The Beginnings of The Revolutionary Era: The American Revolution
The Beginnings of The Revolutionary Era: The American Revolution
The Beginnings of The Revolutionary Era: The American Revolution
At the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Great Britain had become the world’s greatest colonial
power. In North America, Britain controlled Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi (see Map 19.1).
After the Seven Years’ War, British policy makers sought to obtain new revenues from the thirteen
American colonies to pay for expenses the British army incurred in defending the colonists. An attempt to
levy new taxes by a stamp act in 1765 led to riots and the law’s quick repeal. The Americans and the British
had different conceptions of empire. The British envisioned a single empire with Parliament as the supreme
authority throughout. Only Parliament could make laws for all the people in the empire, including the
American colonists. The Americans, in contrast, had their own representative assemblies. They believed that
neither the king nor Parliament had any right to interfere in their internal affairs nor that no tax could be
levied without the consent of an assembly whose members actually represented the people. Crisis followed
crisis in the 1770s until 1776, when the colonists decided to declare their independence from the British
Empire. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved a declaration of independence written
by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) (see the box on p. 577). A stirring political document, the declaration
affirmed the Enlightenment’s natural rights of ‘‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’’ and declared the
colonies to be ‘‘free and independent states absolved from all allegiance to the British crown.’’ The war for
American independence had formally begun.
The year 1789 witnessed two far-reaching events, the beginning of a new United States of America
and the eruption of the French Revolution. Was there a connection between the two great revolutions of the
late eighteenth century? There is no doubt that the American Revolution had an important impact on
Europeans. Books, newspapers, and magazines provided the newly developing reading public with
numerous accounts of American events. To many in Europe, it seemed to portend an era of significant
changes, including new arrangements in international politics. The Venetian ambassador to Paris astutely
observed in 1783 that ‘‘if only the union of the [American] provinces is preserved, it is reasonable to expect
that, with the favorable effects of time, and of European arts and sciences, it will become the most
formidable power in the world.’’But the American Revolution also meant far more than that. It proved to
many Europeans that the liberal political ideas of the Enlightenment were not the vapid utterances
of intellectuals. The rights of man, ideas of liberty and equality, popular sovereignty, the separation of
powers, and freedom of religion, thought, and press were not utopian ideals. The Americans had created a
new social contract, embodied it in a written constitution, and made concepts of liberty and representative
government a reality. The premises of the Enlightenment seemed confirmed; a new age and a better world
could be achieved. As a Swiss philosophe expressed it, ‘‘I am tempted to believe that North America is the
country where reason and humanity will develop more rapidly than anywhere else.’’2 Europeans obtained
much of their information about America from returning soldiers, especially the hundreds of French officers
who had served in the American war. One of them, the aristocratic marquis de Lafayette, had volunteered
for service in America in order to ‘‘strike a blow against England,’’ France’s old enemy. Closely associated
with George Washington, Lafayette returned to France with ideas of individual liberties and notions of
republicanism and popular sovereignty. He became a member of the Society of Thirty, a club composed of
people from the Paris salons. These ‘‘lovers of liberty’’ were influential in the early stages of the French
Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen showed unmistakable signs of the
influence of the American Declaration of Independence as well as the American state constitutions. Yet for
all of its obvious impact, the American Revolution proved in the long run to be far less important to Europe
than the French Revolution. The French Revolution was more complex, more violent, and far more radical
in its attempt to construct both a new political order and a new social order. The French Revolution provided
a model of revolution for Europe and much of the rest of the world; to many analysts, it remains the political
movement that truly inaugurated the modern political world.
2. Background to the French Revolution
Although we associate events like the French Revolution with sudden changes, the causes of such
events involve long-range problems as well as immediate precipitating forces. Revolutions, as has been
repeatedly shown, are not necessarily the result of economic collapse and masses of impoverished people
hungering for change. In fact, in the fifty years before 1789, France had experienced a period of economic
growth due to an expansion of foreign trade and an increase in industrial production, although many people,
especially peasants, failed to share in the prosperity. Thus, the causes of the French Revolution must be
found in a multifaceted examination of French society and its problems in the late eighteenth century.
The long-range or indirect causes of the French Revolution must first be sought in the condition of
French society. Before the Revolution, French society was grounded in the inequality of rights or the idea of
privilege. The population of 27 million was divided, as it had been since the Middle Ages, into legal
categories known as the three orders or estates.
