The French Revolution
It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times. - Charles Dickens
The French Revolution is a movement of God. It
is a pure gift to progress. - Victor Hugo
Terror is only justice: prompt, severe, inflexible.
It is an emanation of virtue. – Robespierre
Persistent Symbol of
Social and Political Change
• ‘It will be like the French Revolution… It will
take years.’
• Hatim Tallima of the Revolutionary Socialists in Cairo,
2013
Watershed moment of modernity
• Overthrew
– Monarchy
– Privilege
– Nobility
– Guilds, corporations
– The Church’s economic and moral preeminence
• Inaugurated (or said to):
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(proto-) Liberalism
Republicanism
(proto-) Socialism
Conservatism
Free-market capitalism
Feminism
Nationalism
Imperialism
Liberal authoritarianism
Totalitarianism
Secular universalism
Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine
• 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)
Aspects that historians study
• Origins
– Circumstances, Social change, Enlightenment thought
– Domestic and Global Problems
• Course
– Was radicalisation inevitable?
– Why the Terror?
– Why did republicanism give way to Bonapartism?
• Legacies
– Liberalism, human rights, social democracy
or
-- political pathologies: terror, authoritarianism, total war
Enlightenment Origins: Ideas
• Faute à Rousseau?
– Collective sovereignty
– Moral regeneration and virtue
• Utopianism
• Faute à Voltaire?
– Desacralisation of religion
– Critical reason and irreverence for authority
Enlightenment Origins: Public Opinion
– A more literate and critical public
– Critique itself as politically de-stabilising
Enlightenment Origins
• Constitutionalism and Contractualism
– Montesquieu: via Parlements
• Checks and balances
• Influences from Britain
– Rousseau:
• Collective sovereignty, the ‘general will’
Immediate Causes
• Financial
– Impending bankruptcy
• 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
Immediate Causes
• Political
– Prior failure to persuade hand-picked assemblies
of notables (1787 and 1788) to agree to more
taxes (First and Second Assemblies of Notables)
– Parlement refuses to increase taxes.
• May 1788: King dismisses the magistrates: revolts break
out
• King agrees to a Meeting of the Estates General
Meeting of the Estates General
May 1789
• Clergy, nobles and third estate.
• First time since 1614 (absolutism had
suppressed most representative bodies).
• Vote by order or by head? Unresolved
question.
Phases of Revolution
• Liberal Phase – 1789-1792
• Radical Phase – 1792-1794
– Year II, the Terror
• Thermidor – 1794-1795
• Directory – 1795-1799
• Consulate, First Empire – 1800-1814
– Napoleonic period
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
• Late June – Louis XVI eventually concedes but
plots military repression.
1789
• July 14 – Storming the Bastille
– Parisians, in search of arms, 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
• August 28: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
– All sovereignty resides in the nation
• 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
1790
• Civil Constitution of the Clergy
– State seizes church lands (10-12% of all land), which will be
auctioned off
– Closure of cloisters – monasteries and convents
– Mandatory oath to uphold the Constitution
• Left/Right splits in National Assembly
– Royalists sit on right; Jacobins and their allies on the left
• Spread of Jacobin clubs throughout France
– Who were Jacobins?
• Initially a group of legislators who meet to strategize
• Eventually, a nationwide network of clubs in favor of a
constitution, rights and legal equality.
1791
• June: Flight to Varennes
– King tries to flee France
– Intended to return with counterrevolutionary
troops (Marie-Antoinette’s brother, Joseph, was
emperor of the Habsburg Empire)
– Recognized at border by a postman and sent back
to Paris
• July: Radicals present petition for a Republic –
authorities fire on them: Massacre on the
Champs de Mars
1792
• April: War declared against Austria. Soon, revolutionary
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
• September 21: First Republic declared
1793
• January 21: Louis XVI is guillotined
• March:
– Vendée counterrevolutionary revolts
– Terror: ‘the order of the day’
• June: Girondins purged from National Convention
• Summer: Federalist Revolts in provinces against
sans-culotte controlled Paris. The revolts are
brutally crushed by central government and
terror institutions in late summer and fall.
