CAIE A-Level History

The French Revolution grew out of a monarchy that could not pay its debts and could not reform itself, in a society where tax fell on the people least able to bear it. The Revolution then moved from a reforming movement in 1789 to a republic in 1792, and the reasons for each step differ.

The Ancien Régime

France in 1774 was an absolute monarchy. Louis XVI, who came to the throne that year, ruled by divine right and held the power to make law, declare war and appoint ministers. In practice royal government was a patchwork: the king's ministers and the intendants who represented him in the provinces worked beside the regional law courts, the parlements, which had to register royal edicts before they took effect and which used that power to block reforms that threatened noble privilege. There was no national representative body; the Estates-General had not met since 1614.

Society was divided into three estates. The First Estate was the clergy, who owned a large amount of land, collected the tithe and paid little direct tax. The Second Estate was the nobility, who held the senior posts in the army, the Church and the administration, were exempt from the main direct tax (the taille) and still collected feudal dues from the peasants who worked their land. The Third Estate was everyone else, which meant the great majority of the population: peasants, urban workers, and the wealthy and educated middle class (the bourgeoisie) of lawyers, merchants and officials. The Third Estate paid the taille, the salt tax (the gabelle), the tithe and feudal dues, and had almost no political voice. The bourgeoisie's anger was less about poverty than about being excluded from status and office that their wealth and education seemed to deserve.

Ideas and the American war

The Enlightenment gave this discontent a vocabulary. Montesquieu argued for limits on power through the separation of powers, Voltaire attacked religious intolerance and arbitrary authority, and Rousseau argued that sovereignty belongs to the people. These writers were read mainly by the educated, and historians disagree about how far ideas caused the Revolution rather than supplying words for grievances that already existed. The American War of Independence mattered in two ways. France joined the American side in 1778 and the war added heavily to a debt that the crown could not control, and it also offered an example of a people overthrowing a monarch and writing a constitution.

Financial crisis, 1774–87

The underlying problem was that the crown spent more than it raised, and could not raise more because the privileged orders would not give up their tax exemptions. Each finance minister tried a different answer and each was dismissed when privileged groups resisted.

• Turgot (1774–76) tried to free the grain trade and abolish the guilds and the forced labour on roads. Bad harvests turned the grain reforms into price rises and riots, and the court and the parlements forced him out.
• Necker (1776–81) paid for the American war by borrowing rather than raising taxes. In 1781 he published an account of royal finance that showed a more favourable position than the true one and revealed the court's spending on pensions; he was dismissed soon after.
• Calonne (1783–87) borrowed heavily to restore confidence, and when credit ran out he proposed in 1786 a general land tax that nobles and clergy would pay, with a freer grain trade and other reforms.

Calonne summoned an Assembly of Notables in February 1787, hand-picked men from the privileged orders, because the parlements would probably have refused his plan. The Notables refused too, and Calonne was dismissed. His successor Brienne tried again with a similar programme, and the Parlement of Paris declared that new taxes could only be approved by the Estates-General. The monarchy's attempt to reform from above had been defeated by the privileged, and in 1788 Louis agreed to call the Estates-General for the following spring.

From the Estates-General to the fall of the Bastille

The year 1788 brought a poor harvest, so bread, the staple food of the poor, became very expensive in the winter and spring of 1789, and unemployment rose in the textile trades. Necker was recalled as finance minister in August 1788 because he was trusted by financiers. Elections for the Estates-General produced the cahiers de doléances, lists of grievances drawn up in every district. They were mostly moderate: they asked for a constitution and regular meetings of the Estates, and for fairer taxes, but largely accepted the monarchy.

The Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789 and was at once deadlocked over procedure. The Third Estate, which had been given as many deputies as the other two together, wanted the three orders to meet together and vote by head, which would give it a majority with liberal clergy and nobles. The privileged orders wanted to vote by order, which would give them two votes to one. After weeks of stalemate the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly on 17 June, and on 20 June, finding its hall locked, its deputies met in an indoor tennis court and swore the Tennis Court Oath not to separate until France had a constitution. Louis XVI made concessions, then moved troops towards Paris and dismissed Necker, which many in Paris read as the start of a royal crackdown.

On 14 July 1789 a Paris crowd, looking for weapons, stormed the Bastille, the royal fortress and prison. It held few prisoners and had little military value, but its fall showed that the king could not rely on his troops and that the people of Paris would act. In the countryside the rumour of brigands hired by nobles produced the Great Fear in the summer, when peasants attacked chateaux and burned the records of feudal dues.

The settlement of 1789

The National Assembly responded in three ways.

• On the night of 4 August it passed the August Decrees, which abolished feudal dues, the tithe and privileges of birth and of provinces and towns. Many peasant obligations in practice had to be bought out, and the changes were worked out in detail over the following months.
• On 26 August it adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which proclaimed liberty, equality before the law, property and the sovereignty of the nation.
• It sent the king a version of both for his assent, and Louis delayed.

In early October a crowd of Paris women, angry at the price and shortage of bread and at reports of royalist behaviour at Versailles, marched there on 5 October, followed by the National Guard under Lafayette. On 6 October the royal family was escorted back to Paris, and the king lived in the Tuileries under the eye of the capital. Louis XVI had been removed from the court's control and the Assembly followed him to Paris.

The Constituent Assembly's reforms, 1789–91

The Assembly rebuilt France on liberal principles.

Finance was the most pressing problem. In November 1789 the Assembly nationalised Church lands, and issued assignats, bonds secured on the value of those lands, from December 1789. From 1790 they were used as paper money, and as more were printed to meet the state's bills, they lost value. The Assembly also replaced the old taxes with a land tax, a tax on movable property and a tax on trade, and ended the tax privileges of the nobility and clergy.

Local government was reorganised in 1790 into 83 départements of roughly equal size, run by elected councils, which swept away the old provinces with their different customs and privileges. Justice was reformed with elected judges and the introduction of juries in criminal trials, and the venality of offices, where judicial posts were bought and sold, was abolished.

The Church became the most divisive issue. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790) made priests and bishops elected, paid by the state and loyal to the nation, and cut the number of dioceses. When the Assembly required clergy to swear an oath to it in November 1790, about half refused. The Pope condemned the measure in 1791, and the Church was split between "constitutional" priests who took the oath and "refractory" priests who did not. The refractory clergy became a rallying point for counter-revolution, especially in the west.

Political instability and the end of the monarchy

The constitution of 1791 made France a constitutional monarchy. The king kept a suspensive veto and the power to choose ministers, while legislative power rested with a single Legislative Assembly elected by "active citizens", men who paid a minimum level of tax. Disagreement about it was open from the start. Some wanted the king's powers curtailed further, and others wanted them restored.

The behaviour of the king destroyed trust in the settlement. On the night of 20–21 June 1791 the royal family tried to escape to the eastern frontier, and was caught at Varennes and brought back. The flight made it look as though the king had never accepted the Revolution, and for the first time there was a serious republican movement in Paris. A petition for his removal drew a crowd to the Champ de Mars on 17 July 1791, where the National Guard under Lafayette fired on it and killed a number of people. The massacre divided the revolutionaries; the Jacobin club split, with moderates leaving to form the Feuillants.

Several groups can be told apart by this point.

• The Feuillants, around Lafayette and Barnave, wanted to keep the 1791 constitution and the monarchy.
• The Girondins, around Brissot, were mainly in the Legislative Assembly and wanted to spread the Revolution by war.
• The Jacobins, with Robespierre as their best-known speaker, were more radical and distrusted the court; Robespierre opposed war as a risk to the Revolution.
• The counter-revolutionaries were émigré nobles abroad, refractory clergy and the king's supporters. They failed to threaten the Revolution seriously in 1789–92 because they were divided, lacked leadership and were not backed by the mass of the population, although their activity fed the revolutionaries' fears.

The Declaration of Pillnitz of August 1791, by Austria and Prussia, said that the monarchs might intervene in France, and made Paris more suspicious. The king hoped that a war would help him, since a defeat might restore his power, and the Girondins hoped that a victory would unite the nation. France declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792, and the first campaigns went badly, with French armies in disarray and fear of treason at home.

Prussia joined the war, and the Brunswick Manifesto of July 1792 threatened Paris if the royal family were harmed, which inflamed the city. On 10 August 1792 armed Parisians and National Guards from the provinces stormed the Tuileries, and the Legislative Assembly suspended the king. In early September, fearing that prisoners would rise when the volunteers left for the front, crowds killed more than a thousand prisoners in the September Massacres. The French army stopped the Prussians at Valmy on 20 September 1792. The new National Convention, elected by something close to universal male suffrage, met on 20 September, and abolished the monarchy the next day. France was declared a republic.