history essay french revolution

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French Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 12, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

The French Revolution was a watershed event in world history that began in 1789 and ended in the late 1790s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. During this period, French citizens radically altered their political landscape, uprooting centuries-old institutions such as the monarchy and the feudal system. The upheaval was caused by disgust with the French aristocracy and the economic policies of King Louis XVI, who met his death by guillotine, as did his wife Marie Antoinette. Though it degenerated into a bloodbath during the Reign of Terror, the French Revolution helped to shape modern democracies by showing the power inherent in the will of the people.

Causes of the French Revolution

As the 18th century drew to a close, France’s costly involvement in the American Revolution , combined with extravagant spending by King Louis XVI , had left France on the brink of bankruptcy.

Not only were the royal coffers depleted, but several years of poor harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor. Many expressed their desperation and resentment toward a regime that imposed heavy taxes—yet failed to provide any relief—by rioting, looting and striking.

In the fall of 1786, Louis XVI’s controller general, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, proposed a financial reform package that included a universal land tax from which the aristocratic classes would no longer be exempt.

Estates General

To garner support for these measures and forestall a growing aristocratic revolt, the king summoned the Estates General ( les états généraux ) – an assembly representing France’s clergy, nobility and middle class – for the first time since 1614.

The meeting was scheduled for May 5, 1789; in the meantime, delegates of the three estates from each locality would compile lists of grievances ( cahiers de doléances ) to present to the king.

Rise of the Third Estate

France’s population, of course, had changed considerably since 1614. The non-aristocratic, middle-class members of the Third Estate now represented 98 percent of the people but could still be outvoted by the other two bodies.

In the lead-up to the May 5 meeting, the Third Estate began to mobilize support for equal representation and the abolishment of the noble veto—in other words, they wanted voting by head and not by status.

While all of the orders shared a common desire for fiscal and judicial reform as well as a more representative form of government, the nobles in particular were loath to give up the privileges they had long enjoyed under the traditional system.

Tennis Court Oath

By the time the Estates General convened at Versailles , the highly public debate over its voting process had erupted into open hostility between the three orders, eclipsing the original purpose of the meeting and the authority of the man who had convened it — the king himself.

On June 17, with talks over procedure stalled, the Third Estate met alone and formally adopted the title of National Assembly; three days later, they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and took the so-called Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume), vowing not to disperse until constitutional reform had been achieved.

Within a week, most of the clerical deputies and 47 liberal nobles had joined them, and on June 27 Louis XVI grudgingly absorbed all three orders into the new National Assembly.

The Bastille 

On June 12, as the National Assembly (known as the National Constituent Assembly during its work on a constitution) continued to meet at Versailles, fear and violence consumed the capital.

Though enthusiastic about the recent breakdown of royal power, Parisians grew panicked as rumors of an impending military coup began to circulate. A popular insurgency culminated on July 14 when rioters stormed the Bastille fortress in an attempt to secure gunpowder and weapons; many consider this event, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution.

The wave of revolutionary fervor and widespread hysteria quickly swept the entire country. Revolting against years of exploitation, peasants looted and burned the homes of tax collectors, landlords and the aristocratic elite.

Known as the Great Fear ( la Grande peur ), the agrarian insurrection hastened the growing exodus of nobles from France and inspired the National Constituent Assembly to abolish feudalism on August 4, 1789, signing what historian Georges Lefebvre later called the “death certificate of the old order.”

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

IIn late August, the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ( Déclaration des droits de l ’homme et du citoyen ), a statement of democratic principles grounded in the philosophical and political ideas of Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau .

The document proclaimed the Assembly’s commitment to replace the ancien régime with a system based on equal opportunity, freedom of speech, popular sovereignty and representative government.

Drafting a formal constitution proved much more of a challenge for the National Constituent Assembly, which had the added burden of functioning as a legislature during harsh economic times.

For months, its members wrestled with fundamental questions about the shape and expanse of France’s new political landscape. For instance, who would be responsible for electing delegates? Would the clergy owe allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church or the French government? Perhaps most importantly, how much authority would the king, his public image further weakened after a failed attempt to flee the country in June 1791, retain?

Adopted on September 3, 1791, France’s first written constitution echoed the more moderate voices in the Assembly, establishing a constitutional monarchy in which the king enjoyed royal veto power and the ability to appoint ministers. This compromise did not sit well with influential radicals like Maximilien de Robespierre , Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, who began drumming up popular support for a more republican form of government and for the trial of Louis XVI.

French Revolution Turns Radical

In April 1792, the newly elected Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria and Prussia, where it believed that French émigrés were building counterrevolutionary alliances; it also hoped to spread its revolutionary ideals across Europe through warfare.

