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The Revolution in Politics (1775-1815)
1. Liberty
1. Introduction
1. Two ideas fueled the revolutionary period in the world: liberty and
equality
2. The call for liberty was first of all a call for individual human rights and
liberals of the revolutionary era protested the way the most enlightened
monarchs regulated what people wrote and believed (demanded an end to
censorship, written and spoken)
1. Called for a new government and believed that the people were
sovereign and alone had the authority to make laws limiting the
individual’s freedom of action
2. Liberals believed that every nation, every ethnic group, had this
right of self-determination and thus a right to form a free nation
3. Liberals argued, in theory, all citizens should have identical rights and
civil liberties and above all, the nobility had no right to special privileges
based on birth
4. Most eighteenth-century liberals were men and generally shared with
other men the belief that equality between men and women was neither
practical nor desirable
1. Men of the French Revolution limited formal political rights of
women, the right to vote, to run for office, to participate in
government
2. Liberals never believed that everyone should be equal
economically
3. The essential point was that everyone should legally have an equal
chance
5. The economic inequality based on artificial legal distinctions were
criticized by liberals, not economic inequality itself
2. The Roots of Liberalism
1. The ideas of liberty and equality had deep roots in Western history; the
ancient Greeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition had affirmed for
hundreds of years the sanctity and value of the individual human being
2. Classical liberalism first crystallized at the end of the seventeenth century
and during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and reflected the
stress on human dignity and human happiness on earth (faith in science,
rationality, and progress)
3. Writers of the Enlightenment preached religious toleration, freedom of
press and speech, and fair and equal treatment before the law
4. John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu were the two important thinkers
responsible for joining the Enlightenment’s concern for personal freedom
and legal equality to a theoretical justification of liberal self-government
1. John Locke maintained that England’s long political tradition
rested on “the rights of Englishmen” and on representative
government through Parliament
2. Montesquieu believed that powerful intermediary groups, such as
the judicial nobility, offered the best defense of liberty against
despotism
3. The Attraction of Liberalism
1. The belief that representative institutions could defend their liberty and
interests appealed powerfully to well-educated, prosperous groups as well
as liberal ideas about individual rights and political freedom
2. Representative government did not mean democracy, which liberal
thinkers tended to frown upon, but they envisioned voting for
representatives as being restricted to those who owned property
(liberalism found broad support among elites in western Europe)
3. Liberalism lacked from the beginning because of weak popular support
1. Liberals questioned theoretical and political ideas while common
people’s questions were immediate and economic (enough to eat?)
2. Traditional practices and institutions that they wanted to abolish
were important to peasants and urban workers (enclosure of lands
and regulation of food prices)
2. The American Revolution (1775-1789)
3. The French Revolution (1789-1791)
1. The Breakdown of the Old Order
1. Many French soldiers, such as Marquis de Lafayette, left to fight France’s
traditional enemy, served in America and were impressed by the ideals of
the Revolution
2. The French Revolution was more radical and more complex, more
influential and more controversial, more loved and more hated (opened the
modern era in politics)
3. The French Revolution origin was the financial difficulties of the
government and the efforts of monarchy to raise taxes stopped by the
Parlement (popular support)
4. The government was forced to finance all its expenditures during the
American war with borrowed money and the national debt and annual
budget deficit soared
1. By 1780s, 50 percent of France’s annual budget went for everincreasing interest payments, another 25 percent when tot maintain
the military, 6 percent absorbed by Versailles, and less than 20
percent left for productive functions of state
2. One way out would have been for the government to declare
partial bankruptcy, forcing its creditors to accept greatly reduced
payments on the debt and France declared this after an attempt to
establish a French national bank ended in 1720
3. By the 1780s, the French debt was being held by an army of
aristocratic and bour-geois creditors, and the French monarchy had
become far too weak for this action
5. King and his ministers could not print money creating inflation to cover
their deficits because France had no central bank, non paper currency, and
could not create credit
6. In 1786, France had no alternative but to try increasing taxes and
increased revenues were possible only through fundamental reforms
(opens social and political demands)
2. Legal Orders and Social Realities
1. France’s twenty-five million inhabitants were still legally divided into
three orders, or “estates,” the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else
2. The first estate, the clergy, numbered about 100,000, owned about 10
