French Revolution
a revolution that took place in France at the close of the eighteenth century. The meeting of the States General May 5, 1789, may be regarded as the beginning. The close may be considered either as the end of the Convention in 1798, or the end of the Directory in 1799, or the end of Napoleon's consulate in 1804. It is considered the most remarkable revolution in the world's history. One writer goes so far as to suggest that millions of years hence, of all the political topics that now fill our histories, the Trojan War and the French Revolution will be the only events that will be worth considering. The English Revolution was a mere incident at the close of which the current of British history resumed its wonted course. The American Revolution, relatively, was a mere assumption of local government. The French Revolution was something more. A powerful nobility, long intrenched in privileged power and wealth, was overturned suddenly; and not only overturned, but practically annihilated. The common people, long oppressed and ignored, assumed the reins of government.
At the time of the Revolution there were in France about 25,000,000 people. There were two privileged classes,--the nobles and the clergy. They numbered together about a quarter of a million. They owned half the soil of France; they owned the castles, chateaux, churches, and buildings of note. In addition to their own vast wealth, they squeezed out of the peasants a full fourth of all they produced. The peasant was obliged to work for his superiors without pay. He couldn't pass over a road with a sack of grain without paying toll. The privileged orders held the offices and enjoyed all the revenues of the government. They themselves were practically exempt from taxation. Forty thousand humble priests labored among the villagers. They lived on a mere pittance, and were of the people; but the higher places in the church were filled, with few exceptions, with the younger scions of the nobility. They left their proper work to hired assistants, and used the vast incomes from church property to maintain a social standing among their relatives. In the rural districts the peasants lived at times on wretched bread made of ground acorns, bark, and bran. Their little crops were destroyed by rabbits and pheasants and deer, which they were forbidden on pain of death either to molest or kill. Local famines were frequent. The peasants died off by the thousand, as is now the case in Russia. The working people in the cities huddled together and starved in wretched cellars and attics,--"sullen masses of rags and misery." Twenty-three million wretched, poverty stricken, hopeless, social drudges, with little to wear and less to eat, supported a million people in luxury. Between these extremes was a third class of well-to-do shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, bankers, and men-of-letters. They are known in French history as bourgeoisie (boor-zhwa-ze). The leaders of the Revolution came for the most part from this class, reinforced, to their credit be it said, by a remnant of the nobility, like Lafayette.
For two centuries the government of France had been despotic. Expensive wars and general extravagance, such as the building of palaces like Versailles, had drained the royal treasury. The misery and thriftlessness of the common people made it impossible to extort more money. The nobility and clergy, the great property owners, were exempt from taxation. The financial affairs of the nation went from bad to worse. The government ran behind $10,000,000 a year. Later the deficit grew to $25,000,000 a year. In this extremity, Louis XVI summoned a meeting of the Notables, an ancient legislative body representing the nobility. He asked this assembly to consent to the taxation of the privileged classes. The Notables refused. The king sent them home. He then summoned a meeting of the States General. This was a general parliament which had not met since 1616, nearly two centuries. It represented all three estates, the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. In the meantime the writing of such men as Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Sieyes, and the influence of the American Revolution, had aroused the thinking people of France to the notion that something desperate must be done. When the States General met, the king and the aristocracy desired that the members sit in three distinct houses or bodies,--the nobility, the clergy, and the third estate. The delegates of the third estate, that is to say, the common people, saw clearly that it would be vain for their chamber to pass a useful measure, because it would be voted down by the other houses. The third estate insisted, therefore, that the entire States General should sit as one assembly. They were in the majority. They had determined leaders and carried their point. Many of the clergy fell in and later the nobility began to fall into line. This new parliament was called the National Assembly. This was the beginning of the French Revolution.
