1. Reasons of the French revolution
a) Enlightened political thought.
Montesquieu (division of powers), Rousseau (the principle of national sovereignty), were thinkers whose ideas influenced French revolutionary leaders. They sought to replace the ancient regime or old order with a new political and social structure.
b) The independence of the United States of America.
Americans had put into practice the principles and ideas of the Enlightenment through the creation of an entirely new State.
c) Social structure.
The existing tension between the privileged social sectors (clergy and noblemen) and the third estate (the commons, including the bourgeoisie) increased at the end of the 18th c. in France. Peasants had to pay high rents and taxes to the Crown, the Church and the nobles, although most of the people were on the verge of famine. The bourgeois or middle class was made up of professionals like lawyers, teachers, even enriched merchants or bankers. In spite of their economic position and influence, the ancient regime did not allow them to participate in governmental affairs.
d) Economic crisis.
The colonial wars against Britain first, and afterwards the support of the American war of independence had shown the financial limits of the French State. New levies had to be collected, but, since only the third estate paid taxes, the new economic burden was too much for the peasants. Besides, a series of bad harvests and the consequent famines hardened the situation of the majority of the people. In order to solve the financial situation, the king called the Estates General, the traditional assembly of the three estates, in order to pass new taxes. This was the first step towards the revolution and the end of the old order.
2. The Revolution
a) The National Assembly (1789-1791)
In May 1789 king Louis XVI summoned the Estates General at the palace of Versailles. The governmental tax project included the privileged classes. Nevertheless, while the nobles and the clergy had no intention to lose their privileges, the members of the third estate tried to start a social and political reform. Inspired by the principle of national sovereignty, they actually asked for a voting system based on the person instead of the estate, because the majority of the members of the Assembly came from the third estate. When the king refused to accept and closed the access to the chamber, they went further and met in an indoor tennis room (jeu de paume) on June 1789, declared themselves the National Assembly (in other words, the only representatives of the French people), and swore that they would provide France with a Constitution (the tennis court oath). Some aristocrats and part of the clergy joined them.
Museo del Prado
The political revolution was supported by popular movements: on 14 July 1789 the crowd took the Bastille, a royal prison in Paris that was the symbol of the tyranny of the old regime, and put the head of its commander on a pike. The popular revolt spread to the provinces and the countryside, and the peasants burned the palaces of the aristocrats and killed them. It was a troubled period called "the great fear" (la grande peur).
Museo del Prado
In August, the National Assembly began its program of social and political reform: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (equality of all men under the law, popular sovereignty, individual rights such as liberty or property). The feudal system (above all the rents paid by the peasants to their lords) was abolished. A new Constitution was promulgated in 1791, based on the revolutionary principles, it created a constitutional monarchy in France.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 26 August 1789
The representatives of the French people, constituted as a National Assembly, and considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man: so that by being constantly present to all the members of the social body this declaration may always remind them of their rights and duties; so that by being liable at every moment to comparison with the aim of any and all political institutions the acts of the legislative and executive powers may be the more fully respected; and so that by being founded henceforward on simple and incontestable principles the demands of the citizens may always tend toward maintaining the constitution and the general welfare.
In consequence, the National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and the citizen:
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.
2. The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation. No body and no individual may exercise authority which does not emanate expressly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the ability to do whatever does not harm another; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no other limits than those which assure to other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by the law.
5. The law only has the right to prohibit those actions which are injurious to society. No hindrance should be put in the way of anything not prohibited by the law, nor may any one be forced to do what the law does not require.
6. The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part, in person or by their representatives, in its formation. It must be the same for everyone whether it protects or penalizes. All citizens being equal in its eyes are equally admissible to all public dignities, offices, and employments, according to their ability, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.
7. No man may be indicted, arrested, or detained except in cases determined by the law and according to the forms which it has prescribed. Those who seek, expedite, execute, or cause to be executed arbitrary orders should be punished; but citizens summoned or seized by virtue of the law should obey instantly, and render themselves guilty by resistance.
