The
French Revolution
Mark Philp
Revolution
Revolution as circular
Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth
Re: the events of the English Civil War were a
revolution in the sense of: ‘a circular motion of the
sovereign power through two usurpers of the late
King to his son.’
Similarly: the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was seen by
many as a restoration of the true constitution (and
religion) of England.
Revolution as progressive

Revolution was descriptive, tended to be ex-post (rather than an
ex ante category of agency), and was dominated by the
combined meanings of political disturbance and the restoration
of an order.

Only some time after the French Revolution, was it (for some)
associated with progressive and irreversible change. In the 19th
C it became a category of agency (esp 1848), and it connoted
fundamental change of more than the strictly political order.
Early to mid
th
19
c thinkers

Marx: progressive change from feudal to capitalist;
fundamental change in class relations

Tocqueville: progressive advance of the equalisation of
constitution and the move from aristocratic to democratic
orders.

J. S. Mill: an age of transition from rule by aristocracy and
property to rule by those with the ability.

Each also saw the Fr. Revn as the inauguration of an era they
identified as ‘modern’ and as distinct from the ‘ancien regime’.
Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette
Basic version
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In the spring of 1789 following the convening of the Estates
General, in May 1789, the representatives of the people
challenged the monarchy and dramatically limited its powers,
forced the unification of the EG in a National Assembly (17-27
June; and brought the king and his family from Versailles to Paris
in October.
Popular forces destroyed the Bastille (14th July 1789) and thereby
the oppressive power of the monarchy.
Privilege and the aristocracy were abolished (Night of 4th August)
The revolution became more extreme in 1792-4 with the
September massacres and the creation of the Committee of
Public Safety.
The King and Queen were executed along with thousands of
others between 1793 and 1794. A republic was declared.
Robespierre, Danton, Marat and others ruled as tyrants, only to
be turned on and killed in turn, eventually re-establishing order
Napoleon rose through the ranks of the army and re-built strong
central control until 1814, when Louis’s brother Louis XVIII was
returned to the throne by Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia.
The Estates General

Those who Pray – the Clergy

Those who Fight – the Nobility (and those who
administer)

And Those who work – the Third Estate – some 85%
of the population
how did we get to the
Estates General ?
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Meets for the first time (since 1641) in May
1789.
Louis agreed to convoke it in November 1787
The rejection of new taxes by the parlement
of Paris (July-Oct 1787)
Follows the failure of Assembly of Notables to
agree new taxes (Feb- Apr 1787)
And that follows impending state bankruptcy
in December 1786 following the expiry of
existing revenue agreements from 1782.
Meeting of the Estates General
May 1789
Tennis Court Oath - 20 June 1789
Storming of the Bastille
July 14, 1789
The Great Fear and Municipal
Revolt

20July to 4 August
Poor wine harvest
Food distribution problems
Raised expectations from
Cahiers des Doleances
Defiance of tax and dues
collectors
Fear of reassertion of control
Panic in the countryside
Wild rumours of aristocratic
rear-guard action
Attack on aristocrat records

July to September
Urban upheavals affected
rural
Urban centres sensing
collapse of Paris’s authority
Bread crises
Following Necker’s dismissal –
fear of reaction.
Self of property owners and
commercial interests
appointed committees
Exclusion of trad. elites from
local power
Night of Aug 4, 1789

Renunciation of Feudal privilege

Seigneurial rights over persons
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Seigneurial rights on property (redeemable)
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Tithes,
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Hunting rights
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Corvées
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Seigneurial justice
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Venality of office
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Special provincial and municipal privileges
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
August 26,1789
The Declaration of Rights, 1789
•
NATURAL, UNALIENABLE AND SACRED
(PREFACE)
•
MEN ARE BORN AND REMAIN FREE AND EQUAL
IN RIGHTS (ART. 1)
•
LIBERTY, PROPERTY, SECURITY AND RESISTANCE
TO OPPRESSION (ART. 2)
more…

No one shall be disquieted on account of his
opinions, including his religious views… (art. 10)

The free communication of ideas and opinions is
one of the most precious the rights of man. Every
citizen may speak, write and print with freedom
(art. 11)

Property is an inviolable and sacred right… (art.
17)

The principle of sovereignty resides essentially in
the nation (art. 3)
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Law is the expression of the general will (art. 6)

The law shall provide such punishments only as
are strictly and obviously necessary… (art. 8)
French Constitution

National Assembly agrees to est. a
constitutional committee 6 July 1789 and
calls itself the ‘Constituent Assembly’

10 Sept Constituent Assembly rejects
bicameralism

11Sept rejects absolute veto, grants a
suspensive one
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1 Oct est. Constitutional Monarchy with
separation of powers
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Journées of 5-6 October
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9 Oct move of Constituent Assembly to Paris
Women’s Bread March, October 5-6, 1789
Brings King and Queen from Versailles to Paris
Flight of the King to Varennes, 1791
Massacre on the Champs de mars, July 1791
Fall of the Monarchy
August 10, 1792
Execution of Louis XVI
January 21, 1793
Maximilien Robespierre, Jacobin and
member of the Committee of Public Safety
If the spring of popular government in time of
peace is virtue, the springs of popular
government in revolution are at once virtue
and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal;
terror, without which virtue is powerless.
Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt,
severe, inflexible; it is therefore an
emanation of virtue; it is not so much a
special principle as it is a consequence of the
general principle of democracy applied to our
country's most urgent needs.
Robespierre, February 1794 (Year II)
Explaining the Revolution
What’s the explanandum?

1789, 1789-1792, 1789-1794, 1789-1797,
1789-1803, 1789-1814/15, 1786-1815, 17861830 etc.

Political revolution: absolute monarchy to
some form of representative government,
to autocracy under Napoleon
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Social revolution: move from feudal order
to modern commercial society
Theda Skocpol: States and
Social Revolutions (1979)
1. Structural conditions
i. Economic conditions: economic instability;
restraint on industrial development; poor
extractive capacity.
ii. Class Action: growing peasant unrest; strains
between peasantry and nobility; worsened by
sense of injustice in tax burdens. Towns less
burdened by still considerable direct crown
control and variable privileges.

iii. Class
structure
(Abbe Expilly, 1780):
clergy
.8%
nobility
.3%
soldiers
1.3%
judicial and financial officials
1.2%
prof. drs, Lawyers
.4%
commerce, financiers, artisans
16.9%
sailors and riverfolk
1.4%
farmers,peasants with livestock
8.8%
winegrowers and workers
18.7%
wage-earners, day labourers
41.4%
servants
8.1%
Regional calculations: artisans, wage earners and servants =
Arles 85%
Caen 75%
Grenoble 60% Pau 82%
Bordeaux 72% Dijon 57% Montauban 73% Rouen 82%
2. Extractive and Repressive
Capacities of the State
Extractive: High financial needs to pay
interest and repay debts, fuelled by wars
in Europe, and America – but no stable
means of enforcing extraction except
against those least able to pay. Dec
1789 assignats and sale of Church lands.
Repressive: weak police system, large
army closely linked to aristocracy,
dependence on elite troops (Swiss
Guard) with little investment in the State.
Paris vs France
3. External Ec, Pol and
Ideological Pressures
1. Economic – main fiscal burdens imposed
by a string of foreign wars – additional
pressure from emigrés
2. Political – Emigrés; Colonial uprisings (St
Domingue); Pillnitz Declaration (Aug
1791);Brunswick Proclamation July 1792
3. Ideological: colonies; crowned heads of
Europe vs people of France
Subjective conditions I:
Positive
Enlightenment ideas
religious scepticism
materialism
confidence in rationality and reason
undercutting of traditional authorities – church, state,
family
republicanism
careers open to talents
attack on nobility
4. Subjective conditions II:
Negative – hostility to prevailing order – scurrility?
Skocpol:

