Download causes of the french revolution

GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
1
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
(1789-1799)
Guillotining of Louis XVI, 1793
M. Nichols GCE Level History BWIC 2007
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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CAUSES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
LONG TERM REASONS
The French Revolution was, like the Russian Revolution of 1917, the result of
a combination of short-term and long–term factors, triggered off by the
momentous events of a single year, in this case 1789.

The Estates System. France was a rigidly classified society divided
into three estates. These estates had their own rights and privileges in
the case of the first two, and lots of onerous duties and responsibilities
in the case of the Third.
“We were the First Estate. Made up of around
130 000 members, we were the cardinals,
archbishops, bishops, abbots, nuns, monks and humble curates. We paid no taxes
whatsoever, but every few years would present
a monetary gift to the King. We owned about
10% of the land in France and even had our
own courts. Many of us were fabulously
wealthy and powerful and had served as
ministers of the King, like Cardinals Richelieu
and Mazarin. The wealth and power of the
Church had led to a certain level of anticlericalism in France. However, the majority of
us were ordinary village priests who were loved
by our peasant flocks”.
“We are the Second Estate and
comprised the aristocracy of 400 000
members. We had enormous privileges
and droits or rights. We paid a few
taxes, but most of the truly onerous
ones like the taille and the corvee we
certainly did not. We even had a term
for those who paid the former. We
contemptuously called them ‘the
taillable’ meaning those who were
directly taxed. We were so snobbish
and aloof that we divided ourselves into
three hierarchies: with the court nobles
being the true elite, then the nobility of
the sword and those of the robe coming
last, as many were government
ministers and civil servants who had
only been en-nobled in the last hundred
years or so”.
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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“We were the Third Estate. We made up
the vast majority of France’s 26 million
people. We, however, were not really an
homogeneous group like the others, as
we comprised everyone from doctors and
lawyers and rich merchants to artisans
and peasants. We paid all the taxes and
had onerous duties like paying for the
roads and bridges to be repaired. We
had no say in government, despite the
fact that our members were often the best
educated people in society. We detested
the Second Estate, especially, which was
holding us back and refusing to relinquish
any of its enormous privileges or allow us
to enter its ranks”.
This rigid system meant even the 1st Estate was increasingly the
preserve of the nobility, while just to be an officer in the army required
generations of noble ancestry. The King was advised solely by the
nobility. Opportunities were thus closed to men of education and talent
with no title. It is not a coincidence that, as Christopher Hibbert has
stressed, the main leaders of the Revolution would be highly educated
members of the middle class and in particular failed writers and
lawyers. Danton, one of the leaders of the Revolution, would say that
“the ancien regime drove us [to revolution] by giving us a good
education, without opening any opportunity for our talents”.
The 2nd Estate was regarded as parasitical, as it enjoyed its many
droits without living up to any of its responsibilities. The economic
problems of the 1770s and 1780s were increasingly passed down to
the peasantry by their noble landlords, who had nothing but contempt
for their tenant farmers. In France, the local squire certainly did not
play cricket on the village green with his tenants - nor did he pay his
way. A bankrupt France was not allowed to tax the very people who
had all the money!
Insufficient
High Ordinary
Poor financial
revenue e.g.
Costs of wars
Expenditure
administration
not
only lack of
e.g. in America
e.g. borrowing =
e.g. palaces
taxes, but their
interest to pay
inefficient
collection
Massive Debts!
=
£££££££££££££
The 2nd and 3rd Estates may have detested each other, but they also
despised the monarchy’s absolutism and so had a common cause.
What is historiography? Is it important? How should we utilise it in our
answers?
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007

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Royal Absolutism. Since the times of the dictatorial and bigoted
Louis XIV, French kings had been invested with enormous powers (e.g.
the infamous lettres de cachet, censorship, etc.).
Louis XIV had been heavily responsible through his innumerable wars
for the parlous state of the French monarchy’s finances by 1789. A
megalomaniac, he had developed the ideas of absolutism and had
strived for hegemony of Europe. His Chief Minister, Cardinal Mazarin
taught him belief in divine kingship, along with a cynicism and contempt
for his fellow Man. He was a spendthrift womaniser with an insatiable
sexual appetite. However, Louis had also been capable, charming,
accomplished and competent. He had been an ideal king.
