The French
Revolution
Lecture #1
Setting the
Stage
I. The Importance of the French Revolution
• Separates Early Modern From Modern
• Great Chain is finally smashed…sorta…
– What strand of the chain still exists at this point
to be smashed?
• France was the most important country in
Europe, (and as a result, the world)
– Largest population
– Cultural influence
– Lingua franca
Schönbrunn Palace
Versailles
II. The Ancien Regime
• Before we jump in to the revolution, we must
set the stage a bit
– a quick tour of 18th century France
• Historians call the government/social system
that existed in France before the French
Revolution the ancien regime
– traditional/old government
French Absolute Monarchy
Marie Antoinette & Louis XVI
Marie
Antoinette
and the
Royal
Children
The Estates System
First Estate
Second Estate
Third Estate
Legal Privileges of the 1st Two Estates
•
•
•
•
1st Estate – Clergy
2nd Estate- Nobility
Don’t pay taxes
Honorific
• For example, the right to best seats at public ceremonies
• Useful
• For example, monopoly on bread baking (peasants must pay
their lord to bake bread)
1st Two Estates are Not Homogeneous
• wealthy priests high up
in the church (live like
nobles)
• poor parish priests (live
like peasants)
• wealthy nobles
• poorer nobles
• Sword versus Robe
Nobles
• It is going to be hard to
generalize about any
group
The
Third
Estate
• Is itself broken into three groups
– Bourgeois/Middle Class
• The public
– Rural Peasants
• The mob
– Urban Poor
• The mob
Bourgeoisie / Middle Class
•
wealthiest group
•
live in towns
•
lawyers, doctors,
merchants, bankers,
etc. (professionals)-
•
compete with
nobility for status
•
Educated
•
intellectuals…
interested in the
Enlightenment
Rural peasants
•
live in countryside
•
farmers
•
religious
•
not educated
•
80% of France (if they
get angry/organized
…yikes)
•
But hard to organize
Urban Workers
•
poorest/ may starve
•
not well educated
•
high end = skilled workers
(blacksmiths, cobblers,
etc.)
•
low end= unskilled
workers (day laborers,
servants, etc.)
•
a huge number of them in
Paris
•
unusual amount of
political influence
considering their small
number and poverty
… (WHY?)
•
Mobs can directly
affect government
Bourgeois v
sans culottes
III. Sources of Tension in 18th Century France
(Or ‘Why the Revolution Occurred’)
A.
• France was an
absolute monarchy …
• …but also the home
of…
– the Enlightenment
• Bound to Clash
B. The Enlightenment- Liberty and Equality
• LIBERTY
– ‘liberate’
– Free people from tyranny
– Sovereignty to people
• Equality
– ‘Equality of Opportunity’
– End legal privileges
– Different from ‘Equality of
Condition’
• Kings foolishly
welcomed rational
thought in science
– Improved their power
– But ultimately led to the
Enlightenment which
undermined them
C. Growing Debt in France
• Related to the 2nd Hundred Years’ War Louis
XIV’s attempts to enlarge France through war
• Massive government borrowing
– By the start of the French Revolution, the government
is paying 50% of its total revenue just to pay interest
on its debts
– NOT GOOD!
• Richest part of the population is tax exempt
• Short term cash infusion from Nobles of the Robe
destroys long term income
• Poor harvests in the twenty years before the
French Revolution
– Remember that the Agricultural Revolution didn’t
improve standard of living
• Why?
The French Urban Poor
80
70
60
50
1787
1788
40
30
20
10
0
% of Income Spent on Bread
Financial Problems
in France, 1789
a Urban Commoner’s
Budget:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Food
Rent
Tithe
Taxes
Clothing
TOTAL
80%
25%
10%
35%
20%
170%
a King’s Budget:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Interest
Army
Versailles
Coronation
Loans
Admin.
TOTAL
50%
25%
25%
10%
25%
25%
160%
D. Real/Perceived Royal Extravagance
• Royalty in France had traditionally been
admired for their lavish lives
– Their great spending honored France
• However, with a crumbling economy and
Enlightenment rationality, the public
attitude was changing
– Royalty had an inability to understand the
plight of the common people
Marie Antoinette’s
“Peasant Cottage”
Marie Antoinette’s
“Peasant Cottage”
The Necklace Scandal
1,600,000 livres
[$100 million today]
Let Them Eat Cake!
Y Marie Antoinette NEVER said that!
Y “Madame Deficit”
Y “The Austrian Whore”
E. Unfair Land Distribution
F. The Influence of the American Revolution
• If they can live as an Enlightened republic,
complete with Enlightenment liberty and
equality, why can’t we?
• France had intimate knowledge of the
American Revolution
– Why?
– Marquis de Lafayette
• More on this later…
G. Loss of Royal Prestige
• “Letters of cachet”
– Conflicts with the Enlightenment
• Louis XVI is weak and indecisive
– Parlements and Remonstration
– Louis XV had blasted apart the Parlements… Louis XVI
restores them
– Wants to be loved… Machiavelli would NOT have approved
• Increasing Numbers of Under the Cloak Books
– Many were pornographic treatments of the Royal family
• Scanned images???
IV. Conflicting Desires for Change
• Royals
– We don’t want change, but we do have money problems…
• Nobles
– The royals don’t know how to run things… give us more power
• Echo of Montesquieu
– However, cut off nobility from those damned upstart Bourgeois
• Bourgeois
– want the glass ceiling removed
– We have got money! More at times than nobles.
– But watch out for the mob… they are dangerous. They are a useful tool to scare
the nobles IF used correctly.
• Rural Peasants
– land and food, but not much other change (not philosophers)
– Religious/traditional
• Urban Workers
– Extremists/Revolution!!!
– Why so extreme?
• Poorest
• Live right next to richest
The Political Spectrum
TODAY:
/
Radicals
1790s:
WantMontagnards
change
/
Reactionary
The Plain
(swing votes)
Don’t want change
Girondists
Monarchíen
(“The Mountain”)
Extreme
Moderate
Jacobins
(Royalists)
Extreme
Basic Ideologies
• Reactionaries/Conservatives
– things should stay the way they are under the king class
– distinctions are necessary and good
• Moderate conservatives and moderate liberals
– Constitutional monarchy
– A move towards individual freedoms and away from tyranny without
‘overturning the apple cart’
• Liberals/Radicals
– republic (democracy/ popular sovereignty)
– Full freedom and equality
– equality of opportunity
• Socialists- (this term was developed after the Revolution)
– extreme change
– equality of condition
The Political Spectrum
Rural Peasants???
Urban Workers
TODAY:
Bourgeois
Nobles
/
Radicals
1790s:
WantMontagnards
change
/
Reactionary
The Plain
(swing votes)
Don’t want change
Girondists
Monarchíen
(“The Mountain”)
Extreme
Kings/Clergy
Moderate
Jacobins
(Royalists)
Extreme
The political terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ even come from the way
the representatives sat in the Legislative Assembly
RadicalsWant
Change!!!
ConservativesWant to Stay
the Same!!!
V. The Catholic Church in France
•Church has a lot of land in France
•This land is not taxed by the crown… large loss of income
•Church and Enlightenment clash
•Many nobles and bourgeois are anti-church
•Rural peasants and royal family are pro church
•Huguenot versus Catholic
•Many Huguenot fled as a result of Louis XIV’s intolerance
(revocation of the Edict of ______)
•Nantes
VI. Revolutionary Themes
• The Cascade Effect
– And
• the Strong Man Effect
Historians Have noticed that there
are patterns to Political Revolutions
• The ‘Cascade Effect’
– Often the first revolutionary change of government is
followed by a series (or cascade) of other revolutions
– Why?
• It is easier to agree on what you ___________ than what you
_________
• Groups that joined to kick the gov out start to __________
• Often (not always!) a Strong Man (Dictator/ Tyrant)
arises. Why?
– people become so sick of the cascading revolutions that
they would prefer anything to chaos
– I bet you know the name of the French ‘strong man’
Governments
• Louis XVI
– Assembly of Notables
• Assemblies
– Estates General
– National Assembly (group that marched out of Estates General to
Tennis Court)
– Legislative Assembly (National dissolved itself and held new
elections to gain legitimacy- largely Jacobins chosen)
– National Convention (new elections to form a Republic were
declared when the king was put on trial)
• Directory
• Napoleonic Empire
• Louis XVIII
Phases
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1763 The Seven Years’ War …British take over French lands in the New World and French debt grows from the cost of the war…
the American Revolution … Frenchmen like the Marquis de Lafayette join the fight and France goes deeper into debt paying for the war
1787 America, victorious in the American Revolution, writes a Republican Constitution
1780- 1790 French king pays 50% of royal tax income to cover royal debts
1785-1790s Poor harvests and inflation harm poor peasants… bread prices skyrocket
1787 Louis XIV calls an ‘assembly of notables’ and requests an increase in royal taxes; they recommend that if higher taxes are paid then the nobles
should have full say over how the money is spent… Louis refuses and the notables demand the Estates General
1787 Louis dissolved the ‘assembly of notables’ and passed taxes by ‘decree’; Parlament of Paris resists, and a mass of protests against the king
broke out across France
May 5, 1789- Louis XVI holds first meeting of the Estates-General in over 150 years
June– Deadlock in the Estates General over Voting System
June 17, 1789 –Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly
June 20, 1789 - Oath of the Tennis Court
June 20th to July 14th- Louis XIV brings royal troops into Paris
July 14, 1789 - Storming of the Bastille
August 4th 1789- Many noble members of the National Assembly give up their estate privilege
August 26, 1789 - Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen issued
October 5, 1789 - Parisian women march to Versailles and force Louis XVI to return to Paris
July 1790 Louis XVI agrees to accept France as a Constitutional monarchy under a Constitution to be hammered out by the National Assembly
(which they finally did by September 1791)
June 1791 - Louis XVI and family attempt to flee France to Austria, but are captured and returned
April 1792 - France declares war on Austria
August 10, 1792 - Storming of the Tuileries
January 1793 - Louis XVI executed
July 1793 - Maximilien Robespierre assumes leadership of the Committee of Public Safety
1793-1794 - Reign of Terror
1794 - Robespierre is guillotined
1794-Thermidorian Reaction
1795- Economic controls are abolished, and suppression of the sans-culottes begins.
1799 - Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Directory and seizes power
1801 Napoleon signs a peace-making Concordat with the Catholic Church
1804 Napoleon’s Civil Code
21 October 1805 Battle of Trafalgar
1810 Napoleonic Empire reaches its height
1812 Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
1814 Waterloo
Phases
A. Growing
Tension
1.
Moderate
(aka liberal
or bourgeois)
Stage
(What makes
it moderate?
2. Radical
Stage
(What makes
it radical?)
4.Napoleonic
Empire
(What is
it?)
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1763 The Seven Years’ War …British take over French lands in the New World and French debt grows from the cost of the war…
the American Revolution … Frenchmen like the Marquis de Lafayette join the fight and France goes deeper into debt paying for the war
1787 America, victorious in the American Revolution, writes a Republican Constitution
1780- 1790 French king pays 50% of royal tax income to cover royal debts
1785-1790s Poor harvests and inflation harm poor peasants… bread prices skyrocket
1787 Louis XIV calls an ‘assembly of notables’ and requests an increase in royal taxes; they recommend that if higher taxes are paid then the
should have full say over how the money is spent… Louis refuses and the notables demand the Estates General
1787 Louis dissolved the ‘assembly of notables’ and passed taxes by ‘decree’; Parlament of Paris resists, and a mass of protests against the ki
broke out across France
May 5, 1789- Louis XVI holds first meeting of the Estates-General in over 150 years
June– Deadlock in the Estates General over Voting System
June 17, 1789 –Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly
June 20, 1789 - Oath of the Tennis Court
June 20th to July 14th- Louis XIV brings royal troops into Paris
July 14, 1789 - Storming of the Bastille
August 4th 1789- Many noble members of the National Assembly give up their estate privilege
August 26, 1789 - Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen issued
October 5, 1789 - Parisian women march to Versailles and force Louis XVI to return to Paris
July 1790 Louis XVI agrees to accept France as a Constitutional monarchy under a Constitution to be hammered out by the National Assemb
(which they finally did by September 1791)
June 1791 - Louis XVI and family attempt to flee France to Austria, but are captured and returned
April 1792 - France declares war on Austria
August 10, 1792 - Storming of the Tuileries
January 1793 - Louis XVI executed
July 1793 - Maximilien Robespierre assumes leadership of the Committee of Public Safety
1793-1794 - Reign of Terror
1794 - Robespierre is guillotined
1794-Thermidorian Reaction
1795- Economic controls are abolished, and suppression of the sans-culottes begins.
1799 - Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Directory and seizes power
(Huh?)
1801 Napoleon signs a peace-making Concordat with the Catholic Church
1804 Napoleon’s Civil Code
21 October 1805 Battle of Trafalgar
1810 Napoleonic Empire reaches its height
1812 Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
1814 Waterloo
3. Moderately
Reactionary
Stage
B. Extremely Reactionary Stage (Huh?)