The population of France in 1789 stood at roughly twenty-five million. Despite recent attempts to prettify the reign of the ‘enlightened despot’ Louis XVI, the great mass of the French people lived in grinding poverty and backwardness. Eighty per cent of the population lived in the rural areas, with the mass of the peasants eking out an existence on small plots of land barely able to support them and their families.
Society was rigidly divided into three orders: the nobility, the clergy and the Third Estate – which combined the urban population, the peasants and the bourgeoisie. The nobility numbered an estimated 400,000, with 4,000 noble courtiers, a kind of ‘leprous court camarilla’, at the top of the aristocratic pyramid. There were an estimated 100,000 priests, nuns and monks but, as Abbé Siecèes pointed out, the clergy did not constitute a homogeneous ‘class’, but was more a ‘profession’. It was divided on class lines between the bishops – ‘nobles of the church’ – and the ordinary priests and nuns. The lower clergy, close to the people, could not fail to reflect the growing class hatred for the nobility including their own bishops. This was reflected in the movement of the ordinary priests over to the side of the Third Estate during the Estates General – the meeting of all three orders together – which was critical in disintegrating the opposition of the nobility and monarchy to the Third Estate’s demands.
The hierarchy of the church owned at least one-fifth of the land of France. Together with the nobles and buttressed by the power of the monarch, they were the dominant force in French society. As many commentators have pointed out, they lived in the most ostentatious luxury – ‘squandermania’ on a vast scale – and viewed with aristocratic contempt the mass of the population of France. This mass was crushed by all manner of feudal and semi-feudal restrictions, with one tax piled upon another.
The French peasant paid a tithe to the church; taille, vingtième, capitation (a poll tax) and gabelle (salt tax) to the state; and to the ‘seigneur’ (lord) of his parish, whether lay or ecclesiastical, he payed a varying toll of obligations, services and payments ranging from the corvée (forced labour exacted in cash or kind) and the cens (feudal rent in cash) to the champart (rent in kind) and lods et ventes (a charge on the transfer of property). In addition to this, if he did not own the land outright he would have to pay for the use of his lord’s mill, wine press and bakery.
Feudalism … or not?
Unbelievably, some bourgeois historians, led by the British historian Alfred Cobban, have argued in a completely hair-splitting, scholastic fashion that France could not be described as ‘feudal’ on the eve of the revolution. They point to the disappearance of serfdom in most regions of France: therefore a revolution to overthrow ‘feudalism’ was entirely unnecessary. A little bit of ‘social engineering’, a heavy dose of the famous British ‘compromise’ between the aristocracy with the rising bourgeoisie could have guaranteed French society a far more peaceful and less sanguinary evolution. The revolution was therefore an unfortunate ‘misunderstanding’ between the contending classes, particularly the aristocracy and the ‘bourgeoisie’ in French society. Covvan’s ‘pure’ feudalism is as much a fiction as is a ‘pure’ capitalism. Every social system contains within it exceptions to the general rule and also the seeds of its own destruction. Different and antagonistic forms of production and classes co-exist alongside the predominant form. Economically, feudalism in its ‘pure’ form can be reduced to individual production by unfree peasants, serfs, and individual appropriation of the surplus produce of the peasant by the lord of the manor. The superstructure built on this is the military fief (peasants forced to do military service at the whim of their feudal master), the feudal state etc.
Capitalism is a system of social production, workers producing in common in big industry, etc, and the individual appropriation of the surplus they create through their labour by the capitalist. Within the womb of capitalism develops the working class, with its own organisations, parties, unions, co-operatives etc, the embryo of the future socialist society. Property relations, the ownership of industry by a parasitic handful of private owners, comes into this conflict with the increasingly ‘socialised’ productive forms. This contradiction can only be overcome on the basis of changing ‘property relations’ – transferring ownership of industry to the state now collectively managed and controlled by the working class. Long before its overthrow, feudalism had ceased to exist in the schematic form envisaged by Cobban. Even at its height, alongside unfree serfs there was always a residue of free peasants. Serfdom had largely disappeared in Britain by the fourteenth century.
In France, the unfree peasant’s labour service was gradually changed into money payment. Moreover, the guilds and chartered towns came into being as exemptions from feudal vassalage and obligations. With them developed the bourgeoisie, who bought fiefs – rights over certain land and the peasants on it – in France as early as the thirteenth century. Feudalism in its ‘pure’ form was undermined moreover by the growth of the absolute monarchy which extended its power at the expense of feudal seigneurs, by promoting royal tax collection, sale of offices etc.
