Lecture Outline

Why France, The three estates. 1789-1791

The National Assembly Sept 91- 93

The terror 1793-1795

The Thermadorian Reaction. 1795

In 1789 France fell into revolution, and the world has never been the same again. Of all the social upheavals of the late eighteenth century it was by far the most momentous. It swept away most forms of aristocratic privilege, it crushed the old regime, it introduced, at least historians tell us, something called modern society. It also introduced a new political vocabulary within which we still work: democracy, nationalism, terrorism, revolution, radical, left and right. In reaction to the events of France modern conservatism came into being In one of its phases, the Emergency Republic of 1793 to 1795 it was so radical that all future revolutions have been compared to it. It introduced organized political terror into the world, and it remains to be seen whether the last crop of revolutions in Eastern Europe and Russian have at last escaped the template of revolutionary violence that France laid down.

Why France?

France was in many ways the most advanced and modern country in Europe.

The most densely settled state, with over 24 million people, double that of Britain or the combined states of germany.

It was also the wealthiest nation, outstripping even Britain in terms of trade. It possessed half of Europes gold.

It was the cultural center of Europe.

All intellectuals looked to France especially Paris as the foundation of the enlightenment.

Adam Smith and David Hume spent their formative years in France. It was thus advanced in terms of its economy and culture, but it was in a very strange shape politically - a hodge podge of old and new, a crazy quilt of overlapping, fiscal, legal and religious units.

It was still composed of the three estates that had their origins in the medieval separations of those who prayed,those who fought and those who worked. These estates were more than what we might mean by classes for an individuals legal rights tax status and social prestige was dependent upon them belonging to an particular order. the society - and this is what is especially hard for us Americans to understand, was organized by codes of privelege rather than by gradations of wealth.

A: 1st estate was the church which in 1789 had about 100,000 people on its books.

it was not just a spiritual estate as one can imagine, together monasteries, bishops, abbeys and schools owned about 10 % of the land surface, it was active in every aspect of French life and it operated most of the schools and charitable agencies. It regulated, through its own extensive courts, much of private life, birth marriage, annulments and death.

B: The 2nd estate was composed of about 400.000 noble. One might think from last semester that the role of the nobility had diminished after the absolutist rule of Louis the 14th, but in fact the nobility had reaffirmed its local jurisdictions. it had fought the central administration of the king of issues such as tax reform and had continued to extract from the peasants many of the old feudal ties, such as manorial fees, banalities, hunting rights and so forth. They has suscessfully maintained the idea of blood lines for militatry appontments.

C: The third estate was composed, consitutionally speaking, of the all of the rest, from merchant to beggar, but in reality it was composed of those who had wealth, some status, but no title. There were the people who were subject to taxes and who were also gaining numerically and economically. In fact they had looked for help from the king in spreading equity in law and taxes as other enlightened monarchs had done.

The background of the revolution then was a collision between two moving objects - an assertive aristocracy fighting royal absolutism and a rising bourgeoisie seeking to gain its just political representation. Nowhere else in Europe did this combination occur.

This was the precondition, but what about the trigger? It was quite simply a financial collapsed, a cash flow crisis, caused by another round of European wars. French war debts were no bigger than England's or Hollands but unlike other colonial powers, the French treasury couldn't raise the money. Direct

taxation and national tariffs had been blocked by the nobility and the clergy using the power of their local parliaments.

Louis the 16 had tried all sorts of measures to circumvent their power, but was forced in July 1788 to call the only constitutional road open to him - to call a meeting of all of the orders of French society, the so called Estates General.

When the estates general met, at Versialles, in May 1789,for the first time in a century and a half, all parties wished to extract some power from the sovereign.to gain their rightful representation in the national body.

Now in 1614, the estate general had met in three separate chambers, one for each estate, and the nobles knew that in this way of proceding, they could block the power of the king and the people. But the third estate was no longer content to be assigned as a lower order. They had breathed in the doctrine of natural rights: freedom of speech, freedom from arbitary arrest. At Versailles, the representatives of the 3rd estate were allmost all lawyers, and they refused to sit in a separate, junior assembly, they declared themselves the only national assembly. They were the "only representatives of the nation" and swore "never to braeak up until such time as the constitution was passed and exablished on form foundations."

A deadlock then ensued. L 16 under pressure, from the nobles, closed the hall. The 3rd estate wandered out to the Tennis Court in order to draft a new constitution - the so called Oath of the Tennis Court.

The king tried to break the deadlock by granting certain rights: parlimentary control of taxation, freedom of the press and reform of the law. It could have been a rerun of 1688 in England. But on the issue of social and legal equality, he returned a blunt negative.

