Welcome back to the series of lectures.
This is History 1122, the second half of Western Civilization.
We’re going to tackle one of the more difficult topics, at least for me, because of its complexity.
We’re going to talk about the French Revolution.
I probably have never done this lecture twice the same way, and that will hold true today.
It’s difficult to determine exactly what to include and what to leave out in a survey
class like this.
There are many, many, many historians who devote their entire careers to particular
aspects of the French Revolution, so the complexity here is profound, and you can get lost in
endless details, and I don’t want to do that.
I don’t think that’s profitable for you.
I think it’s better for survey students to get the big picture, think about context
and significance, and some of the major events and personalities involved here.
See if we can find themes and ideas that extend on into the 19th century.
So let’s start here with context first.
I’m going to give you a couple.
The French Revolution takes place in the what I’ve heard historians call the Era of Democratic
Revolutions.
You remember the American Revolution, 1775 to 76; the French Revolution, 1789 it starts;
and then of course, you have the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s.
So at the end of the 18th century, you have this rash of democratic revolutions, and the
French Revolution is a part of that.
So that’s a context.
Another context of course, is The Enlightenment, and the ideals of The Enlightenment are going
to be triumphant here in the French Revolution.
There are a number of significances.
We’ll tackle most of them when we do our conclusions, but I’m going to give you the
big significance up front, and that is, the French Revolution overturns the feudal orders.
Feudalism had prevailed in Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the
French Revolution is going to put an end to the feudal orders.
Now I will sometimes refer to these as the privileged orders.
So I use feudal and privileged sort of interchangeably.
So be aware of that.
There are two of these privileged orders, the church and the nobility, the traditional
sources of authority in Western Europe.
I’m going to give you some background here.
I read one time that France, by the time of the Revolution, was a rich country with a
poor king.
The idea here is that France, although a rich country, the monarch has difficulty accessing
that wealth, and we’ll see this is a long-running theme regarding the origins of the Revolution.
So long-term causes – There exists in France local centers of power throughout the country.
These are called parliaments, and by the time of the Revolution, these parliaments are pushing
back against the king.
Again, many of these parliaments are some distance from Paris, and they begin to assert
more and more of their own prerogatives.
These parliaments have the power to comment and to criticize the king’s laws or proposals.
Now this doesn’t sound like a big deal to us, where everything is contested; but you
have to remember, the French king is an absolute monarch and he is not used to having his judgements
questioned.
These parliaments issue remonstrances; these are simply the documents that the parliaments
issue stating their case and their arguments or their complaints.
Again, why is this significant?
Well, the king’s decisions could be disputed publicly.
In a country where the monarch’s rule, it was supposed to be accepted without comment
from the subjects.
Another long-term cause – Venal offices, state offices that were purchased and by purchasing
them you could attain noble status, by the time of the Revolution, seventy-thousand of
these venal offices had been sold.
These venal offices were difficult to dismiss be the holder would have to be reimbursed
for the value of his office.
Again, keep this long-running theme in mind.
The king has difficulty accessing the wealth of his kingdom, and selling venal offices
is a way to raise money.
Another long-term cause here – The privileged orders or the feudal orders have persuasive
rationales to avoid paying taxes.
Again, finances, right?
The church had a long-standing argument that said well, the church prays for the kingdom;
therefore the church should not be burdened any further by having to pay taxes to the
king.
The nobility, of course, had a similar argument; they argued that they fought for the kingdom
and they governed the kingdom at the king’s will, therefore they should not have to be
burdened further by paying taxes to the kingdom.
Now by the time of the Revolution, these feudal, these privileged orders, were increasingly
viewed by the mass of the population as unproductive leeches on society, and of course, you’ll
see one of the first things that happens in the Revolution is that the feudal orders are
abolished.
Another long-term cause – The Seven Years’ War, here in North America we call it the
French and Indian War.
France is defeated here, and this is a long and expensive war.
It causes further debt, exacerbating an already difficult financial situation for the French
king.
And then finally, I’m just going to draw a little contrast here between Louis the XIV,
who we talked about earlier when we talked about absolutism, and then Louis the XVI,
who would be the king during the Revolution.
There’s a different, there’s a shift in mentality here; and I think this is key.
Louis the XIV, in the 17 century, simply told his subjects what to think and what to do.
Louis the XVI, in the late 18th century, has to persuade his subjects; he can’t simply
command them the way Louis the XIV could.
Now immediate causes of the Revolution – The king’s finance minister, Necker, he kind
of played a ballet with the books; he hid debt and made the king’s financial position
look stronger than it actually was.
This was fairly common knowledge.
This deceit caused a distrust of the king’s finances among the people, who assumed that
all was well, despite protestations to the contrary; and then of course, you have the
example of the American Revolution, this notion of – what was the old slogan that the Sons
of Liberty would paint on the walls – No Taxation Without Representation.
There’s a sense here among Frenchmen that if it’s good enough for these North American
colonists, then it should be good enough for us.
In 1788, there’s a failed harvest.
Exportation of grain the previous year left the kingdom short of food stocks.
Now this may sound trivial, but it is not.
There are no McDonald’s in late 18th-century France.
If the harvest is not successful, then it has serious ramifications.
That is, people starve to death.
The king, of course, is viewed as sort of a paternal figure, and his primary responsibility
is to make sure his children – the people of the kingdom – are properly fed, and the
harvest is, the means by which bread is made, and that is the staple of the French diet.
So this, again, going back to finances, previous surpluses of grain have been sold on the open
market to raise money.
So now we have a failed harvest, and we don’t have any grain stored – and this is going
to have a terrible effect.
This lessens people’s confidence in the king, in his paternalism.
1788, in August, there’s bankruptcy.
Payments for the French Treasury are suspended.
This rattles the people’s confidence as well.
In response to this financial disaster, the king calls a meeting of the Estates General,
for the first time in over a century.
Remember Louis the XIV did not call the Estates General because he was able to raise revenue
by selling titles of nobility, the robe nobility and the church, for instance.
But here Louis the XVI is going to call the Estates General; these are the hierarchy of
classes in the French society.
You’ve got a feudal order, the nobility and the church; and then you have the third
estate, which is everyone else.
Now for most of French history, this third estate was comprised of illiterate farmers.
Now by 1788-89, the third estate is comprised of rising professionals, people who are literate
= newspaper editors and doctors and lawyers and professors and people who are aspiring
to something more than simple agricultural life.
So the third estate has changed in its complexity.
The Estates General meet in Paris and this will signal the beginning of the end of absolute
monarchy in France.
A vacuum, a political vacuum, is created here when the Estates General meet and the third
estate asserts its dominance.
There’s a political vacuum because power is now contested between the king on the one
hand, and the third estate on the other.
This vacuum, filling this vacuum over the next couple of years, tells the story of the
French Revolution.
So we’ve gone through sort of long-term, then immediate causes.
In our next lecture we’ll discuss the beginning of the Revolution.
Thank you.