The French Revolution: A History in Documents

Micah Alpaugh, Micah Alpaugh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350065321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia francese

The French Revolution: A History in Documents explores the rapidly evolving political culture of the French Revolution through first-hand accounts of the revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) actors themselves. It demonstrates how radical Enlightenment philosophy fused with a governmental crisis to create a moment of new political possibilities unlike any the world had previously seen. In so doing, the French and their allies generated a template for revolutionary possibility from which virtually all subsequent political movements – liberalism, abolitionism, socialism, anarchism, conservatism, feminism and human rights included – derived inspiration. As well as providing an invaluable general introduction, vital contextual notes and thematic bibliographies, Micah Alpaugh selects a fascinating range of pieces, drawing on Parisian, provincial, colonial, and even international voices. From Enlightened dissent to apologias for terror, from declarations of human rights to accounts of slave rebellions, from passionate arguments for democratization to the authoritarian pronouncements of Napoleonic rule, this book presents the French Revolution's evolution in all its awesome complexity. In addition to classic texts, Alpaugh includes many lesser-known sources, a number of which are translated into English here for the first time. This unique collection of 13 visual sources and over 90 documents, incorporating perspectives from across class, gender, race and nationality, provides you with insights into the fervent debates, pronouncements and proposals that spawned modern politics.

1

Revolutionary Origins

No one saw the French Revolution coming, but the developing revolution drew upon the growing cultural and intellectual ferment in eighteenth-century France. Like its counterparts across the European continent, France was a society of orders, with the privileged aided by tax exemptions and preferential eligibility for administrative and military commands. Yet over the eighteenth century, much changed: domestic and colonial economic expansion created a prosperous and growing middle class, while an influx of new ideas, written by those known in France as “the Enlightened (les lumières),” altered the boundaries of what could be asked from government. Yet the path to revolution in France was much more complicated than it appears at first glance: most prosperous members of the middle class sought to buy or marry into the nobility, while more writers in France focused on strategies for Enlightened absolutist government than democratization. Revolution was only one of many potential outcomes from the era’s ferment.

Grand structural changes combined with government mismanagement to make the revolution possible. Louis XVI, shy, indecisive, and maladroit, would have proven a mediocre king in the best of times. Queen Marie Antoinette demonstrated little ability to shape public opinion about herself or those around her, instead becoming a regular target for press attacks. Louis XVI’s finance ministers failed to reform the kingdom’s fiscal system, creating a regime-threatening crisis—though France’s per capita debt remained significantly below their British rivals. The colonial system was rife with atrocities, as colonial officials had long refused to enforce the humanitarian Black Code and slave life expectancy upon arrival in the Caribbean little exceeded three years. Heavy-handed policing of the French people, especially in Paris, bred resentment—which soon incited explosions of collective anger once controls were relaxed. While most French people had long resigned themselves to governmental inefficiencies and abuses, the growing crisis of the 1780s led resentments to smolder anew.

The Enlightenment movement—an inescapable but incomplete explanation for the forms the French Revolution took—is still more paradoxical. Growing from a broader Scientific Revolution expanding across the Western world since at least the Renaissance, the Enlightenment is best characterized as a series of debates over how best to apply reasoned thought to human affairs. Whereas previously most people had expected society to remain in stasis, with “nothing new under the sun,” the intertwined capitalistic and industrious revolutions (unlike political revolutions, a centuries-long process) evinced durable, positive change as cities gained population and consumer choices expanded. Literacy grew, the publishing industry—much of it trading in contraband—proliferated, and the ability to converse and debate on any sphere of knowledge highly prized. Scientific political management enabled the enlightened absolutist rules of Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia, while European thinkers took note of the changes in the new United States and revolts in Corsica, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. While no consensus developed over the best method of government, most thinkers came to detest despotism (rule by whim without constitutional constraint) and superstition (recourse to supernatural explanation that contradicted scientific observation). The Enlightenment’s inquisitive spirit defied boundaries.

