Before 1789, France was ruled by thenobles and theCatholic Church. The ideas of theEnlightenment were beginning to make the ordinary people want more power. They could see that theAmerican Revolution had created a country in which the people had power, instead of a king. The government before the revolution was called the "Ancien Régime".
The high price ofbread and lowwages of workers caused the ordinary people to suffer from hunger andmalnutrition. This made them dislike the rich nobles, who had themoney to eat well and build hugemansions.
TheRoman Catholic Church, which owned the most land inFrance, put atax oncrops called the dime (tithe) which hurt the poorest and hungriest people as they were not able to afford the tax.
The first and the second estate i.e., theclergy and thenobility, enjoyed all theprivileges and rights but theThird Estate (everyone else, middle class, city workers and peasants) had to pay tithes and taille (taxes paid to Church and the court).
Caricature of the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back.
Before the Revolution, France was divided into three Estates. The First Estate was the clergy. It was 1% of thepopulation. The Second Estate was the nobles, also 1% of the population. The other nearly 98% of the population was in the Third Estate. Representatives of the people from all three estates together made up theEstates-General. The Estates General first met in 1302 and 1303, and occasionally met in later centuries.
The Palace of Versailles. This is where the Estates-General met in 1789
In May 1789, the Estates-General was called by King Louis in order to deal with the money problems of the country. They met at the royalPalace of Versailles. However, the members of the Third Estate were angry. They had made lists ofproblems they wanted to fix called the Cahiers de Doléance. They were angry that they were beingtaxed the most when they were the poorest group of people. They, and the Director-General of Finances,Jacques Necker, thought theChurch and the Nobility ought to be taxed more.
They also wantedvotes in the Estates-General to be more fair. Even though the Third Estate had many more members than the other two Estates, each Estate only had one vote in the Estates-General. The Third Estate thought this could be improved by giving members of the Estates-General a vote each. However, when they talked to the other Estates, they could not agree.
Since the First and Second Estates would not listen, The Third Estate decided to break away and start their own assembly where every member would get a vote. On 10 June 1789, they started theNational Assembly. The king tried to stop them by closing the Salle des États meeting room, but they met in an indoortennis court instead. On June 20, they took theTennis Court Oath, where they promised to work until they had created a newconstitution for France.
Asans-coulotte, a radical revolutionary, carrying a tricolor flag.
In July 1789, after the National Assembly was formed, the nobility and the king was angry withJacques Necker, the Director-General of Finances, and they fired him. ManyParisians thought that the King was going to shut down the National Assembly. Soon,Paris was filled withriots andlooting.
On 14 July 1789, the people decided to attack theBastilleprison. The Bastille containedweapons, as well as being asymbol of the power of the nobility and the rule of the king. By the afternoon, the people had broken into the Bastille and released the seven prisoners being held there.
The Members of the Third Estate took over Paris. The president of the National Assembly at the time of the Tennis Court Oath, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, becamemayor of the city. Jacques Necker was given back his job as Director-General of Finances. Soon, the King visited Paris and wore the red, white and blue (tricolor) ribbons (cockade) that the revolutionaries were wearing. By the end of July, the revolution had spread all over France.
The National Assembly began to make lots of changes. On August 4th, the National Assembly ended the special taxes the Church was collecting, and put a stop to the rights of the nobility over their people, endingfeudalism. On August 26th, the National Assembly published theDeclaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was written by the noblemanMarquis de Lafayette.
The National Assembly began to decide how it would be under the new constitution. Many members, especially the nobles, wanted asenate or a second upper house. However, more people voted to keep having just one assembly. The King was given asuspensive veto over laws, which meant he would only have the power to delay laws being made, notstop them. In October 1789, after being attacked at thePalace of Versailles by a mob of 7,000 women, the King was convinced byLafayette to move from Paris to thepalace in theTuileries.
The Assembly began to divide into differentpolitical parties. One was made up of those against the revolution, led by the noblemanJacques Antoine Marie de Cazales and the churchmanJean-Sifrien Maury. This party sat on the right side. A second party was the Royalist democrats (monarchists) which wanted to create a system like theconstitutional monarchy of Britain, where the king would still be a part of the government. Jacques Necker was in this party. The third party was the National Party which was centre or centre-left. This includedHonoré Mirabeau and Lafayette.
Under the new government, theRoman Catholic Church had much less power than they had before. In 1790, all specialtaxes and powers of the Church were cancelled. All the Church’sproperty was taken over by the state. On 12 July 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy made allclergyemployees of the state and made them take anoath to the new constitution. Many clergy, as well as thePope, Pius VI, did not like these changes. Revolutionaries killed hundreds for refusing the oath.
On 14 July 1790, a year since the storming of the Bastille, thousands of people gathered in theChamps de Mars to celebrate.Charles Maurice de Talleyrand led the crowd in a religiousmass. The crowd, including the King and the royal family, took an oath ofloyalty to “the nation, the law, and the king.” However, many nobles were unhappy with the revolution and were leaving the country. They were called émigrés (emigrants).