percent of the land, paid little taxes to the government every five years
1. Church levied a tax (tithe) on landowners, which averaged less
than 10 percent
2. Much of the church’s income was drained from local parishes by
political appointees and worldly aristocrats at the top of the church
hierarchy
3. The second legally defined estate consisted of some 400,000 nobles, the
descendents of “those who had fought” in the Middle Ages (owned about
25 percent of France)
1. Taxed lightly, nobles enjoyed certain privileges of lordship
(manorial rights) which allowed them to tax the peasantry for their
won profit done by exclusive rights to hunt, fish, monopolies on
baking bread and making wine, fees for justice
2. Nobles had “honorific privileges,” such as the right to precedence
on public occasions and the right to wear a sword (legal superiority
and social position)
4. Everyone else was a commoner, a member of the third estate; a few
commoners were merchants or lawyers and officials (could buy manorial
rights), others were urban artisans and unskilled day laborers, but the vast
majority consisted of peasants and agricultural workers in the countryside
(united by their shared legal status)
5. There were growing tensions between the nobility and the bourgeoisie
(middle class)
6. Aided by general economic expansion, the middle class tripled to about
2.3 millions people (8 percent) and became exasperated by “feudal” laws
restraining the economy and by the growing pretensions of reactionary
nobility (closing ranks on bourgeoisie)
1. The French bourgeoisie eventually rose up to lead the entire third
estate in a great social revolution that destroyed feudal privileges
and established a capitalist order based on individualism and a
market economy
2. Revisionist historians see both bourgeoisie and nobility as highly
fragmented as the nobility was separated by differences in wealth,
education
7. Revisionist historians stress three development, in particular
1. The nobility remained a fluid and relatively open order
(commoners continued to obtain noble status through government
service and purchase of positions)
2. Key sections of the nobility and bourgeoisie formed together the
core of the book-hungry Enlightenment public and both groups
saw themselves forming part of the educated elite standing well
above the common people (peasants and urban poor)
3. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were not really at odds in the
economic sphere in that both looked to investment in land and
government services
4. The ideal of the merchant capitalist was to gain wealth, to retire
from trade, purchase estates, and live as a large landowner
(mining, metallurgy, foreign trade)
8. The old Regime had ceased to correspond with social reality by the 1780s
and France had already moved toward a society based on wealth and
education
3. The Formation of the National Assembly
1. The Revolution was under way by 1787 and spurred by a depressed
economy and falling tax receipts, Louis XVI’s minister of finance
proposed to impose a general tax on all landed property as well as
provincial assemblies to help administer the tax
1. Called an assembly of notables to gain support and the assembled
notables, noblemen and clergy, were not in favor and in return for
their support, demanded that control over all government spending
be given to the provincial assemblies
2. Government refused and the notables responded that tax changes
required the approval of the Estates General, the representative
body of all three estates (had not met since 1614); dismissed the
notables and established new taxes by decrees
3. The Parlement specified the “fundamental laws” against which no
king could transgress, such as national consent to taxation and
freedom for arbitrary arrest
4. In July 1788, Louis XVI bowed to public opinion, called for the
Estates General
2. Clergy, nobles, and commoners came together in their respective orders to
draft petitions for change and to elect their respective delegates to the
Estates General
1. The local assemblies of the clergy frowned upon the church
hierarchy and two-thirds of the delegates were chosen from among
the parish priests
2. The nobles, split by wealth and education, remained politically
divide and a majority was drawn from the poorer and numerous
provincial nobility but one-third of the nobility’s representatives
were liberals committed to major changes
3. There was great popular participation in the elections for the third
estate because almost all male commoners twenty-five years or
older had the right to vote but most of the representatives selected
were well-educated, prosperous members of the middle class
(lawyers and government officials)
4. Social status and prestige were matters of concern and no delegates
were elected from the mass of laboring poor, that encouraged the
peasants and urban artisans to intervene directly and dramatically
at numerous points in the Revolution
3. The petitions of change coming from the three estates showed general
agreement
1. Royal absolutism show give way to constitutional monarchy, in
which laws and taxes would require the consent of the Estates
General meeting regularly
2. Individual liberties would have to be guaranteed by law and that
the economic position of the parish clergy would have to be
improved
3. Thought that economic development required reforms (internal
trade barriers)
4. During the electoral campaign: How would the Estates General vote, and
who would lead in the political reorganization that was generally desired?
