The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Nor had the financial crisis those far-distant plans had been prepared to deal with gone away. The deputies did not forget that what had forced the convocation of the future National Assembly was the scale of the State’s debts. The debt was, as Mirabeau put it, a ‘national treasure’, and it must be honoured. The nation’s representatives did not intend to begin their work by declaring France bankrupt, even if, with more important things on their minds, they had ignored Necker’s urgings to address the problem at once at the opening of the Estates-General. But even Necker could not stave off disaster for ever, and in fact by the autumn of 1789 his prestige was on the wane. The peak of his popularity was his triumphant return from his second exile on 29 July, when he stood in tears before an ecstatic Assembly. But his attempt the next day to secure the release of the imprisoned commander of troops on 14 July, Besenval, soured a popular reception organized for him in Paris: and by September his seeming connivance in the king’s evasive attitude to the August decrees was attracting widespread censure. Even his old financial wizardry was in doubt: two loans floated in August failed miserably after savage criticism in the Assembly. Late in September he proposed an unprecedented nonrecurring ‘Patriotic contribution’ of a quarter of every citizen’s income, payable in cash or valuables. The Assembly glumly accepted the idea, but initially provided no means of checking declarations. Necker launched it with a personal contribution of 100,000 livres; but its yield, over the three years it was supposed to run, came nowhere near its target. Nor did the immediate financial situation allow time to wait. The short-term debt alone was estimated at over 707 millions in November 1789, and by the following summer it was believed to be not far short of two billions as the Assembly continued to decree compensation for one form or another of office or property it had abolished. In these circumstances the deputies turned to a measure far beyond anything ever contemplated by Necker. They decided to nationalize the lands of the Church.

  The first threats of such action came with ominous assertions that ecclesiastical property belonged to the Nation during the framing of the 11 August decree. Throughout the financial debates of September, the idea of using church lands in some way to alleviate the burden of the national debt kept recurring. Finally on 10 October Talleyrand lent his authority as a bishop to a formal proposal that the state should take over all clerical property. Two-thirds of it, he argued, should be used to pay the clergy, in place of the tithes lost on 4 August; the remainder should help restore the national finances. Mirabeau, however, moved that the state should have free disposal of the whole, simply recognizing an obligation to maintain the Church out of general national resources. A long and bitter debate on these questions took up much of October. To secular arguments that the Church was merely a trustee administering its lands on behalf of the whole body of the faithful in France, and that since the clergy as an order no longer existed, it could not own property, outraged churchmen, and some laity, replied that clerical entitlement to land was ancient and well attested; that individual institutions, and not the order as a whole, were the true proprietors; and that such a massive expropriation ran clean counter to the property rights guaranteed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. There was also much disagreement about the likely consequences of selling off so much land once it had been taken over. Some thought it would saturate the market, and so be counter-productive. Others predicted that buyers would constitute a natural and permanent body of supporters for the Revolution. The Parisian press joined vigorously in the discussion on both sides. But few minds seem to have been changed by argument. Most deputies had arrived in Versailles that spring convinced that the Church needed root and branch reform, and they tended to see any clerical opposition to change as self-interested special pleading. The noisy anti-clericalism of the public galleries, which greeted any spirited intervention by a deputy from the clergy with cries of ‘Down with skullcaps!’, showed that the people shared these suspicions. And besides, no realistic alternative way of honouring the debt was proposed. Consequently on 3 November Mirabeau’s original motion was in all essentials accepted: 568 deputies outvoted 346 to place the property of the clergy ‘at the disposal of the Nation’.

  How the Nation would use this newly acquired facility remained to be decided. At first action looked like being postponed on the initiative, of all people, of the Protestant Necker, who disapproved of the confiscation. He proposed that the first step towards liquidating the short-term debt should be through a limited issue of paper money by a National Bank. The latter would be a nationalized form of the Discount Bank founded in 1776 by a financial consortium, and much used as a source of credit by governments since. But France’s previous experience of paper money had not been a happy one. In 1720 the Scottish adventurer John Law had attempted to set up a state bank on the promise of overseas trading profits, and had paid the king’s debts in banknotes. After initial runaway success, the whole scheme had collapsed, leaving thousands of families with assets reduced to worthless paper. Subsequent generations were haunted by the memory of this disaster, and there were plenty of deputies prepared to remind their colleagues of it. Nor was there much liking for the ‘capitalists’ who ran the Discount Bank and who would still be needed after nationalization to make it work. Too many people obscurely believed that in some way they were responsible for the State’s financial problems in the first place. And the financial world itself was divided. Catholic financiers, deprived of a livelihood made in manipulating public funds by the abolition of the venal offices through which they did it, did not wish to see their role taken over by a nexus of Protestant and Swiss bankers. Mirabeau made himself the spokesman of all these suspicions, fears, and jealousies when he proposed, against Necker, that the only paper the State should issue should be bonds secured on the value of assets visible to all—the national lands. Surely the credit of the State itself, guaranteed by the National Assembly, was superior to that of any bank? In the course of the debate a name was invented for such bonds: assignats. Eventually this idea won the day. On 19 and 21 December a series of decrees set up an ‘Extraordinary Fund’ (Caisse de l’Extraordinaire) to receive the proceeds of the Patriotic Contribution and the sale of 400 million livres’ worth of national lands. On the strength of these prospects, assignats to the same total value would be issued in 1,000-livre notes bearing interest at 5 per cent. The State would pay its creditors in them; and they in turn could be used to acquire national lands.

  Assignats were, then, not strictly paper money at all at the start. But within months that was what they became. The initial amount had been decided on the expectation of a minimum deficit for 1790, as calculated by Necker, of 80 millions. But by March the fall in tax-revenue forced him to revise the figure to 294 millions. The miscalculation was understandable enough, but it destroyed what was left of Necker’s credibility. The Assembly now brushed aside all his warnings about relying too exclusively on issues of paper to meet mounting debts. On 17 April they voted that the assignats should become legal tender, available in denominations of 300 and 200 livres, and attract only 3 per cent interest to encourage their conversion into land. But still the deficit mounted, and between April and September no fewer than six supplementary issues of assignats were authorized to cover it. On the twenty-ninth of the latter month the Assembly formally decided to triple the number in circulation to 1,200 millions to cover the huge estimated cost of compensating dispossessed office-holders. By then, support for the assignats had become a test of commitment to the whole Revolution, irrespective of what the consequences of an immense multiplication of paper might be. The first to fail this test of patriotism was Necker himself. Hounded ever since October 1789 by radical journalists like Marat, spurned and despised by leading deputies like Mirabeau, and forced by the Assembly to carry out policies he had no faith in, on 3 September 1790 he resigned. Twice on his way back to Switzerland he was arrested on suspicion of trying to emigrate, like some disgruntled nobleman. The national hero of the spring of 178
9, and the methods and policies he stood for, were now as superseded as the whole ancien régime that he had done more than any other man to bring down.

  Everyone, in the spring of 1789, had expected France to emerge from the meeting of the Estates-General profoundly changed. Very few foresaw, if the cahiers are any guide, quite how profound the changes would be. The deputies claimed to be following the cahiers in their reforming work. In the sense that they sought to endow France with a constitutional monarchy, decentralized and representative institutions, civil and fiscal equality, and guarantees for individual liberty, they were broadly true to the instructions of the general cahiers, at least. But even these refined and sophisticated documents, from which popular concerns had largely been strained out, contained no mandate for the abolition of provinces, municipalities, nobility, or titles, and only uncertain or ambiguous instructions regarding feudalism, venality, the parlements, or ecclesiastical property. Almost none called for a declaration of rights, and none at all for a national guard or paper money. Most of the reforms carried out or sanctioned by the Constituent Assembly, in other words, were the product of the revolutionary process itself. They were responses to events and situations without any historical precedent, rather than the known desires of the French nation. And yet, once made, the far-reaching changes of the Revolution’s first year were mostly well received. Their implementation may have been chaotic and disorganized, but they were carried through with remarkable goodwill and even enthusiasm considering the multitude of vested interests they threatened or damaged. Ex-courtiers might emigrate, and disillusioned deputies abandon their seats; prelates might complain of political plunder, lords of damage to their property, and dispossessed office-holders of under-compensation; but every one of these categories also produced warm partisans of the Revolution. Nobles, clerics, and office-holders all played parts quite disproportionate to their numbers in the Assembly’s legislative activity. And in the country at large millions welcomed the end of feudalism and indirect taxes, while hundreds of thousands of bourgeois eagerly seized the opportunity offered by the new regime to participate in public affairs. The work of the Revolution’s first twelve months, in fact, had the support of a broad national consensus. The Feast of the Federation which was observed in every commune as well as in Paris, was a celebration of that consensus. But by the time the second anniversary of the overthrow of the Bastille came around, it was rapidly falling apart.

  6

  The Breakdown of the Revolutionary Consensus, 1790–1791

  Nobody had ever expected that, once the reform of France began, the Church would remain untouched. The cahiers of all three orders in the spring of 1789 were full of suggestions for improving and rationalizing the organization and conduct of religious life. The clergy, as the first order in the State, expected to play a leading role in the process. And at the start they did play a leading role: it was clerical deputies who first broke the ranks of the ‘privileged orders’ in June 1789 and so opened the way to the transformation of the Estates-General into the National Assembly. In doing so they were responding to appeals from the third estate in the name of the God of Peace, and hoping to break a deadlock that was preventing emergency action to relieve the sufferings of a hungry populace. There is no evidence that they intended to give up the clergy’s status as a separate order in the State, or its veto on action prejudicial to the interests of the Church or religion in general. But within weeks far more than these advantages had been lost. No group, probably, suffered more from the renunciations of the night of 4 August than the clergy. Parish priests lost their tithes, their vestry fees, and their ability to group poor benefices through pluralism. Compensation was mooted, but rejected. Bishops and ecclesiastical corporations, including charitable and educational ones, lost whatever feudal dues they happened to own, which were often substantial. Here compensation was voted, but in the end seldom paid. And the Pope himself lost the Annates, the Peter’s Pence that all the faithful contributed towards the upkeep of the Holy See, and whose renunciation had marked the moment, in the sixteenth century, when Protestant kingdoms had made their break with Rome. In the debates over codifying these changes, further threats were uttered, this time against church lands; and Mirabeau declared that all clerics should be content to be salaried servants of the State. The later weeks of August brought yet more blows. The drafters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen refused to declare Catholicism the state religion; refused to restrict freedom of expression and opinion; and declared public office and civil rights available to all, which meant Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics. Clerical speakers in the Assembly were now regularly jeered from the galleries; so that when in October the Assembly returned to the idea of confiscating the estates of the Church for other national purposes, nobody was really surprised. The clergy fought it tooth and nail, not simply to protect what they had left, but also because they saw that the loss of the Church’s remaining independent resources would make further action by the Assembly inevitable. Patriotic speakers sought to offer reassurance: the nation would take over the Church’s educational and charitable functions, and every parish priest was promised an income of at least 1,200 livres. That third of the clergy hitherto dependent on the portion congrue could rejoice at the prospect of a massive rise. But for many others, 1,200 livres represented a cut; and besides, when would payment begin? The Assembly had ordered the continuance of tithes until that moment, but along with feudal dues and taxes, peasants were no longer paying them in most places, and it was dangerous to try to enforce them. By the end of 1789, in other words, the Revolution that so many priests had greeted with such goodwill and enthusiasm had brought the clergy little but spoliation and promises.

  And in 1790 the process continued. On 13 February came the turn of the regular clergy: all monasteries and convents, except those dedicated to educational and charitable work, were dissolved, and new religious vows were forbidden. Previous legislation, of course, had already deprived these institutions of their property and income, but the Assembly’s motives went deeper than that. Most deputies, many parish priests among them, believed that contemplatives were useless parasites, unproductive burdens on society whose existence no national church could justify. There were recent precedents elsewhere in Europe for such a wholesale dissolution, notably in the Habsburg lands under the rationalizing Joseph II. France itself had witnessed many monastic closures since the 1760s. But after all the other blows suffered by the Church over the preceding six months, this new one seemed part of a more alarming pattern. On 12 April a worried Carthusian monk, Dom Gerle, who had hitherto voted with the patriots, moved a surprise motion to declare Catholicism the national religion and grant it the monopoly of public worship. Three hundred deputies supported him, but the motion was still lost in an Assembly which a few weeks before had elected a Protestant pastor, Rabaut de Saint-Étienne, as its president.

  Some people, indeed, were beginning to wonder if the whole Revolution was a Protestant plot. Although there were only some fifteen known Protestants in the Assembly, they included radical leaders like Barnave and Rabaut himself, who demanded complete equality in every sphere for a group which had enjoyed no civil rights at all before 1787. He and five others represented Nîmes, where determined electoral organization by a Protestant bourgeoisie, enormously enriched by two decades of industrialization in the textile trade, had excluded the complacent Catholic establishment from the third-estate representation. Protestants also played a predominant part in setting up the Nîmes citizens’ militia in July. All this constituted a rapid and, to the Catholics, shocking shift of power to a group whose strength had hitherto been solely economic. In Montauban, too, the militia was largely a Protestant creation, arousing similar Catholic apprehensions. The Catholic response was to organize their superior numbers in the municipal elections of the spring of 1790 to ensure that local power remained in their hands. They succeeded, but that left Protestants all the more determined to retain control of the mi
litias and exclude Catholic recruits. In both cities, therefore, sectarian tensions rose over the spring, and on 10 May they broke into an ugly riot at Montauban when crowds led by pious women forcibly prevented officials from taking inventories of confiscated monastic properties. They then turned against the militia, overwhelming them and killing five. Panic-stricken Protestants fled the city, and calm was only restored when militiamen from Bordeaux, with no sectarian associations, arrived in force. A month later far more violent scenes occurred in Nîmes. The term bagarre (brawl), by which they were remembered, does no justice to four days of pitched street battles which began on 13 June when Protestant National Guardsmen opened fire on rival companies of Catholics in an atmosphere of rising excitement as both sides organized their vote for the first departmental elections. Reinforced by peasant co-religionaries who poured in from the countryside at the first rumour of the clashes, the two sides fought with no quarter; but the Protestants had more fire-power, and in the end the bagarre became a massacre of Catholics. Perhaps 300 died, against barely 20 Protestants, and when it was over the Protestants were in complete control of the city for the first time in their community’s history. Subsequently they swept the departmental elections too. Thus it was they, in the Gard department, who represented the revolutionary government and implemented its policies, including its ecclesiastical ones. To pious local Catholics, therefore, the Revolution meant the triumph of an old and feared enemy, the world turned upside-down.