Although the members of the Estates-General had only been elected for a year, the members of the Assembly had all taken the Tennis Court Oath. They had promised to keep working until they had a constitution and no constitution had been made. It was decided that the members would keep working until they had a constitution. The Assembly continued to work on a constitution and make changes. Nobles could no longer pass their titles to their children. Only the king was allowed to do this. For the first time,trials with juries were held. Alltrade barriers inside France were ended along withunions,guilds, and workers' groups.Strikes werebanned.
Many people with radical ideas began to form political clubs. The most famous of these was theJacobin Club, which hadleft-wing ideas. Aright-wing club was theClub Monarchique. In 1791, a law was suggested to prevent nobleémigrés from leaving the country.Mirabeau had been against this law, but he died on 2 April, and by the end of the year, the law was passed.
The royal family returns to Paris on 25 July 1791, after trying to escape.
Louis XVI did not like the revolution, but did not want to get help from other countries or run away from France like the émigrés.General Bouille held the same views and wanted to help the king leave Paris. He said that he would give the King and his family help and support in his camp atMontmédy. Theescape was planned for June 20, 1791.
Dressed asservants, the royal family left Paris. However, their escape was not well planned, and they werearrested atVarennes on the evening of June 21. The royal family was brought back to Paris. The Assemblyimprisoned Louis and his wifeMarie Antoinette, and suspended the king from his duty.
Although the king had tried to escape, most members of the Assembly still wanted to include the king in their government rather than to have aRepublic with no king at all. They agreed to make the king afigurehead, with very little power. The king would have to take anoath to the state. If he did not, or if he created anarmy to attack France, he would no longer be king.
Some people, includingJacques Pierre Brissot, did not like this. They thought the king should be completely removed from the throne and the constitution. Brissot made apetition and a huge crowd came to the Champs de Mars to sign it. Republican leadersGeorges Danton andCamille Desmoulins came and gave speeches.
TheNational Guard, led by Lafayette, was called in to control the crowd. The mob threw stones at the soldiers who first fired their guns over the heads of the crowd. When the crowd kept throwing stones, Lafayette ordered them to fire at the people. Up to 50 people were killed. After this, the government closed many of the political clubs andnewspapers. Many radical left-wing leaders, including Danton and Desmoulins, ran away toEngland or hid in France.
Finally the constitution was completed. Louis XVI was put back on the throne and came to take his oath to it. He wrote, “I engage to maintain it at home, to defend it from all attacks from abroad, and to cause its execution by all the means it places at my disposal.” The National Assembly decided that it would stop governing France on 29 September 1791. After that date, theLegislative Assembly would take over.
The new Legislative Assembly met for the first time in October 1791. Under theConstitution of 1791, France was aconstitutional monarchy. The King shared his rule with the Legislative Assembly, but had the power to stop (veto) laws he did not like. He also had the power to chooseministers.
The Legislative Assembly had about 745 members. 260 of them were “Feuillants”, or Constitutional Monarchists. 136 wereGirondins andJacobins, left-wing liberalrepublicans who did not want a king. The other 345 members were independent, but they voted most often with the left wing.
The Legislative Assembly did not agree very well. The King used his veto to stop laws that wouldsentence émigrésto death. Because so many of the members of the Assembly were left-wing, they did not like this.
The people were turning against King Louis XVI. On 10 August 1792, the members of a revolutionary group called theParis Commune attacked the Tuileries, where the King and Queen were living. The King and Queen were taken prisoner. The Legislative Assembly held an emergency meeting. Even though only a third of the members were there and most of them wereJacobins, they suspended the King from duty.
The kings andemperors of many foreign countries were worried by the French Revolution. They did not want revolutions in their own countries. On 27 August 1791,Leopold II of theHoly Roman Empire/Austria,Frederick William II ofPrussia, and Louis XVI’s brother-in-law, Charles-Philippe wrote theDeclaration of Pillnitz. The Declaration asked for Louis XVI to be set free and the National Assembly to be ended. They said that they wouldinvade France if their requests were ignored. The Declaration was taken very seriously among the revolutionaries.
With the Legislative Assembly in place, the problems did not go away. The Girondins wantedwar because they wanted to take the revolution to other countries. The King and many of his supporters, theFeuillants, wanted war because they thought it would make the King more popular. Many French were worried that the émigrés would cause trouble in foreign countries against France.
On 20 April 1792, the Assembly voted todeclare war onAustria (Holy Roman Empire). They planned to invade theAustrian Netherlands, but the revolution had made the army weak. Many soldiersdeserted. Soon,Prussia joined on the Austrian side. They both planned to invade. Together, on 25 July, they wrote theBrunswick Manifesto, promising that if the royal family was not hurt, nocivilians would be hurt in the invasion. The French believed that this meant the king, Louis XVI, was working with the foreign kings. Prussia invaded France on 1 August, 1792. This first stage of theFrench Revolutionary Wars continued until 1797.