5. Any action had required the agreement of at least two branches, a
requirement that virtually guaranteed control by the nobility and the clergy
6. The Parlement of Paris ruled that the Estates General should once again sit
separately
7. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes argued in 1789 in his famous pamphlet What is
the Third Estate? that the third estate constituted the true strength of the
French nation
8. The government agreed that the third estate should have as many delegates
as the clergy and nobility combined then negated the act by enforcing
separate order
9. In May 1789 the twelve hundred delegates of the three estates went into
Versailles but the delegates of the third estate demanded that the group sit
as a single body
10. After six weeks, a few parish priests joined the third estate, which on June
17 called itself the “National Assembly” and on June 20, the third estate
excluded because of “repairs” moved to a large indoor tennis court where
they swore the famous Oath of the Tennis Court, pledging not to disband
until they had written a new constitution
11. On June 23, he urged the estates to meet but at the same time following
advice of court nobles called an army to Versailles and dismissed his
liberal ministers
12. Facing opposition, Louis XVI resigned himself to bankruptcy and now
sought to reassert his historic “Divine right” to rule (delegates disbanded
at bayonet point)
4. The Revolt of the Poor and Oppressed
1. Grain was the basis of the diet of ordinary people in the eighteenth century
and in 1788 the harvest had been poor and the price of bread began to soar
(bread could cost 8 sous per pound even though the poor could barely
afford to pay 2 sous per pound)
2. Harvest failure and bread prices unleashed a classic economic depression
of the pre-industrial age and the demand for manufactured goods collapsed
(half needed relief)
3. The people of Paris entered decisively onto the revolutionary stage and
believed that the they should have steady work and enough bread at fair
prices to survive and feared that the dismissal of the king’s moderate
finance minister would put them at the mercy of aristocratic landowners
and grain speculators
1. On July 13 the people began to seize arms for the defense of the
city and marched to Bastille to search for gunpowder (gunpowder
was in a medieval fortress)
2. The prison surrendered; the prison governor and the mayor of Paris
were killed
3. The next day, a committee of citizens appointed the Marquis de
Lafayette commander of the city’s armed forces and the king was
forced to recall the finance minister and disperse his troops
(uprising saved the National Assembly)
4. All across France, peasants began to rise in spontaneous, violent, and
effective insurrection against their lords, ransacking manor houses and
burning obligations
5. Fear of vagabonds and outlaws—called the Great Fear—seized the
countryside and fanned the flames of rebellion (free themselves from
manorial rights and exploitation)
6. Some liberal nobles and middleclass delegates responded to peasant
demands at Versailles with a maneuver on the night of August 4, 1789
(duke of Aiguillon, one of France’s greatest nobles, urged equality in
taxation and elimination of feudal dues)
7. All the old exactions imposed on the peasants—serfdom, hunting rights,
fees for justice, village monopolies, and others—were abolished (without
compensation)
8. Peasants never paid feudal dues and the French peasants now protected
their triumph
5. A Limited Monarchy
1. On August 27, 1789, the National Assembly issued the Declaration of the
Rights of Man, which states, “Men are born and remain free and equal in
rights”
1. Maintained that mankind’s natural rights are “liberty, property,
security, and resistance to oppression” and “everyman is innocent
until proven otherwise”
2. Law is an expression of the general will; all citizens have the right
to concur personally or through their representatives in its
formations”
3. Every citizen may therefore speak, write, and publish freely (free
expression)
2. Call for the liberal revolutionary guaranteed equality before the law,
representative government for a sovereign people, and individual freedom
3. The questions of how much power the king should retain and whether he
could permanently veto legislation led to another deadlock, decided by
poor women of Paris
1. Women customarily bought the food and managed the poor
family’s resources and in Paris great numbers of women also
worked for wages (garments)
2. Plummeting demand for luxuries intensified the general economic
crisis and increasing unemployment and hunger resulted in another
popular revolt
3. On October 5, seven thousand desperate women marched to
Versailles, demanding action, invaded the Assembly, invaded the
royal apartments searching for the queen, Marie Antoinette, and
the intervention of Lafayette and the National Guard saved the
royal family (the king was ordered to live in Paris)
4. The next day, the royal family and the National Assembly, followed the
king to Paris until September 1791, saw the consolidation of the liberal
Revolution
1. The National Assembly abolished the French nobility as a legal
order and created a constitutional monarchy, which Louis XVI
reluctantly agreed to in July 1790
2. In the final constitution, the king remained the head of state, but all
