The French Revolution was an important turning point in not just French History but for the whole history of Europe, and beyond. From the antecedents to The Terror to the all the subsequent repercussion it seems appropriate to start a thread about the French Revolution on Bastille Day, July 14.






Start storming the gates of history and see what you can come up with........

Great Topic Zeno!

I have questions as to how much enlightenment ideas had been able to penetrate the various classes before 1789. Looking back we may assume they meant more than they actually did at the time.

For example one main cause for the revolution might have been the great scarcity of food in the 1780s in France. The two years prior to the revolution (1788–89) saw meager harvests and harsh winters, possibly because of a strong El Niño cycle caused by the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland. A series of crop failures caused a shortage of grain, consequently raising the price of bread. Because bread was the main source of nutrition for poor peasants, this led to starvation.

Contributing to the peasant unrest were conspiracy theories that the lack of food was a deliberate plot by the nobility. Conspiracy theories were common in history. For example that (Jewish people caused the plague). But it was also common that people acted on these theories with violent rage and the mob mentality at times in the past.

The Little Ice Age also affected farmers' choices of crops to plant; in other parts of Europe, peasant farmers had adopted the potato as its staple crop. The potato had been introduced to France during the 16th century and despite resistance had largely supplanted the turnip and rutabaga in France. Despite encouragement from individuals like Antoine Parmentier and Louis XVI, grain was still a much more popular staple crop in France. This was partially because potatoes were seen as more difficult to transport and store than grain.

In 1789, a normal worker, a farmer or a laborer, earned anywhere from fifteen to thirty sous per day; skilled workers received thirty to forty. A family of four needed about two loaves of bread a day to survive. The price of a loaf of bread rose by 67 percent in 1789 alone, from nine sous to fifteen. Many peasants were relying on charity to survive, and they became increasingly motivated by their hunger. The "bread riots" were the first manifestations of a revolutionary sentiment.

Mass urbanization coincided with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and more and more people moved into French cities seeking employment. The cities became overcrowded with the hungry, destitute, and disaffected, an ideal environment for revolution not for big ideas but self interest an preservation.

"Bakers' queues" became the term for the long line-ups at shops when bread was short. The phrase is quite rarely used, and it is generally only seen in references to Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution: A History. Carlyle uses the phrase at once to condemn the revolutionaries for their failure to meet basic public needs, and as synonym for the angry French public after the French Revolution started to sour but clearly food riots, something common in history may have as much or more to do with the French Revolution than democratic ideas of equality, citizenship and inalienable rights.

As far as the Enlightenment and social dissemination of Enlightenment ideas, that is a complicated answer that many historians have tried to answer, along with the extent of the connection between the Enlightenment and French Revolution. We can say a couple things, I think. Rousseau was incredibly popular and influential with the revolutionaries. And the urban literate classes were very much aware of the Enlightenment. And they were the ones who led the Revolution, whether it be the earlier elite phase or the more popular sans-culottes phase.

I wanted to comment a bit about the economic stuff, b/c it is often misunderstood. Many people think of the Rev. starting on July 14, 1789, but in fact the king’s power began evaporating in the beginning of 1787. In fact, it had been diminishing for decades. The Rev. wasn’t just a sudden break, even though revolutionaries tried to portray it that way. The institutions and ideology of absolutism had been withering for years before 1789. It was in 1787 that the king was forced to call the Assembly of Notables, a sign of extreme political distress. What’s even more distressing is that the notables were hand picked by the monarchy and they still refused to approve his reform agenda. This was the beginning of the collapse of the Old Regime. It is true that there were some bad harvests along the way, but nothing on the scale that would have caused large-scale unrest if it weren’t for the already unstable political system. Regardless, the political breakdown occurred before the bad harvests. The most serious economic turmoil occurred starting in 1792, and that was more a result of the political instability.

Also, it’s really important to keep in mind the distinction between peasant and urban workers. Peasants in the summer of 1789 did experience unrest (The Great Fear), but it was anti-noble, not anti-royal (although that’s a complicated distinction). Peasants tended to be wary of the Revolution. Urban dwellers, esp. in Paris, tended to be adamantly in support of the Revolution.

Wasn't the French Revolution ultimately a failure? Wasn't Western Europe ran by autocrats for the rest of the 19th century? It's been a while since I studied the revolution but IMO it was far more interesting as a study of what can go wrong when a revolution goes bad rather than the point where Western Europe finally throws off the yolk of the autocrats.