However, unlike the Sun King, the present monarch, Louis XVI was not
a prepossessing figure. Kind, generous, a loving family man, he was
also indolent, indecisive and vacillating. A pious man with an
enormous appetite, who preferred to hunt rather than attend to the
affairs of state, it did not help that he was short and fat (1.70m and
120kg), and hardly looked very regal. His hobbies were also rather
plebeian. His two brothers: the Counts of Provence and Artois were
extreme reactionaries and rarely gave their elder sibling sensible
advice.
His extravagant Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette, hardly helped with his
image. Grant and Temperley have even claimed that she was a
“powerful and dangerous counsellor” to her husband. She had helped
in the dismissal of the progressive finance minister Turgot, for instance.
The royalist system would be referred to as the ancien regime, so
anachronistic was it. The nobility were becoming increasingly resentful
of royal power and attacks on its institutions, like the parlements or law
courts. They were also disinclined to pay any new taxes, which the
increasingly insolvent monarchy needed to impose, in order to pay its
debts. It was Louis’ willingness to contemplate an erosion of the 2 nd
Estates rights that would drive them into an alliance of convenience
with the 3rd Estate. They demanded the re-calling of the Estates
General, a type of parliament that had not sat since 1614, hoping to put
pressure on the King. To the 3rd Estate, the Estates General would
give them a chance of representation, at last.
S. J. Lee is very critical of Louis whom he says oversaw the loss of
direction of government policy and refers to his “chaotic economic and
fiscal system” which, for example, saw him sign a free trade treaty in
1786 with GB, which unleashed the forces of laissez faire at the exact
time when the struggling economy most needed protection. This made
the 3rd Estate even more determined on a parliamentary monarchy so
that its commercial interests could be represented. The well-meaning,
but incompetent and ineffectual antics of the King’s finance ministers
like Calonne and Necker hardly helped matters or endeared the King to
the nobility whom they were threatening to tax. It was this attack on the
most privileged of classes (whose discontent had been apparent as
early as 1787) that ironically spurred the French Revolution into life.
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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The 3rd Estate wanted a review of all the inequitable taxes and a
reduction, but not abolition, of the monarchy’s powers. These ideas
were expressed often in the words of liberal and Enlightenment
philosophers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, though Lee
(and Matthews) stresses they were used merely to articulate the
demands of the reformers rather than having drawn up their policies.
In the same way, the American war of Independence (1775-1781), in
which many Frenchmen had fought (and which more importantly had
contributed to France’s insolvency), had an influence on the thinking
behind the demands of the 3rd Estate (and even some of the Second).
Louis XVI was not as astute and clever as Louis XIV who had used the
support of the bourgeoisie to keep the nobility under control and so
relatively docile. Nor was he as ruthless as other French kings like
Louis XI, the infamous ‘Spider King’. Such ‘divide and rule’ principles,
as utilised by Le Soleil Roi, were beyond the later Louis’ limited political
understanding. By calling an Estates General, says Lee, Louis was
acknowledging “the collapse of absolutism and the existence of a
political vacuum at the centre”. Grant and Temperley put it more
clearly, describing how it was “not inflexibility, but weakness of will that
was his bane”. While Matthews comments that: “the king can be said
to bear major responsibility for bringing things to a head in June 1789”.

Common problems affecting Europe. Lee, like Palmer and
Godechot, has also stresses that France’s revolution was part of a
general wave of unrest in Europe and even North America. Enormous
population growth (from 100 to 200 million people between 1700-1800);
the severe economic crises of the 1770s and 1780s, and the innate
instability of government were not restricted to France. France,
however, experienced the most momentous and lasting changes
because it had the strongest bourgeoisie and elements of social cooperation, while the peasantry also supported the Revolution.
Consensual factors that were absent in other countries.
Ultimately, though the fundamental reasons for the events of 1789
were the result of the above factors, the short-term more direct
considerations were of even more paramount concern. Grant and
Temperley are certainly convinced that France was in no danger of
revolution until the late 1780s.
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
Summaries of the Estates’ Demands
SHORT-TERM CAUSES
It is one of the many ironies of the French Revolution that it was not brought
about by un-ending misery, but quite the reverse.
