French Revolution

IV

The Moderate Revolution

In the year leading up to the storming of the Bastille, the economic problems of many common people had become steadily worse, largely because poor weather conditions had ruined the harvest. As a result, the price of bread—the most important food of the poorer classes—increased. Tensions and violence grew in both the cities and the countryside during the spring and summer of 1789. While hungry artisans revolted in urban areas, starved peasants scoured the provinces in search of food and work. These vagrants were rumored to be armed agents of landlords hired to destroy crops and harass the common people. Many rural peasants were gripped by a panic, known as the Great Fear. They attacked the residences of their landlords in hopes of protecting local grain supplies and reducing rents on their land.

Both afraid of and politically benefiting from this wave of popular violence, leaders of the revolutionary movement in Paris began to massively restructure the state. On the night of August 4, 1789, one nobleman after another renounced his personal privileges. Before the night was over, the National Assembly declared an end to the feudal system, the traditional system of rights and obligations that had reinforced inherited inequality under the Old Regime. The exact meaning of this resolution as it applied to specific privileges, especially economic ones, took years to sort out. But it provided the legal foundation for gradually scaling back the feudal dues peasants owed to landlords and for eliminating the last vestiges of serfdom, the system that legally bound the peasants to live and work on the landlords’ estates.

At the end of August, the National Assembly promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Conceived as the prologue to a new constitution that was not yet drafted, the declaration was a short, concise document ensuring such basic personal rights as those of property, free speech, and personal security. It left unresolved the rights of women and the limits of individual rights in relation to the power of the newly emerging state. But by recognizing the source of sovereignty in the people, it undermined the idea that the king ruled by divine right (see Divine Right of Kings).

A

Restructuring the State

As these developments unfolded, Louis XVI once again failed to act decisively. The queen, Marie-Antoinette, feared catastrophe if events continued on their current course and advocated a hard line. But power was quickly slipping away from the king, as revolutionaries began to organize political clubs and an influential periodical press. Having lost control of events, Louis was forced to yield to them. He gave in so reluctantly—for example, taking months to approve the August 4, 1789, decrees and the Declaration of Rights—that hostility to the crown only increased.

---

---

When rumors circulated that guests at a royal banquet had trampled on revolutionary insignia, a crowd of many thousands, most of them women who were also protesting the high cost of bread, marched to Versailles on October 5. They were accompanied by National Guards, commanded by the Marquis de Lafayette. The Guards were barely able to prevent wholesale massacre, and the crowd forced the royal family to leave Versailles for Paris, never to return. The king and his family were now, in effect, prisoners, forced to inhabit the Tuilerie Palace along with the National Assembly, which moved there as well. Paris had replaced Versailles as the center of power, and the government was now more vulnerable than ever to the will of the restless, and occasionally violent, people of the city.

A

1

Political Change: Constitutional Monarchy

The National Assembly next focused on writing a new constitution, a process that took more than two years. Although it was agreed that France would remain a monarchy, the Assembly decided almost immediately that the constitution would not simply reform the old order, as the more moderate deputies wanted. Instead, it transformed the political system of the Old Regime, but preserved the monarchy.

The new constitution was designed to prevent the return of despotism by making all government officials subject to the rule of law. It proclaimed France as a united, sovereign kingdom, dissolved the entire system of royal administration, and adopted a system of federalism that shifted authority from Paris to the localities. France was divided into 83 districts called departments, each of which would elect administrators to execute laws, maintain public order, levy taxes, and oversee education and poor relief.

The powers of the national government were divided among separate, independent branches. The chief executive was to be the king, who would continue to inherit his office, but his powers were to be limited, particularly in legislative matters. The king was allowed only a suspensive veto, whereby he could at most delay the laws passed by the assembly. As the only law-making body, the single-chambered Legislative Assembly was the heart of the state, enjoying wide powers. Although the right to vote was extended to more than half the adult male population—called active citizens—election to the assembly was made a complex process. Very restrictive qualifications made only about 50,000 men (out of about 26 million French people) eligible to serve as deputies. Like the administration of the departments, the judiciary was also decentralized. Legal procedure was streamlined, and torture banned.

A

2

Social Change: Equal Rights

In addition to reconstituting the state, the National Assembly made many changes to the existing social order. Among the most notable changes were the elimination of the nobility as a legally defined class and the granting of the same civil rights to all citizens; the elimination of guilds and other organizations that monopolized production, controlled prices and wages, or obstructed economic activity through strikes; the extension of rights to blacks in France and to mulattoes in France’s Caribbean colonies, though not the outright abolition of slavery; and the granting of full civil rights to religious minorities, including Protestants and Jews.

A

3

Religious Change: Civil Constitution of the Clergy

Political and social restructuring on this scale raised complicated issues regarding the Catholic Church. The clergy had enjoyed extensive property rights and special privileges under the Old Regime and had long been a target of criticism. The National Assembly incorporated the church within the state, stripping clerics of their property and special rights. In return, the state assumed the large debts of the church and paid the clergy a salary. Dioceses were redrawn to correspond to departments. A presiding bishop would administer each diocese, with local priests beneath him. Since active citizens would elect the bishops and the priests, a Protestant, Jew, or atheist might be chosen to fill these positions. Finally, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 required all priests and bishops to swear an oath of loyalty to the new order or face dismissal.

Almost half the parish priests and bishops (called the refractory clergy) refused to take the oath. This marked an important turn of events. Before the Civil Constitution, opposition to the Revolution had remained a scattered affair. It had been led by an ineffective group of high nobles called the émigrés, who had fled the country beginning in July 1789 and had been conspiring from abroad ever since. More than anything else, the Civil Constitution and the oath solidified resistance to the Revolution by giving the resistance a religious justification and publicly designating a group of influential individuals—the refractory clergy—as enemies of the new state.

Although there were many reasons for the Civil Constitution, financial considerations were some of the most important. The government’s fiscal problems continued well past 1789. The assembly had assumed the Old Regime’s debts, but tax collections had been interrupted by administrative disorders and simple refusals to pay. To cover expenditures, the assembly issued bonds, called assignats; then to repay the assignats, it confiscated and sold the church’s considerable property holdings. The government justified this practice by saying that church property belonged to the nation.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain