Summary
Experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself. - Alexis de Tocqueville
The year is 1789, and you are the King of France. You’d rather be tinkering around in your workshop, but instead you are stuck in this meeting of the three estates and no one seems to be very happy. You inherited the kingdom from your grandfather Louis XV at nineteen years of age. He died a deeply unpopular monarch and left you a kingdom with tremendous financial problems. Still, change is in the air. The Enlightenment has filled France with new ideas; the old world is dying and something new is being born, though it is hard to picture what it will be. There is a lot of criticism of the monarchy these days, and it is coming from both the nobility and the masses. You have often welcomed reform, but there is a right and natural way things are meant to be. Push too hard and something might break. This is why you’ve often retracted unpopular edicts. People call that indecisive, but you’ve always held that public opinion is never wrong. Now here you sit in the middle of the first Estates General in over one hundred and fifty years, listening to everyone air their grievances against the kingdom you rule. A flicker of intuition, a growing sense of doom, as a possibility begins to present itself. You might be the last link in a chain of kings that reaches back one thousand years.
In order to keep all the events straight I generated a companion visual that shows the various political parties in France on a timeline with some of the most important events labeled here: https://graphics.georgefabish.com/french-revolution/ and another document showing this complex and compact timeline of events here: https://graphics.georgefabish.com/french-revolution-timeline/
France was facing extreme social and economic pressures during the reign of Louis XVI, the powers of the monarch were starting to crack. In France politics had long been divided by class between three estates, with the clerics in the first estate, the nobles in the second, and everyone else in the third. The king was facing mounting resistance by both the second and third estate blocking any actions he tried to make. A more authoritarian leader could have likely taken control of this situation, but Louis XVI did not have that temperament. In a final act of desperation to get his monetary reforms passed, Louis calls the first Estates General (meeting of the three estates) that had taken place since 1614.
Since it had been so long, no one was quite sure how it should be done, after long debate, they decided that traditional observances should be strictly followed. One of these traditions required the nobility to wear their finest clothes and required the representatives of the third estate to wear plain clothes. This humiliating ritual increased the third estate’s anger, mobilizing support for more representative government. Very quickly the Estates General ground to a halt over the Third Estate demanding a radical shift in vote counting. Votes had always been counted by estates, which heavily favored the Church and Nobility. The Third Estate demanded votes to be counted by head instead. Unable to come to an agreement the Third Estate declared their own assembly calling it the National Assembly.
The king was shocked by this affront but could see the movement was quickly gaining speed, so he prepared a royal session and a package of concessions. His preparations were not quick enough. When deputies arrived for their next meeting, they had not been informed of the King’s plans and worried that he was preparing to violently stop the movement. The members quickly found a nearby tennis court to use as an impromptu meeting hall and declared, in what would come to be known as the Tennis Court Oath, that they would not disperse until a new constitution had been established. The King watching this situation spiral out of control offered a bundle of concessions but in the end they were not enough, and so seeing more and more of the clergy joining the Third Estate he officially ordered the first and second estates to join the National Assembly. This signaled a tectonic shift in political power from crown to the populace.
A month after this concession in July 1789, the Bastille, which had long been seen as a symbol of oppression by the populace, would be stormed by a mob of armed Parisians. The Parisians took the fortress after hours of fighting, killed the governor, and carried his head on a pike throughout the city. This first great eruption of revolutionary violence also signaled the volatility of its participants.
With food in ever shrinking supplies, rumors spread like wildfire across the countryside. It was believed that nobles and hoarders were conspiring to keep grain out of the hands of the peasants. In what would become known as the Great Fear, the populace responded by attacking the properties of the nobility all over France. Manors would be burnt and castles destroyed. This created a wave of nobles fleeing in to exile, many of whom would engage in campaigns to fund counter-revolutionary forces within France. It also revealed that the feudal system was untenable as it lacked the authority to maintain itself. As a result, the August Decrees abolished feudal privileges, including many dues owed to the nobility and the tithes collected by the clergy.
The Assembly would continue through September hammering out the details of a new constitution that would put France under a constitutional monarchy. The main elements would take another year to settle, and Louis would not formally accept the constitution until September 1791. All the while, the material situation for Parisians continued to deteriorate. A climax was reached on October 5, when a crowd of women gathered outside city hall to protest food shortages. The protestors eventually seized weapons stored there, and a group of around 7,000 marched on the Palace of Versailles.
Some protestors broke into the royal apartments, and Marie Antoinette narrowly escaped. The episode was another humiliation for Louis, who was, for all intents and purposes, forced out of Versailles and into Paris. For Marie Antoinette and many other nobles, the king had already conceded too much, and they urged Louis to act.
While outwardly feigning support for this government, Louis felt trapped and vulnerable. Louis did not intend to accept this government, but in Paris there was not much he could do. So a plan was devised whereby the royal family would attempt a daring escape to a military fortress on the northeastern border of France. The idea was that he could rally citizens loyal to the monarchy, with outside help from other kingdoms, to reassert the monarchy over France. In revolutionary terms that was treason. The actual escape was equal parts clever and ridiculous. They escaped the palace around midnight by dressing like servants and got past the walled gates of Paris with forged papers. Once outside the city, thinking they were safe, they switched into a royal carriage and left behind any subterfuge. They needed to travel 155 miles to reach safety … they covered about 130 before being recognized and stopped within nine miles of a waiting royalist escort. They were led back to Paris in what amounted to a funeral march. Any remaining legitimacy the crown had was demolished; they returned under official arrest.
Leopold II, brother of Marie Antoinette and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, watched with growing alarm as the Revolution unfolded. After the King and Queen were led back under arrest to Paris, Leopold tried to create a coalition of powers to place Louis back on the throne, but the response from the other powers in Europe was tepid. Leopold did not want to enter a full-scale war with France alone, so he issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which stated that Austrian coalition was ready to intervene to put Louis back on the throne if the other great European powers joined. This was worded carefully, but to the French Assembly it was viewed as just another episode of Austria meddling in French politics. With many rumors of spies and double agents inside France, there was a growing appetite for war against Austria. Reading the temperature of the Legislative Assembly, King Louis saw an opportunity: the French army was in complete disarray, and defeat might restore him to power. Louis took the gamble and formally proposed war with Austria, which the deputies adopted. The conflict went badly almost at once, as France suffered a string of humiliating defeats. While France scrambled to put together new recruits, the commander of the Austrian and Prussian armies proclaimed the Brunswick Manifesto, threatening retaliation against Parisians if harm came to the royal family. In Paris many see this as proof of foreign collusion with the royal family, resulting in a mob storming the Tuileries palace. Louis and his family were arrested, and the monarchy was soon abolished. Louis XVI was stripped of his title and known as Citizen Louis Capet. The evidence of King Louis’s treason was so damning as to make conviction all but certain, but the punishment was contest. The death sentence was eventually handed down, passing by a single vote. Among those who supported the death sentence was Philippe Égalité, Louis’s own cousin. This vote would come back to haunt him as he would climb the same steps before year’s end.
King Louis XVI would die by guillotine on 21 January 1793, at the age of 38.
Marie Antoinette had long despised the people of France, and the feeling was reciprocated. From the French public’s perspective, who weren’t far off, Marie had taken every opportunity to sell out French interests to her home country of Austria. Convicted amid a widening list of accusations, with treason at the forefront, she was executed in October 1793.
The French Revolution can’t properly be understood without also paying attention to the fate of the First Estate, the Catholic clergy. The Catholic Church in France was deeply entwined with the crown, so their fates were bound together. The Church held an institutional monopoly on religion that left religious minorities with limited rights, adding more fuel to revolutionary resentment. On top of this, the Church levied a compulsory tithe of 10% on peasant farmers, and many peasants saw little commensurate benefit in return. When the National Assembly abolished feudalism, it also abolished these tithes. There were many representatives actively antagonistic to the Catholic Church, and by the time of Louis’s execution, the tables had turned: the Church had become the target of persecution. In 1789, the state seized Church property, which amounted to nearly 10% of France. Then, in 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy brought the Church under state control. This was met with harsh opposition by the Pope and created resentment against the revolution among French Catholics. The clergy were eventually forced to take oaths of loyalty to the new constitutional order; many priests refused, resulting in state-led persecution that forced many into exile and led some to execution. These actions greatly increased resentment toward the revolutionary regime, especially outside Paris, and helped sow the seeds of counterrevolution.
After the King’s death, the revolutionaries faced an onslaught of problems. The levy France made in February had sparked a rebellion in Vendée, and the war with Austria and Prussia was only deepening. Uprisings spread through Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulon, Marseille, and Caen. Facing the real possibility of collapse, the Convention created the Committee of Public Safety on 6 April 1793. Ostensibly a wartime measure, this committee would eventually become the central mechanism through which the coming Reign of Terror would operate.
The worsening shortages caused the Parisian radicals to grow impatient with the Girondins who dominated the Convention. The clashes grew more intense until on June 2 they boiled over and a crowd of up to 80,000 surrounded the convention demanding food, money, and political reforms. The Jacobins rose to power in the Convention, expelling Girondin deputies, many of whom would be arrested or executed. Robespierre, the most prominent Jacobin, became the most powerful man in France and joined the Committee of Public Safety in July. A new constitution was drafted and completed in eight days. Ratified in late June it was not destined to function for long as it would be suspended later the same year. A few weeks later the incendiary Jacobin journalist Marat was assassinated by a Girondist named Charlotte Corday. This event was further proof to the Jacobins that they had as much to fear from domestic threats as from foreign threats. This became part of the justification for the passage of the Law of Suspects in September 1793 marking the beginning of what would be known as the Reign of Terror. The Law of Suspects expanded both who could be arrested and who could carry out the arrests. The result: in a little under a year 300,000 arrests were made against suspected “enemies of freedom”. The government would officially sanction 16,600 executions with many thousands more executed without trial. During this period not even supporters would be spared, in the spring of 1794 the Dantonists and Hebertists, who had been close allies with Robespierre would see their leaders arrested and executed. The Committee of Public Safety had proven its effectiveness in silencing the opposition, for a few months at least.
At the same time, the military crisis was beginning to turn. In August 1793, France would see its second mass conscription. This levy was much broader than the first and this time it worked. The military campaigns created a new class of military leaders who effectively quashed rebellions and retook French cities. One of these new generals, who had proven especially adept, was named Napoleon.
With all these changes, it may be a good time to consider what, from a French citizen’s perspective, had actually been gained. No longer subjects, the people were now citizens, at least in theory. Political legitimacy now flowed from the nation rather than the crown. Feudal dues and clerical tithes had been abolished. Legal privilege by birth had been attacked. Public life had opened through elections, clubs, newspapers, petitions, and a new language of rights. For peasants especially, the end of seigneurial and clerical obligations was not abstract philosophy; it changed what they owed and to whom.
The pressures that had produced the Revolution had not disappeared. Bread was still scarce, price controls were brutally enforced, and the revolutionary government had become increasingly paranoid. The people had gained rights, but they also lived under a regime willing to arrest and execute in the name of defending those rights. The France they had grown up with had been transmuted in just a few years: calendar, church, king, titles, law, property, and political legitimacy all remade at once. No society can bear that much change in such a compressed period without producing counterrevolutionary force.
On June 10th of 1794, the Law of 22 Prairial was passed, denying the right of defense to those classified as “enemies of the people.” This increased the average number of executions taking place per day in Paris from 5 to 26. Meanwhile Robespierre, a deist, had led a lavish ceremony for the Cult of the Supreme Being, with some accusing Robespierre of starting rumors casting him as a second messiah. Many deputies felt that their survival depended on the removal of Robespierre. On June 29th, three members of the Committee of Public Safety accused him of being a dictator. These accusations coincided with Robespierre experiencing serious physical and psychological problems. This caused Robespierre not to respond for nearly a month, giving the opposition time to organize. The final standoff between Robespierre and the Convention occurred on 9 Thermidor.
If you’ve made it this far, you probably can guess what’s about to happen. Yet another purge, this time led by more conservative elements. This would become known as the Thermidorian Reaction. It would see the fall of the Jacobins, again with many being executed or arrested. Yet another constitution was drafted, bringing the National Convention to an end and starting the Directory Era, where France would be controlled by a bicameral legislative body. The Directory was designed to be a stable republican government in response to the radical parties before it. Yet the underlying fundamentals hadn’t changed: food was scarce, the treasury depleted. There were also new pressures rising from voices who wanted a return to monarchy, while others, the neo-Jacobins, would push from the opposite flank. The Directory era would meet its end when Napoleon overthrew it and made himself France’s first Emperor.