The Second Estate was the nobility, composed of no more than 350,000 people who
nevertheless owned about 25 to 30 percent of the land. Under Louis XV and Louis XVI, the nobility
had continued to play an important and even crucial role in French society, holding many of the
leading positions in the government, the military, the law courts, and the higher church offices.
Much heavy industry in France was controlled by nobles, either through investment or by ownership
of mining and metallurgical enterprises. The French nobility was also divided. The nobility of the
robe derived their status from officeholding, a pathway that had often enabled commoners to attain
noble rank. These nobles now dominated the royal law courts and important administrative offices.
The nobility of the sword claimed to be descendants of the original medieval nobility. As a group,
the nobles sought to expand their privileges at the expense of the monarchy—to defend liberty by
resisting the arbitrary actions of monarchy, as some nobles asserted—and to maintain their
monopolistic control over positions in the military, church, and government. In 1781, in reaction to
the ambitions of aristocrats newly arrived from the bourgeoisie, the Segur Law attempted to limit
the sale of military officerships to fourth-generation nobles, thus excluding newly enrolled members
of the nobility. Although there were many poor nobles, on the whole the fortunes of the wealthy
aristocrats outstripped those of most others in French society. Generally, the nobles tended to marry
within their own ranks, making the nobility a fairly closed group. Although their privileges varied
from region to region, the very possession of privileges remained a hallmark of the nobility.
Common to all were tax exemptions, especially from the taille.
Although the long-range causes of the French Revolution can thus be found in part in the growing
frustration at the monarchy’s inability to deal with new social realities and problems, other factors were also
present. The failure of the French monarchy was exacerbated by specific problems in the 1780s. Although
the country had enjoyed fifty years of growth overall, periodic economic crises still occurred. Bad harvests
in 1787 and 1788 and the beginnings of a manufacturing depression resulted in food shortages, rising prices
for food and other necessities, and unemployment in the cities. The number of poor, estimated by some at
almost one-third of the population, reached crisis proportions on the eve of the Revolution. An English
traveler noted the misery of the poor in the countryside: ‘‘All the country girls and women are without shoes
or stockings; and the plowmen at their work have neither sabots nor stockings to their feet. This is a poverty
that strikes at the root of national prosperity.’’ Increased criticism of existing privileges as well as social and
political institutions also characterized the eighteenth century. Although the philosophes did not advocate
revolution, their ideas were widely circulated among the literate bourgeois and noble elites of France. The
actual influence of the ideas of the philosophes is difficult to prove, but once the Revolution began, the
revolutionary leaders frequently quoted Enlightenment writers, especially Rousseau. The French Parliaments
often frustrated efforts at reform. These thirteen law courts, which were responsible for registering royal
decrees, could block royal edicts by not registering them. Although Louis XIV had forced them into
submission, the Parlements had gained new strength in the eighteenth century as they and their noble judges
assumed the role of defenders of ‘‘liberty’’ against the arbitrary power of the monarchy. As noble defenders,
however, they often pushed their own interests as well, especially by blocking new taxes. This last point
reminds us that one of the fundamental problems facing the monarchy was financial. The immediate cause
of the French Revolution was the near collapse of government finances. At a time when France was
experiencing economic crises, the government was drastically short of money. Yet French governmental
expenditures continued to grow due to costly wars and royal extravagance. The government responded by
borrowing; in the budget of 1788, the interest on the debt alone constituted half of government spending.
Total debt had reached 4 billion livres (roughly $40 billion). Financial lenders, fearful they would never be
repaid, were refusing to lend additional amounts. The king’s finance ministry wrestled with the problem
but met with resistance. In 1786, Charles de Calonne, the controller general of finance, finding himself
unable to borrow any more, proposed a complete revamping of the fiscal and administrative system of the
state. To gain support, Calonne convened an ‘‘assembly of notables’’ early in 1787. This gathering of
nobles, prelates, and magistrates refused to cooperate, and the government’s attempt to go it alone brought
further disaster. On the verge of a complete financial collapse, the government was finally forced to call a
meeting of the Estates-General, the French parliamentary body that had not met since 1614. By calling the
Estates-General, the government was virtually admitting that the consent of the nation was required to raise
taxes.
