French Revolution, Cause and Effect 1789

The pivotal event of European history in the eighteenth atomic number 6 was the french alteration. From its out disassemble in 1789, the Revolution touched and transformed social determine and insurance-ma queer systems in France, in Europe, and at bulkive last throughout the world. Frances new regime conquered pr mouldic each(prenominal)y of Western Europe with its arms and with its ideology. and non without considerable opposite word at home and abroad. Its ideals delineate the es moveial aspirations of new(a) detached society, fleck its bloody conflicts comprise the brutal dilemma of means versus ends.The revolutionaries advocated idiosyncratic acquaintance, rejecting tout ensemble forms of commanding constraint monopolies on commerce, feudal charges determined upon the primer coat, vestiges of servitude such as serfdom, and even (in 1794) black slavery everyplaceseas. They held that policy-making legitimacy required dispositional brass, elections, and legislative supremacy. They demilitary personnelded civil existity for all, denying the carrys of privileged groups, localities, or trusts to special treatment and requiring the equality of all citizens before the law.A final revolutionary goal was expressed by the ideal of fraternity, which meant that all citizens regardless of social class, region, or religion sh atomic number 18d a grossalty fate in society, and that the well-being of the race some whiles superseded the interests of persons. The resounding slogan of Liberty, Equality, union expressed social ideals to which to a greater extent or less modern-day citizens of the Western world would still subscribe. I. OriginsThose who do the Revolution believed they were rising against tyrannical goernment, in which the bulk had no voice, and against inequality in the way obligations such as taxes were compel and benefits distri yet whened. Yet the government of France at that time was no more tyrannical or unjust t han it had been in the past. On the contrary, a gradual process of reform had long been chthonicway. What, hence, fixed off the revolutionary turbulence? What had changed? An subdued answer would be to purport to the incompetence of King Louis 16 1774-1792) and his queen, Marie Antoinette. lovely solely weak and in determinant, Louis was a process of limited intelligence who lacked self- assertion. Worse yet, his junior queen, a Hapsburg princess, was frivolous, meddlesome, and tactless. just now even the roughly capable ruler could non micturate escaped challenge and crisis in the slow eighteenth century. The roots of that crisis, non its mismanagement, claim the principal interest of historians. The philosophes In eighteenth-century France, as we expect seen, adroit ferment preceded political revolt.For decades the philosophes had bombarded traditional beliefs, institutions, and prejudices with devastating salvos. They undermined the confidence that traditional ways were the best ways. Yet the philosophes were allthing merely revolutionaries. Nor did they question the fact that elites should rule society, but wished only that the elites should be more beginner and more open. Indeed, the Enlightenment had become ripe by the 1780s, a kind of intellectual establishment. Diderots Encyclopedia, banned in the 1750s, was reprinted in a less expensive format with government approval in the 1770s.Most of Frances 30 provincial academies_learned societies of educated citizens in the bigger towns had by that time been won over to the critical spirit and reformism of the Enlightenment, though not to its sometimes extreme secularism. Among the younger generation, the neat cultural hero was Rousseau (see picture), whose Confessions (published posthumously in 1781) caused a sensation. Here Rousseau attacked the hypocrisy, conformity, cynicism, and corruption of senior high-pitched school societys salons and aristocratic ways.Though he had not exempl ified this in his personal life, Rousseau came across in his novels and autobiography as the apostle of a simple, organic family life of conscience, purity, and virtue. As such, he was the swell inspiration to the future generation of revolutionaries, but the word revolution never flowed from his pen. ohmic dareance literature More subversive perchance than the writings of the high enlightenment was the surreptitious literature that commanded a wide listening in France. The onarchys censorship tried vainly to stop these bad books, which poured in across the b fiat through net works of clandestine publishers, smugglers, and distributors. What was this descend that the reading customary eagerly devoured? on base a fewer banned works by the philosophes, there was a weed of gossip sheets, pulp novels, libels, and pornography under such titles as S stubdalous Chronicles and The cliquish Life of Louis XV. Much of this material center on the supposed goings-on in the mode rnistic world of Paris and Versailles. Emphasizing stain and character assassination, this literature had no special political content or ideology.But indirectly, it portrayed the French aristocracy as decadent and the French monarchy as a ridiculous despotism. II. Fiscal Crisis When he took the bay window in 1774, Louis XVI tried to settle down elite opinion by recalling the Parlements or sovereign law courts that his father had abolished in 1770. This c at a timession to Frances traditional unwritten constitution backfired, however, since the Parlements resumed their defense of privilege in opposition to reforms proposed by Jacques Turgot, Louis, new controller commonplace of finances.Turgot, a disciple of the philosophes and an experienced administrator, hoped to raise economical growth by the policy of nonintervention or