B Storming of the BastilleOn June 23, 1789, Louis XVI belatedly proposed a major overhaul of the financial system, agreed to seek the consent of the deputies for all new loans and taxes, and proposed other important reforms. But he spoiled the effect by refusing to recognize the transformation of the Estates-General into the National Assembly and by insisting upon voting by estate—already a dying cause. Moreover, he inspired new fears by surrounding the meeting hall of the deputies with a large number of soldiers. Faced with stiffening resistance by the third estate and increasing willingness of deputies from the clergy and nobility to join the third estate in the National Assembly, the king suddenly changed course and agreed to a vote by head on June 27.
Despite much rejoicing, suspicions of the king’s intentions ran high. Royal troops began to thicken near Paris, and on July 11 the still-popular Necker was dismissed. To people at the time and to many later on, these developments were clear signs that the king sought to undo the events of the previous weeks.
Crowds began to roam Paris looking for arms to fight off a royal attack. On July 14 these crowds assaulted the Bastille, a large fortress on the eastern edge of the city. They believed that it contained munitions and many prisoners of despotism, but in fact, the fortress housed only seven inmates at the time. The storming of the Bastille marked a turning point—attempts at reform had become a full-scale revolution. Faced with this insurrection, the monarchy backed down. The troops were withdrawn, and Necker was recalled.
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.
A1 Political Change: Constitutional MonarchyThe 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.
A2 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.
A3 Religious Change: Civil Constitution of the ClergyPolitical 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.
B Growing Factionalism
All these measures were vigorously debated inside and outside the assembly. The assembly had been divided from the start into a conservative right that wanted to limit change and a radical left that wanted major social and political reforms. The assembly therefore lacked a unified voice. As head of state, the king was expected to provide this unifying influence, even if his power was formally limited. However, hopes that the king would step in and fill this role were dashed in June 1791 when the royal family fled Paris in disguise, leaving behind a manifesto denouncing nearly all the Revolution had accomplished since 1789. Poorly planned and executed, the effort ended with the royal family’s arrest at the border town of Varennes. From there they were returned to Paris under heavy guard, now more prisoners than ever.
Because so much had been expected of the king, the Varennes fiasco proved more of a shock than could be absorbed all at once. In an attempt to recover, assembly leaders announced that the incident had been a case of kidnapping, not an escape, and in mid-July the assembly voted to clear the king of all responsibility for what had happened. But these fictions were hardly convincing, and once they collapsed, so did the likelihood of ending the Revolution and establishing a stable government. On the left, moderate revolutionaries who sought to keep the monarchy, called Feuillants, split from the more radical revolutionaries, known as the Cordeliers and the Jacobins, who now began to talk openly about replacing the monarchy with a republic.
The king reluctantly approved the new constitution on September 14, 1791. Alarmed by the radical direction the Revolution was taking, more nobles began to cross the border to become émigrés. Pressured by these émigrés and concerned about the potential effects of the Revolution on their own kingdoms, the Austrian emperor and Prussian king issued the Declaration of Pillnitz on August 27. In this declaration they announced a rather vague willingness to intervene militarily on behalf of the French monarchy. Unclear as it was, the declaration provoked fears of an invasion.
It was under these threatening circumstances that the new constitution took effect and the Legislative Assembly first met on October 1, 1791. At first, the assembly got along remarkably well with the king, but this situation changed when the assembly proposed retaliatory actions against the émigrés and the refractory clergy. On November 9 it passed legislation requiring that the émigrés return to France or face death and the loss of their estates. On November 29 it required the refractory clergy to take the oath to the constitution or fall under state surveillance and lose their pension rights.
V RADICAL REVOLUTION
The émigrés and their efforts to mobilize foreign powers against France created the pretext for France’s entry into war in April 1792. In reality, Austria and Prussia had shown little interest in intervention on behalf of the French king. However, radical political figures, most notably Jacques Pierre Brissot, persistently exaggerated the threat of an Austrian invasion of France and the subversion of the revolutionary government by a conspiracy of Austrian sympathizers called the Austrian Committee. Expecting that a conflict with Austria would weaken the king to their political advantage, Brissot and his colleagues pressed for a declaration of war. Many of the king’s advisors, though at first not the king himself, also advocated the war option. They believed a victory would strengthen royal power and a defeat would crush the Revolution. Persuaded, the king appointed a ministry dominated by Brissot’s associates on March 10, 1792, and on April 20 the assembly declared war on Austria, which was soon joined by Prussia. Thus began the series of conflicts known as the French Revolutionary Wars.
A End of the Monarchy
The wars profoundly altered the course of the Revolution, leading to the end of the monarchy and raising fears of reprisals against the revolutionaries in the event of a defeat. The French had few successes on the battlefield. The French army was in the middle of a major reorganization and was not prepared for war. In addition, Brissot’s ministry proved incompetent and disorganized. During the spring of 1792, the French army lurched from defeat to defeat. Someone, it seemed, was to blame; and the Brissot faction (called Brissotins) blamed the king, who in turn fired the Brissotin ministers on June 13.
On June 20 a mob, alarmed at the worsening military situation and rising bread prices caused by the declining value of the assignats, stormed the Tuilerie Palace. Coached by the Brissotins, the mob demanded that the king reinstate the Brissotin ministers. Louis courageously refused to do so. But military disasters continued during the summer, and the political situation deteriorated further when a Prussian commander, the duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto in which he threatened to execute anyone who harmed the royal family.
On August 10 a crowd again stormed the Tuilerie Palace in the Revolution’s bloodiest eruption to date. This time, however, the mob was not allied with the Brissotins, who still favored a monarchy. Instead it supported the more radical Jacobins who, under the leadership of the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, now demanded the creation of a republic. While the royal family hid in the Assembly hall, the mob hacked to death some 600 Swiss guards, while itself suffering heavy losses. More than lives were lost; so was the monarchy. The Legislative Assembly immediately suspended the king from his duties and voted to hold a convention. The convention, to be elected by nearly universal manhood suffrage, was to write a new, republican constitution.