The French Revolution.docx

IN THE SPRING of 1789 political turmoil erupted in France. By the summer it had led to a revolution that marked the beginning of a new political order in France and eventually throughout the West. The French Revolution brought to the foreground the principles of civic equality and popular sovereignt...

IN THE SPRING of 1789 political turmoil erupted in France. By the summer it had led to a revolution that marked the beginning of a new political order in France and eventually throughout the West. The French Revolution brought to the foreground the principles of civic equality and popular sovereignty that challenged the major political and social institutions of Europe and that in evolving forms have continued to shape and reshape Western political and social life to the present day. During the 1790s the forces the revolution unleashed would cause small-town provincial lawyers and Parisian street orators to exercise more influence over the fate of the Continent than aristocrats, royal ministers, or monarchs. Citizen armies commanded by people of modest origin and filled by conscripted village youths would defeat armies com-posed of professional soldiers led by officers from the nobility. The king and queen of France, as well as thousands of French peasants and shopkeepers, would be executed. The existence of the Roman Catholic faith in France and indeed of Christianity itself would be challenged. Finally, Europe would embark on almost a quarter century of war that would eventually extend across the continent and result in millions of casualties. The Crisis of the French Monarchy Although the French Revolution would shatter many of the political, social, and ecclesiastical structures of Europe, its origins lay in a much more mundane problem. By the late 1780s, thanks in large part to the expenditures associated with supporting the American revolution, the French royal government could not command sufficient taxes to finance itself. The monarchy’s unsuccessful search for adequate revenues led it into ongoing conflicts with aristocratic and ecclesiastical institutions. Eventu-ally, the resulting deadlock was so complete that Louis XVI and his ministers were required to summon the French Estates General, which had not met since 1614. Once the deputies to that body gathered, a new set of issues and problems quickly emerged that led to the revolution itself. Yet, none of this would have occurred if the monar-chy had not reached a state of financial crisis that meant it could no longer function within the limits and practices of existing political institutions. The Monarchy Seeks New Taxes The French monarchy emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) defeated, deeply in debt, and unable thereafter to put its finances on a sound basis. French sup-port of the American revolt against Great Britain further deep-ened the financial difficulties of the government. On the eve of the revolution, the interest and payments on the royal debt amounted to just over one-half of the entire budget. Given the economic vitality of France, the debt was neither overly large nor disproportionate to the debts of other European powers. The problem lay with the inability of the royal government to tap the nation’s wealth through taxes to service and repay the debt. Paradoxically, France was a rich nation in which the inability to collect sufficient taxes led to an impoverished government. Peas-ants, who had the least to spare, bore the heaviest tax burden. They paid taxes not only to the king, but also to the church and their local lords. A bad harvest in 1788 meant that peasants were not only impoverished, but also in danger of starvation as bread prices soared. Without increased taxation on the aristocracy and the church, there was no way that taxation of peasants alone could resolve France’s financial crisis. The debt was symptomatic of the failure of the late-eighteenth-century French monarchy to come to terms with the political power of aristocratic institutions and, in particular, the parlements. As explained in Chapter 5, French absolutism had always involved a process of ongoing negotiation between the monarchy and local aristocratic interests. This process had become more difficult after the death of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) when the aristocracy had sought to reclaim parts of the influence it had lost. Nonetheless, for the first half of the century, the monarchy had retained most of its authority. For twenty-five years after the Seven Years’ War, however, a standoff occurred between the monarchy and the aristocracy, as one royal minister after another attempted to devise new tax schemes that would tap the wealth of the nobility, only to be confronted by opposition from both the Parlement of Paris and provincial parlements. Both Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) and Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) lacked the character, resolution, and political skills to resolve the dispute. In place of a consis-tent policy for dealing with the growing debt and aristocratic resistance to change, the monarchy hesitated, retreated, and even lied. In 1770, Louis XV appointed René Maupeou (1714–1792) as chancellor. The new minister was determined to increase taxes on the nobility. He abolished the parle-ments and exiled their members to different parts of the country. He then began an ambitious program to make the administration more efficient. However, when Louis XV died of smallpox in 1774, his successor, Louis XVI, attempted to regain popular support by dismissing Maupeou, restoring all the parlements, and confirming their old powers. Although the parlements spoke for aristocratic interests, they appear to have enjoyed public support. By the second half of the eighteenth century, many French nobles shared with the wealthy professional and commercial classes similar goals for administrative reforms that would support economic growth. Both groups regarded the lumbering institutions of monarchical absolutism as a burden. More-over, throughout these initial and later disputes with the monarchy, the parlements, though completely dominated by the aristocracy, used the language of liberty and reform to defend their cause. They portrayed the monarchy as despotic—that is, as acting arbitrarily in defiance of the law. Here they drew on the ideas and arguments of many Enlightenment writers, such as Montesquieu and the physiocrats, discussed in Chapter 9. The monarchy was unable to rally public opinion to its side because it had lost much of its moral authority. Louis XVI was considered detached and ineffective. His wife, Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), was always suspect because of her Austrian back-ground. She was viciously accused of sexual misconduct and personal extravagance in an underground pamphlet campaign that became increasingly prurient, misogynist, and xenophobic. Furthermore, Louis XVI and his family continued to live at Ver-sailles, rarely leaving its grounds to mix with his subjects and with the aristocracy, who now, unlike in the days of Louis XIV, often dwelled in Paris or on their estates. Hence, the French monarch stood at a distinct popular disadvantage in his clashes first with the parlements and later with other groupings of the aristocracy. In all these respects, the public image and daily reality of the French monarchy were much more problematical than those of other contemporary monarchs. Freder-ick II