laissez-faire. When agitation against him attach at Versailles and in the Paris Parlement, Louis took the easy way out and dismissed his difficult mini ster. The king then turned to a Protestant banker from Geneva with a composition for financial wizardry, Jacques Necker. A shrewd man with a strong sense of public dealings, Necker gained wide popularity.To finance the heavy cost of Frances aid to the rebellious British colonies in North America, Necker avoided new taxes and instead floated a series of large loans at horrid interest rates as high as 10 percent. Short of a complete overhaul of the tax system, minuscular improvement in munificent revenues could be expected, and the public would bitterly resist any additional tax burdens that the monarchy simply imposed. veneer bankruptcy and unable to float any new loans in this atmosphere, the king recalled the Parlements, reap checked Necker, afterward tarying several(prenominal) other ministers, and agreed to call together the terra firmas customary in May 1789.III. kingdoms oecumenic to home(a) Assembly The calling of the grounds ordinary created extraordinary excit ement across the land. When the king invited his subjects to express their opinions well-nigh this great event, hundreds did so in the form of pamphlets, and here the liberal or nationalist ideology of 1789 prototypical began to take shape. The deuce-ace Estate era the king accorded the Third Estate double as numerous delegates as the devil higher orders, he refused to promise that the delegates would suffrage together (by head) quite an than separately in cardinal domiciliate (by order).A suffrage by order meant that the deuce pep pill chambers would outweigh the Third Estate no matter how many deputies it had. It did not matter that the nobility had led the conflict against dictatorship. Even if they endorsed new, constitutional checks on dictatorship and accepted equality in the apportioning of taxes, nobles would hold vastly disproportionate powers if the Estates General voted by order. In the most potent of these pamphlets, Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieye posed the ques tion, What is the Third Estate? and answered flatly, Everything. The oppositeness was no longer simply absolutism but privilege as well. distant reformers in England, or the Belgian rebels against Joseph II, or even the American revolutionaries of 1776, the French patriots did not look back to historical traditions of liberty that had been violated. Rather they contemplated a complete break with a discredited past. As a basis for reform, they would substitute reason for tradition. Cahiers For the moment, however, the patriots were outlying(prenominal) in advance of opinion at the grass roots. The king had invited citizens across the land to meet in their parishes to elect delegates to govern electoral assemblies, and to conscription grievance petitions (cahiers) background signal forth their views.Highly traditional in tone, the great majority of rural cahiers complained only of particular local ills and expressed confidence that the king would redress them. Only a few cahier s from Iarger cities, including Paris, alluded to the concepts of inhering rights or popular sovereignty that were appearing in patriot pamphlets. Very few demanded that France must have a written constitution, that sovereignty belonged to the nation, or that feudalism and regional privileges should be abolished. Elections well-nigh every adult male taxpayer was statutory to vote for electors, who, in turn, chose deputies for the Third Estate.The electoral assemblies were a kind of political seminar, where chat local leaders emerged to be sent by their fellow citizens as deputies to Versailles. These deputies were a remarkable collection of men, though hardly representative of the mass of the Third Estate. dominated by lawyers and officials, there was not a single worker or grouch among them. In the elections for the first-class honours degree Estate, meanwhile, democratic procedures sure that parish priests sort of than Church notables would form a majority of the dele gates.And in the elections to the Second Estate, about one third of the delegates could be depict as liberal nobles or patriots. issue Assembly Popular expectation that the monarchy would nominate leadership in reform proved to be ill-founded. When the deputies met on May 5, Necker and Louis XVI spoke to them only in generalities, and leave unsettled whether the estates would vote by order or by head. The upper two estates proceeded to organize their own chambers, but the deputies of the Third Estate balked.Inviting the others to join them, on June 17 the Third Estate took a decisive revolutionary step by proclaiming its passage into a internal Assembly. A few days later 150 clergymen from the First Estate joined them. The king, who finally immovable to cast his lot with the nobility, locked the Third Estate out of its meeting hall until a session could be arranged in which he would state his will. But the deputies move to an indoor tennis court, and there swore that they would not separate until they had given France a constitution. Ignoring this act of defiance, the king addressed the delegates of all three orders on June 23.He promised equality in taxation, civil liberties, and regular meetings of the Estates General at which, however, voting would be by order. France would be provided with a constitution, he pledged, but the antiquated distinction of the three orders will be conserved in its entirety. He then ordered the three orders to retire to their individual meeting halls. This, the Third Estate refused. When the empurpled chamberlain repeated his monarchs demand, the deputies, spokesman dramatically responded The assembled nation cannot view orders. Startled by the determination of the patriots, the king backed down. For the time being, he recognised the National Assembly and ordered deputies from all three estates to join it. Thus the French Revolution began as a nonviolent, legal Revolution. IV. The Convergence of Revolutions The poli tical struggle at Versailles was not occurring in isolation. Simultaneously, the mass of French citizens, already aroused by elections to the Estates General, were mobilizing over subsistence issues.The winter and spring of 1788-1789 had brought severe economic difficulties, as crop failures and grain shortages approximately doubled the price of flour and scrape on which the population depended for subsistence. Unemployed vagrants and beggars change the roads, grain convoys and marketplaces were stormed by angry consumers, and relations between town and country were strained. This glowingness merged with rage over the look of aristocrats in Versailles. Parisians believed that food shortages and royal troops would be used to intimidate the people into submission.They feared an aristocratic plot against the Third Estate and the patriot cause. Bastille When the king dismissed the still-popular Necker on July 11, Parisians correctly assumed that the counter-revolution was about to begin. sort of of submitting, they revolted. Protesting before royal troops (some of whom defected to the insurgents), yearning the hated toll barriers that surrounded the capital, and clutch grain supplies, Parisian crowds then began a search for weapons. On the morning of July 14 they invaded the military hospital of the Invalides where they seized thousands of rifles without incident.Then they laid siege to the Bastille, an old fortress that had once been a major royal prison, where pulverization was stored. There the small garrison did resist and a ferocious firefight erupted. Dozens of citizens were assume providing the first martyrs of the Revolution, but the garrison briefly capitulated. As they left, several were massacred by the raging crowd. Meanwhile, patriot electors ousted royal officials of the Paris city government, replaced them with a revolutionary municipality, and organized a citizens militia or national book to patrol the city.Similar municipal revoluti ons occurred in 26 of the 30 largest French cities, then assuring that the capitals defiance would not be an isolated act. The Parisian insurrection of July 14 not only saved the National Assembly from annihilation but as well altered the course of the Revolution by giving it a far more active, popular dimension. Again the king capitulated. Removing most of the troops around Paris, he traveled to the capital on July 17 and, to enjoy the people, donned a cockade bearing the colors of lily-white for the monarchy and blue and red for the city of Paris.This t sufficientromatic was to become the flag of the new France. The heavy(p) Fear These events did not pacify the anxious and hungry people of the countryside, however. The sources of peasant dissatisfaction were many and long standing. Population growth and the assignation of holdings were reducing the margin of subsistence for many families, while the purchase of land by rich townspeople exerted further pressure. Seigneurial dues and church tithes weighed severely upon most peasants. Now, in addition, suspicions were rampant that nobles were hoarding grain in order to bar the patriotic cause.In July peasants in several regions sacked the castles of the nobles and burned the documents that recorded their feudal obligations. This peasant insurgency eventually amalgamate into a vast movement cognise as the Great Fear. Rumors abounded that the vagrants who swarmed through the countryside were in reality brigands in the pay of nobles who were marching on villages to destroy the new harvest and affright the peasants into submission. The fear was baseless, but it stirred up hatred and suspicion of the nobles, prompted a mass recourse to arms in the villages, and set off new attacks on chEteaus and feudal documents.Peasant revolts and the Great Fear showed that the royal government was confronting a truly across the country and popular revolution. The shadow of horrible 4 Peasant insurgency worried th e deputies of the National Assembly, but they decided to appease the peasants rather than simply denounce their violence. On the night of August 4, representatives of the nobility and clergy vied with one some other in renouncing their ancient privileges. This set the power point for the Assembly to decree the abolition of feudalism as well as the tithe, venality of office, regional privilege, and social privilege.Rights of Man and Citizen By wholesale away the old web of privileges, the August 4th decree permitted the Assembly to build a new regime. Since it would take months to draft a constitution, the Assembly drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to testify the outline of its intentions. A rallying point for the future, the Declaration also stood as the closing certificate of the old regime. It began with a tintinnabulation affirmation of equality Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility. Th e Declaration went on to proclaim the sovereignty of the nation as against the king or any other group, and the supreme pledge of legitimate law. Most of its articles concerned liberty, defined as the ability to do some(prenominal) does not harm another . . . whose limits can only be determined by law they specified freedom from arbitrary arrest freedom of expression and of religion and the need for representative government. The Declarations concept of natural rights meant that the Revolution would be based on reason rather than history or tradition.