In summoning the Estates-General, the government was merely looking for a way to solve the
immediate financial crisis. The monarchy had no wish for a major reform of the government, nor did the
delegates who arrived at Versailles come with plans for the revolutionary changes that ultimately emerged.
Yet over the next years, through the interplay of the deputies meeting in various legislative assemblies, the
common people in the streets of Paris and other cities, and the peasants in the countryside, much of the old
regime would be destroyed, and Europe would have a new model for political and social change.
The Estates-General consisted of representatives from the three orders of French society. In the
elections for the Estates-General, the government had ruled that the Third Estate should get double
representation (it did, after all, constitute 97 percent of the population). Consequently, while both the First
Estate (the clergy) and the Second (the nobility) had about 300 delegates each, the commoners had almost
600 representatives. Two-thirds of the latter were people with legal training, and three-fourths were from
towns with more than two thousand inhabitants, giving the Third Estate a particularly strong legal and urban
representation. Of the 282 representatives of the nobility, about 90 were liberal minded, urban oriented, and
interested in the enlightened ideas of the century; half of them were under forty years of age. The activists of
the Third Estate and the reform-minded individuals among the First and Second Estates had common ties in
their youth, urban background, and hostility to privilege. The cahiers de doleances , or statements of local
grievances, which were drafted throughout France during the elections to the Estates- General, advocated a
regular constitutional government that would abolish the fiscal privileges of the church and nobility as the
major way to regenerate the country. The Estates-General opened at Versailles on May 5, 1789. It was
divided from the start over the question of whether voting should be by order or by head (each delegate
having one vote). The Parliament of Paris, consisting of nobles of the robe, had advocated voting by order
according to the form used in 1614. Each order would vote separately; each would have veto power over the
other two, thus guaranteeing aristocratic control over reforms. But opposition to the Parlement’s proposal
arose from a group of reformers calling themselves patriots or ‘‘lovers of liberty.’’ Although they claimed to
represent the nation, they consisted primarily of bourgeoisie and nobles. One group of patriots known as the
Society of Thirty drew most of its members from the salons of Paris. Some of this largely noble group had
been directly influenced by the American Revolution, but all had been affected by the ideas of the
Enlightenment and favored reforms made in the light of reason and utility.
The failure of the government to assume the leadership at the opening of the Estates-
General created an opportunity for the Third Estate to push its demands for voting by head. Since it
had double representation, with the assistance of liberal nobles and clerics, it could turn the three
estates into a single-chamber legislature that would reform France in its own way. One
representative, the Abbe Sieyes, issued a pamphlet in which he asked, ‘‘What is the Third Estate?
Everything. What has it been thus far in the political order? Nothing. What does it demand? To
become something.’’ Sieyes’s sentiment, however, was not representative of the general feeling in
1789. Most delegates still wanted to make changes within a framework of respect for the authority
of the king; revival or reform did not mean the overthrow of traditional institutions. When the First
Estate declared in favor of voting by order, the Third Estate felt compelled to respond in a
significant fashion. On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate voted to constitute itself a ‘‘National
Assembly’’ and decided to draw up a constitution. Three days later, on June 20, the deputies of the
Third Estate arrived at their meeting place only to find the doors locked; thereupon they moved to a
nearby indoor tennis court and swore (in what has come to be known as the Tennis Court Oath) that
they would continue to meet until they had produced a French constitution. These actions of June 17
and June 20 constituted the first step in the French Revolution, since the Third Estate had no legal
right to act as the National Assembly. This revolution, largely the work of the lawyers of the Third
Estate, was soon in jeopardy, however, as the king sided with the First Estate and threatened to
dissolve the Estates-General. Louis XVI now prepared to use force. The revolution of the lawyers
appeared doomed.
The common people, however, in a series of urban and rural uprisings in July and August
1789, saved the Third Estate from the king’s attempt to stop the Revolution. From now on, the
common people would be mobilized by both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politicians and
used to support their interests. The common people had their own interests as well and would use
the name of the Third Estate to wage a war on the rich, claiming that the aristocrats were plotting to
destroy the Estates-General and retain its privileges. This war was not what the deputies of the Third
Estate had planned. The most famous of the urban risings was the fall of the Bastille. The king’s
attempt to take defensive measures by increasing the number of troops at the arsenals in Paris and
along the roads to Versailles served not to intimidate but rather to inflame public opinion. Increased
mob activity in Paris led Parisian leaders to form the so-called Permanent Committee to keep order.