8. Only strictly and obviously necessary punishments may be established by the law, and no one may be punished except by virtue of a law established and promulgated before the time of the offense, and legally applied.
9. Every man being presumed innocent until judged guilty, if it is deemed indispensable to arrest him, all rigor unnecessary to securing his person should be severely repressed by the law.
10. No one should be disturbed for his opinions, even in religion, provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by law.
11. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may therefore speak, write, and print freely, if he accepts his own responsibility for any abuse of this liberty in the cases set by the law.
12. The safeguard of the rights of man and the citizen requires public powers. These powers are therefore instituted for the advantage of all, and not for the private benefit of those to whom they are entrusted.
13. For maintenance of public authority and for expenses of administration, common taxation is indispensable. It should be apportioned equally among all the citizens according to their capacity to pay.
14. All citizens have the right, by themselves or through their representatives, to have demonstrated to them the necessity of public taxes, to consent to them freely, to follow the use made of the proceeds, and to determine the means of apportionment, assessment, and collection, and the duration of them.
15. Society has the right to hold accountable every public agent of the administration.
16. Any society in which the guarantee of rights is not assured or the separation of powers not settled has no constitution.
17. Property being an inviolable and sacred right, no one may be deprived of it except when public necessity, certified by law, obviously requires it, and on the condition of a just compensation in advance.
b) The constitutional monarchy and the war
A relatively moderate political position prevailed. A majority political party composed of rich bourgeois, which would later come to be known as the Girondins, was willing to reach a compromise with the king to support a new constitutional regime. The king was not excluded from government, but he was considered only the head of the executive power. The Legislative Assembly, elected by a limited number of citizens, held the legislative power, although the king enjoyed a right of veto against the laws passed by the Assembly. Nevertheless, king Louis could not stop the civil constitution of the clergy that separated State and Church and imposed an allegiance oath to priests. The properties of the Church were confiscated and sold at auction.
The Constitution of 1791 opened the government to the participation of the bourgeoisie, but only the richest citizens had a voting right. It kept the king as the head of the government, but, as a matter of fact, Louis XVI was not happy with the revolutionary changes. He tried to stop the revolution and to come back to the absolute regime with the support of part of the clergy and he aristocracy.
The king conspired against the regime he apparently respected, and secretly called the absolutist monarchs of Europe to help him. After being forced to leave Versailles and to come to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the king decided to flee from the capital. But the royal family was recognised at Varennes and forced to return to Paris. The flight to Varennes (June 1791) revealed the real intentions of the king with respect to the Revolution and his plans to favour a foreign military intervention in France. The king had lost the trust of his people.
Meanwhile, the European powers hesitated about the right path to follow, above all Spain, where the king was also a Bourbon, and Austria, whose emperor was a relative of the queen. Actually, the second Assembly declared war on Austria and Prussia; when the Austrian and Prussian troops invaded France to restore the ancien régime, popular demonstrations against the king took place in Paris, and finally the crowd entered the Tuileries, forcing the Assembly to remove Louis XVI from power: in September 1792 France became a Republic.
c) The Convention (1792-1795)
The Convention was the third Assembly elected in a moment of panic due to foreign invasion, and as a result, it implied the radical turn of the Revolution. The new government called for a mass conscription against the European powers and the enemies of the Revolution. At home, the Convention eliminated people suspected of being enemies of the revolution by using massively the guillotine. Even king Louis and his wife Marie Antoinette were convicted of treason and executed in 1793.
In the same year a new Constitution was promulgated, based on the universal suffrage and the principle of social equality. The government approved a number of social laws to improve the conditions of life of the popular classes, such as the Law of Maximum in order to establish a limit in the prices of basic necessities (bread).
