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The French Revolution Mark Philp

Explore the significant events and key figures of the French Revolution, including the Estates General, Tennis Court Oath, Bastille Storming, and the Declaration of Rights. Understand the revolution's impact on society, politics, and governance.

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The French Revolution Mark Philp

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  1. The French Revolution Mark Philp

  2. Revolution

  3. Revolution as circular Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth Re: the events of the English Civil War were a revolution in the sense of: ‘a circular motion of the sovereign power through two usurpers of the late King to his son.’ Similarly: the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was seen by many as a restoration of the true constitution (and religion) of England.

  4. Revolution as progressive

  5. Revolution was descriptive, tended to be ex-post (rather than an ex ante category of agency), and was dominated by the combined meanings of political disturbance and the restoration of an order. • Only some time after the French Revolution, was it (for some) associated with progressive and irreversible change. In the 19th C it became a category of agency (esp 1848), and it connoted fundamental change of more than the strictly political order.

  6. Early to mid 19th c thinkers • Marx: progressive change from feudal to capitalist; fundamental change in class relations • Tocqueville: progressive advance of the equalisation of constitution and the move from aristocratic to democratic orders. • J. S. Mill: an age of transition from rule by aristocracy and property to rule by those with the ability. • Each also saw the Fr. Revn as the inauguration of an era they identified as ‘modern’ and as distinct from the ‘ancien regime’.

  7. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

  8. Basic version • In the spring of 1789 following the convening of the Estates General, in May 1789, the representatives of the people challenged the monarchy and dramatically limited its powers, forced the unification of the EG in a National Assembly (17-27 June; and brought the king and his family from Versailles to Paris in October. • Popular forces destroyed the Bastille (14th July 1789) and thereby the oppressive power of the monarchy. • Privilege and the aristocracy were abolished (Night of 4th August) • The revolution became more extreme in 1792-4 with the September massacres and the creation of the Committee of Public Safety. • The King and Queen were executed along with thousands of others between 1793 and 1794. A republic was declared. • Robespierre, Danton, Marat and others ruled as tyrants, only to be turned on and killed in turn, eventually re-establishing order • Napoleon rose through the ranks of the army and re-built strong central control until 1814, when Louis’s brother Louis XVIII was returned to the throne by Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia.

  9. The Estates General • Those who Pray – the Clergy • Those who Fight – the Nobility (and those who administer) • And Those who work – the Third Estate – some 85% of the population

  10. how did we get to the Estates General ? • Meets for the first time (since 1641) in May 1789. • Louis agreed to convoke it in November 1787 • The rejection of new taxes by the parlementof Paris (July-Oct 1787) • Follows the failure of Assembly of Notables to agree new taxes (Feb- Apr 1787) • And that follows impending state bankruptcy in December 1786 following the expiry of existing revenue agreements from 1782.

  11. Meeting of the Estates General May 1789

  12. Tennis Court Oath - 20 June 1789

  13. Storming of the Bastille July 14, 1789

  14. The Great Fear and Municipal Revolt • 20July to 4 August Poor wine harvest Food distribution problems Raised expectations from Cahiers des Doleances Defiance of tax and dues collectors Fear of reassertion of control Panic in the countryside Wild rumours of aristocratic rear-guard action Attack on aristocrat records • July to September Urban upheavals affected rural Urban centres sensing collapse of Paris’s authority Bread crises Following Necker’s dismissal – fear of reaction. Self of property owners and commercial interests appointed committees Exclusion of trad. elites from local power

  15. Night of Aug 4, 1789 • Renunciation of Feudal privilege • Seigneurial rights over persons • Seigneurial rights on property (redeemable) • Tithes, • Hunting rights • Corvées • Seigneurial justice • Venality of office • Special provincial and municipal privileges

  16. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen August 26,1789

  17. The Declaration of Rights, 1789 natural, unalienable and sacred (preface) Men are born and remain free and equal in rights (art. 1) Liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression (art. 2)

  18. more… • No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views… (art. 10) • The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious the rights of man. Every citizen may speak, write and print with freedom (art. 11) • Property is an inviolable and sacred right… (art. 17)

  19. The principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation (art. 3) • Law is the expression of the general will (art. 6) • The law shall provide such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary… (art. 8)

  20. French Constitution • National Assembly agrees to est. a constitutional committee 6 July 1789 and calls itself the ‘Constituent Assembly’ • 10 Sept Constituent Assembly rejects bicameralism • 11Sept rejects absolute veto, grants a suspensive one • 1 Oct est. Constitutional Monarchy with separation of powers • Journées of 5-6 October • 9 Oct move of Constituent Assembly to Paris

  21. Women’s Bread March, October 5-6, 1789 Brings King and Queen from Versailles to Paris

  22. Flight of the King to Varennes, 1791

  23. Massacre on the Champs de mars, July 1791

  24. Fall of the Monarchy August 10, 1792

  25. Execution of Louis XVI January 21, 1793

  26. Maximilien Robespierre, Jacobin and member of the Committee of Public Safety

  27. If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs. Robespierre, February 1794 (Year II)

  28. Explaining the Revolution What’s the explanandum? • 1789, 1789-1792, 1789-1794, 1789-1797, 1789-1803, 1789-1814/15, 1786-1815, 1786-1830 etc. • Political revolution: absolute monarchy to some form of representative government, to autocracy under Napoleon • Social revolution: move from feudal order to modern commercial society

  29. Theda Skocpol: States and Social Revolutions (1979) 1. Structural conditions i. Economic conditions: economic instability; restraint on industrial development; poor extractive capacity. ii. Class Action: growing peasant unrest; strains between peasantry and nobility; worsened by sense of injustice in tax burdens. Towns less burdened by still considerable direct crown control and variable privileges.

