the french revolution - Ça ira! - university of warwick · 2014-11-04 · the french revolution it...
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The French Revolution - Ça ira!
• Ça ira! (Edith Piaf)
– Ça ira, ça ira! Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
– Song dates from the Revolution itself.
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Making of the Modern World
The French Revolution
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The French Revolution
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
The French Revolution is a movement of God. It is a pure gift to progress. - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
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Enduring Reference Point for Social and Political Change
• ‘It will be like the French Revolution… It will take years.’
• Hatim Tallima of the Revolutionary Socialists in Cairo, 2013 (Arab Spring)
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Watershed moment of modernity
• Overturned
– Divine-right, absolutist monarchy
– Privilege (as opposed to equality before the law)
– Nobility
– Guilds, corporations
– The Church’s wealth and moral preeminence
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• Inaugurated (sometimes in ‘proto’ form): – Liberalism – Republicanism – Socialism – Conservatism – Free-market capitalism – Feminism – Nationalism – Imperialism (an ideologically driven form of it) – Liberal authoritarianism (contradiction in terms?) – Totalitarianism (Cold War term: from Rousseau, to
Robespierre, to Stalin?) – Secular universalism
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Burke (anti) vs. Paine (pro)
• Kings will be tyrants by policy when subjects are rebels by principle.
– Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
• The circumstances of the world are continually changing and the opinions of man also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.
– Paine, Rights of Man (1791)
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• Origins – Circumstances (financial, political) – Class – Enlightenment ideas – Public Opinion
• Course – Was radicalisation inevitable? – Why the Terror (1793-94, the Year II)? – Why did republicanism give way to Bonapartism?
• Legacies – Did the French Revolution pave the way to liberalism and
human rights, social democracy or pathological forms of democracy?
Historical debates
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Thesis of circumstances
• Financial breakdown – France helped finance the American War for Independence
from Britain (1770s-1780s) – More than half of annual tax revenues used up to pay interest
on the debt (1786) – No central bank, regime borrowed at high interest rates – Refusal to pay more taxes
• Political juggernaut
– Parlements and Notables (represent ‘the nation’) vs. – Monarchy
• Bad harvests, high bread prices
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Class Interpretation (prevalent in mid-20th century)
• Three Estates
– Clergy
– Nobles
– Third Estate
• High bourgeoisie: all the wealth and productive power but no political power
• Abbé Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (1789)
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Enlightenment Origins: Ideas?
• Faute à Rousseau?
– Collective sovereignty
– Moral regeneration and virtue
– Utopian principles lead to authoritarianism?
• Faute à Voltaire and aux philosophes?
– Desacralisation of throne and altar
– Critical reason trumps ethics, morality
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Enlightenment Origins: Public Opinion
– A more literate and critical public
• Content of print and conversations – Critical of monarchy (debauched, arbitrary, corrupt)
– Irreverence for sacred power: throne and altar
• The rise of a critical public, thinking for oneself – People, bombarded with print (some of it produced by
politically interested sources like the monarchy) learn to be skeptical
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Course of Revolution
• Liberal Phase – 1789-1792 (constitutional monarchy)
• Radical Phase – 1792-1794 (republic)
– Year II, the Terror (1793-94)
• Thermidor – 1794-1795 (republic)
• Directory – 1795-1799 (republic, but increasingly authoritarian)
• Consulate, Empire – 1799-1814 (Napoleon)
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Meeting of the Estates General May 1789
• Prior failure to persuade hand-picked assemblies of notables (1787 and 1788) to agree to more taxes
• Parlement (sovereign judicial courts) refuses to agree to more taxes
• Only remaining solution is an Estates General: a meeting of the clergy, nobles and third estate. First time since 1614 (absolutism had suppressed most representative bodies).
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1789 – La Révolution
• June 17 - Third Estate, impatient and suspicious of clergy and nobles, declares itself to be ‘the nation’. Asserts its sovereign authority over taxation and swears to uphold the debt
• Also creates a committee to investigate bread crisis and propose solutions.
• Late June – Louis XVI eventually concedes but plots military repression.
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June 20 – Tennis Court Oath (indoor, see below) New National Assembly takes an oath to refuse to disband until Constitution is completed June 27 – Louis XVI concedes but plots military repression
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1789
• July 14 – The Storming of the Bastille – Parisians, in search of arms to protect themselves from monarchy’s
repression, attack this fortress and prison on the edge of Paris for arms; few prisoners being held there at the time. Governor fires on crowds, who storm the prison and put his head on a pike.
• August 4 – Abolition of Privilege (end of the Old Regime, since privilege was at the very heart of it)
• End of August: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
• October 5-6 – Women’s Bread March to Versailles – Brings King, Queen and National Assembly to Paris, where they were
more vulnerable to popular pressures
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Storming of the Bastille, July 14 Was torn down, stone by stone
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Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen note resemblance to Ten Commandments: a modern, secular religion?
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1790 • Civil Constitution of the Clergy
– State seizes church lands (10-12% of all land), which will be auctioned off (to pay for the national debt)
– Closure of monasteries and convents (seen as un-useful institutions in an age of Enlightenment utility)
– Requires religious clerics to swear an oath to uphold the new Constitution
• Left/Right splits in National Assembly
– Arch-Royalists sit on right; Progressives (Jacobins and their allies) on the left
• Spread of Jacobin clubs throughout France
– Who were Jacobins? • Initially a group of legislators who met to strategize • Eventually, became a nationwide network of clubs in favour of a constitution,
rights and legal equality • Often pressured local officials to carry out new laws
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1791
• June: Flight of the King to Varennes – Intended to return with counterrevolutionary
troops to put down the Revolution (Marie-Antoinette’s brother, Joseph, was emperor of the Habsburg Empire)
– Louis XVI was recognized at border by a postman, sent back to Paris
• July: Radicals call for a Republic – authorities fire on them: Massacre on the Champs de Mars
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1791
• Constitution (September)
• Legislative Assembly replaces Constituent Assembly
• Abolition of guilds, corporations and all government regulation bodies
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1792 • Tensions increase
– Religious Counterrevolutionary propaganda proliferates Resistance to clerical oath and anger about new constitutional priests imposed on parishes -- Social and economic Disruptions in the world of labour; popular discontent infiltrates political clubs and sections -- Political King is essentially a prisoner in Paris, plotting in hopes of a foreign invasion to put down revolution Divisions among revolutionaries radicals vs. moderates (Jacobins / Girondins)
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1792
• April: War declared against Austria. Soon, France is at war with most of its neighbours, who fear the spread of revolution.
• August 10: The monarchy falls in violent insurrection
• September 2-7: Prison massacres of priests and nobles in Paris by radical ‘sans-culotte’ forces
• September 21: First Republic declared
– Constitution won’t be promulgated until June of 1793 – Operating in a state of exception… all executive decisions easily
denounced as arbitrary… no constitutional guidelines.. Sharp tensions between a free-market and regulated economy
– Pressure for political justice
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1793
• January 21: Louis XVI is guillotined • March: counterrevolutionary revolts in Vendée • Terror gears up
– Creation of the Committee of Public Safety (executive) – Committee of General Security (police committee) – Revolutionary Tribunals (which condemn ‘enemies’ of the
revolution to the guillotine
• June: Jacobins, pushed by sans-culottes in Paris, purge the Girondins from National Convention.
• Summer: Federalist Revolts against Paris and sans-culotte movement (provinces resent purge)
• Autumn: Marie-Antoinette and Girondins guillotined
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1794
• Slavery in French colonies abolished (Feb)
• Terror escalates (spring) – Purge of Dantonistes (who wanted to end the Terror) – Purge of Hébertistes (sans-culottes who wanted to push the
Terror further)
• High Terror (June/July): thousands executed in Paris • 27 July (9 Thermidor): Robespierre and other members of
the Committee of Public Safety are arrested and guillotined
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1795-1799
• The Directory
– Executive-heavy Republic, with 5 directors
– Difficult to pursue a middle path between radicalism and royalism
– 1797: elections are nullified; repression increases
– Revolution exported; the republican generals gain in reputation and power
• 18 Brumaire (Nov 9, 1799): Coup brings Napoleon to power
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1800-1815
• Consulate and First Empire: – Napoleon conquers much of Europe
– overturns old regimes across Europe
– Fleeces conquered countries but imposes new ideology and administrative structures… creating new political and administrative structures that will help bring about the rise of ‘nation states’ across the 19th century
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Key terms and concepts
• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) • Jacobinism (centralising state, fiercely secular, touch of
social justice) • Sans-culottes (for economic regulations and punishment of
‘enemies’ of the nation) • Vendée (civil war) • Levée en masse – universal draft, largest army in Europe
almost overnight (1793---) • Terror • Guillotine (pain and torture is no longer the point of judicial
punishment. Equality and prompt, painless elimination of enemies from the nation)
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The Terror in perspective
• Struck at all ‘suspects’ of the new regime.
• Deaths from revolutionary strife
– 17,000 executions by revolutionary tribunals
– 15,000-17,000 die in prison
• Deaths in civil and foreign wars (1792-1815) – roughly 4 million across Europe
– 250,000 to 400,000 in the civil war of the Vendée
– Most deaths occur during Napoleon’s wars
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A new culture
• Time, weights and measure - rationality – Metric system created – more rational than inches, feet, etc. – Revolutionary Calendar based on nature. 10 day weeks
• Brumaire (Nov-Dec): ‘brume’ means fog • Ventôse (March-Apr): ‘vent’ means wind
• Revolutionary Festivals – Festival of the Supreme Being (June 1794)
• Deism • Notre Dame cathedral converted into the Temple of Reason
• Some public schools and museums founded
• Cult of the Nation –
– Pantheon: where France’s ‘great’ heroes were buried • Voltaire, Rousseau, radical murdered journalist Marat, etc.
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Revolutionary Calendar
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Sample of a ‘meter’ for public to use as guide, during Revolution
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A Temple of Reason (conversion of church, 1794)
Reads: The French people recognise the Supreme Being and the immortality of the spirit
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Festival of the Supreme Being
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Guillotine Execution of Louis XVI (Jan 21, 1793)
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Impact
• Revolutionary Europe (19th Century) – Notably in 1848
• Nationalism, rise of nation states (19th/20th centuries)
• Democratic revolutions across the world (20th century)
• Literature and Philosophy – Fires imaginations for more than two centuries
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Founding Interpretations
• Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790) – Modern conservatism
– Need for tradition and reverence
• Alexis de Tocqueville (The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 1857) – Abstract literary politics (Enlightenment) combines
with state centralisation to form new, modern forms of political oppression
• Marx/Jaurès (mid 19th, turn-of-20th) – Revolution as class war
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Confused?
Brief overview here, or:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXsZbkt0yqo