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 19th 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 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 ?

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 GeneralMay 1789

Tennis Court Oath - 20 June 1789

Storming of the BastilleJuly 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

Seigneurial rights on property (redeemable)

Tithes,

Hunting rights

Corvées

Seigneurial justice

Venality of office

Special provincial and municipal privileges

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the CitizenAugust 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)

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

1 Oct est. Constitutional Monarchy with separation of powers

Journées of 5-6 October 9 Oct move of Constituent Assembly to Paris

Women’s Bread March, October 5-6, 1789Brings 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 MonarchyAugust 10, 1792

Execution of Louis XVIJanuary 21, 1793

Maximilien Robespierre, Jacobin andmember 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, 1786-1830 etc.Political revolution: absolute monarchy to some form of representative government, to autocracy under NapoleonSocial revolution: move from feudal order to modern commercial society

Theda Skocpol: States and Social Revolutions (1979)1. Structural conditionsi. 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

2. the colapse of ancien régimes are not the product of actions of revolutionaries

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 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Abbe Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Jacobinisme (1797) Revolution as the outcome of a conspiracy of unscrupulousous

intellectuals, ambitous for power, who drove a civilized order into barbarism and chaos.

Epitomized in : The assault on the Roman Catholic Church The efficient slaughter by the Parisian mob (September

Massacres,1792) Civil war in various parts of France Emigration of the elite Pantheon – cult of Enlightenment national heroes Voltaire, Rousseau,

Condorcet, Marat Festival of the Supreme Being Revolutionary Calendar The Great Terror September 1793- August 1794

Pantheon, Paris

Festival of the supreme being June 1794

REVOLUTIONARY CALENDAR

The Great Terror

Arrest of Girondins 2 June 1793

Assassination of Marat 13 July 1793

4-5 Sept 1793 – Terror is the order of the day

31 Oct 1793 Girondins executed

March 1794 Hérbertistes executed

13-16 April Dantonists executed

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 COUNTER-REVOLUTION’ ARNO MAYER, THE FURIES (2000)THESIS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT?

Ideological ‘cancer-cells’?

Revolution and the 19th Century

France did not lapse back into the Old Regime, even though it came close to doing so in the 1820s (Charles X)

Rise of ‘altar and throne’ discourses, mixed with nationalism

Subsequent revolutions of 1830,1848 and Paris Commune of 1871

Rev’n remained deeply contested – Marseillaise banned into 1880s – and revolutionary issues constantly re-fought.

Marx – 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Lenin’s langauage theorising the possibilities for and the events of the Russian Revolution – especially Thermidor (overthrow of Robespierre)

Liberal Cold War Views

American Revolution – a good revolution Negative rights (limited government)

Unconcerned with general will, collective sovereignty

‘Liberal’ political economy

Popular but elite led

French Revolution – inherently unstable Positive rights (pro-active state)

Popular sovereignty

Social and economic rights, social equality…

Popular, but out of control

Explaining the French Revolution

As a social (bourgeois) revolution

As a political revolution – failures of Louis and nobility

As a geopolitical phenomenon – the result of a collapsing and transforming European order orchestrated around the people in arms

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.

Dawn of the Modern world in which the people are an active force - for good or ill!

Remains deeply contested: and what it was and what explains it are important to understand where we now are.