  30. iii. Class structure (Abbe Expilly, 1780): clergy .8% nobility .3% soldiers 1.3% judicial and financial officials 1.2% prof. drs, Lawyers .4% commerce, financiers, artisans 16.9% sailors and riverfolk 1.4% farmers,peasants with livestock 8.8% winegrowers and workers 18.7% wage-earners, day labourers 41.4% servants 8.1% Regional calculations: artisans, wage earners and servants = Arles 85% Caen 75% Grenoble 60% Pau 82% Bordeaux 72% Dijon 57% Montauban 73% Rouen 82%

  31. 2. Extractive and Repressive Capacities of the State Extractive: High financial needs to pay interest and repay debts, fuelled by wars in Europe, and America – but no stable means of enforcing extraction except against those least able to pay. Dec 1789 assignats and sale of Church lands. Repressive: weak police system, large army closely linked to aristocracy, dependence on elite troops (Swiss Guard) with little investment in the State. Paris vs France

  32. 3. External Ec, Pol and Ideological Pressures 1. Economic – main fiscal burdens imposed by a string of foreign wars – additional pressure from emigrés 2. Political – Emigrés; Colonial uprisings (St Domingue); Pillnitz Declaration (Aug 1791);Brunswick Proclamation July 1792 3. Ideological: colonies; crowned heads of Europe vs people of France

  33. Subjective conditions I:Positive Enlightenment ideas religious scepticism materialism confidence in rationality and reason undercutting of traditional authorities – church, state, family republicanism careers open to talents attack on nobility

  34. 4. Subjective conditions II: Negative – hostility to prevailing order – scurrility?

  35. Skocpol: • 1. the outcomes of revolutions are not those intended by any agent • 2. the colapse of ancien régimes are not the product of actions of revolutionaries • 3. Objective revolutionary situations – a necessary condition for revolutions, are never the causal product of acts of revolutionaries • John Dunn, ‘Understanding revolutions’ in his Rethinking Modern Political Theory (CUP, 1985)

  36. Reactions I ‘How much the greatest event that has happened in the history of the world, and how much the best.’ Charles James Fox, 1789 ‘I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment in the human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominance of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.’ Richard Price, 1789 The catching up thesis!

  37. Reactions II • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) • Abbe Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Jacobinisme (1797) • Revolution as the outcome of a conspiracy of unscrupulousousintellectuals, ambitous for power, whodrove a civilizedorderintobarbarism and chaos. Epitomized in : • The assault on the Roman Catholic Church • The efficient slaughter by the Parisian mob (September Massacres,1792) Civil war in various parts of France • Emigration of the elite • Pantheon – cult of Enlightenment national heroes Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Marat • Festival of the Supreme Being • Revolutionary Calendar • The Great Terror September 1793- August 1794

  38. Pantheon, Paris

  39. Festival of the supreme being June 1794

  40. Revolutionary Calendar

  41. The Great Terror • Arrest of Girondins 2 June 1793 • Assassination of Marat 13 July 1793 • 4-5 Sept 1793 – Terror is the order of the day • 31 Oct 1793 Girondins executed • March 1794 Hérbertistes executed • 13-16 April Dantonists executed • 28-30 July 105 Robespierristes executed c. 40,000 executed

  42. What went wrong? Thesis of circumstances Flight of the king (1791) War with Europe (1792-93) Thesis of counterrevolution ‘There can be no revolution without counter-revolution’ Arno Mayer, The Furies (2000) Thesis of the Enlightenment? Ideological ‘cancer-cells’?

  43. Revolution and the 19th Century • France did not lapse back into the Old Regime, even though it came close to doing so in the 1820s (Charles X) • Rise of ‘altar and throne’ discourses, mixed with nationalism • Subsequent revolutions of 1830,1848 and Paris Commune of 1871 • Rev’n remained deeply contested – Marseillaise banned into 1880s – and revolutionary issues constantly re-fought. • Marx – 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon • Lenin’s langauage theorising the possibilities for and the events of the Russian Revolution – especially Thermidor (overthrow of Robespierre)

  44. Liberal Cold War Views • American Revolution – a good revolution • Negative rights (limited government) • Unconcerned with general will, collective sovereignty • ‘Liberal’ political economy • Popular but elite led • French Revolution – inherently unstable • Positive rights (pro-active state) • Popular sovereignty • Social and economic rights, social equality… • Popular, but out of control

  45. Explaining the French Revolution • As a social (bourgeois) revolution • As a political revolution – failures of Louis and nobility • As a geopolitical phenomenon – the result of a collapsing and transforming European order orchestrated around the people in arms • As a cultural and intellectual revolution – transformation of public sphere, enlightenment utopianism/rationalism

  46. The modern significance of the French Revolution • In France revolutionary terms are still used to describe much 19th 20th and 21st history – political left and right – the Jacobin state - reaction – thermidor - red and white terrors – Brumaire – Bonnet Rouge. • Dawn of the Modern world in which the people are an active force - for good or ill! • Remains deeply contested: and what it was and what explains it are important to understand where we now are.

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