The middle class (bourgeoisie) were prospering throughout most of the 18th
century. Famines were actually decreasing and were nothing like those that
had happened in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. With this prosperity
there came increasing aspirations and an expectation of continued progress.
The droughts, famines and increased prices that thus hit France from 1785
were an even more traumatic shock than they might otherwise have been.
The suddenness of the terrible downturn in prosperity that came in 1788 and
1789, after the disastrous harvests of those years, says S. J. Lee, had “a far
more dangerous psychological impact” than normal. The deep resentment
and growing bitterness aimed at the entrenched Second Estate thus had a
focus: if we are now suffering why do they continue to do so well?
Louis, ever the reactionary, tried to halt the meeting of the Estates General
(the first since 1614) who then met instead at an indoor tennis court. There
they signed the famous tennis court oath, vowing not to go home until they
had secured their political and human rights.
The calling of an Estates General had helped to turn a crisis into outright
revolution. Arguments over voting rights led the 3rd Estate to convene a
National Assembly and a determination by the bourgeoisie to keep the
(political) rights it had won by July 1789.
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GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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However, the Assembly members were not particularly radical. They were
much less interested in social reforms, than in securing their political rights
first and foremost, and it was left to the Parisian poor to really push the
revolution in a more radical, new direction.
The storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789, was a massive symbolic event,
which had also involved great bloodshed. But it was also a reaction to the
King’s attempts to suppress the Revolution. The assistance of the regular
army French Guards, showed how the revolution was spreading. The
Bastille’s fall helped to radicalise the revolution and gave it a lasting memorial
and day of celebration. To Grant and Temperley it symbolised the takeover of
the Revolution by Paris, which then began to attract the desperate and
unemployed from the provinces. Even the King and his family were forced to
live in Paris and abandon their beloved Versailles, from October, 1789.
The peasants in the countryside though also took matters into their own hands
and the Grand Peur of the late summer (soudure) of 1789 saw them seize
land and destroy the last vestiges of the hated seigneurial droits and terriers.
Revolution needs all classes’ involvement to succeed and in France this was
pretty much the case, with even Louis himself ending up wearing the new,
revolutionary tricolour in the days that followed (the tricolour being a
combination of the red and blue of Paris - and the white of the king). Grant
and Temperley have even claimed Louis wanted revolution to help sort out the
nation’s problems, just not the Revolution he was to get.
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF REASONS FOR THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
The ideas of Enlightenment thinkers
like Montesquieu, Quesnay, Rousseau
& Voltaire pervaded educated society
France was an over-populated
nation of 26m, which was
experiencing a general downturn in
prosperity, like the rest of Europe
The disastrous harvests
of the late 1780s led to
rising bread prices and
starvation amongst the
poor, as well as
unemployment
France’s involvement in the
American War of Independence
(1776-1781) had helped bankrupt
the state and added to its fiscal
woes
Royal absolutism
was distrusted by all
three estates,
especially as
Louis XVI was an
ineffectual ruler
France was nearly bankrupt.
The King needed to raise new
taxes and disastrously
considered taxing the wealthy
1st and 2nd Estates
Most
Significant
Many Frenchmen
had fought in
America and came
back with radical
ideas and beliefs,
which the Revolution
would copy
Unlike in the rest of Europe,
in France there was certain
consensus amongst the
classes
Ambitions of the Third Estate for power and influence, and
an end to seigneurial, feudal droits, along with lower taxes.
They had been doing well, but in the last decades of the
18th century had seen their progress and prosperity
thwarted by the ancien regime, which had been unable and
unwilling to reform, with Louis not supporting his
ministers
NATURE AND EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Less
Significant
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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“It is feared that the Revolution like Saturn will end up devouring its own
children” Citizen Vergniaud (A Moderate, Guillotined during the Terror)
After the first tentative months, the Revolution became genuinely radical. The
Parisian sans-culottes under their acerbic leaders like the journalist Marat,
had a say in government and enormous political clout. The Legislative
Assembly was divided into radical and more moderate factions, the
Montagnards and Feuillants, respectively. Conservatives sat on the righthand side, radicals on the left, establishing a convention that exists to this
day. The struggle to take the revolution in different directions would dominate
the years after 1789 with first one faction and then the other triumphing. The
Revolution though, would ultimately end up fizzling out and, as so often
happens in history, events would ironically end up producing a system that
was reminiscent of the ancien regime, which the Revolution had meant to
dismantle.
