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

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)

• 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

Aspects that 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 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 GeneralMay 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