OUTCOMES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

1789-1795

Peter McPheeUniversity of Melbourne

220 June 1789 - Jacques-Louis David

314 July 1789 - Bastille

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‘Grande Peur’July-August

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4 August 1789

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A. THE DREAM OF FREEDOM, 1789

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

The August Decrees

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1. absolute monarchy → constitutional monarchy

divine right → popular sovereignty 2. privilege → civil equality in taxes, law,

beliefs 3. hierarchy of birth → merit, talent 4. partial abolition of feudalism

‘cahiers de doléances’

8Return from Versailles, 6 October

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B. THE REMAKING OF FRANCE, 1789-1791

Resolving problems: bankruptcy and political power

Remaking public life: (a) administration(b) customs & measures(c) state taxes(d) justice

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Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789-1799 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Woloch, Isser, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).

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C. SOURCES OF TENSION AND CONFLICT, 1791-1792

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, July 1790

The king’s flight, 20-25 June 1791 The ‘massacre on the Champ de

Mars’, 17 July 1791 Revolt in St Domingue (Haiti),

August 1791 The origins of the war of 20 April

1792 A second revolution, 10 August

1792

Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000).

Varennes

Timothy Tackett, When the King took Flight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Saint-Domingue August 1791

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10 August 1792

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‘sans-culottes’

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D. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TERROR, 1793-1794

The summer of 1793 The meaning of “Terror” Emergency measures The Terror’s achievements by the

end of 1793 The debate over the Terror’s

purpose The collapse: June-July 1794

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Vendée

27‘Levée en masse’ – August 1793

David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 2005).

Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E. Kaiser and Marisa Linton (eds). Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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10 August 1793

Societies ofFriends of theConstitution/Jacobin Clubs

32‘deChristianisation’

33Executions 1793-94

Fleurus – 26 June

3528 July/10 Thermidor

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E. THE ‘SETTLEMENT’ OF 1795 The ‘Thermidorian Reaction’ after

9 Thermidor The last sans-culottes challenge:

April-May 1795 (Germinal-Prairial year III)

The Constitution of 1795: back to 1791?

37Boissy d’Anglas May 1795

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1. absolute monarchy → constitutional monarchy (republic to 1802)

divine right → popular sovereignty

2. privilege → civil equality in taxes, law, beliefs

3. hierarchy of birth → merit, talent

‘cahiers de doléances’

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F. A SOCIAL REVOLUTION?

“Minimalism” and “Maximalism” A land of manual work Slaves The countryside The status of women

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Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: the Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (2011).

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Saint-Domingue1791179418021804Haiti

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Insisting in May 1791 that the community would pay no more seigneurial dues unless the seigneur produced the evidence of his titles, the mayor of Villeseque, the blacksmith François Séguy, declared that:

“it is unjust to give blindly and immediately the subsistence of a miserable family, the work of our arms, and even our sweat, to someone to whom we don’t know we are obliged. Our ancestors, too simple and ignorant, would have given everything and would have submitted to anything these gentlemen required of them, but in the present century this simpleness and this ignorance no longer exist, wickedness has been destroyed, justice punishes it.”

(cited by Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasant, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières, 1780-1830, Oxford, 1999, pp. 215-6)

The Baron de Bouisse: ‘I have cherished and I still cherish the people of Fraïsse as I have cherished my own children; they were so sweet and so honest in their way, but what a sudden change has taken place among them. All I hear now is corvée, lanternes, démocrates, aristocrates, words which for me are barbaric and which I can’t use. ... the former vassals believe themselves to be more powerful than Kings.’

(McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France, p. 60)

John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

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‘la maraîchère’

Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2004).

5220 September 1792

537 March 1793

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Unanticipated outcomes The Revolution had achieved most of

the goals of the Third Estate in 1789, but at an unexpected cost:

Impact on the Church War and civil war ‘The Terror’