1. Discuss the origins of the French Revolution.

Ans. The French Revolution is an important event in the history of France and the world. Its interpretation is crucial both for the understanding of the age of social change which preceded it, and of the developments in that period which has followed. However, the debate over the Revolution remains an ever-open field of enquiry. With regard to the origins, historians disagree in evaluating the factors that brought about the Revolution.

To begin with, it must be taken note of that the term ‘French Revolution’ itself has been questioned. A. Cobban has called it the ‘myth of the French Revolution’, since aspects of the Old Order continued even after the Revolution. Those who accept that there was a Revolution are also divided over its chronology. For some, the Revolution begins with the aristocratic revolt in 1788-89. Others place it between 1789-91, when the middle-classes took over and, aided by the peasants, overthrew the established order. However, for some, the real Revolution was the radical Jacobin phase from 1792-94. Thus, whether of the Right or the Left, royalist or republican, conservative or Jacobin, Marxist or Liberal, the French Revolution has a different interpretation and meaning for all.

The 18th century was a period of general crisis in Europe; the challenges faced by the old regime were not a purely French phenomenon. But the origins of the Revolution must be sought not merely in the general conditions of Europe but in the specific situation within France. The Revolution can be said to have marked a breach between the existing Ancien Régime (Old Order) and the “new” French “nation”. This period witnessed the intensification of old socio-political struggles such as between the aristocracy and an absolutist monarchy; as well as the challenge of new forces such as the ideas of Enlightenment, prospering commerce and the beginnings of industrialization, resulting in the rise of new social groups, and increasing political tensions. The question of the origins of the French Revolution thus involves a study of these forces, keeping in mind the political, economic, social and cultural context that underlay the Revolution.

The French Revolution had a unique nature due to the peculiar character of the French social classes that played a role in the Revolution. Medieval France had divided society into three estates, each having a distinct function – the Church, the nobles, and the non-nobles, mainly the middle-class and the peasants. However, in practice, this legal classification had ceased to bear any close relation to social realities long before 1789. The ruling elite of France (the notables) comprised of the members of upper clergy (who were powerful nobles), the court nobility and sections of the wealthy upper bourgeoisie. Also, French society at this time saw the rise of various social groups which could not be fitted into this system. Social identity, as A Cobban has pointed out, was complex with several determinants – mode of life, profession, family, actual wealth, sources of income, social status and prestige, legal status, political orientation, economic function, personal aspirations and grievances, and so on, all not necessarily distinct.

The Church was a semi-autonomous body which intervened in the political, social and economic life of the community at all levels, while itself escaping from secular control. It had the privilege to pay a relatively small percentage of its income to the state. This was referred to a ‘free gift’ (don gratuit), which the clergy consented to grant the king, for which it collected the money itself. The Church also collected tithe (one-tenth of the income) from all sections of the society, though the main burden fell on the peasantry. Moreover, it owned about 6-10% of the land in France. As a great landowner, often by seigneurial tenure, it participated in the more business-like management of its assets, which appeared to the peasantry as hard-fisted avarice.

The organization of the Church mirrored that of lay society in the sense that there was a fairly sharp distinction between a ruling hierarchy and an impoverished rank and file, based essentially on noble birth. By the time of Louis XVI, every bishop was a nobleman. Many chapters and religious houses were similarly the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy. This upper clergy was distinct from the lower clergy or the country priests (‘bon prêtre’, literally ‘good priest’; or ‘curé’, leader of community life). The latter formed the vast majority among the clergy, belonged to the Third Estate, and had limited means. They played an important role later in the Revolution, by siding with the Third Estate, leading to a split in the Church.

Nobles directly owned about 25% of the land in France, though through overlordship it had ¾ths of the land under its control. They enjoyed important legal privileges, rights of jurisdiction and immunity from varying types of taxation. They were not expected to pay the taille personelle (levied on personal income), and only a few nobles paid the taille réelle (levied on land). They also evaded payment of their proper share of the vingtième (one-twentieth of the income) and capitation (a form of poll tax), introduced to supplement the taille at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. The nobility also dominated the Parlements – the hereditary legal corporations.

