French Revolution
Fighting the British in the French-Indian war and fighting in the American War of independence, France was losing a lot of money and resources. After helping America win their freedom, the new USA government refused to repay them. This caused food shortage that mostly affected the poor. The common people suffered while the upper class continued to frolic and revel in excess. People were angry. Food prices rose and unemployment went up.
King Louis 16th and Marie Antoinette
The couple lives a life of lavish pomp and expense. They lived at the palace of Versailles and knew little of the lives of their people. Marie had a personal chocolatier, and their dogs were baked fresh treats every day. Marie was concerned with being a figure of high fashion and had stylists create groundbreaking new looks and massive tiered hair. At one point she had her hair made to look like a ship. Marie Antoinette gained the nickname “Madame Deficit”.
Divine Right of Kings is a political and religious doctrine of political legitimacy of a monarchy. It stems from a specific metaphysical framework in which a monarch is, before birth, pre-ordained to inherit the crown. Significantly, the doctrine asserts that a monarch is not accountable to any earthly authority because their right to rule is derived from divine authority.
Romans 13 – “Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. 2 So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished.”
Due to the recent Enlightenment, people had begun to rethink the royal divinity and considering equality among all people. Seeing this frivolous expenditure at the expense of the taxes they were paying, simmering resentment started to boil over. Philosophers Montesquieu & Rousseau created a new way of thinking that we take for granted today. They proposed that all people are equal in worth and society was a mutual contract between them. Power cannot rule itself in the interests of the people and therefore a balance of power is needed. This was very different from the societies of the time.
Estates General of 1789
Revolutionary opinions began to be exchanged on the streets. Things became so bad that King Louis 16th called together an assembly of representatives of the realm for the first time in 173 years.
The Lettre announces:
"We have need of a concourse of our faithful subjects, to assist us surmount all the difficulties we find relative to the state of our finances... These great motives have resolved us to convoke the assemblée des États of all the provinces under our authority ...."
Representatives from across France were invited by the King to meet and negotiate a solution to the crisis.
The meeting included representatives of the clergy (First Estate) representing 1% of the population- 1 vote, the nobility (Second Estate) representing 1% of the population – 1 vote and the commoners (Third Estate) representing 98%.- 1 vote (made up of Lawyers, public officials and non-noble land owners.)
Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution was one of the nobles’ present.
King Louis tried getting money out of the noble class, but they declined. Next, he suggested a stamp tax like the one that had failed miserably in America. This was down voted. They argued for hours. King Louis got frustrated and signed arrest warrants for anyone who disagreed with him.
The people resented the fact that nobles could excuse themselves from most of the burden of taxation and service that fell on the ordinary people. Nobody could agree where the blame lay and who was responsible to fix it. They had reached an impasse. Instead of discussing the King's taxes, the three estates began to discuss separately the organization of the legislature.
The next day, the Third Estate had come to an agreed proposal and invited the clergy and nobles to work with them on it. (Not the king) The two other estates declined, and the Third Estate continued to declare themselves a “National Assembly” an assembly not of the estates, but of the people. They invited the other orders to join them but made it clear that they intended to conduct the nation's affairs with or without them. As their numbers exceeded the combined numbers of the other estates, they could dominate any combined assembly in which issues were decided based on majority or supermajority votes of its members, rather than the traditional arrangement giving equal decision-making power to each of the three Estates. The Third Estate balked at this traditional arrangement, because the clergy and nobility were more conservative than the commoners and could overrule the Third Estate on any matter 2–1. The Third Estate had initially demanded to be granted double weight, allowing them to match the power of the First and Second Estates, but those estates had refused to accept this proposal.
King Louis was very concerned. On the advice of his council, he was advised to arrive at the assembly and reverse its decisions and order them to disband. He arrived at their meeting hall before they got there and ordered his men to lock the doors. The Assembly went and found another building big enough and ended up meeting at an indoor tennis court and made the ‘Tennis Court Oath’ agreeing not to disband until they got their way. Two days later they met at a church and the majority of the representatives for the clergy joined them. The next day members of the nobility joined them.
Storming of the Bastille - 1789
Louis sent troops to Paris to protect the capital from being destroyed or captured by the revolutionaries. He purposely sent his Swiss and German soldiers believing that his French troops might be too sympathetic to the revolution.
