On the Origins and Causes of the French Revolution
Although the financial crisis of the ancien regime was the immediate spark that set off the French Revolution, which broader factors within France contributed to the Revolution?
Prior to the evolution of the Estates-General into the National Assembly on the 17th of June, 1789 and the taking of the Tennis Court Oath three days later, the state of France had been lumbering along in its burdensome way for generations. With French involvement in the American War of Independence pushing the intolerable and unsustainable financial administration of the country beyond breaking point, and the privileged orders anxious to maintain their status quo, it created the catalyst for the wealthy, professional and ambitious representatives of the 3rd Estate to take up and claim political change and reform as their sacred and inviolable right.
This essay seeks to explore how other factors, in addition to the immediate bankruptcy of the monarchy, were to contribute to the causes of the French Revolution. It shall examine how factors such as the Enlightenment, although played down by many historians, provided the spirit and language of a newly politicised class, and how the manifest of this spirit in 1789 provided the recognition, justification and impetus for those feeling the more material pinch of the ancien regime to act, in the taking of the Bastille on the 14th of July, 1789. It shall explore how the consistently blocked attempts at financial and administrative reform which could perhaps have satisfied most of the fairly moderate aims that found themselves presented in the cahiers de doleances. How these ‘cahiers’ in their turn allowed political thought to become a popular interest, but as McPhee points out, it is necessary to remember that “people were being consulted about reform proposals, not about whether they wanted a revolution.” [1]
With this in mind, it is important to look at how the ideas of the Enlightenment are both the product of their age – following industrialisation especially, but also advancements in science, and the relaxation of the influence of the church amongst thought and expression – and the expression of hope for a new age.
In his book Will and Circumstance, Norman Hampson looks at the writings of men like Marat, Robespierre and Brissot in the years preceding the Revolution and how they were influenced by the writers of the Enlightenment. He asserts that Montesquieu and Rousseau “were quoted, paraphrased and misunderstood by everyone who wrote about politics.”[2] These two men were to form the language and ideas that the men of the Revolution would take up and champion during the years of political change, reform and terror that followed the forming of the National Assembly in 1789. Ideas of the separation of judicial, legislative and executive powers and governments respecting the much confused concept of the ‘general will’ of the population became intermingled with the notion of the government playing an active role in the moral regeneration of its people.
Although these two positions seem at odds with one another, they were both drawn upon regularly to form a common and fairly moderate political ideology aimed at “the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man; …liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”[3] These ideas had been written and debated upon for decades preceding the French Revolution, and while their direct role in the events of June and July 1789 is demonstrably limited, their contribution to the emerging ideologies of the following years is almost total. As Duncan Townson argues, the philosophes were not revolutionary nor even opposed to the ancien regime itself, but that it was “only when the ancien regime had collapsed and new institutions had to be constructed did the ideas of the Enlightenment produce a revolutionary ideology.”[4]
Considering this view, the question to be asked is what constituted the collapse of the ancien regime. It could be argued that it was with the fall of the Bastille on the 14th of July 1789 that the monarchy failed, however its role beyond this date is prominent but ineffectual, with the power of veto still legally available to Louis in late 1791, and also a remaining willingness to retain him as head of state.
Whatever the clear sign that power had changed hands, it remains that it was the calling for the meeting of the Estates-General in 1788 that began the events leading to revolution. What led to the calls for this group to meet again for the first time in over 150 years were the constant power struggles that were occurring between the King’s financial ministers like Necker, Calonne and Brienne, and the Paris Parlement and later the Assembly of Notables. These men saw that extensive changes needed to be made in order for the French economy to survive, whereas the Notables and Parlement saw the proposals as a danger to their own privileges and to the social order itself. Townson identifies the fact that Montesquieu saw the parlements, dominated by the nobility, as playing an intermediary role between King and subjects, preventing despotism of Louis and his ministers,[5] but it is precisely this role that was to block the reforms that may have prevented, or at least delayed the Revolution. As Albert Soboul saw it: “the aristocracy had undertaken the struggle against absolutism in order to recover its political dominance and preserve its outworn social privileges.”[6]
Following the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who had been Controller-General of finance and responsible for initiating many reforms such as a central treasury and the issuing of the statement of royal finances, the Compte Rendu in the late 1770s and early 1780s, one of the more prominent reforming ministers of the 1780’s was Calonne. When no longer able to secure loans to keep the French economy from collapsing after the American War of Independence, Calonne also found fiscal reform to be inevitable. In seeking to reform the tax system he came into conflict with members of the clergy and nobility. While these orders could see that reform was indeed necessary, and were willing to make concessions, they were unwilling to tolerate any changes that would affect their social position.
As Georges Lefebvre saw it, “by threatening the tax privileges, it [the reforms] aimed a blow at the social structure of the Old Regime.”[7] In an effort to bypass the opposition he expected from the Paris Parlement, and unwilling to trust in support from the King, Calonne arranged for an Assembly of Notables to consider his proposals. They met in the first half of 1787, and like the Paris Parlement who adopted a similar position, claimed that only an assembly with representatives from all three estates could decide upon questions of tax reform. Thus with the calling of the Estates-General and the cahiers de doleances was the way set out for the rising middle classes to be able to dominate the political debate that had previously been monopolised by the king’s ministers and the parlements, or in effect, the nobility.
The Estates-General convened on the 3rd of May 1789, with changes having been made to allow for double representation for the Third Estate, so that they more or less equaled the number of deputies of the first two orders. It was assumed by the Third Estate deputies that voting would now be by head, and not as had previously been the case, by order, where each estate decided upon an issue and then cast one vote. It was thought that this would effectively negate the gesture of doubling the 3rd Estate. What this effectively did was to put the first two orders at odds with the third, as observed by Mallet du Pan, “Public debate has assumed a different character. King, despotism and constitution have become only secondary questions. Now it is war between the Third Estate and the other two orders.”[8]
The men of the Third Estate elected to the Estates-General were the rising professional and mercantile classes. Doctors and lawyers as well as bankers and merchants. They were literate in legal matters and had experience in financial administration. They were well versed in the writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu and interested in furthering their own aims and positions, which previously they had to do under the ancien regime by aspiring to noble office. Now they were presented with the opportunity to achieve the bourgeois aims that had arisen out of years of the slow move towards the industrialisation of the French economy, whilst also improving the lot of their fellow countrymen. It was this class of men who had learned the ideas for revolution, had been given the opportunity by the feuding ministers and nobles, and who possessed the financial means and independence to take part.
It could be said that the Revolution took almost everyone by surprise, although many had called for it, they had not necessarily envisaged it as it was to play out over the next five years. While many motives at work were purely for financial reform, the revolutionaries had been won over by the hyperbole of the Enlightenment writers. In this way the moral aspirations and political ideologies of writers like Rousseau and Montesquieu were to find themselves expressed in the reforms of the new governments, securing their contribution to the Revolution.
In terms of setting off the events of 1789, the financial reforms and counter-reforms over much of the 1780’s created an almost stalemate situation where stalling tactics led to the involvement of the new political breed, the representatives of the Third Estate who were to become the driving force behind the Revolution. In this way it was not just the bankruptcy of 1788 that sparked revolution, but financial mismanagement from the mid 1770s and earlier.
If it were the bourgeoisie who made the Revolution, the perspective that then follows is that the industrial revolution which made them, combined with the Enlightenment which shaped their ideas and thoughts, became the sufficient wedge to drive them between the administration of the Monarchy and the nobility at a time when both were weakened by their division from the other.
Bibliography:
Declaration of the Rights of Man
Hampson, Norman., Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.
Lefebvre, Georges., The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962.
McPhee, Peter., The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Soboul, Albert ., A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977.
Townson, Duncan., France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.
[1] Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 45.
[2] Norman Hampson, Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983, p. viii.
[3] Declaration of the Rights of Man.
[4] Duncan Townson, France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 12
[5] Ibid., p. 11.
[6] Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977, p. 14.
[7] Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962, p. 22.
[8] Mallet du Pan in Townson, p. 26.
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