In part 4 of the Great Revolutions series, Dominic Alexander examines the events that led to the French Revolution

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 2: The English Revolution: the first civil war
Part 3: The English Revolution Completed

Like the English Revolution almost 150 years before it, the French Revolution began with a crisis within the state and the ruling class. England’s revolution had led to the unleashing of capitalist development, and thus to its rise as a great power in Europe. Much of the eighteenth century passed in wars between France and Britain and their respective allies. Britain’s prosperity enabled it to weather the cost of these wars, and even bankroll the rise of the Prussian military machine as a continental balance against France and its allies. Conversely, the French state had been drained dry by the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and then its intervention in the American War of Independence (1775 – 1783), where it had sought to take advantage of the opportunity for revenge for British victory in the former war.

The English Revolution had been preceded by the intellectual turmoil of the Reformation, but in the case of the French, the Enlightenment provided political ideas more directly as alternatives to the current regime. Nonetheless, it was not ideas which brought down the Old Regime, but the financial crisis stemming from its wars. After various political and fiscal manoeuvres, King Louis XVI was forced to call a royally handpicked Assembly of Notables in January 1787 to agree to reforms of the state, and the raising of new loans. The idea was that a carefully controlled body would do as the King and his finance minister, the Comptroller General, Calonne, wanted. However, the landowners and wealthy clergy that were convened in this body raised objections to the measures which would affect their power and wealth. Attempts to rile wider public opinion against the notables fell flat and the King was forced to dismiss his finance minister.^[i] Like the English Revolution, the French therefore began with an aristocratic revolt: the ruling class itself was bitterly divided over how to restructure its position of dominance.

The fallout from the failure of the Assembly of Notables was firstly, increased public awareness of the extent of the state’s fiscal problems, fuelling the growth of calls for an Estates General (a parliament of sorts, which had not been called since 1614), and secondly an explosion of pollical pamphlets. Moreover, the highest courts of the kingdom, known as the parlements (not to be confused with English parliaments, these were thirteen appeal courts filled with the noblesse de robe, whose offices were either bought or inherited), were now in the position to be required to accept the policies which had been put forward by Calonne, but rejected by the Assembly of Notables. The parlements wanted to preserve aristocratic tax privileges, against royal attempts to reform these in the interests of the states’ fiscal needs, while keeping an appearance of defending the public interest.^[ii]

The king vs the parlements

This tricky situation wasn’t initially a problem, with the parlement of Paris passing measures such as free trade in grain and the commutation of the corvée (feudal labour dues) into a tax. The parlement of Bourdeaux raised some difficulties, but it was the parlement of Paris, the most senior of these bodies, which really deepened the crisis with its refusal to register the government’s tax plans unless the royal accounts were revealed. The king refused this, but parlement declared that only an Estates General could approve the government’s permanent changes to the tax regime. The approval of the public for the parlement’s stance was marked by great crowds at its meeting, while the aristocratic salons urged the parlement on in its opposition. With the mushrooming of political clubs and pamphlets, and broadsheets being published at a rate of one a day, the government decided to impose its new tax laws with the absolutist manoeuvre of a lit de justice held at Versailles, ‘away from the rebellious atmosphere of the capital’.^[iii] Having to retreat from Paris to pass new laws effectively by decree was itself an ominous sign of the crisis of the king’s authority.

The response to the king was an escalation in the size of the crowd gathered around the parlement when it met. The parlement responded to the crowds by declaring the forced registration of the new laws void, and a few days later re-iterated this position as well as deciding to proceed against Calonne for criminal mismanagement of the kingdom’s finances. The king’s response, a standard one in conflicts between the monarchy and the parlements, was to exile it to Troyes, over 100 miles away. This produced mass protests in Paris, and ‘incredible’ abuse of the king and queen, according to an English observer, but the officials of the parlement obeyed, thinking this would be temporary and would end with compromise. However, the royal court was determined to regain control of the situation, and banned political clubs in Paris, ordered booksellers to supress unauthorised publications, and had troops patrol the streets of the capital.

