Why was there a revolution in French in 1789 and nowhere else in Europe? It is true that there were national political rebellions in Belgium, Poland and Holland but all their attempts were still-born. It happens only in France Why?
Historians, being adept at reading backwards, have answered the question in different ways depending on their own prejudices or those of their contemporaries. But let us begin with a brief introduction to the French society of ancient regime, together with its government and institutions, which will serve as a curtain-raiser to the dramatic events that began to unfold in 1789.
The French society during the eighteen century was like a pyramid, whose apex was fulfilled by the Court and aristocracy, its centre by the ‘middle class’ or bourgeoisie, and its base by the ‘lower orders’ of peasants and urban tradesmen and craftsmen. So, the French social pyramid was riddled with contradictions both within and between its constituent parts. For it had monarchy that, although absolute in theory, carried within it the seeds of own decay; an aristocracy that though privileged and mostly wealthy, was deeply resentful of its long exclusion from office; bourgeoisie that, though enjoying increasing prosperity, was denied the social status and share in government commensurate with its wealth; and presents who were becoming more literate and independent, yet were still regarded as a general beast of burden, despised and over-taxed. Moreover, these conflicts and the tensions they engendered were becoming sharper as the century went on.
Looking from the base of pyramid, the presants were, in general, by no means as impoverished and unfree as they were in many other European countries of the day. By the end of ancient-regime, perhaps one in four peasant families owned their land outright, some were relatively prosperous, and others, true enough, ‘poor and miserable’. Half or more of the peasants were poor share crappers who owned no capital and shared their produce with their landlords on a fifty-fifty basis; and a quarter or more were landless labourers and cottagers working for wages and renting tiny plots. Again, on the positive side of the equation, fewer than one in twenty mainly on the noble and ecclesiastical estates in the east were serfs, though not fully tied to the land or deprived of royal justice. But, though his legal disabilities were less oppressive than in many other states, the French peasant bore a heavy burden of taxation: he paid tithe to the church; taille a direct tax on the income or land, Vingtieme a ‘twentieth’ tax an income, capitation a income tax per head and gabelle was a salt tax to the state; and to the lord of the manor, whether lay or ecclesiastical, he discharged a vary toll of obligations, services and payments ranging from the corvee (forced labour on the roads), or if not owning his land outright; he might have to pay for the use of his lords mill, wine-press or bakery. The heaviness of these burdens, varied greatly from one region to the next. But the problem arose, in the years of bad harvests and depression, they proved to be universally vexatious and intolerable, and this was to be a problem that grew more acute as the century went on – as were the grievances of the middle classes.
The mobility or aristocracy fell into two main groups: the nobility ‘of the sword’ and the ‘nobility’ of the robes’, formerly wealthy bourgeois who, from the seventeenth century on had acquired heredity deeds of nobility from their purchase of the offices, in the royal bureaucracy. This allowed them to take post as intendants, and gave them access to the Parlements – who in times of the weak and divided governments and idle or incompetual rulers, were able to exercise political authority by refusing to register government edicts. Such offices had, since Louis XIV’s (King 1643 – died 1715) time, been refused to the elder nobility as a punishment for the disruptive role they had played in the civil war in the late 1640s and early 1650s.
Though this older nobility continued to harbour resentments because of their exclusion from high office, they retained the privilege of occupying the senior army posts and, as owners of landed estates, exercising the rights of the old feudal lords of the manor: right of local justice and surveillance, rights of monopoly to hunt and maintain a mill, an oven or a wine-press. In addition, the members of the French nobility as a whole, whether of the ‘robe’ or the ‘sword’ enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom from direct taxation. The clergy, whose upper ranks belonged almost without exception to the nobility, enjoyed even greater financial privileges.
The degree of privileges enjoyed by the privileged classes, purely depended on the authority commanded by the king. In theory, France’s system of government was still the ‘absolute’ system that King Louis XIV had built at Versailles a century before. But under the sun king’s successors, that system had lost a great deal of its vigour and its ability to command the respect and loyalty of its subjects, whether privileged or not. Meanwhile, the middle classes became more resentful of the extravagance, inefficiencies and tyranny of a court and government to whose upkeep they contributed heavily but over which they had no control. Louis XVI, after his father’s long reign, was eager to bring about substantial reform in the administration to reduce the expenditure of the Court, the free trade of petty restrictions, to ease the tax burden of the peasants and to promote a measure of self-government by means of local assemblies in the provinces. However, well intentioned the monarch or honest and able him ministers were, so long as the privileged orders were left in possession of their powers through the Parlements and their influence at Court to abstract the operation.
And the French middle classes, for all their expanding prosperity had other grievances besides. Among them were the obstacles to the free exercise of trade and manufacture created by onerous internal tolls and duties. Another was their growing failure to realize social and political ambitions commensurate with their wealth. It had long been the aim of merchantmen and financiers, enriched by the banking, manufacture or commerce, to crown their carriers by the purchase of hereditary office of the state or commissions in the army. But the ‘aristocratic’ or ‘feudal’ Army Laws of France of 1781, debarred to the promotion to the rank of captain and above by the reservation for men of at least four ‘quarters’ of nobility, which excluded all commoners and those recently ennobled. It was not just matter of doors to preferment being progressively closed but of doors being closed at all, led them to believe that doors should be opened wider. The resentment and grievances were both genuine enough, and in history, as Tocqueville reminds us in The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution, it is often resentment that is the more important of the two.
