A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (37 page)

Revolutionary war

The war began disastrously. The French army suffered serious defeats—partly because its generals had a tendency to go over to the enemy—and the king tried to use the resulting chaos as an excuse to get rid of the Girondins. The Duke of Brunswick proclaimed on behalf of the invading army that it would impose ‘exemplary vengeance’ if victorious and ‘hand over the city of Paris to soldiery and punish the rebels as they deserved’.
²⁶

The threat of counter-revolution backfired. It prompted a new up-swell of activity from below. There was a feeling among the mass of the population that foreign invasion threatened everything gained in the previous three years. Thousands of people, ‘passive citizens’ officially deemed too poor to vote, flooded into the
sections
, the regular mass assemblies in each Parisian locality. A call from the National Assembly for volunteers to fight the counter-revolutionary invasion led to 15,000 signing up in Paris alone.
Fédérés
, active enthusiasts for the revolution, began to march to Paris from provincial towns—most notably those from Marseilles, whose marching tune became the anthem of the revolution. All except one of the 48
section
meetings in Paris demanded a republic. Local National Guard units in the poorer areas were increasingly influenced by the revolutionary mood.

It was not only the poor who were frightened by the spectre of counter-revolution, so were the radical sections of the middle class led by Robespierre, Danton and Marat. They saw that defeat stared them all in the face unless they made a further revolution. They did so on 10 August 1792, the second great turning point of the revolution. Tens of thousands of
sans-culottes
from the
sections
joined the
fédérés
to march on the Tuileries palace. National Guards who were meant to be defending the king joined the insurrection and it defeated the royal troops after a battle in which 600 royalists and 370 insurgents died.

The Parisian masses were once again in control of the city. The Assembly, made up of ‘moderate’ representatives elected under the property qualification less than a year before, bowed to the new power. It voted to suspend the king, recognise the new revolutionary commune based on the Parisian
sections
, and organise new elections based on universal male suffrage. The Girondins were back running the government, but had to give three positions to Jacobins—most notably to Danton, who became minister of justice.

These changes alone were not enough to defeat the threat from outside. The French army continued to suffer defeat as the foreign armies—now joined by the likes of Lafayette—marched towards Paris. There were hordes of nobles and royalists in the capital, many in poorly guarded prisons, waiting for the opportunity to wreak revenge for the humiliations of the past three years. The officer corps of the army and the government administration were stuffed with royalist sympathisers.

Only two things could deal with the threat to the revolution—sending large numbers of eager revolutionary volunteers to confront the enemy at the front, and decisive action to stop further coups by monarchists and aristocrats at the rear. The Girondins who dominated the government were not capable of fulfilling either task. But Danton displayed the energy needed to tap the popular mood. ‘Audacity, audacity and still more audacity’ was his slogan as he used enthusiastic revolutionary volunteers from the poorer areas of Paris to breathe new life into the armies at the front.

In Paris, too, the masses took a decisive initiative. Spurred on by Marat, they took the crushing of domestic counter-revolution into their own hands. They descended on the prisons and summarily executed those they believed to be royalists in what became known as the ‘September massacres’.

The move was a response by crowds who knew they would face the gibbet or the guillotine themselves if the enemy took Paris, and who also knew many people in high places were ready to aid that enemy. They had already seen friends and neighbours suffer—in the massacre at the Champ de Mars, in the slaughter at the front where officers sided with the enemy, and from the hunger brought by the shortage of bread. They had to do something. Unfortunately, in the panic and without organisations of their own to guide them, the crowds were easily drawn into indiscriminate killing of those in prison, so that ordinary prisoners died alongside rabid opponents of the revolution. Nevertheless, the action had the effect of intimidating and subduing the royalist fifth column in the city.

On 20 September the revolutionary army halted the invading forces at Valmy. The next day the new Convention—the first legislature of any country in history to be elected by the vote of the whole male population—abolished the monarchy and declared France ‘the republic, one and indivisible’.

Not only had the king gone, so had very many features regarded as irremovable only three years before. The remnants of feudalism were now swept away in deed as well as word, as were the tithes which people had been forced to pay to keep bishops and abbots in luxury. The superstitions of the church were no longer propped up by the might of the state. There were plans to encourage education and extend scientific knowledge, bringing the ideas of the Enlightenment into everyday life. The customs posts which impeded trade routes in order to benefit local notables were gone. In the volunteer militia units at the front ordinary soldiers voted for their fellows to become officers.

No wonder Goethe believed a new era had begun.

Yet the revolution was far from over. The next two years saw a further radicalisation both in the government and at the base of society. Then, in the summer of 1794 there was a sudden falling back of the revolutionary wave, allowing new inequalities and some old privileges to re-emerge in what became, eventually, a new monarchy. In the process there occurred the famous ‘terror’ which has so befogged many people’s understanding of—and sympathy for—the revolution. The execution of the king, agreed on by the narrowest of majorities in the Convention, was followed by the execution of many other aristocrats and the queen. Then the Jacobins sent Girondin leaders to the guillotine; Robespierre and Saint-Just sent Danton and Hébert to the guillotine; and finally, Robespierre and Saint-Just themselves were sent to the guillotine by the ‘Thermidorians’—a coalition of former supporters of the Girondins, Danton and Hébert. It was this grisly spectacle which popularised the saying, ‘Revolutions always devour their own children’
²⁷
—and with it, the implication that revolutions are always futile and bloody enterprises.

It is a false generalisation. The English Revolution did not devour its leaders—that task was left to the Restoration executioners—and neither did the American Revolution. It is an observation which also fails utterly to grasp the real forces at work in France.

The roots of revolution

Any brief account of revolutionary events necessarily concentrates on eye catching events and the best known personalities. But a revolution is always more than that. It involves a sudden change in the balance of social forces, resulting from slow, often imperceptible developments over long periods of time. It can only be understood by looking at those developments.

At the top of the old society—usually known as the
ancien régime
—were the monarchy and the nobility. The traditional feudal aristocracy of the
noblesse d’epée
(nobility of the sword) retained a privileged position in France which it had long since lost in Britain. The French monarchy had over the centuries cut back on some of the independent power of the great nobles. It had been able to do so by using the towns and the new, moneyed ‘bourgeois’ classes as a counterweight to the great aristocrats. The monarchs of the 16th and 17th centuries had given institutional expression to this by selling positions in the state administration and the courts to sons of the moneyed classes, who soon became a new hereditary nobility, the
noblesse de robe
(nobility of the robe). This group dominated the law courts (confusingly for English speakers, known as
parlements
) which implemented royal decrees.

Finally, there was yet another form of nobility consisting of the great ‘princes’ of the church—bishops and abbots. These enjoyed wealth comparable to the great aristocrats, while the mass of priests lived in conditions hardly better than the peasants. The upper clergy owed their positions to royal patronage—which, in turn, was dependent on influence at court. So it was possible for someone like Charles Maurice de Talleyrand—a member of one of the old aristocratic families, ‘lacking in all apostolic virtues’
²⁸
and who had not even completed holy orders—to be given an important abbotship at the age of 21. Like the nobles, the upper clergy paid no taxes yet received the rents and feudal dues from vast tracts of land as well as church tithes.

No major section of the nobility showed any inclination to give up of its privileges. Indeed, as the costs involved in maintaining a life of luxurious consumption rose, the nobility set out to increase them—by greater severity in the enforcement of feudal dues, by taking over parts of the communal property of peasant villages, and by monopolising lucrative positions in the state, the army and the church. There was a ‘violent aristocratic reaction’.
²⁹

This was while France was experiencing considerable industrial growth, particularly in rural handicraft production. According to a recent estimate the economy grew at 1.9 percent a year throughout the 18th century.
³⁰
Textile output grew 250 percent, coal output seven or eightfold, and iron output from 40,000 tons to 140,000 tons. By 1789 a fifth of France’s population were employed in industry or handicrafts.
³¹