The government, feeling it had the upper hand, now offered a compromise deal, which the Paris parlement accepted, but the public reaction was disgust with both the government and the parlement. Provincial parlements also resented their Parisian colleagues’ climbdown after they had supported Paris, particularly Bourdeaux, which had also been exiled from its usual seat. The king convened a special Royal Session of the parlement to institute the new reforms, which would include the granting of civil rights to French Protestants.  However, Louis overreached himself at the session, acting as if it were another lit de justice, clearly hoping thereby to reassert the principle of his absolutism, declaring ‘it’s legal because I wish it’.^[iv]

This was more than clumsy mismanagement, as some historians suggest. It was an incendiary thing for the king to say at this stage.  The country was generally in uproar over the very issue of royal despotism, so for the king to assert it so baldly just blew open what was the real source of the conflict so far. Equally, however, the king and his closest advisors no doubt believed this was precisely the moment to reassert the supremacy of the monarchy over law making in the state.

The parlement registered the king’s programme, but continued to sit after he had left, and then disassociated itself from the registration. There followed a series of moves and counter moves that escalated the challenge to the authority of both sides, and by April of 1788, rumours had spread that the parlements were to be remodelled. The Paris parlement defended its centrality to the law of France, and then forbade tax collectors to collect the main new tax registered in the special session late the previous year. The parlement went on to assert that only an Estates General could grant new subsidies to the king, and that all Frenchmen were free from arbitrary arrest.

The king attempted to regain control by having two judges arrested, and then through a new lit de justice where the parlement’s powers to resist royal decrees were to be abrogated. This was attended by troops surrounding the palace of justice, but also with swelling protests. In the face of these, lower courts in Paris refused to register the new laws, and provincial courts insisted on remaining in session, despite an order for them to recess. The Bourdeaux parlement returned to its usual seat, accompanied by very lively popular demonstrations, which included fireworks. In Grenoble, in June, the military governor attempted to supress the provincial parlement, but in response there were serious riots. Four people were killed, while citizens bombarded troops from the rooftops with tiles.^[v] In Rennes, the authorities lost control of the city, as the military chose not to fire upon protestors, and rumours spread throughout the country that very many officers were opposed to the government and its actions. The weight of public discontent was increasingly affecting the decisions made, not just by the government itself, but down through the layers of authority.

Crisis escalates

By this point, it was accepted even in the government that an Estates General would have to be called, but then a terrible harvest, and the financial chaos of the months of crisis, brought the state to actual bankruptcy, amid a run on the largest bank, and a forced loan on the state’s creditors. The leading minister resigned, and the new incumbent, Necker, a popular previous Chief Minister, made it clear he was a placeholder until the Estates General convened: ‘The bankruptcy of the monarchy was therefore not only financial, but political and intellectual, too. It had collapsed in every sense, leaving an enormous vacuum of power.’^[vi]

In fact, such a situation was not entirely unprecedented in French history, since in the mid-seventeenth century, roughly contemporary with the English Revolution, France underwent a collapse of royal authority, and a period of unrest amounting at times to a state of civil war, known as the Fronde (1648-53). In the end, there were too many divisions among opponents of royal power, and a lack of any radical social alliance which could have imposed a new settlement along the lines of the English republic under Cromwell. The monarchy was able to restore its authority, and even move towards a reinvigorated absolutism during the rest of the century. No doubt many in the court hoped that the collapse in 1788 would be similarly temporary. That it was not owes most to the actions of the plebian crowds in Paris and the provinces in 1789 onwards.

The fiscal crisis of 1788 was exacerbated by the decision to remove all restrictions on the grain trade, which dissipated the surpluses from previous good harvests. This was only the first time during the revolutionary period that the issue of free trade would prove politically combustible, even though, among the wealthier classes, there was an overwhelming consensus in its favour. Trade controls were re-imposed by Necker in August 1788, but this was too late, and the rise in food prices meant that the proportion of earnings spent on bread by urban workers and landless peasants went up from a range of a third to a half of wages to a range of two-thirds to nine-tenths. The resultant collapse in demand had knock-on effects for industry, particularly textiles, and the economy went into deep recession.

Disorders brought troops into the streets, who killed and wounded many. The crowds had also begun to make pointed political interventions, at one point forcing those inside coaches (wealthier people) to stop, alight and bow to a statue of the ‘good’ King Henry IV (1589-1610), and otherwise assaulting symbols of authority. Economic desperation does not by any means invariably lead to political expression, and that it did in this case was due to the palpable possibility of radical change.

The government’s weakness led Necker to react to the growing unrest by releasing all journalists who had been imprisoned for writing against the government, and signalled an end to the normal censorship regime. Yet troops continued to fire upon and kill protestors, even while political clubs were permitted to reopen. Government policy at this point was, at best, hapless. Necker also sent an edict for the parlements to register for the Estates General to meet in January 1789. However, this immediately led to more political complications, since many were worried that the government would engineer the Estates to be a docile body. Related to this was the question of its composition.

Electoral struggles

The previous iterations of the Estates General had been ordered into three separate groups, the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobility), and the Third Estate (everyone else). As the Estates voted by social order, the First and Second Estates would always outvote the Third by two to one. This, in the Middle Ages, ensured the dominance of the feudal ruling class. However, the Third Estate now represented a very diverse social landscape, from wealthy merchants and capitalists to the notables of urban guilds, artisans, and the urban working poor, as well as the ranks of rural peasantry. The wealthier of these ranks had considerable social weight, and indeed the state needed loans from Third Estate financiers to restore government finances. The growing urban disorder also showed that the poor and artisans in the towns would have to be placated as well.

Conflict also broke out between social classes over the various suggestions for how the Estates should be configured. In Brittany, the nobility refused any reform which would dilute their privileges in favour of the Third Estate. In the ensuing uproar, they had to fight their way out of their meeting hall with swords, killing several of the protestors who had surrounded their assembly, demanding support for the Third Estate’s agenda. Elsewhere, there was similar unrest. Leaders of the Third Estate began to emerge, most of them lawyers, whose profession gave them more experiences of public life than others. Among these emerging in the provinces was one Maximilien Robespierre. One nobleman complained in his diary that ‘everything would have been calm in Franche Comté if ten advocates [lawyers] had been hanged.’^[vii]

Despite the leadership being mostly drawn from a narrow section of the Third Estate, the preparations for the Assembly involved much wider layers of people, even down to village level. Cahiers de doléances, books of grievances, were drawn up recording the concerns of most of the population, and what they most wanted the king to hear and remedy. These cahiers also acted as a guide to the delegates to the Estates General on how they should represent their electors. Despite the conservative and complex nature of the rules around the elections to this assembly (the first level of election selected the ‘electors’ who in turn voted for the actual representatives), it wasn’t only the wealthiest who were chosen. Even among the nobility, the lesser nobility swamped the great magnates, and among the clergy, lowly parish priests were strongly represented in their Estate, compared to the powerful church hierarchy. This would significantly affect how each Estate would behave later.

The drawing up of the cahiers, however, was another occasion for disorders. In Paris, a rumour spread that manufacturers were calling for wages to be slashed, and in one district, troops were overwhelmed by rioters who sacked the house and factory of a wallpaper maker named Réveillon, shouting ‘down with the rich’. Twenty-five were killed by the troops sent in to restore order.^[viii] In Marseilles, property owners were so concerned at the inability of the authorities to maintain control, that the electors of the three Estates cooperated to take over the city government, and set up a militia composed of wealthier citizens.^[ix] Accounts of French revolutions tend to concentrate on Paris, as the centre of power, but it is important to recall that at this stage, towns across France, particularly those that were seats of parlements, were in an uproar. Class conflicts were brimming over, and the old order was dissolving even as the Estates General assembled at Versailles.

The extent of the collapse of elite authority was particularly exemplified by the result of the elections to the First Estate, the representatives of the Church. In normal times, the hierarchy, archbishops, bishops, abbots and so on, dominated Church affairs. However, two-thirds of the representatives in the Estates General were ordinary parish priests; the hierarchy no longer had the support and confidence of the body of the clergy. The clerical cahiers also demanded radical reforms to the economic structures of the Church. This situation paved the way for an alliance with the Third Estate, during the height of revolutionary unity. The course of the revolution, and its increasing anticlericalism, would drive many of the lesser clergy into opposition, but for the moment unity was in the ascendant. The higher nobility did better in elections to the Second Estate, but the Third was dominated by lawyers and officials. Workers, artisans and the poor would make themselves heard on the street rather than in the assembly.

The Estates General

On the second day of the meeting of the Estates General at Versailles, the location of the major royal palace in May 1789, the Third Estate, soon calling itself ‘the Commons’,^[x] voted that it would not conduct any business as a separate body from the first two Estates, and called for the representatives of the clergy and nobility to join them in a single assembly where voting would be carried out by individual deputy rather than by each whole Estate. The unwillingness of the clergy and nobility to accept this eventually drove the Third Estate into unilateral and illegal action, declaring itself to be the National Assembly on 10 June. All this was done with a boisterous audience of the Parisian crowd, who flocked to Versailles and encouraged the deputies onward. These crowds clearly represented wider public opinion.^[xi] At first three clerics, and then more, came over to the Assembly in the following days. On 17 June, this new National Assembly declared all existing taxes illegal, but provisionally legal unless the Assembly was dissolved. This was a calculated act against royal power, effectively calling for a tax strike if the king tried to act against it, which possibility loomed large with Swiss and German-recruited regiments assembled around Versailles.^[xii]

The king did indeed react, attempting to regain control by calling a Royal Session of the Estates where he planned to revoke the Third Estates’ decisions, but first, the doors of the assembly hall were shut against the deputies on the morning of 20 June. The result of this action was the famous Tennis Court Oath: the deputies gathered at the royal tennis court at Versailles, surrounded by crowds angry at the royal coup, and collectively swore to assemble wherever they could until a new constitution had been settled on France. The Royal Session followed a few days later, with troops massed around the hall, and every effort made to emphasise the inferior status of the Third Estate.^[xiii] The king did offer some genuine reforms, but finished with a threat that no decision was valid without his approval. When the deputies were commanded to disperse, the nobility and clergy, except those who had already gone over to the Third Estate, obediently filed out, but the ‘National Assembly’ refused to do so.

As news of these events filtered into Paris, there was uproar, and crowds roaming through Versailles even invaded the palace, with the troops uncertain and paralysed. The Archbishop of Paris had to be rescued by the soldiers, but others in the city, who only months before had shot down rioters, now refused to take action against the crowds. Some were gathering in public places and shouting ‘Vive le Roi, vive le Tiers’, couching their opposition in conventionally loyal terms. However, even foreign regiments were assuring Parisians that if ordered to march on the city, they would disable their muskets.^[xiv] Still in the midst of a fiscal crisis, the absolute monarchy was now at the mercy of both plebian anger and bourgeois economic power.

The king and his court had no more room for manoeuvre, and on 27 June, Louis invited those clergy and nobility who had not yet joined the Third Estate to do so, and the resultant body took the name of the Constituent Assembly on 9 July. Even the deputies of the Third Estate were worried by the scale and vehemence of the popular movement which had, as much as anything, driven these events, and hoped for a calm period in which to construct a constitution.

Despite the king’s capitulation on 27 June, things remained tense. On 30 June, a crowd of 4000 people broke into a prison where a group of mutinous French Guards were being held, and freed them. The Court was still plotting to regain control of events, and people knew it, not least from the intimidating movements of troops into position around Paris. So, when the popular minister Necker was abruptly dismissed, the crowds erupted. Necker was not only known to have been a long-standing advocate of major reforms, but had also been doing his best to keep Paris well-supplied with food, during a period of shortages and high prices.

[i] William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: OUP 1989), p.73.

[ii] Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution (Los Angeles: University of California Press 1977),p.12.

[iii] Doyle, History, p.76.

[iv] ibid. p.80.

[v] ibid. p.83.

[vi] ibid. p.85.

[vii] ibid. p.95.

[viii] While Doyle says 25 were killed dismissing larger numbers as ‘rumours’, but Eric Hazan maintains that 300 were killed alongside twelve on the soldiers’ side.  See Eric Hazan, A People’s History of the French Revolution (London: Verso 2012), p.53.

[ix] Doyle, History, p.98.

[x] ‘Les communes’: this can refer to the basic layer of local government, or just possibly to the English ‘House of Commons’. The English structure of constitutional monarchy was a popular model among many deputies.

[xi] Doyle, History, p.103.

[xii] Hazan, People’s History, pp.61-2.

[xiii] George Rudé, The French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1996), pp.40-1.

[xiv] Doyle, History, p.107; Hazan, People’s History, p.65.