1793 (cont)
• Marat assassinated (July)
• Levée en masse – first universal modern
conscription
• Law of Suspects (September)
• Revolutionary Government (October)
• Dechristianisation (November-December)
• Autumn: Marie-Antoinette and Girondins
guillotined
1794
• Slavery in French colonies abolished (Feb)
• Terror escalates (spring)
– Purge of the Indulgents (who wanted to end the Terror)
– Purge of the ‘enragés’ (sans-culottes who wanted to push
the Terror further)
• High Terror (June/July): thousands executed in Paris
• 27 July (9 Thermidor): Robespierre and Committee of
Public Safety members fall
The Terror in perspective
• Struck at all ‘suspects’ of the new regime.
• Deaths from revolutionary strife
– 17,000 executions by revolutionary tribunals
– 18,000 die in prison
• 400K-500K arrested (3-4% executed)
• Deaths in civil and foreign wars (1792-1815) –
roughly 4 million across Europe
– 400K-450K in armed combat, most in the Vendée
– More deaths occur during Napoleon’s wars
Why the lapse into the Terror?
• Circumstances?
– Marxist historians (but not only)
• Ideology?
– Cold War anti-Marxist, anti-totalitarian historians
– Moral regeneration/collective will leads to terror. Why?
• dissent amounts to treason
• Obsessions with conspiracies/plots
• Counter-revolution?
– Marxists (but not only)
• Crisis of Redistribution?
– Initial inability to redistribute wealth (bankruptcy, low tax revenues)
and unwillingness to do so (commitment to economic liberalism,
which separated ‘the economy’ from ‘politics’) weakened political
allegiances, leading to corruption and radical forms of redistribution.
A new culture
• Time, weights and measure - rationality
– Metric system
– Revolutionary Calendar based on nature
• Revolutionary Festivals
– Festival of the Supreme Being (June 1794)
• Public schools and museums founded
• Cult of the Nation – new focus for collective, religious-like
fervour around the
– Pantheon: where ‘great’ individuals are buried
Thermidorian period
• July 1794 – October 1795
• White Terror - vengeance
– Return of émigrés; jeunesse d’orée
– Release of prisoners from the Terror
• Journées:
– Germinal/Prairial Year III (spring 1795)
• Left – last sans-culotte insurrection
– Vendémiaire Year III (September)
• Popular rightwing insurrection
• Opposed to 2/3rd decree
• Whiff of Grapeshot: crushed by Napoleon
The Directory
1795-1799
• The Directory
– Executive heavy but still a republic
– Difficult middle path between radicalism and
royalism
– Conspiracy of Equals (Babeuf-proto communist)
– 1797 elections are nullified: repression increases
– Revolution exported; the republican generals gain
in reputation and power
Napoleon
• 18 Brumaire Year VIII
• Corsican, pro-Jacobin, imprisoned during
Thermidor
• Whiff of Grapeshot – rise to fame
• Successful campaigns in Italy
• Bad ones in Egypt, but depicted favorably and
sensationally in the (manipulated) press
Napoleonic Period
• Constitution, Consulate
– Dramatically limited political participation
• Concordat (1802)
– Catholicism=official religion
– Nation keeps land, however
• Civil Code (1804)
– Outlaws divorce; equality before the law; patriarchal
family
• Legion of Honor – new meritocracy
• Education greatly expanded
Napoleonic Wars
• 1799-1803
– Largely successful
– Italy, Spain, German States, consolidated in
empire
• Battle of Trafalgar
– English navy defeats France/Spain
• Chronic unrest in Spain
• Russia (1812)
• Defeat at Waterloo (1815)
Key terms and concepts
• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen (1789)
• Jacobin Club
• Sans-culottes (radical phase)
• Vendée (civil war)
• Terror
• Guillotine