The revolutionaries saw this mobile force of troops as a threat of impending force by King Louis. So, they prepared themselves for defense. The city of Paris was in a state of alarm. If the king was going to suppress them then they needed weapons. So, they headed for the arsenal kept at the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison.
The crowd gathered outside the fortress around mid-morning, calling for the pulling back of the seemingly threatening cannon from towers and walls and the release of the arms and gunpowder stored inside. Two men were allowed inside to negotiate but negotiations dragged on while the crowd grew and became impatient. Around 1:30 pm, the crowd surged into the undefended outer courtyard. A small party climbed onto the roof of a building next to the gate to the inner courtyard of the fortress and broke the chains on the drawbridge, crushing one. Protesters rushed in. Gunfire began, apparently spontaneously, turning the crowd into a mob. The crowd seems to have felt that they had been intentionally drawn into a trap and the fighting became more violent and intense. A nearby regiment of 5,000 French troops refused to intervene, and the governor surrendered. Although rumored to hold many prisoners, the Bastille held only seven: four forgers, two noblemen held for "immoral behavior", and a murder suspect. Nevertheless, as a potent symbol of the Ancien Régime, its destruction was viewed as a triumph and Bastille Day is still celebrated every year.
83 protesters died and 9 guards. When they caught the governor, they put his head placed on a pike and paraded around the city. An English traveller, Doctor Edward Rigby, reported what he saw, "[We] perceived two bloody heads raised on pikes, which were said to be the heads of the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, and of Monsieur Flesselles, Prévôt des Marchands. It was a chilling and a horrid sight! ... Shocked and disgusted at this scene, [we] retired immediately from the streets."
The king first learned of the storming only the next morning. "Is it a revolt?" asked Louis XVI. The duke replied: "No sire, it's not a revolt; it's a revolution."
There were a few different factions of Revolutionaries. The Jacobines, the Girondins and the Montagnards. Their opinions varied from keeping the king and becoming a Constitutional Monarchy to getting rid of the King entirely and becoming a Republic.
Afraid he was losing control, Louis appointed Lafayette and Jean Sylvian Bailly as leaders of a new Constitution. The hope was that if he helped give the common people more rights then he could decide what those rights might be. After initial optimism, rumor and suspicion soon spread. Louis fired the Controller-General of Finances who was a popular man trying to impose taxes on the rich instead of the poor and replaced him with a new Controller-General of Finances. Louis chose the new man because he was going to tax the poor just as Louis wanted. People were angry and frustrated. A mob captured the new man and tried to hang him from a lamppost. The rope broke 3 times, so they cut his head off instead and parades the head through town on a pike.
The new Assembly voted to have the Bastille demolished and so they paid 1,000 people to take it apart brick by brick. Lafayette gifted the key to his good friend; George Washington and it remains on display in Virginia to this day. The new Assembly also passed laws taking away the privileges and making them equal to the common man. Other decrees included equality before the law, government representation for all, nobody is tax exempt, freedom of religion (France was Catholic at the time) and mandatory church tithes were abolished.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
In1789, Lafayette, with consultation from his friend, Thomas Jefferson, wrote a new French declaration of rights. Inspired by philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu & Rousseau. In a lot of ways, it was inspired by the American declarations but according to many historians may have been more influential.
The declaration defines a single set of individual and collective rights for all men. Influenced by the doctrine of natural rights, these rights are held to be universal and valid in all times and places. The declaration is in the spirit of "secular natural law", which does not base itself on religious doctrine or authority,
“Human Beings are born and remain free and equal in rights.”
“These rights are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression.”
“Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others.”
“The law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to society.”
The declaration of rights, American Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and British Magna Carta inspired the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
1791 – Rights of Man – Thomas Paine
Zoo
1792 – French Revolutionary Wars
Neighboring countries were concerned that the Revolutionary zeal would spill over into their kingdoms. Their royal families watched in terror as the most populous country in Europe was stripped of its power. So, they requested troops to be stationed at the border with France. Next, the royal families, who had given shelter to many of the exiled French royals, demanded that King Louis and Marie Antoinette should not be hurt.
The French revolutionist government saw this as ungrounded and aggressive intervention by a foreign monarch and worried that they would invade, attempting to re-establish the King. They responded by demanding that the troops on the border be sent home and gave them a deadline. When the troops didn’t leave, they declared war. The battle ended as a stalemate with the French feeling positive that they had defended their land.
