The French Revolution

From its Origins to 1793

Georges Lefebvre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134522378
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Internationally renowned as the greatest authority on the French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre combined impeccable scholarship with a lively writing style. His masterly overview of the history of the French Revolution has taken its rightful place as the definitive account. A vivid narrative of events in France and across Europe is combined with acute insights into the underlying forces that created the dynamics of the revolution, as well as the personalities responsible for day-to-day decisions during this momentous period.

Part I
The World on the Eve of the French Revolution

1
EUROPEAN EXPANSION

The European spirit of conquest, so marked in all spheres from the twelfth century onward, dominant in the sixteenth, was then checked by religious and royal reaction. It was again released in the eighteenth century, termed by Michelet the ‘great century’ and in any terms the century of true renaissance. Let us look first at Europe’s progress in exploration and in acquiring new territories overseas, as well as at the limits, still relatively narrow, which marked its extent.

KNOWLEDGE OF THE GLOBE

Maritime exploration lagged during the seventeenth century, but was revived and systematized under the impulse of scientific knowledge and with technical improvements. One of the era’s most important innovations was the ability to fix position, a development essential to navigation as well as to measurement of the globe and to cartography. New nautical instruments such as the compass, the sextant, and Borda’s circle determined latitudes. Construction of the chronometer and maritime clocks and basic establishment of astronomical charts meant that longitudes could be calculated rather than simply estimated. These were revolutionary advances.

On the basis of knowledge gained during his second voyage (1772–76), Cook dismissed the theory that a southern continent bordered on the antarctic pole. Many explored the waters of the Pacific, which covered one-third the globe’s surface; Cook devoted his first and third voyages to the Pacific, and La Pérouse sailed the length of its American and Asiatic coasts. Many new islands were being discovered and had yet to be enumerated and visited. In addition, the search for polar areas and for the arctic passages of north-west and north-east remained in abeyance.

Continental expanses posed greater obstacles to penetration and were explored at a slower pace. Canadians reached Lake Winnipeg, the Great Slave Lake, and the Columbia River, then pushed over the Rockies and at Nootka Sound met Russians from Alaska and Spaniards from California. Squatters in the United States settled on the Ohio plains, but the area between the Mississippi and California was unknown, and knowledge of the Amazon basin was sketchy. Asia was known only superficially; of Africa nothing was familiar but the Mediterranean shores. The advent of the machine era had not yet shortened distances between points of the globe, and vast reaches of the earth were shrouded in mystery. The main outlines of continents and seas were nevertheless registered upon new maps; the face of the earth was emerging from shadow. In France Méchain, Delambre, and Lalande were about to undertake measuring a meridian.

THE PARTITION OF OVERSEAS TERRITORIES

These new advances did not immediately affect the destiny of Europe, in contrast to the discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had produced an overseas empire. The congenital fragmentation of that empire reflected the disharmony of its rulers: Europe faced the new territories as a single conquering power, yet this was not the unity with which it had confronted Islam at the time of the early Crusades. Christianity still reigned, but religious differences were growing more pronounced; the East was Orthodox, the North, Protestant, the South, Catholic; the central regions were mixed; and free-thinkers were scattered through all areas. Political dissension was even older in origin. The formation of large states and their eastward expansion during the eighteenth century signified the disintegration of Europe as a political entity, for the drive towards power which spurred the dynasties responsible for state building also pitted ruler against ruler.

Discovery of new lands presented a larger stage for the play of rivalry among great powers. This had two results: continental hostilities expanded overseas in the form of increasingly complex naval and colonial warfare; and the powers bordering on, or having access to, the Atlantic profited most from the sharing of new spoils, which stimulated their economies and strengthened Western supremacy. The farther a nation lay from the Atlantic the lower was its level of prosperity, if not of civilization. Losing its monopoly over connections with Asia, the Mediterranean ceased to be the dynamic centre it once had been, a change hastened by the facts that part of its shores belonged to Islam and that it lacked anything like the natural resources of the West. Now only local traffic passed over the once great trading route running from Venice to Bruges and Antwerp by way of the Brenner Pass, Augsburg, and the Rhine valley. Italy and Germany lost their primacy in Europe’s economy, and neither shared in the acquisition of colonies overseas. Italy still preserved a part of the wealth it had acquired, but Germany, ruined by the Thirty Years War, had to wait until the last decades of the eighteenth century for a revival.

Eastern Europe was even less fortunate: its only access to international trade lay through the Baltic, and the efforts of eighteenth-century enlightened despots could not alleviate its poverty. Its backwardness in comparison to the West grew more pronounced. Not until relatively late was it decided that the schismatic Muscovites could be considered Europeans. No one suspected that, in occupying Siberia, Russia was building its own kind of colonial empire, for Russian Asia then contained scarcely half a million inhabitants.

The diversity of Europe and the warring anarchy to which it was subject produced two visible results by the end of the Old Regime. Not only had the partitioning of new territories slackened since the sixteenth century; European supremacy was not yet contested, but colonial empires seemed faced with the threat of internal decomposition. And, although Europe continued to expand, dissension among its rulers curbed its overseas growth. The majority of the world’s population lay outside its grasp.

THE COLONIAL EMPIRES

Portugal and Holland were minor imperial powers left with fragments of their former possessions. Portugal now had Brazil and a few ports in Africa and Asia. Holland could boast of part of the West Indies, Dutch Guiana, settlements around the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, chiefly of Java and the Spice Islands. Spain, in contrast, not only retained its imperial boundaries but was expanding them by occupying California, where San Francisco had just been founded, and by acquiring Louisiana and along with it the Mississippi delta and New Orleans. It thus controlled the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and of the Caribbean Sea as well as two jewels in the Caribbean’s belt of islands.

Last to become colonial powers, England and France had vied for North America, India, and the smaller West Indian islands. As the losing competitor, France possessed only Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Île-de-France; in addition, it regained Saint Lucia, Tobago, and commercial agencies in the Senegal in 1783. Despite its losses, it therefore possessed a good part of the sugar-producing areas. The newly founded British Empire appeared shaken by the secession of its thirteen American colonies, and its conquest of India had slowed. Britain still controlled all of Bengal, received tribute from Oudh, and with Calcutta ruled Bombay and Madras. But Cornwallis, successor to Warren Hastings, had undertaken reform of the civil administration and was conciliatory in mood; he declined to support the Nizam, sovereign of Hyderabad, when that ruler was attacked by Tippoo, ruler of Mysore. Another threat was posed by the alliance of feudal Marathas led by Sindhia, whom the Great Mogul recognized as his hereditary lieutenant. Britain nevertheless held an ascendant position among European colonial powers.

The exploitation of all these empires led to similar ruthless mercantile practices. Each mother country imported the products it lacked and sent back part of its usual exports. In principle it did not allow its colonies to raise or manufacture anything that might compete with its own goods or to trade with other countries, and it permitted no ships other than its own to be used. In France this was called l’exclusif or exclusive colonial rights. Overseas territories thus supplied Europe with a mandatory clientele and with two of the basic resources that stimulated its economy: precious metals and tropical produce.

Three-fourths of the world’s gold and more than nine-tenths of its white metals were provided by Latin America. The once rich Potosí mines of Bolivia were being exhausted, and Mexico was now the chief source of silver. As new lode veins were opened and the price of mercury dropped 50 per cent, after a group of Germans reorganized the working of Almadén, the production of silver jumped after 1760 and reached its greatest annual rate of 900 tons between 1780 and 1800. Gold had to be obtained by panning, and even though Brazil and the Guinea coast of Africa added rich sources, production declined.

The planting of food crops spread and stock farming expanded with the opening up of vast grasslands. Leather goods were exported, and the port of Buenos Aires, declared open in 1778, began to prosper. But Europeans were really interested only in tropical crops, primarily sugar cane and secondarily coffee, cacao, cotton and indigo, and tobacco. Sugar, coffee, and cotton from Brazil were added to shipments from Spanish colonies. Among native plants, vanilla and quinine, logwood and mahogany were sent to Europe. The labour force consisted mostly of Indians, who were compelled to reside in specific places and to perform forced labour. Charles III freed them in principle from the mita in mines and from the encomienda, which grouped them in villages serving plantations, but wage earners, such as the peons of Mexico, were in fact little more than slaves. In addition, the natives were required to pay a direct tax and to buy whatever European manufactured goods the managers wished to distribute. Many workers fled to the savanna, the mountains, or the impenetrable forests, so Negro slaves, who were, furthermore, stronger, were also employed. According to Humboldt, however, there were not many Negroes: he estimated that they constituted 5 per cent (as compared to an Indian population of 47 per cent) of the 16 million inhabitants he attributed to Latin America. But he added a category of ‘mixed blood’ forming 32 per cent.