The French Revolution was unique in how important women were to the movement. It was a group of armed women, after all, who marched on the Palace of Versailles in 1789. They were rewarded with radical leaps forward in civil rights, including the ability to divorce, converting marriage into a civil contract, equal inheritance laws, and some real financial and property rights. Even so, women were completely locked out of the political process. This gave rise to many new clubs and movements of women who would attempt to change this fact. Playwright Olympe de Gouges famously argued: “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.” Tragically, two years later she was forced to mount the scaffold without ever getting access to the rostrum. The Jacobins feared allowing women into the political system for a variety of reasons and ultimately cracked down on the women’s movements in 1793, when all women’s political clubs were banned, making it the official policy that women were to be kept apart from the political system.
The other unique aspect of the Revolution was its progressive yet complicated stance on slavery. France had a booming network of slave labor in its colonies and even though the Declaration of the Rights of Man opens with the line “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” this in practice, like its American counterpart, was selectively applied. Tired of waiting for equal treatment, the brilliant military leader Toussaint Louverture became a leader in a rebellion against the French in what is now the sovereign state of Haiti. Toussaint would soon ally himself with the Spaniards, who were eager to take advantage of the disorganization of the French. Britain too had its eye on the island and invaded at the same time. Hopelessly outnumbered, the local French commissioner declared that all slaves on the island would be free, but that they must fight for their freedom. This decision was later ratified in Paris. Upon hearing this, Toussaint turned to join the French and helped to drive the Spaniards and British off the island.
Napoleon would roll back almost all these advances. Reinstating slavery in 1802, he ensured slavery would be a fixture of France until it was finally abolished in 1848. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 would strip women of many of their civil rights, returning women to a dependent legal status once again.
Thoughts
The French Revolution is the sister revolution to the American Revolution. The two nations became inextricably linked during America’s own Revolutionary War. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, would also help to compose France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. He remained a stalwart ally of the French Revolution even through the ‘Reign of Terror’. Thomas Paine, who helped to inflame the colonies against Britain, was such a vocal advocate for the French Revolution that he would be granted citizenship and participated in the Convention for the new constitution. The tides of French favor turned when he opposed the execution of King Louis, at which point he was thrown in prison, where he was saved from execution by blind luck. Lafayette, the head of France’s national guard, was the same Lafayette who sailed to North America and became one of George Washington’s closest confidants. After the American Revolutionary War he returned to France and attempted to be a moderating voice in the revolution; he ended up fleeing for his life, eventually being captured by the Austrians. It was King Louis XVI who came to the aid of the United States in its war with Britain. The tables would turn when the French diplomat Genêt tried to get the Americans to join the French against Britain. After several faux pas, Genêt, a solidly revolutionary Girondin, would be recalled to France, only to find that if he returned home, he would face almost certain execution by the ascendant Jacobins, and on and on.
The French Revolution, then as now, creates ambivalent feelings. On the one hand the noblest of principles, on the other the chaos of mob rule mixed with revolutionary fervor. One cannot help but think the United States got off far easier in its ability to start fresh far away from the world’s superpowers and without the baggage of one thousand years of tradition.
The French Revolution is a Rorschach test, the parts you choose to focus on likely say more about your goals and intentions. There is a little something for everyone in this revolution. The revolutionary and the conservative will both use this historical moment to validate their theories.
The French Revolution is a contradiction. Leaps forward in personal liberties are accompanied by the constant undoing of some of those advances. Ultimately, the rise of Napoleon, who undid so much of what would have made the French Revolution worth its trouble, casts a pall over the entire affair.
It is hard to do politics right; revolutions are even trickier. The French Revolution displays that the best principles and values aren’t protection against human nature. The underlying conditions, resource shortages and debt, will sour even the most utopian of moods. Man does not live on bread alone, but he tends to riot without it.
Popkin did a thorough job handling the Revolution and guiding the reader who is completely unaware of French norms through one of the most fascinating, complex and macabre periods in modern history.