Q: How far would it be correct to call the French Revolution a Popular Revolution?
The French Revolution was a period of social and political upheaval, which resulted in radical changes in France. The system of absolute monarchy, with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and the Christian clergy underwent a change to a new form of government based on the principles of enlightenment and inalienable rights.
Many historians have described the French Revolution as the encounter of competing classes. In such an appraisal the Revolution is seen to begin with aristocratic protest against the absolute monarchy bequeathed by Louis XIV, then to enlarge in scope as a bourgeois movement seeking fundamental political change, and, finally, to take on popular dimensions with working-class participation, particularly in Paris.
The popular rebellion or revolution refers to that phase of the French Revolution, which involved the massive participation of the common people that included the peasantry and the sans-cullotes (the urban poor-apprentices, small tradesmen, journeymen, domestic servants, labourers etc).
The grievances of this section of the society were closely interlinked to the economic hardships that they had to face. The peasantry, in particular, was overburdened by taxation. They were compelled to pay the tithe to the church; feudal rent in cash and kind to the landowner along with other dues for the use of his facilities and render forced labour or corvee at the behest of the landowner. To add to this was the ever-increasing pressure from the state in the form of salt taxes, excises and tailles. Moreover, the peasantry resented the attempts made by the impoverished feudal lords to squeeze the peasantry further to revive their glory days. Finally, they were opposed to the coming of capitalism in the countryside as well as it further accentuated the differences between the rich and the poor peasantry and at the same time promoted private property and enclosure movements, which resulted in the loss of land for a large number of peasants. Similarly, for the urban poor, in addition to the rising food prices, which they were unable to afford with their meager wages, they resented the low social status and lack of opportunity which defined their existence.
Some scholars have, however, argued that the economic hardships have been over exaggerated. For instance, Tocqueville, who argued that in many ways, 18th century saw growing prosperity of the French economy. For instance, peasants were already in control of one-third of the land. It was precisely because the middle classes were becoming richer and more conscious of their social importance, and because the peasants were becoming more free, literate and prosperous, that the old feudal and aristocratic privileges appeared all the more intolerable. Others like C. E. Labrousse have shown that France in this period was a growing economy, which was nonetheless slowing down in the decades before the Revolution. A slump in the grape harvest affected the wine-market, one of the most lucrative avenues for peasants. This was followed by a fall in grain-prices and finally a drought, which killed the livestock in 1785. Moreover, industrial production had halted, as the third estate forming the bulk of the consumer class could not afford the industrial goods due to their meager wages. [1]
Moreover, other scholars believe that despite the economic advancement of France, the social structure prevented everyone from reaping equal benefits from such prosperity. Thus, while a long-term rise on prices swelled the income of large landowners and bourgeoisie, wages failed to keep pace and the living standards of the masses were steadily declining.
The common people unanimously agreed that it was the government and the upper classes who were responsible for their afflictions. The taxes increased, while income did not; the production was crippled; there was no bread available and the officials themselves were obstructing the possibility of controlling food prices by indulging in hoarding themselves. This was the final blow, as the common people believed that the upper classes and government officials were profiting from the high prices that increased their poverty. However, it should be kept in mind that France was no stranger to outbursts of popular rebellions. In this case, the economic hardships came up at a time when the political climate of France was on the verge of a change; the bourgeoisie already demanded the creation of the Estates-General that would take note of their grievances and called for reforms. Thus, by the late 1780s the absolute power of the monarchy and the aristocracy was already being challenged, thereby, creating a strong support base for the popular rebellions.
In 1787-89, bad harvests and shortage worsened the conditions of the impoverished, overburdened rural and urban masses by raising the price of bread. The common people against the backdrop of such rising prices and other grievances were greatly agitated and through bread riots, attacks on food convoys, bakers, millers and speculators the starved masses expressed their grievance. Throughout the kingdom markets had become the scene of disturbances and even the army and police were hesitant to put a stop to the rebels, whose grievances they shared and unconsciously began to feel a common sympathy with them. According to Lefebvre, the armour of the old regime was rapidly disintegrating.
The discontent in the urban areas was further fuelled by the fear of an aristocratic conspiracy to subvert the movement being initiated and led by the bourgeoisie and the common people. They feared that the aristocracy, which had already hoarded the grain, would destroy them, unleash the brigands on them and seek the help of foreign powers to suppress them. Such a fear psychosis compelled them to adopt defensive measures like create a national militia to resist the royal troops and attempt to destabilize the royal army. Moreover, they also resorted to punishing the aristocrats or other enemies through acts of brutality, imprisonment and public massacres.
It was against a backdrop like this that the dismissal of Necker, the minister of Finance, who favoured the third estate that fears of an aristocratic conspiracy were confirmed and ignited the masses. A huge crowd of Parisians stormed the royal palace and after a brief armed encounter was able to force the governor to surrender. The electors took over the municipal control, appointed their own man as the mayor and took over the command of the National Guard. However, the most significant outcome of the ‘Conquest of Bastille’ had been the king’s decision to dismiss his troops, recall Necker and accept the new revolutionary flag that merged the old France with the new.
Similarly, in the provinces the news of the dismissal of Necker had provoked strong feelings and an immediate response. The bourgeoisie kept their grip over the instruments of control in almost every area. This new order gradually took over the whole of the administrative apparatus and each municipality wielded absolute power in its own confines and the surrounding areas. Thus, gradually because of this ‘Municipal Revolution’ France was getting converted into a federation of communes with each municipality trying to address the most immediate concerns of the common people as they had participated in this rebellion.
Rural disturbance had begun long before, perhaps since December 1788. Starting as grain riots it had, by the following spring and summer, begun to assume the proportions of widespread rural revolt against game laws, hunting rights, royal taxes, tithes and seigneurial dues. The news from Paris gave this movement a fresh stimulus and intensified it. It was accompanied by the strange phenomenon known as “la Grande Peur” (the Great Fear) – the peasant suspicion of an aristocratic conspiracy meant to unleash brigands in the countryside to sabotage their produce – itself a product of the economic crisis and of the revolution in Paris. Not only did the peasants refuse pay taxes, but also taking defensive measures, they attacked chateaus and destroyed records of feudal dues, which is often taken as symbolic of their attack on the feudal order. However, peasant attack on feudal property cannot be taken as an attack on feudalism per say, since rarely were aristocrats attacked in person. The peasant revolts of 1789 were also significantly directed against capitalism in the countryside – the enclosure edicts are opposed in the cahiers, and common rights were reclaimed in the course of peasant insurrection. Also, they were led by persons bearing orders purporting to come from the King himself; and there seems little doubt that the peasants believed that, in settling accounts with their seigneurs, they were carrying out the King’s wishes, if not his specific instructions. Peasant action in a sense determined the legislation of the revolutionary government at the cost of the interests of some bourgeois proprietors, reflected in the abolition of seigneurial dues between August 4th-11th 1789, primarily prompted by fear of peasant revolt and thus the need to pacify the countryside.
The Fall of Bastille had saved the National Assembly from being dissolved and enabled it to change the feudal regime, the main purpose of its creation. It was able to adopt equality of taxation, legal punishment, admission of all to public office; abolition of venality in office; freedom of worship and prohibition of plural holdings of benefices among other reform measures. Thus, the assembly in principle was able to achieve the legal unity of the nation by the destruction of the feudal regime and aristocratic domination over rural areas. This way the assembly had been able to pave the way for a discussion of a declaration of rights. According to Lefebvre, this text proclaiming liberty, equality and national sovereignty was in effect the ‘act of decease’ of the Old Regime, which had been put to death by the popular revolution.
However, the king refused to sign these decrees. Despite the repeated efforts of the revolutionaries to appease the king to get him to sanction these decrees, he was unwilling to concede. As a result, the agitation among the common people refused to abate and this political crisis once again merged with the economic crisis of the time. Bread was once again expensive, luxury industries were under threat of closure, unemployment had never been this high, scarcity was rampant, markets were empty etc. The common people believed that laying hands on the kings was one such remedy. When women from the faubourg Saint-Antoine and Les Halles in October decided to march to Versailles, the bourgeoisie decided to accompany them with the aim of bringing the king to Paris to sanction the decrees. Despite, his reluctance the king had to ultimately comply with the wishes of the mob that had surrounded his palace and was refusing to leave, constantly chanting “to Paris”. Thus, it was this October insurrection that gave the legitimacy to the August reforms.
However, despite the role played by popular forces in bringing about the French Revolution, scholars are not of the unanimous opinion that it should be called a ‘popular revolution’. Most of the contemporary historians of the French Revolution looked upon the event as one being led by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie against the monarchy. For instance, Edmund Burke writes that the revolution was the outcome of the actions of a number of selfish people i.e. group of liberal aristocrats with whom “jumped up moneyed interests” (new rich people) joined hands. They hatched the conspiracy against the monarchy and were followed by huge common people, whom he calls the “Swinish Multitude”. Similarly, Adolphe Theirs believes that it was the bourgeoisie that played the major role in the French Revolution with the common people acting as mere appendages to the bourgeoisie, not being capable of leading such a movement themselves. However, Germaine Madame de Stael believed that without the support of the common people the revolution would not have reached its penultimate stage.
The Classical interpretation of the French Revolution by Marxists such as G. Lefebvre and A. Soboul is that it was a “bourgeois capitalist revolution”; a class war between a decadent feudal nobility and a rising capitalist bourgeoisie.
According to, Georges Lefebvre, “The Revolution of 1789 restored the harmony between fact and law.” He argued that the bourgeoisie were the most significant economic element within France. The wealth they generated and the professions they filled were far more important than the political role they were allowed by tradition and law to play. Through revolutionary ideology and institutional change, the bourgeoisie gained a political authority not known before in any European country. In this sense, the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution and the origins of the revolution lay in the internal divisions within the bourgeoisie and the different relations that the various sections of the bourgeoisie held with the working class. The abolition of aristocratic privileges, the confiscation of church and aristocratic lands and their purchase by the bourgeoisie, and the removal of internal obstacles to trade and commerce allowed the middle class greater economic and social mobility. Moreover, he attributed an autonomous status to the peasant rebellions of this period.
Similarly, Albert Soboul believes that the French Revolution was much more than a political transformation; it was also essentially social and economic. Socially, it was a bourgeoisie revolution in the sense that political power moved from landed aristocrats to the bourgeoisie and economically, it was a capitalist revolution in which this new bourgeoisie class transferred the source of wealth from land to more liquid forms of capital. He (like Lefebvre) admitted that the common people- peasants, sans-culottes- had been major partners in the beginning but by 1792 had become victims. The bourgeoisie consolidated the victory and reaped the benefits of the revolution and in this way, instead of becoming an actual democracy, genuine political power was transferred from one elite group to another.
He writes that the sans-culottes were tied to the Bourgeoisie by a hatred for the aristocracy but since they were a combination of socially disparate elements, they lacked class-consciousness. The bourgeoisie alone possessed a coherent programme and was ready to direct the revolutionary action and thus the victory of the sans-culottes was a “Bourgeoisie Victory”.
However, this has been criticized by the Revisionist historians like A. Cobban and G. Rudé as it reduces the Revolution to the deterministic operation of an historical law. They point out certain flaws with the theory. Cobban has argued that the Bourgeoisie makes up only 13% of the constituent, while, 2/3rd of the deputies of the third estate were liberal professionals. It is difficult to conceive how a miniscule group represented independent interests in a Bourgeoisie that was neither united nor homogenous could substitute the capitalist order for the older one. He instead has argued that the revolutionary leadership was in the hands of the declining officer class and the “men of talent”, and not in the hands of the rising commercial class (if at all they represented “capitalist interests”). The socio-economic struggles both in the towns as well as the countryside that attacked the Old Order in the opening year of the Revolution also tended to be anti-capitalist. Even though privileges were abolished, in effect, wealth replaced birth as a criterion for power. The class of ruling elite that emerged from the Revolution was a landed class. Thus, in terms of affecting any profound social or economic changes the Revolution achieved little and did not effectively prepare France for an “advance of capitalism” or for equality or upliftment of the poor or common man.
Moreover, Cobban accusses the political interpretation of the sans-culotte-ist movement for diverting the attention from the economic and social history of the revolution. He points to the social problems, both rural and urban, of French Revolution history and its economic crises- the high price and shortage of bread, bad harvests and industrial crisis. Cobban suggests that the coincidence of economic distress with a period of intense political agitation rather than political altruism propelled the masses into revolutionary action.
Rude sought to shatter a stereotypical picture of an urban revolution constituted primarily by bands of criminals, unemployed people and vagabonds who responded to slogans of revolution out of the greed for loot. Rude argues, instead, that urban protest was organized primarily around the older quarters of Paris, such as the Faubourgs St. Antoine and St. Marcel. These areas housed a `pétit-bourgeoisie’ of small shopkeepers, master craftsmen and artisans, who trod a delicate line between moderate bourgeois status and a descent into proletarianization. Essentially, Rúde’s argument is that the lower bourgeoisie of the older quarters of Paris provided leadership to the popular movement, and the working-class groupings clustered together as a militant force under their command.
Thus, it can be seen that the common people or the popular elements played a crucial role during the French Revolution. This is a fact that is not denied by anyone. The political victory for the Third Estate was enforced by popular pressure, through revolts that broke out in the towns and the countryside. The Fall of Bastille on July 14 saved the National Assembly from dissolution and later in October, the march of Parisian women to Versailles exerted pressure on Louis XVI to return to Paris and accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, firmly establishing the Revolution. In fact, the popular movements through their fusion with the political revolution were critical in the success of the ongoing political struggle.
However, most of the modern historians have looked upon the French Revolution as a Bourgeoisie Revolution, both in terms of the origin and the outcome of the revolution. They believed that despite the role played by the common people were soon to be abandoned by the revolutionary government, which assumed all power and prevented a genuine people’s democracy from coming into existence. It was the bourgeoisie, which had replaced the aristocracy as the ruling elite.
In terms of economic status there was very little to differentiate between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Thus, the French Revolution is looked upon more as an attack on privilege than property. Thus, it was the bourgeoisie class, which guided the movement and gave it a coherent structure and programme as it had vested interests. It sought to reach the status, which earlier had been closed to them by the traditional nobility.
Thus, in light of such arguments one can conclude that while the popular elements played a vital role in the French revolution their uprising had become a common phenomenon in France due to the stagnant economic structure of the country. It was the changing political environment of this period, which was brought about by the bourgeoisie that gave legitimacy to the struggle of common people during this period that had been brought about by economic hardships. Even then these rebellions took place within a bourgeoisie framework. Thus, while it maybe incorrect to name the entire revolution as the “Popular Revolution”, as the government that emerged after this phase was not a ‘popular’ one nor was this the first time that the common people had revolted to express their grievances. However, it maybe correct to view this particular phase of the revolution as the popular phase given the important role played by the common people in assisting the bourgeoisie to achieve the aims.
[1] Alexis de Tocqueville argued that in the 18th century the peasantry was on the economic upswing as they controlled more than 1/3 of the land by this point, and it is precisely this prosperity emerging in the middle class that led to the growth of discontent with the feudal privileges of the old order. Labrousse, on the other hand, feels that though the peasantry experienced an economic surge, this slumped in the 18th century