The West Indies, Louisiana, the Atlantic coast from Florida to Maryland, and the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean had no mines; there agricultural production found no rival. A large part of Europe’s sugar and coffee came from the West Indies. France and England jealously regarded the islands as their most valuable colonies. The United States exported tobacco, but not yet cotton: introduction of the long-staple cotton called ‘sea island’ dated only from 1786. Because the Carib Indians had been exterminated in the West Indies and because colonists on the American continent were pushing the natives back from the coast, the entire economy of these areas depended upon Negro slave labour. Humboldt estimated that 40 per cent of the West Indies population was Negro, a figure which seems small in view of the fact that Necker recorded 85 per cent in the French islands. In Louisiana they were thought to constitute half of the total population; the United States had at least 500,000. In 1790 it was estimated that slave traders transported 74,000 Negroes to America each year. Africa was the ‘ebony reservoir’ for the New World. Europeans decimated the population with their raids on the mainland; a part of those captured died later at sea. The white men in Africa who ran commercial agencies sometimes traded with natives, but did not try to subjugate them.

A similar relationship, purely commercial, prevailed in Asia, where the main concern was not conquest but trade. Europeans paid native rulers for the right to establish trading stations, some of which remained in the eighteenth century. There had been many chartered trading companies in America, but now they were important only in Canada, where they dealt in furs. In contrast, the various East India companies retained their monopolies—the Dutch East India Company, which had gone in debt during the American war and was still having financial difficulties; the French Company, recently (1785) reorganized by Calonne; and the British Company, reformed by Pitt in 1784, which held the dominant position.

These companies sold little and bought much in the Far East. The exports of the French East India Company rose over a four-year period to 7 million livres, and the returns rose to 50 million. In the same period the British East India Company brought in a few woollen goods and hardwares, took back cotton goods, indigo, sugar, rice, and some saltpetre, and left an annual balance of about 2 million pounds sterling. The companies’ monopoly did not extend to China: in 1789 twenty-five ships flying various flags, another fifty under the English flag, and yet another fifty serving inter-Indies traffic put in at Canton. The Chinese balance sheet, however, was similar to the European: they bought only a little opium and sold full cargoes of tea, china, and lacquer wares. Whereas Europe grew rich from America, the contrary was true of its relation to Asia, where it spent its money. Stockholders did not suffer from this arrangement, for sale of imported goods brought them huge profits at their compatriots’ expense.

On the eve of the French Revolution the Dutch and the English were adding other strings to their bows. By subjugating native populations, as they had in America, they could exploit the inhabitants without having to import Negro slaves. The Dutch forced Malayans to work their plantations, imposed certain crops on the rural communities, and availed themselves of a portion of the harvest. The British East India Company exercised monopolies on salt, opium, and saltpetre, concluded unconscionable bargains with weavers by granting them advances, and after dispossessing native rulers collected a land tax in their stead. The exactions of the Company’s agents aroused indignation within England: the trials of Clive and Warren Hastings brought to light a few of the practices—excused on grounds of services rendered—illustrating the extent to which subalterns were willing to push their authority. Asia did not know slave traders, but it experienced techniques which recalled those employed by the conquistadors.

In his Philosophic History of the Two Indies the abbé Raynal had recently published an indictment of overbearing masters, but only slavery itself was beginning to arouse religious or philanthropic scruples. For a long time the Quakers were the sole group to stigmatize the slave trade; the philosophes then joined their protests; finally a London Society of Friends of the Negroes was founded in 1787, and a sister organization was established in Paris during the following year. Wilberforce and Pitt grew interested in their programme, which aimed not at immediate suppression but at gradual disappearance by abolition of the trade.

Politicians and businessmen were too closely involved in the colonial system to consider giving it up, and, moreover, there were pleaders of its cause. Few on the continent defended the British colonists in India or those in North America who waged war against the Indians to push them westward and settle in their place. But as for Latin America, Raynal was reminded that the natives evidently benefited from prohibition of internecine wars, from undeniable advances in techniques and development of the economy, since the native population was increasing despite famine and epidemics. Reforms intended to alter colonial abuses were cited, as well as the paternalistic benevolence practised by some planters and the enthusiasm of monks who, like the earlier Jesuits in Paraguay, brought Indians into the missions to educate them. Colonial defenders pointed to the development of an embryonic middle class composed of Indians, half-breeds, and moneyed and educated mulattoes. Undeniable, nevertheless, was the fact that Europeans and planters supplied the colonies and developed production only to augment their own profits, doing nothing to improve the condition of the natives in the belief that it was sufficient to impose Catholicism upon them. While Western languages and customs spread through natural contact, personal interest, and social differentiation, the whites, imbued with racial prejudice, pushed aside the assimilated—even the half-breeds and mulattoes whom they had sired. Yet most of the subjugated peoples never entirely conformed to a European pattern. They transformed foreign languages into native dialects, secretly practised their religious rites, such as the Voodoo cult at Santo Domingo, and even preserved their legal customs.

White men did not attempt to establish residence in tropical Asia and Africa, where the climate was unfavourable and a frightening mortality rate reduced the ranks of company agents and employees. But in America and the Mascarene Islands there were, in addition to officials and military personnel, resident Europeans—planters, traders, supervisors, and ‘petty whites’ of various professions and circumstances. Many of them put down roots, and by the end of the eighteenth century colonial-born Europeans far outnumbered those from the mother country.

According to Humboldt, Spanish America was 19 per cent white and the proportion of European-born residents in Mexico was 7 per cent. Necker stated that 12 per cent of the French West Indies population was white; 3 per cent he classified as free ‘people of colour’. Overseas, a minority of masters confronted a huge majority of subjects. In either long- or short-range terms a potential threat to the encroachers could not be denied. From time to time a leader arose to foment rebellion: the Peruvian Tupac Amaru in 1781; the Brazilian Tiradentes, executed in 1792. From their black slaves, planters feared domestic crimes and sporadic revolts. Yet in their eyes such perils inevitably accompanied the system, and by adjusting to conditions transplanted Europeans grew confident enough of the future to secede from their homeland.

THE EMPIRES IN JEOPARDY AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Europe exported its methods of governing to the overseas territories: absolutism, bureaucratic centralism, military and police rule, religious intolerance. Only England, having evolved a constitutional system, granted its American nationals a certain degree of autonomy through charters. Aspects of the social structure of the older continent were also transplanted to Latin America: clerical privileges and certain noble pretensions, even the manorial regime in French Canada. These features were being attenuated, however, at least in the towns. In the French West Indies, for example, direct taxes were based on landholdings and admitted no exemptions; the Church did not have a great deal of property; nobles and commoners mingled in a modern, propertied bourgeoisie, characterized by wealth and forming a class distinct from the ‘petty whites’.

The white men of Africa and Asia, few in number, residing temporarily, concerned only with achieving personal profit rapidly and at any risk, were not tempted to contest the discretionary authority of their companies. Whatever conflicts existed arose from competition and personal resentment, tensions characteristic of the mother country as well. Colonial-born residents, however, took a different stand. They grew impatient with a ministerial bureaucracy which undertook to decide the most important questions concerning them; they were jealous of crown representatives and aspired to self-government, if not to independence. Above all, they resented exclusive rights and wanted particularly to trade freely abroad. The West Indies especially would have profited from setting up a regular exchange of supplies from New England in return for sugar and rum. To these material issues were joined those of the enlightened philosophy that reached America. The colonists had sc...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
• PART II: THE ADVENT OF THE BOURGEOISIE IN FRANCE
• PART III: THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE UP TO THE FORMATION OF THE FIRST COALITION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY