The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  It began as chaotically as it was to continue. Before d’Aiguillon could speak another nobleman, the Viscount de Noailles, doubtless aware of what was afoot, came forward and moved his own version of abolition. D’Aiguillon could only support him, but the effect of two similar proposals coming in quick succession was to start an auction. Both had called for redemption of dues and abolition of serfdom and labour services; but others saw that feudalism did not end there. Hunting rights were soon being denounced, then private courts, then tolls. The original motion, and its purpose of calming the countryside, was soon lost sight of in a torrent of denunciations and renunciations, each carried by acclaim. The all-night session would be remembered as a display of boundless altruism and, as one nobleman carried away by emotion termed it, a ‘moment of patriotic intoxication’.3 But old scores were also settled amid the enthusiasm. Country nobles made sure that the courtiers who had deprived them of their manorial prerogatives did not escape with their pensions and sinecures. A bishop, it was noted, had been the first to denounce hunting rights, and this led an angry duke to call for an end to tithes. Vestry fees and pluralism soon went the same way, and by the time dawn broke the parish clergy had been stripped of much of their income. In the small hours the session developed into a general assault on privileges of all sorts. Representatives of corporate towns and whole provinces came forward to renounce liberties and exemptions accumulated over half a millennium. Magistrates abandoned the privileges of their offices, declared for free justice, and raised no demur when venality of office, the basis of their tenure, was thrown on to the bonfire in turn. Every public employment, the consensus was, would now be open to all according to their talents. Frenchmen would henceforth enjoy complete civil and fiscal equality. It was past two in the morning when the sitting came to a close with the deputies ordering a Te Deum to be sung throughout the kingdom, and the striking of a commemorative medal depicting themselves abandoning all privileges on one side, and Louis XVI, now proclaimed ‘Restorer of French Liberty’, on the other.

  Nobody who was not there, Rabaut de Saint-Étienne later recalled, could know what this extraordinary session had been like. Even those who had been there had conflicting memories. Only scanty minutes had been kept; it took a week to draft all the decisions taken into a formal decree, and a further six months before all the technical details were settled. In cold legal language it all sounded, and was, less generous and expansive than it had seemed in the emotional candlelight of a summer night. The decree of 11 August began with a ringing declaration that ‘The National Assembly entirely destroys the feudal regime’. What it actually did was lay down that most feudal dues were redeemable, and should continue to be collected until compensation was paid. They were, after all, property, just like the venal offices for which compensation was also laid down. Tithe, on the other hand, was abolished outright, despite protests from the clergy. Some deputies were heard to declare ominously that all ecclesiastical property ought to be at the disposal of the nation. Yet in the event it proved irrelevant whether compensation had been decreed or not. By 11 August peasants all over France had stopped paying both dues and tithes (not to mention taxes), and they took the decree as a vindication of their stand. They did not now intend to start paying again, on however limited a basis, and few of them did. It was they, rather than the National Assembly, who really destroyed the feudal regime by refusing to co-operate even in its orderly winding up. So the decree’s most important effect, along with the need to get back into the fields to gather in the harvest, was simply to calm the countryside down; and by the end of the month the worst of the rural unrest and panic had died away.

  But far more than feudalism had been cast aside on the night of 4 August. Privilege, that fundamental principle of social and institutional life since time immemorial, had been renounced. With it went the whole structure of provincial, local, and municipal government. For three centuries French social mobility had largely been channelled through the sale of offices, but that too now stood condemned. So did the system by which the pastoral clergy had always been supported, although the estates of the Church (minus feudal rights) remained for the moment intact. Nothing so sweeping had been in the minds of most French people when 1789 began. Many deputies, indeed, had had positive mandates from their electors not to support measures like the destruction of local and provincial privileges; and there had been overwhelming support for paying the parish clergy more, rather than destroying their income altogether. But by now the deputies at Versailles had gone far beyond their mandates on a wide range of issues. The merger of the orders itself could not have taken place if mandates had been strictly respected by nobles and clergy; and one of the National Assembly’s first formal acts was to vote, on 8 July, for the abrogation of all binding mandates. This left the representatives of the sovereign nation free, without referring back, to decree the destruction of whatever they saw fit. It also left them at liberty to reconstruct their country on entirely new lines.

  All the deputies assembled at Versailles in May 1789 believed that they had been elected to endow France with a constitution. As early as 7 July they had voted to call themselves the National Constituent Assembly. And there was remarkable agreement across all three orders, and in the cahiers, about what the constitution should contain. Most deputies believed (although some deplored giving such hostages to fortune) that it should be prefaced by a declaration of rights along the lines pioneered in the 1780s by certain American states. Between 9 and 28 July a score of drafts were submitted by various deputies, and on 4 August, the afternoon before the famous all-night session, the Assembly agreed to promulgate a declaration as a matter of urgency. On 26 August, after a week of discussion spun out by clerical reluctance to concede total freedom of thought and worship, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was finally voted. The Assembly reserved the right to add to or alter it when the constitution itself was finally promulgated, but when that moment came two years later nobody dared. The declaration had become the founding document of the Revolution and, as such, sacrosanct.

