5.4 The French Revolution

• Debt: wars, especially aid to the Americans, left the crown nearly bankrupt by 1788.
• Privilege: the First Estate (clergy) and Second Estate (nobles), together a small fraction of the population, paid little direct tax. The Third Estate, everyone else, from rich lawyers to poor peasants, bore the burden.
• Failed reform: ministers tried to tax the privileged, but nobles and the parlements blocked them and demanded the Estates-General.
• Hunger: a bad harvest in 1788 sent bread prices soaring in 1789.
• Ideas: Enlightenment arguments about rights and popular sovereignty, and the American example.

The Estates-General met in May 1789 for the first time since 1614. Each estate traditionally had one vote, so the two privileged orders could outvote the Third. The Third Estate demanded voting by head. On June 17 it declared itself the National Assembly, and on June 20, locked out of its hall, its members swore the Tennis Court Oath not to separate until they had written a constitution.

When the king massed troops near Paris and dismissed a popular minister, Parisians stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison, on July 14, 1789. In the countryside, peasants attacked manor houses in the Great Fear. On August 4 the Assembly abolished feudal privileges, and on August 26 it issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which proclaimed equality before the law, popular sovereignty and freedoms of speech and religion. In October, crowds of Parisian women marched to Versailles and forced the royal family to move to Paris.

The Assembly seized Church lands to pay debts and passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), which made priests state employees elected by citizens. The pope condemned it, and about half the clergy refused the required oath, splitting the country. The Assembly also replaced the old provinces with 83 new departments of roughly equal size. The Constitution of 1791 created a constitutional monarchy in which only men who paid a set amount of tax could vote. The king's failed flight to Varennes in June 1791 destroyed trust in him.

France declared war on Austria in April 1792, and Prussia joined Austria. Fearing betrayal, Parisian crowds stormed the royal palace in August 1792. A new National Convention, elected by almost all adult men, declared a republic in September 1792 and executed Louis XVI on January 21, 1793.

The Jacobins were a radical political club; their leaders, including Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton and the journalist Jean-Paul Marat, pushed out the more moderate Girondins in June 1793. Marat was assassinated that July, and Danton was himself executed in the Terror in 1794. Facing foreign invasion and a Catholic royalist revolt in the Vendée region, the Committee of Public Safety ran France. It ordered the levée en masse (1793), drafting the whole nation for war, fixed maximum prices for bread and other goods, and maximum wages too, and launched the Reign of Terror. About 17,000 people were officially executed, many by guillotine, and many more died in prison or in the brutal crushing of revolts. The Republic also abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794 and tried to replace Christianity with a revolutionary calendar and civic cults.

As French armies won, the Terror seemed less necessary, and Robespierre's colleagues feared for their own lives. In July 1794 (the month of Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar) they had him arrested and executed. A new constitution in 1795 created the Directory, a five-man executive with an elected legislature limited to property owners. It was corrupt and unstable, relied on the army, and fell to Napoleon in 1799.

Historians debate the Revolution's nature. An older Marxist view saw a bourgeois (middle-class) revolution against feudalism. Revisionist historians argue that political ideas and culture, not class, drove events, and that nobles and middle-class elites had more in common than the older view suggested.