of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria genuinely saw themselves, and were seen by their subjects, as patriotic servants of the state. In central Europe, rulers were often themselves the generators of reform, which meant even criticism of current policy was generally combined with confidence in the monarchy’s ability to correct any errors. George III of Great Britain, despite all his political difficulties, was regarded by most Britons as having a model character and as seeking the economic improvement of his nation. Frederick II, Joseph II, and George III all had reputations for personal frugality, and they moved frequently among the people they governed. ==== Necker’s Report France’s successful intervention on behalf of the American colonists against the Brit-ish only worsened the financial problems of Louis XVI’s government. By 1781, as a result of the aid to America, its debt was larger, and its sources of revenues were unchanged. The new royal director-general of finances, Jacques Necker (1732–1804), did not want to admit that the situation was as bad as was feared. Necker, a Swis banker, produced a public report in 1781 that used a financial sleight of hand to downplay France’s financial difficulties. He argued that if the expenditures for the American war were removed, the budget was in surplus. Necker’s report also revealed that a large portion of royal expenditures went to pensions for aristocrats and other royal court favorites. Necker was pressured to leave office not because of his dubious accounting, but because court aristocratic circles were embarrassed by his revela-tions. The damage had already been done: Necker’s misleading assessment of French finances made it more difficult for government officials to claim a real need to raise new taxes. Calonne’s Reform Plan and the Assembly of Notables The monarchy hobbled along without a plan for financial improvement until 1786. By this time, Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734–1802) was the minister of finance. Calonne proposed to encourage internal trade, to lower some taxes, such as the gabelle on salt, and to transform the corvée, peasants’ labor services on public works, into money payments. He also sought to remove internal barriers to trade and reduce government regulation of the grain trade. More importantly, Calonne wanted to intro-duce a new land tax that all landowners would have to pay regardless of their social status. If this tax had been imposed, the monarchy could have abandoned other indi-rect taxes. The government would also have had less need to seek additional taxes that required approval from the aristocratically dominated parlements. Calonne also intended to establish new local assemblies made up of landowners to approve land taxes; in these assemblies the voting power would have depended on the amount of land a person owned rather than on his social status. All these proposals would have undermined both the political and the social power of the French aristocracy. Other of his proposals touched the economic privileges of the French Church. These policies reflected much advanced economic and administrative thinking of the day. The monarchy, however, had little room to maneuver. The creditors were at the door, and the treasury was nearly empty. Calonne needed public support for such bold new undertakings. In February 1787, he met with an Assembly of Notables, nominated by the royal ministry from the upper ranks of the aristocracy and the church, to seek support for his plan. The Assembly adamantly refused to give it. There was some agreement that reform and greater fairness in taxation were neces-sary, but the Assembly did not trust the information they had received from Calonne. In his place they called for the reappointment of Necker, who they believed had left the country in sound fiscal condition. Finally, they claimed that only the Estates General of France, a medieval institution that had not met since 1614, could con-sent to new taxes. The notables believed that calling the Estates General, which had been traditionally organized to allow aristocratic and church dominance, would actually allow the nobility to have a direct role in governing the country alongside the monarchy. The issue was less the nobility not wishing to reform tax structure than its determination to acquire power at the expense of the monarchy and to direct reforms itself. Deadlock and the Calling of the Estates General Again, Louis XVI backed off. He replaced Calonne with Étienne Charles Loménie de Brienne (1727–1794), archbishop of Toulouse and the chief opponent of Calonne at the Assembly of Notables. Once in office, Brienne found, to his astonishment, that the financial situation was as bad as his predecessor had asserted. Brienne himself now sought to reform the land tax. The Parlement of Paris, however, in its self-appointed role as the embodiment of public opinion, took the new position that it lacked author-ity to authorize the tax and that only the Estates General could do so. Shortly there-after, Brienne appealed to the Assembly of the Clergy to approve a large subsidy to fund that part of the debt then coming due for payment. The clergy, like the Parlement dominated by aristocrats, not only refused the subsidy, but also reduced the voluntary contribution, or don gratuit, that it paid to the government in lieu of taxes. As these unfruitful negotiations were taking place at the center of political life, local aristocratic parlements and estates in the provinces were making their own demands. They wanted to restore the privileges they had enjoyed during the early seventeenth century, before Richelieu and Louis XIV had crushed their independence. Furthermore, bringing the financial crisis to a new point of urgency, in the summer of 1788 bankers refused to extend necessary short-term credit to the government. Consequently, in July 1788, the king, through Brienne, agreed to convoke the Estates General the next year. Brienne resigned, and Necker replaced him. Some kind of political reform was coming, but what form it would take and how it would happen would be largely determined by the conflicts that emerged from summoning the Estates General. === The Revolution of 1789 The Estates General Becomes the National Assembly The Estates General had been called because of the political deadlock between the French monarchy and the vested interests of aristocratic institutions and the church. Almost immediately after it was summoned, however, the three groups, or estates, represented within it clashed with each other. The First Estate was the clergy, the Second Estate the nobility, and the Third Estate was, theoretically, all other adult men in the kingdom, although its representatives were drawn primarily from wealthy members of the commercial and professional middle classes. All the representatives in the Estates General were men. During the widespread public discussions preced-ing the meeting of the Estates General, representatives of the Third Estate made it clear they would not permit the monarchy and the aristocracy to decide the future of the nation. A comment by a priest, the Abbé Siéyès (1748–1836), in a pamphlet published in 1789, captures the spirit of the Third Estate’s representatives: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been in the political order up to the present? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.” The spokesmen for the Third Estate became more determined to assert their role less from any preexisting conflicts with the nobility than from the conflicts that emerged during the debates and electioneer-ing for the Estates General in late 1788 and early 1789. Debate Over Organization and Voting Before the Estates General gathered, a public debate over its proper organization drew the lines of basic disagreement. The aristocracy made two important attempts to limit the influence of the Third Estate. First, a reconvened Assembly of Notables demanded that each estate have an equal number of representatives. Second, in September 1788, the Parlement of Paris ruled that voting in the Estates General should be conducted by order, or estate, rather than by head—that is, each estate in the Estates General, rather than each individual member, should have one vote. This procedure would in all likelihood have ensured the aristocratically dominated First and Second Estates could always outvote the Third by a vote of two estates to one estate. Both moves raised doubt about the aris-tocracy’s previously declared concern for French liberty. Spokesmen for the Third Estate immediately denounced the arrogant claims of the aristocracy, which seemed only concerned to protect its own privilege. In many respects the interests of the aristocracy and the most prosperous and well-educated members of the Third Estate had converged during the eighteenth century, and many nobles had spouses from wealthy families of the Third Estate. Yet a fundamental social distance separated the members of the two orders. Many aristocrats were much richer than members of the Third Estate, and noblemen had all but monopolized the high command in the army and navy. The Third Estate had also experienced various forms of political and social discrimination from the nobil-ity. The resistance of the nobility to voting by head confirmed the suspicions and resentments of the members of the Third Estate, who tended to be well-off, but not enormously rich, lawyers. The stance of both the reconvened Assembly of Notables and the Parlement of Paris regarding the composition and functioning of the forth-coming Estates General meant that the elected members of the Third Estate would approach the gathering with a newly awakened profound distrust of the nobility and of the aristocratically dominated church. Doubling the Third In the face of widespread public uproar over the aristocratic effort to dominate composition and procedures of the Estates General, the royal coun-cil eventually decided that strengthening the Third Estate would best serve the inter-ests of the monarchy and the cause of fiscal reform. In December 1788, the council announced the Third Estate would elect twice as many representatives as either the nobles or the clergy. This so-called doubling of the Third Estate meant it could easily dominate the Estates General if voting proceeded by head rather than by order. The council correctly assumed that liberal nobles and clergy would support the Third Estate, confirming that, despite social differences, these groups shared important interests and reform goals. The method of voting had not yet been decided when the Estates General gathered at Versailles in May 1789. The Cahiers de Doléances When the representatives came to the royal palace, they brought with them cahiers de doléances, or lists of grievances, registered by the local electors, to be presented to the king. Many of these lists have survived and provide considerable information about the state of France on the eve of the revolution. The documents criticized government waste, indirect taxes, church taxes and corruption, and the hunting rights of the aristocracy. They included calls for periodic meetings of the Estates General, more equitable taxes, more local control of administration, unified weights and measures to facilitate trade and commerce, and a free press. The overwhelming demand of the cahiers was for equality of rights among the king’s subjects. Yet it is also clear that the cahiers that originated among the nobility were not radically different from those of the Third Estate. There was broad agreement that the French government needed major reform, that greater equality in taxation and other matters was desirable, and that many aristocratic privileges must be aban-doned. (See the Document “The Third Estate of a French City Petitions the King,”page 359.) The cahiers drawn up before May 1789 indicate that the three estates could have cooperated to reach these goals. But it became clear almost from the moment the Estates General opened that conflict among the estates, rather than cooperation, was to be the rule. ====== The Third Estate Creates the National Assembly The complaints, demands, and hopes for reform expressed in the cahiers could not, however, be discussed until the questions of the organization and voting in the Estates General had been decided. From the beginning, the Third Estate, whose members consisted largely of local offi-cials, professionals, and other persons of property, refused to sit as a separate order as the king desired. For several weeks there was a standoff. Then, on June 1, the Third Estate invited the clergy and the nobles to join them in organizing a new legislative body. A few priests did so. On June 17, that body declared itself the National Assem-bly, and on June 19 by a narrow margin, the Second Estate voted to join the Assembly. The Tennis Court Oath At this point, Louis XVI hoped to reassert a role in the proceedings. He intended to call a “Royal Session” of the Estates General for June 23 and closed the room where the National Assembly had been gathering. On June 20, finding themselves thus unexpectedly locked out of their usual meeting place, the National Assembly moved to a nearby indoor tennis court. There, its members took an oath to continue to sit until they had given France a constitution. This was the famous Tennis Court Oath. Louis XVI ordered the National Assembly to desist, but many clergy and nobles joined the Assembly in defiance of the royal command. On June 27, the king, now having completely lost control of the events around him, capitulated and formally requested the First and Second Estates to meet with the National Assembly, where voting would occur by head rather than by order. Because of the doubling of its membership, the Third Estate had twice as many members as either of the other estates that joined them. Had nothing further occurred, the government of France would already have been transformed. Henceforth, the monar-chy could govern only in cooperation with the National Assembly, and the National Assembly would not be a legislative body organized according to privileged orders. The National Assembly, which renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly because of its intention to write a new constitution, was composed of a majority of members drawn from all three orders, who shared liberal goals for the administrative, constitutional, and economic reform of the country. The revolution in France against government by privileged hereditary orders, however, rapidly extended beyond events occurring at Versailles. Fall of the Bastille Two new forces soon intruded on the scene. First, Louis XVI again attempted to regain the political initiative by mustering royal troops near Versailles and Paris. On the advice of Queen Marie Antoinette, his brothers, and the most conservative aristocrats at court, he seemed to be contemplating the use of force against the National Con-stituent Assembly. On July 11, without