The resentments and grievances of the peasants were also compounding during these latter years of the ancient regime. For one thing, the increasing peasant prosperity was never universal. While one in four of French peasants owned their land, the majority of these rural proprietors held tiny plots that, even in years of good harvest, were quite insufficient for their family’s needs. A more general cause for discontent was the recent tendency of landlords, nobles or bourgeois to revive old privileges attaching to the land and to impose new or added obligations to those already exacted from their peasants.
The crisis in France after 1778 hit the bulk of the peasantry both consumers and producers: as wine-growers, dairy-farmers and what growers found the general prosperity grinding to a halt. And on top of that, France entering in 1778 in support for American Revolutionary War. Thus peasants and urban workers were drawn together in a common bond of hostility to ancient regime. These classes therefore entered the Revolution in a context of increasing shortage and hardship rather than one of ‘prosperity’.
But, of course, it needed more than economic hardship, social discontent and thwarted ambitions to make a revolution. To give cohesion to the discontent and aspirations of widely varying social classes there had to be some unifying body of ideas, a common vocabulary of hope and protest something, in short, like a common ‘revolutionary psychology’. As ideological preparation in the revolution, has been the worker of mass political parties but in eighteenth-century, France had no such parties until long after the Revolution started; nor did she have them when revolutions occurred again between 1830 and 1871. So the ground had to be prepared by other means: in the first instance by the writers of the Enlightenment who, as Burke and Tocqueville were noted, weakened the ideological defenses of the ancient regime. The ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and many others were widely disseminated and were absorbed by an eager reading public, both aristocratic and plebeian. Meanwhile, such terms as ‘citizen’, ‘nation’, ‘social contract’, ‘general will’ and the ‘rights of man’ –soon to be followed by ‘third estate’ – were entering into a common political vocabulary that became widely diffused. This was largely the work of the pamphleteers of 1788 and 1789, but, long before, the ground had been prepared by the tracts and remonstrance of the Parlement who, in their prolonged duel from the 1750’s on, with ministerial ‘despotism’, quoted freely and often discriminately from the writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau and other ‘philosophical’ critics of the day.
However, its is easy with knowledge gained by hand sight, to see that revolution was close at hand, and still less to forestall the form that such a revolution would take. Yet, it still need a spark or trigger to cause explosion of any kind, and it needed a further spark to being about the particular alignment of 1789.
The first spark was provided by the French government’s individual with the revolution in America. It was not until 1783 after America war of Independence, that French minister of Finance, Calonne faced a deficit of a quarter of the nation’s annual revenue, declared a state of bankruptcy and called for drastic remedies to overcome it. So, the Notables’ ‘assembly’ was called, who however refused to endorse the ministral call for Notables immunities on the issue, instead they countered with a call for the Estates – General, representing all the three Estates but held in the abeyance for 175 years. The Ministry, however, turned this proposal down, thus provoking the ‘aristocratic revolt’ which tore the country apart for almost a year. The revolt ended with the defeat of the Ministry and a total victory for the Parlements and aristocracy. Above all, the government was forced to call the States General. So, in September 1788, as the Paris Parlement returned to the capital from enforced exile. So a brief in revolution, provoked by the nobility’s challenge, was already in the air, but the form that it look proved to be of quite a different kind. Why was this? Briefly, because the promise of a State General compelled the contending parties to define their aims and to take up new positions. The bourgeoisie, or Third Estate, hitherto divided into supporters and opponents of ministral reform, now found it expedient, once the States – General was called, to close ranks and present a programme of its own. The Parlements and nobility, however, voiced that the reforms they had in mind by no means the same as those voiced by the Third Estates or by the national large.
In consequences, the aristocracy and clergy, far from gaining more recruits, began rapidly to lose them. Alignments changed after the Estates- General met at Versailles in May 1789. Although hesitant as ever, when faced with the irreconcilable claims of nobility and Third Estates Louis XVI chose to support the former. He called in troops to Versailles and prepared to dismissed the illegal National Assembly by force of arms.
This coup was averted by the intervention of the people of Paris. The peasants, too stirred by the economic and political crisis, had began to take action of their own; and it was a combination of these forces – middle classes, urban craftsman, and peasants, now united in a common purpose – that with liberal – aristocratic and clerical support; in July – August 1789, carried through the first major stage of the revolution in France.
The French Revolution appears, then to have been the outcome of both, long-term and short term factors, which arose from the social-political conditions of the ancient regime. The long-standing grievances of the peasants; townsmen and bourgeoisie; the frustrations of rising hopes among wealthy and ‘middling’ bourgeoisies and peasant; the insolvency and break down of government; a real feudal reaction; the claims and intransigence of a privileged aristocracy; the propagation of radical ides among wide sections of the people; a sharp economic and financial crisis; and the successive ‘triggers’ of state bankruptcy, aristocratic revolt and popular rebellion: these all played a part. Were there explosive factors peculiar to France? Taken individually or isolation, the answer must be no. If we compare it with other European countries, excluding the ultimate ‘triggers’, of France, other were worse in the degree of poverty at this time. Why then was there a revolution in France 1789 and nowhere else? The answer is that, for a variety of reasons, the factors which have been noted in the eighteenth century. France did not appear in a similar combination in any other part of Europe. Furthermore, there was also another factors that set France apart from Countries both east and west: Paris, even more than London, was a Capital city that lay at the very heart of public affairs: at the centre of government and administration of law culture and education.
Louis XVI(1774-1793), the last of the rulers of the Old Regime was twenty years old and Queen , Maire Antoinette, but nineteenth century when they heard the death of Louis XV, they both expressed the same thought, “How unhappy are we! We are too young to rule”, Louis XVI on May 5, 1789 opening the session of the States – General was the starting of a new chapter in the history of Revolution of Revolution of the world, with slogan, Liberty, Egalite, Fraternity.
