In part 5 of the Revolutions series, Dominic Alexander outlines the role of the Parisian crowd in driving the events of the French Revolution

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 2: The English Revolution: the first civil war
Part 3: The English Revolution Completed
Part 4: The French Revolution: the road to revolution

May had been marked by food riots over wide swathes of northern France, and these grew closer to Paris as the summer drew on, with crowds in Lyons rising up and destroying the ring of toll gates around their city. Necker’s dismissal also angered bourgeois opinion; the Paris bourse shut itself in protest on 12 July, and thus credit for a government in deep fiscal crisis evaporated.

The Assembly debated the issue of bread prices, but the delegates were committed to the rising economic ideology of the day: free trade. Critics of the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution are fond of pointing out how few capitalists there were among the ‘revolutionaries’ of the Assembly, most being lawyers or officials. Thus they conclude, this could not have been a bourgeois revolution. However, the importance of the bourgeois class was such that its general social interests, particularly as expressed through the new science of political economy, formed the dominant political consciousness. A capitalist world view was hegemonic among wide middle-class layers, well beyond those individuals who were actually themselves capitalists. The supposed problem of the class leadership of the revolution disappears as soon as class is considered in properly relational terms.

The issue of economic intervention, versus free trade, would be a running sore throughout the years of the revolution, and lay underneath much of the factional strife and internecine bloodletting later on. For the moment, however, the Assembly simply did not reach a decision about food supplies, as bread prices reached their highest levels in twenty years. The people of Paris were not so paralysed by economic theory, and sensed that the king’s party at Court were preparing to make their move. Popular action was encouraged by an incident where German cavalry attacked some crowds in the Tuileries gardens. The soldiers withdrew in the evening, but in the meantime people in the city had busied themselves trying to find weapons with which to repel the expected royal onslaught.

Like their fellows in Lyons, the Parisian crowds set fire to the toll gates around the city, where levies on food imports into the city were raised, and demolished the customs wall. In the search for weapons, hidden stocks of grain were found. This seemed to prove the rumour of profiteering at the expense of the people. The search for weapons went on during the day of 13July, while an attempt by the Paris electors of the Estates General to form a militia to restore order failed, as no one dared to oppose the plebian fury. The French Guard was ordered against the crowds, but already having shown considerable insubordination, now simply went over to the people.

In their search for weapons, many had been gathered, while artisans had forged thousands of pikes for the people’s use, but the search for more went on. On 14 July, this brought the crowds to the gates of the fortress and prison called the Bastille. This fortress was a hated symbol of royal despotism, and was also suspected at this moment to be hiding forces prepared to massacre the citizens.^[i] Initially, negotiations for its surrender were attempted, but these broke down, and in an attempt at taking it, 100 people were shot dead by the Swiss Guards inside. At this point, more artisans from the suburbs and rebellious French Guards with cannon reinforced the existing crowd, and the drawbridge was forced, leading the Bastille’s commander to surrender.

Faced with this debacle in Paris, and news of rebellion breaking out across the country, the king had no choice but to retreat from the attempts to regain control. Necker and other ministers were restored to office, the troops were withdrawn from Paris, and the king himself appeared on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville with a tricolour cockade, the new symbol of the revolution. The Assembly’s attempt to create a militia to protect property against the plebian crowd resulted in the creation of the National Guard, whose members were meant to be drawn from the ranks of the propertied, but would later in 1792 include the lower classes as well.^[ii] Its political allegiances would be serially ambiguous.

The storming of the Bastille has become a leading celebratory symbol of the French Revolution, but it was just the beginning of the plebian revolution, which would peak again on 10 August 1792 and then May-June 1793.^[iii] The revolution in Paris began a cascade of events elsewhere throughout France which brought down the old royal administrative structure. City governments were replaced with new bodies, either elected or composed of electors to the Estates General. Things did not stop there, as the popular crowds which led the destruction of the old order in the provinces, also resisted attempts to restore ‘order’. In Le Havre, for example, the crowd took over cannons at the harbour to prevent the city garrison from being reinforced by a troop of 400 hussars. Demands to end taxation of wheat and bread also spread across the country.

The Great Fear

In the midst of upheaval, rumours grew that aristocrats with foreign allies would strike back against the revolution, and that a related wave of brigandage was threatening small peasant property. While the latter fear has usually been dismissed as a ‘chimera’, it was entirely rational to fear a violent response by the old order.^[iv] Whatever its origins, the peasant uprising which followed the fall of the Bastille destroyed castles and manors, and estate records were burned. There was nothing indiscriminate about this movement; it was targeted and organised at village level. The rumour-filled panic came a little later, and was largely separate from the revolt proper, but itself also spurred revolutionary organising in nearby towns.^[v] Feudal and lordly or seigneurial power, and the exactions still levied on the peasantry, were in practice overthrown by the rural revolt.^[vi]

On the 4 August, the demise of the old order was confirmed in law by the National Assembly, however, with the caveat that the peasants would have to pay redemptions over time for the feudal property rights that had been abolished. This condition would be largely impossible to meet for the poorer peasants. The power of the old regime in rural France was over, but the bourgeois property owners of the Assembly were not yet ready to countenance such a radical attack on what they saw as property rights, even of the aristocracy.

A new radical newspaper in Paris, written by one Jean-Paul Marat soon warned about the abolition decree, ‘Let us beware; they are seeking  to lull us to sleep, to deceive us … the faction of the aristocrats has always dominated the National Assembly, and the deputies of the people have always blindly followed the directions it has given them.’^[vii] It didn’t take long for the peasants to figure this out too, and by September, peasants in many places were organising to refuse payment of taxes and dues once more. The formal abolition of feudalism was accompanied by the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man, but at the very moment when the bourgeois ideas of legal equality reached this apotheosis, the expectations of what the Revolution was really about were clearly dividing on class lines, with the demands of the poor of the towns and countryside becoming increasingly terrifying for property owners of all kinds.

However, the political crisis at the centre had not abated. Despite vociferous popular opposition, the National Assembly had voted to allow the king a veto over legislation in the new Constitution. Meanwhile, bread prices were rising again in Paris, and groups of women were stopping grain convoys within the city, and making demands for closer control of prices and supplies.^[viii] The women of Paris were becoming the backbone of popular actions. In this volatile situation, the king summoned a hitherto well-disciplined regiment to Versailles, and on the basis of the security those troops seemed to offer him, he declared that he would only accept parts of the August declarations, and went further on 4 October, criticising the Declaration of Rights.

The women’s revolution

News of pointedly counterrevolutionary celebrations at Versailles at the reception of new more loyal troops set things alight once again, with Danton at the Cordeliers club calling for a march on Versailles.^[ix] The Cordeliers club was committed to a democratic constitution, and had a low membership fee, making it more open than even the Jacobins, so Danton’s call was met with enthusiasm. The tocsins were rung from church towers in Paris on 5 October. Crowds of women assembled at the markets, and marched together to the Hôtel de Ville, demanding bread, and then set off to Versailles dragging several cannons with them, along with other seized weapons.

First the demonstrators invaded the National Assembly, once again demanding bread and punishment for counterrevolutionaries. Placatory speeches in the National Assembly did not satisfy the women, who next invaded the royal palace. King Louis responded to this by formally approving the August decrees, but while this calmed things, it did not end entirely settle the crowds. Finally, the next morning, effectively at the demand of the protesters, the royal family, the court and its guards set off on a gigantic procession to Paris, where the National Assembly soon joined them. The king would never return to Versailles.

The first phase of the Revolution was completed by these events, but serious political divisions among the revolutionaries began to mount. Alarm at the ungovernability of the working people of Paris led to the passage of a decree of martial law, intended to bring order, and reassure property owners. It caused immediate and bitter dissent, not least from popular tribunes like Marat, whose continuous opposition eventually led to threats of his arrest. He was defended by Danton at the radical Cordeliers club. The radical deputy Robespierre also objected to the law.

One hero of the revolution so far, the Marquis de Lafayette, drew ever closer to the king’s party in the course of 1790, while the influence of the decidedly more radical Jacobin club grew. This club was named after the convent in Paris in which its meetings were held. By November 1790, over 200 provincial political clubs had sought affiliation with the Paris Jacobins.^[x] The Jacobin national network became an important conduit for the transmission of revolutionary programmes across the country. While political factions, still a long way from being political parties in the modern sense, were forming at the centre, disorders continued to erupt across France. In January 1790, twenty-two castles were destroyed in Brittany, and there were similar disturbances elsewhere. Evasion and refusal of taxes and redemption dues was so widespread that the National Assembly in the course of 1790-1 abolished them all, alongside tax privileges and special jurisdictions, to be replaced with more equitable, national direct taxes.^[xi]

Fissures between the deputies of the Assembly and the rebellious people of Paris also showed further signs of opening up as aspects of the new constitution were debated. Initially, there was to be a constitutional monarchy, but there was also the issue of who would be allowed to stand for a new legislative body, and who to vote for it. The plans were for indirect elections restricted by tax-paying status, restricting voting at the base level to ‘active’ citizens; men over 25 paying a minimum level of taxation. This restricted the electorate to about 4.3 million men out of a total population of twenty-eight million. A few radicals in the Assembly, such as Robespierre, objected, but the general view was that the propertyless (‘passive’ citizens) must be kept away from politics so that they would not have power over wealth. Only landowners would be eligible as candidates for the legislative assembly. The Assembly was clearly determined to remove the political system from the reach of the people who had rescued the revolution, and the National Assembly itself, during the events of 1789. The plans were, of course, vociferously denounced by the radical press.

The sans culottes

Nonetheless, there were new municipal elections in 1790, where the restrictions were less onerous, and it was enough to be an ‘active citizen’ to participate. This meant that artisans were able to enter into local administrations. Largely, however, the propertied classes were firmly in change here too. France was also divided into departments, sweeping away the old patchwork of particular jurisdictions into a new uniform structure, with cities divided into ‘sections’ for electoral and administrative purposes. The sections in Paris would become the basis for popular revolutionary organising in the coming years. Meanwhile, Marat, with his paper, L’ami du people, was a leading voice of radical and popular opinion in Paris, and in January 1790, an attempt to arrest him was thwarted by a crowd of poor sans culottes, and he was able to escape to London, returning to Paris in May.

The politicisation of the Paris sans culottes, as they began to be called, was deepened through the fraternal political societies that sprang up in the winter of 1790. The Cordeliers club was particularly connected to these. Women were allowed to take part and speak at the Cordeliers, and its minimal membership fee allowed many artisans to be active in it. The term sans culottes (referring to those who wore trousers rather than expensive breaches and hose) was in effect a class term, in that it pitted poor, working people against the propertied and wealthy. Strictly speaking it joined together relatively disparate groups of wage workers, artisans, shopkeepers, and small traders. It did not refer to a working class or proletariat in modern, industrial terms, but it did act as a unifying epithet for the plebian classes of the time.

The nature of the class divide between the property owners of the Assembly and the sans culottes was made clear, not only by the recurring issue of food prices, but through the abolition of guilds in March 1791. This was part of the clearing away of the social structures of feudal privilege, but it also opened the way for workers to start organising, encouraged by the radical political clubs. By June, the National Assembly felt it had to intervene on behalf of employers, so it legislated against workers’ organisations and banned industrial action of any kind. This example of anti-worker bourgeois legislation would stand for the next 73 years.^[xii]

The other major faultline which opened up in the course of 1790 was the secularisation of the state, and the Assembly’s attack on the clergy. A major reason for this conflict, which at points would threaten to derail the revolution entirely, was the fiscal crisis which was far from being solved. The solution was to confiscate the property of the Church, and use it to back a new paper currency. The confiscation of property inevitably meant the closing of religious houses, and a confrontation with the Catholic Church as a whole. In late November 1790, the Assembly decreed that all clergy would have to swear an oath of loyalty to the new regime, which most refused. By March 1791 relations with the Vatican had broken down entirely, with the Pope condemning the civil constitution of the clergy. On the one hand, this confrontation had the effect of creating a widespread base for a counterrevolutionary party, but on the other it strengthened the Jacobin clubs’ support across the country.

Division and disarray

Throughout this period, there were both real and imagined counterrevolutionary plots from within France, and from émigré aristocrats without, who were particularly active in trying to engineer foreign intervention against the revolution. Distrust of the attitudes and possible plans of the royal court ratcheted tensions ever higher. It was in this context that the royal family made its ill-fated escape attempt in June 1791. This came to grief when the king was recognised by the postmaster in a small town, who roused the National Guard. The fugitives were quickly arrested. Eric Hazan comments that this debacle, and the collapse of ‘all the aristocratic plots was undoubtedly due to the failure to grasp the transformation that had taken place in popular mentality and organisation’ throughout France.^[xiii] Worse for the king, he had left a letter denouncing almost all the changes from 1789 onwards, confirming the darkest suspicions about his hostility to the revolution.

On being returned to Paris, the king’s constitutional powers were suspended. However, the long gap between this event, the declaration of a republic in September 1792, and the trial and execution of the king, was the product of the increasing breakdown of consensus within the leadership of the revolution. Many feared that the deposition of the king would mean a difficult regency at best, or worst handing greater power to the popular forces which most had been increasingly concerned to contain and neutralise. The king was suspended from all his legal functions, but absolved of blame for the escape and the letter. Most deputies were so insistent on maintaining the monarchy in some form that the Assembly was willing to twist and turn endlessly to justify it.^[xiv]

There was division too among the Jacobin clubs, which now numbered over 900 and had grown further in strength. Over sixty called for a trial of the king, and a few went so far as to call for a republic. The Cordeliers club was calling for a republic, and organised, together with a small republican group, an invasion of the Jacobin club in Paris with a crowd of 4,000 calling for joint action against the Assembly’s conciliatory treatment of the king. The result was a split among the Jacobins with the majority, including Lafayette and Antoine Barnave, leaving to establish the constitutional-monarchist Feuillant club in a sharp move to the right.

Of the National Assembly deputies, only Robespierre and three others remained in the Jacobins. However, the radicals moved forward with a petition-style manifesto culminating in a demonstration of about 20,000 at the Champ de Mars, where the crowd had been driven by Lafayette and the National Guard, using the martial law decree of October 1789. The situation deteriorated and ended with a massacre of the unarmed demonstrators (who were accused also of lynching two men suspected of being spies). Estimates of the slain range from a dozen to 400.^[xv] The massacre of the Champ de Mars would become emblematic for the Parisian sans culottes.

In the wake of this opening up of violence between different sides of the revolution, the National Assembly began to try to construct a more conservative order, limiting rights to free expression and assembly, including restricting the right to join political societies to ‘active citizens’. The revolutionary ideal of citizens’ equality was sacrificed to the greater ideal of the protection of bourgeois property.

The final months of the National Assembly saw further discreditable decisions, such as the one allowing the legality of slavery in French colonies. Deputies hoped that at its dissolution, and the King’s acceptance of the newly agreed constitution, the revolution would be over. In October 1791, a new Legislative Assembly assembled after elections, returning a body of whom a third were constitutional monarchists who affiliated to the Feuillants, with a larger body of waverers between them and the Jacobin left. However, an assembly dominated by moderates and lawyers was not enough for stability, particularly as food prices were rising again, along with shortages of coffee and sugar, partly due to the slave revolution in Haiti. Meanwhile, the paper currency was falling, dropping to 60% of its face value by the spring of 1792. Even worse, the long-feared foreign intervention began to loom when Austria and Prussia signed a convention for an invasion to protect the French monarchy. Counterrevolutionaries were seizing this weak point of the revolution to foment revolt.

War and the fédérés

Plebian and peasant revolutionary energy had not, however, dissipated. Food riots began to break out, and there was a renewed wave of sackings of chateaux, usually those of aristocratic émigrés, often supported, remarkably enough, by the National Guard. This wave was sparked in particular by decisions of the Assembly concerning redemption payments for feudal rights. In the mounting chaos, the Assembly stuck by its monarchism, and still refused to abolish all feudal rights without compensation, despite its wish to calm peasant anger.

The Assembly’s solution to its problems was to declare war on the Holy Roman Empire, that is, Austria. Up to this point, it was unlikely that Austria and Prussia were going to activate their convention against revolutionary France, and the Assembly knew this, but a ‘people’s war’ seemed like the best way to unite France and quell disorders. Even among the Jacobins, only Robespierre and his allies spoke against the war, with a pro-war party forming around Jacques-Pierre Brissot. His faction would later on become known as the ‘Girondins’.^[xvi] The royal court also supported the war, in the hope that defeat for the Assembly’s army would rescue them.

Robespierre’s objections, however, contained a lesson that would have been well worth heeding: ‘The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution. No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.’^[xvii]

The war went very badly for the Assembly, with regular troops defecting to the Austrians, and early defeats leading the generals to declare that France must sue for peace. Aristocratic members of the king’s guard were seen openly celebrating the military defeats. The king himself vetoed several decisions of the Assembly. Lafayette’s advice to the king, read out to the Assembly, amounted to a call for a counterrevolutionary coup, but Brissot’s faction balked at this, and attacked Lafayette as a threat to liberty. Still, the Assembly was otherwise indecisive.

A demonstration of 10,000 people in defence of the revolution was reluctantly received by the Assembly, and then it passed onwards to invade the Tuileries, the royal palace in Paris, where the king was held captive for several hours, but while he agreed to wear the red liberty cap, he refused to renounce his veto over legislation. Eventually the mayor of Paris and a delegation from the Assembly arrived and were able to disperse the crowd. This was a defeat for the cause of the sans culottes, and was used by Lafayette and others to attack the Jacobins as ‘tyrannising’ citizens and planning atrocities. Brissot’s Girondin faction criticised the king, but feared that deposing him would release an irresistible popular movement. On 11 July 1792, the Assembly finally declared la patrie en danger. In response, at the Jacobin club, Robespierre called for the dismissal of both the king and the Assembly as having betrayed the nation, and demanded a new election based on genuine universal suffrage.

The Assembly’s plan to call for volunteer troops to defend the country, even though it had been vetoed by the king, was underway nonetheless, and many of these fédérés (so called because they were federated to the Parisian National Guard),^[xviii] were already travelling to Paris, including a battalion from Marseilles, singing the newly written song ‘La Marseillaise’, and spreading it as a revolutionary favourite. Once they reached Paris, about a thousand stayed, helped to find lodgings by the Jacobins, and presented a petition to the Assembly demanding the deposition of the king. In Paris itself, the sections had established in August a central meeting body of section commissioners, that was to play a major role in the events to come. Several sections in late July and early August demanded the deposition of the king, and a petition also demanding the arrest of Lafayette and the dismissal of the army general staff.

Meanwhile, the Austrian and Prussian armies announced jointly that if the slightest ‘violence or outrage’ was done to the royal family, then Paris would face ‘total destruction, and rebels given the punishment they deserved’.^[xix] If the French Revolution has a reputation for popular violence, especially after this point, it was not least due to threats like this, and previous massacres by the authorities. These created a climate of dread and fear, and an entirely rational determination to crush the revolution’s enemies decisively, lest they return to wreck bloody havoc.

[i] Rudé, French Revolution, p.54.

[ii] Soboul, Short History, pp.52-3.

[iii] Hazan, People’s History, p.71.

[iv] Soboul, Short History, p.42; Hazan, People’s History, p.75.

[v] Rudé, French Revolution, pp.47-9.

[vi] Soboul, Short History, pp.21-2.

[vii] Hazan, People’s History, p.78.

[viii] Doyle, History, p.121.

[ix] Rudé, French Revolution, p.46.

[x] Doyle, History, p.142.

[xi] ibid. pp.130-131.

[xii] ibid. p.149.

[xiii] Hazan, People’s History, p.125.

[xiv] Doyle, History, pp.152-3.

[xv] Hazan, People’s History, p.132, Doyle, History, p.154.

[xvi] Hazan, People’s History, pp.153-6.

[xvii] ibid, p.155.

[xviii] Soboul, Short History, p.53

[xix] Hazan, People’s History, p.170.