France

F

2

Louis XVI

The public hoped for more from the reign of his grandson, Louis XVI, who became king in 1774. Not wanting to appear a despot, he quickly reinstated the parlements, to much public rejoicing. But Louis was an unimpressive emblem of the monarchy in an age when public opinion carried increasing political weight. Awkward and seemingly slow-witted, he became an object of derision for his incapacity to consummate his marriage to Marie-Antoinette for seven years. More important, the king was thought to be dominated by his Austrian-born wife, whose conspicuous spending was increasingly resented.

Under Louis XVI, France had only one major success in foreign affairs, the American Revolution, which France supported with men and money to weaken Britain. But in eastern Europe, France lacked the means to effectively prop up its old allies, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, against rising threats from Russia. Austria, France’s supposed ally, frequently sided with Russia, causing the French to become increasingly hostile to the 1756 alliance and to Marie-Antoinette. Her Austrian origins and connections aroused doubts about her loyalty to France. Meanwhile, Prussia humiliated France by snuffing out a French-supported revolt in the Netherlands.

F2

a

Financial Problems

But the monarchy’s main problem lay closer to home, namely its finances. The American Revolution added another 1.5 billion to 2.0 billion livres to the exploding national debt. By 1789 the government was spending half its budget on debt servicing. Louis’s finance ministers sought to stop the coming tide of bankruptcy, while other ministers sought reforms in the administration. From 1774 to 1776, Finance Minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot tried to increase revenues by expanding the economy. To do so, he removed state controls on the grain trade and encouraged new manufacturing by suppressing the guilds.

His successor, Jacques Necker, streamlined the tax-collection system and reorganized the treasury. But like Turgot, Necker was forced to borrow additional money at increasingly ruinous interest rates. In 1781 Necker published the Compte rendu, a doctored account of state finances, to reassure the state’s creditors about the regime’s financial health.

---

---

These numbers were soon challenged by Necker’s rival, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who succeeded him in 1783. Calonne sought to expand tax revenues by stimulating the economy through additional state expenditures. Whatever its economic effects, Calonne’s spending spree worsened the debt crisis, and he had to consider additional taxes, among other measures. By this time, however, the French public viewed such initiatives as signs of impending despotism. To overcome resistance in the Paris parlement, Calonne sought to win prior approval of his plans by an Assembly of Notables, composed of nobles and high church officials hand-picked for the occasion. Meeting in early 1787, the notables approved parts of his general plan, but not the tax increases.

Calonne left office and was replaced by Loménie de Brienne, whose own reform plan did no better with the notables. The notables were dismissed in May 1787, and Brienne tried to deal directly with the Paris parlement. But negotiations eventually broke down. To resolve the impasse, the monarchy stripped the parlements of their political powers in May 1788. The only result was an outpouring of support for the parlements and rising demand for a meeting of the Estates-General to consider the disintegrating condition of the state. In August, Brienne was fired, Necker recalled, and the Estates-General summoned to meet in Versailles. The calling of the Estates-General raised a second issue alongside that of royal despotism: How was the nation to be represented?

F2

b

The Estates-General

Elections were held in late 1788 and early 1789, and lists of grievances were drawn up to guide the delegates in their deliberations. The compiling of these lists contributed to the politicization of the nation. In September 1788 the Paris parlement decided that voting in the forthcoming meeting of the Estates-General would proceed by estate, not by head. (The Estates-General was divided into three estates, or legally defined social classes: the clergy, who made up the first estate; the nobility, who made up the second estate; and the rest of the people, who made up the third and largest estate.) The decision was probably made to prevent the king from tampering with the procedures of the Estates-General. But members of the third estate considered the decision a sellout because it gave disproportionate power to the clergy and nobles. The issue of voting dominated the Estates-General when it met in May 1789, leaving the financial crisis unresolved.