The moneyed class of big merchants (especially in the Atlantic ports connected to the West Indian sugar colonies), ‘putters out’ and, occasionally, manufacturers (like the handful of monopolists who controlled the printing industry) grew in size and wealth. The rich bourgeoisie were in an anomalous position. In formal, legal terms they were inferior to any members of the nobility. But often they were richer and able to exercise considerable influence over the monarchy. What is more, they could buy up land which gave them feudal dues from the peasantry and could profit from acting as tax ‘farmers’ for the monarchy. Beneath them the lower bourgeoisie were completely excluded from influence. But they, too, often channelled money their families had obtained through trading, shopkeeping or luxury crafts into investments in land or into the purchase of certain legal offices. Both groups of the bourgeoisie resented the discrimination against them by the aristocracy, but they by no means stood in automatic revolutionary opposition to the absolutist monarchy. Indeed, they could still look to the monarchy to protect them from the aristocracy.

Wedged between the bourgeoisie and the urban poor were a mass of small tradespeople and artisans. Traditionally they had relied on state sponsored guilds to regulate prices and protect their incomes. But the spread of the market made this a less and less effective way of providing them with security. A sudden change in market conditions might deprive them of an income, while the increase in the price of bread after harvest failures—as in the late 1780s and again in the early 1790s—might drive them close to starvation. What is more, a growing portion of the artisan and small trading workforce was made up of journeymen—employees—who could never expect to own their own businesses. These had little in common with those artisans and traders who remained conservative and guild-minded.

There were also a growing number of ‘men on the make’—people prepared to look for any opportunity to get ahead: a lucrative trading deal, a financial reward for some political service, or the pioneering of a new productive technique. But although such people could resent the ‘irrationality’ of the old order—they often devoured popular forms of Enlightenment thinking—they were not revolutionaries.

The peasantry made up the bulk of French society. It varied enormously from region to region. In a few areas it had undergone changes similar to those in England, with the emergence of capitalist farmers employing innovative techniques. There were a rather larger number of peasants whose production was oriented to the market (through the cultivation of vines or a combination of spinning or weaving with farming), but with holdings that remained small. Then there were vast numbers who leased land from or shared their crop with landowners, leaving them with no funds for agricultural improvement even if some were able to employ a limited number of labourers. Finally, there were many whose condition, apart from the absence of formal serfdom, hardly differed from medieval times. Yet almost all of the peasantry had certain features in common. They felt the land was really their own, yet had to pay feudal dues to landowners, tithes that could amount to 9 percent of the crop to the church, and, usually, rent on top. What is more, they had to pay high taxes from which the nobility and the clergy were exempt. This burden meant they suffered terribly if their crops failed or the prices of things they had to buy rose.

The complex interrelation between the monarchy, the aristocracy, the different groups of the bourgeoisie and the various sections of the peasantry has led some ‘revisionist’ historians to claim the revolution cannot be explained in class terms.
³²
The bourgeoisie, they say, was more likely to obtain its income from legal offices, landownership or even feudal dues than it was from modern industry. Therefore, it could not have been a class standing for a new, capitalist way of producing in opposition to a nobility and monarchy based on feudalism. These historians argue that their case is confirmed by the small number of big industrialists involved on the revolutionary side and the considerable number of merchants who took the side of the king.

Some of their factual claims are undoubtedly true. The bourgeoisie as a class certainly did not stand in unremitting revolutionary opposition to the old order. It had grown up within this order over hundreds of years and was tied to it, both ideologically and financially, in innumerable ways. The leading revolutionary figures were not financiers or industrial capitalists but lawyers like Danton and Robespierre, journalists like Desmoulins, and even, in the case of Marat, a former doctor to the upper classes. But the conclusions drawn by the revisionists are fundamentally false. The intertwining of the interests of the nobility and the bourgeoisie did not stop them being attracted towards opposite visions of French society. One looked back to the past, to the defence of aristocratic privilege and feudal dues against all change. The other looked towards a society built around the formal equality of the marketplace, where ancestry alone could not hold back the ‘man on the make’. The mass of the bourgeoisie repeatedly hesitated in face of the measures needed to advance that model of society. But they certainly did not go into exile in disgust when it triumphed, as did much of the aristocracy.