consulting Assembly leaders, Louis abruptly dismissed Necker, his minister of finance. Louis’s gathering troops and dismissal of Necker marked the beginning of a steady, but consistently poorly executed, royal attempt to undermine the Assembly and halt the revolution. Most of the National Constituent Assembly wished to establish some form of constitutional monarchy, but from the start, Louis’s refusal to cooperate thwarted that effort. The king fatally decided to throw in his lot with the conservative aristocracy against the emerging forces of reform drawn from across the social and political spectrum. The second new factor to impose itself on the events at Versailles was the popu-lace of Paris, which numbered more than 600,000 people. The mustering of royal troops created anxiety in the city, where throughout the winter and spring of 1789 high prices for bread, which was the staple food of the poor, had produced riots. Those Parisians who had elected representatives to the Third Estate had continued to meet after the elections. By June they were organizing a citizen militia and collecting arms. They regarded the dismissal of Necker as the opening of a royal offensive against the National Constituent Assembly and the city. They intended to protect the Assembly and the revolution had begun. On July 14, large crowds of Parisians, most of them small shopkeepers, trades-people, artisans, and wage earners, marched to the Bastille to get weapons for the militia. This great fortress, with ten-foot-thick walls, had once held political prison-ers. Through miscalculations and ineptitude by the governor of the fortress, the troops in the Bastille fired into the crowd, killing ninety-eight people and wounding many others. Thereafter, the crowd stormed the fortress. They released the seven prison-ers inside, none of whom was a political prisoner, and killed several troops and the governor. On July 15, the militia of Paris, by then called the National Guard, offered its command to a young liberal aristocrat, the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834). This hero of the American Revolution gave the guard a new insignia: the red and blue stripes from the colors of the coat of arms of Paris, separated by the white stripe of the royal flag. The emblem became the revolutionary cockade (badge) and eventually the tricolor flag of revolutionary France. The attack on the Bastille marked the first of many crucial journées, days on which the populace of Paris redirected the course of the revolution. The fall of the fortress signaled that the National Constituent Assembly alone would not decide the political future of the nation. As the news of the taking of the Bastille spread, similar disturbances took place in provincial cities. A few days later, Louis XVI again bowed to the force of events and personally visited Paris, where he wore the revolutionary cockade and recognized the organized electors as the legitimate government of the city. The king also recognized the National Guard and thus implicitly admitted that he lacked the military support to turn back the revolution. The citizens of Paris were, for the time being, satisfied. They also had established themselves as an independent political force with which other political groups might ally for their own purposes. ===== The “Great Fear” and the Night of August 4 Simultaneous with the popular urban disturbances, a movement known as the “Great Fear” swept across much of the French countryside. Rumors that royal troops would be sent into the rural districts intensified the peasant disturbances that had begun during the spring. The Great Fear saw the burning of châteaux, the destruction of legal records and documents, and the refusal to pay feudal dues. The peasants were determined to take possession of food supplies and land that they considered right-fully theirs. They vented their anger against the injustices of rural life and reclaimed rights and property they had lost through administrative tightening of the collection of feudal dues during the past century. Their targets were both aristocratic and eccle-siastical landlords. On the night of August 4, 1789, aristocrats in the National Constituent Assem-bly attempted to halt the spreading disorder in the countryside. By prearrangement, several liberal nobles and clerics rose in the Assembly and renounced their feudal rights, dues, and tithes. In a scene of great emotion, they surrendered hunting and fishing rights, judicial authority, and legal exemptions. These nobles and clerics gave up what they had already lost and what they could not have regained without civil war in the rural areas. Many of them later received financial compensation for their losses. Nonetheless, after the night of August 4, all French citizens were subject to the same and equal laws. Furthermore, since the sale of government offices was also abolished, the events of that night opened political and military positions, careers, and advancement to talent rather than basing them exclusively on birth or wealth. This dramatic session of the Assembly effectively abolished the major social institu-tions of the Old Regime and created an unforeseen situation that required a vast legal and social reconstruction of the nation. Without those renunciations, the construc-tive work of the National Constituent Assembly would have been much more dif-ficult and certainly much more limited. (See the Document “The National Assembly Decrees Civic Equality in France,” page 365.) Both the attack on the Bastille and the Great Fear displayed characteristics of the urban and rural riots that had occurred often in eighteenth-century France. Louis XVI first thought the turmoil over the Bastille was simply another bread riot. Indeed, the popular disturbances were only partly related to the events at Versailles. A deep economic downturn had struck France in 1787 and continued into 1788. The harvests for both years had been poor, and the food prices in 1789 were higher than at any time since 1703. Wages had not kept up with the rise in prices. Throughout the winter of 1788–1789, an unusually cold one, many people suffered from hunger. Wage and food riots had erupted in several cities. These economic problems fanned the fires of revolution. The political, social, and economic grievances of many sections of the country became combined. The National Constituent Assembly could look to the popular forces as a source of strength against the king and the conservative aristocrats. When the various elements of the Assembly later quarreled among themselves, however, the resulting factions would appeal for support to the politically sophisticated and well-organized shopkeeping and artisan classes. They, in turn, would demand a price or their cooperation. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen In late August 1789, the National Constituent Assembly decided that before writing a new constitution, it should publish a statement of broad political principles. On August 27, the Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. This declaration drew on the political language of the Enlightenment and the Decla-ration of Rights that the state of Virginia had adopted in June 1776. The French declaration proclaimed that all men were “born and remain free and equal in rights.” The natural rights so proclaimed were “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” Governments existed to protect those rights. All politi-cal sovereignty resided in the nation and its representatives. All citizens were to be equal before the law and were to be “equally admissible to all public dignities, offices, and employments, according to their capacity, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.” There were to be due process of law and presump-tion of innocence until proof of guilt. Freedom of religion was affirmed. Taxation was to be apportioned equally according to the capacity to pay. Property constituted “an inviolable and sacred right.” The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was directed in large measure against specific abuses of the old French monarchical and aristocratic regime, but it was framed in abstract universalistic language applicable to other European nations. In this respect, the ideas set forth in the declaration like those of the Protestant reformers three centuries earlier could jump across national borders and find adher-ents outside France. The two most powerful, universal political ideas of the declara-tion were civic equality and popular sovereignty. The first would challenge the legal and social inequities of European life, and the second would assert that governments must be responsible to the governed. These two principles, in turn, could find them-selves in tension with the declaration’s principle of the protection of property. It was not accidental that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen spe-cifically applied to men and not to women. As discussed in Chapter 9, much of the political language of the Enlightenment, and especially that associated with Rous-seau, separated men and women into distinct gender spheres. According to this view, which influenced legislation during the revolution, men were suited for citizenship, women for motherhood and the domestic life. Nonetheless, in the charged atmo-sphere of the summer of 1789, many politically active and informed Frenchwomen hoped the guarantees of the declaration would be extended to them. They were par-ticularly concerned with property, inheritance, family, and divorce. Some people saw in the declaration a framework within which women might eventually enjoy the rights and protection of citizenship. Those hopes would be disappointed during the years of the revolution and for many decades thereafter. Nonetheless, over the succeeding two centuries the universalist language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen would provide an intellectual frame-work for bringing into the realm of active civic life many groups who were excluded in the late eighteenth century. ===== The Parisian Women’s March on Versailles Louis XVI stalled before ratifying both the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the aristocratic renunciation of feudalism. His hesitations fueled sus-picions that he might again try to resort to force. Moreover, bread remained scarce and expensive. On October 5, some 7,000 Parisian women armed with pikes, guns, swords, and knives marched to Versailles demanding more bread. They milled about the palace, and many stayed the night. Intimidated, the king agreed to sanction the decrees of the Assembly. The next day he and his family appeared on a balcony before the crowd. Deeply suspicious of the monarch and believing that he must be kept under the watchful eye of the people, the Parisians demanded that Louis and his fam-ily return to Paris with them. The monarch had no real choice. On October 6, 1789, his carriage followed the crowd into the city, where he and his family settled in the old palace of the Tuileries in the heart of Paris. The National Constituent Assembly also soon moved to Paris. Thereafter, both Paris and France remained relatively stable and peaceful until the summer of 1792. A decline in the price of bread in late 1789 helped to calm the atmosphere. The Reconstruction of France In Paris, the National Constituent Assembly set about reorganizing France. In govern-ment, it pursued a policy of constitutional monarchy; in administration, rationalism; in economics, unregulated freedom; and in religion, anticlericalism. Throughout its proceedings and following the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the Assembly was determined to protect property in all its forms. The Assem-bly sought to limit the impact on the national life of those French people who had no property or only small amounts of it. Although championing civic equality before the law, the Assembly, with the aristocrats and middle-class elite united, spurned social equality and extensive democracy. It thus charted a general course that, to a greater or lesser degree, nineteenth-century liberals across Europe would follow. Political Reorganization In the Constitution of 1791, the National Constituent Assembly established a consti-tutional monarchy. The major political authority of the nation would be a unicameral Legislative Assembly, in which all laws would originate. The monarch was allowed a suspensive veto that could delay, but not halt, legislation. The Assembly also had the power to make war and peace. Active and Passive Citizens The constitution provided for an elaborate system of indirect elections to thwart direct popular pressure on the government. The citizens of France were divided into active and passive categories. Only active citizens—that is, men paying annual taxes equal to three days of local labor wages—could vote. They chose electors, who then, in turn, voted for the members of the legislature. Further property qualifications were required to serve as an elector or member of the legislature. Only about 50,000 citizens of a population of about 25 million could qualify as electors or members of the Legislative Assembly. Women could neither vote nor hold office. These constitutional arrangements effectively transferred political power from aristocratic wealth to all forms of propertied wealth in the nation. The accumula-tion of wealth from land and commercial property, not hereditary privilege or the purchase of titles or offices, would open the path to political authority. These new political arrangements based on property rather than birth reflected the changes in French society over the past century and allowed more social and economic interests to have a voice in governing the nation ===== Olympe de gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman The laws that excluded women from voting and holding office did not pass unnoticed. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges (d. 1793), a butcher’s daughter from Montauban in northwest France who became a major revolutionary radical in Paris, composed a Declaration of the Rights of Woman, which she ironically addressed to Queen Marie Antoinette. Much of the document reprinted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, adding the word woman to the various original clauses. That strategy demanded that women be regarded as citizens and not merely as daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers of citizens. Olympe de Gouges further outlined rights that would permit women to own property and require men to recognize the paternity of their children. She called for equality of the sexes in marriage and improved education for women. She declared, “Women, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights.”3 Her declaration illustrated how the simple listing of rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen created a struc-ture of universal civic expectations even for those it did not cover. The National Assembly had established a set of values against which it could itself be measured. It provided criteria for liberty, and those to whom it had not extended full liberties could demand to know why and could claim the revolution was incomplete until they too enjoyed the freedoms. Departments Replace Provinces In reconstructing the local and judicial adminis-tration, the National Constituent Assembly applied the rational spirit of the Enlight-enment. It abolished the ancient French provinces, such as Burgundy and Brittany, and established in their place eighty-three administrative units called départementsof generally equal size named after rivers, mountains, and other geographical features. The departments in turn were subdivided into districts, cantons, and communes. Elections for departmental and local assemblies were also indirect. This administra-tive reconstruction proved to be permanent. The departments still exist in twenty-first-century France. (See Map 10–1.) All the ancient judicial courts, including the seigneurial courts and the parle-ments, were also abolished and replaced by uniform courts with elected judges and prosecutors. Procedures were simplified, and the most degrading punishments, such as branding, torture, and public flogging, were outlawed. ==== Economic Policy In economic matters, the National Constituent Assembly continued the policies Louis XVI’s reformist ministers had formerly advocated. It suppressed the guilds and liberated the grain trade. The Assembly established the metric system to provide the nation with uniform weights and measures. (See “Encountering the Past: The Metric System,” page 371.) Workers’ Organizations Forbidden The new policies of economic freedom and uniformity disappointed both peasants and urban workers. In 1789, the Assembly placed the burden of proof on the peasants to rid themselves of the residual feudal dues for which compensation was to be paid. On June 14, 1791, the Assembly crushed the attempts of urban workers to protect their wages by enacting the Chapelier Law, which forbade workers’ associations. The Assembly inter-preted the efforts of workers to organize as a re-creation of the abolished guilds of the Old Regime and thus to oppose the new values of political and social individualism that the revolution championed. Peasants and workers were henceforth to be left to the freedom and mercy of the marketplace, without the protec-tion of assocation. Confiscation of Church lands While these various reforms were being put into effect, the financial crisis that had occasioned the calling of the Estates General persisted. The Assem-bly did not repudiate the royal debt because it was owed to the bankers, the merchants, and the commercial traders of the Third Estate. The National Constituent Assembly had suppressed many of the old, hated indirect taxes (such as taxes on staples like salt, bread, and wine) and had substituted new land taxes, but these proved insufficient. Moreover, there were not enough officials to collect the new taxes, and many people simply evaded them in the general confu-sion of the day. The continuing financial problem led the Assembly to take what may well have been, for the future of French life and society, its most decisive action. The Assembly decided to finance the debt by confiscating and then selling the land and property of the Roman Catholic Church in France. The results were further inflation, religious schism, and civil war. In effect, the National Constituent Assembly had opened a new chapter in the relations of church and state in Europe. The Assignats Having chosen to plunder the church, the Assembly authorized the issuance of assignats, or government bonds, in December 1789. Their value was guaranteed by the revenue to be generated from the sale of church property. Initially, a limit was set on the quantity of assignats to be issued. The bonds, how-ever, proved so acceptable to the public that they began to circulate as currency. The Assembly decided to issue an ever-larger number of them to liquidate the national debt and to create a large body of new property owners with a direct stake in the revolution. Within a few months, however, the value of the assignats began to fall and inflation increased, putting new stress on the urban poor. Fluctuation in the worth of this currency would plague the revolutionary government throughout the 1790s. ==== The Civil Constitution of the Clergy The confiscation of church lands required an ecclesiastical reconstruction. In July 1790, the National Constituent Assembly issued the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which transformed the Roman Catholic Church in France into a branch of the secular state. This legislation reduced the number of bishoprics from 135 to 83, making one diocese for each of the new departments. It also provided for the election of pastors and bishops, who henceforth became salaried employees of the state. The Assembly, which also dissolved all religious orders in France except those that cared for the sick or ran schools, consulted neither Pope Pius VI (r. 1775–1799) nor the French clergy about these sweeping changes. The king approved the measure only with the great-est reluctance. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was the major blunder of the National Constituent Assembly. It embittered relations between the French church and the state, a problem that has persisted to the present day. The measure immediately cre-ated immense opposition within the French church, even from bishops who had long championed Gallican liberties over papal domination. In the face of this resistance, the Assembly unwisely ruled that all clergy must take an oath to support the Civil Constitution. Only seven bishops and a little less than half the lower clergy did so. In reprisal, the Assembly designated those clergy who had not taken the oath as “refrac-tory” and removed them from their clerical functions. Angry reactions were swift. Refractory priests celebrated Mass in defiance of the Assembly. In February 1791, Pope Pius VI condemned not only the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but also the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. That condemnation marked the open-ing of a Roman Catholic offensive against the revolution and liberalism more broadly that continued throughout the nineteenth century. Within France itself, the pope’s action created a crisis of conscience and political loyalty for all sincere Catholics. Religious devotion and revolutionary loyalty became incompatible for many people. French citizens were divided between those who who supported the constitutional priests and those who, like the royal family, followed the refractory clergy. Counterrevolutionary Activity The revolution had other enemies besides the pope and devout Catholics. As it became clear that the old political and social order was undergoing fundamental and probably permanent change, many aristocrats, eventually over 16,000, left France. Known as the émigrés, they settled in countries near the French border, where they sought to foment counterrevolution. Among the most important of their number was the king’s younger brother, the count of Artois (1757–1836). In the summer of 1791, his agents and the queen persuaded Louis XVI to attempt to flee the country. ===== Flight to Varennes On the night of June 20, 1791, Louis and his immediate fam-ily, disguised as servants, left Paris. They traveled as far as Varennes on their way to Metz in eastern France where a royalist