"The king wills that the ancient distinction between the three orders of society shall be maintained in its entireity as essentially bound up with the constition of the kingdom."

In a decision that proved fateful, in the contest between the third estate and the nobles, the king had sided with the later. 16,000 royal troops were sent to Versialle to impose royal order.

You can define your own politics, I think, by determining when things went right, and when things went wrong. The Estates General were the best features of the revolution. broke up the essential features of the Ancient regime, catholic, corporate and customary. The oath of the tennis court initiated a kind of frenzy in the way that the populace backed their constitutional demands. Certainly the contemporary American observers took it to be the high point. Three days before the storming of the bastille Jefferson could write home that the National Assembly as "in complete and undisputed possession of sovereignty... They have prostrated the old government, and are now beginning to build one from the foundation."

While the estates general were meeting the rest of the country fell into dissolution - urban districts saw a wave of strikes and food shortages. The price of bread was higher than it had been in one hundred years. Random violenece also broke out in the countryside, rates of vagancy doubled, beggars and tramps looted food and cash. Those in Paris caught by this great fear of rural unrest spreading into the capital organized citizen militias and went around to aromories lookings for arms. The storming of the Batille was in fact a mistake. the governor of the famous prison mistook the intentions of the crowd and order fire into its midst.

the crowd quickly became a mob.

It was a mistake but a dramatic one. By virtue of a popular insurrection the third estate took command. The king recognized the National Assembly, withdrew his troops from Versailles on July 14th.

The first French revolution had occured.

The National Assembly.

For two years, between oct 1789 and sept 1791, the national assembly undertook the systematic destruction of the old regime. It broke up its essential features which were catholic, corporate and customary. Old taxes, titles and the old local autonomies of the courts and parliaments were abolished. Men who had been influenced by the enlightenment now ruled and they were bound to a vision of legal equality. France was divided into 83 departments or areas which would all elect their local officials. The assembly reorganized the entire political shape of the country on principles of secularism, rationality, uniformity and election to office, even to such offices as those of Bishop, parish priest and judge

As was to be expected with such men in control, the social consequences of this phase of the revolution were somewhat limited. Economic privileges that depended exclusively upon birth were abolished, together with forms of personal servitude but traditional payments connected with land were put into the sacrosanct class of property, and the sale of church estates on the whole benefited the well-to-do rather than the poorer peasants. In the towns the laws of Adam Smith markets were introduced - trades and guilds were abolished but so were the campagnages -the unions of artisans.

The revolution at this stage was in control of those who had already been able to define their economic interests in terms of property and capital, rather than privilege, and the many more who became converted to that view, who found ample opportunity to prosper in this phase of the revolution.

The assembly defeated the advocates of of both political and economic democracy. It curtailed the very broad franchise on which the 3rd estate had been elected in 1789. Voting privileges were restricted to men over the age of 25 who owned property. Social inequality remained, and remember this was still not a republic. When a member of the assembly asked why the new system of naval law provided corporal punishments for sailor but not for officers, he was told that the loss of honor for an officer by the mere fact of punishment made any comparison of penalties irrelevant.

Such legistlation continued to cause resentment from the peasants, but most fatefully of all the national assempbly tackled the church -- almost all church lands were confiscated and became state properties. Uunder the new civil constitution of the clergy, preiest becmae government employees. It was not as in the American case that the church became disestablished -- there was no separation of church and state, rather a complete blending.. the bishops and carnidals were forced to answere the legistlature and not the pope. Some territorial independence had always been given to the Frnch church by the Vatican - the so called galacian liberties - but the pope condemned the whole revolution and demanded that priests swear alleignce to him, about half agreed. this refractory clergy formed a barely concealed counter-revolutuion. The french church was thrown by the revolution into the arms of the pope.

The new constitution went into effect in September 1791 with many internal tensions left unresolved.

Frist there was a king of uncertain status and known subversive leanigs. In July 1791 Lious, Marie Antoinette had attmepted to flee the country (with about 15 maids and attnedants) in diguise.

He was recognized by an inn keeper near the border, and was brought back in disgrace. From that point on, republicanism, the rejection of kingship became the revolutionary slogan of the paris crowd.

Second there was a strong undercurrent of dissent, especially from the Parisian sections, and from northern rural areas, from those who thought that the pace of change was too slow, that the revolution had stopped short of economic justics. Third, there was the presence of the refractory, or no juror clergy, about 15 thousnad of whom were in hiding, began to organize local dissent especially in the South.

I think it still may have had a chance of working.

But it was the international situation that made these internal tensions explode. The revolutuionary spirit was hardly confined to France's borders, nor was the conservative reaction to it.

on one side - there was nationalists revolt in Belgium and Ireland, a massive wave of strikes in Germany and a wave of radical pamphleteering in England.

on the other conservative side, a counter-revolution came toghter with a ideology well articulated by Burke's REflections on the revolution in Frence.

The king of sweden offered to lead a monarchist crusade in France and Catherine the Great of Russia, whose famed enlightment principles were always somethig of an export commodity, pursued an increasing repressing of liberals at home.

In all European countries - and the americas, north and south there were peolple whose loyalties lay abroad. Nothing had happened like that since the reformation, and i'd agrue nothing comparable to it until world war 2.

The actual coming of war in april 1792 has a tortured diplomatic history which need not concern us. there was agression on both sides. Leopold the hapsburg emporeer and bother of marie Antoinette offered, in the Declaration of Pillnitz, to save the monachy and the French crown. Such gave added power

It was france that declared war in April 1792.

By 1792 France through the revolution had become a nation to be defended. No longer was it a jumble of localities and regions,

The revolution had unleased a new force nationalism which would mobilize millions adn topple governements for the next 200 years. The mood changed in the second half of 1791 from amialable cosmopolitansim to crusading self rightousness. "The French have beome the formeost people in the universe, " proclaimed Isnard, "so their conduct must now correspond to their new destiny. As slaves they were bold and great, are they to be timid and feedble now that they are free."

War would be a new school of revolutionary virtue, turning Frenchmen into the kind of citizen soldier not seen since Roman times. The nation armed, would become a much more potent symbol of the soviergnity than the presense of a moribund king.

The war intially went very badly for the revolutionary army and caused futher food shortages and remarkable rates of inflation.

Dissastified though most French were, when the war began the unproprtied classes were theatened with a return of artistocratic emigrees and a possible vindictive restoration of the old regime, whcih for the peasants would have been the worst of all eventualities.

the working classes the sans culottes the artisnas mechanics, shopkeepers rallied to the spirit of the revolution but not to the revolutionary government in power.

The legistlative assembly and the monach lacked the confidence of large elements of the population.

led by radical jacobins, the so called mountain, who sat up high on the left hand side of the assembly - robbespierre, marat, dnaton, saint just maasses of people maases of people burst out in a wave of patriotic sentiment against the constitutionary monarchy

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This left plenty of space to the left of the assemlby for those who had been excluded from the limited definition of citizenship. Clubs were started to push for greater democrcay, especially representing workers and women. The cordeliers, led by Marat, The Society of Indigents and especially the Fraternal society fro patriots of both sexes pushed for much greater social egalitariansim.}}}}}

In the summer of 1792 transient provincial troops and workng class activists from Paris stormed the Tuilleries where the king was housed. They called for a new convention. 1,100 people were killed, mainly refractory clergy.

The radicals demanded an end to Consituional monarchy. L16 was put on trial fro treason, rightly enough in Decmeber 1792, (though treason against the radicals, not agaist the constitueial. On Jan 1 the convention found him guilty and sentenced him to death 361 to 360. One new deputy Tom paine recommended exile to New York. L was dispatched to Madame la Guilootine forthwith and the execitioner Sanson, made a tydy profit selling bits of clothing and hankerchiefs dipped in the Kings blood.

The death of the king coincided with the reversal of fortunes in the War. The french were driven from belguim and at the same moment there was the threat of civil war with a potent Catholic uprising in the Vendee. Girondins leaders took over much of the south and refused to obey the dictates of the replican assembly.

The sans culottes the workers and radical journailists in Paris grew much more restless, there was rapid inflation, and further food shortages.

The convention was constantly raided or surrounded by groups from the commune of Paris, pressing for more radical measures, and eventually most of the girondins leaders were arrested and executed, blamed for loosing the war and for formenting federalists uprisings. This left the mountain, the radical jacobins to rule.. as the logic of revolutionary protest from below unfolded some kind of order, some kind of bloody resolution had to be sort.

The Terror

There were four elements to the new revolutionary state established in July 1793, which commentators have claimed lay the groundwork for all following totalitiarian regimes:

A) the massive mobilization of military resources, the so-called levee en masse, a new consprict army which the historian Gabriel Hanotaux has aptly named an empire of recruitment, of about 300,000 men, aminly peasants were in arms by the fall of 1793.

B) return to economic regulation, laws were instituent against hoarding grain and other foods, aided by portable guilottines sent into the countryside. Laws were also established controlling the price of bread and other essential foodstuffs. laws of the maximum. The peasants were relieved of paying commpensation to their old masters.