  The keynote of the declaration was the rule of law. It is specifically referred to in nine of the seventeen articles. Article VI defines law as the expression of the general will, made by the direct or indirect participation of all citizens; an implicit condemnation of the legislative sovereignty claimed by kings under the old order. Sovereignty in any case, article III declares, ‘rests essentially in the nation’. No body and no individual (which meant no king) might exercise any authority not expressly emanating from the nation. In the eyes of the law all citizens are equal, for, states the very first article, men are born and remain free and equal in rights. The aim of all political associations (art. II) is the preservation of the natural rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Hitherto, the inference was, these rights had been ignored in France. That was why it was necessary for the declaration to condemn arbitrary arrest and imprisonment (art. VII), presumption of guilt before judgement (art. IX), public officials who were not accountable (art. XV), and insecurity of property (art. XVII). ‘Any society’, article XVI specifies, ‘in which the guarantee of rights is not assured or the separation of powers not determined has no constitution.’ And equality before the law meant the end of privilege. Taxation henceforth would be ‘apportioned equally among all citizens according to their capacity to pay’ (art. XIII), and appointment to public positions would be open to all citizens ‘according to their capacity, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues and talents’ (art. VI). Only on freedom of thought is the declaration somewhat equivocal. Although free communication of thought and opinion is singled out as ‘one of the most precious of the rights of man’ (art. XI) it is noted that it can be abused, in ways the law will define. And although no one may be disturbed for his opinions, even (in a rebuff to clerical arguments for a continued Catholic monopoly of public worship) religious ones, a limit may be set if their manifestation threatens public order (a
rt. X). This was one of the few hints in the declaration that men and citizens had duties as well as rights, although some early drafts had sought to list duties, too. To have done so would certainly have made the whole document less memorable. As it was, it long outlived the constitution to which it was a preamble; and has been looked to ever since by all who derive inspiration from the French Revolution as the movement’s first great manifesto, enshrining the fundamental principles of 1789.

  Its drafters could not have hoped for more; but from the start they realized that something else was required to endow the declaration with the full solemnity they intended. It needed the assent of the king. So did the decree of 11 August. If the monarch did not openly and freely associate himself in this way with the destruction of the ancien régime, the whole work of the Assembly would be vitiated. Yet could the king really be free without the right to refuse? The issue plunged the deputies at once into the intricacies of constitution-making.

  Admirers of the checks and balances of the British constitution dominated the Assembly’s constitutional committee, and they believed that the king should have the same powers of veto as the British monarch. They also believed that the democratic element of an elective National Assembly should be balanced by a second chamber or senate whose members sat for life. Led by Mounier, Malouet, and a handful of rich and eloquent metropolitan nobles like Lally-Tollendal and Clermont-Tonnerre, and energetically supported by Mirabeau, these monarchiens (as their opponents dubbed them) spent the first two weeks of September trying to hustle the Assembly into accepting their programme. But the alliance of patriotic heroes of July like Mounier and Mirabeau with notorious conservatives like Malouet provoked widespread surprise and suspicion; provincial noble deputies mistrusted rich former courtiers when they advocated what looked like a House of Lords which only the great would enter; while ordinary third-estate deputies saw no point in dividing a legislature that had been unified after a tremendous struggle only a few months beforehand. On 10 September a second chamber was decisively rejected by 490 votes to 89, and the monarchien-dominated constitutional committee dissolved. The veto question was even more hotly contested. The king seemed in no hurry to sanction the August decrees, and that seemed evidence of the danger of allowing him an unlimited veto. But only a handful of deputies, such as Sieyès and the prolix but still uninfluential Robespierre, believed that once the National Assembly had pronounced the monarch should have no veto at all. Most, including patriotic leaders like Barnave, Duport, and the noble Lameth brothers, were attracted to the idea of a temporary or ‘suspensive’ veto; and when Necker let it be known that this was also the king’s preference, they detected a hint that the August decrees would be sanctioned if it was carried. Consequently the suspensive veto passed overwhelmingly (673 votes to 352) on 15 September.

  It was the first time the Assembly had flouted popular sentiment, for in Paris and many of the provinces it was clear that any form of veto aroused deep mistrust. As soon as the issue arose there was uproar at the Palais Royal, and on 30 August a renegade nobleman who spent his time there, the Marquis de Saint-Huruge, attempted to drum up a protest march to Versailles. The king and Assembly, the marchers declared, should be brought to Paris where they would be under constant scrutiny. There were only a few hundred of them, and they were stopped by the National Guard; but nobody was in a position to stop anti-veto agitation in pamphlets and the periodical press which had established itself as a permanent feature of political life in the capital since July. A whole new paper, in fact, was launched on 12 September with denunciations of the Assembly’s equivocations over the veto. It was called Le Publiciste Parisien, but soon changed its name to L’Ami du Peuple. With it, the intellectual drifter Jean-Paul Marat at last found his vocation after years of failure and rejection. Marat throve on an atmosphere of plots and suspicion, and called for the Assembly to be purged of unreliable members. The lesson of the previous July was that the people should never shrink from direct action in the public interest. Foreign visitors were appalled by such talk. ‘Woe’, wrote an English visitor who had begun as a sympathizer with the Revolution, ‘be to the Legislature that employs a senseless, profligate rabble to enforce its laws. Lanterns are arguments in this country’4—meaning the threat of lynching by hanging from street lamps. Such paranoid attitudes were compounded by persistent economic difficulties in the capital. After falling somewhat in late July and August, the price of bread began to climb again and supplies became irregular, just at the time of year when a good harvest should have banished all food worries for a twelve-month. But the fine, still weather that had ripened the grain had also dried up rivers and immobilized mills. Grain riots began to be reported from markets in outlying districts around the capital, and by mid-September rowdy groups of women were stopping grain convoys within the city and petitioning the municipal authorities to bring prices and supplies under closer control. The Assembly forbade them to intervene. Guards were placed on bakers’ shops, but Lafayette and his militia found themselves hard pressed to contain all the incidents that occurred.

  Parallels with the situation early in July escaped no one. All that was needed to reproduce it exactly was a military threat; and that, too, soon materialized. Alarmed at persistent rumours of being taken by force to Paris, on 14 September the king summoned the notoriously well-disciplined Flanders Regiment from the north-east frontier to Versailles. It arrived a week later, and at the palace was rapturously received. Encouraged by the security it seemed to promise, the king broke silence on the August decrees. On 18 September, in a long letter drafted by Necker, he explained that he was prepared to accept some parts of the 11 August decree but not others. The deputies felt betrayed. They petitioned the king to promulgate the decree at once, without amendments. He said he would ‘publish’ it but not promulgate it. Then on 4 October he voiced reservations about the Declaration of Rights. By now, however, Paris was alive with rumours about a reception given by the King’s bodyguard on 1 October to welcome the Flanders Regiment. After many noisy toasts had been drunk, and none to the nation, the national cockade was said to have been trampled as the air rang with unpatriotic slogans. Banquets themselves seemed unpatriotic when bread was so scarce, and by 4 October all Paris believed that counter-revolutionary orgies at Versailles were the prelude to a new attempt to starve the capital. The next morning, several districts of the city were awakened by the ringing of the tocsin from church bell-towers, recognized ever since the days of July as a call to arms. Crowds of women began to assemble at markets, from where they marched to the Hôtel de Ville. After surging through the building to impress the city authorities with their determination, late in the morning they set off for Versailles dragging cannon and brandishing whatever makeshift weapons they could lay hands on, recruiting newcomers as they went along. Perhaps 7,000 of them reached Versailles early in the evening and invaded the National Assembly, calling for bread and punishment for those who had insulted the national cockade. The unprotected deputies tried in vain to greet them with mollifying speeches. They were visibly relieved when a deputation went on to confront the king. Many of them recognized, however, that popular intervention had probably been the only way to make the king assent unambiguously to their decrees; and he was quick to do so once the crowds of women appeared. The problem was how to disperse the demonstration and restore calm once this object had been achieved. The forces of order, in the shape of Lafayette and 20,000 National Guardsmen, arrived in Versailles later that night after a forced march through an autumnal downpour. Lafayette had been reluctant to come at all, leaving Paris unpoliced and thereby risking accusations that he was in complicity with the demonstrators. But his men insisted, and crowds outside the Hôtel de Ville were muttering about stringing him and Bailly up if they continued to temporize. When he arrived all he could do was try to ensure that what the populace wanted was brought about without disorder, and he formally requested the king, in the name of Paris, to return to the capital with him and take up residence in
the Tuileries palace. The king made no promises that night, but early the next morning a number of Parisians found their way into the palace precincts and were fired on by royal bodyguards. Thereupon an enraged mob poured into the palace, massacred two guardsmen, and almost broke into the queen’s apartments. Only prompt action by unco-ordinated units of the National Guard contained them, and Lafayette bundled the royal family onto the palace balcony to stand under his personal protection. The impact on the volatile crowd milling below was favourable, but constant shouts of ‘To Paris!’ made clear that only one thing would really satisfy them. Late in the morning of 6 October the king announced that he would go.