Paris was the key to the revolution in 1789 and the scene of its greatest dramas over the next six years. Its population at the time of the revolution has been estimated at between 524,000 and 660,000. Only London with a population of 850,000 was larger than Paris at this stage. The city contained about 10,000 clergy, 5,000 nobles and 40,000 financial, commercial, manufacturing and professional bourgeois. The rest, the great majority, were the small shopkeepers, petty traders craftsmen, journeymen, labourers, vagrants and city poor, who formed what later became known as the sans culottes. It was also estimated that about 300,000, or half, of these were ‘wage-earners’. As Rudé comments, ‘In eighteenth century France, the term ouvrier (worker) might be applied as readily to independent craftsmen, small workshop masters – or even, on occasion, to substantial manufacturers – as to ordinary wage-earners; in its most frequent use it was synonymous with artisan’.
Although clashes, including quite bitter strikes, took place between masters and journeymen, these were of secondary importance and the wage-earner was usually more concerned with the price of food – particularly of bread – than with the amount of his earnings. This mass – the sans-culottes – played the decisive role in July and at each turn in the revolution. With the rise in the remper of the Faubourgs, the bourgeoisie decided to intervene. The Duc d’Orléans, who had gone over to the Third Estate at Versailles, set up a permanent headquarters at the Palais Royal. Orléans was the pretender, a rival for the throne of Louis. His considerable funds were used to produce pamphlets, organise orators and give direction to the growing opposition to the Capetian – Louis’ family name was Capet – monarchy.
The traditional bourgeois of Paris were gathered together in the 407 electors of the Parisian Third Estate. Their headquarters were at the Hôtel de Ville – the Town or City Hall. They largely restricted themselves in the first period to paper schemes for setting up a citizens’ militia, a malice bourgeoisie. The Duc d’Orléans proved to be much more audacious. Crowds directed from his headquarters at the Palais Royal forcibly released eleven guardsmen from the Abbaye prison had been incarcerated there for refusing to fire on the crowd at Versailles on the night of 22-23 June.
The army
Under the pressure of the masses, the royalist army itself began to disintegrate. Carlyle makes an apposite comment:
Good is grapeshot, Messeigneurs, on one condition: that the shooter were also made of metal! But unfortunately he is made of flesh; under his buffs and bandoliers, your hired shooter has instincts, feelings, even a kind of thought. It is his kindred, bone of his bone, the same canaille that shall be whiffed; he has brothers in it, a father and mother – living on meal-husks and boiled grass … If he shed Patriot blood, he shall be accursed among men. The soldier, who has seen his pay stolen … his blood wasted … and the gates of promotion shut inexorably on him if he were not born noble – is himself not without griefs against you. Your cause is not the soldier’s cause; but, as would seem, your own only, and no other god’s nor man’s.
Carlyle at least understood what the liberals and reformists are blind to: that the army, even one such as that of the ancien regime, is in general a copy of the society from which it ushers. In a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary period, the army will tend to split under the pressure of the masses. The troops will not, however, come over to the side of the masses unless the latter have demonstrated in practice that they are prepared to go the whole way. This the Parisian masses gave abundant evidence of in July 1789. They did not act primarily in defence of the Assembly. They were more concerned about their own fate, being convinced that the city was surrounded by royalist troops and that they were about to be bombarded from Montmartre and the Bastille.
On 10 July, 80 artillery men who had broken out of their barracks in the Hôtel des Invalides, a former military hospital, were feted in the Palais Royal and the Champs Elysées. Then, urged on by the queen, Louis dismissed Necker on 11 July and sent him into exile. His replacement was a nominee of the queen, the Baron de Breteuil. This ignited the tinderbox of Paris. The news reached the city on the twelfth. The masses flocked to the Palais Royal where the future Jacobin leader Camille Desmoulins, with pistol and sword in hand, called the masses to insurrection with the cry ‘To arms – to arms’. Demonstrators swarmed into the boulevards and reached Saint-Honore. The cavalry undertook to make them disperse and charged the crowd in the Place Louis XV. The gardes françaises (army reservists) who had gone over to the people in turn attacked the cavalry. Besenval, commander of the Parisian garrison, withdrew to the Champ de Mars. Crowds thronged the streets and emptied the debtors’ jail at La Force.
Barricades were going up, trenches were being dug to repel the cavalry and paving stones were carried to the upper floors of the five- and six-storey buildings that dominated the narrow streets. The capital was now in effect in the hands of the people. The tocsin (the bell) summoned the Parisian masses to battle. The hated barrières (customs posts) which were resented by shopkeepers, wine merchants and small consumers, because they drove up the price of consumer goods, were burnt down. The arsonists were concerned also to destroy the monopoly of the Fermiers General (the tax collectors) and above all to control the exit and entry of persons and arms in and out of the city. Fearing bloody revenge from royalist troops, the main concern of the masses was for arms. Thus a frantic search for arms took place throughout the city. The bourgeois were alarmed at this mass movement. Earlier, one of the deputies of the Third Estate, a bourgeois from Bar-le-duc, Duquesnoy, summed up the attitude of the bourgeoisie when he wrote: ‘One must work for the good of the people, but the people must do nothing for it themselves’. Now that the people were acting for themselves and moreover with arms in hand, the alarm bells began to ring. Carlyle once more describes the scene: ‘On Monday the huge City has awoke, not to its weekday industry: to what a different one! The working man has become a fighting man; has one want only: that of arms. The industry of all crafts has paused – except it be the smith’s, fiercely hammering pikes; and, in a faint degree, the kitcchener’s, cooking offhand victuals’. A detachment of civilians and gardes-françaises broke into the monastery of Saint-Lazare, searched it for arms, released prisoners and removed food to the central market. Everywhere there was a search for arms. Religious houses, gunsmiths, armourers and harness makers were raided in different parts of the capital.
The bourgeoisie now took decisive measures in order to attempt to control the situation. They organised, with the permission of the king of course, a national guard. It was composed of ‘men of property’, who formed the backbone of this force. All vagrants and homeless persons and even a large part of wage-earners were excluded. It was in the words of Barnave, spokesman for the bourgeoisie, to be ‘bonne bourgeois’. Yet the arming of the masses went much further and wider than the bourgeois National Guard. Following the attack on the Invalides, the masses now concentrated on the Bastille.
Storming the Bastille
Royalist slanderers, contemptuous of the ‘ignorant’ Parisian masses, have always pictured the assault on the Bastille as something of a damp squib. The impression has been given that the Bastille was stormed in order to release revolutionaries incarcerated in this royalist stronghold. In fact it held at the time of the July insurrection no more than seven prisoners. It was of course a hated symbol of royalist despotism. But the main reason for storming the Bastille was in order to capture the arms which, it was believed, were stockpiled in large numbers within its confines. Moreover, the guns of the Bastille could have wreaked havoc if they were turned on the Parisian masses, particularly in the Rue Saint-Antoine, the main bastion of the revolution. The storming of the Bastille has been told many times and does not need to be repeated in detail here.
However, the crowds which besieged the Bastille did not in the first instance intend to storm it. The governor, de Launey, negotiated with a deputation from the bourgeois ‘electors’ for the handing over of gunpowder and arms. The besieging crowds filled the outer courtyard and the governor, mistakenly believing that an assault was about to take place, ordered his men to fire. The besiegers lost 98 dead and 73 wounded. The bourgeois ‘electors’ lost control of the situation and detachments of gardes-françaises and armed civilians from Saint-Antoine and the neighbouring districts used cannons against the main gates. Such was the outrage at de Launey’s unprovoked attack on the crowd earlier, that he, together with six other defenders, were massacred. This was the culmination of an insurrectionary movement which resulted in the complete capitulation of the monarch and the disintegration of the court party. Its effects reverberated throughout the whole of France and beyond its borders.
Trotsky once commented that only a minority directly participates in an insurrection, but the strength of that minority lies in the support or at least sympathy of the majority. It was not just those who directly participated in the storming of the Bastille who ‘made’ the revolution of 1789. They had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Parisian masses. This can be gauged by the fact that it is estimated that a quarter of a million Parisians, the vast majority of them opposed the privileged orders and the monarchy, were under arms at this stage.
The court camarilla urged the king to flee and seek support in the provinces. They themselves fled into foreign exile. The king, like Archimedes, was seeking a point of support with which to shift the axis of this changing world. His problem was that this did not exist. As one of his marshals put it: ‘We can get to Metz alright, but what are be to do when we have got there?’. The problem for the monarchy and the aristocracy was that the movement in Paris was echoed in the provinces and to some extent paralleled it. The dismissal of Necker also provoked an immediate reaction there.
In some towns the arsenal was broken into and workers’ militias were set up. The governor of Dijon was arrested and nobles and priests were confined to their dwellings. At Rennes the garrison deserted to the side of the people and the military commander fled. At Caen, a similar movement seized the citadel and attacked the hated tribunal de sel (the court which enforced the salt tax).
At Le Havre, the naval arsenal was seized and in Bordeaux insurgents took control and fraternized with the troops. As in Paris the commanders of the royal troops showed little enthusiasm for fighting for the dying regime. At the same time, the bourgeoisie of the provinces aped their counterparts in Paris. They set up ‘safe’ militias restricted to ‘men of property’. The ‘municipal revolution’ spread to the whole of France. It differed from place to place but in all instances it refused to recognise the royal power and only obeyed orders from the National Assembly.
Central authority was weakened and in the vacuum which was created ‘towns started to conclude mutual assistance pacts, spontaneously transforming France into a federation of Communes’. The Paris Commune – which was again to rise in revolution in 1871 – was in 1789 at first firmly under the control of the bourgeoisie, was the model for the bourgeoisie throughout France. Of course, the masses went much further than the bourgeoisie wished. In Paris, the assembles citizens met in the districts – divisions established for elections to the Estates General – claiming to supervise the municipal authority which had been set up to replace the ‘electors’. This was the beginning of the ‘direct democracy’ which the sans-culottes cherished and fought for in the course of the revolution.
The peasant rising
The movement of the peasantry ran alongside that of the urban masses. It is a myth that the peasants tamely waited for the deliberations of the bourgeois National Assembly, soon to become the Constituent Assembly, for the satisfaction of their demands. Nowhere, as Trotsky commented was feudalism abolished without force or the mobilisation of the masses.
The fundamental axis of the French revolution was in face a plebeian movement in the towns, supplemented by a peasant war to destroy the remnants of feudalism. It was only through the establishment of the Jacobin petit bourgeois democracy in Paris and the other towns of France that the feudal yoke was lifted from the backs of the peasants. They found a leadership in the towns, without which the peasant movement could not have succeeded. Indeed, the peasants supported the urban petit bourgeois democracy – the Jacobin/sans-culottes alliance – only up to the liquidation of feudalism in 1793. Thereafter, peasant hostility to the towns provided a reservoir for Thermidorean, and later Bonapartist, reaction.
In the months before and after the July revolution the countryside experienced huge rural insurrections, grain riots, assaults on millers, granaries and food convoys: ‘A vast national conflagration against the régime féodal as a whole and, in particular, against manorial registers housed by the landlords in the chareaux, monasteries or abbeys’.
In the previous year, peasants had protested at the game laws, hunting rights, royal taxes, tithes and seigneurial dues/ News of the Paris insurrection stimulated this movement even more. The agricultural crisis had increased the number of vagrants in the country areas as well as intensifying the hostility of the peasants to the landlords. The peasants concluded that the aristocrats together with the brigands were about to avenge themselves on them. They armed themselves, but when the brigands did not arrive they turned their arms against the mansions of the landlords instead. Burning chateaux lit up the skyline from one end of France to another. The target of this peasant war was not so much the buildings of the landlords themselves, but the manorial rolls through which the landlords had exacted further tribute from the peasants. This mass movement was decisive in forcing the hand of the bourgeoisie who dominated the National Assembly.
Under its pressure, the Assembly declared on the night of 4 August 1789 that ‘The feudal regime had been utterly destroyed’. In fact it had not, at least not yet. The remnants of serfdom were abolished, along with the corvée and ecclesiastical tithes. However, some of the more oppressive privileges and obligations – the cens, quit rent, champart, lods et ventes among them, were made ‘redeemable’: that is, the peasants had to pay for them by cash payment. But the masses went way beyond the letter of the law.
In all revolutions, the august bourgeois representatives in their assemblies invariably have to scramble to keep up with the insurgent masses. Thus, in the Spanish revolution, the Republican government elected in February 1936 managed to get round to ‘legally’ freeing workers who had been imprisoned in 1934 following the suppression of the Austurian commune only in September 1936 two months after Franco’s seizure of power! The masses, however, had already torn open the jails and released them as soon as the victory of the ‘Popular Front’ was announced!
The ‘redemptions’ of the National Assembly imposed on the peasants amounted to an expected total compensation of four thousand livres. This however remained a dead letter. The peasants simply refused to pay and the Jacobin Convention ratified the accomplished fact by a decree of July 1793, declaring the outstanding debt null and void.
The poverty and privations of the masses were the spur which drove the revolution forward. A survey by the Constituent Assembly in 1790 showed that some ten million people out of a population of twenty-five million were in need of relief and three million were considered to be ‘paupers’ – i.e. beggars!
In the aftermath of the storming of the Bastille, the king hesitated between flight and passive resistance until such time as the necessary forces could be assembled to crush the revolution and restore the rights of the aristocracy and the monarchy. He chose the latter course. On 17 July he made the journey from Versailles to the outskirts of Paris escorted by 50 deputies (Robespierre among them). He donned the new revolutionary cockade of red, white and blue, as a token of his acquiescence.
Flushed with confidence, the bourgeoisie proceeded to lay down the principles of its regime. These were enshrined in the famous ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ which began with the words: ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’. Wordsworth summed up the ardour which the declaration and the revolution aroused in all opponents of despotism. He wrote in the famous words from his poem Prelude: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven’. Conversely, the feudal reaction foamed at the mouth at the events unfolding in France.
The Rights of Man were defined as ‘Liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’. It also sanctioned the right to rebellion. While it is a general statement of universal principles and human rights, it was in essence in favour of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and those from the clergy and liberal aristocracy who had come over to their side. As Rudé commented: ‘Running through it all is the concern of the nation’s new rulers that the system to be devised must be adequately protected against the triple danger of royal “despotism”, aristocratic privilege and popular “licentiousness”.’
Though the declaration had proclaimed the right of all citizens to representation and involvement in the making of laws, it did not specify who should have the right to voteor how it should be exercised. This allowed the Sieyès, consummate representative of the bourgeoisie, to propose that only those of ‘substance and property’ should be allowed to vote in two electoral stages. Thus the population were divided into the ‘actives’ and the ‘passives’, with the ‘actives’ alone having the right to vote.
Under the 1791 Constitution formulated on the basis of the declaration, only 50 per cent of the population could qualify as electors in the ‘primary’ assemblies, and only one in a hundred might qualify as a national deputy. This of course was far more democratic than elections to the unreformed British Parliament, but the masses who had made the revolution were denied the ‘legal’ right to vote. Nevertheless, it was the intervention of these masses which was to push the revolution forward and to shatter the schemes of a section of the bourgeoisie to establish a ‘constitutional monarchy’ on the British pattern.
The bourgeoisie entertained fond hopes that the king would acquiesce in the establishment of such a regime. In August 1789, the liberal nobles, in conjunction with an estimated half of the deputies of the Third Estate, dubbed the ‘monarchiens’, controlled the Assembly. They wished to establish in France a bicameral system of an upper and lower house with the right of veto still retained by the king. They were denounced by the other patriots as ‘Anglomaniacs’, or simply ‘Englishmen’, for wanting to establish the English system in France. The majority of the patriots, however, still considered that the king should be given a ‘suspensive’ veto: that is, the right to delay legislation for three sessions but not an ‘absolute’ veto.
The king, while treacherously pretending publicly to accept the revolution, secretly wrote to one of his supporters on 5 August: ‘I will never consent to the spoliation of my clergy or my nobility. I will not sanction decrees by which they are despoiled’. In the teeth of royal intransigence, the bourgeois in the assembly were once more impotent. Using the divisions in the ranks of the patriots the king blocked all attempts to ‘legally’ complete the destruction of feudalism. It would take a second dose of revolution and the removal of the king from Versailles to Paris to bring the monarchy to heel.
The masses, particularly the starving population of neighbouring Paris, looked on the manoeuvres of the king and the monarchists in the assembly as part of the aristocratic plot to cheat them of the gains of the revolution. Notwithstanding idealist philosophers or professors of jurisprudence, be it in the eighteenth or the twentieth century for that matter, the masses do not make a revolution for abstract ‘idealistic’ reasons. They fight for a change in their conditions. Democracy is not an empty social abstraction but a means whereby they can acquire the weapons – in the modern epoch, the right to strike, freedom of assembly, free press, etc – with which to improve their lot in life. In this respect at least the Parisian masses were no different to the workers of the advanced industrial countries or the rural masses in the colonial and semi-colonial world today.
Together with the bourgeoisie, the sans-culottes had, they believed, carried through the revolution in July. However, because of the economic crisis, unemployment continued to escalate sharply. There were already 22,000 in the public workshops, where the unemployed were engaged on public works, of whom 18,000 were in Montmartre alone. The unemployed began to agitate for jobs, but on 9 August some were arrested for forming an ‘illegal’ assembly. Some trades began to press for increased wages and better working conditions. But imprisonment was the lot of those who championed the workers’ cause. At the same time the bourgeoisie, fearing the large concentration of workers in the public workshops, attempted to close them down, but met with the fierce resistance of the proletariat.
It was bread which was the main concern of Paris. The price had come down somewhat following the July insurrection, but was still very expensive at thirteen sous per pound. It was also in great demand, and the masses correctly saw the hand of the aristocrats and their agents as the force behind the shortages. Marat, through his journal L’Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People), founded in September 1789, denounced the hoarders and identified Necker, the king’s minister, as the chief accomplice of them. The masses compared the sumptuous lifestyle of the court at Versailles with the starvation that stalked the capital. Carlyle comments on the mood of the sans-culottes: ‘Yes, here with us is famine; but yonder at Versailles is food enough and to spare’.
It was the women of Paris who were to take the lead in the movement which culminated in the march to Versailles on October 5. Carlyle comments once more ‘Sullen is the male heart, repressed … men know not what the pantry is when it grows empty; only housemothers know … Will Guards named National thrust their bayonets into the bosoms of women? Such thought, or rather such dim unshaped raw material of a thought, ferments universally under the female nightcap; and, by earliest daybreak, on slight hint, will explode.’
On 16 September five cartloads of grain were stopped by women who brought it to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. The next day the women besieged Bailly the mayor of Paris, complaining about the conduct of the bakers. The following day, the Hôtel de Ville was once more besieged and a cartload of grain was held up.
At the same time a colossal political movement had begun in Paris in response to the deadlock at Versailles, where the Assembly was based. Agitators, such as Desmoulins, Danton and others whipped up popular indignation against the sabotage by the king at Versailles, where he had returned. The idea grew that the king should be removed from the intrigues of the court of Versailles and brought to Paris. This mood was reinforced by the growing popular conviction that the monarchy was considering fleeing from Versailles to Compiègne or Soissons, to prepare the forces to crush the revolution.
On the last day of August an abortive attempt was made to stage a march on Versailles. This came to nothing because the patriots in the assembly were still firmly committed to negotiations with the monarchy. However, the growing economic difficulties, together with the agitation of the patriots, had inflamed the Paris masses by the beginning of October. As in July, it was the provocations of the court at Versailles which were the trigger for mass action. The Flanders regiment had been summoned to Versailles on 1 October. Its purpose was allegedly to prevent ‘disorders’. Its mobilisation, together with a display of royalist and aristocratic arrogance, was to have precisely the opposite effect.
The October days
A sumptuous banquet was organised on 2 October with the royal family circulating amongst the degenerate aristocrats to wild acclaim. Menacing gestures against the ‘patriots’ and provocative speeches were made. The national cockade was trampled underfoot with the cry going up ‘Every man take the black cockade, that is the best one’. Black was the colour of Austria, and Marie Antoinette, as was well known, was an Austrian. The ‘ladies of the court’ distributed white cockades, the colour of the Bourbons. The class hatred felt by the masses for the monarchy commingled with the national hatred of the ‘foreign despot’ Marie Antoinette. The same feelings were expressed by the plebeian masses in the English revolution towards the French wife of King Charles I and also by the Russian workers and peasants towards the German wife of the last of the Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas II. Paris, when it learnt of the banquet, construed this as preparations for an assault on the assembly. Marat advised that forces be concentrated at the Hôtel de Ville in order to ward off the royalist counter-revolution. The district assemblies went into permanent session and, on Danton’s initiative, the Cordeliers Club demanded prosecution for the crime of Lèse-nation – a crime against the nation, as opposed to lèse-majesté, a crime against the king – of anyone wearing any but the tricolour cockade. The women of Paris were particularly stirred up at the debauchery at Versailles, the sumptuous living and the arrogance of Marie Antoinette.
The march on Versailles
On the morning of 5 October, a revolt began in the central markets and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The women led this movement in both areas. In the market the movement was started by a small girl, who set out from the district of Saint-Eustache beating a drum and declaiming against the scarcity of bread. Meanwhile, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the tocsin was rung at the instigation of the women calling the citizens to arms. The women from both areas then converged on the Hôtel de Ville, despite the presence of three and a half million livres in cash and the near starvation of the assailants, not a penny was taken. Indeed, at all stages of the revolution, the sans-culottes never resorted to looting but in fact punished any such manifestation, sometimes with death. Lafayette and Bailly were missing from the Hôtel de Ville and therefore the women, numbering about 7000, put at their head Maillard, one of the combatants of 14 July, and proceeded to march to Versailles. As they marched they chanted ‘Let us fetch the baker, the baker’s wife and the little baker’s lad’. Thus the Parisian masses, particularly the women, at this stage identified the king – the baker – and his return to the capital as a guarantee of plentiful food supplies. Lafayette, who was the commander of the bourgeois National Guard, first of all argued afainst emulating the women. But the whole of the city rang to the cries of ‘To Versailles’.
Threatened with the lanterne (that is, being hung from the nearest lamppost!), he consented to lead 20,000 men composed of National Guardsmen and about a thousand sans-culottes on a march to Versailles. Meanwhile Louis XVI, weighed down by the affairs of state, had gone hunting as was his custom in critical moments.
The women reached Versailles at five-thirty in the evening and a clash took place between the guards at the palace and the Parisians. Some of the demonstrators entered the king’s chateau and penetrated even as far as the ante-chamber of the queen’s apartment. One of the guards from a window shot dead a cabinet-maker from Saint-Antoine. Enraged, the crowd slaughtered two guards and cut off their heads.
Lafayette’s forces arrived at Versailles at ten that night and Lafayette himself was cordially received by the king. However, the masses were clamouring for the return of the king to Paris. One bourgeois commented that they were complaining that they had lost a day’s wages in the march to Versailles and ‘If the king did not come to Paris, and if the bodyguard were not killed, Lafayette’s head should be stuck on the end of a pike’. One of the leaders of the crowd, in language that could be readily understood by the masses, declared: ‘You don’t see that you are being screwed by Lafayette and the king. The whole damn bunch has to be taken to Paris’.
The king was under the impression that the only issue at stake was his veto over the constitutional decrees of the Assembly. Under mass pressure, and as a means of disarming the movement, he accepted the constitutional decrees of August and September and therefore the power of the Assembly. As Lefebvre comments: ‘The Assembly adjourned at 3 am. It alone had gained a substantial advantage from the day’s events, for the king had “accepted” the constitutional decrees and implicitly recognised that his “sanction” was not needed. Once again, a mass movement had assured the success of a juridical revolution’. The king considered that this was the end of the matter but the Parisian masses were determined to bring him back to the capital. The king appeared on a balcony with the royal family and the masses roared ‘To Paris’. After a few minutes the king accepted. Both the royal family and the National Assembly, the latter after a vote, agreed to transfer to Paris. The October days were a turning point in the revolution. The revolutionary bourgeoisie wished to defeat the plots of the king and the aristocracy to frustrate and roll back the gains of the July revolution. The people of Paris were less concerned at this conspiracy but were also motivated by their desperate social and economic situation. They combined together in the October days to weaken the veto of the king, with real power from now on lodged in the Assembly. The masses contributed the lion’s share to the victory in October but the bourgeoisie once more reaped most of the benefits. Having leaned on the people to gain victory over the aristocracy and ‘despotism’, the bourgeoisie now wanted them to go quietly back to sleep. The masses however had other ideas. The day after the king returned to Paris crowds of women invaded the corn market and dumped rotten flour into the river. This was followed in late October by a baker, Francois, receiving summary justice through the lanterne.
Dual Power
The Assembly, in an attempt to quell the mass movement, introduced the death penalty for rebellion, and also censorship aimed at the radical press, such as Marat’s paper. The bourgeoisie, eager to consolidate its power, did not hesitate to trample underfoot one of the proclaimed aims of the revolution: ‘liberty’. A Bastille labourer, Michel Adrien, was publicly hanged on 21 October, a bare four months after the revolution, for allegedly attempting to provoke ‘sedition’ in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Similar measures were taken against the peasants. The bourgeois National Assembly also took measures to curb any movement of the workers. However, neither the monarchy nor the aristocracy had abandoned all hope of rolling back the revolution.
A situation of dual power, a stage which is seen in all great revolutions, both of the bourgeois and of the socialist type, obtained in France at this stage. The Assembly, the Backbone of which was the upper levels of the Third Estate, concentrated the real power in its hands. However, it had not fully succeeded in removing the prerogatives of the king. Louis had sent secret messages to Vienna and Madrid repudiating all the concessions he had made since 15 July. Aristocrats began to flood out of France and the ‘monarchiens’ in the Assembly withdrew, some of them in an attempt to raise the provinces against Paris. Over 300 deputies asked for their passports, a clear sign that they were intending to flee, but in the event of 26 actually withdrew from the Assembly.
The king still hoped that enough internal reserves existed, bolstered by the threat of foreign intervention which in time could be used to organise the counter-revolution. The phenomenon of dual power or ‘double sovereignty’ would be manifested in subsequent stages of the revolution but involving different forces. This first period of dual power between the Assembly and the monarchy comes to an end with the flight of the king to Varennes in June 1791.
In its early days, the Assembly, in conjunction with the Commune, took energetic measures on the food front. Regular supplies of grain were supplied to the bakers. The bourgeoisie set about organising its regime, administration, economy and army. Latterday right-wing bourgeois historians have laboured to ‘prove’ that the French revolution was of little economic consequence. Thus Neewsweek (20 February 1989) declared: ‘One of the most persistent misconceptions about the revolution is the idea that it “modernised” a backward, under industrialised France.’ It points to a growth in industry throughout the eighteenth century but then declares ‘The revolution slowed these processes’. It further cites the views of an ‘expert’, Pierre Chaunu, a right-wing professor at the Sorbonne University. He declaims that the revolution worked to the advantage of France’s main rival. ‘It [the revolution] made England the industrial power of the nineteenth century’. These merely echo similar arguments deployed by the bourgeois historians against the historical legitimacy of the Russian revolution. According to this school of thought, the Russian revolution, by inaugurating a planned economy, actually retarded rather than enormously speeded up the Russian economy. It is an incontestable historical fact, that no economy history, not even the Japanese economy at the height of the post-war boom, has equalled that of Russia since 1917. The colossal potential of the planned economy, despite the enormous wastage and mismanagements, inevitable in a totalitarian one party regime, is justified in the advances of the Russian economy and in the living standards of the Russian masses. As to the argument that France would have progressed at an even greater rate, a cursory examination of the fact proves otherwise. The unification of the national market was carried through. Domestic traffic was freed from the tolls and the check-points. This in turn provided the framework for the future untrammelled development of the productive forces. Lefebvre comments:
Unbinding its fetters was not enough to transform production, and for that reason many have stated that the revolution did not mark a decisive date in French economic history. In fact, it neither launched nor accelerated production, and later the war retarded it. The Constituent Assembly nevertheless paved the way for future events. We have no better testimony to the advent of the bourgeoisie than the first proclamation of economic freedom in Europe.
The bourgeoisie were, of course, not prepared to extend the same kind of ‘freedom’ to the incipient proletariat. The assembly closed down the public workshops which had been set up in 1789 to absorb the unemployed. At the same time, they introduced the infamous Le Chapelier law making combinations illegal. That is, they outlawed workers coming together to oppose the massive increases in food prices or to fight for wage increases. This measure had been preceded by strikes of carpenters and other workers and was introduced at the behest of the manufacturers. Not a single deputy, not even Robespierre, objected to the introduction of this law. Trade unions were outlawed throughout the revolution, and the law was not finally repealed until 1884.
However, the year 1790 was better than most for the mass of the French population. The price of bread had fallen to 8 sous per pound by June of 1790. This together with other factors was responsible for a peaceful interlude in the revolution. This period of relative social peace lasted with minor interruptions until the spring of 1791.
The tempo at which a revolution develops is determined by a number of factors. A critical element is undoubtedly the role of the revolutionary party – what Marxists call the subjective factor – in the revolution. Thus, the Russian revolution developed in a rapid fashion, over nine months, primarily because of the role of the Bolshevik Party, with a far-sighted revolutionary leadership, which was in place before the revolution.
The French revolution gave power to the Jacobins only after a period of almost four years. The Jacobin party, for that is what it was, did not exist prior to 1789, but was created in the fire of events themselves.
In a revolution, which is a process not just one act, such pauses are inevitable. The masses after the exertions of an insurrection pause and take stock. However the National Assembly, subject to the ferocious and conflicting forces after the October days, could not arrive at agreement on any fundamental issue. The deputies were under the constant scrutiny of the Parisian masses who, from the time of the Estates General, had flooded out the visitors galleries, sat in the gangways and sometimes on the chairman’s and speakers’ rostrums. They never hesitated to boo and hiss at speakers who aroused their ire. There were constant interruptions, the hearing of cahiers (petitions on grievances) from ‘hordes of delegations which filed up to the speakers’ desk facing the president’.
The constitutional monarchists, now led by Lafayette, attempted to draw sections of the patriots over to their side with the offer of ministerial positions. Mirabeau proposed that the king should be allowed to select ministers as in the British ‘parliamentary’ system. The patriots, realising that this would split their ranks, prohibited deputies from accepting ministerial positions. Mirabeau constantly and secretly conspired with the king and the queen behind the backs of the Assembly. He even urged the monarchy to organise their own party, with him of course in the leadership. But, the Assembly was compelled under mass pressure to ratify the dismantling of the feudal system. This it achieved in a series of decreed. Thus on 7 November 1789, the ‘social orders’ ceased to exist and on 28 February 1790 ‘venality in office’ was abolished from the army, which meant that ‘commoners’ could be promoted from the ranks. In February 1790 each commune elected a municipal council and ‘manorial authority’ over the villages was destroyed. One consequence of this decentralisation was a disastrous financial crisis. Having made the revolution, arms in hand, the masses refused to pay indirect taxes and were reluctant to pay any others.
The land was the main source of wealth and therefore the main source of taxation. The Assembly also taxed income and ‘moveable’ property, but without a proper survey taxes could not be equalised and therefore the total amount was estimated on the basis of the old ‘tax system’. This particularly irritated the peasants, who were crushed by the taxes of the ancien regime – the old order of feudal France. Karl Marx once commented that when the French peasants thought of the devil they imagined him in the guise of a tax collector!
The sale of Church property
The financial situation went from bad to worse. Faced with economic catastrophe, the Constituent Assembly was compelled to take emergency measures. It solved the problem by proposing the sale of church property. It used these assets as security for the ‘assignats’; state credit notes which eventually became the currency of the revolution. The bourgeoisie had long looked hungrily towards the wealth of the church. The value of its properties, including those of the parishes and monastic orders, yielding an income of 100 million livres a year, represented something between 40 and 50 per cent of the landed wealth in every province of the realm. It was, moreover, exempted from taxation other than what it voluntarily ceded to the state.
With the church discredited and divided, on 2 November 1789, its estates were ‘put at the nation’s disposal’. In a series of other decrees the regular clergy was suppressed apart from the teaching or charity orders and they were relieved of authority to administer property. At the same time, the state set up a budget of ‘public worship’ and in May 1790 outlined the specific terms of sale of church land. It ordered creditors to accept payment in assignats, as a means of establishing its new currency.
These measures did not immediately bring the church into conflict with the revolution. Many of the parish priests, now state officials, were being paid more generously than before. Moreover, the Assembly had no intention of disestablishing the Catholic Church. While it recognised a fuller freedom of right to worship, extending this to Protestants (and later to Jews), it still upheld the privileged position of the Catholic Church as the state church of France. The re-organisation of dioceses as a means of saving money to the state did provoke, however, some opposition in depriving bishops and some priests of their livelihood. The refusal of the assembly, however, to submit the civil constitution of the clergy in 1790 to a vote of a synod of the church for its approval or otherwise provoked a furious opposition.
After a period of negotiation, during which the bishops of France appealed to the Pope, the assembly finally implemented unilaterally the constitution of 1790. They ordered clerics holding office to take an oath of allegiance to the constitution of the kingdom (and, therefore, by implication, to the civil constitution of the clergy) yet only two of the Assembly’s 44 bishops and a mere one-third of its clerical members complied. Those who took the oath were ‘jurors’ and those who refused were ‘non-jurors’. After much hesitation the Pope came to the support of the ‘non-jurors’ instructing all members of the clergy to withdraw their support for the church settlement. This was an important factor in the revolution, identifying the opponents of the civil constitution as enemies of the revolution itself. The majority of the clergy were to play a counter-revolutionary role and were to earn the hatred of the revolutionaries, receiving no mercy. The role of the clergy in supporting the counter-revolution led to the ferocious suppression of the Vendée and other attempts at civil war by the aristocracy.
The counter-revolution organises
The open forces of the counter-revolution, organised behind the ‘blacks’ – the most reactionary wing of the aristocracy – continued even after October to organise resistance against the Assembly. They attempted to use the parlements and whipped up the provinces, particularly in the Dauphiné and Cambrésis. They also organised the suppression of the peasant movement, sometimes continuing the old ‘manorial rights’ in defiance of the law. In age old fashion they sought to convince the poor that only the well being of the privileged orders could guarantee the general well-being of society. If the privileged classes were ruined, the poor would also be dragged down.
Some of the aristocrats fled abroad in preparation for foreign intervention. Others openly campaigned within the borders of France for intervention, while others fomented civil war in the region of the Midi. The first conspiracy, the Languedoc plan, resulted in bloody fights in May and June 1790. This was followed in July by the Lyons plan, with a proposal for different aristocratic armies to march on the city. The insurrection was fixed for 10 December and was supposed to coincide with the flight of the king from Paris. However, a number of conspirators were arrested and the nest of aristocratic conspirators in Lyons was cleared out.
The revolutionary societies
The masses were on constant alert, encouraged by those like Marat who urged them to take offensive action against the aristocratic counter-revolution. The balance of forces in France at this stage was decisively in favour of the revolution. The main feature in the situation was the self-organisation of the bourgeoisie, paralleled by a similar movement amongst the masses. Thus in November 1789, the Breton club was reconstituted in Paris at a monastery owned by the Dominicans, who were popularly known as ‘Jacobins’. This club, the ‘Society of Friends of the Constitution’, was hitherto known by the more popular name of Jacobins.
At the outset, the Jacobins had a high subscription rate of 36 livres, and 12 livres entrance fee. This indicated the predominantly petit bourgeois composition. Gradually, however, they acquired a mass base. Additional spectators’ galleries were built, which allowed the Parisian masses to follow and influence the debates of the Club.
Following this, clubs sprang up in practically every town in France and affiliated to the Paris society. At the height of the revolution, the membership of the Jacobin clubs stood at over one million. The upper bourgeoisie and the liberal nobles who had gone over to them organised their own clubs, embryonic political parties, such as Lafayette’s ‘Brothers and Friends’.
As in all revolutions, an enormous thirst for knowledge developed amongst the masses, not just the petit bourgeois who were able to read, but the sans-culottes also. Revolutionary journals sprang up like mushrooms in the forest at the first hint of spring rains. It has been estimated that only one edition of Rousseau’s famous Social Contract was published before 1789. In the next ten years however, during a period of revolution and counter-revolution, ten more editions of the book were published!
It was amongst the most oppressed masses, the sans-culottes, that the thirst for ideas as a means of arming themselves for battle was the greatest. They were amazed and angry that they were pushed aside by the newly triumphant bourgeoisie. Four and a half million ‘active citizens’ were allowed the vote. These met in ‘primary assemblies’, which in turn chose the electors and they elected the deputy in the main town or department. Three million ‘passive citizens’ were denied voting rights. Yet even under the old regime they had at least taken part in local assemblies.
The defection to the king of a section of the patriots aroused suspicions amongst the masses. This in turn led the ‘district of Cordeliers’ under the guidance of Danton and his friends to acquire support amongst the Parisian masses. They protected Marat from arrest and challenged the bourgeois leaders of the Commune.
Repression inevitably followed and the districts were dissolved in May 1790. This was immediately followed by the founding of a club, ‘The Cordeliers’, to protect the citizens against ‘abuses of authority’ and whose emblem was ‘Eye of vigilance’. Its monthly subscription of only one penny made it accessible to the masses. Its plebeian style and the speeches of its orators were in sharp contrast to the lavish dinners of the 1789 Club and the rather academic oratory of the Jacobins. Later on, following the defection of the bourgeois ‘Feuillants’ to the king, the Cordeliers were to be linked to the Jacobins. At the same time the Abbe Fauchet opened his ‘Cercle Social’ in which the ideas of ‘social’, that is socialistic, Christianity were preached. Several thousand Parisian sans-culottes regularly attended its meetings. Like Babeuf later on, Fauchet, in his newspaper Bouche-de-Fer, denounced private property and the inadequacy of mere political reform. He commanded the enthusiasm of the poorer citizens and the ire of the bourgeois republicans. These clubs undoubtedly played a critical role in the education of the masses in preparation for the future events.
The role of women
Women were also admitted to the Cercle Social and were able to join the new fraternal and popular societies which sprang up in 1791.
At no stage in the revolution, however, were women accorded the right to vote. And yet, they were a critical factor in the revolution and in the organisations of the revolutionary power. In order to battle the enormous role of the women sans-culottes, bourgeois historians either extol the virtues of those such as the wife of the Gironde leader, Mme Roland, or ridicule the well-known feminists such as Claire Lacombe and Olympe de Gouges. These latter were involved with the Sociétés des républicaines révolutionnaires, the Parisian women’s clubs. Standing on the extreme left, they began in 1793 to demonstrate in the streets, decked out in red and white striped trousers and items of military uniform, demanding entry to the Convention and the Jacobin Club. To begin with, the Jacobins welcomed these citoyennes, but their method of ‘winning friends and influencing people’ was to attack, sometimes physically, all those they did not like or who were opposed to them. The Jacobins and even many sans-culottes were repelled by them. This was reinforced by the fact that some, like Olympe de Gouges, supported the Gironde and opposed the king’s execution.
But far more important was the movement from below of the militant women in the plebeian Faubourgs. Women played a key role, not just in the journées, but also in the basic organisations of the revolution – the general assemblies of the sections. This was particularly the case from the autumn to October 1793, when the women’s clubs were banned.
Before then, however, as in ll revolutions, women – amongst the most oppressed strata – were more determined than the men in demanding, and sometimes enforcing, revolutionary changes. In 1793, the women demanded the right to vote. At the time of the primary assemblies at the beginning of July 1793, women participated in the main assemblies at the beginning of July 1793, women participated in the main assemblies of the societies, sometimes voting by acclamation, but not by role-call. Women also enthusiastically accepted the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, and some voices were raised demanding the right to vote. According to Soboul:
After the president of the Beaurepaire delegation had presented to the Convention his section’s approval of the Constitution, he yielded the floor to a citoyenne who loudly demanded political equality … [she declared] ‘Women … are not counted in the political system. We are asking you from the primary assemblies, and since the constitution rests on the rights of man, we demand the full exercise of those rights’. Thuriot … merely responded that the Convention would examine this demand.
Despite the ‘legal’ ban on women’s voting rights, they did participate and vote in many of the Parisian sections in the summer of 1793. This in turn led to popular women’s societies, such as the Society of the Revolutionary Republican Women, being formed, demanding the vote. Moreover, some of the male societies, such as the Society of Free Men, opened their doors to women. This pressure was maintained for equal rights for women up to the suppression of the exclusively feminist Society of Revolutionary Republicans by the Jacobins. However, the sans-culottes continued to admit women to the sections and popular societies.
The bourgeoisie, even its most extreme wing, were hostile to granting equal rights for women. The Thermidorean reaction in 1795 banned all women from ‘attending’ political assemblies, and ordered the arrest of those who would gather in groups of more than five. Despite their low cultural level, only amongst the organisations of the sans-culottes did the demands of women find an echo in the revolution. These organisations, the clubs and sections, ceaselessly explained the course of the revolution and the nature of the legislation passed by the assembly.
The movement and organisation of women was an indication of how the revolution had sunk deep roots into Parisian society and allowed a whole number of mass leaders to arise, to be trained and educated, who were to play a decisive role in subsequent developments. They were the organisers, together with the Jacobin leaders and the Cordeliers, of the mass movement which was to result in the establishment of the republic and the execution of the king. Before that stage was reached however, the revolution would feel the whip of the counter-revolution.