I guess it depends on how you define failure. France certainly wasn't run by autocrats. No ruler after the Revolution would ever dare to claim to be the absolute sovereign authority of France. Even Napoleon, who was probably the most authoritarian by nature used plebescites to give the apparence of popular sovereignty. He always claimed to rule on behalf and for the people. He was the first modern populist. Louis XVIII was the most reactionary of the royalists during the Revolution, yet he accepted the Charter in 1814, which was basically a written constitution with a monarchical system not too unlike Britain.

In my opinion, the greatest single victory of the French Revolution was that it once and for all ended absolutist ideology and enshrined the idea of popular sovereignty as a fundamental part of our modern political culture. I think the vast majority of historians of the Revolution would agree with this.

Agree with this. I'd even say Napoleon is probably the most misunderstood ruler of modern times, especially by people in Anglophone countries, since British historians for a century and a half took a... less than favorable view of him. He was far more progressive and republican in his leanings (even as emperor, he never claimed the lofty authority of the personally-hated Bourbons) than basically any of his contemporaries, and helped energize liberalism and national consciousness throughout Western Europe. He took the crown in part to try and legitimize his rule when the other crowned heads of Europe were calling for his death and for the violent crushing of the Revolution and the restoration of the Bourbons. Not to say he wasn't arrogant and occasionally harsh in his dealings, but I always roll my eyes at the argument I occasionally hear that he was some kind of miniature Hitler with dreams of autocratic world conquest.

To say "the Revolution" was a failure is to perhaps make a mistake in defining one's terms. The Revolution is an enormously complicated era filled with many sub-periods and themes. Did it create a Republic that went largely unaltered in its basic institutions like the United States (or Britain post-1688)? No. Did it totally destroy the Catholic Church and the nobility of France (as some of the more radical movements wished)? No. Did it banish absolutism and redefine politics in France and most of Europe (which nearly all the revolutionaries wanted)? Yes.

A little bit off-topic, but is France the only country to have an atheist governement?
Which was introduce by Napoleon I think

I agree that the breakdown started to occurred before the bad harvests. I just think that it may have contributed way more than people think. I also think the US Revolution had impact as well. In France, as in Britain’s North American colonies, a financial crisis preceded a revolution. There was not only a parallel but also a direct connection between the revolution of 1776 and that of 1789. French participation in the American War of Independence enormously increased an already excessive governmental debt. Furthermore I think, the example of the US captured the imagination of those French who were discontented.

To them Benjamin Franklin, the immensely popular American envoy to France, was the very embodiment of the Enlightenment. Yet it would be going too far to claim that the American Revolution actually caused the French Revolution; rather, it speeded up developments in France that had long been underway. And, just as the reasons for revolution were more deeply rooted and more complicated in France than in America, so the revolution itself was to be more violent and more sweeping.

The immediate cause of the Revolution was financial. King Louis XVI tried one expedient after another to avert bankruptcy and at last summoned the Estates General, the representative assembly that had not met for 175 years. Once assembled, the Estates initiated reforms that were to destroy the Old Regime in France. The more deep-rooted causes of the Revolution, however, reached into France’s society and economy and into its political and intellectual history.

As you noted behind the financial crisis of the 1780s lay many decades of fiscal mismanagement. The nobles and clergy refused to pay the necessary share of the taxes. Resentment against inequitable taxation and inefficient government built steadily among the unprivileged peasantry, the workers, and above all, the bourgeoisie. What translated bourgeois resentment into the potential for revolution was the program of change put forward by the philosophes.

Early in the Revolution, the revolutionaries nationalized Church land and basically took over the Church, including making priests paid state employees. Napoleon actually tried to reconcile with the Church, which he kind of did with the Concordat. Thinks went south with the Pope, whom Napoleon eventually had arrested.

There's kind of this myth among Americans that the American Rev. helped cause the French Revolution. It is true that the American War was the most expensive war France had ever fought and they financed it almost entirely with debt. This exploded the Crown debt and led to a fiscal crisis. But I've never seen any evidence that French were inspired by the ideals of the American Rev or anything along those lines. Most French saw the war as simply a war of revenge against the Brits for the humiliation the French suffered during the Seven Years War.

Franklin is another American myth. Again, I've never seen any evidence that he was anywhere near as influential as Americans would like to think, in France anyway. It's true that he was a curiousity at court and among men of letters, but he didn't have the signficance that people talk about. And for the French Rev, the embodiement of the Enlightenment was most certainly Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not Franklin. In fact, I've never seen Franklin referenced in any revolutionary documents, now that I think about it. Rousseau on the other hand is everywhere.