Absolutism, although in the final analysis resting on the feudal nobility, was not averse to leaning on the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy. What remained therefore of feudalism by the seventeenth century? In Cobban’s ‘pure’ form very little. But as Rudé has pointed out: ‘Of its “bastards” or offshoots a considerable amount’. These included the previously mentioned taxes. Above all, the old manorial system was not only maintained but reinforced in the latter half of the seventeenth century.
On the eve of the revolution, mainmort was imposed on half a million peasants; the peasant was forced to reside on the lord’s estate, he was restricted in his right to bequesth land and even to marry, had to take enforced oaths of allegiance etc. At the same time the peasants were still expected to make payments in king to the manorial lord and sometimes to do corvée. On top of this came the ‘feudal reaction’ (the peasants in France did not quibble about terms like Cobban) in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Taxes were increased on an already crushed rural population and new ‘lords’ re-examined the manorial rolls through an army of special agents, in order to increase the return on their investments. Francois ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, the legendary leader and inspiration for the communist ‘Conspiracy of Equals’, to be dealt with later on, started out as such an agent. His experience of what these exactions meant for the peasants combined with the sweep of the revolution pushed him in the direction of communism.
The aristocracy
The aristocracy was a closed and largely hereditary caste. The restrictions and tolls imposed on commerce and industry were an impediment to the development of the bourgeois who counterposed ‘freedom’ of trade and competition to the ‘restrictions’ of feudalism. The French aristocracy clung tenaciously to its privileges. Thus, whereas in the earlier part of the eighteenth century under Louis XIV, some bourgeois were promoted to high office, no such hopes could be entertained by the bourgeois under Louis XVI. The aristocracy had a monopoly in the army, church and state. Several of the ‘parlements’, the councils of the nobility, were refusing to admit ‘commoners’ into their ranks. Moreover, an ordinance in 1781 made it impossible for a bourgeois to qualify as an officer candidate in the army unless actually rising from the ranks.
Thomas Carlyle summed up the aristocracy:
Close viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus … Such are the shepherds of the people: and now how fares it with the flock? With the flock, as is inevitable, it fares ill, and ever worse. They are not tended, they are only regularly shorn. They are sent for, to do statute-labour, to pay statute-taxes; to fatten battlefields (named ‘Bed of Honour’) with their bodies, in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is in every possession of man; but for themselves they have little or no possession. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed; to pine dully in thick obscuration, in squalid destitution and obstruction: this is the lot of the millions.
Consequently, between 1750 and 1785 there were 100 peasant uprisings. It is true that these did not take the form of the peasant jacqueries, the rural rebellions that swept the countryside in previous centuries, but were largely disturbances in the main marked towns. They were mainly provoked by rising food prices in years of shortages. The last of these outbreaks took place in May 1775. Some historians have nevertheless concluded that, rather than deprivation, rising rural prosperity characterised the period immediately before the revolution. Therefore the revolt of the ‘lower orders’ was entirely justified. As we shall see, it was precisely the betterment in the conditions of at least a layer of the rural population, followed by a worsening in their conditions immediately before the revolution, which was a trigger for the events of 1789 itself.
The urban masses
It was not just the peasantry but the urban masses who also suffered. Between 1730 and 1789 wages in France rose by more than 20 per cent, but grain prices increased by 60 per cent! Strikes and industrial disputes were a feature of France throughout the eighteenth century, including the Lyons silk weavers’ strikes and bloody riots in 1744, 1779 and 1788, and the strikes of bookbinders, building workers, carpenters, farriers, locksmiths and others between 1776 and 1789.
Crashing at every turn against the fetters imposed upon them by feudalism, the Third Estate, that is twenty-four and a half million out of the twenty-five million population of France, was in a state of open rebellion on the eve of the revolution.
Marxism has pointed out that war is often the midwife of revolution. The French autocracy had expanded not a little of its treasure in supporting the revolt of the American colonists against its age old enemy Britain, ‘perfidious Albion’. This was to have two calamitous consequences for the French monarchy. The state was bankrupted and the example of the American revolution which invoked the ‘Rights of Man’ proved contagious for France itself.
The soil upon which these ideas took root had been ploughed up by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. ‘The wind always blows the tops of the trees first’: intellectual ferment and criticism of the old order are an inevitable preparatory stage for revolution, as is strikingly obvious in the case of the French revolution. Engels pointed out that:
The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognised no external authority of any kind. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions were all subjected to the most unsparing criticism: everything had to justify its existence before the judgement seat of reason – or give up existence.
France had not experienced a Reformation and the church, as we have seen, was a pillar of feudalism. It was naturally subjected to withering criticism, as with Voltaire’s savage satires. But this criticism was not restricted to religion alone. All scientific tradition and political institutions were subjected to scrutiny and criticism. Materialism, which had been the preserve of a handful of ‘cultivated men’ in Britain, was seized on in France as a revolutionary weapon against the autocracy. Rousseau declared in the opening words of his famous Social Contract: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. The philosophers, with their appeal to ‘eternal reason’, idealised the demands of the rising bourgeoisie. Of course, the philosophers advanced the cause of the whole of the Third Estate in their criticisms of unequal taxation and manorial rights. Yet in the words of Lefebvre: ‘They rendered particular service to the bourgeoisie … who like all classes striving for supremacy saw themselves as the champion of the whole “nation” against “despotism”.’
However, as Engels again points out: ‘The French revolution had realised this rational society and government. But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational’. Nevertheless the philosophers provided the intellectual armoury for the overthrow of the old society.
At the end of the American war in 1783, the state could only make up the colossal deficit accumulated during the war by further borrowing. Such a policy could not continue indefinitely. Therefore Calonne, the king’s minister, proposed increased taxation to fill the gap.
King against nobles
The drop in the purchasing power of the masses and the already colossal tax burden carried by them meant that little more could be extracted from this quarter. Calonne therefore proposed to tax the nobles. This was linked with a threat to the ‘manorial rights’ of the church, and a proposal to give responsibility for apportioning taxes to provincial assemblies elected by landowners without distinction as to order. This mild measure of ‘reform’ was to meet the same kind of fate as similar earlier attempts of Turgot and Necker. Both had been frustrated in their attempts to introduce very mild fiscal and other reforms which merely trimmed the finger nails of the aristocracy.
The aristocracy therefore came into collision not just with Calonne, but with his master Louis XVI. It was Karl Marx who pointed out that ‘revolution always starts from the top’. Feeling the ground trembling beneath their feet, one section of the ruling classes urges reforms in order to prevent revolution from below. Another section, clinging tenaciously to the old order, advocates further repression.
In the case of the French revolution it was the tussle between the monarchy and the nobility in defence of their respective rights and privileges which opened the floodgates. This conflict was to set in motion a movement which would destroy both. Chateaubriand later lamented: ‘The patricians began the revolution – the plebeians finished it’. The major problem for Calonne was that the monarchy had become completely discredited. Indifferent to the suffering of the masses, Louis was devoted to the hunt, drank and ate to excess and was the laughing stock of his courtiers. The Queen, Marie Antoinette, had gained a reputation of a Messalina, the dissolute wife of Roman emperor Claudius, and had lost face in the ‘Diamon Necklace Affair’ of 1785. She had attracted the hatred of the masses for her gambling, lavish clothes, obtaining lucrative positions for her friends, etc. The ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ involved a complicated swindle, whereby the court jeweller was duped into handing over a fabulously expensive diamond necklace, valued at 1,600,000 francs, to a woman impersonating Marie Antoinette. This led to a trial and the imprisonment of the conspirators. But, during the trial, Marie was vilified, condemned as ‘that Austrian bitch’, and booed and hissed by the crowds. The Paris police wrote to the Queen, suggesting that she should stay away from the capital for fear of provoking riots! Moreover, it was rumoured that most of her children were not the king’s!
An American, on the eve of the overthrow of the monarchy, commented about Louis: ‘What will you have from a creature who, situated as he is, eats and drinks and sleeps well, and laughs and is as merry a grig as lives’. Another commented: ‘Usually he listened, smiled and rarely decided upon anything. His first word was usually no’.
Louis’ diary completely bears this out. For the early part of July 1789, it reads: ‘Tuesday 7th: Stag hunt at Port Royal, killed two, Wednesday 8th: nothing. Thursday 9th: nothing. Deputation of the Estates General’. As the storm clouds gather, as a social earthquake gives warning tremors, this vacuous king writes: ‘Friday 10th: nothing. Replied to the deputation of the Estates. Saturday 11th: nothing. Departure of M Necker. Sunday 12th: Vespers and salut.’ On the eve of the storming of the Bastille, his diary records: ‘Monday 13th: nothing.’ And the entry on 14th July, as Louis’ world was turning upside-down, with the capital convulsed by revolution” the diary records: ‘Tuesday 14th: nothing’!!
Trotsky points out that the French monarchy, like the Romanov monarchy a hundred and thirty years later, went toward the abyss ‘with the crown pushed down over their eyes’. Comparing the French king with the Russian tsar, he pointed out that both were ‘moral castrates, who are absolutely deprived of imagination and creative force … they had just enough brains to feel their own triviality, and they cherished an envious hostility towards everything gifted and significant’. The king was therefore a very unreliable prop for Calonne in his conflict with the nobles. He was soon forced out, to be replaced by Brienne. The latter, compelled to follow the same course as Calonne, also offered to retain the three orders in the provincial assemblies, thus maintaining the privileged power of the aristocracy, and to leave the clergy’s manorial rights alone.
However, the nobles replied that it was not within their power to consent to taxes. Prompted by Lafayette, a noble who had played an important role during the American revolution, they hinted that only the Estates General, which had not been convened since 1614, had this power. Brienne submitted his proposals to the Paris parlement, but this body refused to register the decree on the land tax and demanded once more that the Estates General be convened to deal with the matter. The decrees were however promulgated on 18 November 1787. The Duc d’Orléans protested, and the king retaliated by exiling the Duke two councillors. The parlement came to their defence and, in order to ward off attack, published a declaration of ‘fundamental laws’, stating that the right to raise taxes belonged to the Estates General and that no Frenchman could be arbitrarily arrested or detained. They also defended the ‘customs and privileges’ of the provinces. Louis retaliated by abrogating to the Royal tribunals rights which the nobles and seigneurs exercised previously through the manorial court. This in turn triggered off a revolt of the provincial parlements and the clergy. This was paralleled by riots which broke out in Paris and several other cities. In the ‘day of tiles’, the citizens of Grenoble rose on 7 June 1788 to shower troops with tiles from the roof tops.
Convening the Estates General
Checked at every turn, Brienne and the king yielded and conceded that the Estates General should convene on 1 May 1789. But Brienne was forced to resign on 24 August 1788. The king recalled Necker, who immediately reconvened the parlement of Paris that had been suspended by the king. This body in turn declared that the Estates General would consist of three orders as in 1614. Each would have the same number of representatives but would meet separately and would have a veto over the others. As Lefebvre pointed out: ‘The nobility and clergy were made masters of the assembly. This was the aristocrats’ victory’.
However, the precedents set by the nobles were noted by the spokesmen of the Third Estate. They would use similar methods against the nobles as the latter had used against the monarchy. The mere announcement of the convening of the Estates General had a profound effect on the whole of the Third Estate. One section of the bourgeois had favoured the revolt of the aristocracy, whereas others were largely indifferent. But all of that was changed by the convening of the Estates General. The tradesmen of Paris, the journeymen and apprentices, were already in revolt at the dramatic upward movement in the price of bread. The countryside was astir with rebellion. A peasant woman had declared to the English traveller, Arthur Young, a few days before the fall of the Bastille: ‘Something was to be done by some great folk for such poor ones.’ She did not know how this was to be done or by whom. ‘God send us better, for the taille and manorial rights are crushing us’.
All the oppressed classes in French society were roused to their feet by the mere convocation of the Estates General. The bourgeoisie finally hoped that the nobles would concede ‘equal rights’. Their hopes however were to be cruelly dashed by the decision of the Paris parlement to uphold precedent in the Estates General. This involved separate voting by orders, thus guaranteeing a majority in the Estates General to the nobles and the clergy.
The fury of the Third Estate, particularly the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie, exploded. Notwithstanding the ideal schemes of ‘reform’ which today’s historians put forward at the safe distance of two hundred years later, their 1789 predecessors declared war on the aristocracy. The latter refused to grant any concessions which touched on their fundamental interests. Barnave, a spokesman for the Third Estate, had written earlier: ‘The roads are blocked at every access’. Abbé Sieyès, then cannon of Chartres, lamented that he would never obtain the office of bishop. Lefebvre comments: ‘Since the doors were everywhere closed, the only course was to break them down.’ To advance its cause the bourgeoisie of France, in contrast with that of England and the United States, was led to emphasise the equality of rights. It was forced to champion the rights of all oppressed classes. Sieyès summed this up when he declared ‘What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it hitherto been in our form of government? Nothing. What does it demand? To become something’. At the same time he vented his hatred of the nobility: ‘This class is assuredly foreign to the nation because of its do-nothing idleness’. Mirabeau, an impoverished ex-noble, turning to ancient Rome for inspiration, praised Marius, ‘for having exterminated the aristocracy and the nobility in Rome’.
The upper bourgeois, in preparation for the Estates General, organised itself into the ‘patriot’ party. Their activities were co-ordinated through the ‘committee of thirty’ which included not just the bourgeois but also sections of the liberal nobility such as Lafayette. This has led some bourgeois historians to conclude that the French revolution was not at all a bourgeois revolution. After all, sections of the nobility such as the Marquis de Lafayette played a prominent role in the revolution itself. With the breakdown of feudalism, some sections of the nobility, through impoverishment, were forced into the ranks of the Third Estate. Even some wealthy aristocrats, under the impact of the American revolution and the blind alley which feudal society meant for France, had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie.
The overwhelming majority of the nobility were, however, implacably opposed to any reforms. They had entered the struggle as a champion of the ‘people’ against the monarchy. But now the king, outraged by the ‘disloyalty’ of the nobles, under the prompting of Necker decided to allow double representation to the Third Estate. This would allow it to outvote the privileged orders. As Rudé comments: ‘The aristocracy and parlements, so recently the acclaimed custodians of the nation’s “liberties” against ministerial oppression, [now] appeared as its bitterest enemy.’ The nobility warned the monarchy ‘The state is in danger … a revolution of governmental principles is brewing … already the suppression of feudal rights has been proposed … Could Your Majesty resolve to sacrifice, to humiliate, his brave, his ancient, his respectable nobility? … Let the Third Estate cease attacking the rights of the first two orders’.
Nor was the struggle restricted to words alone. In some of the provinces the nobles violently protested at the doubling of the vote of the Third Estate. In Britanny, class struggle broke out into open civil war. In Rennes, fights broke out at the end of January 1789. Meanwhile the masses in both the urban and rural areas were driven to revolt by the sudden deterioration in their conditions. The roots of this lay in the crisis in agriculture. As a result of France’s entry into the American war, there was a recession in which prices fell both in industrial and farm products but particularly in wines and textiles. After 1778 the prices in the wine market fell by fifty per cent. They rose a little in 1781 because of scarcity but not enough to compensate the peasants who, in practically every area of France, relied on vine growing as the most profitable crop. Grain prices also fell and the peasants’ misery was compounded by the drought of 1785 which killed off livestock.
This general crisis in agriculture merged with the economic catastrophe of 1787-89. From agriculture it spread to industry with huge increases in unemployment in Paris, Lille, Lyons, Troyes, Sedan, Rouen and Rheims. The failure of the grain crops in 1788-89 steadily pushed up the price of bread. Urban craftsmen and workers were drawn together with the peasants in common hostility to the government, landlords, merchants and speculators. Some bourgeois historians still maintain that the general prosperity of France, evident throughout the last half of the eighteenth century, was increasing at the time of the revolution. They conclude that the deterioration in the conditions of the lives of the masses could be discounted as a factor in the revolution. It is true that France had doubled her income throughout the seventeenth century. Yet a big part of the increased income from the colonial trade was re-exported. A general rise in prices moreover, which had benefited the large landowners and bourgeoisie, completely outstripped the rise in wages. Reserves were so low that bad harvests inevitably meant famine in the countryside as the peasants were affected both as producers and consumers. Moreover, the massive increase in food prices in 1787-89 meant that the masses’ expenditure on bread shot up to half, three-quarters and even four-fifths of their earnings.
Revolutionary change
The existence of relatively recent prosperity, rather than staving off the threat of revolution, only stoked up the fires. It is neither economic upswing nor a downswing which in and of itself, provokes revolution. It is the change from one period to another which creates the conditions for a rapid change in the consciousness of the masses, their receptiveness to revolutionary ideas and to a revolutionary rupture in society. Such were the conditions that were maturing amongst the masses in the period 1788-1789 in France.
The mood of the masses was decisive in ensuring the victory of the revolution of 1789. They acted not just in defence of the bourgeois dominated National Assembly in its conflict with the king and nobility, but saw in a revolutionary change the means whereby they would transform their own miserable conditions. It was these masses, the heroic sans-culottes, who were to be the driving force of the French revolution itself. While compelled to lean on these masses to destroy feudalism, the French bourgeois feared them. The liberal bourgeoisie in 1789-96 were to display the same fear of the plebeian masses of Paris as the German and Russian bourgeois were to later show towards the industrial working class.
Trotsky in his theory of the permanent revolution showed that, in the modern epoch, the liberal bourgeoisie is incapable of carrying through the tasks of the capitalist revolution: that is, land reform, unification of the country and freedom from imperialist domination. Through its investment in the land and the landlords’ investment in industry, it is enmeshed in the perpetuation of feudal and semi-feudal land relations. Moreover, confronted by the modern proletariat, it is terrified of leading a mass movement which will inevitably go beyond the framework of bourgeois society. It is for these reasons that Trotsky concluded that the bourgeois democratic revolution could only be carries out not with but against the liberal bourgeoisie. It is only the working class, even though numerically small in a backward country, which can mobilise the peasantry to carry through the bourgeois democratic revolution. This movement, having taken power, would in turn ‘grow over’ to the socialist revolution on a national and international scale. This fear of the bourgeoisie of a mass movement to carry through the bourgeois democratic revolution was commented on by Marx during the 1848 revolution. The cowardly German bourgeoisie stopped halfway in its struggle against feudal Junker reaction. In the light of the experiences of the 1848 revolution Marx coined his famous phrase about the ‘permanent revolution’.
The French bourgeoisie displayed the same fear of the ‘lower orders’ as its German and Russian counterparts, and as the present colonial and semi-colonial bourgeoisie do today. Engels, commenting 100 years after the great revolution wrote:
The bourgeois, here (France) as everywhere, were too cowardly to defend their own interests … from the day of the Bastille on, the people had to do all their work for them … without their intervention on July 14, October 5-6, until August 10 and September 2 etc. the bourgeoisie would have fallen each time before the old regime … the Coalition in league with the court would have crushed the revolution, and that consequently these plebeians (the sans-culottes) alone carried through the revolution.
The French bourgeoisie did, however, preside over the carrying through of their revolution. Their representatives, at least the most extreme wing, did form an uneasy alliance with the plebeian masses to smash feudalism. Their descendants in the backward countries today, as with the Russian bourgeoisie in 1917, however, are incapable of emulating them.
Why the difference in the attitude of the bourgeoisie today and in 1789? The explanation is to be found in the fact that the bourgeoisie today confronts an entirely different situation than that obtaining in 1789. Then, industry, even in the most developed countries, such as Britain, was subordinate to agriculture, which was the main source of wealth and still dominated economic relations. Concentrations of workers in some large enterprises did exist, but it was the small business, with the master and a handful of workers, which predominated. This absence of large scale industry, the weakness of the productive forces – science, technique and the organisation of production – and consequently of a proletariat meant that socialism was impossible at that stage. The socialist transformation of society is only possible after capitalism has exhausted all possibilities of further growth. This was clearly not the case in France, or of any other country in 1789. The capitalists had a long road ahead of them in developing industry, society and thereby the working class.
The force of circumstances, in the shape of ferocious feudal reaction, compelled the bourgeoisie to go to the extreme of leaning on the Jacobins and the sans-culottes. They were not, however, confronted by a powerful working class, as they were later, or as the Russian capitalists faced in 1917. The triumph of plebeian petit bourgeois democracy could only be a temporary episode, which would clear the way for the development of capitalism, and thereby the political rule of capital.
Nevertheless, the French bourgeoisie, even at its birth, displayed that fear of the ‘lower orders’ which would become full blown later, when confronted with a powerful proletariat, organised and disciplined by the very development of capitalism itself. Therefore the elements of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, both from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie – fear and hesitation in the face of the mass movement – and from that of the masses themselves – pressure to go further, etc – were already present in the French revolution.
Following the Paris Commune of 1871, the French bourgeoisie, terrified at the emergence of a powerful proletariat, deliberately held back the development of industry – and thereby the development of the working class.
Rentier capital – banking, exploitation of colonial possessions and investment abroad – predominated over industrial capital. One of the effects of this was that French capital invested heavily in Russia – alongside British capitalism – which in turn developed industry and the mighty Russian working class. Thus, dialectically, the very power of the French workers contributed indirectly to the emergence of the Russian workers, the force which led and carried through the Russian revolution.
Thus, while attempting to being the movement of the sans-culottes to its will, the French bourgeoisie at the same time viewed it with dread.
The Réveillon riots
In the period leading up to 1789 the masses, particularly those in Paris, showed their mettle in a series of movements. Most of these took the form of protests at the scarcity and the price of food. Yet in April 1789 the so-called ‘Réveillon riots’ took place in the Fauborg Saint-Antoine (the various parts of Paris were called fauborgs; they had once been suburbs, but had been incorporated into the city). These riots were remarkable in the history of the revolution for two reasons. They took place in the area which was destined to become famous as the stronghold of sans-culottism during the revolution itself. It was at the same time one of the few insurrectionary movements distinctly of wage-earners. The movement was triggered off by the remarks of Réveillon, a wallpaper manufacturer employing 350 workers in his factory in Fauborg Saint-Antoine. On 23 April he made a speech in which he complained about the high costs of production and the burden imposed on industry by the high level of wages. Outraged, 600 workers gathered near the Bastille to hang an effigy of Réveillon. In the succeeding days, protests and demonstrations, involving thousands of workers, climaxed in the storming of Réveillon’s house.
Gardes françaises – army reservists – protecting the house opened fire and a massacre followed. The masses fought back with cries of ‘Freedom … we will not be moved’ while others shouted ‘Long live the Third Estate’. The irony was that Réveillon was himself a prominent member of the Third Estate. Yet even in this movement, the masses were picking up the slogans of the revolutionary bourgeoisie in its struggle against the privileged orders and using them to advance their own demands and interests.
The Estates General meets
In the provinces, peasants were already stopping food convoys, raiding markets and destroying game reserves. It was against this background of sharpening crisis that the elections and meeting of the Estates General took place. When it met in May everything was done to humiliate the Third Estate. Its representatives were ordered to wear the traditional black (in contrast to the splendid attire of the aristocrats) and enter the meeting hall by a side door. At the outset of the meeting, an incident involving the king and the Third Estate took place. When the king had seated himself and put on his hat, the privileged orders put theirs on likewise. The Third Estate, in defiance of the usual custom, imitated them, but when Louis XVI saw what was happening, he again bared his head so that all hats had to be quickly removed. This ‘war of the hats’ was a precursor of a more violent exchange between the different orders that was to take place in the succeeding period.
The bourgeoisie had placed high hopes in the Estates General. While the king had agreed to double representation for the Third Estate, he was opposed to the demand that the three estates should meet in common. They were invited instead to meet in separate assemblies. The bourgeoisie felt cheated because, even with ‘double representation’, they could still be outvoted by the other two orders. The Third Estate therefore refused to meet separately and invited the other orders to join them. The nobles and the bishops resisted, with the bishops having great difficulty in restraining the parish priests (who outnumbered them by five to one) from joining their ‘fellow commoners’.
The period between the meeting of the Estates General and the July revolution was essentially a period of deadlock between the Third Estate on the one side and the privileged orders on the other. To begin with, the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie appealed to a section of the privileged orders, particularly the clergy, ‘in the name of the god of peace’ as Mirabeau put it, to come over to their side. The noble ordered, however, frustrated all attempts to compromise. The bourgeois deputies were also under the ferocious pressure of the masses, who were looking towards the Estates General as a solution to their problems: ‘All France is in a roar’ wrote Carlyle later.
Aristocratic intransigence was connected in the consciousness of the masses with a plot to drive up the price of food, to create famine conditions in order to shipwreck all attempts at reform. As we have seen, the price of food had increased sharply in 1789. A worker commented to an observer that the ‘princes had cornered the grain market on purpose so that they could the more easily succeed in toppling M. Necker, whom they all had so great an interest in overturning’. This was one manifestation of the ‘great fear’ which lay deep in the psyche of the rural and urban masses of France and which was to play a significant role in the revolution. Lefebvre has demonstrated that it was connected in the minds of the masses with the issue of food supplies, always precarious at the best of times. The French peasants had a deep fear of ‘brigands’. Starving, roving bands of ex-peasants, landless labourers and discharged servicemen, sometimes did indeed pillage the fields of the peasants, particularly in periods of famine. Invariably the peasants connected with the exactions inflicted on them by the nobles. The urban masses had the same fear of food hoarders which they invariably ascribed to the privileged orders and their agents in the towns and cities.
This phenomenon of the ‘great fear’ was to be a recurring theme throughout the revolution. It was not, as royalist historians have asserted, either an invention of the revolutionaries or a blind inchoate movement of the masses without any material foundation. In the charged atmosphere of revolution and counter-revolution it was not difficult for the masses, with their age-old fear of ‘brigands’, to ascribe, with full justification, the same motives to the nobles and international feudal reaction. Of course, there were sometimes excesses, such as the prison massacres, but even these were rooted in the attempt of the feudal reaction to smash the revolution by force of arms. The mass movement was worked up into a frenzy at the spectacle of the aristocracy’s attempt, during the Estates General, to sabotage all their hopes and aspirations.
The whole of France followed the deliberations of the Estates General. The news was carried by a thousand different channels to the masses. Hundreds of pamphlets were produced and new journals mushroomed. The masses were mobilised by journals such as Les Révolutions de Paris, published by Loustalot, which bore the motto ‘The great appear great in our eyes only because we are on our knees. Let us rise’.
Although largely illiterate, the masses were able to follow events as the speeches of the deputies of the Third Estate in the Estates General were often read out publicly to mass meetings gathered outside town halls throughout France. Moreover, the journeyman, the small businessman, was usually able to read and communicated the news to his workers. Uinder the constant pressure of the masses the representatives of the Third Estate at Versailles decided to act.
The National Assembly
At the beginning of June, Sieyès declared that the moment had come for ‘cutting the cable’. It was proposed that the privileged orders should be summoned to meet together with the Third Estate. If they refused, a roll call should be taken of all those who were present and those not in attendance should be declared ‘defaulted’. The Third Estate should then declare itself ‘the national representatives of the people,’ if necessary without the king’s consent. A few parish priests joined them and on 16 June they declared themselves the ‘National Assembly’. Three days later, the deputies were, it seems by accident, locked out of the usual meeting place and were forced to meet in the neighbouring indoor tennis court. It was there that they took the famous ‘Tennis Court oath’ in which they declared:
That all members of this Assembly shall at once take a solemn oath never to separate but to meet in any place that circumstances may require, until the constitution of the kingdom shall be laid and established in secure foundations; and that after the swearing of the oath each and every member shall confirm this indefeasible resolution by signing with his own hand.
Only one deputy refused to take the oath. At a royal session on 23 June, however, Louis declared that the acts of the Third Estate were null and void but authorised ‘joint deliberations and vote by head in affairs of general interest’. However, defending the privileged orders until the end, he expressly excluded any re-consideration of the ‘ancient and constitutional rights of the three orders, the form and constitution of future Estates General, feudal and manorial property, and honorific privileges and useful rights of the first two orders’. He also defended the rights of the clergy in all religious matters. In a warning to the Third Estate he declared: ‘If you do not obey, then I shall send you back home and alone I shall create the happiness of my people’.
The nobility greeted the king’s defence of their privileges with wild enthusiasm. When the nobility withdrew from the Estates General, the Third Estate remained in position with Bailly, one of their representatives, declaring: ‘The nation when assembled cannot be given orders’. At first the king was disposed to forcibly disperse the assembly but then declared: ‘Oh well, the devil with it – let them stay’. More importantly, the Parisian masses now intervened, stirred up by the rumour that Necker, who was supporting the claims of the Third estate, was about to be dismissed. Soldiers also refused to fire on the crowd and deputies of the Third Estate gathered at Versailles. The king was forced to retreat.
On 27 June, the remnants of the other orders were instructed by him to merge with the Third Estate in the ‘National Assembly’. However, the king was merely playing for time. Swiss and German troops were concentrated on the outskirts of the city ready, the king imagined, to snuff out without difficulty the resistance of the ‘National Assembly’. But he had reckoned without the rising revolutionary temper in the capital.