lawmaking power was given to the National Assembly, elected by
the economic males
5. New laws broadened women’s rights to seek divorce, to inherit property,
and to obtain financial support from fathers for illegitimate children
1. Majority of National Assembly believed that women should raise
the child, complete domestic duties and leave politics and most
public activities to men
2. Delegates were convinced that political life in absolutist France
had been corrupt and one way was immoral aristocratic women
had used their sexual charms
6. The National Assembly replaced the historic provinces with eighty-three
departments of approximately equal size, introduced the metric system in
1793, promoted liberal concept of economic freedom and prohibited
monopolies, guilds, and worker’s combinations and abolished barriers to
trade within France
7. Assembly imposed a radical reorganization on the Catholic church by
nationalizing the church’s property and abolished monasteries as useless
relics of a distant past
8. The government used all former church property as collateral to guarantee
a new paper currency, the assignats, then sold these properties to support
the state’s finances
9. Reorganization of France brought the new government into conflict with
the Catholic church and Christians, but many delegates harbored a deep
distrust of popular piety
10. The Assembly established a national church, with priests chosen by voters
then required the clergy to take a loyalty oath to the new government and
this resulted in a division within both the country and the clergy on the
religious question
11. Policy toward the church was the revolutionary government’s first
important failure
4. World War and Republican France (1791-1799)
1. Foreign Reactions and the Beginning of War
1. France was seen as a mighty triumph of liberty over despotism and in
Great Britain, people hoped that this would lead to a fundamental
reordering of the political system
1. The system consolidated in the revolution of 1688 to 1689, placed
Parliament in the hands of the aristocracy and a few wealthy
merchants
2. Conservative leaders such as Edmund Burke (Reflections on the
Revolution in France, 1790) defend inherited privileges of English
monarchy and aristocracy, glorified the unrepresentative
Parliament, and predicted that thoroughgoing reform, like in
France, would lead only to chaos and tyranny
3. Mary Wollstonecraft was incensed by Burke’s book and wrote (A
Vindication of the Rights of Man) then developed for the first time
the logical implications of natural-law philosophy in her
masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
4. Wollstonecraft set high standards for women, advocated
coeducation, and marked the birth of the modern women’s
movement for equal rights (give women chance)
2. among European kings and nobility that revolution would spread resulted
in the Declaration of Pillnitz (1791), which threatened the invasion of
France by Austria and Prussia (expected to have a sobering effect on
revolutionary France w/o causing war)
3. When the National Assembly disbanded, it sought popular support be
decreeing that none of its members be eligible for election to the new
Legislative Assembly
1. The great majority of the legislators were still middle-class men
but were younger and less cautious than their predecessors (called
“Jacobins,” after the name of their political club and were
passionately committed to liberal revolution)
2. The Jacobins lumped “useless aristocrats” and “despotic monarch”
together and believed that if the courts o Europe were attempting
to incite war of kings against France, ten million Frenchmen would
be able to change the face of the world
4. France declared war on Francis II, the Habsburg monarch but the crusade
went poorly at first because Prussia joined Austria in the Austrian
Netherlands and French forces broke and fled at first encounter with
armies of this First Coalition
1. It is possible that only conflict between the eastern monarchs over
the division of Poland saved France from defeat (as the road to
Paris lay wide open)
2. Military reversals and Austro-Prussian threats caused a wave of
patriotic fervor to sweep France and the Legislative Assembly
declared the country in danger
3. Volunteer armies from the provinces stream through Paris singing
(Marseillaise)
4. On August 10, 1792, on news of treason by the king and queen, a
revolutionary crowd attacked the royal palace at the Tuileries
capturing the palace, while the royal family fled to the Legislative
Assembly, which suspended the king from all his functions,
imprisoned him, and called for a new National Convention to be
elected by universal male suffrage
2. The Second Revolution
1. The fall of the monarchy marked radicalization of the Revolution (second
revolution)
1. Louis’s imprisonment was followed by the September Massacres
where stories seized the city that imprisoned counter-revolutionary
aristocrats and priests were plotting with the allied invaders and
half the men and women were slaughtered
2. The new, popularly elected National Convention proclaimed
France a republic
2. The republic sought to create a new popular culture that glorified the new
order by adopting a revolutionary calendar, addressing each other with
“thou” instead of “you,” promoting democratic festivals (brought the