Needing arms, they organized a popular force to capture the Invalides, a royal armory, and on July
14 attacked the Bastille, another royal armory. The Bastille had also been a state prison but now
held only seven prisoners (five forgers and two insane persons). There were few weapons there
except those in the hands of the small group of defenders. The Bastille was an imposing fortress
with eight towers connected by 9-foot-thick walls. It was easily defended, but its commander, the
marquis de Launay, was more inclined to negotiate. Although fighting erupted, de Launay refused
to open fire with his cannon, and the garrison soon surrendered. In the minds of the Parisians who
fought there, the fall of the Bastille was a great victory, and it quickly became a popular symbol of
triumph over despotism. Paris was abandoned to the insurgents, and Louis XVI was soon informed
that the royal troops were unreliable. Louis’s acceptance of that reality signaled the collapse of royal
authority; the king could no longer enforce his will. Louis then confirmed the appointment of the
marquis de Lafayette as commander of a newly created citizens’ militia known as the National
Guard. At the same time, independently of what was going on in Paris, popular revolutions broke
out in numerous cities. In Nantes, permanent committees and national guards were created to
maintain order after crowds had seized the chief citadels. This collapse of royal authority in the
cities was paralleled by peasant revolutions in the countryside. A growing resentment of the entire
seigneurial system, with its fees and obligations, greatly exacerbated by the economic and fiscal
activities of the great estate holders—whether noble or bourgeois—in the difficult decade of the
1780s, created the conditions for a popular uprising. The fall of the Bastille and the king’s apparent
capitulation to the demands of the Third Estate now encouraged peasants to take matters into their
own hands. From July 19 to August 3, peasant rebellions occurred in five major areas of France.
Patterns varied. In some places, peasants simply forced their lay and ecclesiastical lords to renounce
dues and tithes; elsewhere they burned charters listing their obligations. The peasants were not
acting in blind fury; they knew what they were doing. Many also believed that the king supported
their actions. As a contemporary chronicler wrote, ‘‘For several weeks, news went from village to
village. They announced that the Estates-General was going to abolish tithes, quitrents and dues,
that the King agreed but that the peasants had to support the public authorities by going themselves
to demand the destruction of titles.’’The agrarian revolts served as a backdrop to the Great Fear, a
vast panic that spread like wildfire through France between July 20 and August 6. Fear of invasion
by foreign troops, aided by a supposed aristocratic plot, encouraged the formation of more citizens’
militias and permanent committees. The greatest impact of the agrarian revolts and the Great Fear
was on the National Assembly meeting in Versailles.We will now examine its attempt to reform
France.
One of the first acts of the National Assembly (also called the Constituent Assembly because from
1789 to 1791 it was writing a new constitution) was to destroy the relics of feudalism or aristocratic
privileges. To some deputies, this measure was necessary to calm the peasants and restore order in the
countryside, although many urban bourgeois were willing to abolish feudalism as a matter of principle. On
the night of August 4, 1789, the National Assembly in an astonishing session voted to abolish seigneurial
rights as well as the fiscal privileges of nobles, clergy, towns, and provinces.
On August 26, the assembly provided the ideological foundation for its actions and an
educational device for the nation by adopting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen
(see the box on p. 584). This charter of basic liberties reflected the ideas of the major philosophes of
the French Enlightenment and alsoowed much to the American Declaration of Independence and
American state constitutions. The declaration began with a ringing affirmation of ‘‘the natural and
imprescriptible rights of man’’ to ‘‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.’’ It went
on to affirm the destruction of aristocratic privileges by proclaiming an end to exemptions from
taxation, freedom and equal rights for all men, and access to public office based on talent. The
monarchy was restricted, and all citizens were to have the right to take part in the legislative
process. Freedom of speech and press were coupled with the outlawing of arbitrary arrests. The
declaration also raised another important issue. Did the proclamation’s ideal of equal rights for ‘‘all
men’’ include women? Many deputies insisted that it did, at least in terms of civil liberties, provided
that, as one said, ‘‘women do not aspire to exercise political rights and functions.’’ Olympe de
Gouges a playwright and pamphleteer, refused to accept this exclusion of women from political
rights. Echoing the words of the official declaration, she penned a Declaration of the Rights of
Woman and the Female Citizen in which sheinsisted that women should have all the same rights as
men (see the box on p. 584). The National Assembly ignored her demands.
The King and The Church
In the meantime, Louis XVI had remained inactive at Versailles. Hedid refuse, however, to
promulgate the decrees on the abolition of feudalism and the declaration of rights, but an
unexpected turn of events soon forced the king to change his mind. On October 5, after marching to
the Hoˆtel de Ville, the city hall, to demand bread, crowds of Parisian women numbering in the
thousands set off for Versailles, 12 miles away, to confront the king and the National Assembly.
One eyewitness was amazed at the sight of ‘‘detachments of women coming up from every
direction, armed with broomsticks, lances, pitchforks, swords, pistols and muskets.’’ After meeting
with a delegation of these women, who tearfully described how their children were starving for lack
of bread, Louis XVI promised them grain supplies for Paris, thinking that this would end the protest.
But the women’s action had forced the Paris National Guard under Lafayette to follow their lead
and march to Versailles. The crowd now insisted that the royal family return to Paris. On October 6,
the king complied. As a goodwill gesture, he brought along wagonloads of flour from the palace
stores. All were escorted by women armed with pikes (some of which held the severed heads of the
king’s guards), singing, ‘‘We are bringing back the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy’’
(the king, queen, and their son). The king now accepted the National Assembly’s decrees; it was
neither the first nor the lastoccasion when Parisian crowds would affect national politics. The king
was virtually a prisoner in Paris, and the National Assembly, now meeting in Paris, would also feel
the influence of Parisian insurrectionary politics.
The Catholic Church was viewed as an important pillar of the old order, and it soon also felt
the impact of reform. Because of the need for money, most of the lands of the church were
confiscated, and assignats (ah-see-NYAH), a form of paper money, were issued based on the
collateral of the newly nationalized church property. The church was also secularized. In July 1790,
the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy was put into effect. Both bishops and priests of the Catholic
Church were to be elected by the people and paid by the state. All clergy were also required to
swear an oath of allegiance to the Civil Constitution. Since the pope forbade it, only 54 percent of
the French parish clergy took the oath, and the majority of bishops refused. This was a critical
development because the Catholic Church, still an important institution in the life of the French
people, now became an enemy of the Revolution. The Civil Constitution has often been viewed as a
serious tactical blunder on the part of the National Assembly, for by arousing the opposition of the
church, it gave counterrevolution a popular base from which to operate.
A NEW CONSTITUTION
By 1791, the National Assembly had completed a new constitution that established a
limited constitutional monarchy. There was still a monarch, but he enjoyed few powers not subject
to review by the new Legislative Assembly. The assembly, in which sovereign power was vested,
was to sit for two years and consist of 745 representatives chosen by an indirect system of election
that preserved power in the hands of the more affluent members of society. A distinction was drawn
between active and passive citizens. Although all had the same civil rights, only active citizens (men
over the age of twentyfive paying taxes equivalent in value to three days’ unskilled labor) could
vote. The active citizens probably numbered 4.3 million in 1790. These citizens did not elect the
members of the Legislative Assembly directly but voted for electors (men paying taxes equal in
value to ten days’ labor). This relatively small group of 50,000 electors chose the deputies. To
qualify as a deputy, one had to pay at least a ‘‘silver mark’’ in taxes, an amount equivalent to fifty-
four days’ labor. The National Assembly also undertook an administrative restructuring of France.
In 1789, it abolished all the old local and provincial divisions and divided France into eighty three
departments, roughly equal in size and population. Departments were in turn divided into districts
and communes, all supervised by elected councils and officials who oversaw financial,
administrative, judicial, and ecclesiastical institutions within their domains. Although both
bourgeois and aristocrats were eligible for offices based on property qualifications, few nobles were
elected, leaving local and departmental governments in the hands of the bourgeoisie, especially
lawyers of various types.
By 1791, France hadmoved into a vast reordering of the old regime that had been achieved
by a revolutionary consensus that was largely the work of the wealthier members of the bourgeoisie.