The origins of the French Revolution are both too many and too few: scholars have identified manifold contributing factors, but none sufficiently explain the great rupture with tradition and precedent unleashed in 1789. It is impossible, however, to make sense of the French Revolution without some reference to the era’s inefficient government, expanding economy, and growing ferment of ideas. Revolution was not inevitable, but it is retrospectively impossible not to see the combustible potential of eighteenth-century France.

Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748

A judge on Bordeaux’s Parlement, a regional supreme court, the Baron de Montesquieu spent over two decades composing his massive Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu saw the merits of both democratic and monarchical government, but detested despotism—which he defined as unchecked power, that abrogated reason and compromise in favor of an individual’s caprice. In his erudite work, Montesquieu draws examples from across the known world, seeking to discover governing systems’ foundations in human nature, helping lay the basis for modern political science. While he remained skeptical that laws could be directly transferrable from one nation to another—as this would violate the environmental specificity of laws’ development and the existing system’s spirit—Montesquieu asserts that new laws can be adopted and reforms instituted over time. Though controversial today for advocating environmental determinism (particularly his association of despotism with the heat of the tropics, while he asserted temperate weather enabled cooler reflection and balanced government), Montesquieu influentially advocated the concept of mixed government. Calling for flexibility and balance in the construction of legal systems, the book popularized the concept of “checks and balances,” greatly influencing the framers of the United States’ Constitution and those composed in France during the Revolution.

I have examined men, finding that, in the infinite diversity of laws and manners, they are not led by their fantasies alone.

I have hypothesized principles and seen specific cases comply with them; the histories of all nations are only their after-effects. Each specific law relates to another law or depends on a more general one. . . .

I have not derived my principles from my prejudices, but from the nature of things.

Thus, many truths cannot make themselves felt except once we see the chain connecting them to others. The more we reflect on such details, the more we feel the certainty of principles. . . .

Before all these laws are those of nature, thus named because they derive uniquely from the constitution of our being. . . .

In this state, everyone feels themselves inferior; thus, everyone feels equal. People do not attack each other and peace is nature’s first law. . . .

As soon as men enter society, they lose their feeling of weakness and of the equality that existed between them. The state of war begins. . . .

The general force can be placed in a single person’s hands, or in the hands of many. Some have thought that nature established paternal power, considering the government of an individual most conforming to the state of nature. But, the example of paternal power proves nothing. . . .

It is better to say that the government most conforming to nature is that whose particular disposition relates best to the disposition of the people for whom it is established.

Particu lar forces cannot come together, without all wills doing so. “The joining of these wills,” Gravina well explains, “is what one calls the Civil State.”¹

The law, in general, is human reason, insofar that it governs all the earth’s peoples, and the political and civil laws of each nation are only particular cases for applying this human reason.

They must be proper for the people for whom they are made, and thus it is a great hazard if one nation’s are adopted for another’s.

They must be in keeping with nature and the established government’s principles, or those they want to establish . . .

They must relate to the country’s environment, whether the climate is frigid, hot or temperate; to the quality of terrain, to how it is situated, to its height; to the lifestyle of its peoples, laborers, hunters, or farmers: they must correspond to the degree of liberty the constitution can suffer; to the inhabitants’ religion, to their inclinations, to their wealth, to their number, to their commerce, to their morals, to their manners. In the end, all these relate. They have their origins, their legislative objects, the order of things over which they are established. All these perspectives must be considered.

Here is what I want to do in this work: I want to examine all these relationships. Together, they form what we call the spirit of the laws. . . .

There are three kinds of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic. To discover their nature, examine under which men are the least instructed. I suppose three definitions, or moreover three states: in the first, republican government is where the assembled people, or only part of the people, have the sovereign power; the monarchy, where a single person governs, but by fixed and established laws; whereas in despotism a single person, without laws or regulations, does everything by his will and caprice. . . .

It remains a fundamental law of democracy that the people make the laws. There are a thousand occasions when it is necessary for the Senate to pass statutes; it is even often necessary to try out a law before establishing it. The constitutions of Rome and Athens were very wise. Senate measures held the force of law for a year; they did not become perpetual except by the people’s will.

Subordinate and dependent intermediary powers constitute monarchical government’s nature; this is to say that which an individual governs by fundamental laws. . . . These fundamental laws necessarily suppose intermediary canals through which power flows: because if there was nothing in the state except an individual’s momentary will and capriciousness, nothing would be fixed, and in consequence there would be no fundamental law.

It results from the nature of despotic power, that one man can only exercise what one man is capable of. A man to whom five hundred ceaselessly say that he is everything, while everyone else is nothing, is naturally lazy, ignorant and voluptuous. . . .

Madame de Campan, Memoirs on the Private Life of Marie Antoinette, published 1823

Marie Antoinette, already the symbol of an unpopular Austrian alliance when she arrived in France to marry the Dauphin (future Louis XVI), fell victim to increasingly vicious gossip and tabloids soon after she ascended to the French throne in 1775. As related by her lady-in-waiting Madame de Campan, summer nighttime soirées in the Versailles palace gardens, often lasting until two or three a.m., which she often spent with the King’s brother the Comte d’Artois instead of her husband, gave rise to rumors of infidelity and questionable paternity of her children. Despite spending most of her time surrounded by courtiers and the public, stories flew of what might occur at less-supervised moments. Marie Antoinette became the subject of pornographic publications, alongside denunciations of her luxury, gambling, and absolutist political predilections. Royal counter-campaigns celebrating her as a virtuous mother accomplished little. Even as Louis XVI remained personally popular, Marie Antoinette was commonly held in low esteem. While Campan’s Memoires were not published until after her death in 1823, and sought to defend her reputation along with that of the rest of Marie Antoinette’s inner circle, they portray the frustration of a group besieged by often-unfair calumnies.

The summer of 1778 was extremely hot. July and August passed, but the air was not cooled by a single storm. The Queen spent whole days in closed rooms and could not sleep until she breathed the fresh night air, walking with the princesses and her brothers along the terrace by her apartments. These promenades at first inspired no remark, but some of the party suggested enjoying the music of wind instruments during these fine summer nights. The chapel musicians were ordered to play from the steps built in the middle of the garden. The Queen, seated on a terrace bench, enjoyed the effects of the music, surrounded by the whole royal family except the King, who joined them only twice, not liking to change his bedtime.

Nothing could be more innocent than these parties; yet Paris, France, nay, all Europe, were soon following them in a manner most disadvantageous to Marie Antoinette’s reputation. The truth is that all Versailles’ inhabitants enjoyed these serenades, while there was a crowd around from eleven at night until two or three in the morning. . . .

I do not know whether a few incautious women might have ventured further, wandering to the lower park; but the Queen, Madame [the King’s aunt], and the Comtesse d’Artois were always arm-in-arm, never leaving the terrace. . . .

My advice was useless. Misled by the pleasure she found in these promenades, and securely believing her conduct blameless, the Queen could not anticipate the lamentable results that necessarily followed. This was very unfortunate; for, besides the mortifications they brought her, it is very probable that they prompted the vile plot that gave rise to Cardinal de Rohan’s fatal error.²

Having enjoyed these evening promenades about a month, the Queen ordered a private concert within the colonnade featuring Pluto and Prosperine’s statues.³ Sentinels were placed at the entrances, and ordered to admit only those persons with tickets signed by my father-in-law. A fine concert was performed there . . . No music was played on the terrace. The crowd of inquisitive people, whom the sentinels kept at a distance from the enclosure went away displeased; the small number of people admitted no doubt occasioned jealousy, giving rise to offensive comments the public spread. I will not apologize for the kind of amusement the Queen indulged herself with during this and the following summer. The consequences were so lamentable that the error was surely great, but what I have said respecting these promenades’ character may be relied upon ...