Enlightenment, Revolution and Modernity (2): The

French Revolution

Dr Chris Pearson

Lecture outline

• Outline of the Revolution’s history

• The relationship between the Revolution and the Enlightenment

• The Revolution and the making of the modern world

Louis XVI (1754-1793)

Ancien régime France

• Absolute monarchy, but King’s power curtailed by parlements

• Despite attempts at centralization, a highly diverse country

• Aristocracy approximately 1 in 200 of the population (25,000 families, approx 125,000 members) but owned one third of landed property, dominated society

The Catholic Church in the 1780s

• 170,000 members of the clergy (0.6% of the population)

• Powerful landowner; owned 7% of national territory

• Wealthy – tithe provided 150 livres annually

• 90% church attendance rates• Figures from MacPhee, Social History of

France, p. 18

The background to the revolution

• Failing harvests, rising grain prices, and a sovereign debt crisis (sound familiar?)

• Having spent years trying to avoid bankruptcy, the state runs out of money in August 1788

• Estates-General summoned for first time since 1614; the clergy [First Estate], Nobility [Second Estate], and everyone else [Third Estate]

The Third Estate claims sovereignty (17 June 1789):

‘The interpretation and presentation of the general will belong to it… The name National Assembly is the only one which is suitable.’

An enlightened revolution? (1): Politics

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good. 2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. 3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. Declaration of the Rights of Man (1791)

Rousseau’s “general will” makes an appearance

6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.

‘There is no longer either a nobility or a peerage, or hereditary distinction, or distinction of orders, or a feudal regime, or any of the corporations or decorations for which proofs of nobility were required, or which implied distinctions of birth, or any other superiority but that of public officials in the exercise of their duties.’

Constitution of 1791

An Enlightened revolution? 2: Religion

• Proposal of the deputies of the Third Estate: reduction of dioceses, sale of Church lands, abolition of tithes etc

• The National Assembly nationalizes church lands and grants religious freedoms to Protestants and Jews

• Oath to the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” (July 1790)

• 50% of clergy, along with the King, Pope, and most bishops rejected the oath

• Oath exposed a Catholic/anti-clerical fault-line running through French society

Sans culottes: trouser-wearing revolutionary militants opposed to the monarchy and the church

An Enlightened revolution (3)?: Women

‘Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.’

Olympe de Gouges

‘Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flame of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains.’

Declaration of the Rights of Women, 1791

Female Revolutionaries

• Society of Revolutionary Republican Women created in May 1793

• Opposed moderate republicans

• Ultimately banned by the Convention

Women’s role as supposedly determined by nature:

‘The delicate constitution of women, perfectly appropriate for their principal destination, that of perpetuating the species and of watching over with solicitude the perilous stages of infancy…. this constitution, I say, limits them to the timid chores of the household and the sedentary tastes which these tasks require…to impose heavy tasks on these frail organs is to outrage nature with the most cowardly barbarity.’

Mirabeau, Travail sur l’éducation publique (1791)

Robespierre: launches the Great Terror in Spring 1794

‘We wish an order of things where all low and cruel passions are enchained by the laws, all beneficent and generous feelings awakened…where distinctions arise only from equality itself…where the country secures the welfare of each individual… where industry is an adornment to the liberty that ennobles it, and commerce the source of public wealth, not simply the monstrous riches for a few families… We wish in a word to fulfil the course of nature, to accomplish the destiny of mankind.’

Robespierre, 5 February 1794

The revolution’s impact: politics

‘Britain provided the model for its railways and factories… but France made its revolutions and gave them their ideas, to point where a tricolour of some kind became the emblem of virtually every emerging nation, and European (or indeed world) politics between 1789 and 1917 were largely the struggle for and against the principles of 1789 or the more incendiary ones of 1793.’

Hobsbawn, Age of Revolution, 53

People Power?• The people are sovereign – masters of the

rulers• ‘Learn… that we are deliberating here in

front of our masters and we are answerable to them for our opinions.’ (Deputy in 1789)

• Most governments now claim to speak for the people (even if sometimes through rigged elections)

‘It is over.’ Really??• Revolution becomes a reference point

for revolutionaries and conservatives alike

• Different meanings: progress, reason, equality or bloodshed, oppression, breakdown in social order

• Divergent views also evident in the historiography (Marxists/Republicans v Furet and the Revisionists

The Concordat, 15 July 1801

• Signed between Napoleon and the Vatican

• The Catholic Church was restored and the state recognized Catholicism as ‘the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.’

• State funding for the church…• …but also state control over bishops

and priests

Conclusion

• The revolution’s meaning and impact have evolved over time, as different generations have reinterpreted it for their times

• Revolution a significant event in the making of the modern world…

• But how significant?