By mid-1791, however, this consensus faced growing opposition from clerics angered by the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, lower classes hurt by the rise in the cost of living resulting from the
inflation of the assignats, peasants who remained opposed to dues that had still not been abandoned,
and political clubs offering more radical solutions to the nation’s problems. The most famous were
the Jacobins (JAK-uh-binz), who first emerged as a gathering of more radical deputies at the
beginning of the Revolution, especially during the events of the night of August 4, 1789. After
October 1789, they occupied the former Jacobin convent in Paris. Jacobin clubs also formed in the
provinces, where they served primarily as discussion groups. Eventually, they joined together in an
extensive correspondence network and by spring 1790 were seeking affiliation with the Parisian
club. One year later, there were nine hundred Jacobin clubs in France associated with the Parisian
center. Members were usually the elite of their local societies, but they also included artisans and
tradespeople. In addition, by mid-1791, the government was still facing severe financial difficulties
due to massive tax evasion. Despite all of their problems, however, the bourgeois politicians in
charge remained relatively unified on the basis of their trust in the king. But Louis XVI disastrously
undercut them. Quite upset with the whole turn of revolutionary events, he sought to flee France in
June 1791 and almost succeeded before being recognized, captured at Varennes, and brought back
to Paris. Though radicalscalled for the king to be deposed, the members of the National Assembly,
fearful of the popular forces in Paris calling for a republic, chose to ignore the king’s flight and
pretended that he had been kidnapped. In this unsettled situation, with a discredited and seemingly
disloyal monarch, the new Legislative Assembly held its first session in October 1791. Because the
National Assembly had passed a ‘‘selfdenying ordinance’’ that prohibited the reelection of its
members, the composition of the Legislative Assembly tended to be quite different from that of the
National Assembly. The clerics and nobles were largely gone. Most of the representatives were men
of property; many were lawyers. Although lacking national reputations, most had gained experience
in the new revolutionary politics and prominence in their local areas through the National Guard, the
Jacobin clubs, and the many elective offices spawned by the administrative reordering of France.
The king made what seemed to be a genuine effort to work with the new Legislative Assembly, but
France’s relations with the rest of Europe soon led to Louis’s downfall.
Before the National Convention met, the Paris Commune dominated the political scene. Led by the
newly appointed minister of justice, Georges Danton (1759–1794), the sans-culottes sought revenge on
those who had aided the king and resisted the popular will. Fears of treachery were intensified by the
advance of
a Prussian army on Paris. Thousands of presumed traitors were arrested and then massacred as ordinary
Parisian tradespeople and artisans solved the problem of overcrowded prisons by mass executions of their
inmates. In September 1792, the newly elected National Convention began its sessions. Although it was
called to draft a new constitution, it also acted as the sovereign ruling body of France. Socially, the
composition of the National Convention was similar to that of its predecessors. Dominated by lawyers,
professionals, and property owners, it also included for the first time a handful of artisans. Two-thirds
of the deputies were under age forty-five, and almost all had had political experience as a result of the
Revolution. Almost all were also intensely distrustful of the king and his activities. It was therefore no
surprise that the convention’s first major step on September 21 was to abolish the monarchy and establish a
republic. But that was about as far as members of the convention could agree, and the National Convention
soon split into factions over the fate of the king. The two most important were the Girondins (so-called
because their leaders came from the department of Gironde, located in southwestern France) and the
Mountain (so-called because its members’ seats were on the side of the convention hall where the floor
slanted upward). Both were members of the Jacobin club.
Representing primarily the provinces, the Girondins came to fear the radical mobs in Paris and were
disposed to keep the king alive as a hedge against future eventualities. The Mountain represented the
interests of the city of Paris and owed much of its strength to the radical and popular elements in the city,
although the members of the Mountain themselves were middle class. The Mountain won out at the
beginning of 1793 when the National Convention found the king guilty of treason and sentenced him to
death. On January 21, 1793, the king was executed, and the destruction of the old regime was complete.
Now there could be no turning back. But the execution of the king produced further challenges by creating
new enemies for the Revolution both at home and abroad while strengthening those who were already its
enemies. Factional disputes between the Girondins and the Mountain were only one aspect of France’s
domestic crisis in 1792 and 1793. In Paris, the local government was controlled by the Commune, which
drew a number of its leaders from the city’s artisans and shopkeepers. The Commune favored radical change
and put constant pressure on the National Convention, pushing it to ever more radical positions. As one man
warned his fellow deputies, ‘‘Never forget that you were sent here by the sansculottes.’’ 8 At the end of May
and the beginning of June 1793, the Commune organized a demonstration, invaded the National Convention,
and forced the arrest and execution of the leading Girondins, thereby leaving the Mountain in control of the
convention. The National Convention itself still did not rule all of France. The authority of the convention
was repudiated in western France, particularly in the department of the Vendee, by peasants who revolted
against the new military draft.
Domestic turmoil was paralleled by a foreign crisis. Early in 1793, after Louis XVI had been
executed, much of Europe—an informal coalition of Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Dutch
Republic—was pitted against France. Carried away by initial successes and their own rhetoric, the French
welcomed the struggle. Grossly overextended, the French armies began to experience reverses, and by
late spring some members of the anti-French coalition were poised for an invasion of France. If they
succeeded, both the Revolution and the revolutionaries would be destroyed and the old regime reestablished.
The Revolution had reached a decisive moment. To meet these crises, the program of the National
Convention became one of curbing anarchy and counterrevolution at home while attempting to win the war
by a vigorous mobilization of the people. To administer the government, the convention gave broad powers
to an executive committee known as the Committee of Public Safety, which was dominated initially by
Danton. For the next twelve months, virtually the same twelve members were reelected and gave the country
the leadership it needed to weather the domestic and foreign crises of 1793. One of the most important
members was Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), a small-town lawyer who had moved to Paris
as a member of the Estates-General. Politics was his life, and he was dedicated to using power to benefit the
people, whom he loved in the abstract though not on a one-to-one basis.
A Nation in Arms
In less than a year, the French revolutionary government had raised an army of 650,000; by
September 1794, it numbered 1,169,000. The Republic’s army—a nation in arms—was the largest
ever seen in European history. It now pushed the allies back across the Rhine and even conquered
the Austrian Netherlands (see Map 19.2). By May 1795, the anti-French coalition of 1793 was
breaking up. Historians have focused on the importance of the French revolutionary army in the
creation of modern nationalism. Previously, wars had been fought between governments or ruling
dynasties by relatively small armies of professional soldiers. The new French army, however, was
the creation of a ‘‘people’s’’ government; its wars were now ‘‘people’s’’ wars. The entire nation
was to be involved in the war. But when dynastic wars became people’s wars, warfare increased in
ferocity and lack of restraint. Although innocent civilians had suffered in the earlier struggles, now
the carnage became appalling at times. The wars of the French revolutionary era opened the door to
the total war of the modern world.
To meet the domestic crisis, the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety
established the ‘‘Reign of Terror.’’ Revolutionary courts were organized to protect the Republic
from its internal enemies, ‘‘who either by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings,
showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny or enemies of liberty’’ or ‘‘who have not constantly
manifested their attachment to the revolution.’’12 Victims of the Terror ranged from royalists, such
as Queen Marie Antoinette, to former revolutionary Girondins, including Olympe de Gouges, the
chief advocate for political rights for women,and even included thousands of peasants. Many
victims were persons who had opposed the radical activities of the sans-culottes. In the course of
nine months, 16,000 people were officially killed under the blade of the guillotine, a revolutionary
device for the quick and efficient separation of heads from bodies. But the true number of the
Terror’s victims was probably closer to 50,000. The bulk of the Terror’s executions took place in
the Vendee and in cities such as Lyons and Marseilles, places that had been in open rebellion
against the authority of the National Convention. Military force in the form of revolutionary armies
was used to bring recalcitrant cities and districts back under the control of the National Convention.
Marseilles fell to a revolutionary army in August. Starving Lyons surrendered early in October after
two months of bombardment and resistance. Since Lyons was France’s second city after Paris and
had defied the National Convention during a time when the Republic was in peril, the Committee of
Public Safety decided to make an example of it. By April 1794, some 1,880 citizens of Lyons had
been executed. When guillotining proved too slow, cannon fire and grapeshot were used to blow
condemned men into open graves.
In the Vendee, revolutionary armies were also brutal in defeating the rebel armies. After
destroying one army on December 12, the commander of the revolutionary army ordered that no
quarter be given: ‘‘The road to Laval is strewn with corpses. Women, priests, monks, children, all
have been put to death. I have spared nobody.’’ The Terror was at its most destructive in the
Vendee. Forty-two percent of the death sentences during the Terror were passed in territories
affected by the Vendee rebellion. Perhaps the most notorious act of violence occurred in Nantes,
where victims were executed by sinking them in barges in the Loire River. To a great extent, the
Terror demonstrated little class prejudice. Estimates are that the nobles constituted 8 percent of its
victims; the middle classes, 25 percent; the clergy, 6; and the peasant and laboring classes, 60. To
the Committee of Public Safety, this bloodletting was only a temporary expedient. Once the war and
domestic emergency were over, ‘‘the republic of virtue’’ would ensue, and the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen would be fully established. Although theoretically a republic, the
French government during the Terror was led by a group of twelve men who ordered the execution
of people as national enemies.
After the execution of Robespierre, revolutionary fervor began to give way to the Thermidorean
Reaction, named after the month of Thermidor. The Terror began to abate. The National Convention
curtailed the power of the Committee of Public Safety, shut down the Jacobin club, and attempted to provide
better protection for its deputies against the Parisian mobs. Churches were allowed to reopen for public
worship, and a decree of February 21, 1795, gave freedom of worship to all cults. Economic regulation was
dropped in favor of laissez-faire policies, another clear indication that moderate forces were regaining
control of the Revolution. In addition, a new constitution was written in August 1795 that reflected this more
conservative republicanism or a desire for a stability that did not sacrifice the ideals of 1789.
To avoid the dangers of another single legislative assembly, the Constitution of 1795 established a
national legislative assembly consisting of two chambers: a lower house, known as the Council of 500,
whose function was to initiate legislation, and an upper house of 250 members, the Council of Elders,
composed of married or widowed members over age forty, which would accept or reject the proposed laws.
The 750 members of the two legislative bodies were chosen by electors who had to be owners or renters of
property worth between one hundred and two hundred days’ labor, a requirement that limited their number
to 30,000, an even smaller base than the Constitution of 1791 had provided. The electors were chosen by the
active citizens, now defined as all male taxpayers over the age of twenty-one. The executive authority
or Directory consisted of five directors elected by the Council of Elders from a list presented by the Council
of 500. To ensure some continuity from the old order to the new, the members of the National Convention
ruled that two-thirds of the new members of the National Assembly must be chosen from their ranks. This
decision produced disturbances in Paris and an insurrection at the beginning of October that was dispersed
after fierce combat by an army contingent under the artillery general Napoleon Bonaparte. This would be the
last time in the great French Revolution that the city of Paris would attempt to impose its wishes on the
central government. Even more significant and ominous was this use of the army, which made it clear that
the Directory from the beginning had to rely on the military for survival.
The period of the Directory was an era of materialistic reaction to the suffering and sacrifices that
had been demanded in the Reign of Terror and the Republic of Virtue. Speculators made fortunes in
property by taking advantage of the government’s severe monetary problems. Elaborate fashions, which had
gone out of style because of their identification with the nobility, were worn again. Gambling and roulette
became popular once more.
The government of the Directory had to contend with political enemies from both ends of the
political spectrum. On the right, royalists who dreamed of restoring the monarchy continued their agitation;
some still toyed with violent means. On the left, Jacobin hopes of power were revived by continuing
economic problems, especially the total collapse in the value of the assignats. Some radicals even went
beyond earlier goals, especially Gracchus Babeuf , who sneered, ‘‘What is the French Revolution? An open
war between patricians and plebeians, between rich and poor.’’ Babeuf, who was appalled at the misery of
the common people, wanted to abolish private property and eliminate private enterprise. His Conspiracy of
Equals was crushed in 1796, and he was executed in 1797.
New elections in 1797 created even more uncertainty and instability. Battered by the left and right,
unable to find a definitive solution to the country’s economic problems, and still carrying on the wars left
from the Committee of Public Safety, the Directory increasingly relied on the military to maintain its power.
This led to a coup d’ etat in 1799 in which the successful and popular general Napoleon Bonaparte was able
to seize power.