A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  Chapter 2

  The French Revolution

  ‘Here and today begins a new age in the history of the world,’ wrote Goethe, the foremost representative of the Enlightenment in Germany, in the summer of 1792.

  A year previously, the Dutch conservative patrician van Hagendorp had seen the way things were going. ‘In all nations’ two great parties were forming, he wrote. One, the party of the church and state, believed in ‘a right government to be exercised by one or several persons over the mass of people, of divine origin and supported by the church’. The other denied any right of government, ‘except that arising from the free consent of all those who submit to it’ and held ‘all persons taking part in government accountable for their actions’. 24

  What excited Goethe was that these two great ‘parties’ had confronted each other on the field of battle at Valmy, in northern France, and the second party had won. The forces of the French Revolution had defeated the armies of half the monarchies of Europe.

  Ten years earlier nothing would have seemed more absurd to most thinking people than the idea of a revolution in France, let alone one that would set all Europe ablaze. The French monarchy had ruled for well over 1,000 years and had enjoyed unchallenged power for 140 years. Louis XIV, the ‘sun king’, and his great palace at Versailles symbolised the consolidation of an enduring ‘absolutism’ which had made France the greatest power in Europe, such had been the inheritance of his successors Louis XV and Louis XVI.

  Yet in the summer of l789 that power had suddenly begun to fall apart. The king had summoned representatives of the three ‘estates’ which made up French society – the clergy, the nobles and the rest of the population, the ‘Third Estate’ – to discuss ways of raising taxes. But the representatives of the Third Estate had refused either to bow to the nobles or to do what the king told them. They proclaimed themselves a ‘National Assembly’ and, gathering on a tennis court after the king had locked them out of their hall, swore an oath not to disperse until he gave them a constitution. The king responded by summoning 20,000 troops and sacking his chief minister, Necker, supposedly sympathetic to the call for reform.

  Chronology of the French Revolution

  1787–88: Aristocrat reaction resists taxes on big estates, king agrees to call Estates-General.

  April 1789: Meeting of Estates-General in Versailles.

  June 1789: Third Estate delegate declare themselves National Assembly.

  July 1789: Parisian crowd storms Bastille.

  October 1789: Women’s march on Versailles, king dragged back to Paris, Lafayette’s national guards begin to dominate city, constitutional monarchy.

  July 1790: Festival of the Federation in Paris, celebration of ‘harmony’ between king and people.

  Spring 1791: King tries to flee Paris.

  July 1791: Guards massacre people in Champ de Mars.

  August 1791: Beginning of slave rising in Saint-Domingue (Haiti).

  September 1791: Constitution with tight property qualification.

  January 1792: Food riots in Paris.

  April 1792: Girondin government declares war on Austria and Prussia, serious military defeats.

  August 1792: Insurrectionary journée in Paris, arrest of the king, Danton joins government.

  September 1792: Victory at Valmy, election of Convention by male adult suffrage.

  January 1793: Execution of king.

  February 1793: Britain joins war.

  Spring 1793: Advance of invading armies towards Paris, Royalist risings in west of France (Vendée).

  May–June 1793: Insurrection in Paris, Jacobin government led by Robespierre and Danton, civil war.

  Summer 1973: Murder of Marat, end of all feudal payments, Royalists hand Toulon to British.

  September 1793: Journée in Paris, law setting maximum prices, beginning of Terror.

  October–December 1793: Defeat of Royalist and Girondist revolts.

  February 1794: Jacobins end slavery throughout French Empire.

  March–April 1794: Execution first of Hébert, then of Danton, by Jacobins, revolutionary armies successful on all fronts.

  June–July 1794: ‘Great Terror’.

  July 1794: ‘Thermidor’, execution of Robespierre and other Jacobins.

  November–December 1794: Jacobin club closed, repeal of ‘maximum’ laws for prices.

  March–May 1795: Vicious suppression of last popular rising, 1,200 arrests, 36 executions.

  September 1795: New constitution with restricted suffrage, government relies on Bonaparte to suppress royalist rising, real power with five-man Directory.

  November 1799: Bonaparte seizes power, becomes ‘first consul’.

  1804: Bonaparte makes himself Emperor Napoleon I.

  The delegates of the Third Estate were all from the respectable middle class, and most from the wealthier parts of it. Half were lawyers, the rest mostly merchants, bankers, businessmen and wealthy middle-class landowners. There was not a single artisan or peasant. They were also almost all convinced of the need for a monarchy, albeit a ‘constitutional one’, and for rigid property qualifications in any electoral system. But they were not prepared simply to be crushed, and the arguments in Versailles were creating a ferment among vast numbers of people in Paris who had never thought of politics before. Clubs emerged, initially among well-off members of the middle class, at which people discussed what was happening. A host of news sheets and pamphlets appeared. Some 400 representatives of the Parisian middle class met in the city hall and declared themselves the city council, or ‘commune’.

