adrift in a leaky barge.
The wartime fear and hysteria that brought on the Terror also inspired patriotism. The army drafted all bachelors and widowers between the ages of 18 and 25. Hundreds of open air forges were installed in Paris to make weapons. Saltpeter, a necessary ingredient of gunpowder, was scraped from cellars and stables. By the close of 1793, the French armies had driven out the foreign invaders, which, of course, the Committee of Public Safety took credit for. However, they were not the only reason the French began to win. The coalition against France was weakening in its unity again. One thing that really helped was that men of the third estate were now allowed to be in the army and to be officers. They had a lot of determination and that made the French army the most enterprising of the ones fighting. To combat inflation and scarcity, the Terror imposed wage and price controls, and rationed meat and bread. Finally, the Convention passed laws that allowed them to confiscate the remaining property of the emigres and other opponents of the revolution and to redistribute the land to landless Frenchmen.
Cultural and social reforms of the Terror
The Terror presented its most revolutionary aspect in its drastic social and cultural reforms. Nothing that was like the Old Regime (the old ways)was to be allowed to remain. The Jacobins who ran the Terror were all anti-religious and very opposed to organized religion. They felt the Christian religion was an "Oriental myth" and that Frenchmen should be weaned of their attachment to it! To this end, churches were closed and turned into offices and barracks; the clergy were forbidden to wear vestments at any time; and education of children was taken away from the church. In the place of the Christian church, the Jacobins offered the beliefs and ideals of the Enlightenment. Robespierre believed in a Supreme Being which was the ultimate source of all morality. One time Robespierre had a "Festival of the Supreme Being"; in this, Robespierre set fire to figures representing Vice, Folly, and Atheism, and from the ashes a statue of Wisdom emerged. His audience laughed. The French did not want Enlightenment ideals as their religion.
The Jacobins also believed that the old calendar made no sense. They wanted to begin again. The Revolution was to be used as the starting point of counting years; thus, 1792 was Year I of the Revolution, 1793 was Year II of the Revolution and so on. They chose 1792 because that is when the first republic began. The months were renamed, too, with names that made "sense". January was "Nivose" (snowy); February was "Pluvose" (rainy); March was "Ventose"(windy); June was "Prairial"; July was "Thermidor" (heat) and so on. They changed the weights and measures to the new metric system; to show that everyone in society was equal, the Jacobins decreed that the traditional forms of address would be changed to "Citizen" and "Citizeness".
The end of the Terror
The ‘Republic of Virtue’ was too abstract and too violent to keep popular support. It demanded too much of people in the way of devotion to duty and indifference to suffering and hardship. As one after another of the so-called enemy groups were removed, Robespierre pressed the Terror ever more relentlessly. During the first half of 1794, Robespierre pressed the Terror so hard that the members of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee for Public Security thought that they might be the next victims. The Law of 22 Prairial, Year II greatly expanded the definition of "enemies of the people". The new definition included "those who disparage the Convention", "those who inspire discouragement", "those who try to prevent the provisioning of Paris" and "those who mislead opinion" - these being just some examples.
This kind of thing made Robespierre begin to lose his following both in the Convention and in the two powerful committees. They thought he was going too far. More and more they urged moderation and they argued that success in the war called for less, not more, terror. The crucial day came on the 9th of Thermidor (July 27, 1794) when the presiding officer in the Convention refused to let Robespierre speak and the deputies shouted "Down with the tyrant!" The Convention then ordered his arrest, and the next day he was guillotined, a victim of the system he had helped to create. He found out the hard way that you can’t make people want or do what you think is right without using something like the Terror, and then you are, in a sense, falling short of your own ideals. When he made the comment that the French had to be forced to be free, he made his fatal mistake.
The Thermidorian Reaction, or move toward moderation, July, 1794
The leaders of the "Thermidorean Reaction", as the move toward moderation was called after the death of Robespierre, immediately dismantled the Terror. They disbanded the Revolutionary Tribunal, recalled the "deputies on mission" , and took away the independent authority of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of Public Security. They closed the Paris Jacobin club and invited the surviving Girondins to resume their seats in the Convention. They allowed priests to celebrate Mass, though under state supervision. The press and the theatre were allowed their freedom.
However, instability, insecurity and class hatred did not go away. In Paris, young middle class youths calling themselves "gilded youth" went around in gangs beating up on Jacobins or anyone they suspected of being Jacobin. These same young men also destroyed busts of Marat and forced the removal of his remains from their burial place. In southern and western France, there was now a counterrevolutionary "White Terror" that took the lives of supporters of the Mountain and those who had bought church and noble land. The leaders of Thermidor caused an acute inflation by canceling the wage and price controls that the Terror had imposed. This meant that the price of food went sky high and the assignats went so low in value no stores would accept them. This caused a lot of suffering as people could not pay for food and other essentials.
The Thermidorean Reaction concluded with the passage of the Constitution of 1795, which was the last major act of the Convention. The new constitution established an executive branch with five directors who had to be over forty years old. They were selected by one of the legislative bodies from a list of fifty names nominated by the other legislative body. The legislative branch had two bodies, a Council of 500 and a Council of Elders (or Ancients). To be in the House of Elders you had to be forty years old and married. The Council of 500 could propose and discuss measures but could not make them into law. The Council of Elders could not initiate measures; they could only ratify the resolutions given them by the Council of 500 or reject them. One third of the people in the legislative bodies ran for election every year so that the groups never had all new members; one director ran each year so the executive branch never had all new members. None of these people was elected directly by the people. All were elected by electors who were chosen by the people who had to own property to have the vote. The candidates had to own property, too. The judiciary was also elected by the electors and was separate from the rest of the government, as was the Treasury Department, which was also elected. This government was usually referred to as the Directory, from the name of its executive branch.
This constitution showed that the most radical phase of the revolution had passed. However, violence was not over. Three weeks before the constitution was to go into effect, there was rioting in Paris, this time by people who wanted to restore the monarchy. These people were put down in the massacre of Vendemaire (October 5, 1795). Napoleon Bonaparte made an appearance on this scene, helping the Convention to get things under control. (Napoleon had his own reasons for not wanting a Bourbon comeback; it would interfere with his PLANS so he was happy to help the Convention) The first winter of the Directory (1795-1796) brought France the worst suffering they’d seen yet. It was very cold that winter, and the people had to deal with inflation, high prices, and shortages of food. After that, things got better. The harvests were good, and the Directory attacked the economic problems and actually made some progress.
The Directory raised tariffs, both as a war measure and as a concession to French business. Tariffs, as you will remember from the chapter on the War for Independence, are taxes placed on imported goods in the hopes of encouraging people to buy the goods of their own country. They also took all the assignats out of circulation and replaced them with francs. In order to have the money to do this, the Directory had to cut government spending to the bare minimum, and it had to collect taxes efficiently, which it did. It also helped to have some loot from the defeated countries coming in. It helped a whole lot to simply repudiate two-thirds of the government’s debts. When you repudiate a debt, you simply say you cannot and will not pay it! Individuals would have a very hard time doing this, but governments can do it. It is not popular, but they can do it.
The Directory had a lot of trouble steering a cautious middle course between restoring the monarchy and reverting to Jacobin extremism. The constitution was repeatedly violated as the directors and the legislature clashed; councils fired directors before their terms were up and directors refused to let duly elected council members take their seats. Worried moderates, fearful that the Directory would collapse, began to get friendlier and friendlier with the army. This was what gave Napoleon his chance. In October, 1799, Napoleon took over the Directory and became the ruler of France.