French Revolution

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Napoleon

It was in the course of the Italian campaign that Napoleon Bonaparte first made himself known to the general public. Born in 1769 to a poor but noble Corsican family, Bonaparte was trained as an artillery officer and quickly advanced through the ranks during the early years of the Revolution. A Jacobin associate during the Reign of Terror, Bonaparte was briefly imprisoned after Thermidor, but once released, he made himself useful to the new Directory by crushing a counter-revolutionary uprising in October 1795. As commander of French forces in Italy, he won a series of brilliant victories, established a new north Italian sister republic called the Cisalpine Republic, and in October 1797 negotiated a treaty with Austria of his own design.

With a number of important secret provisions that ceded almost two-thirds of Austrian territory along the Rhine River to France, this Treaty of Campo Formio so expanded the French sphere of influence that it did less to create peace than to provoke a new war. Imagining themselves to be liberating Europe, French forces proceeded to impose new political arrangements in western Germany; to establish additional sister republics in Switzerland and Italy; to assist, unsuccessfully, an Irish revolt against England; and to send an army under Bonaparte to Egypt to attack the Ottoman Empire. Successful at first in Egypt, the French army was isolated after the English navy won a victory at Abū Qīr Bay in August 1798, whereupon Bonaparte left his troops and returned to France. He was welcomed as a great hero despite his failure to capture Egypt and his loss to the English.

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End of the Directory

Perceiving in the French position both weakness and a continuing threat, England, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria formed a new anti-French coalition. By the spring of 1799 the armies of this second coalition forced France to retreat on all fronts, most dramatically in Italy where they dislodged the French altogether and dismantled the sister republics. Although the coalition was pushed back in September and began to disintegrate, the French military position remained uncertain. Suddenly on the defensive and rudely reminded of their vulnerability, the French nation lost still more respect for the Directory. Gradually during 1799 the Directory lost its political grip.

As the military situation darkened and Austria threatened France, opponents of the Directory won an election and, for once, were able to purge the Directory, rather than vice versa. The purge enabled newly elected deputies to take radical measures to advance the war effort. They imposed forced loans on the wealthy and persecuted the relatives of émigrés, recalling the Reign of Terror. The primary beneficiary of the purge, however, was Emmanuel Sieyès, who was appointed director. He began plotting to radically revise the constitution to protect the regime from any further threats from the radical left or the counter-revolutionary right. Needing a charismatic, popular figure to lead the charge, Sieyès joined forces with Bonaparte.

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At this point, fresh counter-revolutionary uprisings occurred in the provinces and a radical movement to take over the republic became apparent. The plotters then persuaded members of the Directory to resign. On November 9 (18 Brumaire) they asked the legislature to vest power in a provisional government made up of Sieyès, Bonaparte, and Roger Ducos. When the legislature resisted, soldiers loyal to Bonaparte chased resistors from the legislature and persuaded the remaining deputies to approve the plan.

The Directory was dead, and with it went the last revolutionary regime that could make any pretense to embody the liberal parliamentary government intended by the revolutionaries of 1789. Under Bonaparte, the Revolution, if it could be said to have remained alive at all, did so in the form of a military dictatorship that had far more power than any French king had ever possessed.

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The Ambiguous Legacy of the Revolution

At its core, the French Revolution was a political movement devoted to liberty. But what that liberty actually was and what was required to realize it remained open questions during the Revolution, as they have ever since. Some historians have suggested that what the revolutionaries’ liberty meant in practice was violence and a loss of personal security that pointed to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. This negative view had its roots in the ideas of many counter-revolutionaries, who criticized the Revolution from its beginning. These ideas gained new popularity during the period of reaction that set in after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, when the monarchy and its counter-revolutionary allies were restored to power.

However, the majority of Europeans and non-Europeans came to see the Revolution as much more than a bloody tragedy. These people were more impressed by what the Revolution accomplished than by what it failed to do. They recalled the Revolution’s abolition of serfdom, slavery, inherited privilege, and judicial torture; its experiments with democracy; and its opening of opportunities to those who, for reasons of social status or religion, had been traditionally excluded.

One of the most important contributions of the French Revolution was to make revolution part of the world’s political tradition. The French Revolution continued to provide instruction for revolutionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries, as peoples in Europe and around the world sought to realize their different versions of freedom. Karl Marx would, at least at the outset, pattern his notion of a proletarian revolution on the French Revolution of 1789. And 200 years later Chinese students, who weeks before had fought their government in Tiananmen Square, confirmed the contemporary relevance of the French Revolution when they led the revolutionary bicentennial parade in Paris on July 14, 1989.

Along with offering lessons about liberty and democracy, the Revolution also promoted nationalism. Napoleon’s occupation provoked nationalist groups to organize in Italy and Germany. Also influential was the revolutionaries’ belief that a nation was not a group of royal subjects but a society of equal citizens. The fact that most European countries are or are becoming parliamentary democracies, along the lines set out by the French Revolution, suggests its enduring influence.

Socially, the Revolution was also important. Clearly, society in France and to a lesser extent in other parts of Europe would never be the same. Once the ancient structure of privilege was smashed, it could not be pieced together again. The Revolution did not fundamentally alter the distribution of wealth, but that had not been the intention of most of the revolutionaries. Insofar as legal equality gradually became the norm in France and Europe, the revolutionaries succeeded.

The cultural impact is harder to assess. The Revolution did not succeed in establishing the national school system it envisioned, but it did found some of France’s elite educational institutions that have produced some of that nation’s greatest leaders. Its attack on the church had profound repercussions, making the status of the church a central political issue, which even today divides France politically and culturally.

As for economic development, the Revolution probably hurt more than it helped. In the long term, the liberation of the economy from royal controls, the standardization of weights and measures, and the development of a uniform civil law code helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution. But the disruptive effects of war on the French economy offset the positive effects of these changes. In terms of total output, the economy was probably set back a generation.