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): – (proto-) Liberalism– Republicanism– (proto-) Socialism– Conservatism– Free-market capitalism– Feminism– Nationalism– Imperialism– Liberal authoritarianism– Totalitarianism– Secular universalism

Burke vs. 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)

• Origins– Circumstances vs. Enlightenment– Domestic and Global Causes

• Course– Was radicalisation inevitable?– Why the Terror?– Why did republicanism give way to Bonapartism?

• Legacies– Did the French Revolution pave the way to liberalism and

human rights, social democracy or pathological forms of democracy?

Aspects historians study

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 destabilising

Course

• Liberal Phase – 1789-1792• Radical Phase – 1792-1794– Year II, the Terror

• Thermidor – 1794-1795• Directory – 1795-1799• Consulate, Empire

Immediate Causes

• Colossal Debts– 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)

• Impending bankruptcy of the regime– No central bank, regime borrowed at high interest

rates

Meeting of the Estates GeneralMay 1789

• Prior failure to persuade hand-picked assemblies of notables (1787 and 1788) to agree to more taxes

• Parlement refuses to agree to more taxes on privileged

• Only remaining solution: 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.

• Late June – Louis XVI eventually concedes but plots military repression.

1789• July 14 – The Storming of 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

• 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

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 of the King to Varennes– Intended to return with counterrevolutionary troops

to put down the Revolution (Marie-Antoinette’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

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• Summer: Federalist Revolts against Paris and

sans-culottes• 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 sans-culotte leaders (who wanted to push the Terror

further)

• High Terror (June/July): thousands executed in Paris

• 27 July (9 Thermidor): Robespierre falls

1795-1799

• The Directory– Executive heavy Republic– Difficult 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): Napoleon’s coup

1800-1815

• First Empire: Napoleon conquers Europe

– overturns old regimes across Europe

– Fleeces countries but imposes new ideology and administrative structures… creating ‘nation state’ structures

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

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– 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

Impact

• Revolutionary Europe (19th Century)

• Nationalism, nation states (19th/20th centuries)

• Democratic revolutions across the world (20th century)

• Literature and Philosophy– Fires political imaginations for more than two centuries

across the world

Founding Interpretations

• Edmund Burke– Modern conservatism– Need for tradition and reverence

• Alexis de Tocqueville– Abstract literary politics (Enlightenment) combines

with state centralisation to form new, modern forms of political oppression

• Marx/Jaures– Class War

Atlantic Revolutions

• The French Revolution as part of a string of democratic revolutions– Denmark reforms (1770s)– Geneva (1782, 1792-94)– Dutch Revolts and Revolution (1780s, 1789)– American Revolution (1775-1791)– Haitian (Saint Domingue) Revolution (1791-1804)– Spanish American Revolutions (1810s-1820s)

Struensee (Danish reformer, queen’s lover) drawn and quartered in 1772

Meaning of ‘Revolution’ changes• Cyclical, restorative: return to original principles– Glorious Revolution of 1688 -- liberties were restored– 1640s-50s England: ‘protestant revolts’, ‘civil war’

• Radical, abrupt change– Robespierre: ‘neither the books of political writers

who did not foresee this Revolution nor the laws of tyrants’ provided ‘a theory of revolutionary government, which is as new as the Revolution that spawned it.’

• Modernity: man makes his/her own world!

Atlantic RevolutionsThesis I: Ideological Contagion

• Patriot movement– Especially in United States, Holland, France– Attachments to the nation– Free trade, international finance, universalism– Constitutionalism, Rights– Civil equality

• Examples:– Thomas Paine, Jacques Pierre Brissot– Mix of Montesquieu and Rousseau

Atlantic RevolutionsThesis II: Circumstances

• International Politics– Why would an absolutist king (Louis XVI of France)

support a democratic revolt against Britain?– Spanish colonial revolutionaries were initially

supporters of Ferdinand VII (imprisoned by Napoleon). Struggles over representation of colonies soon led to more radical demands for independence

• Historical accidents– Slave abolition in Saint-Domingue in 1793-94 (Haiti)– Fear of slave revolts in United States

Legacies of Revolution

• 19th Century: – Against Old Regimes– Driven by some bourgeois elites, peasants and working

classes

• 20th Century:– Rival forms of democracy

• Liberal vs. social– Cold War

• Disillusionment of communism on the Left sets in• Victory of liberal democracy in 1989

– Elections, Civil Rights and Liberties, Free Markets

The End of History?

• Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1989)– ‘The endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution [is] the

universalization of Western liberal democracy -- the final form of human government’

• Why, then, the reemergence of revolution in 2011 (Arab world)?– Does it represent the continual march of liberalism?– Or is ‘the social’ exploding under the stresses and internal

contradictions of a liberal world order: in which case, history is NOT over, nor are revolutions…