1. the outcomes of revolutions are not those
intended by any agent
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2. the colapse of ancien régimes are not the
product of actions of revolutionaries
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3. Objective revolutionary situations – a necessary
condition for revolutions, are never the causal
product of acts of revolutionaries

John Dunn, ‘Understanding revolutions’ in his
Rethinking Modern Political Theory (CUP, 1985)
Reactions I
‘How much the greatest event that has happened in the history of
the world, and how much the best.’ Charles James Fox, 1789
‘I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general
amendment in the human affairs; the dominion of kings changed
for the dominion of laws, and the dominance of priests giving way
to the dominion of reason and conscience.’ Richard Price, 1789
The catching up thesis!
Reactions II
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Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
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Abbe Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Jacobinisme (1797)
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Revolution as the outcome of a conspiracy of unscrupulousous
intellectuals, ambitous for power, who drove a civilized order into
barbarism and chaos.
Epitomized in :
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The assault on the Roman Catholic Church
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The efficient slaughter by the Parisian mob (September Massacres,1792)
Civil war in various parts of France
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Emigration of the elite
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Pantheon – cult of Enlightenment national heroes Voltaire, Rousseau,
Condorcet, Marat
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Festival of the Supreme Being
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Revolutionary Calendar
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The Great Terror September 1793- August 1794
Pantheon, Paris
Festival of the supreme
being June 1794
REVOLUTIONARY CALENDAR
The Great Terror
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Arrest of Girondins 2 June 1793
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Assassination of Marat 13 July 1793
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4-5 Sept 1793 – Terror is the order of the day
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31 Oct 1793 Girondins executed
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March 1794 Hérbertistes executed
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13-16 April Dantonists executed
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28-30 July 105 Robespierristes
executed
c. 40,000 executed
What went
wrong?
THESIS OF CIRCUMSTANCES
•
Flight of the king (1791)
•
War with Europe (1792-93)
THESIS OF COUNTERREVOLUTION
•
‘THERE CAN BE NO REVOLUTION WITHOUT COUNTERREVOLUTION’ ARNO MAYER, THE FURIES (2000)
THESIS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT?
Ideological ‘cancer-cells’?
Revolution and the 19th
Century
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France did not lapse back into the Old Regime, even though it
came close to doing so in the 1820s (Charles X)
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Rise of ‘altar and throne’ discourses, mixed with nationalism
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Subsequent revolutions of 1830,1848 and Paris Commune of 1871
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Rev’n remained deeply contested – Marseillaise banned into
1880s – and revolutionary issues constantly re-fought.
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Marx – 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
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Lenin’s langauage theorising the possibilities for and the events of
the Russian Revolution – especially Thermidor (overthrow of
Robespierre)
Liberal Cold War Views
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American Revolution – a good revolution
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Negative rights (limited government)
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Unconcerned with general will, collective
sovereignty
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‘Liberal’ political economy
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Popular but elite led
French Revolution – inherently unstable
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Positive rights (pro-active state)
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Popular sovereignty
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Social and economic rights, social equality…
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Popular, but out of control
Explaining the French
Revolution

As a social (bourgeois) revolution
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As a political revolution – failures of Louis and nobility
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As a geopolitical phenomenon – the result of a collapsing and
transforming European order orchestrated around the people
in arms
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As a cultural and intellectual revolution – transformation of
public sphere, enlightenment utopianism/rationalism
The modern significance
of the French Revolution

In France revolutionary terms are still used to describe much
19th 20th and 21st history – political left and right – the Jacobin
state - reaction – thermidor - red and white terrors – Brumaire –
Bonnet Rouge.
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Dawn of the Modern world in which the people are an active
force - for good or ill!
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Remains deeply contested: and what it was and what explains
it are important to understand where we now are.