In September, things got worse. The Legislative Assembly had almost no power. No single group was controlling Paris or France. The country was being invaded by the Prussian Army. The revolutionaries were very angry and violent. They began to go into prisons and kill people they thought weretraitors to France. They hated thepriests of the Roman Catholic Church the most, but they also killed many nobles and ordinary people. By 7 September, 1,400 people were dead.
The Legislative Assembly had lost all its power. France needed a new government. On 20 September 1792, theNational Convention was formed. The Convention had both Girondins and radical Jacobins.
The Brunswick Manifesto had made many people suspicious of the king. They thought he was plotting with the Prussian and Austrian rulers to invade France. In January 1793, the National Convention voted and found Louis XVIguilty of “conspiracy against the publicliberty and the general safety.” On the twenty-first of January, the King wasexecuted using theguillotine.Marie Antoinette, the Queen, was executed on the sixteenth of October.
Painting showing the Battle of Choet in the Vendée 1793.Henri de La Rochejacquelein at the Battle of Cholet in 1793 by Paul-Emile Boutigny
People in the area ofVendée did not like the revolutionary government. They did not like the rules about the church in theCivil Constitution of the Church (1790) and new taxes put in place in 1793. They also disliked being forced to join the French army. In March, they rose up against the government in a revolt. The war lasted until 1796. Hundreds of thousands of people from Vendée (Vendeans) were killed by the Revolutionary French army.
Now that the king was dead, the National Convention made a newrepublican constitution that began on 24 June. It was the first one that did not include the king and gave every man in France a vote. However, it never came into force because of the trouble between the Jacobins and Girondins. The war with Austria and Prussia was causing the state to have money problems.Bread was very expensive and many people wanted things to change. In June 1793, the Jacobins began to take power. They wanted to arrest Girondin members of the National Convention. In July, they became angrier whenCharlotte Corday, a Girondin, killedJean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin.
By July, thecoup was complete. The Jacobins had taken power. They put in new, radical laws including a new RepublicanCalendar with new months and new ten-day weeks. They made the army bigger and changed the officers to people who were better soldiers. Over the next few years, this helped the Republican army push back the attacking Austrians, Prussians, British, andSpanish.
In July 1793, a Jacobin calledMaximilien de Robespierre and eight other leading Jacobins set up theCommittee of Public Safety. It was the most powerful group in France. This group and Robespierre were responsible for theReign of Terror. Robespierre believed that if people were afraid, the revolution would go better. The Reign of Terror lasted from the spring of 1793 to the spring of 1794.
It was not only the nobility who died in the Reign of Terror. Anyone who broke the Jacobins' laws, or was even suspected of breaking their laws or working against them, could be arrested and sent to the guillotine, most without a trial. Even powerful people who had been involved in the Jacobin coup were executed. Prisoners were taken from the prisons to “Madame Guillotine” (anickname for the guillotine) in an open wooden cart called the tumbrel. According to records, 16,594 people were executed with the guillotine. It is possible that up to 40,000 people died in prison or were killed during the Reign of Terror.
Maximilien de Robespierre
By July 1794, people began to turn against Maximilien de Robespierre. He and his Revolutionary Tribunal had killed 1,300 people in six weeks. On 27 July, the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety turned against him. Robespierre tried to get help from the Convention’s right-wing members, but he failed. A day later, Robespierre and many of his supporters in the Paris Commune were sentenced to death by guillotine without any kind of trial. This reaction against Robespierre is called theThermidorian Reaction.
Now that the terror was over, the National Convention started to make a new Constitution, called theConstitution of the Year III. On 27 September 1794, the constitution came into effect.
The new constitution had created the Directories (Directory), which was the first government of France to bebicameral (split into two houses). The lower house, theparliament, had 500 members. It was called theConseil de Cinq-Cent (Council of Five Hundred). The upper house, thesenate, had 250 members and was called theConseil des Anciens (Council of Elders). There were five directors chosen every year by theConseil des Anciens from a list made up by theConseil de Cinq-Cent. This group was in charge and was called the Directory.
Although the constitution of 1793 had given all men in France a vote, in this constitution only people with a certain amount of property could vote. The Directory was much more than the governments in France since 1789. The people were tired of radical changes and the unstable governments. Things were much more stable under the Directory than they had been before.
However, the Directors were disliked by the people - especially the Jacobins, who wanted a republic, and the royalists, who wanted a new King. France’s money problems did not go away. The Directors ignoredelections that did not go the way they wanted. They ignored the constitution in order to do things to control the people. They used the ongoing war and the army to keep their power.
TheCoup of 18 Brumaire brought GeneralNapoleon Bonaparte to power as First Consul of France on 9 November 1799. In the view of most historians it ended the French Revolution. This bloodless coup d'état overthrew the Directory, replacing it with theFrench Consulate.
The 18 Brumaire marks the end of the Republican part of the French Revolution when Napoleon Bonaparte took control.