Despite its social prestige and distinct way of life, the aristocracy was a disparate group with significant internal divisions. Nobility, although was traditionally based on blood, through the practice of ennoblement started by Louis XIV, could be acquired by wealth. During the course of the 18th century, sections of merchants and financiers, who became prosperous through flourishing commerce and by lending to the State, found their way into the ambit of political power through purchase of offices. So there was a distinction between the noblesse d’épée (‘nobles of the sword’), who looked down on the noblesse de robe (the new wealthy administrative nobility). In addition, the nobility was separated in terms of function from the parlementaires. A third distinction was between the noblesse de cour and the provincial nobility. This followed directly from the centralizing policy of Louis XIV. While the court nobles enjoyed access to the King and monopolized all offices, the nobles in the countryside were generally poorer and unable to afford to reside in Versailles. The entry of agrarian capitalism in the countryside further sharpened the divide between the rich and the provincial nobility.

By the 18th century, however, all nobles were facing financial difficulties. Since they were formally debarred from exercising a trade or profession, they depended on the income of their estates, or, if they belonged to the favoured minority of court nobles, on wealthy marriages, court pensions, gifts and sinecures. But the expenses of noble status were large and rising, while their incomes fell. Inflation also tended to reduce the value of fixed revenues such as rents. This led to what some scholars have termed as the “feudal reaction” – ways adopted by the nobles to cope with the financial crisis. In this they were supported by the policies of the King, which discriminated in favour of the nobles. Educational institutions began to bar the entry of non-nobles. In 1701, nobles were allowed to engage in wholesale, but not retail trade. In 1767, they were allowed to participate in manufacturing activity and banking. Also, throughout the 18th century, high posts in administration and in the army came to be reserved for the nobility. By the 1780s, all bishops were nobles. The ordinance of 1781 restricted commissioned entry into the army to those who could prove four generations of nobility. All this devalued the titles that the Crown had been selling to the aspiring bourgeois. It also deprived the newly-ennobled of some of the most important practical advantages that their status had formerly conferred. This created a sharp division of interests between the old noblesse and the upper middle class and anoblis.

The Church and the nobility together made up only 4% of the population. The remaining 96% belonged to the Third Estate. However, this was a very broad category that included several diverse groups within it. One such group was the bourgeoisie. G. Lefebvre divides the 18th century French bourgeoisie into five groups – (a) the bourgeois proper, who had enough resources to dispense with manual labour and to live ‘nobly off their possessions’, i.e., principally off revenues from land; (b) members of the royal administration, officers, proprietors of venal offices, some of them ennobled; (c) lawyers – notaries, procureurs, avocats; (d) members of the liberal profession – doctors, scientists, writers, artists; and (e) those in the world of finance and commerce – shipbuilders, wholesale traders, entrepreneurs etc. Within each of these groups there were widely divergent levels of wealth and status.

There were differences between the upper bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The vast and heterogeneous petty bourgeoisie were poorer and possessed very small holdings of land. The upper bourgeoisie had more in common with the nobility; and its corporate organization fostered the same exclusiveness it resented in the nobility. The petty bourgeoisie were disdainfully referred by them as ‘le peuple’. Their traditional attitude towards the aristocracy was one of aspiration rather than hostility. There were frequent inter-marriages between the two. However, this section of the bourgeoisie found that the doors of entry into aristocratic institutions and political power were closing for itself as the 18th century drew to a close, as there was increasing emphasis on the nobility of blood for office. This aristocratic reaction in the defense of privileges was to act as a precursor to the future political struggle between the aristocracy and those who began to attack privileges, partly because they could not enjoy it.

Another group that made up the Third Estate was the lower urban classes. This included wage-earners of different kinds, such as small tradesmen, master craftsmen, journeymen, apprentices, labourers and domestic servants; and unemployed people like beggars and vagabonds. They did not form a working class in the Marxist sense, and formed no significant part of the social pattern of Europe on the eve of the French Revolution. Most of them were peasant migrants; moreover there were no large-scale industries at this time. However, they were affected by rising food prices. Thus, though the issue of wages might have divided them, the urban masses were inclined to see their overriding economic interest as one and, in times of shortage, to unite in common action against wholesalers, merchants and city authorities. It is due to this reason, among others, that there was to emerge later during the course of the Revolution, a combination of social forces in Paris to which was attached the common label of sans-culottes.

The largest component of the Third Estate was the peasantry. Strictly speaking there was no such thing as a clearly defined and cohesive peasant class, as the peasant’s economic and social status and degree of personal freedom varied widely from one part of France to another. On the basis of land ownership, one can identify three groups within the peasantry – (i) around 50% were the métayers or share-croppers, to whom the landlord provided animals and equipment in return for half of the crop and a certain amount of labour-service; (ii) 25% made up the landless peasants; and (iii) the remaining 25% that owned land. Within the last category again, there were the laboureurs (prosperous tenant farmers); those who had very small plots, not enough for subsistence; and a small number of wealthy coqs de village, who owned substantial property.

The main grievance of the peasantry was that they bore a heavy burden of taxation. As a whole, it did not reject the Church, though it was against the misuse of the tithe, which they paid to the Church. Seigneurial dues included the cens (feudal rent in cash) and the champart (rent in kind) paid to the landowner; lods et ventes (rent due on sale or transfer of property); and payment for feudal monopolies or banalities, which compelled the peasant to use his lord’s facilities (mill, bakery etc.). Peasants also had an obligation to perform forced labour, known as corveé. The state added to these taxes. The taille and vingtiéme was paid almost entirely by the rural population. They also had to pay indirect taxes such as the salt tax (gabelle) and excises (aides).

Another major source of peasant discontent stemmed from the so-called “feudal reaction”. Impoverished nobles, especially the provincial ones with few other resources, attempted to counteract the decline in their income by squeezing the utmost out of their feudal rights to exact money from the peasantry. Specialists in feudal law (feudists) were employed by the landlords to revive obsolete feudal claims, or invent new ones, or to maximize the yield of existing ones, and to bring up-to-date the manorial rolls and records of feudal obligations (terriers). However, A. Cobban feels it reflected the more business-like management of their landed property on the part of the newly-created nobility of middle-class origin.

The peasants also resented the coming of capitalism in the countryside. They had a deep-rooted distrust of private property and opposed enclosures, as they benefited large proprietors exclusively and deprived them of common lands. Moreover, capitalism had resulted in further differentiation among the peasantry, making the prosperous peasantry like the coqs de village unpopular. Thus, we can say that the peasantry opposed both the feudal and the capitalist landlords. However, this did not translate into an attack on the King, who was still seen as the protector of the people.

France was, therefore, a complex society marked by local variations at every level. For a great number of reasons, political, economic, social and religious, tensions were increasing in the second half of the 18th century.

The beginning of the Revolution can be seen, however, in the intensification of the age-old political struggle between a centralizing monarchy and an aristocracy resisting this effect, what precipitated into the “aristocratic revolt” (revolte nobiliaire) in 1788-89. The immediate context for this struggle was provided by the unprecedented fiscal burden that the court faced. Financial troubles were a recurrent concern for an extravagant court, with an expensive bureaucratic machinery and nobility that measured prestige through the extent of indebtedness. However, it was really the French participation in the American War of Independence that blew the royal crisis out of proportion. The state now faced a fiscal deficit of 112 million livres, excluding interest.

The strain on the French economy and the threat of bankruptcy obliged ministers to institute radical reforms. This reform took the form of the monarchical decision to infringe on the fiscal privileges of the Church and aristocracy, justified on the principles of Enlightenment, since the option of taxing the overburdened masses was ruled out. However, it was actually a result of the practical concerns of the monarchy, since it feared that such a decision could lead to popular revolts.

This attempt faced obvious resistance from the privileged orders, since exemption from direct taxation had almost become central to noble identity. The noble struggle against reform was carried forth by the parlements, led by the Parlement of Paris, and backed by the Church. With their right of remonstrating royal decrees, the Parlements attacked royal tyranny and defended noble privileges, interestingly giving them the garb of “traditional liberties”. This was done to stir popular disturbances against the monarchy. The Remonstrances reflect the language of Enlightenment that they used, holding the nobility as a bulwark against despotism and claiming to represent the “nation”, reflecting their interpretation of Montesquieu. Stating that Estates-General (National Assembly) alone had the right to vote new taxes, they demanded its convocation (defunct since 1614), with the ulterior motive of restoring their own power vis-à-vis the monarchy. Louis XVI was forced to agree and elections were ordered in August 1788, arousing hopes of liberal and constitutional reforms.

The decision to call the Estates-General is seen by many as the capitulation of the monarchy. Thus, the French Revolution seen in this context, as G. Lefebvre puts it, was inaugurated by the aristocracy. However, a new revolution against them had already begun, by associating the middle and lower classes in common action against King and aristocracy. This was by no means what the aristocrats had intended or foreseen.

During the months spent in the preparation of elections for the Estates-General, the political debate assumed a new character. The question now was how the Estates-General should be constituted. Accordingly to the formula of 1614, the three orders should be composed of an equal number of deputies and should deliberate in their three separate assemblies, thus ensuring that the Third Estate would be in a permanent minority in its relations with the other orders. But the Third Estate of 1789 was not willing to accept this humble role any more, and it began to insist that it should have double representation and that the orders should meet in a single deliberative assembly; thus the Third Estate would be assured of a majority at all times. Abbe Sieyes, whose pamphlet ‘What is the Third Estate?’ appeared at the end of January, went further and identified the “nation” with the majority of the population, i.e., the Third Estate.

 

The privileged orders, however, had a very different conception and at the end of September 1788, the Paris Parlement insisted that the precedent of 1614 should be followed. This exposed the intentions of the Parlements and of the conservative majority of the aristocracy who were unwilling to compromise on their privileges. It galvanized the members of the Third Estate against aristocratic arbitrariness, giving them a unity they otherwise could not possess, given the diversity of their backgrounds. Even the wealthy bourgeoisie, alienated by the aristocracy, were now forced to turn to masses. Thus, what had hitherto been a struggle against royal despotism changed into a conflict between the privileged and unprivileged classes, demanding equality before law.

A “patriot” party was formed, demanding constitutional reform. Though mainly voicing the hopes of the Third Estate, it included some liberal aristocrats like Talleyrand, Lafayette and Condorcet. Similarly, many of the young nobles in the Parlement of Paris were in favour of abolition of fiscal privileges. Thus, as Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued, the initiative for political reform did not merely come from “the bourgeoisie”, but also from a group of men diverse in their social backgrounds but sharing similar liberal ideas. Thus, to look at the “bourgeois revolt” as merely “bourgeois” is to give primacy to a class identity, if it existed, over belief in common ideology.

Some historians lay too much stress on the existence of a central direction of all revolutionary agitation and exaggerate the part played by Freemasons and “the Society of Thirty”, whose operations have been seen as evidence of a concerted “conspiracy” to undermine the institutions of the Old Regime. Yet it must be remembered communications had not as yet sufficiently developed to allow of a highly organized direction by comparatively unknown men. At the same time, the role of pamphlets and propaganda in shaping political opinion cannot be ignored. Lefebvre argues that given the state of communications, the local bourgeoisie must have played an important role in mobilizing public opinion. Under this pressure, the monarchy acceded to the demand for double representation by the Third Estate, though voting by order was retained.

The Estates-General met at Versailles on 5 May 1789 against a background of mounting crisis and popular unrest in Paris. Earlier in the year, people had been invited to prepare their cahiers de doleances, or lists of grievances, to guide their estates in their deliberations. Innumerable cahiers had come pouring in from the provinces, making it clear that sweeping political and social reforms, far exceeding the object of its meeting, were expected from the Estates-General. But as the assembly opened, nothing was done to spare the Third Estates’ susceptibilities or to realize their high hopes of early reform. In every way, they were made mindful of their inferiority of status. The Crown was indecisive, vacillating. The growing impatience of the Third Estate lead them to declare themselves as the National Assembly on June 17, 1789, and they invited the other two orders to join them. Majority of the members of the clergy (parish priests) joined the Assembly, splitting the first order, and so did some liberal nobles. When the king had their meeting place closed, they adjourned to an indoor tennis court, and there took an oath (June 20) not to disband until a constitution had been drawn up. On June 27, the king yielded and legalized the National Assembly.

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, these popular movements had an autonomous course and objective, were not merely the tools of the revolutionary leadership summoned at their will, even though the middle class played an important role in raising their level of political consciousness.

Popular unrest was closely allied with economic realities and tended to flare up in times of economic crisis. There is a debate over whether the economy of Pre-Revolutionary France was in a state of crisis or not. Scholars like J. Michelet argued that growing misery among the people resulted in a popular uprising against an unjust order. This was challenged by 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. Based on recent researches, both these theses can now be questioned. C. E. Labrousse has shown that France in this period was a growing economy, which was nonetheless slowing down in the decades before the Revolution. This was made worse by the free trade treaty concluded with England in 1786, the fiscal crisis faced by the state, and the agrarian crisis of the 1780s. In 1787-89, bad harvests and shortage worsened the conditions of the impoverished, overburdened rural and urban masses by raising the price of bread. Through bread riots, attacks on food convoys, bakers, millers and speculators the starved masses had expressed their grievance.

Rural disturbance had begun long before, perhaps since December 1788. Starting as grain riots in 1775, a small consumers’ movement attended by assaults on millers, granaries and food convoys, 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 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 urban movements were more closely allied to the political ideals of the revolutionary clubs that the Revolution had fostered, often adopting their political slogans. But the elite intellectual culture of Enlightenment, when percolated down to the lower classes, assumed a different nature and began to attack the very salón society which fostered the philosophers. Guided by a moralistic sense of frugal virtue, consciously juxtaposed with aristocratic decadence, or rather the exaggerated myth of it, the lower class attacked the aristocratic elite with a savagery that cannot be otherwise explained. The popular results also tended to be anti-clerical, attaching Church symbols. However, the constant underlying motive of most popular movements was concerned with economic circumstances – the revolt against the increasing price of bread or wages declining in their purchasing power in a worsening inflationary situation. Labrousse has shown that the cost of living went up by 45% during the years 1771-89. Coupled with this was a resentment towards the rich, and large property, which it was feared would wipe the lower urban classes out of existence. Thus one can see the same conservatism among the lower urban classes in their assault on capitalism.

An important factor that cannot be overlooked is the role played by the King in the Revolution. He oscillated between his role as a traditional monarch and thus a defender of privilege; or an Enlightened monarch. Thus, although he declared a policy to tax the privileged classes, he did not have the courage to go through with it. Such a decision required a monarch with more skill and a resolute personality. If the King had proved himself more trust-worthy as a champion of reform, events might have turned out differently and the Third Estate might have settled for a compromise. But, after July, it was too late – by his wavering and disappointing conduct, and his feeble intrigues with court and nobility, the King had already lost all chance of being accepted as the leader of a national movement of regeneration.

After the overthrow, the Assembly conferred the title of ‘Restorer of French Liberty’ on Louis XVI. Here too the monarchy had a slim chance to save itself. But the King was weak-willed and played a double game. In the first place, he had only accepted the Constitution in name. Long before it had signed, he had made an unsuccessful bid to seek safety in flight and, having been returned ignominiously to his capital, continued to intrigue with the rulers of Sweden, Spain, Prussia and Austria for the restoration of his old authority by the force of arms. So the monarchy could not be trusted.

The role of the army, the traditional bulwark of the Crown, must also be noted. Political disaffection in the officer corps was so widespread that it was impossible to rely on the army to confront the National Assembly or, still less, to disperse seething Parisian mobs. Further, the French Guards and other mutinous elements of the army provided the military know-how to the mob to seize the Bastille on 14 July. Thus, although it was only one factor among many, the army played a decisive role, not only ensuring the survival and expansion of the Revolution at home, but within a few years achieving a succession of military victories which would preserve and consolidate the Revolution.

The question to be really asked here is as to what extent was the Revolution and the revolutionaries rooted in the dominant intellectual current of the time, represented by the Enlightenment, without undermining the complexity of what either represented. The ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, and those of many others, were being widely disseminated among the aristocratic and middle class. Meanwhile, such terms as “citizen”, “nation”, “social contact”, “general will” and the “rights of man” were entering into a common political vocabulary. The opening of the political atmosphere in 1789 fostered liberal ideas associated with the Enlightenment, particularly under political clubs. This political liberalism, rationality that ran through the Enlightenment, the belief in the enjoyment of in alienable natural rights by all men, freedom of thought and expression was reflected in the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. The secularization of politics, by removal of the Church from the arena of political life, the opening of clerical posts to election, may be rooted in the thought of the philosophes, Voltaire particularly. The dissolution of Church lands however, might have been meant to address the fiscal crisis.

Thus, the connection between the ideas of Enlightened thinkers and the outbreak of revolution in 1789 is somewhat remote and indirect. They did not preach revolution, and were usually ready enough to lend support to any absolute monarch who was prepared to patronize them and adopt their teachings. Nor were most of their readers inspired to what, or to work for revolution, they were mostly themselves aristocrats, lawyers, business people, and local dignitaries, whose lot in the existing order was far from unhappy. The doctrines of the philosophies came to be used later on, during the course of the revolution in France, often to justify measure that the philosophies themselves would have opposed. Their teachings became more important later; if they had any influence at all on the outbreak and the initial stages of the great revolution, it was only to the extent that they had fostered a critical and irreverent attitude towards all existing institutions. They made men more ready, when the need arose, to question the whole foundation of the Old Order.

But the origin of notions of popular sovereignty, of the redefinition of the nation that emerged during the course of the revolutionary crisis is more complex. It is argued by Cobban, that if any of the Enlightened thinkers even came close to popular sovereignty, it was Rousseau, but his thought on general will an idealized will did not imply popular sovereignty on the extensive scale that it emerged during the Revolution. Even though ideas provided symbols for political struggles, beginning with the defence that the Parlements present for their privileges, the course of the Revolution is dictated by circumstances and material concerns. Lefebvre too has argued that despite a streak of genuine idealism among the revolutionaries, material concerns dictated the course of the Revolution. In fact, practical circumstances influenced ideas and political theory.

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. 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. Firstly, it is wrong to call the nobility ‘feudal’ alone, since many were increasingly getting involved in capitalist activities. Similarly, the bourgeoisie cannot be called ‘capitalist’. As they have shown, 60% of the bourgeoisie were office-holders, 30% were rentiers (lived off fixed income from financial investments) and only 10% were engaged in capitalism, this too largely mercantile, not industrial capitalism. Also, there was a lot common between the upper bourgeoisie and the nobility, in terms of property and culture. Thus, the 18th century had not a “revolutionary bourgeoisie” but one which aspired to noble status and emulated noble lifestyles. They turned against the nobility only when they found themselves unable to enter the privileged group. 

Moreover, A Cobban 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. That the officiers and the men of the liberal professions directed the revolution, and that the businessmen were not its prime movers, was also the view of Lefebvre. But he argued that all the same, it represented their interests and opened the way to capitalism. This has been critiqued by Cobban. Although certain internal barriers to trade were abolished, free trade, per say, did not emerge. The Revolution, although it abolished seigneurial rights, also established the inalienability of the right to landed property, reinforcing the importance of land as source of wealth and thus, social prestige, if not privilege. 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”.

Thus, there were differing conceptions of what the Revolution was. All the social groups involved wanted change, but they were not united on the nature of this change. Each class had its own motives and objectives; thus it is perhaps better to speak of the ‘French Revolutions’. However, for sake of convenience, all these are seen as phases or a series of events from 1788-1799 (though some would include the Napoleonic Era as well, from 1799-1815), which transformed the socio-political structure of France.

The Revolution essentially began as a political movement by the aristocratic classes, a struggle for the possession of power and over the conditions in which power was to be exercised. But it paved the way for the opening of a new political atmosphere within which new ideas and socio-economic struggles were to grow. Popular participation, arising from socio-economic grievances, won the political struggles that characterized the Revolution in all its stages – the struggle between monarchy and aristocracy, between the Third Estate and the aristocracy, between the monarchy and the National Assembly, between Revolution and what was perceived to be counter-revolution. Thus, an interplay between a complex of factors – social, economic and ideological, all within a political framework – led to the French Revolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

  1. David Thomson – Europe Since Napoleon
  2. David Ogg – Europe Of The Ancien Regime, 1715-1783
  3. Alfred Cobban – A History Of Modern France, Volume One – Old Regime And Revolution, 1715-1799
  4. Alfred Cobban – The Social Interpretation Of The French Revolution
  5. Albert Goodwin – The French Revolution
  6. George Rudé – Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815
  7. George Rudé – Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Aristocracy and the Bourgeois Challenge
  8. Georges Lefebvre – The French Revolution: From Its Origins To 1793 (Translated by Elizabeth Moss Evanson)
  9. Norman Hampson – A Social History Of The French Revolution
  10. J. Hobsbawm – The Age Of Revolution (Europe, 1789-1848)
  11. Steven T. Ross (ed.) – The French Revolution: Conflict Or Continuity?
  12. Ronald Schechter (ed.) – The French Revolution: The Essential Readings
  13. Gary Kates (ed.) – The French Revolution: Recent Debates And New Controversies
  14. Gregory Fremont-Barnes – Essential Histories: The French Revolutionary Wars