  The fall of the Bastille and after

  Rumours of a pending military coup stirred the masses of the city as never before. On 12 July crowds from the poorer sections of the city demonstrated, seizing any muskets they could find. Two days later a vast number marched on the symbol of royal domination over the city, the Bastille fortress, 100 feet high and surrounded by an 80-foot moat. This was not just some protest demonstration. Powder for muskets was stored in the building, and innumerable opponents of the regime had been imprisoned there. The crowd was determined to capture it. The defenders opened fire with cannon. Three hours of shooting followed, causing 83 deaths. People dragged out cannon of their own, seized from the Hotel des Invalides. After threatening to blow up the fortress and the popular district around it, the commander surrendered the Bastille to the masses. Revolution had taken hold of the capital – an example soon to be followed in town after town across the country.

  The fall of the Bastille was the first great turning point in the revolution. The action of the Parisian masses emboldened the National Assembly to decree the abolition of feudalism (although it expected the peasants to pay compensation for the ending of feudal dues) and to pass a ‘declaration of the rights of man’, similar in tone to the American Declaration of Independence. Further mass action thwarted another attempt by the king to stage a military coup. Women from the poorer areas of Paris marched to Versailles, pulling 20,000 armed men behind them. They broke into the palace and forced the king to return with them to Paris, where he would be under popular surveillance.

  This was still a long way short of the overthrow of the monarchy. The crowd which attacked the Bastille and the women who marched on Versailles did so very much on their own initiative, prompted by the food shortages hitting poor areas as well as by hatred of the king’s aristocratic friends. But they still accepted the leadership of the official representatives of the Third Estate – upper middle-class men who wanted only limited change. These concentrated the new armed power in Paris in the hands of a National Guard recruited almost exclusively from the better-off sections of the middle class. Presiding over it was Lafayette, a former general and aristocrat, whose ‘democratic’ credentials came from acting as an official French adviser in the American War of Independence. Under his leadership the assembly set about framing a constitution which restricted the vote, through a steep property qualification, to so-called active citizens and left
the king with the power to delay new laws by two years. People were expected to rejoice at a new order built around the ‘unity’ of the king and the assembly, of the rich and the poor. Many did at first. There was a general feeling of liberation and exaltation when the king, ex-aristocrats, the middle classes and the Parisian masses jointly commemorated the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille at a great ‘Festival of the Federation’.

  The sense of unity did not last long. The aristocrats bitterly resented the loss of their old privileges, even though they hung on to their wealth. Many were to move abroad, from where they plotted the overthrow of the revolution with those who stayed behind. The king and queen wrote secretly to other monarchs, urging a foreign invasion.

  At the same time, there was growing bitterness among the masses of both country and town at the fact that material conditions had not improved. Already, the summer of 1789 had seen a wave of discontent among the peasantry – ‘the great fear’ – which involved the invasion of aristocratic châteaux and burning of titles to feudal dues. In the cities and market towns there was repeated agitation over food shortages, price rises and unemployment which merged into a hatred for aristocrats and speculators. There was a ferment of ideas, encouraged by a proliferation of newspapers – 250 burst into print in the last six months of 1789 alone – and the influence of political clubs where people met to debate what was happening. The best known of these was the Jacobin club in Paris, dominated by a lawyer from the northern town of Arras, Robespierre, and corresponding with scores of other such clubs throughout the country. Another lawyer, Danton, dominated the Cordelier club, which was cheaper to join and so closer to the masses, its members much influenced by the daily newssheet L’Ami du Peuple written by Jean-Paul Marat.

  Yet for more than two years Lafayette’s ‘moderate’ constitutional monarchism dominated the political terrain. An attempt by the king to flee Paris in June 1791 to join counter-revolutionary armies gathering across the border was only thwarted by the prompt action of a village postmaster in summoning the local militia. The dominant faction in the assembly rejected any challenge to the monarchy. ‘The revolution is over,’ they proclaimed and spread the story that the king had been kidnapped. ‘The greatest danger’, said one leader, Barnave, would be ‘the destruction of the monarchy’, for it would mean ‘the destruction of the concept of property’. 25 Jean-Paul Marat was driven into hiding and a spell in exile in Britain. ‘Le Chapelier’ laws banned unions and strikes. The National Guard opened fire on thousands of people queueing to sign a republican petition in the Champ de Mars – the venue of the Festival of the Federation almost 12 months before. Fifty died in a massacre rarely mentioned by those who weep over the subsequent fate of the queen, Marie Antoinette.

  Repression could not stop rising popular agitation, however. Food shortages, price rises and unemployment drove the artisans and tradespeople (known as sans-culottes because the men wore trousers rather than the breeches of the wealthy classes) as well as the labourers to the point of desperation. January and February 1792 saw food riots in Paris, while in the countryside bands of poor peasants descended on markets to impose price reductions on corn and bread. One of the Jacobins, Hébert, produced a paper Le Père Duchesne , specially directed at sans-culottes readership. Jacques Roux, a popular priest in one of the poorest quarters, built a group of followers, described by their enemies as the enragés (‘madmen’), who articulated the elemental hatred of the poor for the aristocrats and rich. A growing number of sans-culottes joined political clubs and flocked to regular ‘section’ meetings held in each part of Paris. A revolutionary women’s organisation led by an ex-actress, Claire Lacombe, built support among those who had participated in the food protests and the march on Versailles.

  Repression could not paper over the splits at the top of society either. The king and queen were still plotting with the counterrevolutionary armies abroad. The ‘moderates’ who ran the government fell out among themselves, torn between fear of these plots and fear of the masses below. Within the Jacobin club a group known as the Brissotins (after one of their leaders, Brissot) or Girondins, who saw themselves as less radical than Robespierre and Danton, began to manoeuvre to replace Lafayette in the government.

  Each of these rival groupings believed there was a simple solution to their problems – war against the foreign armies that had gathered across France’s northern borders. The king believed war would lead to defeat by foreign troops who would restore his full power. Lafayette believed it would enable him to become a virtual dictator. The Girondins believed they would benefit from a wave of nationalist enthusiasm. The most determined opposition to war came from Robespierre, so often portrayed by historians and popular novelists as a bloodthirsty monster. He argued in the Jacobin club that war would open the door to counter-revolution. But he could not stop the Girondins from agreeing with the king to form a government and then declaring war on Austria and Prussia in April 1792.

  Revolutionary war

  The war began disastrously. The French army suffered serious defeats – partly because its generals had a tendency to go over to the enemy – and the king tried to use the resulting chaos as an excuse to get rid of the Girondins. The Duke of Brunswick proclaimed on behalf of the invading army that it would impose ‘exemplary vengeance’ if victorious and ‘hand over the city of Paris to soldiery and punish the rebels as they deserved’. 26

  The threat of counter-revolution backfired. It prompted a new upswell of activity from below. There was a feeling among the mass of the population that foreign invasion threatened everything gained in the previous three years. Thousands of people, ‘passive citizens’ officially deemed too poor to vote, flooded into the sections , the regular mass assemblies in each Parisian locality. A call from the National Assembly for volunteers to fight the counter-revolutionary invasion led to 15,000 signing up in Paris alone. Fédérés , active enthusiasts for the revolution, began to march to Paris from provincial towns – most notably those from Marseilles, whose marching tune became the anthem of the revolution. All except one of the 48 section meetings in Paris demanded a republic. Local National Guard units in the poorer areas were increasingly influenced by the revolutionary mood.

  It was not only the poor who were frightened by the spectre of counter-revolution, so were the radical sections of the middle class led by Robespierre, Danton and Marat. They saw that defeat stared them all in the face unless they made a further revolution. They did so on 10 August 1792, the second great turning point of the revolution. Tens of thousands of sans-culottes from the sections joined the fédérés to march on the Tuileries palace. National Guards who were meant to be defending the king joined the insurrection and it defeated the royal troops after a battle in which 600 royalists and 370 insurgents died.

  The Parisian masses were once again in control of the city. The Assembly, made up of ‘moderate’ representatives elected under the property qualification less than a year before, bowed to the new power. It voted to suspend the king, recognise the new revolutionary commune based on the Parisian sections , and organise new elections based on universal male suffrage. The Girondins were back running the government, but had to give three positions to Jacobins – most notably to Danton, who became minister of justice.

  These changes alone were not enough to defeat the threat from outside. The French army continued to suffer defeat as the foreign armies – now joined by the likes of Lafayette – marched towards Paris. There were hordes of nobles and royalists in the capital, many in poorly guarded prisons, waiting for the opportunity to wreak revenge for the humiliations of the past three years. The officer corps of the army and the government administration were stuffed with royalist sympathisers.

  Only two things could deal with the threat to the revolution – sending large numbers of eager revolutionary volunteers to confront the enemy at the front, and decisive action to stop further coups by monarchists and aristocrats at the rear. The Girondins who dominated the government were no
t capable of fulfilling either task. But Danton displayed the energy needed to tap the popular mood. ‘Audacity, audacity and still more audacity’ was his slogan as he used enthusiastic revolutionary volunteers from the poorer areas of Paris to breathe new life into the armies at the front.

  In Paris, too, the masses took a decisive initiative. Spurred on by Marat, they took the crushing of domestic counter-revolution into their own hands. They descended on the prisons and summarily executed those they believed to be royalists in what became known as the ‘September massacres’.

  The move was a response by crowds who knew they would face the gibbet or the guillotine themselves if the enemy took Paris, and who also knew many people in high places were ready to aid that enemy. They had already seen friends and neighbours suffer – in the massacre at the Champ de Mars, in the slaughter at the front where officers sided with the enemy, and from the hunger brought by the shortage of bread. They had to do something. Unfortunately, in the panic and without organisations of their own to guide them, the crowds were easily drawn into indiscriminate killing of those in prison, so that ordinary prisoners died alongside rabid opponents of the revolution. Nevertheless, the action had the effect of intimidating and subduing the royalist fifth column in the city.

  On 20 September the revolutionary army halted the invading forces at Valmy. The next day the new Convention – the first legislature of any country in history to be elected by the vote of the whole male population – abolished the monarchy and declared France a ‘republic, one and indivisible’.