The events of the early phases of the Revolution between 1789-92 can be
summarised as:



The destruction of the Bastille prison in July 1789, a hated symbol
of royal power, though also another example of the many ironies of the
Revolution in that it contained only 7 prisoners, none of whom were
even political detainees (4 were forgers, one a lunatic, one a sexoffender and one a foreigner!) - and that conditions there were a lot
better than in most other (more over-crowded) French prisons; the
actual storming though, unlike that other great Revolutionary symbolic
event, the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, was genuinely
bloody. Hundreds were killed and it ended with the governor of the
prison, the Marquis de Launay, being decapitated by the mob and
having his head placed on a pike; Lee says the events symbolised the
bankruptcy of royal authority; Louis’s further attempts to stem the
direction of the events of 1789 would result in the famous October
march on Versailles (orchestrated by the women of Paris) and his
removal to Paris;
Events in the countryside especially where, during the Grand Peur, the
peasants had taken matters into their own hands, resulted in a number
of radical changes: feudalism and the tithe were abolished; Church
lands put up for sale and the Declaration of the Rights of Man drawn
up; the aristocratic parlements were dismantled; de-centralisation, with
the establishment of the departments system, was introduced; the
National Assembly became the more egalitarian Constituent Assembly;
Other more moderating influences though were already apparent; the
franchise was restricted to taxpayers and property owners, (with a
definition of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens) though this still meant 4.3
million voters; the 1791 Constitution, however, opened up a Pandora’s
Box according to J. Roberts, that could not be closed;
As so often in revolutions, the initial altruistic aims were hijacked by those of a
more conservative and even reactionary frame of mind, and they in turn were
opposed by the fanatics. The King, a very reluctant supporter of the new
constitution of 1791 was determined not to see any further erosion of his
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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powers which now saw him termed not ‘King of France’, but ‘King of the
French’. The Left agitated in response for a republic, and radicals like the
incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre denigrated a system that had not
introduced universal male suffrage. The radicals even started in-fighting
amongst themselves with the Montagnards triumphing over the slightly more
moderate Girondins.
During 1792-94, the Revolution entered its most radical stage; the
catalyst for this being war with Revolutionary France’s many foreign enemies
and counter-revolution in the Vendee. The search for internal enemies after
attacks by the Prussians resulted in the truly barbaric massacres of
September 1792, in which the prisons were emptied of ‘traitors’. Louis’ fate
was sealed after his attempt to escape France and re-capture at Varennes
(and the activities of his aristocratic supporters in exile abroad). With the
declaration of a republic in September 1792, he was executed in January
1793, the blade of the guillotine finding it difficult to slice through his fat neck.
The Montagnards then turned on the Girondins who were also executed.
The introduction of the Terror in 1793, which lasted to 1794, saw the radicals,
led by the priggish Robespierre, decimate both their political and class
enemies, and anyone presumed to be a threat to the new republic.
Traditionally seen as an attack on the privileged, in reality, as Hibbert points
out, only 9% of its victims were nobles, 6% members of the former 1st Estate,
and the remaining 85%, members of the class the Revolution was meant to
benefit. In all, 16 -18 000 people were executed. Most were ordinary people.
The Committees of Public Safety and General Security, which now ran the
country, paradoxically extended the franchise, but at the same time tended to
concentrate power in their own hands. Equally contradictory was the
emphasis on liberty at the expense of individual freedom, which Marat and
Robespierre symbolised. The latter persecuted atheists, while introducing an
absurd new religion: the Cult of the Supreme Being and new calendar, and felt
compelled to make men free, even if this meant the use of terror. The
Jacobins also used the Terror to eliminate their political rivals both those they
found too moderate (Dantonists) and those too radical (Hebertists). In many
ways it was the kind of bloody purge of political enemies that the 20th century
dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler would also resort to.