military force was waiting for them. At Varennes the king was recognized, and his flight was halted. On June 24, a company of soldiers escorted the royal family back to Paris. Eventually the leaders of the National Constituent Assembly, determined to save the constitutional monar-chy, announced the king had been abducted from the capital. This convenient public fiction could not cloak the reality that the king was now the chief counterrevolutionary in France and that the constitutional monarchy might not last long. Profound distrust now dominated the political scene. Declaration of Pillnitz Two months later, on August 27, 1791, under pressure from the émi-grés, Emperor Leopold II (r. 1790–1792) of Aus-tria, who was the brother of Marie Antoinette, and King Frederick William II (r. 1786–1797) of Prussia issued the Declaration of Pillnitz. The two monarchs promised to intervene in France to protect the royal family and to preserve the monarchy if the other major European powers agreed. This provision rendered the declaration practically meaningless because, at the time, Great Britain would not have given its consent. The declaration was, however, taken seriously in France, where the revolutionaries saw the nation surrounded by aristocratic and monarchical foes seeking to undo all that had been accomplished since 1789. The End of the Monarchy: A Second Revolution The National Constituent Assembly drew to a close in September 1791, having com-pleted its task of reconstructing the government and the administration of France. The Assembly had passed a measure that forbade any of its own members to sit in the Legislative Assembly the new constitution established. That new Assembly, filled with entirely new members, met on October 1 and immediately had to confront the challenges flowing from the resistance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the king’s flight, and the Declaration of Pillnitz. Emergence of the Jacobins Ever since the original gathering of the Estates General, deputies from the Third Estate had organized themselves into clubs composed of politically like-minded per-sons. The most famous and best organized of these clubs were the Jacobins because the group met in a former Dominican priory dedicated to St. Jacques (James) in Paris. The Jacobins had also established a network of local clubs throughout the provinces. They had been the most advanced political group in the National Constituent Assem-bly and had pressed for a republic rather than a constitutional monarchy. They drew their political language from the most radical thought of the Enlightenment, most particularly Rousseau’s emphasis on equality, popular sovereignty, and civic virtue. Such thought and language became all the more effective because the events of 1789 to 1791 had destroyed the old political framework, and the old monarchical politi-cal vocabulary was less and less relevant. The rhetoric of republicanism filled that vacuum and for a time supplied the political values of the day. The flight of Louis XVI in the summer of 1791 and the Declaration of Pillnitz led to renewed demands for a republic. Factionalism plagued the Legislative Assembly throughout its short life (1791–1792). A group of Jacobins known as the Girondists (because many of them came from the department of the Gironde in southwest France) assumed leadership of the Assembly. They were determined to oppose the forces of counterrevolution. They passed one measure ordering the émigrés to return or suffer the loss of their property and another requiring the refractory clergy to support the Civil Constitution or lose their state pensions. The king vetoed both acts. Furthermore, on April 20, 1792, the Girondists led the Legislative Assembly to declare war on Austria, by this time governed by Leopold II’s son, Francis II (r. 1792–1835), and allied to Prussia. This decision launched a period of armed conflict across Western Europe that with only brief intervals of peace lasted until the final defeat of France at Waterloo in June 1815. The Girondists believed the war would preserve the revolution from domestic enemies and bring the most advanced revolutionaries to power. Paradoxically, Louis XVI and other monarchists also favored the war. They thought the conflict would strengthen the executive power (the monarchy). The king also hoped that foreign armies might defeat French forces and restore the Old Regime. Both sides were play-ing a dangerous, deluded political game. The war radicalized French politics and Legislative Assembly for the right to bear arms and to fight to protect the revolution. Léon also wanted women to serve in the National Guard. These demands to serve, voiced in the universal language of citizenship, illustrated how the rhetoric of the revolution could be used to challenge traditional social roles and the concept of sepa-rate social spheres for men and women. Furthermore, the pressure of war raised the possibility that the nation could not meet its military needs if it honored the idea of separate spheres. Once the war began, some Frenchwomen did enlist in the army and served with distinction. Initially, the war effort went poorly. In July 1792, the duke of Brunswick, commander of the Prussian forces, issued a manifesto threatening to destroy Paris if the French royal family were harmed. This statement stiffened sup-port for the war and increased distrust of the king. Late in July, under radical working-class pressure, the government of Paris passed from the elected council to a committee, or commune, of representatives from the sections (municipal wards) of the city. Thereafter the Paris commune became an independent political force casting itself in the role of the protector of the gains of the revolution against both internal and external enemies. Its activities and forceful modes of intimidation largely accounted for the dominance of the city of Paris over many of the future directions of the revolutionary government for the next three years. On August 10, 1792, a large crowd invaded the Tuileries palace and forced Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to take refuge in the Legislative Assembly. The crowd fought with the royal Swiss guards. When Louis was finally able to call off the troops, several hundred of them and many Parisian citizens lay dead in the most extensive violence since the fall of the Bastille. Thereafter the royal family was imprisoned. Their quarters were comfortable, but the king was allowed to perform none of his political functions. The recently established constitutional monarchy no longer had a reigning monarch. ======= The Convention and the Role of the Sans-culottes The September Massacres Early in September, the Parisian crowd again made its will felt. During the first week of the month, in what are known as the September Massacres, the Paris Commune summarily executed or murdered about 1,200 people who were in the city jails. Some of these people were aristocrats or priests, but most were simply common criminals. The crowd had mistakenly assumed the prisoners were all counterrevolutionaries. News of this event, the August massacre of the Swiss guards, and the imprisonment of the royal family spread rapidly across Europe, rous-ing new hostility toward the revolutionary government. The Paris Commune then compelled the Legislative Assembly to call for the elec-tion by universal male suffrage of still another new assembly to write a democratic constitution. That body, called the Convention after the American Constitutional Convention of 1787, met on September 21, 1792. The previous day, the French army, filled with patriotic recruits willing to die for the revolution, had halted the Prus-sian advance at the Battle of Valmy in eastern France. Victory on the battlefield had confirmed the victory of democratic forces at home. As its first act, the Convention declared France a republic—that is, a nation governed by an elected assembly without a monarch. Goals of the Sans-culottes The second revolution had been the work of Jaco-bins more radical than the Girondists and of the people of Paris known as the sans-culottes. The name of this group means “without breeches” and derived from the long trousers that, as working people, they wore instead of aristocratic knee breeches. The sans-culottes were shopkeepers, artisans, wage earners, and, in a few cases, factory workers. The persistent food shortages and the revolutionary inflation reflected in the ongoing fall of the value of the assignats had made their difficult lives even more burdensome. The politics of the Old Regime had ignored them, and the policies of the National Constituent Assembly had left them victims of unregulated economic liberty. The government, however, required their labor and their lives if the war was to succeed. From the summer of 1792 until the summer of 1794, their attitudes, desires, and ideals were the primary factors in the internal development of the revolution. The sans-culottes generally knew what they wanted. The Parisian tradespeople and artisans sought immediate relief from food shortages and rising prices through price controls. The economic hardship of their lives made them impatient to see their demands met. They believed all people have a right to subsistence, and they resented most forms of social inequality. This attitude made them intensely hostile to the aristocracy and the original leaders of the revolution of 1789 from the Third Estate, who, they believed, simply wanted to share political power, social prestige, and economic security with the aristocracy. The sans-culottes’ hatred of inequal-ity did not take them so far as to demand the abolition of property. Rather, they advocated a community of small property owners who would also participate in the political nation In politics they were antimonarchical, strongly republican, and suspicious even of representative government. They believed the people should make the decisions of government to an extent as great as possible. In Paris, where their influence was most important, the sans--culottes had gained their political experi-ence in meetings of the Paris sections. The Paris Commune organized the previous summer was their chief political vehicle and crowd action their chief instrument of action. ===== The Policies of the Jacobins The goals of the sans-culottes were not wholly compatible with those of the Jacobins, republicans who sought representative gov-ernment. Jacobin hatred of the aristocracy and hereditary privilege did not extend to a general suspicion of wealth. Basically, the Jacobins favored an unregulated econ-omy. From the time of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes onward, however, the more extreme Jacobins began to cooperate with leaders of the Parisian sans-culottes and the Paris Commune to overthrow the monarchy. Once the Conven-tion began to deliberate, these Jacobins, known as the Mountain because their seats were high up in the assembly hall, worked with the sans-culottes to carry the revolution forward and to win the war. This willingness to cooperate with the forces of the popular revolution sepa-rated the Mountain from the Girondists, who were also members of the Jacobin Club. Execution of louis XVI By the spring of 1793, several issues had brought the Mountain and its sans-culottes allies to dominate the Con-vention and the revolution. In December 1792, Louis XVI was put on trial as “Citizen Capet,” the original medieval name of the royal family. The Girondists looked for a way to spare his life, but the Mountain defeated the effort. An overwhelming majority convicted Louis of con-spiring against the liberty of the people and the security of the state. Condemned to death by a smaller majority, he was beheaded on January 21, 1793. Marie Antoinette was subsequently tried and executed in October of the same year; their son died in 1795, in prison, of disease exacerbated by neglect. In February 1793, the Convention declared war on Great Britain and Holland, and a month later on Spain. Soon thereafter, the Prussians renewed their offensive and drove the French out of Belgium. To make matters worse, General Dumouriez (1739–1823), the Girondist victor of Valmy, deserted to the enemy. Finally, in March 1793, a royalist revolt led by aristocratic officers and priests erupted in the Vendée in western France and roused much popular support. Thus, the revolution found itself at war with most of Europe and much of the French nation. The Girondists had led the country into the war but had been unable either to win it or to suppress the enemies of the revolution at home. The Mountain stood ready to take up the task Europe at War with the Revolution Initially, the rest of Europe had been ambivalent toward the revolutionary events in France. Those people who favored political reform regarded the revolution as wisely and rationally reorganizing a corrupt and inefficient government. The major foreign governments thought that the revolution meant France would cease to be an impor-tant factor in European affairs for years. Edmund Burke Attacks the Revolution In 1790, however, Irish-born writer and British statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1799) argued a different position in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke con-demned the reconstruction of the French administration as the application of a blind rationalism that ignored the historical realities of political development and the concrete complexities of social relations. He also forecast further turmoil as people without political experience tried to govern France, predicted the possible deaths of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at the hands of the revolutionaries, and forecast that the revolution would end in military despotism. As the revolutionaries proceeded to attack the church, the monarchy, and finally the rest of Europe, Burke’s ideas came to have many admirers. Thomas Paine, the hero of the American Revolution, composed The Rights of Man (1791–1792) in direct response to Burke and in defense of the revolutionary principles. Paine declared, “From what we now see, nothing of reform on the political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.” Paine’s volume sold more copies at the time in England, but Burke’s was influential in the long run and was immediately pub-lished widely on the continent where it became a handbook of European conservatives. By the outbreak of the war with Austria in April 1792, the other European mon-archies recognized, along with Burke, the danger of both the ideas and the aggression of revolutionary France. In the United States, no amount of gratitude for France’s assistance during the revolutionary war could move Washington to offer support to France; throughout his presidency, Washington insisted that the new republic must resist foreign entanglements. The increasing radicalism of the French Revolution alienated even those foreign statesmen initially sympathetic to its early reformist impulses. Instead