The French Revolution, 1788-1792

Prof. Gaetano Salvemini, I. M. Rawson

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781789120721
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

"The first English translation of what has long been considered a classic in Europe…it is easy to see why the work has been held in such esteem abroad."—The New YorkerTHE word 'revolution' may mean either the forcible overthrow of an established social or political order or any great change brought about in a pre-existing situation, even slowly and without violence.The word can be used in both senses for the upheaval that took place in France towards the end of the eighteenth century. In so far as it consisted in the violent destruction of the feudal and monarchical régime, the French Revolution may be said to have come to an end on September 21st, 1792, when the monarchy was formally abolished. But as the creation of a new social and political order it continued until the coup d'état of Brumaire, indeed, up to the time of the Consulate for Life, when nineteenth-century France appeared finally constituted.This book is concerned with the French Revolution as understood in the first sense. Its aim is to explain why and in what way the feudal monarchy was destroyed.In this endeavour it has been necessary to present the four revolutionary years in relation to a complex system of cause and effect the origins of which must be traced to former times, often centuries before the Revolution itself. A considerable part of the book, therefore, is devoted to social conditions, ideas and events chronologically remote from, but logically bound up with, the revolutionary period. The author's aim has been, not to bring new facts to light, but simply to put before his readers, in a rapid synthesis, the conclusions he has reached in the course of extensive study of the subject.

CHAPTER I—SOCIAL CONDITIONS IN FRANCE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

I. Decline of the feudal classes.—I. Immunity from taxation and administrative confusion.—II. Tithe, feudal dues and feudal property.—IV. The State officials and feudal survivals.—V. Bourgeoisie and city proletariat.—VI. The rural population.—VII. Moral and material weakness of the privileged classes.—VIII. Fundamental cause of the Revolution.

I

IN feudal France, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, all political and administrative power, and nearly all the land, was held by the nobility and clergy. The King was only one of the feudal lords, and had little effective authority outside his own domains. The population consisted almost entirely either of peasants, who were serfs of the glebe, or of artisans who, when they, too, were not actually serfs like the workers on the land, were still subject to the lay and ecclesiastical lords.

During the eleventh century there was a gradual decline in the economic and political predominance of the nobility and clergy.

The population was growing in the towns; division of labour began to develop, and a new social class—the bourgeoisie—composed largely of merchants and craftsmen, was becoming steadily more prosperous. They filled all the lucrative and honourable liberal professions, organized themselves into guilds, and gained control of the municipalities. Their rapid economic and social progress enabled them to exert an ever-increasing political influence.

In the country districts the serfs banded themselves together and by means of strikes and risings, or through purchasing their freedom, waged a ceaseless war of attrition against the feudal rights, little by little gaining ownership of the land.

As six centuries passed and the commons prospered, the kings slowly consolidated their own position. They made alliance with the new middle-class, conferred the seal of legality on their trade-guilds, and, with their support, gradually subjugated the lay and ecclesiastical nobility, putting an end to independent feudal rule and creating political and administrative unity.

By the eighteenth century the old feudal order in France had already disintegrated, and amid the ruins of the past the broad outlines of a new bourgeois society were beginning to appear.

The area of France amounted to some fifty million hectares, of these a large part had already passed into the hands of the commons. In the north, on the eve of the Revolution, the peasantry possessed 32 per cent of the land, the city bourgeoisie 16 per cent or 17 per cent, the nobility 22 per cent and the clergy 19 per cent or 20 per cent. The rest belonged to the Crown or to charitable institutions, or was communal property. In the western provinces the proportion was less favourable to the commons, who owned only a fifth of the land; but in the centre, the south-east and the south, they held as much as half, or even more. Altogether, it may be said that the clergy, who constituted the ‘First Estate’ of the realm, still owned a fifth of the landed property of France; the nobles, or ‘Second Estate’, also a fifth; while the property of the Crown, the communes and of charitable institutions accounted for another fifth of the country. Of the property in private hands, half belonged to the ‘Third Estate’: this was, in fact, the most productive in the kingdom, whereas the forests, marshes, untilled and badly-cultivated areas were almost all included in the patrimony of the feudal classes.

The commons numbered 25 million; there were 130,000 clerics (of whom 70,000 belonged to the ‘secular’ clergy, or priesthood, and 60,000 to the ‘regular’ clergy, or monastic orders); while the noblesse, or ‘Second Estate’, amounted probably to some eighty thousand families. Nearly a million labourers were still subject, in some Crown and Church lands, to feudal servitude, which, however, in many districts had been considerably lightened More than twenty million small peasant proprietors, tenant-farmers, métayers (share-croppers), agricultural labourers and peasant artisans, had already gained personal freedom. The rest of the population was concentrated in Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Le Havre, Nantes, Rouen, Amiens, Tours and other big urban centres.

In the cities, the feudal orders were confronted by the commercial bourgeoisie: ship-owners and ship-builders, owners of mines, foundries, tanneries and glass furnaces, or of china, earthenware and paper factories; manufacturers of silk, wool and cotton, shareholders in banking companies, members of importing and exporting firms; proprietors of vast domains in the colonies cultivated by slave labour and of refineries in the mother-country; and contractors, financiers, physicians, engineers and lawyers.

