A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  Not only had the king gone, so had very many features regarded as irremovable only three years before. The remnants of feudalism were now swept away in deed as well as word, as were the tithes which people had been forced to pay to keep bishops and abbots in luxury. The superstitions of the church were no longer propped up by the might of the state. There were plans to encourage education and extend scientific knowledge, bringing the ideas of the Enlightenment into everyday life. The customs posts which impeded trade routes in order to benefit local notables were gone. In the volunteer militia units at the front ordinary soldiers voted for their fellows to become officers.

  No wonder Goethe believed a new era had begun.

  Yet the revolution was far from over. The next two years saw a further radicalisation both in the government and at the base of society. Then, in the summer of 1794 there was a sudden falling back of the revolutionary wave, allowing new inequalities and some old privileges to re-emerge in what became, eventually, a new monarchy. In the process there occurred the famous ‘Terror’ which has so befogged many people’s understanding of – and sympathy for – the revolution. The execution of the king, agreed on by the narrowest of majorities in the Convention, was followed by the execution of many other aristocrats and the queen. Then the Jacobins sent Girondin leaders to the guillotine; Robespierre and Saint-Just sent Danton and Hébert to the guillotine; and finally, Robespierre and Saint-Just themselves were sent to the guillotine by the ‘Thermidorians’ – a coalition of former supporters of the Girondins, Danton and Hébert. It was this grisly spectacle which popularised the saying, ‘Revolutions always devour their own children’ 27 – and with it, the implication that revolutions are always futile and bloody enterprises.

  It is a false generalisation. The English Revolution did not devour its leaders – that task was left to the Restoration executioners – and neither did the American Revolution. It is an observation which also fails utterly to grasp the real forces at work in France.

  The roots of revolution

  Any brief account of revolutionary events necessarily concentrates on eye-catching events and the best-known personalities. But a revolution is always more than that. It involves a sudden change in the balance of social forces, resulting from slow, often imperceptible developments over long periods of time. It can only be understood by looking at those developments.

  At the top of the old society – usually known as the ancien régime – were the monarchy and the nobility. The traditional feudal aristocracy of the noblesse d’épée (nobility of the sword) retained a privileged position in France which it had long since lost in Britain. The French monarchy had over the centuries cut back on some of the independent power of the great nobles. It had been able to do so by using the towns and the new, moneyed ‘bourgeois’ classes as a counterweight to the great aristocrats. The monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had given institutional expression to this by selling positions in the state administration and the courts to sons of the moneyed classes, who soon became a new hereditary nobility, the noblesse de robe (nobility of the robe). This group dominated the law courts (confusingly for English speakers, known as parlements ) which implemented royal decrees.

  Finally, there was yet another form of nobility consisting of the great ‘princes’ of the church – bishops and abbots. These enjoyed wealth comparable to the great aristocrats, while the mass of priests lived in conditions hardly better than the peasants. The upper clergy owed their positions to royal patronage – which, in turn, was dependent on influence at court. So it was possible for someone like Charles Maurice de Talleyrand – a member of one of the old aristocratic families, ‘lacking in all apostolic virtues’ 28 and who had not even completed holy orders – to be given an important abbotship at the age of 21. Like the nobles, the upper clergy paid no taxes yet received the rents and feudal dues from vast tracts of land as well as church tithes.

  No major section of the nobility showed any inclination to give up its privileges. Indeed, as the costs involved in maintaining a life of luxurious consumption rose, the nobility set out to increase its privileges – by greater severity in the enforcement of feudal dues, by taking over parts of the communal property of peasant villages, and by monopolising lucrative positions in the state, the army and the church. There was a ‘violent aristocratic reaction’. 29

  This was while France was experiencing considerable industrial growth, particularly in rural handicraft production. According to a recent estimate the economy grew at 1.9 per cent a year throughout the eighteenth century. 30 Textile output grew 250 per cent, coal output seven or eightfold, and iron output from 40,000 tons to 140,000 tons. By 1789 a fifth of France’s population were employed in industry or handicrafts. 31

  The moneyed class of big merchants (especially in the Atlantic ports connected to the West Indian sugar colonies), ‘putters out’ and, occasionally, manufacturers (like the handful of monopolists who controlled the printing industry) grew in size and wealth. The rich bourgeoisie were in an anomalous position. In formal, legal terms they were inferior to any members of the nobility. But often they were richer and able to exercise considerable influence over the monarchy. What is more, they could buy up land which gave them feudal dues from the peasantry and could profit from acting as tax ‘farmers’ for the monarchy. Beneath them the lower bourgeoisie were completely excluded from influence. But they, too, often channelled money their families had obtained through trading, shopkeeping or luxury crafts into investments in land or into the purchase of certain legal offices. Both groups of the bourgeoisie resented the discrimination against them by the aristocracy, but they by no means stood in automatic revolutionary opposition to the absolutist monarchy. Indeed, they could still look to the monarchy to protect them from the aristocracy.

