French Revolution 1789-1799
• What is wrong with the Ancien Regime?
Ancien Regime
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Feudal system inequality
Deficit, Marie Antoinette/American Rev. War
Famine/bread shortages
Poor use of land, lack of Agricultural Revolution techniques
Feudal privileges kept peasants from hunting
Nobles taxing more
American Revolution debt and their ideas of liberty
Enlightenment ideals circulating still
Lack of education nation wide
Louis XVI weak as a king at a time when strength was needed.
Approximate, not exact…
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20 % of budget available to develop France
6% spent on Versailles/Louis/Antoinette
50% interest payments on existing debt
25% to maintain military
Louis XVI tries
• Louis repeatedly appoints economic advisors
who all pretty much say the same thing which
is tax the nobles but Paris Parlement won’t
allow it.
• 1787 Louis calls an assembly of notables to
gain support for taxing the wealth of France
and they say no because they want more
power in return which Louis is unwilling to
grant.
Louis gets frustrated and dissolves the notables but parlement
declare royal decrees null and void, this spreads so Louis forced
to invite Estates General
• 1st Estate: clergy (many poor)
• 2nd Estate: nobles (divided)
• 3rd Estate: everybody 98% of France! (mostly mid-class)
Allowed to bring cahiers
Estates General design
1788 meet
• Separate meeting rooms per estate
• 3rd Estate has many many more members.
Sieyes: “What is 3rd Estate? Everything”
• Vote is taken by house…main sticking point
• Some are switching sides, especially poor
clergy members
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Abbé Sieyès' pamphlet begins:The plan of this book is fairly simple. We must ask ourselves three
questions.
1. What is the Third State? Everything.
2. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing.
3. What does it want to be? Something....
and ends:The Third Estate embraces then all that which belongs to the nation; and
all that which is not the Third Estate, cannot be regarded as being of the
nation.
What is the Third Estate?
It is everything.
• Debate over how a new government should
be created: many agreed on a constitutional
monarchy but developed by whom?
• 3rd estate told by Louis XVI to wear specific
costumes to identify them and locked out of
meeting room, so…
Tennis Court Oath 1789, a National
Assembly is born
• Louis’s reaction?
Agree to let estates meet together and think on
constitution, or no wait, maybe hire 18,000
troops to push the men out, and yeah, yeah,
try to be absolute again because Marie tells
me to!
Louis tries to dismiss but forced to sign. Marie Antoinette
advises not to. Louis hires troops around Versailles and Paris,
people still have no bread, leads to…
Growing discontent
• What do people of Paris want?
Jobs and Bread and they think the King or the
Estates should provide it…
Keep this in mind when we see the initial
popularity of the Mountain/Robespierre
July 14, Bastille stormed, this leads to…
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoXKrr14
uY8
• Bastille
NOTHING
• No political prisoners found
• No stockpile of weapons found
But it does show king the people are serious and
willing to act on their discontent
But their belief in the king’s reaction leads to…
The Great Fear
• Riots in fear of king’s revenge
• Murder of nobles
• Paris lost,
LaFayette in
charge.
• Emigres
• August 4
nothing)
(thanks for
National Assembly issues the Declaration
of Rights of Man, but deadlock on new
Constitution
• http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/declara
tion.html
Louis still slow in accepting reforms and
people still hungry so…
Around 7,000 Women around Paris March on Versailles
(12 miles), bring royal family to Paris
• The revolutionary debate was becoming
widespread through the media. Cheap and
widely circulated (1455 printing press so more
and more could read)
Marat: Ami du Peuple, left
Rivarol: Actes des Apotres, right
1790 (big legal year) Constituent
Assembly
• Created a legislative assembly with vast
powers
• Constitutional monarch had powers but
mostly limited by the legislative body
• Reformed judicial system
• Women’s rights expanded, but no voting
rights and couldn’t hold office (Women’s clubs
closed when women becoming too
demanding)
• Economic advances as guilds, monopolies,
barriers to trade gone.
• Clergy, Civil Constitution (July 1790) was a bad
idea. Tolerance great but nationalizing the
Church, bad.
• Few men could vote or run for office: based
on land and wealth
Louis tries to escape with family
Trouble with finding letters/Declaration of
Pilnitz 1791
• King is arrested and charged with treason
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Constitution in the works and Assembly
becoming divided
Jacobins: wealthy theorists, split to:
Girondists: more active, crusade against
representatives of ancien regime (afraid
Mountain could turn bloody dictators)
Mountain: Robespierre/Danton radical (afraid
Girondists could become more conservative)
Sans-culottes: went back and forth between
groups and their support was desired by both
groups
• Louis is brought back to Paris where he accepts
the new constitution.
• Celebration in the streets September 1791
• Girondists believe war must be waged on foreign
powers…at first Louis says no but later agrees,
why?
• Some European powers at first supported the
French effort but peasant violence scared them
away. Burke: Reflections on the French
Revolution
• US supported verbally but did nothing. Paine:
Rights of Man, elected to Assembly
• More suspicion about king getting aid so…
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseillaise#
Lyrics
August 10, 1792 (year it’s getting really radical) sans culottes
plan an insurrection and attack Swiss Guards at Tuileries
• After funeral in September…Crazy crazy violence
everywhere (mostly sans-culottes). The
Septembrists/September Massacres
• “We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a
pike was presented at the window. Tison's wife screamed
loudly; the murderers thought it was the queen's voice,
and we heard the frantic laughs of those barbarians.
Thinking that Her Majesty was still at table, they had
raised the victim's head so that it could not escape her
sight; it was that of the Princesse de Lamballe. Though
bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling,
floated around the pike.”
• Legislative Assembly believed to be too
conservative so forced out in favor of new
elections (universal male suffrage) for a
National Convention
• New government to draw a new constitution
since as of August 10, 1792 France no longer
had a monarch.
• Argument between Girondists and Mountain
getting more heated:
Girondists: more along line of philosophes,
snooty, poor people are gross…laissez faire.
Revolution had gone far enough.
Mountain: end glaring inequality of wealth and
abolish the misery of poverty. “No enemy to
the Left.”
Mountain will win most support of the masses
Louis put on trial
• Louis’s last speech to Assembly December 26, 1792. “Speaking
to you perhaps for the last time I declare to you that my
conscience does not reproach me in any way and that my
defenders have told you nothing but the truth. I have never
feared a public examination of my conduct; but it wounds my
heart to find in the indictment the charge that I wished to
shed the people’s blood, and, above all, that the misfortunes
of 10 August were attributable to me. I confess that the often
repeated pledges that I have at all times given of my love for
the people and the way in which I have always behaved seem
to me an evident proof that I had little fear of endangering
myself in order to spare their blood, and that these pledges
and this behaviour should preserve me for ever from any such
imputation.”
• Inevitable that king will be found guilty of treason,
executed January 21, 1793
“…Frenchmen, I die innocent. I pardon the authors of
my death. I pray God that the blood about to be spilt
will never fall upon the
head of France…”
Drums drown him out.
• Also country is at war with
other European countries.
All out chaos. War going badly
as England reacts to Louis’s
death and declares war:
1st Coalition:
England,
Holland,
Prussia,
Austria,
Spain, Italy
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War miserable
Parisians still hungry
Riots
All out brawls in Convention
Girondists losing more and more ground
Committee of Public Safety created to calm
the storm. Robespierre becomes leader of
committee.
Army called to arrest Girondists, May 31, 1793
1793 Constitution
• Suffrage assured for men(but women’s clubs
closed since they discussed rights)
• Social relief to the poor
• Robespierre used planned economy and price
controls
Other developments:
• Employment increase because of war efforts
(total war)
• Church later becomes a house of reason for the
supreme being
• New calendar with year zero and new months.
• Women had been extremely influential and
involved and wanted rights:
• Olympe de Gouges
• Condorcet
Both guillotined during The Terror
Robespierre and his Reign of Terror, Committee
of Public Safety 1793
• “If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid
revolution it is at the same time virtue and terror: virtue, without which
terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing
but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of
virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general
principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.”
• Robespierre goes after all “anti-revolutionaries”
40,000 in all, guillotines all over France, in Paris
can kill 1 every 3 minutes
• At war, controls prices, only brown bread
allowed, jobs, lessens anti-Christianization policy
• Goes after too many within government, wages
low and terror is too much, so…
• Danton and others were sick at the
bloodletting and wanted a constitutional
government of the middle class.
• Hebert led a group who believed in the terror
but seemed to threaten power of Robespierre
• Robespierre sent both men and supporters to
the guillotine. So…
Robespierre executed
July 28,1794
Danton
Marie Antoinette Louis XVI
Hebert
Robespierre
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otnADq4Y
0-A
• French Rev summary
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Reign of Terror over and now White Terror
(Thermidorean Reaction 1794-1795)
Overturn liberal ideas and go back to
conservative society with rich at the top.
Kill supporters of Robespierre
Price controls over, embarrassed about being
rich over
Catholic Churches reopened, emigres return
Directory elected by legislative body runs
country
War going badly
Still riots over bread and poverty
Yet another constitution 1795
• Protected property rights
• Re-established property requirements for
voting
• Executive power in Directory
• Bicameral legislature
• Decreed amnesty to royalists and priests
Instability continued, the war effort was
overwhelming and the royalists rebelled…SO…
• http://flocabulary.com/french-revolution/
Two cartoons: one depicting event and
one depicting significance (effects)
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Tennis Court Oath
Storming of Bastille
Great Fear
March on Versailles
Royal family tries to escape
September Massacres
Robespierre’s Reign of Terror
Napoleon Game
• Your game board must represent Napoleon’s rule
in some creative way.
• You must write out the rules so that anyone could
walk up and play after reading them.
• Your game must be based upon who knows the
most about Napoleon using your
question/answer cards
• You may use other cards or spaces on the board
to penalize or move players but they need to
have something to do with Napoleon’s history.
• Have fun!!!