C) The reaborbtion into the state of the powers of popular and punitive violence. The architect of this maneover was the ever-humurless, ever tidy Saint Just who wrote the so-called Law of Suspects which gave the Committee of public Safety estraordinary powers of arrest over braod categories of poeple defined as harbouring revolutionary designs.

D) the replacement of the spontaneous politics of the clubs and radoical press by a program of offical ideology. The jacobin elite had learned enough to manipulate the language and the tactics of popular mobiization for the reinforcement, rather than for the subversion of state power. Enrage's militiants in Paris were "invited" by Robespeierre to present petitions the words of which he supplied. It was the end of spontaneous revultionary innocnece.

Robespeirre, saint just and others used the national Convention to make the world anew, to impose a republic of virtue at every level of social life.

Even time started afresh. a new calender opened when the king died and the revolutionaries diided time into units that they took to be rational and natural: ten days to a week, three weeks to a month. Days received new names, and each was dedicated to a natural rather than a religious menaing, so that St Cecelias day, november 22 became the offical day of the turnip.

The committee on public instruction also tried to legistlate Christian nmaes out of existance. Dandelion was a recommended name for girls, rhubarb for boys.

The foreighn minster Pierre-Henri Le Brun named his daughter Civilization-republic.

There were not matters of fashion byut of policy.

Virtue was to be the central ingredient of the new political culture - imposed even by force.

Robiespierre, a devotee of Rouseauy, seemed to see France as the embattled Sparta or Geneva of Rousseaus dreams. The actual struggling republic became an ideal city engaged in an inevitable war to the death with the old order. Monarchy said Saint Just is no just a king but a crime. The republic is not a senate, it is virtue.

All aspects of life were now considered public matters for debate and legistlation. The revolution now substituted the state for the Church as the ultimate authority in the conduct of private life -- much good came from this - freer divorce laws, universal primary education, manumission of slaves.

But it is not the staes new control over the private aspects of life for which the years 1793, 1794 are now rememembered. We remember the terror, the offical terror directed by the Committe of Public safety and the revolutionary tribunal. In all the official terror claimed about 17000 lives, not much by modern standards of state butchery, but it's the rationalization of killing that has scared modern history at its birth. indeed it pointed the way to the totalitarian regimes of this century.

Viktor Suvorov, in his book Inside the Aquarium (1986), states: "Millions are killed only by those who consider themselves good. People like Robespierre do not grow out of criminals but out of the most worthy and most humane types. The guillotine was invented not by criminals but by humanists. The most monstrous crimes in the history of mankind were committed by people who did not drink vodka, did not smoke, were not unfaithful to their wives and fed squirrels from the palms of their hands

As you know from your reading the chief ideologistist of the terror was Robbespieree. Terror was of course the operating priniciple of all despotic regimes. Virtue the traditional basis of republics. For infant revolutionary republics, claimed Robbespieree, virtue and terror were to be twinned. In order to ferret out counter-revolutionaryis, plotting from within and from without, violence had to be institutionalised as part of the revolutionary fabric.

Robesperire used the terror to steer and frightening strong and yet thin course through the politics of the revolutionary convention. He undermined "leftists" in the paris commune such as Herbert and he attacked men to his right such a s Danton. In so doing he managed to keep a semblance of political order, but at a firghtening human cost.

The Thermadorian Reaction.

The terror in the towns in 93 and 94, and Robespierries aggressive stern and shaky leadership in the convention were in marked contrast to the growing strenght and organization of the army.

By the spring of 1794, the army retook its lost territoes and was composed of over 800,000 men fighting for a clear national cause and led by generals who had got their rank, unusually for generals, on their merit.

The continuing success of the military made many French less willing to put up with the dictatorial rule of the committees and the regimentation of the terror. Robespieree had antagonized all significant factions in the convention.

In july 1794(9 thermador by the new calender, a group in the convention called for the outlawing of Roberspieree and he was dispatched to the guillotine.

In the leadership crisis that followed over the next few months battles continued bewteen the convention and the radicals in paris. In may 1795 troops returned to Paris for the first time since 1789. The generals immideaite deported over 10,000 radicals. The revolution had at last consumed its own children

The political victors after the fall of Robespierre were the middles classes - the remants of the lawyers and officeholders who had been active in 1789. These so claled thermadorians had litltle faith in wide democracy which they assoociated with mob rule and street violence, but they were republicans in that they beleived in individual legal rights and in a written constitution. Frnace was now a country ruled by middle class proerty owners and office holders, fierce nationalists - but the rulers were dependent for that rule on the power of the army - includeing a young general named Napoleon Bonapart.