France

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b

The Radical Revolution

The National Convention met in September 1792 and voted to abolish the monarchy immediately and establish a republic. It proceeded to try Louis for treason, convicted him, and executed him on January 21, 1793. During this time, counterrevolutionary revolts broke out in rural areas such as the Vendée, and the military situation continued to deteriorate.

The convention was dominated by conflict between two factions—the more moderate Girondins (the former Brissotins) and the more radical Jacobins—although many deputies were unaffiliated. The Jacobins formed an alliance with the Paris mob, which for a time exercised considerable power, and purged the convention of the Girondin leadership. In the late summer and fall of 1793, the Jacobins, under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, established the machinery of the Reign of Terror. The Terror was intended to coerce citizens into contributing to the war effort and to help save the republic.

The Jacobins won notable successes on the battlefield and crushed the Vendée revolt. They thereby saved the revolution, but they also arrested a quarter-million French people. Of these, they executed about 30,000, often on questionable grounds, for working against the republic. They terrorized other deputies and eventually alienated the Paris crowd. By July 1794 they had so narrowed their political base that Robespierre and his closest associates were arrested and guillotined. The Terror was over, and the French Revolution drifted toward the right for the first time since 1789.

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c

The End of the Revolution

As the instruments of the Reign of Terror were dismantled, the convention worked on a new constitution. The goals of this new constitution were to preserve the achievements of the French Revolution while ending the process of revolution itself. To prevent a renewal of the Terror by a single branch of government, the constitution that was enacted in 1795 distributed power between a two-chambered legislature and a five-man executive, known as the Directory.

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Although it lasted longer than the other revolutionary regimes before it, this government also failed to stabilize the political system. Its leaders fundamentally distrusted democratic procedures and went so far as to cancel elections that brought undesired results. The government refused to abide by its own constitution. It shifted back and forth between alliances with the left and the right, turning increasingly to a policy of repression imposed by the military.

Meanwhile, the armies of the republic extended the French sphere of influence into Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy. Military victory contributed to the growing power of a Corsican-born general with great political ambitions, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799 serious military setbacks weakened the Directory’s political grip, and fears grew that the radical left was about to take over. Politician and theorist Emmanuel Sieyès then joined forces with Bonaparte to scuttle the government. On November 9, 1799, Bonaparte’s troops forced members of the legislature to vest state power in a new provisional government, soon to be called the Consulate. It was composed of Sieyès, Bonaparte, and French statesman Pierre Roger Ducos. The Directory was finished and so was the revolutionary process that had brought it into existence.

The only real star in the new government, Bonaparte was designated as first consul and given a term of ten years. He quickly assumed nearly total power, despite the existence of a puppet legislature. In 1802 he signed a treaty with France’s enemies, which allowed France to keep control of northern Italy and the regions around the Rhine. It brought France the first real peace it had known in ten years. On a wave of popular acclaim, Bonaparte was appointed first consul for life. He successfully built up a wide constituency, drawing from both supporters and opponents of previous revolutionary regimes. To further that end, he pardoned most of the émigrés in 1802.

Even more important were Bonaparte’s institutional reforms, most dating from this early period of his rule. In 1801 he settled the outstanding issues related to the French Catholic Church in a concordat agreed to by the pope. The concordat affirmed Roman Catholicism as “the religion of the great majority of citizens,” limited papal interference in the affairs of the French church, provided state salaries for the clergy, and recognized the Revolution’s confiscation of church lands as permanent. Bonaparte reorganized the civil administration, instituting a system of prefects, subprefects, and mayors charged with executing his orders in the provinces. To strengthen state finance, Bonaparte stabilized the value of the franc, the common name for the livre after 1789, and established the Bank of France (Banque de France), which facilitated government borrowing. To reform education, he instituted a series of secondary schools run according to a code of military discipline. These schools were later incorporated into the Imperial University, a state agency to oversee and coordinate education. Bonaparte also completed another project that would help define the modern French nation—France’s first systematic law code (see Code Napoléon).

Having reformed France’s government, Bonaparte reformed his own status. In 1804 he crowned himself emperor as Napoleon I, thereby initiating the First Empire. The revolutionary dreams of liberty were now forgotten in favor of a benevolent despotism, whose citizens were kept under close surveillance by Napoleon’s police chief Joseph Fouché, duc d’Otrante.

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d

First Empire

Many of Napoleon’s individual domestic reforms—the system of prefects, the Bank of France, the law code—proved enduring, but the fate of the First Empire as a whole was determined on the battlefield. Indeed, the First Empire was, more than anything else, a machine of war. In 1803 France renewed conflict with England, and soon thereafter with other powers. Over the next few years, Napoleon won a string of brilliant military victories. His special target was Britain, the keystone of the opposing alliance. Napoleon sought to cripple the British economy and stimulate French production with the Continental System, a blockade to prevent British goods from reaching most European nations. The Continental System failed, but by 1810 Napoleon had established an empire of satellite kingdoms—many ruled by his relatives. Napoleon’s empire extended from Spain to Poland and included an alliance with Russia as well as the subordination of Prussia and Austria.

This empire proved unstable and was short-lived. Spain erupted in guerrilla activity, supported by Britain; Russia pulled out of both the Continental System and its French alliance; and Napoleon failed to turn around Russian opposition through his ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. By 1813 the empire was crumbling and reeling from defeat. The following year allied armies entered France. Napoleon abdicated and was sent to the Italian island of Elba while the Bourbons returned to power under Louis XVIII.

In 1815 Napoleon attempted a comeback. He arrived in France and rallied the people to his side under the promise of a new, more liberal regime. But this brief interlude, known as the Hundred Days, ended with Napoleon’s final crushing defeat in the Battle of Waterloo and the second Bourbon restoration. The career that began in military glory ended because of military and diplomatic miscalculation. Napoleon was exiled to the Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.

Few individuals have had such a lasting impact on French history as Napoleon. Yet the nature of his legacy remains disputed. He ended the turbulence of the revolutionary decade while completing some of the revolution’s unfinished business. His way of healing the cleavage between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries was to personalize politics through a cult of his own glory, to embark on ultimately fruitless campaigns of military conquest that cost the lives of about 3 million people, and to unify the nation through the centralization of power. This was one possible answer to the instability resulting from the revolution, and those who were moved by Napoleon’s myth in later years found it as compelling as had so many of his contemporaries.

Yet, whether such a system could have endured much longer is questionable, given the losses of manpower and wealth. Although Napoleon attempted to stimulate French economic production, he was unable to prevent a net decline in trade and a reduction in the agricultural and industrial growth rate, due to the disruptions of war. Moreover, it is arguable that the Napoleonic system of command was not suited for a nation that still had aspirations for liberty, had practiced a primitive form of democracy during the revolution, and was about to enter a new industrial age. Napoleon opened careers to men of talent but modest background, so long as they accepted the kind of state-imposed tutelage from which the early revolution had sought to release them. It remained to be seen what the French would do under less coercive regimes.

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2

19th-Century French Economy and Society

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a

Industrialization in France

The term Industrial Revolution, invented over a century ago to describe the rapid economic transformation of Britain, is not entirely appropriate to describe the change of manufacturing methods in modern France. To be sure, the two economies appear remarkably similar now, but France’s transition to an industrial economy was much more gradual. French industrial production lagged behind that of Britain and Germany for many decades.

This pace was in large part the result of the slow expansion of the French population relative to population growth in virtually all other countries of Europe. During the 19th century, the British population increased by about 350 percent, the German population increased by about 250 percent, and the overall European population more than doubled. But the French population increased by only 40 percent, to about 39 million. French mortality rates did decline—from 25.3 per 1,000 between 1816 and 1820 to 18.3 per 1,000 during the period from 1911 to 1913. However, the birthrate declined more—from 32.9 per 1,000 from 1816 to 1820 to 18.8 per 1,000 from 1911 to 1913, which was unusually low for Europe in this period.

Part of the explanation for France’s low birthrate lies in the persistence of the peasantry, which grew in absolute size, although it declined as a fraction of the total population. Peasants were typically forced to limit family size because they earned only very modest incomes from cultivating small plots and working at a variety of low-paying jobs. Some peasants migrated to the cities in search of work, but France’s urban growth was modest relative to Britain’s. Only 14 percent of the French population inhabited cities of over 10,000 by 1851, compared to 39 percent of the British population. Slower rates of population and urban growth meant smaller domestic demand for industrial goods. The foreign market did little to increase this demand because France exported only 8 percent of its manufactured products until the 1840s. High protective tariffs until the 1860s reduced foreign competition that might have stimulated innovation.

As in Britain, industrialization in France began in the textile industry. It then spread to heavy industry, especially iron, which became the dominant industrial sector by the mid-19th century. Not all sectors of manufacturing were immediately affected by the Industrial Revolution. Until the 1880s, for example, glassware continued to be produced by small family firms of skilled workers employing traditional, manual glassblowing techniques.

Beginning in the 1840s, railroad construction powerfully transformed all sectors of the French economy, spearheading an economic boom that lasted until the 1860s. Earlier in the 19th century, canal and road building had begun to create a truly national market, but the railroads allowed goods to reach virtually all areas of France by World War I (1914-1918). Railroad construction also stimulated demand for metal to produce rails and rolling stock.

Railroads did not, however, prevent the onset of a serious economic recession beginning in the 1860s. The recession was caused primarily by the inability of French agricultural and industrial producers to meet the growing worldwide competition for markets to which a reduction in tariffs in 1860 had exposed them. The recession slowed but did not halt French industrial growth until the strong recovery of the 1890s. Between the 1890s and World War I, French economic growth accelerated to twice the rate of the previous three decades.

The impact of industrialization on French society was strong, but not so dramatic as in Britain and Germany, where faster rates of economic change altered the landscape within a few decades. Paris suffered critical problems related to health and traffic congestion because it was so large and grew relatively rapidly. In the 1850s the government undertook a massive program of urban reconstruction under the leadership of the George Eugène, baron d’Haussmann, who was prefect of the Seine. Haussmann demolished many buildings, widened streets, and constructed a massive network of waterworks and sewers. Haussmann’s projects, which were accompanied by a great deal of private rebuilding, transformed Paris from a medieval city into a modern city and provided a model of urban renewal followed in other French cities.

Industrialization also led to the formation of a French working class. The industrial labor force expanded from 1.9 million in the period between 1803 and 1812 to 6.7 million in 1913. However, as late as 1906, only about a quarter of these people worked in establishments of more than 50 workers, while the remainder worked in smaller businesses. Many people worked under dangerous conditions, lived in overcrowded housing, and had little employment security. The living standards of most workers did not begin to rise substantially until the boom of the 1850s. This improvement was followed by further uneven rises until World War I.

Peasants, too, improved their standard of living during the 19th century, as comforts once known to only a few became more common. Some peasants had maintained commercial relations with urban areas for centuries. However, the coming of railroads and the opening of state-supported schools, especially during the Third Republic, broke down the commercial and cultural isolation of others. Standardized French gradually replaced old dialects.

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b

Emergence of the Middle Class

Living primarily in cities and larger villages, the middle class blended imperceptibly at its upper end with the aristocracy. This group of so-called notables reaped most of the benefits of industrialization and dominated politics until the Third Republic in the 1870s. At its lower end, the middle class fused with the upper reaches of the working class. Between these extremes emerged a large class of white-collar workers with modest incomes derived from small businesses, retail shops, and clerical and professional jobs. This class formed the backbone of the republican constituency in the late 19th century.

In families of the middle class, women were not expected to work in salaried positions outside the home. This was particularly true for women who were married and had children. But primarily because of economic necessity, 68 percent of all women over age 16 and 56 percent of all married women held salaried jobs in 1906; these numbers were, however, much lower in nonagricultural areas.

Despite their critical contributions to the economy, women had far fewer rights than men. Indeed, they constituted the largest disadvantaged group in a nation that had proclaimed the equality of rights in 1789. Under the Code Napoléon, husbands had full control over family property, including dowries brought by wives into their marriages. Divorce was illegal from 1816 until 1884, and the legal and social consequences of adultery were much more severe for women than for men. Secondary education was unavailable to most females until the 1880s. The right to vote was extended to women only in 1945 after a half-century of agitation. Even today women hold only a small, although increasing, number of top positions in the French government.