entire population together)
3. All the members of the National Convention were Jacobins and
republicans but the convention was divided into two bitterly competitive
groups—the Girondists, named after a department in the France, and the
Mountain, led by Robespierre and Georges Jacques Danton (called this
because members sat on uppermost benches of hall)
4. By a single vote (361 of 720), the National Convention convicted Louis
XVI of treason and sentenced him to death in January 1793 (died on
guillotine)
5. The Prussians had been stopped at the indecisive Battle of Valmy on
September 20, 1792; republican armies captured Nice, the city of
Frankfurt, won their first major battle at Jamappes and by November
1792, occupied the entire Austrian Netherlands
6. French armies found support among peasants and middleclass people but
lived off the land, requested food and supplies; started to look like
invaders and tensions mounted
1. In February 1793, the National Convention, already at war with
Austria and Prussia, declared war on Britain, Holland, and Spain
(France was now at war with almost all of Europe, a war that
would last almost without interruption until 1815)
2. Driven from the Austrian Netherlands, peasants did not want to be
drafted and were supported in their resistance by devout Catholics,
royalists, foreign agents
7. The National Convention found itself locked between Girondists and the
Mountain
1. The two groups were in general agreement on questions of policy
but the Girondists feared a dictatorship by the Mountain and the
Mountain was convinced that the more moderate Girondists would
turn to conservatives even royalists
2. With the middle-class delegates divide, the laboring poor of Paris
decided
8. The laboring men and women had drove the Revolution forward and petty
traders and laboring poor were often known as the sans-culottes (“without
breeches”) because men wore trousers instead of the breeches of the
aristocracy and the solid middleclass
1. In the spring of 1793, rapid inflation, unemployment, and food
shortages encouraged by so-called angry men, such as journalist
Jacques Roux, sans-culottes men and women demanded political
action to guarantee them daily bread
2. The Mountain joined the Girondists in rejecting these demands but
the Mountain and Robespierre became more sympathetic, joined
with sans-culottes in a popular uprising forcing the Convention to
arrest 31 Girondists deputies for treason on June 2 and all the
power passed to the Mountain
3. Total War and the Terror
1. In July 1794, the Austrian Netherlands and the Rhineland were under the
French and the First Coalition was falling apart and was due to the
government’s success in harnessing the explosive forces of a planned
economy, revolutionary terror, and modern nationalism in a total war
effort
2. Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety advanced with resolution
(1793-94)
1. Collaborated with patriotic and democratic sans-culottes, who
retained the common people’s faith in fair prices and a moral
economic order; established a planned economy with egalitarian
social overtones
2. The government decreed the maximum allowable prices for a host
of key products, rationing was introduced, and quality was also
controlled
3. Production of arms and munitions for the war effort were
controlled and craftsmen and manufacturers were told what to
produce and when to deliver
4. The second revolution and the ascendancy of the sans-culottes had
produced an embryonic emergency socialism (subsequent
development of socialist ideology)
3. During the Reign of Terror (1793-1974), special revolutionary courts
responsible only to Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety tried
political crimes and some 40,000 French died and another 300,000
suspects crowded the prisons
1. Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was a political weapon directed
against all who might oppose the revolutionary government
(secular ideology)
2. Strengthened belief that France had replaced a king with a bloodily
dictatorship
4. The most decisive element in the French republic’s victory over the First
Coalition was its ability to continue drawing on the explosive power of
patriotic dedication to a national state and a national mission (French
people stirred by a common loyalty)
5. All unmarried young men were subject to the draft; the French armed
forces grew to one million men in fourteen armies and were led by
generals who had risen rapidly from the ranks and personified the
opportunities the Revolution offered to the people
6. By the spring of 1794, French armies were victorious on all fronts
(republic saved)
4. The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory, 1794-1799
1. Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety relaxed the emergency
economic controls but extended the political Reign of Terror; their goal
was an ideal democratic republic where justice would reign and there
would be neither rich nor poor
1. Unrestrained despotism and the guillotine struck down on any who
opposed order
2. Robespierre’s Terror wiped out many men who had criticized him
for being soft on the wealthy and who were led by the radical
social democrat Jacques Hebert
3. After March 1794, several of Robespierre’s collaborators led by
Danton, marched up the steps on the guillotine when howled down
Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) and the next day,
Robespierre was guillotined to death
2. France experienced a reaction to the despotism of the Reign
(Thermidorian reaction)
3. Respectable middle-class lawyers and professions who led the liberal
revolution of 1789 reasserted their authority and the National Convention
abolished many economic controls, printed more paper currency, and let
prices rise sharply
4. The Convention restricted local political organizations and speculators
celebrated the end of the Terror with self-indulgence and ostentatious
luxury (worsen working poor)
5. The sans-culottes believed in small business, decent wages, and economic
justice and finally revolted in Paris against the new order in early 1795
(used army to control)
6. As the government began to retreat on the religious issue from 1796 to
1801, the women of rural France brought back the Catholic church and
open worship of God
7. National Convention wrote another constitution in 1795, which would
guarantee their economic position and political supremacy where the mass
voted for electors who elected members of a legislative assembly, who in
turn chose the Directory (five men)
8. The Directory continued to support French military expansion abroad and
unprin-cipled action of Directory reinforced widespread disgust with war
and starvation
9. After the national elections of 1797 (conservative and monarchist
deputies) and the Directory used the army to nullify the elections and
began to govern dictatorially
10. Napoleon Bonaparte ended the Directory in a coup d’etat and substituted a
strong dictatorship; effort to establish stable representative government
had failed
5. The Napoleonic Era (1799-1815)
1. Napoleon’s Rule of France
1. In 1799, young General Napoleon Bonaparte was a national hero and
seized power; (born in Corsica in 1769) Napoleon rose rapidly in the army
and placed in command of French forces in Italy where he won brilliant
victories in 1796 and 1797 (Egypt)
2. Napoleon learned of members of the Legislative Assembly who were
plotting against the Directory (weak dictatorship and firm rule had more
appeal than liberty)
1. Abbe Sieyes wrote that the nobility was over privileged and that
entire people should rule the French nation; wanted a strong
military ruler like Napoleon
2. The conspirators and napoleon organized a takeover and on
November 9, 1799, they ousted the Directors, and the following
day soldiers disbanded the Assembly
3. Napoleon was named first consul of the republic and a new
constitution consolidating his position was approved in December
1799
3. Essence of Napoleon’s domestic policy was to use powers to maintain
order and end civil strife and did so by working out unwritten agreements
with powerful groups in France where groups received favors in return for
loyal service
1. Napoleon’s bargain with the middle class was codified in the
famous Civil Code of 1804, which reasserted principles of the
revolution of 1789: equality of all male citizens before the law and
absolute security of wealth and private property
2. Napoleon and leading bankers of Paris established the privately
owned Bank of France, which loyally served the interests of the
state and the financial oligarchy
3. Napoleon’s defense of the new economic order also appealed to
the peasants, who had gained both land and status from the
revolutionary changes
4. Napoleon reconfirmed the gains of the peasantry and reassured the
middle class
4. Napoleon also accepted and strengthened the position of the French
bureaucracy and building on the government from the Old Regime, he
perfected a centralized state
5. A network of prefects, subprefects, and centrally appointed mayor s
depended on Napoleon and in 1800 and 1802, Napoleon granted official
pardon to the nobles on the condition that they return to France and take a
loyalty oath (occupied high posts)
6. In 1800, the French clergy was divided into those who had taken the oath
of allegiance to the revolutionary government and those in exile who had
refused
1. Napoleon, personally uninterested in religion, wanted a united
Catholic church in France that could serve as a bulwark of order
and social peace
2. Napoleon and Pope Pius VII signed the Concordat of 1801 where
the pope gained for French Catholics the right to practice religion
freely, but the government now nominated bishops, paid the
clergy, and exerted influence of the church of France
7. Napoleon’s domestic initiatives gave the great majority of French people a
welcome sense of order and stability and Napoleon added the glory of
military victory
8. Under Napoleon’s authoritarian rule, women lost many of the gains and
could not make contracts or even have bank accounts in their name and reestablished a “family monarch” where the power of the husband and father
was absolute over the rest
9. Free speech and freedom of the press, rights of the liberal revolution in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, were continually violated where number
of newspapers in Paris were reduced (government propaganda), harsh
penalties for politic offense, Napoleon left control of police state in France
to Joseph Fouche who organized an efficient spy system and by 1814,
there were 250,000 political prisoners
2. Napoleon’s Wars and Foreign Policy
1. After coming to power in 1799, he sent peace feelers to Austria and Great
Britain, the two remaining members of the Second Coalition, which had
been formed in 1798
1. After being rejected, French armies led by Napoleon defeated the
Austrians; in the Treaty of Luneville (1801) were Austria lost
almost all of its Italian possessions and German territory on the
west bank of the Rhine
2. Napoleon concluded the Treaty of Amiens with Great Britain in
1802 where France remained in control of Holland, the Austrian
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Netherlands, the west bank of the Rhine, and most of the Italian
peninsula (diplomatic triumph)
Redrawing the map of Germany to weaken Austria and attract the
secondary states of Germany toward France, Napoleon threatened British
interests in the eastern Mediterranean and tried to restrict British trade
with all of Europe
1. Deciding to renew war with Britain in May 1803, Great Britain
remained dominant on the seas and a combined French and
Spanish fleet was annihilated by Lord Nelson at the Battle of
Trafalgar on October 21, 1805; invasion of England was
impossible but renew fighting allowed to proclaim himself
emperor in 1804
2. Austria, Russia, and Sweden joined Britain to form the Third
Coalition against France before the Battle of Trafalgar and
assumption of the Italian crown had convinced Alexander I of
Russia and Francis II of Austria of Napoleon’s threat
3. Napoleon scored a brilliant victory over the Austrians and
Russians at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805 and accepted
territorial losses for peace
Napoleon abolished many of the German states in 1806 and established by
decree the German Confederation of the Rhine (minus Austria, Prussia,
and Saxony) and named himself “protector” of the confederation (firmly
controlled western Germany)
1. Prussians mobilized, Napoleon attacked, and won two more
brilliant victories in October 1806 at Jena and Auerstadt and after
Prussia, joining with Russia, lost to Napoleon’s larger armies,
Alexander I of Russia wanted peace
2. In June 1807, the tsar and emperor negotiated and finally at the
treaties of Tilsit, Prussia lost half of its population, while Russia
accepted Napoleon’s reorganization of Europe and also promised
to enforce the economic blockade
Napoleon saw himself as the emperor of Europe (“Great Empire”), which
was consisted of three parts, the expanding France as the core, a number
of dependent satellites and allies that were expected to support Napoleon’s
continental system after 1806, and the independent but allied states of
Austria, Prussia, and Russia
In the areas incorporated into France and in the satellites, Napoleon
introduced many French laws, abolished feudal dues and serfdom, and put
the prosperity and special interest of France first in order to safeguard his
power base (conquering tyrant)
The first great revolt occurred in Spain where in 1808 a coalition of
Catholics, monarchists, and patriots rebelled against attempts to make
Spain a French satellite
In 1810, Britain remained at war with France, helping the guerrillas in
Spain and Portugal, the economic blockage was a failure creating hard
times for French artisans and middle class, and Napoleon turned on
Alexander I of Russia (scapegoat)
8. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia began in June 1812 with a force that had
600,000 and although planning to winter in the Russian city of Smolensk,
Napoleon pressed on a
1. Defeated the Russians at the battle of Borodino, but Alexander
ordered the evacuation of Moscow, which then burned, and
Alexander refused to negotiate
2. After five weeks in the burned-out city, Napoleon ordered a retreat,
one of the great military disasters in history; the Russian army and
Russian winter cut Napoleon’s army to pieces and only 30,000
men returned to their homelands
9. Prince Klemens von Metternich, offered the proposal that France get
reduced to its historical size but Austria and Prussia joined Russia and
Great Britain in the fourth Coalition and was cemented by the Treaty of
Chaumont, intended to last twenty years
10. On April 4, 1814, Napoleon abdicated his throne and granted him the
island of Elba off the coast of Italy as his own state and allowed him to
keep his imperial title
11. The allies agreed to the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty and the new
monarch, Louis XVIII tried to consolidate that support by issuing the
Constitutional Charter, which accepted many of France’s revolutionary
changes and guaranteed civil liberties
12. A constitutional monarchy established in 1791 allowed few people to vote
for repre-sentatives to the resurrected Chamber of Deputies and was
treated leniently by allies\
13. Louis XVIII lacked the glory and magic of Napoleon and hearing of
political unrest in France, Napoleon stage an escape from Elba in February
1815, used appeals for support and French officers and soldiers who had
fought for him responded but the allies were united against him at the tend
of a period known as the Hundred Days, the Duke of Wellington crushed
Napoleon at Waterloo on June 18, 1815
14. Napoleon was imprisoned on the island of St. Helena and Louis XVIII
returned “in the baggage of the allies” but now the allies now dealt more
harshly with the apparently incorrigible French (Napoleon wrote memoirs
and an era had ended)