After weeks of bickering, the third estate acted on its own. It established itself as the National Assembly in June and invited the clergy and nobility to join it and vote by head. The king at first opposed the new arrangement, then reluctantly accepted it. But already a major break with past practice had occurred, and the king appeared to want to reverse a process over which he had lost control.

Further deepening the crisis was the first major famine in France since 1709. Bread prices skyrocketed, and vagrancy increased as the poor searched for food. Many saw these vagrants as paid agents of the nobility intent on attacking the peasantry, resulting in new waves of panic. When Louis called for military reinforcements in and around the capital and dismissed Necker, the hungry people of Paris rose in revolt. On July 14, 1789, they stormed the Bastille, an old fortress-prison that many critics of justice in the Old Regime had made the symbol of despotism. Revolt had turned into revolution.

G

The Reshaping of France

The crumbling of the monarchy in 1789 opened the way to more sweeping changes in France’s political structure than occurred in any other period of French history. In the course of the French Revolution, the state was massively reorganized, while a tradition of revolution became part of France’s political culture. As a result, political stability, which the revolutionaries themselves sought after a time, proved elusive. The French Revolution caused a breach in French politics that would not be healed for a century and a half. Again and again, conservative, counterrevolutionary parties that defined the nation in terms of its prerevolutionary past clashed with parties that saw 1789 as a critical moment of national rebirth. Since the revolution, France has lived through five republics, two empires, and a variety of other regimes.

During the 19th century, France’s society and economy experienced other less dramatic but equally important changes. The French Revolution destroyed the structure of traditional privilege, turning subjects unequal before the law into citizens with roughly equal rights. The Industrial Revolution, which took place more gradually in France than in other European nations, offered new means of making a living and greatly raised living standards. Indeed, one of the major issues in modern French politics has been how to assure a fair distribution of the benefits provided by the industrial economy.

G

1

Revolution and Empire

G1

a

The Moderate Revolution

In 1789 the French nation embarked on reconstructing itself. In August the National Assembly proclaimed the end of the feudal regime—meaning primarily the end of the dues peasants owed their landlords. The assembly also enacted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, intended as the preface to a constitution to be written later. Brief and vague, the Declaration both affirmed the sovereign authority of the nation and limited that authority by recognizing individual rights to life, property, and security. Work on the constitution began immediately. Finished in 1791, the constitution maintained the monarchy. But in an effort to prevent further despotism, the constitution sharply limited the king’s powers and invested greater authority in a single-bodied legislature, to be elected by wealthy males.

Between 1789 and 1791, the National Assembly also reorganized the nation into 83 districts, called departments, and gave them considerable power to run their own affairs. The assembly eliminated the nobility as a legally defined class, abolished venality of office, and made the French Catholic Church an agency of the state. The lands of the church were seized and gradually sold off to repay the monarchy’s debts and to reimburse venal officeholders. Full citizenship was extended to Jews and other religious minorities. These radical changes were resisted by some people, especially the nobility and the clergy, who began to leave France as early as the summer of 1789. Called the émigrés, these exiles lobbied other nations to crush the French Revolution.

In October 1789 an angry mob forced the king and his family to leave Versailles for Paris. The king then reluctantly and belatedly accepted revolutionary reforms. In June 1791 the royal family attempted to escape from Paris and possibly from France, only to be stopped near the French border.

The king and his family were essentially prisoners when the new constitutional monarchy took effect in October 1791. Differences soon surfaced over measures to be taken against the émigrés and those members of the clergy who refused to swear the required oath of allegiance to the new regime. Using the issue as a means to gather support, a group of deputies called the Brissotins gained power in the legislature (Brissot, Jacques Pierre). In April 1792 they pushed the legislature into declaring war on Austria, which was later joined by Prussia, England, Spain, and the Netherlands. The French army was unprepared for war and was soon put on the defensive. The whole revolution now seemed in acute danger. In August angry mobs attacked the Palace of the Tuileries, where the royal family lived. Shortly thereafter, the assembly voted to disband the new government in favor of a new constitution to be written by the National Convention, a new body of elected deputies.