The French Revolution - Ça ira!
• Ça ira! (Edith Piaf)
– Ça ira, ça ira! Les
aristocrates à la
lanterne!
– Song dates from the
Revolution itself.
Making of the Modern World
The French
Revolution
The French Revolution
It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times. - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
The French Revolution is a movement of God.
It is a pure gift to progress. - Victor Hugo, Les
Misérables
Enduring Reference Point for
Social and Political Change
• ‘It will be like the French Revolution… It will
take years.’
• Hatim Tallima of the Revolutionary Socialists in Cairo,
2013 (Arab Spring)
Watershed moment of modernity
• Overturned
– Divine-right, absolutist monarchy
– Privilege (as opposed to equality before the law)
– Nobility
– Guilds, corporations
– The Church’s wealth and moral preeminence
• Inaugurated (sometimes in ‘proto’ form):
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Liberalism
Republicanism
Socialism
Conservatism
Free-market capitalism
Feminism
Nationalism
Imperialism (an ideologically driven form of it)
Liberal authoritarianism (contradiction in terms?)
Totalitarianism (Cold War term: from Rousseau, to
Robespierre, to Stalin?)
– Secular universalism
Burke (anti) vs. Paine (pro)
• Kings will be tyrants by policy when subjects
are rebels by principle.
– Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
• The circumstances of the world are continually
changing and the opinions of man also; and as
government is for the living, and not for the
dead, it is the living only that has any right in
it.
– Paine, Rights of Man (1791)
Historical debates
• Origins
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Circumstances (financial, political)
Class
Enlightenment ideas
Public Opinion
• Course
– Was radicalisation inevitable?
– Why the Terror (1793-94, the Year II)?
– Why did republicanism give way to authoritarianism?
• Legacies
– Did the French Revolution pave the way to liberalism and
human rights, social democracy or pathological forms of
democracy?
Thesis of circumstances
• Financial breakdown
– France helped finance the American War for Independence
from Britain (1770s-1780s)
– More than half of annual tax revenues used up to pay interest
on the debt (1786)
– No central bank, regime borrowed at high interest rates
– Refusal to pay more taxes
• Political juggernaut
– Parlements and Notables (represent ‘the nation’) vs.
– Monarchy
• Bad harvests, high bread prices
Class Thesis
(prevalent in mid-20th century)
• Three Estates
– Clergy, nobles, third estate
• High bourgeoisie: had most of the productive
power but no political power
• abbé Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (1789)
– What is the Third Estate? Everything
– What has it been recognised to be until now?
Nothing
– What does it aspire to be? Something
Enlightenment Origins: Ideas?
• Faute à Rousseau?
– Collective sovereignty
– Moral regeneration and virtue
– Utopian principles lead to authoritarianism?
• Faute à Voltaire and aux philosophes?
– Desacralisation of throne and altar
– Critical reason trumps ethics, morality
Enlightenment Origins: Public Opinion
– A more literate and critical public
• Content of print and conversations
– Critical of monarchy (debauched, arbitrary, corrupt)
– Irreverence for sacred power: throne and altar
• The rise of a critical public, thinking for oneself
– People, bombarded with print (some of it produced by
politically interested sources like the monarchy) learn to be
skeptical
Course of Revolution
• Liberal Phase – 1789-1792 (constitutional
monarchy)
• Radical Phase – 1792-1794 (republic)
– Year II, the Terror (1793-94)
• Thermidor – 1794-1795 (republic)
• Directory – 1795-1799 (republic, but
increasingly authoritarian)
• Consulate, Empire – 1799-1814 (Napoleon)
Meeting of the Estates General
May 1789
• Prior failure to persuade hand-picked
assemblies of notables (1787 and 1788) to
agree to more taxes
• Parlement (sovereign judicial courts) refuses
to agree to more taxes
• Only remaining solution is an Estates General:
a meeting of the clergy, nobles and third
estate. First time since 1614 (absolutism had
suppressed most representative bodies).
1789 – La Révolution
• June 17 - Third Estate, impatient and
suspicious of clergy and nobles, declares itself
to be ‘the nation’. Asserts its sovereign
authority over taxation and swears to uphold
the debt
• Also creates a committee to investigate bread
crisis and propose solutions.
• Late June – Louis XVI eventually concedes but
plots military repression.
June 20 – Tennis Court Oath (indoor, see below)
New National Assembly takes an oath to refuse to disband until Constitution
is completed
June 27 – Louis XVI concedes but plots military repression
1789
• July 14 – The Storming of the Bastille
– Parisians, in search of arms to protect themselves from monarchy’s
repression, attack this fortress and prison on the edge of Paris for
arms; few prisoners being held there at the time. Governor fires on
crowds, who storm the prison and put his head on a pike.
• August 4 – Abolition of Privilege (end of the Old Regime, since
privilege was at the very heart of it)
• End of August: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
• October 5-6 – Women’s Bread March to Versailles
– Brings King, Queen and National Assembly to Paris, where they were
more vulnerable to popular pressures
Storming of the Bastille, July 14
Was torn down, stone by stone
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
note resemblance to Ten Commandments: a modern, secular religion?
1790
• Civil Constitution of the Clergy
– State seizes church lands (10-12% of all land), which will be auctioned
off (to pay for the national debt)
– Closure of monasteries and convents (seen as un-useful institutions in
an age of Enlightenment utility)
– Requires religious clerics to swear an oath to uphold the new
Constitution
• Left/Right splits in National Assembly
– Arch-Royalists sit on right; Progressives (Jacobins and their allies) on
the left
• Spread of Jacobin clubs throughout France
– Who were Jacobins?
• Initially a group of legislators who met to strategize
• Eventually, became a nationwide network of clubs in favour of a constitution,
rights and legal equality
• Often pressured local officials to carry out new laws
1791
• June: Flight of the King to Varennes
– Intended to return with counterrevolutionary
troops to put down the Revolution (MarieAntoinette’s brother, Joseph, was emperor of the
Habsburg Empire)
– Louis XVI was recognized at border by a postman,
sent back to Paris
• July: Radicals call for a Republic – authorities
fire on them: Massacre on the Champs de
Mars
1791
• Constitution (September)
• Legislative Assembly replaces Constituent
Assembly
• Abolition of guilds, corporations and all
government regulation bodies
• Tensions increase
1792
– Religious
Counterrevolutionary propaganda proliferates
Resistance to clerical oath and anger about new
constitutional priests imposed on parishes
-- Social and economic
Disruptions in the world of labour; popular discontent
infiltrates political clubs and sections
-- Political
King is essentially a prisoner in Paris, plotting in hopes of
a foreign invasion to put down revolution
Divisions among revolutionaries
radicals vs. moderates (Jacobins / Girondins)
1792
• April: War declared against Austria. Soon, France is at war with
most of its neighbours, who fear the spread of revolution.
• August 10: The monarchy falls in violent insurrection
• September 2-7: Prison massacres of priests and nobles in Paris by
radical ‘sans-culotte’ forces
• September 21: First Republic declared
– Constitution won’t be promulgated until June of 1793
– Operating in a state of exception… all executive decisions easily
denounced as arbitrary… no constitutional guidelines.. Sharp tensions
between a free-market and regulated economy
– Pressure for political justice
1793
• January 21: Louis XVI is guillotined
• March: counterrevolutionary revolts in Vendée
• Terror gears up
– Creation of the Committee of Public Safety (executive)
– Committee of General Security (police committee)
– Revolutionary Tribunals (which condemn ‘enemies’ of the
revolution to the guillotine
• June: Jacobins, pushed by sans-culottes in Paris, purge the
Girondins from National Convention.
• Summer: Federalist Revolts against Paris and sans-culotte
movement (provinces resent purge)
• Autumn: Marie-Antoinette and Girondins guillotined
1794
• Slavery in French colonies abolished (Feb)
• Terror escalates (spring)
– Purge of Dantonistes (who wanted to end the Terror)
– Purge of Hébertistes (sans-culottes who wanted to push the
Terror further)
• High Terror (June/July): thousands executed in Paris
• 27 July (9 Thermidor): Robespierre and other members of
the Committee of Public Safety are arrested and guillotined
1795-1799
• The Directory
– Executive-heavy Republic, with 5 directors
– Difficult to pursue a middle path between
radicalism and royalism
– 1797: elections are nullified; repression increases
– Revolution exported; the republican generals gain
in reputation and power
• 18 Brumaire (Nov 9, 1799): Coup brings
Napoleon to power
1800-1815
• Consulate and First Empire:
– Napoleon conquers much of Europe
– overturns old regimes across Europe
– Fleeces conquered countries but imposes new
ideology and administrative structures… creating
new political and administrative structures that
will help bring about the rise of ‘nation states’
across the 19th century
Key terms and concepts
• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)
• Jacobinism (centralising state, fiercely secular, touch of
social justice)
• Sans-culottes (for economic regulations and punishment of
‘enemies’ of the nation)
• Vendée (civil war)
• Levée en masse – universal draft, largest army in Europe
almost overnight (1793---)
• Terror
• Guillotine (pain and torture is no longer the point of judicial
punishment. Equality and prompt, painless elimination of
enemies from the nation)
The Terror in perspective
• Struck at all ‘suspects’ of the new regime.
• Deaths from revolutionary strife
– 17,000 executions by revolutionary tribunals
– 15,000-17,000 die in prison
• Deaths in civil and foreign wars (1792-1815) –
roughly 4 million across Europe
– 250,000 to 400,000 in the civil war of the Vendée
– Most deaths occur during Napoleon’s wars
A new culture
• Time, weights and measure - rationality
– Metric system created – more rational than inches, feet, etc.
– Revolutionary Calendar based on nature. 10 day weeks
• Brumaire (Nov-Dec): ‘brume’ means fog
• Ventôse (March-Apr): ‘vent’ means wind
• Revolutionary Festivals
– Festival of the Supreme Being (June 1794)
• Deism
• Notre Dame cathedral converted into the Temple of Reason
• Some public schools and museums founded
• Cult of the Nation –
– Pantheon: where France’s ‘great’ heroes were buried
• Voltaire, Rousseau, radical murdered journalist Marat, etc.
Revolutionary Calendar
Sample of a ‘meter’ for public to use
as guide, during Revolution
A Temple of Reason
(conversion of church, 1794)
Reads: The French people recognise the Supreme Being and the immortality of the
spirit
Festival of the Supreme Being
Guillotine
Execution of Louis XVI (Jan 21, 1793)
Impact
• Revolutionary persists across (19th Century)
– Notably in 1830, 1848 and 1871
• Nationalism, rise of nation states (19th/20th centuries)
• Democratic revolutions across the world (20th century)
• Literature and Philosophy
– Fires imaginations for more than two centuries
Founding Interpretations
• Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in
France, 1790)
– Modern conservatism
– Need for tradition and reverence
• Alexis de Tocqueville (The Old Regime and the
French Revolution, 1857)
– Abstract literary politics (Enlightenment) combines
with state centralisation to form new, modern forms
of political oppression
• Marx/Jaurès (mid 19th, turn-of-20th)
– Revolution as class war
Confused?
Click here or
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXsZbkt
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