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Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Jacobins (the radical party) dominated the Convention, with the support of the sans culottes (lower classes) of Paris. This period is known as the reign of Terror: to protect the revolution, thousands of people were condemned as traitors by a Revolutionary Tribunal controlled by Robespierre. Executive and military powers were given to certain committees (above all the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security) composed by a number of its members. Actually, this confusion of powers between the executive, legislative and judiciary was contrary to the ideas of Montesquieu. Robespierre chose to concentrate all power to save the Revolution at the expense of democracy.
On the other hand, there were reasons to fear a counter-revolution. In the Vendée, a region in the West of France, the peasants rebelled against the revolutionary authorities because of their allegiance to the old monarchy and the Catholic Church. In fact, the radical position of the Convention saved the Republic from its internal and external enemies. Universal conscription provided France with an army able to defeat the successive coalitions of European powers sent against it. Military victories expanded the Revolution over new countries.
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In domestic affairs, Jacobins sought to change France completely. With respect to the Church, they wanted to eliminate its influence by closing churches and promoting the alternative cult of goddess reason. The calendar was changed, replacing seven-day for ten-day weeks, and proclaimed 1792 as the year I of a new era.
Because of the new situation and of the radicalisation of the Jacobins, most of people opposed the Convention, and the Terror finished with the execution of Robespierre himself in 1794.
MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE. SPEECH TO THE CONVENTION, FEBRUARY 5, 1794
(.) What is the goal toward which we are heading? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws have been inscribed, not in marble and stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them and in that of the tyrant who denies them. (.)
Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are of their own making, do for themselves all that they can do well, and by their delegates do all that they cannot do for themselves. (.)
Now, what is the fundamental principle of popular or democratic government, that is to say, the essential mainspring which sustains it and makes it move? It is virtue. I speak of the public virtue which worked so many wonders in Greece and Rome and which ought to produce even more astonishing things in republican France - that virtue which is nothing other than the love of the nation and its law.
But as the essence of the republic or of demo-cracy is equality, it follows that love of country necessarily embraces the love of equality. (.)
But the French are the first people of the world who have established real democracy, by calling all men to equality and full rights of citizenship; and there, in my judgment, is the true reason why all the tyrants in league against the Republic will be vanquished. (.)
Here the development of our theory would reach its limit, if you had only to steer the ship of the Republic through calm waters. But the tempest rages, and the state of the revolution in which you find yourselves imposes upon you another task. (.)
We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them. Now, in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.
If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.
It has been said that terror was the mainspring of despotic government. Does your government, then, resemble a despotism? Yes, as the sword which glitters in the hands of liberty's heroes resembles the one with which tyranny's lackeys are armed. Let the despot govern his brutalized subjects by terror; he is right to do this, as a despot. Subdue liberty's enemies by terror, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is it not to strike the heads of the proud that lightning is destined? (.)
d) The Directory (1795-1799)
After years of political instability, the Revolution came to a moderate phase, under the influence of conservative bourgeois eager to give birth to an appropriate political framework for their businesses. These new leaders created the new governmental institution called the Directory.
Nevertheless, military victories and the expansion of the revolutionary ideas (Low Countries, Switzerland, Italy) paved the way for the pre-eminence of certain triumphant generals in the political arena, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. After his campaigns in Italy and Egypt, Napoleon joined the Directory till a new coalition formed by Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain threatened again the Revolution. Then he overthrew the Directory after a coup d'État and imposed a new constitution and a new political system called the Consulate in 1799 (18 Brumaire). The Revolution was officially finished.
3. Consequences of the French Revolution
In spite of the military opposition of the European States against the French Revolution, revolutionary ideas spread throughout Europe as the principles of the Enlightenment had done during the 18th century. French revolutionary leaders believed that their fight against absolutism was the first step of a universal struggle for freedom and popular sovereignty.
The French military success favoured the creation of a number of revolutionary Republics under French influence: the Batavian, Helvetic, Ligurian, Cisalpine, Roman, Parthenopean Republics. The Austrian Low Countries and the Rhineland were put under the direct rule of France. Afterwards, the imperial conquests of Napoleon enlarged the influence of the revolutionary ideas.