Also, keep in mind that the Estates never really assembled per se. They could never really agree on how to vote. The Third Estate (commoners) wanted their influence to be reflected by a more fair voting system. The other two, privileged estates wouldn't agree to give up their positions. The Third Estate finally declared itself the National Assembly on June 17, 1789 in which they basically declared themselves to be the legitimate government of France. I actually consider this date to be the real beginning of the French Rev, not July 14, 1789.

You are a bit off about how taxes worked, but I think that discussion would bore the casual readers of this thread. I find taxes fascinating and would be happy to go into it if you really wanted.

You make a very interesting point about Franklin, having never seen Franklin referenced in any revolutionary documents. America was a young country then, so you make a good point about how much respect that some French would give the upstart (some of that attitude lingers today). But i still think you are underestimating the United States and it's influence on the French.

When the Letters of a Pennsylvanian Farmer became known in Europe, Diderot said that it was madness to allow Frenchmen to read such things, as they could not do it without becoming intoxicated and changed into different men. But France I think was more impressed by the event than by the literature that accompanied the US independance. The United States had made herself independent under less provocation than had ever been a motive of revolt, and the French Government had acknowledged that her cause was righteous and had even gone to war for it. If the French King was right for America, he was utterly wrong at home, and if the Americans acted rightly, the argument was stronger, the cause was a many times better, in France itself.

All that justified their independence condemned the Government of their French allies. By the principle that taxation without representation is robbery, there was no authority so illegitimate as that of Lewis XVI. The force of that demonstration was irresistible, and it produced its effect where the example of England failed. The English doctrine was repelled at the very earliest stage of the Revolution, and the American was adopted. What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government—their cutting, not their sewing. Many French nobles served in the war, and came home republicans and even democrats by conviction. It was America that converted the aristocracy to the reforming policy, and gave leaders to the Revolution. “The American Revolution,” says Washington, “or the peculiar light of the age, seems to have opened the eyes of almost every nation in Europe, and a spirit of equal liberty appears fast to be gaining ground everywhere.”

When the French officers were leaving, Cooper, of Boston, addressed them in the language of warning: “Do not let your hopes be inflamed by our triumphs on this virgin soil. You will carry our sentiments with you, but if you try to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for centuries, you will encounter obstacles more formidable than ours. Our liberty has been won with blood; you will have to shed it in torrents before liberty can take root in the old world.”

Adams, after he had been President of the United States, bitterly regretted the Revolution which made them independent, because it had given the example to the French; although he also believed that they had not a single principle in common.

Nothing, on the contrary, is more certain than that American principles profoundly influenced France, and determined the course of the Revolution. It is from America that Lafayette derived the saying that created a commotion at the time, that resistance is the most sacred of duties. There also was the theory that political power comes from those over whom it is exercised, and depends upon their will; that every authority not so constituted is illegitimate and precarious; that the past is more a warning than an example; that the earth belongs to those who are upon it, not to those who are underneath. These are characteristics common to both Revolutions.

At one time also the French adopted and acclaimed the American notion that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, or prosperity, or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or the adaptation of national law to national character, or the progress of enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; that the private individual should not feel the pressure of public authority, and should direct his life by the influences that are within him, not around him.

And there was another political doctrine which the Americans transmitted to the French. In old colonial days the executive and the judicial powers were derived from a foreign source, and the common purpose was to diminish them. The assemblies were popular in origin and character, and everything that added to their power seemed to add security to rights. James Wilson, one of the authors and commentators of the constitution, informs us that “at the Revolution the same fond predilection, and the same jealous dislike, existed and prevailed. The executive, and the judicial as well as the legislative authority, was now the child of the people, but to the two former the people behaved like stepmothers. The legislature was still discriminated by excessive partiality.” This preference, historic but irrational, led up naturally to a single chamber. The people of America and their delegates in Congress were of opinion that a single Assembly was every way adequate to the management of their federal concerns, and when the Senate was invented, Franklin strongly objected. “As to the two chambers,” he wrote, “I am of your opinion that one alone would be better; but, my dear friend, nothing in human affairs and schemes is perfect, and perhaps this is the case of our opinions.”

Alexander Hamilton was the ablest as well as the most conservative of the American statesmen. He longed for monarchy, and he desired to establish a national government and to annihilate state rights. The American spirit, as it penetrated France, cannot well be described better than it was by him: “I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

But when we speak in the gross of the American Revolution we combine different and discordant things. From the first agitation in 1761 to the Declaration of Independence, and then to the end of the war in 1782, the Americans were aggressive, violent in their language, fond of abstractions, prolific of doctrines universally applicable and universally destructive. It is the ideas of those earlier days that roused the attention of France, and were imported by Lafayette, Noailles, Lameth, and the leaders of the future revolution who had witnessed the lowering of the British flag at Yorktown.

Sort of, and not quite. One of the early acts of the Republic was to make the clergy civil officers of the government, rather than private servants of the Church (this was a huge move against the Church's power), and also confiscated many Church lands. Later, around 1792, the Hebertist faction set up the Cult of Reason, an atheistic movement intended as a replacement for Christianity, which many radical revolutionaries associated with the ancien regime and believed was keeping the French peasantry in darkness and superstition. Christian holidays were replaced with the holidays of the new cult, culminating in the Festival of Reason, during which the Catholic altar of Notre Dame (called the Temple of Reason at that point) was replaced with an "altar of Liberty," and other icons were torn down.

The move was not well-regarded by most of the population, though some did embrace it. Most of the Jacobins sat in opposition, and upon taking power, Robespierre replaced the atheistic Cult of Reason with the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, which he believed was necessary to promote a virtuous republic.

Napoleon, upon taking power, eased many of the restrictions on Catholicism and signed a Concordat with the Pope, allowing normal Catholic functions to resume in France, but he made it explicit that the Church would have no government power (interpreted by some as meaning that the tyrannical Napoleon would not share power, but more rightly interpreted as a sign that Napoleon had no interest in renewing the hated ancien regime).

Catholicism still remains fairly prevalent and influential on France today.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but this myth is so prevalent among Americans that I feel the need to emphasize once more how wrong it is. I teach the French Revolution class every Fall and students always mention the influence of the American Revolution on France. Americans have this bloated perception of the importance of the American Revolution. I can only assume it’s high school teachers who are somehow beating this into high school students. The American Revolution had no more effect on France than it had on the rest of the western world.

For one thing, Americans over estimate the significance of the American Revolution. It wasn’t some magical event that came out of nowhere. It was very much within the context of the mid-eighteenth century Atlantic World, especially Britain itself. George III had angered a lot of people in Britain, especially in parliament, by deviating from what they considered settled constitutional practice. Tons of people in Britain had been calling for a reapportioning of Parliament so that people were equally represented. The “no taxation without representation” was not uniquely American. Not even close. It grew out of the exact same type of arguments already extant in Britain itself. It grew out of the British reform movement of the 1760s and 1770s. In fact, many Britons actively supported the Americans and hoped it would led to fairer parliamentary representation in Britain itself. Americans did not single handedly bring democracy to the western world. It was part of a much, much larger context that developed around the Atlantic World.

Also, the Americans were much more influenced by the French than the other way around. The Americans were intimately aware of the French Enlightenment, particularly people like Diderot, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. That latter one was perhaps the most important in shaping the new American Constitution. Montesquieu was a noble and far from a firebrand radical. He and Voltaire deeply admired the British system and wanted the French system to be more like it—that is, with a constitutional monarchy. These are the guys, ironically, who shaped the Americans—guys who admired the British system. The French revolutionaries on the other hand were influenced by radical Enlightenment figures, not the earlier moderate philosophes. They looked to people like Condorcet, but particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was without a doubt the most radical democrat of the Enlightenment. Americans never accepted Rousseau’s radical, egalitarian democracy. The French, during the French Revolution, did.

Also, the American Revolution and French Revolution were not anything alike. They didn’t even use the term “revolution” in the same way. Americans used it in the traditional way to mean “bring back around” (like a revolution of the earth around the sun). They saw George III as undermining British politics and they meant their revolution to put things back in order the way they were before George III. The French changed the very definition of the word “revolution.” For the first time, the word was used to mean rupture from the past—a complete and irrevocable break. They were doing something completely new that had never been done before (even in America!). They began referring to the “Old Regime.” It was done and in the past. It was of no use after this radical rupture. They even changed the calendar to start over from the birth of the republic as year one. Time would now be told from the birth of the republic, not Christ. (I mention this in more depth in my “Ask a Professional Historian” thread.) The word revolution had never been used in this way before, but now it meant something completely new.

You also have to understand that the French Revolution didn’t just happen in the late 1780s. There had been numerous conflicts between the Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris going back to 1763 over taxes and deficits. The exact same type of debates that were going on at exactly the same time in Britain (and then America). Those political debates between king and parlement continued all the way through the 1780s but only becoming more intense after the debt doubled with the American War. Politics had been changing in France for nearly two generations. Absolutism had been undermined for decades before the French Revolution. There was a long history of political contestation in France before most French had ever heard of Jefferson or Franklin. I could go on about Bertin, Terray, the Maupeou Revolution, Turgot, Necker, Calonne, etc, etc, etc. The French Revolution has a real history that has a very real French context. It was not somehow sparked by Americans.

Finally, you mention noble officers serving in America and coming back democrats. That is simply not true. Lafayette, whom you mention quite a bit, for example was a moderate. He was never a democrat. In fact, he became head of the National Guard in large part to curtail popular violence and repress the forces of popular democracy. He accompanied the October Days in order to protect the king from the people. He ordered the Champ de Mars Massacre. He ultimately left France for exile in 1792, and good thing he did b/c he almost certainly would have been killed during the Terror. Lafayette was no radical democrat. And tons of research has shown that there were huge tensions between the noble officers and common soldiers after the start of the Revolution. Soldiers simply refused to follow noble officers’ orders, which were in support of the monarchy.

Again, I won’t belabor the point further, but I do think it’s a pretty important point. By the way, only Americans have this inflated sense of the American Revolution. People in France don’t see the American Revolution as a core cause of the French Revolution. Nor do Britons, Canadians, etc. Only Americans hold this notion as the American Revolution being central to modern western history.

That is a great post.

Going back to an earlier point you and Turn Prophet made about the relative success of the French Revolution; to the degree that France did not achieve radical, egalitarian democracy, why is it wrong to judge the revolution a failure in this respect?

Again, it depends on your definition of both the Revolution itself as well as failure and success. The Revolution went through many different phases and historians disagree on when the Revolution started and when it ended. Some see it as ending with the Terror, other with the Directory, and other with Napoleon. From 1789 through the summer of 1791, the Revolution was pretty moderate. Revolutionaries thought of themselves as reforming French politics to make France a constitutional monarchy much like Britain. In June 1791, the king escaped Paris for the Austrian frontier. This is known as the Flight to Varennes. He was unsuccessful. The Flight to Varennes radicalized the Revolution. For the first time there was a significant political faction that called for the ending of the monarchy and the creation of a Republic. The Revolution continued to be divided and radicalized. This is when Rousseau’s idea of the general will and popular sovereignty became so influential for the Revolution.

Radical egalitarian democracy was not the goal of all revolutionaries. In fact, even many of the most radical revolutionaries didn’t believe in the abolition of slavery or equal treatment of people of African descent in the colonies. Still, the idea of popular sovereignty was a real achievement of the Revolution. And it was not just in France but all of the western world. The Revolution basically said that the people are ultimately in charge of their own politics. In other words, no one individual can claim to be the absolute sovereign authority. Only the people have that right. The Revolution is considered a turning point in western history because it ended absolutism, for the most part. It transformed the nature of political discourse and politics itself throughout the west.

I wouldn’t really call the Revolution a success or failure, to be honest, but the rise of modern political culture based upon popular sovereignty and the ending of absolutism was a very real outcome of the French Revolution.

I tried to phrase my question so that I wasn't oversimplifying things, but I do concede that my (as such, under-informed) picture of the revolution is weighted towards the sensational, romantic, terrible elements, from the radical republican/populist politics to the terror. So were those aspects of the revolution a failure (with the latter being rather unfortunate)?

I know you made the point about Louis XVIII signing the charter in 1814, but how were the French people in charge of their own politics when Louis was installed on the throne by foreign powers -- he enjoyed so little popular support that Napoleon crowd-surfed his way back into power without firing a shot (or have I watched Waterloo too much)?

Louis XVIII ruled in the same way that George III and George IV did in Britain--with a constitution that limited his authority, recognized the sovereignty of the people, and ruled along side an elected legislature with which he shared power. Absolutism was over after the Revolution.

You are right that Louis XVIII was unpopular, on both sides. His brother Charles ruled from 1824 to 1830. Charles wanted to restore the power of the monarchy to its glory days. He was removed from office by a revolution in 1830. The legislature picked the next king who would be Louis Philippe (son of a royal cousin who voted to execute Louis XVI). He was kicked out of office in 1848 by a revolution. The Revolution began a long history of popular involvement in politics that only began in 1789. It would continue throughout the 19th century and very much to today. This is why there is a strike every time I'm in France.

Good stuff ITT.

After reading your post I admit that I may be overestimating the influence of the United States on France on the revolution. That said I think you are implying that events in the United States had absolutely no impact. Even though I may have overvalued the American influence I think you are significantly undervaluing it.