  Wedged between the bourgeoisie and the urban poor were a mass of small tradespeople and artisans. Traditionally they had relied on state-sponsored guilds to regulate prices and protect their incomes. But the spread of the market made this a less and less effective way of providing them with security. A sudden change in market conditions might deprive them of an income, while the increase in the price of bread after harvest failures – as in the late 1780s and again in the early 1790s – might drive them close to starvation. What is more, a growing portion of the artisan and small trading workforce was made up of journeymen – employees – who could never expect to own their own businesses. These had little in common with those artisans and traders who remained conservative and guild-minded.

  There were also a growing number of ‘men on the make’ – people prepared to look for any opportunity to get ahead: a lucrative trading deal, a financial reward for some political service, or the pioneering of a new productive technique. But although such people could resent the ‘irrationality’ of the old order – they often devoured popular forms of Enlightenment thinking – they were not revolutionaries.

  The peasantry made up the bulk of French society. It varied enormously from region to region. In a few areas it had undergone changes similar to those in England, with the emergence of capitalist farmers employing innovative techniques. There were a rather larger number of peasants whose production was oriented to the market (through the cultivation of vines or a combination of spinning or weaving with farming), but with holdings that remained small. Then there were vast numbers who leased land from or shared their crop with landowners, leaving them with no funds for agricultural improvement even if some were able to employ a limited number of labourers. Finally, there were many whose condition, apart from the absence of formal serfdom, hardly differed from medieval times. Yet almost all of the peasantry had certain features in common. They felt the land was really their own, yet had to pay feudal dues to landowners, tithes that could amount to 9 per cent of the crop to the church, and, usually, rent on top. What is more, they had to pay high taxes from which the nobility and the clergy were exempt. This burden meant they suffered terribly if their crops failed or the prices of thin
gs they had to buy rose.

  The complex interrelation between the monarchy, the aristocracy, the different groups of the bourgeoisie and the various sections of the peasantry has led some ‘revisionist’ historians to claim the revolution cannot be explained in class terms. 32 The bourgeoisie, they say, was more likely to obtain its income from legal offices, landownership or even feudal dues than it was from modern industry. Therefore, it could not have been a class standing for a new, capitalist way of producing in opposition to a nobility and monarchy based on feudalism. These historians argue that their case is confirmed by the small number of big industrialists involved on the revolutionary side and the considerable number of merchants who took the side of the king.

  Some of their factual claims are undoubtedly true. The bourgeoisie as a class certainly did not stand in unremitting revolutionary opposition to the old order. It had grown up within this order over hundreds of years and was tied to it, both ideologically and financially, in innumerable ways. The leading revolutionary figures were not financiers or industrial capitalists but lawyers like Danton and Robespierre, journalists like Desmoulins, and even, in the case of Marat, a former doctor to the upper classes. But the conclusions drawn by the revisionists are fundamentally false. The intertwining of the interests of the nobility and the bourgeoisie did not stop them being attracted towards opposite visions of French society. One looked back to the past, to the defence of aristocratic privilege and feudal dues against all change. The other looked towards a society built around the formal equality of the marketplace, where ancestry alone could not hold back the ‘man on the make’. The mass of the bourgeoisie repeatedly hesitated in face of the measures needed to advance that model of society. But they certainly did not go into exile in disgust when it triumphed, as did much of the aristocracy.

  The division of society around these rival poles was, in the first place, brought about not by the bourgeoisie, but by the aristocratic reaction. As with the English and American revolutions, it was not the mass of people demanding something new which produced the initial upheaval, but the attempt of the old order to push things backward.

  Money had become the central preoccupation of the French monarchy in the 1780s. It had spent enormous sums on the Seven Years War with Britain and Prussia, and more again during the American war with Britain. Bankruptcy threatened if it did not find ways to increase its tax revenue. But it found this almost impossible. The exemption of the nobles and clergy from taxation meant the burden fell on the lower classes, and the point had been reached where most of them simply could not pay more. Average living standards in the countryside were falling, while wages in the towns had risen by only 22 per cent against price rises of 65 per cent. 33 What is more, the method of raising tax was hopelessly inefficient, with considerable sums being siphoned off by the ‘tax farmers’ who collected it.

  The king was briefly brought to see how serious the situation had become. He appointed a ‘reforming’ ministry in 1786 which presented a plan to rationalise the tax system and extend it to the huge landholdings of the nobility and the church. The aristocracy were outraged. An assembly of ‘notables’ picked by the king rejected the proposals. When further reforms were brought forward, the noblesse de robe in the provincial parlements refused to implement them – and when the ministers tried to proceed in spite of them, they organised public protests which turned into riots in some places. In these protests, the nobility still found it possible to win the support of many members of other classes. After all, the talk of higher taxes could seem like a threat to some members of the bourgeoisie and peasantry.

  The nobility, seeing themselves as the natural leaders of society, had the illusion that they could use popular support to bend the government to their will. Their central demand was for an Estates-General – an assembly which had last been convened in 1614. In agreeing to this in May 1789, the king was conceding to the reactionary demands of the aristocracy, not some progressive movement of the bourgeoisie or the lower classes.

  Yet this concession to the aristocracy forced the other classes to organise. They were required to choose representatives of the ‘Third Estate’. In the towns this meant assemblies to choose ‘electors’ who in turn would vote for delegates. In the countryside it meant villagers deciding who to send to an area meeting which would take decisions. The mass of people had no experience of such things and usually put their trust in those best able to speak. The result was that the assembly of the Third Estate was dominated by lawyers and other well-heeled members of the middle class. But the process of choosing delegates encouraged many millions of people to think for the first time about what they wanted from society. In villages and towns across France they drew up doléances – lists of demands they wanted the Estates-General to implement. The discussion led to the activist groups beginning to crystallise in the poorer quarters of Paris, which were to storm the Bastille in July and march on Versailles in October. It also encouraged ferment among the peasants, which boiled over into revolt against local nobles in the summer of 1789.

  The reactionary offensive of the aristocracy roused the middle class and created the mood of self-assertion among its representatives as the Estates-General assembled. They were not revolutionary in intent. They were still enamoured of the monarchy and, rather than abolish it, wanted to cut the aristocracy down to size, so that there would be an end to arbitrary privilege and bullying. But they were not prepared to be dictated to, and they felt emboldened by the ferment in society. Hence their defiant gestures – their assertion of ‘human rights’, and declarations about the end of feudalism – could be followed by a compromise which left the king with considerable power and the aristocracy with their property.

  But the aristocratic reaction was not going to be brought to an end so quickly. So long as the aristocrats were in control of their fortunes, their country estates and the officer corps of the army, they were going to try to re-establish their old positions of privilege.

  Reformers, revolutionaries and sans-culottes

  The popular movements which had backed the middle-class assembly in the summer of 1789 had roused the lower classes to challenge their miserable lot for the first time. They had begun to see that the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many were two sides of the same coin. At first they identified wealth with the aristocracy. But it was not long before they were turning their attention to those sections of the bourgeoisie who aped the aristocracy or who enriched themselves as ‘tax farmers’, landowners and speculators.

  The agitation of 1789 had thrown up many thousands of new political activists among the middle classes. It was they who attended the political clubs, read the mass of pamphlets and newspapers, and took part in electoral meetings. They were exultant at first. It seemed that history was offering them a chance to realise the dreams of the Enlightenment, to right the wrongs castigated by Voltaire, to introduce the society imagined by Rousseau. They adopted heroic postures, imagining themselves as reincarnations of figures from ancient Rome like Brutus.

  But they were in danger of being trapped between aristocratic reaction on the one side and the popular ferment on the other. For although 1789 had shown that popular unrest could defeat the aristocracy, peasants burning landowners’ title deeds did not stop if the landowners were from the bourgeoisie, and townspeople did not stop attacking food speculators who had bourgeois credentials.

  It was this which led to the repeated splits within the ranks of the middle-class political activists. Typically, the majority opted for security, property and conciliation of the monarchy and aristocracy. Only a radical minority were prepared to risk rousing the masses. But then reaction, emboldened by the concessions made to it, would make moves which threatened the majority and they would swing behind the radicals – although with a section splitting away to join the counter-revolution.

  This was what happened in 1791 and 1792. It was to happen again in 1793.

  The crisis of 1792, which culminated in the proclamation of t
he republic and the execution of the king, had involved the overthrow of Lafayette by the Jacobins and the Parisian masses organised through the sections . The Girondins had gone along with this action, but were still reluctant to go further and agree to the execution of the king. They feared ‘the mob’ – the ‘hydra of anarchy’ as Brissot called it. 34 Against a background of growing hunger in town and countryside alike, they resisted demands from the Parisian sections to control prices, to requisition grain supplies to feed people and to take exemplary action against ‘hoarders and speculators’.

  Instead they attacked the masses in much the same way as the previous government. ‘Your property is threatened’, one of their leaders warned the wealthy bourgeoisie in April, ‘and you are closing your eyes to the danger … Chase these venomous creatures back to their lairs’. 35 The Convention voted overwhelmingly to send Marat before the revolutionary tribunal on a charge of subversion, only to see him acquitted. Hébert was arrested and the president of the Convention declared – in language similar to the notorious statement of the Duke of Brunswick – that unless ‘recurrent insurrections’ in the city stopped, ‘Paris would be destroyed’. 36 The army suffered a new series of defeats as its commander, Dumouriez, deserted to the enemy. Disaffected peasants in the Vendée region in the west of France joined a bloody monarchist rising.

  Finally, on 29 May ‘moderates’ and royalists together seized control of Lyons and imprisoned the Jacobin mayor, Chalier, before executing him in July.

  Robespierre’s Jacobins were as middle class as the Girondins, although many historians argue they came mostly from a lower layer of the middle class. They were just as devoted to the ‘rights’ of property, as they repeatedly declared in their public statements. Robespierre was personally incorruptible, but many of his supporters had no compunction about trying to benefit financially from the revolution – after all, they were members of, or aspirants to, the bourgeoisie. Danton had personally enriched himself, at one point accepting money from the king. Marat and Hébert did agitate among the Parisian masses – but from the point of view of those who were small artisans or traders, with no objection to profit.