Moderate men desired to reform the government by providing for regular sessions of the States General and for equal taxation; but the Revolution once started soon swept beyond their control. At the prospect of relief, hatred engendered by decades of cheating and starving and beating and maiming transformed the peasantry into veritable fiends. Wretched bands of peasants armed with flails and clubs rose in revolt. They ran in delirious joy from estate to estate. They set fire to the chateaux of their former oppressors. They pillaged and plundered everywhere. The poor of Paris rose in revolt. Men of violence obtained control of the Assembly. The king and queen were hurried to the scaffold. A thousand nobles were put to death with scant formality, and thousands of others were cut down in cold blood or driven from France forever. The French republic was proclaimed. The watchwords were liberty, fraternity, and equality. A dictatorship was appointed. The army was charged with the defense of the young republic and the liberation of the Italian cities from Austrian domination. As the need of an efficient leader became evident Napoleon was appointed consul. In 1804 he caused himself to be proclaimed emperor. After Waterloo came the Bourbons; after the Bourbons came Napoleon III.
For a time it seemed as though France had lost politically all that the Revolution had gained; but in reality great gains had been made. The nobility had been suppressed effectually. More just ideas of public taxation had taken root. With the lifting of burdens and the security of property the common people became more prosperous. At the close of the Franco-Prussian War the French republic was proclaimed. In a real sense the French Revolution may be said to have come to a close, then, in 1871.
See Turgot; Neckar; Marie Antoinette; Versailles; Voltaire; Rousseau; Sieyes; Mirabeau; Bastille; Lafayette; Girondists; Louis Xvi; Danton; Robespierre; Marat; Reign Of Terror; Marseillaise; September Massacre; Napoleon; Paris; Louvre
France was girdled with foes. The Empire, Prussia, and Sardinia were in arms; Naples and Spain were soon to join the coalition; Sweden and Russia both offered to do so, if they were needed. In July a Prussian army, commanded by old officers of Frederick the Great, crossed the frontier; and two Austrian armies, one from the Netherlands and one from the upper Rhine, converged upon the same line of invasion. The French levies were outnumbered three to one. Worse still, they were utterly demoralized by the resignation of many officers in the face of the enemy and by a justifiable suspicion that many of those remaining sympathized with the invaders. Within France were royalist risings and plots of risings; and the King was in secret alliance with the enemy. There is no doubt now that the Queen had even communicated the French plan of campaign to the Austrians.
After August 10, Danton became the leading member of a provisional executive committee, and at once infused new vigor into the government. "We must dare," his great voice rang out to the doubting Assembly, "and dare again, and ever dare,--and France is saved!" In this spirit he toiled, night and day, to raise and arm and organize recruits. France responded with the finest outburst of patriotic military enthusiasm the world has ever seen in a great civilized state. September 20 the advancing Prussians were checked at Valmy; and November 9 the victory of Jemmapes, the first real pitched battle of the war, opened Belgium to French conquest. Another French army had already entered Germany, and a third had occupied Nice and Savoy.
These successes of the raw but devoted French soldiery over the veterans of Europe intoxicated the nation, and called forth an orgy of democratic enthusiasm. The new National Convention became, in Danton's phrase, "a general committee of insurrection for all nations." Flamed out one fiery orator,--"Despots march against us with fire and sword: we will bear against them liberty!" The Convention ordained a manifesto in all languages, offering the alliance of the French nation to all peoples who wished to recover their liberties; and French generals, entering a foreign country, were ordered "to abolish serfdom, nobility, and all monopolies and privileges, and to aid in setting up a new government upon principles of popular sovereignty."
Starving and ragged, but welcomed by the invaded peoples, the French armies sowed over Europe the seed of civil and political liberty. The Revolution was no longer merely French. It took on the intense zeal of a proselytic religion, and its principles were spread by fire and sword.--West.
All France and whatsoever it contains of men and resources is put under requisition. The republic is one vast besieged city. . . . The young men shall go to battle; it is their task to conquer; the married men shall forge arms, transport baggage and artillery, provide subsistence; the women shall work at soldiers' clothes, make tents, serve in the hospitals; children shall scrape old linen into surgeon's lint; the old men shall have themselves carried into public places, and there, by their words, excite the courage of the young and preach hatred to kings and unity for the Republic.--Committee of Public Safety, Proclamation of August 23, 1793.
In this humor, then, since no other will serve, will France rush against its enemies; headlong, reckoning no cost, heeding no law but the supreme law, Salvation of the People. The weapons are all the iron there is in France; the strength is that of all the men and women there are in France. . . . From all hamlets toward their departmental town, from all departmental towns toward the appointed camp, the Sons of Freedom shall march. Their banner is to bear "The French People risen against Tyrants." . . . These soldiers have shoes of wood and pasteboard, or go booted in hay-ropes, in dead of winter. . . . What then? "With steel and bread," says the Convention Representative, "one may get to China." The generals go fast to the guillotine, justly or unjustly. . . . Ill-success is death; in victory alone is life. . . . All Girondism, Halfness, Compromise, is swept away. . . . Forward, ye soldiers of the Republic, captain and men! Dash with your Gallic impetuosity on Austria, England, Prussia, Spain, Sardinia, Pitt, Coburg, York, and the Devil and the World!
See accordingly on all frontiers, how the "Sons of Night" astonished, after short triumph, do recoil; the Sons of the Republic flying after them, with temper of cat-o-mountain or demon incarnate, which no Son of Night can withstand. --Carlyle, French Revolution.
RESULTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
With the overthrow and exile of Napoleon the old Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne of France. It was a million foreign bayonets, and not the voice of the French people, that restored Louis XVIII. And the nobles who had for a quarter of a century been lurking in foreign lands or serving against France in foreign armies now trooped back to their own; and their own received them not. The old regime was gone forever. The Revolution had altered the face of society in France, and the Bourbons, who "learned nothing and forgot nothing," found themselves in a new world.
For, in truth, the convulsions and horrors so prominent on the pages of history were but the temporary incidents of the great Revolution. The movement for reform at its inception was, in the main, in the hands of prudent and high-minded men. It was its misfortune that the control of things slipped away from them and was grasped by the mob. The destruction of religion and education was only for a time, and Jacobin violence was in turn soon restrained by reason and law.
The changes in France naturally were striking. And the most of them may be summed up in the one word, equality. All exclusive privilege was swept from the soil of France as by a flood. A quarter century since 1789 had seen a new generation grow up which never knew the exemptions and monopolies of the old noblesse. And they could not be restored. The Church, too, and the merchant gilds, had lost their special rights. All Frenchmen were equal before the law.
Preferment in the civil service and in the army had too long been open to merit for a return to the old restriction to members of noble families. Massena, general of the republic and marshal of the empire, had been a private in the ranks. Murat, the incomparable leader of cavalry, marshal of France, and king of Naples, had been a waiter in an inn. The Gascon, Bernadotte, had become king of Sweden. And these cases were typical. The privilege of serving France in posts of honor belonged to all Frenchmen who could prove ability; and noble birth was no longer such proof.
The vast body of land that formerly belonged to the Church and the nobles had been appropriated by the State and sold. The titles had passed through many hands since 1793, and it was obviously as impracticable to restore the soil to its original owners as it would have been to undo the confiscations of the first Frankish conquerors of Gaul. The soil now belonged to its cultivators. There was freedom of agrarian contract for all classes, and the practical effect had been greatly to intensify the tendency to the breaking up of large estates; small peasant holdings became common.
No inequality of the old regime was more indefensible or more exasperating than the capricious incidence of taxation. The exemptions which formerly belonged to the nobles and clergy had disappeared. Taxation was uniform throughout the nation, and it would have been as hopeless to attempt to bring back the old unjust system as it would be to essay the reconstruction of an extinct geologic age.
The condition of the working classes had been greatly improved; wages had been raised on the average, estimated in purchasing power, to some two or three times what they had been before the Revolution; and in the country the peasants were now owners of the soil. The destruction of the old feudal restrictions and the equalization of taxation had given a better chance to the proverbial thrift of the French industrial masses, of which they had availed themselves eagerly and successfully. Here was a vast social revolution in itself, and one that could not go backward.
The old idea of vested property interests in public office, so that one might buy and sell and inherit a judgeship, for instance, had disappeared; and all sinecure offices, so numerous under Louis XVI, had also been destroyed. An exact and uniform system of law courts had been created, with regular appeal to a supreme body at Paris; and the law administered had also been made equal. The tangle of customs and conflicting statutes which excited the derision of Voltaire had been replaced by the systematic Codes which made law the same everywhere in France, and which at the same time made justice inexpensive and speedy.--Harry Pratt Judson, Europe in the Nineteenth Century.