Robespierre has been seen favourably by French historians like Mathiez, and
Lefebvre, and even US historians like Jordan, as the most sincere and
dedicated of revolutionaries. When Lenin came to power he erected a statue
outside the Kremlin walls to a man he much admired. I prefer to see him as a
cold, deluded fanatic completely out of touch with reality and having lost sight
of the practical purposes of revolution. We should avoid caricaturing him as
did a variety of nineteenth century writers from de Stael and Carlyle to
Dickens, but even so there seems little in him to find truly attractive.
A detached, vain, ambitious, provincial lawyer who probably died a virgin, he
had few pleasures other than clothes and a fastidious hair-style. He was also
fond of oranges, loved by his sister Charlotte and kind to animals. He had
been deserted by his dissolute lawyer father at six, by which time his mother
had also died. He was brought up by two aunts. Educated at the best school
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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in France, Louis Le Grand, where he had been an outstanding scholar and
the protégé of the Bishop of Arras, he had become a judge at a young age. In
1788-89, he had defended an innocent soldier called Louis-Marie Hyacinthe
Dupond who had spent 14 years in prison because of a royal lettre de cachet.
According to Jordan, this case made him the radical he was to become.
His later promotion of the Cult of The Supreme Being as an alternative to
Christianity was not only absurd and unpopular, but alarmed many atheists,
as well as Catholics. According to Jordan, Robespierre the man and
Robespierre the revolutionary were inseparable. He lacked Danton’s warmth
and rough bonhomie and Marat’s approachability. He would readily give
interviews, but only on receipt of formal, written notice - in advance.
He grew to be so hated that when he was at last overthrown, someone shot
him in the face the night before his execution. He went to the guillotine with
his jaw hanging off, covered in blood and jeered by the very masses he
proclaimed to be saving. It is hard to feel much sympathy for him nor for the
equally repulsive Marat who was assassinated in his palliative bath by the far
more attractive Charlotte Corday; an event immortalised in the painter JeanJacques David’s masterpiece.
Lee gives Robespierre and the Committees some credit for saving France
from its external enemies, but says overall he and the government of this
period were largely a failure. One of their very few surviving reforms other
than the military system of conscription (the highly effective levee en masse),
was the decimal system, which would be revived by Napoleon.
On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI of France went to the scaffold after his
conviction for treason and the proclamation of France’s First Republic. He had
been unable to stop or adapt to the early events of the French Revolution, and
his clumsy attempts to regain control with the help of Austria and other foreign
monarchies had set him on a collision course with the radical Montagnard
deputies in the National Convention. He was executed because he was the
king and all that he symbolised, not because he was the nonentity, Louis
Bourbon.
In October, the 37 year old Marie-Antoinette was also decapitated. ‘Madame
Deficit’ had not only lost a lot of money, now she had also lost her head.
During her trial, absurd accusations had been made against her, and most
cruelly, even her young son (Louis XVII) had been forced to invent lurid tales
about his mother’s sexual activities. Since the diamond necklace affair of
1786, when she was meant to have contracted syphilis from the Cardinal de
Rohan and had affairs with men like the Swedish Count Fersen, MarieAntoinette had been the victim not so much of radical gossip, as smallminded, French xenophobia.
It was a Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a deputy since 1789, who had introduced
a law requiring that all public executions be performed by a decapitating
machine, which was felt to be more egalitarian and humane than traditional
methods. Ironically, the guillotine was to become the most lasting image of the
inhumane tyranny of the Reign of Terror – and of French culture. (Murder in
France was still punishable by the guillotine when I was a boy!).
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The Terror however did not solely utilise the guillotine. In 1793, in Nantes,
mass executions took place by drowning; in Lyons, victims were lined up in
front of cannons and peppered with grapeshot. The anti-Revolutionary
reaction in the Vendee region saw 200 000 perish, while the earlier
(September,1792) massacres in Paris had been conducted with cudgels and
butchers’ blades.
The third phase of the Revolution (1794-1799) saw a swing to the right, as
the middle classes, for and by whom the Revolution was arguably
orchestrated, began to assert their control.
The coup that overthrew Robespierre, however, known as Thermidor, was the
result of both those who saw Robespierre as too moderate and those who
found him too radical. In many ways the Thermidorians were a disparate
bunch whose only common feature was a fear for their lives and a desire to
reverse the more radical aspects of the revolution.
The risings by the sans-culottes of Germinal and Prairial, 1795 were brutally
crushed by the government and its loyal troops (including Napoleon).
The new regime saw reforms including the creation of oligarchic institutions
like the Council of 500 and the Council of the Elders (men 40 plus), as a well
as a five-man Directory, to run the country. Lee calls the reforms of the new
government “not unimpressive”, including: reform of the paper currency, a
return to a metallic coinage, communications improved and poor relief
reorganised. Fashionable people (Les Incroyables) were even free to
tastelessly mock the guillotine by wearing red ribbons around their throats.
The new system’s opposition to party-politics, however, allowed the accession
to power of a dictator, one Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. He was helped by
his brother Lucien the real hero of the Brumaire Coup who had fortified his
quavering older brother’s resolve.
Bonaparte would go far to overturning much of the achievements of the
Revolutionary period and betray the very revolution that had made him.
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
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The Wider Impact of the French Revolution
Human blood has a terrible power against those who have spilt it…The
Terrorists have done us immense and lasting harm. Were you to go into the
last cottage in the farthest country of Europe, you would meet that memory
and that curse (Michelet)
The French Revolution has been generally seen as one of the most
momentous events in world history. In 19th century France, it created an idea
of the state being a permanently revolutionary nation. France experienced
numerous revolutions in the 19th century: the overthrow of the Bourbons in
1830; the revolutionary activities of 1848-51, as well as 1870-71. A
parliamentary enquiry in 1871 even commented that: “Other peoples have had
revolutions more or less frequently; but we have revolution permanently”!
Even in the 20th century, ever turbulent France was in danger of various
possible revolutions and coups, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s.
Myths grew up about the 1789 Revolution which persist to the present day. In
reality, there were no barricades, no tricoteuses (inventions of Dickens) on the
scaffolds, no liberation of political prisoners form the Bastille. However, this in
no way denigrates the impact of the Revolution nor its radicalism, as myths
can be more effective than the truth in promoting a desired image.
France’s initial revolution’s impact then and now was, and is, wide-ranging.
Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out how “France provided the vocabulary and the
issues of liberal and radical-democratic politics for most of the world”. The
tricolour of some kind dominates many countries emblems. Revolutionary
France would provide universal codes of law, measurement and ideology.
Given one in five Europeans were French, it is not surprising the ideas of
France came to dominate the continent. Hobsbawm believes the French
Revolution unlike any other 18th century one was ecumenical – it was
designed to be spread. It had influence in Latin America, even India to radical
nationalists like Simon Bolivar and Ram Mohan Roy respectively. Hobsbawm
terms it simply: “the revolution of its time”.
Contemporaries either took hope from it (such as the English radical, Tom
Paine) or denounced it as an evil aberration (the Irishman, Edmund Burke).
Most of Europe’s rulers viewed it with a mix of alarm and disgust. The
autocratic emperors of Austria (Joseph II and Leopold) and Russia (from
Catherine the Great to Tsars Paul and Alexander I) were understandably
antagonistic to a system that proclaimed ‘Equality, Fraternity and Liberty’ for
all. However, even relatively liberal states like GB, with its constitutional,
parliamentary democracy, were quickly alienated by the goings on in France
after 1789, especially given the universal promises of its ‘Declaration of the
Rights of Man’.
The reactionary states of Austria and Prussia formed the first anti-French
coalition in 1792. The French then fought the British and the Dutch in 1793.
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Austria was consistently anti-French, also joining the later coalition of GB,
Russia and the Kingdom of Naples.
Russia was a little more ambivalent, at least initially, in its response.
Catherine the Great (who died in 1796) was always more concerned about the
Jacobin influences on her near neighbour Poland, than with France directly.
However, even she eventually supplied ships to help the British Royal Navy in
its activities in the North Sea against France. Her son, Tsar Paul (murdered in
1801) was more overtly anti-Revolutionary, especially after France had
invaded Malta (1798), an island he had a romantic obsession with. Russia
had even allied with its traditional arch-enemy, Turkey, in 1798, alarmed at
French encroachments into the eastern Mediterranean, which threatened
Russia’s Black Sea ports.
GB though would be the staunchest enemy of Revolutionary France.
Historically, both countries had always been at loggerheads and the execution
of Louis had been especially disturbing to an essentially conservative nation
like GB. The Revolution paradoxically though brought Britons of all classes
closer together. Portrayed as an anarchic menace dripping with blood, most
British people thus continued to regard France as its prominent national
enemy and this over-riding nationalism helped to consolidate the British state.
The Republican USA and France, however, maintained relatively cordial
relations, though perhaps more because their mutual interests rarely clashed
than out of purely ideological compatibility.
The Revolutionary armies had initially fought defensive campaigns against
those like the Austrians determined to crush it. However, like the Terror,
these high ideals quickly gave way to selfish and atavistic interests. What had
initially been defensive actions, soon became wars designed to spread the
Revolution, provide friendly or at least amenable neighbours, and eventually
gain a Republican empire in vulnerable areas like the Holy Roman Empire
and Italy. Such expansionist policies were to be further developed by
Napoleon I.
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O
N
VERB
ADJECTIVE
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
15
HOW DID THE TERROR AFFECT PEOPLE?
Maximillien Robespierre
Louis XVI
An aristocrat
Edmund Burke
Marie-Antoinette
An abbot
A workman is brought before the Committee for Public
Safety
“They said I was an ‘Austrian
****’ and plotted against
France, and so executed me a
few months after my husband”
“We were sentenced to
death and after we were
guillotined in January,
1793, a republic was
declared”
“They said all aristocrats
were enemies of the
Revolution and they killed
thousands of us!”
“I was responsible for
the guillotining of
thousands, before I
myself was guillotined”
“The First Estate suffered enormously,
especially from the atheists on the
committees and many of us died”
“I was an Irishman
who criticised and
wrote against the
Revolution and
encouraged British
opposition to it”
“Even though I was an
ordinary citizen I was
brought before the
Committee and
sentenced to death like
thousands of other
innocent people”
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
16
WHAT WAS THE IMPACT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION?
Positive Reforms
The French Revolution resulted in a number of improvements to peoples’ lives.
Ordinary people now had some __________ power. They had more of a say in
running the country than they had ever had before. The estates system was
________. Titles were __________ and Church lands were __________. Some
even found their way to the ________. Priests now had to answer to the _________
for what they did.
The legal system was also improved. ____________ was abolished. Judges now
had to be _________ and so were less likely to be ___________.
Certain freedoms were introduced so newspapers were no longer __________.
Couples could now __________ whom they pleased, without seeking permission.
There were more _________ opportunities and people could _________whatever
god they wanted to. There were also laws to combat __________ discrimination,
reflecting the universal aspects of the Declaration of the ________ of Man.
Negative Changes
The Committee for _________________ ended up bringing about a reign of cruelty
known as the __________. The ___________that succeeded in ____ ended up
using the _______to crush any opposition. France was going backwards!
A new paper currency called the ______________ was introduced, but quickly lost its
value.
Revolutionary France also became a much more aggressive nation determined to
export its ideas abroad and this brought France into conflict with countries
like__________ and ____________, whose emperor was furious at the execution of
his sister.
No Change
Ordinary people rarely got a chance to buy __________ lands, which were instead
bought up by people who were _________even before the Revolution. They could
also still not __________ despite the fact they paid___________.
In the end, France even stopped being a republic and went back to being a
_________ when in _________ a Corsican tyrant called ____________ crowned
himself the new ________________!
After his final defeat in 1815, even the _______________ monarchy returned.
Things, as they often do in history, had come full circle.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE-TERROR-TAXES-CHURCH-EMPEROR-ELECTED-WORKGOVERNMENT-CENSORED-CORRUPT-RACIAL-MONARCHY-WORSHIP-ASSIGNATSDIRECTORY-MARRY-POLITICAL-ABOLISHED-ARMY-1795-DISMANTLED-WEALTHYVOTE-1804-BRITAIN-CONFISCATED-PEASANTRYBOURBON-PUBLIC SAFETY-TORTURE-RIGHTS-AUSTRIA
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
17
Timeline of the French Revolution
Date
1786
1787
1788
June 1789
July 1789
July/August
1789
October 1789
1790
1791
1792
September 1792
January 1793
1793
1794
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
Events
GCE Level History M. Nichols BWIC 2007
18
SUMMARY OF EFFECTS
OF THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION –SOCIAL,
ECONOMIC, MILITARY,
RELIGIOUS & POLITICAL