The French Revolution – Week 1

Question 1

Background to the French Revolution:

Answer 1

• France = biggest country in Western Europe – 28 million
• 98% Catholic country
• Capital was Versailles
• Paris = the largest city
• 85% rural (only 8% lived in towns of more than 10,000 people)
• Mostly substantive agriculture
• Landownership (mostly by nobility, church or urban bourgeoisie)
• Very diverse: many different languages and provincial capitals
• Few peasants able to produce a surplus for sale
• Louis XVI = “King of France by Grace of God”
• Louis XIV = “I am the state”

Question 2

The Three Estates:

Answer 2

Traditional feudal structure had characterised French society since medieval times:

1. Clergy (primary duty = to pray)
2. Nobility (primary duty = to bear arms)
3. The Third Estate or Commoners (those who worked)

Question 3

First Estate: (Church)

Answer 3

Very divided

3,000 higher clergy (noble birth), some very wealthy

Most parish clergy were poor

Male contemplative orders often criticised (nuns not usually)

Church owned 10% of French property, rural and urban

Question 4

Second Estate: (Nobility)

Answer 4

Dominated governance, administration and the army (90% of officer corps was of noble birth)

125,000 people from 25,000 families (also 0.5% of population)

Owned 30% of French land, but many families also had traditional rights

Nobility divided in various ways, especially into: the ‘sword’ and the ennobled for service, or brought titles

Divided by wealth: elite, c.4000 families spent most of the year at Versailles. The rest lived on the estates

Question 5

Third Estate

Answer 5

Everyone who wasn’t privileged “from beggars to bankers”

Most were peasants

Question 6

The Enlightenment:

Answer 6

Phrase used in 18th century

Very diverse

Question 7

Two common thread of the Enlightenment:

Answer 7

Enlightenment thinkers attacked orthodox ideas in religion based on “reason”

Linked these to attack on absolutism and privilege

Question 8

D’Holbach:

Answer 8

“Man is unhappy because he is ignorant of nature”

Question 9

Diderot:

Answer 9

“Every century has its on characteristic spirit. The spirit of ours seems to be liberty”

Main editor of encyclopaedia published between 1751 and 1772

Question 10

Philosophes: (intellectuals)

Answer 10

Often critical of the monastic orders, of the Church’s wealth, hierarchy, intolerance and privileged, but seldom attacked Christianity itself. Atheism was rare.

Denial of original sin and doctrine of damnation more common

Use of reason and science expected to lead to material progress

Hoped an Enlightened monarch would lead France towards political and economic progress

Widespread belief in progress

Question 11

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

Answer 11

Major exception

Fundamentally democratic

Condemned extremes of wealth and poverty

In books like ‘A Discourse of the Origins of Inequality’ (1755) and ‘Of the Social Contract’ or ‘Principles of Political Right’ (1762) he outlined a radical philosophy that influenced Robespierre and their revolutionary leaders’

Question 12

Causes of the Revolution:

Answer 12

First Treaty of Paris (1763) ended the Seven Years War (1756-63), known as the “French and Indian War” in the USA and practically destroyed France’s North American Empire

French determined to get revenge on Britain

French signed alliance with American colonists in 1778

In 1781, their naval blockade of Yorktown led to Britain surrendering under Cornwallis

Second Treaty of Paris (1783) created the USA

Victory cost over 1 billion livres (double the states entire annual revenue). Resultant debt forced King to raise taxes and remove many exemptions

Louis XVI was forced to call a meeting of the Estates General in 1789

Estates-General – Louis tried to pressure the nobility by doubling the number of representatives from the Third Estate

Question 13

What is the Third Estate?

Answer 13

Meaning preceded by vigorous pamphlet war

In January 1789, a talented cleric from a legal background, the Abbe Emmanuel Sieyes published ‘What is the Third Estate?’

What is the Third Estate? EVERYTHING

What has it been until now in the political order? NOTHING

What does it ask? TO BECOME SOMETHING

Question 14

The Tennis Court Oath:

Answer 14

When the Third Estate’s deputies were locked out of meeting they set up their own National Assembly

Question 15

Outbreak of Revolution:

Answer 15

11 July 1789: Louis dismissed Jacques Necker, his only non-noble minister.

Paris rose in open rebellion

Over the next four days, forty of the 54 customs houses around Paris were sacked, weapons were seized from gunsmiths and the Invalids military hospital

On 14th July, about 8,000 armed Parisians laid siege to the Bastille both to seize arms and gunpowder, but also because of its symbolic dominance

Question 16

Rights of Man:

Answer 16

On 27th August the National Assembly proclaimed the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”
- Article I: Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.
- Article II: The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural rights of man
- Article III: Principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation
 French declaration largely conceptualised by comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791)
 Thomas Jefferson’s drafts of the US declaration of Independence were a direct inspiration

Question 17

American Declaration of Independence:

Answer 17

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”

Question 18

Liberty for all?

Answer 18

Profoundly ambiguous. Even if the principle of sovereignty “resides essentially in the Nation” how is the nation to express its views?

Despite the promise of 1789 that people were “born free and equal”, in the French colonies of the Caribbean, equality had been granted only to children of freed slaves. When planters refused to contemplate even this, a slave rebellion erupted in St-Domingue in August 1791

Before the Revolution, when Louis encouraged his people to submit their grievances to the Estates-General, some women in the Pays de Caux in Northern France had written: “In the lower classes, women are regarded as good only for spinning, sewing and keeping house. In the upper classes they are supposed to be good only for singing, dancing, making music, playing and smiling. However, it is in working like men, in the toil of the fields, in commerce, that some have been seen to hold the ruins of government as well as men”

Question 19

Revolution in St-Domingue

Answer 19

Key leader was Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), born a slave

Essentially led to the founding of the independent state of Haiti in 1804.

But 350,000 died (on both sides) in the struggle

Question 20

Rights of Women:

Answer 20

5 October 1789, 7000 women had marched to Versailles, invaded the assembly and demanded to see the King, forcing him to recognise the Assembly’s more radical demands.

Question 21

The Flight to Varennes:

Answer 21

21 June 1791: Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and their children fled Paris, apparently heading for Luxembourg

Left behind a declaration condemning the “false friends” of the people who had fooled them into abandoning their King and Church

They were captured the following night at Varennes and brought back to Paris in humiliation

Question 22

War with Austria:

Answer 22

The National Assembly voted for a supposedly defensive war with Austria in 1792 (whose emperor was Marie-Antoinette’s nephew)

After five months of defeats, National assembly called for Volunteers claiming that “the homeland is in danger” because “a league of kings has been formed in order to destroy it”

July 1792, the Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, announced that Paris would be raised to the ground when he conquered it, leading to panic and the aiming of tens of thousands of sans-culottes

Question 23

Sans-culottes:

Answer 23

Usual term for the poor (literally, those without the fancy knee-britches worn by the upper classes)

Question 24

Defending Paris:

Answer 24

Volunteers from many of the provinces came to defend Paris, those from Marseilles singing a new song that soon became known as La Marseillaise

Question 25

The Carmagnole:

Answer 25

The san-culottes and their allies took the Tuileries on 10th August

The song, La Carmagnole written to celebrate their victory

Question 26

The Republic:

Answer 26

September 1792, new Convention was elected. Mostly professional men, officials, landowners and businessmen with a few artisans and farmers, plus 46 clergy but only 23 nobles

Determined to defend France and the revolution. They proclaimed a republic on 21 September 1792

Question 27

Political divisions:

Answer 27

New convention divided into three factions:
1. Girondins (from the region of the Gironde in Bordeaux), moderate and wealthy. Included Jacques Pierre Brissot and Nicolas de Condorcet
2. Jacobins (most prominent Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat)
3. In between sat the uncommitted, known as the Plain (or, more pejoratively, the Marais or “swamp”) which included prominent heroes like Sieyes
Many started referring to the Left and Right of the Chamber (i.e. Jacobins and Girondins)

Question 28

Execution of Louis XVI:

Answer 28

After much debate, Jacobins won a narrow vote: Louis was executed on 21 January 1793

Question 29

The Terror:

Answer 29

English naval blockade pushed up prices leading to food riots.

Spring 1793, the Convention voted to delegate executive powers to the Committee of Public Safety.

September 1793 a “law of suspects” was passed, allowing local surveillance committees to interrogate anyone suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies.

Within a month, 4,500 were imprisoned in Paris, 80,000 across the country.

Leading Girondins and Marie Antoinette were executed.

Question 30

Camille Desmoulins:

Answer 30

The Jacobin radical’s newspaper called for an end to emergency controls and repression

Question 31

Robespierre:

Answer 31

Threat of invasion was receding, but the terror was stepped up in summer 1794, with 1,500 executions in Paris (compared with 1,100 in the previous 15 months).

Soon the last foreign troops were driven from French soil and Robespierre seemed to have a mental and physical breakdown

He was soon arrested (July 1794) and executed on 10 August 1794

Question 32

Napoleon Bonaparte:

Answer 32

A young artillery officer, commanded Republican forces who recaptured Toulon from the English

Republic signed peace treaties with Prussia, Spain and Holland in 1795, but Austria and Britain remained enemies.

New government, the Directorate, placed Napoleon in charge.

Organised a coup in December 1799 and was one of three consuls appointed to run the country

Question 33

Jonathon Israel:

Answer 33

Argues Enlightenment’s key ideas were fundamentally incompatible with the Old Regime

Coined the term “Radical Enlightenment” to describe claims for popular sovereignty and religious tolerance

Few philosophes called for Revolution

Question 34

Marxist View:

Answer 34

Marxist historians argue that the Revolution was a major bourgeois revolution that brought a new class to power and led to the development of a capitalist society

Question 35

What had changed after the Revolution?

Answer 35

Revisionists claim that the revolution made large-scale, profit-orientated enterprise impossible in much of France, so it hindered the growth of capitalism

The sans-culottes lost most of the rights they had once, and it would be decades (over a century in the case of social welfare payments) before they regained them

The church lost its property, it also lost its ability to give relief to the poor, which it never regained

There was no ominous gain in equality, with a wealthy political elite taking over from one based on birth

Napoleon restored old titles and encouraged the emigres to return; by 1830, 266 of the 387 richest families in France were Ancien Regime nobles

Few gains for women

The revolutionary divorce law (best in Europe at the time) was restricted in 1804 and abolished in 1816. It was not reintroduced until 1884

French women didn’t get the vote until 1944

Question 36

Lasting impact of the revolution:

Answer 36

Peter McPhee argues for the continuing significance of the Revolution and its ideals