Manufactured goods were still chiefly produced by small firms employing few workers, or by independent craftsmen supplied with raw materials by the merchant-capitalist. The most important factories, like the iron foundries at Montbard, cost scarcely three hundred thousand livres to set up; less than the value of the ground they stood on. But already, especially in the glass, wool and cotton industries, in those of spinning, dyeing, and the manufacture of hats, the big capitalist distributing raw materials among many hundreds of workers, and supplying wide and distant markets, was beginning to appear: at Sedan, twenty-five cloth manufacturers were employing 10,500 workers. In the metallurgical and paper trades, and some textile industries, the first factories requiring heavy capital expenditure and equipped with machinery driven by steam or water-power, were already to be seen, with a working population concentrated around them. Réveillon, a paper manufacturer in Paris, had 400 workers; a factory at Roanne making china ornaments employed a similar number, and the muslin factory at Puy-en-Velay 1200. They were forerunners of the great industrial capitalism that was to transform economic and social life in the nineteenth century.

Trade between France and her colonies in America, which in 1716, carried by 300 vessels, had brought in 25 million livres a year, had risen by 1786 to 239 million livres, with 1219 vessels engaged on it. That with the Barbary Coast, which in 1740 had amounted to 1 million livres a year (apart from the corn trade) had grown to more than six million in 1788. In 1789, the total value of imports and exports amounted to more than 1100 million livres: in comparison with 1715 the movement of trade had increased fourfold.

‘All experts’, wrote the economist Messance in 1766, ‘are agreed that the country has made surprising progress in the last forty years. More goods are being manufactured now than in the past, and not only have our traditional products improved, but many new ones, unknown to our fathers, have been introduced.’

Agriculture, too, was trying new methods. Many bogs were drained and much untilled land broken up. Between 1779 and 1789, 1900 hectares were newly put under the plough in Languedoc. It was estimated in 1780 that during the previous twenty years 305,000 hectares had been added to the land under cultivation in France. Potatoes were being increasingly grown, and plantations of mulberry trees for the silk industry were spreading. The system of leasing large properties to farmers with considerable capital resources was in many districts replacing the small-scale agriculture that had impoverished the countryside. Land-values were rising everywhere.

Apart from the income derived from their own estates, from trade, commerce, and the liberal professions, the bourgeoisie held nearly all the shares in the Public Debt, the interest on which amounted in 1784 to 207,000,000 livres a year. Moreover, the local administrative bodies, clergy and nobility were all in debt to the bourgeoisie to an extent that, though it is difficult to determine, was certainly very considerable.

While the Third Estate was thus improving its position, the nobility still clung to the social values of mediaeval times, when landed property and the profession of arms denoted rank and power, and wealth from other sources implied inferior status. The nobles, save for some rare exceptions during the last years of the old régime, would have thought it beneath them to engage in the commons’ activities. Thus, aristocratic families, exposed like all others to vicissitudes of fortune, had no means of repairing financial loss, and the nobility, as a class, became more and more impoverished. Although the right of primogeniture, which entitled the eldest son in a noble family to inherit two-thirds of the family property, staved off the ruin of a part of the nobility, it merely hastened that of the rest: for if the younger brothers of one generation shared a third of the paternal inheritance, those of the next divided the third of a third, and after three or four generations, as Chateaubriand observed, the patrimony of their descendants consisted of no more than a rabbit, a pigeon or a hound.

Those nobles not yet ruined lived at court. Many of them knew neither what their incomes were nor where their estates lay: a great lord would have thought it beneath his dignity to discuss such matters as fertilizers or the housing of his peasants. It was the business of the bailiffs and attorneys to keep his accounts, and his to spend the money. ‘My lord Archbishop,’ said Louis XVI to Monseigneur Dillon, ‘it is said that you have a great many debts.’ ‘Sire,’ replied the prelate ironically, ‘I will inquire of my intendant, and shall have the honour of rendering an account of them to Your Majesty.’

Naturally, they were riddled with debt. The Duc de Lauzun, at twenty-six years of age, had squandered the whole capital of his 100,000 crowns’ income and was in debt to the sum of two million; the Prince de Conti, with 600,000 livres a year, had a horde of creditors at his heels; the Comte de Clermont, Abbot of Saint-Germain des Prés, went bankrupt twice in succession; the millions of the Comte d’Artois and the Cardinal de Rohan went to pay the interest on their debts; the Duc de Choiseul had property worth 14 million and debts amounting to 10 million; while the Duc d’Orléans had creditors claiming 74 million. When the revolutionaries confiscated the property of the émigré nobles they found that the richest were all mortgaged. If a fifth of the landed property of France was held by the nobles before the Revolution, this was largely due to the fact that the richer commoners, by gradually entering the ranks of the aristocracy either through the purchase of posts carrying ennoblement, or by obtaining ennoblement directly from the King, were at least in, part filling the gaps produced by the disintegration of the authentic feudal families.

Step by step with economic decline went political decline. Not only the high dignitaries of the Church, for whom in the past ecclesiastical office had meant political and military power, but also the descendants of those feudal lords who, in the Middle Ages, had exercised sovereign rights throughout their own lands, were in the eighteenth century almost wholly excluded both from politics and the administration. The kingdom was governed by the royal officials. At the centre was the King’s Council, which drew up laws, levied taxes, and was the supreme authority in all branches of public administration. Next came the Comptroller-General, who saw to the enforcement of the laws and royal ordinances, and directed all the internal administration of the country, from finance to the police, and from public works to poor relief. In the provinces, the intendants, under the orders of the Comptroller-General, and—in less important areas—subdélégués under those of the intendants, supervised communal administration and governed former lay and ecclesiastical fiefs. Through these officials the Comptroller’s orders were transmitted to the remotest corners of the country. Administrative centralization was not, as many believe, created by the revolutionaries: it was the result of long and patient labour by the kings and their officials, and was already highly developed before the Revolution. The revolutionaries perfected the system and made it work efficiently.

As time passed and the King’s authority gradually became extended to the whole of France, an ever-growing army of employees was required by the administration, which every day was becoming more complicated. The King could no longer administer his affairs himself, as he had done in the twelfth century. What had originally been under his personal supervision was now the collective responsibility of the bureaucrats. The officials who, according to juridical theory, were instruments of the royal will, became in reality the true depositaries of power: they dealt according to their own lights with most of the work of administration, interpreting and applying the laws that emanated from the King. They suggested such measures to him as were in their opinion necessary, and in effect were themselves the ruling class. As Frederick of Prussia said, in referring to the French ministers, they were ‘subaltern kings’.

These ‘subaltern kings’ rarely belonged either to the feudal nobility or to the clergy. The kings were careful to exclude both classes from the administration. The royal officials were generally bourgeois—for the most part lawyers—without family traditions or personal connections, who could be dismissed from office at the King’s will and who carried out his orders unquestioningly. In the seventeenth century and still more in the eighteenth, the custom of ennobling high state officials became common; but this ‘nobility of the robe’ remained distinct from the ‘nobility of the sword’, which as a rule was still excluded from the more important administrative posts. When Louis XIV died, there was an attempt, under the Regency of the Duke of Orléans, to restore authority to the feudal lords; but the ‘nobles of the sword’ soon tired of governing, and left it once more to the bureaucrats, contenting themselves with such offices as were merely lucrative sinecures. In the reign of Louis XVI only three ministers were of unquestionably feudal origin. The nobility of five others dated only from the fifteenth or fourteenth centuries; the rest came from the nobility of the robe, and most of these had acquired their rank no earlier than the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Among the intendants very few indeed belonged to the old noble families: the majority had been ennobled no more than four generations back.

II

The prerogatives enjoyed in eighteenth-century France by the feudal nobles and clergy were but sorry survivals of their early wealth and sovereignty: the last visible remains of a great continent submerged by the waters.

One of these prerogatives consisted in immunity from taxation.

In the Middle Ages this privilege had been justified by the fact that, while the commons served the King by paying the expenses of public administration, and the clergy by praying to God for his prosperity, the nobles lent him free military aid. But in the eighteenth century few, even among the clergy themselves, believed that prayers were an adequate substitute for taxes. As for the nobility, since the feudal levies were no longer called upon for service, such nobles as served in the standing army received regular pay, like all other servants of the state.

Furthermore, in mediaeval times, when the royal imposts were comparatively few, exemption from taxation had represented no great benefit for the privileged class nor an excessive burden upon the rest. But by the eighteenth century the days were long past when Sully, minister of Henri IV, had been wont to say, ‘It is easy enough to talk of a hundred thousand crowns, the difficulty is to find them.’ The rising number of employees required by the central administration, the maintenance of a large army, foreign wars and general social progress, all threw a growing burden of work and expenditure upon public administration, and forced the central Government to augment its revenue by increasing old imposts and creating new ones. Ordinary revenue, which in the time of Louis XI amounted annually to 4,700,000 livres, had risen to 70,000,000 under Richelieu, to 85,000,000 in 1661, to 119,000,000 in 1683, to 166,000,000 in 1715, to 283,000,000 in 1757, and to 476,000,000 in 1789.

It is true that the increase in taxation was accompanied by an increase in wealth. But tax privileges prevented the imposts from being levied on the wealth which should have borne them.

Of the 476,000,000 livres of ordinary revenue in 1789, about three-fifths represented indirect taxation (on wine, liquors, salt, tobacco, the circulation of manufactured goods, etc.); which, as was natural, weighed most heavily upon the poorest classes. In addition, many of the privileged class succeeded in obtainin...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER I-SOCIAL CONDITIONS IN FRANCE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
• CHAPTER II-THE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT
• CHAPTER III-ATTEMPTED REFORM AND THE REVOLT OF THE PRIVILEGED GLASSES
• CHAPTER IV-THE FALL OF THE FEUDAL RÉGIME
• CHAPTER V-THE CIVIL CONSTITUTION OF THE CLERGY
• CHAPTER VI-THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES
• CHAPTER VII-ORIGINS OF THE WAR
• CHAPTER VIII-THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY
• EPILOGUE
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER