Kinlore
1789–1799

The French Revolution

Bankruptcy and a summons of the Estates-General turn into a revolution that abolishes privilege, declares the rights of man, executes the king and invents modern politics.

  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
  • Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)
  • Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789 — Assemblée nationale constituante, Conseil constitutionnel (1789)
  • Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
  • The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)

Well established democracystatehoodreligionconflictidentity

By the 1780s the French monarchy was effectively bankrupt, partly because of its costly support for the American Revolution. Society was formally divided into three estates: clergy, nobility and everyone else, the Third Estate, which paid most of the taxes. A bad harvest in 1788 sent bread prices soaring. To raise money, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614.

  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
  • The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)

1789

When it met at Versailles in May 1789, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and swore, in the Tennis Court Oath of 20 June, not to disband until France had a constitution. On 14 July Parisian crowds stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison, in search of gunpowder. In the countryside, peasants attacked manor houses in the “Great Fear”, and on the night of 4 August the Assembly abolished feudal privileges. On 26 August it adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, whose first article says: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”

The Revolution then remade almost everything: departments replaced provinces, the metric system replaced local measures, church lands were sold, and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) split the Church between priests who swore loyalty to the state and those who refused.

  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)

Republic, war and Terror

War with Austria and Prussia from 1792 radicalised everything. The monarchy fell in August 1792, the Republic was proclaimed in September, and Louis XVI was guillotined on 21 January 1793. With foreign armies at the borders and revolt at home, the Committee of Public Safety, in which Maximilien Robespierre was the leading voice, ruled through the Terror of 1793–94. About 17,000 people were officially executed, and many more died in prison or without trial.

  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
  • Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)

The bloodiest episode was in the Vendée in western France, where a Catholic and royalist peasant rising in 1793 was crushed with mass killings by republican “infernal columns” and drownings at Nantes. Estimates of deaths on the rebel side range widely, from about 150,000 to more than 200,000 depending on the historian, with tens of thousands more on the republican side.

  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)

The Revolution also went beyond France. Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue rose in 1791, and in February 1794 the Convention abolished slavery throughout the colonies, the first European power to do so; Napoleon restored it in 1802.

  • Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)

Robespierre was overthrown and executed in July 1794. The more moderate Directory that followed was unstable and dependent on the army, and in November 1799 a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power.

  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)

Legacy

Few events have been fought over as long. The Republic made 14 July the national holiday in 1880 and the Marseillaise the anthem, and the bicentenary in 1989 was a national festival. But the Revolution also left a France divided into “two Frances”, republican and secular against Catholic and conservative, a divide that shaped politics until well into the twentieth century.

  • Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)
  • The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)

How it's seen
Republican tradition

The birth of the nation and of universal rights: the end of feudal privilege, equality before the law, popular sovereignty. The violence was real but was forced on the Revolution by war, foreign invasion and counter-revolution. This is the story told in schools and celebrated on 14 July.

Catholic and counter-revolutionary memory

A catastrophe that killed a king, persecuted priests and nuns and crushed the Catholic, royalist West. Some, notably Reynald Secher, have called the repression of the Vendée a genocide; most historians reject that term while accepting that it was a massacre of civilians. This memory is still strong in parts of western France.

  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
  • Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)

The historians' debate

For much of the twentieth century Marxist historians read 1789 as a bourgeois revolution against feudalism. From the 1970s François Furet and the "revisionists" argued instead that its driving force was political, a new language of popular sovereignty that contained the seeds of the Terror. Most historians now draw on both.

  • Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)
  • The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)

Why it matters today

France

The Revolution is France's founding myth and its oldest argument. The motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the tricolour, the Marseillaise, 14 July, the idea of a nation of equal citizens with no intermediate loyalties, the left–right divide (which began with where deputies sat in 1789): all come from it. So does the instinct to take to the streets. How you judge it, especially the Terror and the Vendée, still says something about where you stand.