The Friend of the People – Jean-Paul Marat – 1789 - 1792
A political journalist wrote in the newspapers and his violent & decisive opinions became very popular.
“Five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom and happiness.”
“It is the height of stupidity to claim that men who for a thousand years have had the power to berate us, to fleece us and to oppress us with impunity, will now agree, with good grace, to be our equals.”
Many royalists and neutrals saw his writings as insightful and dangerous. Revolutionaries saw him as a voice of reason and conviction.
September Massacre - 1792
At home, the changing political systems and confrontation with neighboring countries had the Assembly concerned for their survival and the success of their cause. They made the proclamation: “We ask that anyone refusing to give personal service or to furnish arms shall be punished with death.”
They were concerned that if the foreign powers made progress into France then they could set free the royalists, Catholics, and counterrevolutionaries in prison. So, their troops ran into the prisons and killed up to 1,600 prisoners in 20 hours.
Assassination of Marat
Marat was in his bathtub, soothing a chronic skin condition he struggled with. When a young woman from Caen, Charlotte Corday, appeared at his flat, claiming to have vital information on the activities of the escaped counter-revolutionaries. Despite his wife's protests, Marat asked for her to enter and gave her an audience by his bath, over which a board had been laid to serve as a writing desk. Their interview lasted around fifteen minutes. He asked her what was happening in Caen and she explained, reciting a list of escapees. After he had finished writing out the list, Corday claimed that he told her, "Their heads will fall within a fortnight," At that moment, Corday rose from her chair, drawing out from her corset a five-inch kitchen knife, which she had bought earlier that day, and brought it down hard into Marat's chest, where it pierced just under his right clavicle, opening the an artery, close to the heart. The massive bleeding was fatal within seconds. Slumping backwards, Marat cried out his last words to his wife, "Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!" ("Help me, my beloved!") and died.
Corday was a counter-revolutionary sympathiser who came from an impoverished royalist family; her brothers were exiled royal princes. Charlotte Corday was guillotined July 1793 for the murder. During her four-day trial, she testified that she had carried out the assassination alone, saying "I killed one man to save 100,000."
Execution 1793
France continued to fight battles against Prussia. It was believed that they were trying to reinstate the monarchy (something they most definitely wanted.) and would continue to be a threat to France until they got their way. Letters from King Louis to foreign kings were found and it was believed he was trying to destroy the new Republic and put himself back in charge. (Which he probably was.) Then King Louis and Marie got caught trying to escape to Prussia and it made them look even more against the revolution and conspiring.
“The king must die so that the country can live.”
―
On 17 January 1793, the Assembly condemned Louis to death for "conspiracy against public liberty and general safety". Louis was condemned to death by a majority of one vote. Philippe Égalité, formerly the Duke of Orléans and Louis's cousin, voted for Louis's execution, a cause of much future bitterness among French monarchists; he would himself be guillotined on the same scaffold,
Louis XVI mounted the scaffold, he appeared dignified and resigned. He delivered a short speech in which he pardoned "...those who are the cause of my death.... ".He then declared himself innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, praying that his blood would not fall back on France. On Monday, 21 January 1793, Louis XVI, at age 38, was beheaded by guillotine. While Louis's blood dripped to the ground, several onlookers ran forward to dip their handkerchiefs in it. This account was proven true in 2012 after a DNA comparison.
Thus ended over 1,000 years of Royal reign. The institutions of the old world had been up-rooted.
Marie Antoinette was declared guilty of the three main charges against her: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the State, and high treason because of her intelligence activities in the interest of the enemy.
She maintained her composure, despite the insults of the jeering crowd. A constitutional priest was assigned to her to hear her final confession. He sat by her in the cart, but she ignored him all the way to the scaffold as he had pledged his allegiance to the new republic.
Her last words are recorded as, "Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès" or "Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose", after accidentally stepping on her executioner's shoe. Marie Antoinette was guillotined at 12:15 p.m. on 16 October 1793.
Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1821, claimed that "Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d’Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the Guillotine" adding that "I have ever believed that, had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution.” Others were shocked and viewed it as evidence of the dangers of Revolution.
Horrified conservatives across Europe called for the destruction of revolutionary France. Instead of making the surrounding monarchies less interested it made them more adamant to stamp out the anti-monarch sentiment. The Revolutionists hoped war would unite the people behind the government and provide an excuse for rising prices and food shortages but found themselves the target of popular anger. The first military conscription was imposed, and it sparked riots in Paris. The crisis led to the creation on 6 April 1793 of the Committee of Public Safety, Orwellian in nature, it was there to keep the people in-line and restore law and order.
Reign of Terror 1794
The Reign of Terror began as a way to harness revolutionary fervour, but quickly degenerated into the settlement of personal grievances. The separate groups of revolutionaries had different ideas and were turning on one another. Maximillian Robespierre took the lead and set up a more extreme vision of what France should be. On 17th, the Law of Suspects ordered the arrest of suspected "enemies of freedom".
“The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.”
―
"not only revealed massacre and destruction on an unprecedented scale, but a zeal so violent that it has bestowed as its legacy much of the region's identity."
The frenzy had reached such a point that fellow revolutionaries that didn’t agree with the consensus were hanged as traitors. Nobles who had helped and voted to execute King Louis were now getting executed themselves.
The Reign of Terror was characterized by a dramatic rejection of long-held religious authority, its hierarchical structure, and the corrupt and intolerant influence of the aristocracy and clergy. The tension sparked by these conflicting objectives laid a foundation for the "justified" use of terror to achieve revolutionary ideals and rid France of the religiosity that revolutionaries believed was standing in the way.
Over the course of a year 16,600 had been executed in Paris and the provinces of France. Another 10,000 died in prisons before trial.
Seemingly intoxicated with the power over life and death, Robespierre called for more purges and executions. By the summer of 1794, many in the Revolutionary government began to question his motives, as the country was no longer threatened by outside enemies. An awkward coalition of moderates and revolutionaries formed to oppose Robespierre and his followers. Pretty soon he was being the one executed by Guillotine after signing hundreds of executions himself.
Convention
The new Democratic Committee was over the top, fearful, and suspicious. In striving for a better world, they performed horrific acts on innocent people who did nothing but disagreed. Heads on pikes hardly screams Enlightenment.
However, many of their enlightenment ideals made it through. The equality of men of all social standings. On 4th February 1794 the National Convention decreed the abolition of slavery in all of France and in French colonies. Soon Napoleon, a member of the common class with a lawyer father became the leader of France.
The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field. The oppressed had become the oppressors themselves.
Motions were passed that caused them to announce themselves as an Empire with Napoleon named as the First Emperor of France in 1804. They had traded an absolute monarch for an absolute Emperor.
Legacy
France today is adorned with the history of the revolution. The French Tricolour has been seen as embodying all the principles of the Revolution—Liberté, égalité, fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.) The French national anthem was written in 1792 and is still used today.
Arise, children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us, tyranny's
Bloody standard is raised, (repeat)
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They're coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!
To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
March, march!
Let an impure blood
Water our furrows!
What does this horde of slaves,
Of traitors and conspiring kings want?
For whom have these vile chains,
These irons, been long prepared? (repeat)
Frenchmen, for us, ah! What outrage
What furious action it must arouse!
It is to us they dare plan
A return to the old slavery!
Tremble, tyrants and you traitors
The shame of all parties,
Tremble! Your parricidal schemes
Will finally receive their prize! (repeat)
Everyone is a soldier to combat you,
If they fall, our young heroes,
Will be produced anew from the ground,
Ready to fight against you!
Ironically, one of the factors that lead to the financial strain on the French people was their monarchies support in the American Revolution, a revolt against a rival Monarchy. It seemed like a good option at the time to get one over on Great Britain but the revolutionary fervor spilled over into their own country and came crashing down with fierce anger over years and years of oppression. It’s a funny thing, a king that gets himself killed. Absolute power but too out of touch to preserve it against his subjects.
The left–right political spectrum is a system of classifying political positions, ideologies and parties. Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. Right-wing politics holds that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal or desirable. The terms “left” and “right” first appeared during the French Revolution. When the French National Assembly met to draft a constitution, the delegates were divided on how much authority should be given to King Louis XVI. The conservative, aristocratic supporters of the monarchy who wanted to give the king more power sat to the presiding officer’s right; while the anti-royalist revolutionaries seated themselves to his left. Due to this, the French newspapers of the time began making reference to the progressive “left” and traditionalist “right”.
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