On the domestic front, meanwhile, the political crisis took a radical turn when a group of insurgents led by the extremist Jacobins attacked the royal residence in Paris and arrested the king on August 10, 1792.

The following month, amid a wave of violence in which Parisian insurrectionists massacred hundreds of accused counterrevolutionaries, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the French republic.

On January 21, 1793, it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine ; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.

Reign of Terror

Following the king’s execution, war with various European powers and intense divisions within the National Convention brought the French Revolution to its most violent and turbulent phase.

In June 1793, the Jacobins seized control of the National Convention from the more moderate Girondins and instituted a series of radical measures, including the establishment of a new calendar and the eradication of Christianity .

They also unleashed the bloody Reign of Terror (la Terreur), a 10-month period in which suspected enemies of the revolution were guillotined by the thousands. Many of the killings were carried out under orders from Robespierre, who dominated the draconian Committee of Public Safety until his own execution on July 28, 1794.

Did you know? Over 17,000 people were officially tried and executed during the Reign of Terror, and an unknown number of others died in prison or without trial.

Thermidorian Reaction

The death of Robespierre marked the beginning of the Thermidorian Reaction, a moderate phase in which the French people revolted against the Reign of Terror’s excesses.

On August 22, 1795, the National Convention, composed largely of Girondins who had survived the Reign of Terror, approved a new constitution that created France’s first bicameral legislature.

Executive power would lie in the hands of a five-member Directory ( Directoire ) appointed by parliament. Royalists and Jacobins protested the new regime but were swiftly silenced by the army, now led by a young and successful general named Napoleon Bonaparte .

French Revolution Ends: Napoleon’s Rise

The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field.

On November 9, 1799, as frustration with their leadership reached a fever pitch, Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “ first consul .” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, during which France would come to dominate much of continental Europe.

Photo Gallery 

French Revolution. The National Archives (U.K.) The United States and the French Revolution, 1789–1799. Office of the Historian. U.S. Department of State . Versailles, from the French Revolution to the Interwar Period. Chateau de Versailles . French Revolution. Monticello.org . Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 

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French Revolution: History, Timeline, Causes, and Outcomes

The French Revolution, a seismic event that reshaped the contours of political power and societal norms, began in 1789, not merely as a chapter in history but as a dramatic upheaval that would influence the course of human events far beyond its own time and borders.

It was more than a clash of ideologies; it was a profound transformation that questioned the very foundations of monarchical rule and aristocratic privilege, leading to the rise of republicanism and the concept of citizenship.

The causes of this revolution were as complex as its outcomes were far-reaching, stemming from a confluence of economic strife, social inequalities, and a hunger for political reform.

The outcomes of the French Revolution, embedded in the realms of political thought, civil rights, and societal structures, continue to resonate, offering invaluable insights into the power and potential of collective action for change.

Table of Contents

Time and Location

The French Revolution, a cornerstone event in the annals of history, ignited in 1789, a time when Europe was dominated by monarchical rule and the vestiges of feudalism. This epochal period, which spanned a decade until the late 1790s, witnessed profound social, political, and economic transformations that not only reshaped France but also sent shockwaves across the continent and beyond.

Paris, the heart of France, served as the epicenter of revolutionary activity , where iconic events such as the storming of the Bastille became symbols of the struggle for freedom. Yet, the revolution was not confined to the city’s limits; its influence permeated through every corner of France, from bustling urban centers to serene rural areas, each witnessing the unfolding drama of revolution in unique ways.

The revolution consisted of many complex factions, each representing a distinct set of interests and ideologies. Initially, the conflict arose between the Third Estate, which included a diverse group from peasants and urban laborers to the bourgeoisie, and the First and Second Estates, made up of the clergy and the nobility, respectively.

The Third Estate sought to dismantle the archaic social structure that relegated them to the burden of taxation while denying them political representation and rights. Their demands for reform and equality found resonance across a society strained by economic distress and the autocratic rule of the monarchy.

As the revolution evolved, so too did the nature of the conflict. The initial unity within the Third Estate fractured, giving rise to factions such as the Jacobins and Girondins, who, despite sharing a common revolutionary zeal, diverged sharply in their visions for France’s future.

The Jacobins , with figures like Maximilien Robespierre at the helm, advocated for radical measures, including the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic, while the Girondins favored a more moderate approach.

The sans-culottes , representing the militant working-class Parisians, further complicated the revolutionary landscape with their demands for immediate economic relief and political reforms.

The revolution’s adversaries were not limited to internal factions; monarchies throughout Europe viewed the republic with suspicion and hostility. Fearing the spread of revolutionary fervor within their own borders, European powers such as Austria, Prussia, and Britain engaged in military confrontations with France, aiming to restore the French monarchy and stem the tide of revolution.

These external threats intensified the internal strife, fueling the revolution’s radical phase and propelling it towards its eventual conclusion with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who capitalized on the chaos to establish his own rule.

READ MORE: How Did Napoleon Die: Stomach Cancer, Poison, or Something Else?

Causes of the French Revolution

The French Revolution’s roots are deeply embedded in a confluence of political, social, economic, and intellectual factors that, over time, eroded the foundations of the Ancien Régime and set the stage for revolutionary change.

At the heart of the revolution were grievances that transcended class boundaries, uniting much of the nation in a quest for profound transformation.

Economic Hardship and Social Inequality

A critical catalyst for the revolution was France’s dire economic condition. Fiscal mismanagement, costly involvement in foreign wars (notably the American Revolutionary War), and an antiquated tax system placed an unbearable strain on the populace, particularly the Third Estate, which bore the brunt of taxation while being denied equitable representation.

Simultaneously, extravagant spending by Louis XVI and his predecessors further drained the national treasury, exacerbating the financial crisis.

The social structure of France, rigidly divided into three estates, underscored profound inequalities. The First (clergy) and Second (nobility) Estates enjoyed significant privileges, including exemption from many taxes, which contrasted starkly with the hardships faced by the Third Estate, comprising peasants , urban workers, and a rising bourgeoisie.

This disparity fueled resentment and a growing demand for social and economic justice.

Enlightenment Ideals

The Enlightenment , a powerful intellectual movement sweeping through Europe, profoundly influenced the revolutionary spirit. Philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu criticized traditional structures of power and authority, advocating for principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Their writings inspired a new way of thinking about governance, society, and the rights of individuals, sowing the seeds of revolution among a populace eager for change.

Political Crisis and the Estates-General

The immediate catalyst for the French Revolution was deeply rooted in a political crisis, underscored by the French monarchy’s chronic financial woes. King Louis XVI, facing dire fiscal insolvency, sought to break the deadlock through the convocation of the Estates-General in 1789, marking the first assembly of its kind since 1614.

This critical move, intended to garner support for financial reforms, unwittingly set the stage for widespread political upheaval. It provided the Third Estate, representing the common people of France, with an unprecedented opportunity to voice their longstanding grievances and demand a more significant share of political authority.

The Third Estate, comprising a vast majority of the population but long marginalized in the political framework of the Ancien Régime, seized this moment to assert its power. Their transformation into the National Assembly was a monumental shift, symbolizing a rejection of the existing social and political order.

The catalyst for this transformation was their exclusion from the Estates-General meeting, leading them to gather in a nearby tennis court. There, they took the historic Tennis Court Oath, vowing not to disperse until France had a new constitution.

This act of defiance was not just a political statement but a clear indication of the revolutionaries’ resolve to overhaul French society.

Amidst this burgeoning crisis, the personal life of Marie Antoinette , Louis XVI’s queen, became a focal point of public scrutiny and scandal. 

Married to Louis at the tender age of fourteen, Marie Antoinette, the youngest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, was known for her lavish lifestyle and the preferential treatment she accorded her friends and relatives.

READ MORE: Roman Emperors in Order: The Complete List from Caesar to the Fall of Rome

Her disregard for traditional court fashion and etiquette, along with her perceived extravagance, made her an easy target for public criticism and ridicule. Popular songs in Parisian cafés and a flourishing genre of pornographic literature vilified the queen, accusing her of infidelity, corruption, and disloyalty.

Such depictions, whether grounded in truth or fabricated, fueled the growing discontent among the populace, further complicating the already tense political atmosphere.

The intertwining of personal scandals with the broader political crisis highlighted the deep-seated issues within the French monarchy and aristocracy, contributing to the revolutionary fervor.

As the political crisis deepened, the actions of the Third Estate and the controversies surrounding Marie Antoinette exemplified the widespread desire for change and the rejection of the Ancient Régime’s corruption and excesses.

Key Concepts, Events, and People of the French Revolution

As the Estates General convened in 1789, little did the world know that this gathering would mark the beginning of a revolution that would forever alter the course of history.

Through the rise and fall of factions, the clash of ideologies, and the leadership of remarkable individuals, this era reshaped not only France but also set a precedent for future generations.

From the storming of the Bastille to the establishment of the Directory, each event and figure played a crucial role in crafting a new vision of governance and social equality.

Estates General

When the Estates General was summoned in May 1789, it marked the beginning of a series of events that would catalyze the French Revolution. Initially intended as a means for King Louis XVI to address the financial crisis by securing support for tax reforms, the assembly instead became a flashpoint for broader grievances.

Representing the three estates of French society—the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners—the Estates General highlighted the profound disparities and simmering tensions between these groups.

The Third Estate, comprising 98% of the population but traditionally having the least power, seized the moment to push for more significant reforms, challenging the very foundations of the Ancient Régime.

The deadlock over voting procedures—where the Third Estate demanded votes be counted by head rather than by estate—led to its members declaring themselves the National Assembly, an act of defiance that effectively inaugurated the revolution.

This bold step, coupled with the subsequent Tennis Court Oath where they vowed not to disperse until a new constitution was created, underscored a fundamental shift in authority from the monarchy to the people, setting a precedent for popular sovereignty that would resonate throughout the revolution.

Rise of the Third Estate

The Rise of the Third Estate underscores the growing power and assertiveness of the common people of France. Fueled by economic hardship, social inequality, and inspired by Enlightenment ideals, this diverse group—encompassing peasants, urban workers, and the bourgeoisie—began to challenge the existing social and political order.

Their transformation from a marginalized majority into the National Assembly marked a radical departure from traditional power structures, asserting their role as legitimate representatives of the French people. This period was characterized by significant political mobilization and the formation of popular societies and clubs, which played a crucial role in spreading revolutionary ideas and organizing action.

This newfound empowerment of the Third Estate culminated in key revolutionary acts, such as the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, a symbol of royal tyranny. This event not only demonstrated the power of popular action but also signaled the irreversible nature of the revolutionary movement.

The rise of the Third Estate paved the way for the abolition of feudal privileges and the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , foundational texts that sought to establish a new social and political order based on equality, liberty, and fraternity.

A People’s Monarchy

The concept of a People’s Monarchy emerged as a compromise in the early stages of the French Revolution, reflecting the initial desire among many revolutionaries to retain the monarchy within a constitutional framework.

This period was marked by King Louis XVI’s grudging acceptance of the National Assembly’s authority and the enactment of significant reforms, including the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Constitution of 1791, which established a limited monarchy and sought to redistribute power more equitably.

However, this attempt to balance revolutionary demands with monarchical tradition was fraught with difficulties, as mutual distrust between the king and the revolutionaries continued to escalate.

The failure of the People’s Monarchy was precipitated by the Flight to Varennes in June 1791, when Louis XVI attempted to escape France and rally foreign support for the restoration of his absolute power.

This act of betrayal eroded any remaining support for the monarchy among the populace and the Assembly, leading to increased calls for the establishment of a republic.

The people’s experiment with a constitutional monarchy thus served to highlight the irreconcilable differences between the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality and the traditional monarchical order, setting the stage for the republic’s proclamation.

Birth of a Republic

The proclamation of the First French Republic in September 1792 represented a radical departure from centuries of monarchical rule, embodying the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

This transition was catalyzed by escalating political tensions, military challenges, and the radicalization of the revolution, particularly after the king’s failed flight and perceived betrayal.

The Republic’s birth was a moment of immense optimism and aspiration, as it promised to reshape French society on the principles of democratic governance and civic equality. It also marked the beginning of a new calendar, symbolic of the revolutionaries’ desire to break completely with the past and start anew.

However, the early years of the Republic were marked by significant challenges, including internal divisions, economic struggles, and threats from monarchist powers in Europe.

These pressures necessitated the establishment of the Committee of Public Safety and the Reign of Terror, measures aimed at defending the revolution but which also led to extreme political repression.

Reign of Terror

The Reign of Terror, from September 1793 to July 1794, remains one of the most controversial and bloodiest periods of the French Revolution. Under the auspices of the Committee of Public Safety, led by figures such as Maximilien Robespierre, the French government adopted radical measures to purge the nation of perceived enemies of the revolution.

This period saw the widespread use of the guillotine , with thousands executed on charges of counter-revolutionary activities or mere suspicion of disloyalty. The Terror aimed to consolidate revolutionary gains and protect the nascent Republic from internal and external threats, but its legacy is marred by the extremity of its actions and the climate of fear it engendered.

The end of the Terror came with the Thermidorian Reaction on 27th July 1794 (9th Thermidor Year II, according to the revolutionary calendar), which resulted in the arrest and execution of Robespierre and his closest allies.

This marked a significant turning point, leading to the dismantling of the Committee of Public Safety and the gradual relaxation of emergency measures. The aftermath of the Terror reflected a society grappling with the consequences of its radical actions, seeking stability after years of upheaval but still committed to the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality .

Thermidorians and the Directory

Following the Thermidorian Reaction , the political landscape of France underwent significant changes, leading to the establishment of the Directory in November 1795.

This new government, a five-member executive body, was intended to provide stability and moderate the excesses of the previous radical phase. The Directory period was characterized by a mix of conservative and revolutionary policies, aimed at consolidating the Republic and addressing the economic and social issues that had fueled the revolution.

Despite its efforts to navigate the challenges of governance, the Directory faced significant opposition from royalists on the right and Jacobins on the left, leading to a period of political instability and corruption.

The Directory’s inability to resolve these tensions and its growing unpopularity set the stage for its downfall. The coup of 18 Brumaire in November 1799, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, ended the Directory and established the Consulate, marking the end of the revolutionary government and the beginning of Napoleonic rule.

While the Directory failed to achieve lasting stability, it played a crucial role in the transition from radical revolution to the establishment of a more authoritarian regime, highlighting the complexities of revolutionary governance and the challenges of fulfilling the ideals of 1789.

French Revolution End and Outcome: Napoleon’s Rise

The revolution’s end is often marked by Napoleon’s coup d’état on 18 Brumaire , which not only concluded a decade of political instability and social unrest but also ushered in a new era of governance under his rule.

This period, while stabilizing France and bringing much-needed order, seemed to contradict the revolution’s initial aims of establishing a democratic republic grounded in the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Napoleon’s rise to power, culminating in his coronation as Emperor, symbolizes a complex conclusion to the revolutionary narrative, intertwining the fulfillment and betrayal of its foundational ideals.

Evaluating the revolution’s success requires a nuanced perspective. On one hand, it dismantled the Ancien Régime, abolished feudalism, and set forth the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, laying the cornerstone for modern democracy and human rights. 

These achievements signify profound societal and legal transformations that resonated well beyond France’s borders, influencing subsequent movements for freedom and equality globally.

On the other hand, the revolution’s trajectory through the Reign of Terror and the subsequent rise of a military dictatorship under Napoleon raises questions about the cost of these advances and the ultimate realization of the revolution’s goals.

The French Revolution’s conclusion with Napoleon Bonaparte’s ascension to power is emblematic of its complex legacy. This period not only marked the cessation of years of turmoil but also initiated a new chapter in French governance, characterized by stability and reform yet marked by a departure from the revolution’s original democratic aspirations.

The Significance of the French Revolution

The French Revolution holds a place of prominence in the annals of history, celebrated for its profound impact on the course of modern civilization. Its fame stems not only from the dramatic events and transformative ideas it unleashed but also from its enduring influence on political thought, social reform, and the global struggle for justice and equality.

This period of intense upheaval and radical change challenged the very foundations of society, dismantling centuries-old institutions and laying the groundwork for a new era defined by the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

At its core, the French Revolution was a manifestation of human aspiration towards freedom and self-determination, a vivid illustration of the power of collective action to reshape the world. It introduced revolutionary concepts of citizenship and rights that have since become the bedrock of democratic societies.

Moreover, the revolution’s ripple effects were felt worldwide, inspiring a wave of independence movements and revolutions across Europe, Latin America, and beyond. Its legacy is a testament to the idea that people have the power to overthrow oppressive systems and construct a more equitable society.

The revolution’s significance also lies in its contributions to political and social thought. It was a living laboratory for ideas that were radical at the time, such as the separation of church and state, the abolition of feudal privileges, and the establishment of a constitution to govern the rights and duties of the French citizens.

These concepts, debated and implemented with varying degrees of success during the revolution, have become fundamental to modern governance.

Furthermore, the French Revolution is famous for its dramatic and symbolic events, from the storming of the Bastille to the Reign of Terror, which have etched themselves into the collective memory of humanity.

These events highlight the complexities and contradictions of the revolutionary process, underscoring the challenges inherent in profound societal transformation.

Key Figures of the French Revolution

The French Revolutions were painted by the actions and ideologies of several key figures whose contributions defined the era. These individuals, with their diverse roles and perspectives, were central in navigating the revolution’s trajectory, capturing the complexities and contradictions of this tumultuous period.

Maximilien Robespierre , often synonymous with the Reign of Terror, was a figure of paradoxes. A lawyer and politician, his early advocacy for the rights of the common people and opposition to absolute monarchy marked him as a champion of liberty.

However, as a leader of the Committee of Public Safety, his name became associated with the radical phase of the revolution, characterized by extreme measures in the name of safeguarding the republic. His eventual downfall and execution reflect the revolution’s capacity for self-consumption.

Georges Danton , another prominent revolutionary leader, played a crucial role in the early stages of the revolution. Known for his oratory skills and charismatic leadership, Danton was instrumental in the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the First French Republic.

Unlike Robespierre, Danton is often remembered for his pragmatism and efforts to moderate the revolution’s excesses, which ultimately led to his execution during the Reign of Terror, highlighting the volatile nature of revolutionary politics.

Louis XVI, the king at the revolution’s outbreak, represents the Ancient Régime’s complexities and the challenges of monarchical rule in a time of profound societal change.

His inability to effectively manage France’s financial crisis and his hesitancy to embrace substantial reforms contributed to the revolutionary fervor. His execution in 1793 symbolized the revolution’s radical break from monarchical tradition and the birth of the republic.

Marie Antoinette, the queen consort of Louis XVI, became a symbol of the monarchy’s extravagance and disconnect from the common people. Her fate, like that of her husband, underscores the revolution’s rejection of the old order and the desire for a new societal structure based on equality and merit rather than birthright.

Jean-Paul Marat , a journalist and politician, used his publication, L’Ami du Peuple, to advocate for the rights of the lower classes and to call for radical measures against the revolution’s enemies.

His assassination by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, in 1793 became one of the revolution’s most famous episodes, illustrating the deep divisions within revolutionary France.

Finally, Napoleon Bonaparte, though not a leader during the revolution’s peak, emerged from its aftermath to shape France’s future. A military genius, Napoleon used the opportunities presented by the revolution’s chaos to rise to power, eventually declaring himself Emperor of the French.

His reign would consolidate many of the revolution’s reforms while curtailing its democratic aspirations, embodying the complexities of the revolution’s legacy.

These key figures, among others, played significant roles in the unfolding of the French Revolution. Their contributions, whether for the cause of liberty, the maintenance of order, or the pursuit of personal power, highlight the multifaceted nature of the revolution and its enduring impact on history.

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(2) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 11-12

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(30) Lewis, Gwynne. The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate. Routledge, 2016, pp. 30 -31.

(31) Hazan, Eric. A People’s History of the French Revolution, Verso, 2014, pp.. 53 -62.

(32) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 129-130.

(33) Hazan, Eric. A People’s History of the French Revolution, Verso, 2014, pp. 62-63.

(34) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 156-157, 171-173.

(35) Hazan, Eric. A People’s History of the French Revolution, Verso, 2014, pp. 65-66.

(36) Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Random House, 1989, pp. 543-544.

(37) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 179-180.

(38) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 184-185.

(39) Hampson, Norman. Social History of the French Revolution. Routledge, 1963, pp. 148-149.

(40) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 191-192.

(41) Lefebvre, Georges. The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793. Routledge, 1962, pp. 252-254.

(42) Hazan, Eric. A People’s History of the French Revolution, Verso, 2014, pp. 88-89.

(43) Schama, Simon. Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution. Random House, 1990, pp. 576-79.

(44) Schama, Simon. Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York, Random House, 1990, pp. 649-51

(45) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 242-243.

(46) Connor, Clifford. Marat: The Tribune of the French Revolution. Pluto Press, 2012.

(47) Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Random House, 1989, pp. 722-724.

(48) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 246-47.

(49) Hampson, Norman. A Social History of the French Revolution. University of Toronto Press, 1968, pp. 209-210.

(50) Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution. Vintage Books, 1996, pp 68-70.

(51) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 205-206

(52) Schama, Simon. Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York, Random House, 1990, 784-86.

(53) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 262.

(54) Schama, Simon. Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York, Random House, 1990, pp. 619-22.

(55) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 269-70.

(56) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 276.

(57) Robespierre on Virtue and Terror (1794). https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/robespierre-virtue-terror-1794/. Accessed 19 May 2020.

(58) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 290-91.

(59) Doyle, William. Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 293-95.

(60) Lewis, Gwynne. The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate. Routledge, 2016, pp. 49-51.

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The French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity

From 1789 to 1799, the French Revolution stands as one of the most pivotal episodes in world history. This tumultuous decade witnessed the dramatic overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, the rise of radical political factions, and the eventual ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. Rooted deeply in the Enlightenment ideals, the revolution was more than just a change in political leadership. It signified a profound metamorphosis of societal values, marked prominently by the revolutionary triad: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These guiding principles did not merely serve as ideological rallying cries but were the bedrock upon which the new republic was built. Through a nuanced exploration of these core tenets, this essay will elucidate the essence of the French Revolution and its enduring imprint on the annals of democratic thought.

Table of content

Liberty – Breaking the Chains

Liberty, the very lifeblood of the French Revolution, embodied the deep-seated yearning of a populace stifled under absolute monarchy. This was not a fleeting desire but a fervent aspiration that echoed through the streets of Paris and the countryside of France alike.

Pre-revolutionary France was characterized by an entrenched system of royal absolutism, where the Bourbon kings wielded unchallenged power. Their unchecked authority, rampant corruption, and regressive taxation cultivated an environment of suffocation. The Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, sowed the seeds of liberty in the minds of the French. They championed the idea that individuals had inalienable rights, free from the whims and fancies of monarchs.

The storming of the Bastille, while a physical act, bore symbolic weight. It was not just dismantling a fortress prison but a resounding message against oppression. Liberty evolved from an abstract concept to concrete legislative reforms as the Revolution progressed. The suppression of censorship, the proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the gradual diminishing of the king’s power were tangible manifestations of this pursuit.

However, it is crucial to note that this road to liberty was fraught with challenges. While the revolution sought to free the citizenry from the shackles of the old regime, new chains of radical factions and the Reign of Terror emerged. Nevertheless, once ignited, the spirit of liberty refused to be extinguished. Even amidst the revolution’s darkest hours, the flame of liberty continued to burn, guiding the nation toward a more democratic future.

Equality – Leveling the Field

The clarion call for Equality during the French Revolution was more than just a repudiation of the aristocratic privileges; it was a radical reimagining of societal structures. The ancien régime had perpetuated a stratified society where birthright and lineage overshadowed merit and individual capability. This systemic inequality was entrenched in the legal and political fabric and deeply woven into France’s cultural and social tapestry.

With its archaic representation, the Estates-General was a glaring example of this inequity. The First and Second Estates, representing the clergy and nobility, respectively, enjoyed disproportionate influence despite being a minuscule fraction of the population. In contrast, the Third Estate, representing most of the populace, was marginalized. The growing resentment of this imbalance paved the way for the revolutionaries to demand a more equitable society.

Revolutionary reforms sought to dismantle these outdated hierarchies. The abolition of feudalism in 1789 marked a seismic shift, toppling centuries-old structures of serfdom and manorial rights. Likewise, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy sought to break the ecclesiastical stronghold, making the Church subordinate to the state. This transformative period also witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie, as wealth and education began to rival, if not surpass, nobility as markers of societal status.

However, the quest for equality was a double-edged sword. As much as the revolution aimed to flatten societal disparities, it also grappled with internal contradictions. The Reign of Terror, while championing the cause of the common man, often veered into a despotic purge of perceived counter-revolutionaries. This underscores the complexity of the revolution’s pursuit of equality: an aspiration both noble in its intent and intricate in its execution.

Fraternity – A Unified Nation

Fraternity, often overshadowed by the more tangible tenets of Liberty and Equality, played an integral role in shaping the ethos of the French Revolution. At its core, Fraternity evoked a sense of communal belonging, a shared destiny, and a collective purpose. It was not just about fostering bonds among citizens but was a call to stitch together a nation fragmented by centuries of divisions.

Before the Revolution, France was not the homogenous entity we envision today. It was a patchwork of regions, dialects, customs, and allegiances. While unifying to an extent, the Bourbon monarchy often played one faction against another, exacerbating regional and class distinctions for political gains.

The Revolution sought to mend these fractures. Fraternity became the rallying cry for creating a cohesive national identity. This was not just a sentiment but actualized through policies and symbols. The adoption of “La Marseillaise” as the national anthem, the establishment of a unified legal code in the form of the Napoleonic Code, and the promotion of the French language at the expense of regional dialects were all geared towards forging a united France.

However, the road to fraternity was not without its paradoxes. The desire for a unified nation sometimes clashed with recognizing individual and regional identities. The de-Christianization campaigns, while aimed at reducing the Church’s influence, alienated many devout citizens. Similarly, the aggressive promotion of French as the lingua franca often came at the expense of regional identities and cultures.

Nevertheless, despite these challenges, the spirit of Fraternity endured. The French Revolution may have been tumultuous and, at times, contradictory, but its emphasis on a united national identity laid the groundwork for the modern French nation-state. It served as a testament to the enduring human desire to belong, connect, and forge a shared destiny.

The French Revolution, with its whirlwind of events, ideologies, and personalities, remains a seminal chapter in the annals of history. Through its embrace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, it not only redefined the contours of French society but also set a precedent for global movements advocating democratic principles.

In dissecting these tenets, we are offered a lens through which the revolution’s multifaceted nature becomes evident. Liberty, with its call for personal freedoms, was both an aspiration and a challenge constantly sought after and fought for in the face of evolving threats. Equality, a demand for societal leveling, was an endeavor to bridge the yawning chasm between the elite and the commoner, reimagining the societal structures that had held sway for centuries. Fraternity, perhaps the most nuanced of the three, sought to weave a tapestry of shared identity from the disparate threads of regional, class, and religious affiliations.

Nevertheless, beyond the theoretical lies the pragmatic. The French Revolution was not a linear progression of ideals but a crucible where these principles were tested, redefined, and, at times, compromised. It was a testament to the complexities of nation-building and the intricacies of balancing individual rights with collective responsibility.

As we reflect upon the legacy of the revolution, its resonances are palpable even today. From the Arab Spring to civil rights movements, the echoes of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity reverberate, reminding us of the universality of these aspirations. The French Revolution, thus, is not just a historical event confined to textbooks but a living testament to humanity’s relentless quest for a more just, equitable, and united world.

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Online Sources: The French Revolution (1789-1799)

• ARTFL Project - Public Databases more... less... This page of the project contains access to public databases; other information on the site is available for a fee. "The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) is a cooperative enterprise of the Laboratoire ATILF (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Division of the Humanities, and Electronic Text Services (ETS) of the University of Chicago."
• British Newspaper Coverage of the French Revolution more... less... "A Small Archive of the British View of Unspeakable Events in the French Revolution" University of California, Santa Barbara
• Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789 more... less... Approved by the National Assembly of France, August 26, 1789 Provided by The Avalon Project at Yale
• Declaration of the Rights of Women, 1791 more... less... "Olympe de Gouges, a butcher's daughter, proved to be one of the most outspoken and articulate women revolutionaries. In 1791 she wrote the following declaration, directly challenging the inferiority presumed of women by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Her attempts to push this idea lead to her being charged with treason during the rule of the National Convention. She was quickly arrested, tried, and on November 3, 1793, executed by the guillotine." Modern History Sourcebook
• The French Revolution (Hanover Historical Texts) more... less... Arthur Young, Travels in France (1792) excerpts Cahier of 1789, The Clergy of Blois and Romorantin Cahiers of 1789: The Nobility of Blois Cahiers of 1789: The Third Estate of Versailles Cahier of 1789: The Third Estate of Carcassonne The Decree Abolishing Feudalism (1789) The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) Documents of the National Convention St. Just, Republican Institute excerpts Napoleon, Account of the Situation of the Empire (1804) excerpts
• The French Revolution (Modern History Sourcebook) more... less... Access documents and other information related to the French Revolution. Provided by The Internet Modern History Sourcebook from Fordham University
• The French Revolution and Napoleon Collection (FSU) more... less... The French Revolution and Napoleon Collection at Florida State University holds over 20,000 rare titles from this period alongside numerous manuscript and record collections. It was established in the early 1960s as the Department of History expanded its offerings in that particular period of history by establishing the Institute on Napoleon & the French Revolution. Florida State University, through the Department of History and the Institute, provides the only graduate program in the United States devoted to the historical study of this time period.
• French Revolutionary Drama and French Revolutionary Pamphlets Collection (UFDC) more... less... Pamphlets and popular drama works related to the French Revolution.
• French Revolutionary Pamphlets (University of Alabama) more... less... "The pamphlets were used to spread the word of revolution, but never created with the intention of lasting over 200 years. This ephemera was digitized from the over 300 pamphlets from the period of the French Revolution housed in the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library's Rare Books Collection. The pamphlets include writings by some of the best known players of the French Revolution and Directory periods, including Robespierre, St. Juste, Desmoulins, and Danton."
• French Revolution Digital Archive more... less... "The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française. " Note text is in French.
• French Revolution Pamphlet Collection (Emory University) more... less... "The publication dates of the pamphlets range from 1776-1817, although the bulk dates from 1789-1795." Emory University
• French Revolution Pamphlets (Ball State University) more... less... "The French Revolution Pamphlets digital collection consists of pamphlets produced from 1779 to 1815. Although the French Revolution happened in the decade ranging from 1789 to 1799, this collection of pamphlets documents the time leading up to the revolution through the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Often privately printed due to newspaper censure by the monarchy, the pamphlets were used to disseminate information and ideals concerning nationalism, citizenship, personal freedoms, and social injustice." Ball State University Digital Media Repository
• Gallica more... less... This sites presents the catalog of digital collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de la France. It contains approximately 70, 000 digital documents, 1200 full-text documents, and 80, 000 images. Content can be browsed or searched.
• La Revolution Française more... less... "Arisitum was an online repository of French etexts. They are reproduced here, after the website closed..." Internet History Sourcebook Livre des sources médiévales
• Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution more... less... "...provides an accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution as well as an extraordinary archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs. " George Mason University
• Newberry French Pamphlet Collection more... less... The Newberry Library's French Pamphlet Collection primarily consists of material published between 1780 and 1810 from the French Revolution Collection (FRC), the Louis XVI Trial and Execution Collection, and several smaller collections of French Revolution era material. It charts the political, social, and religious history of the French Revolution. The material represents the opinions of all the factions that opposed and defended the monarchy during the turbulent period from 1789 to 1799 and chronicles the events—both dramatic and quotidian—of the First Republic.
• Pamphlets and Periodicals of the French Revolution of 1848 (ARTFL) more... less... The Center for Research Libraries, the University of Chicago Library, and the ARTFL Project, (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) have cooperated on a project to digitize pamphlets and periodicals from the French Revolution of 1848 held by CRL as a test of electronic distribution of archive material via internet.
• Political Prints from the Curzon Collection more... less... "... contains digital facsimiles of 1400 prints made in Britain and Continental Europe during the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. "
• Thomas Jefferson - Onset of the French Revolution, 1789
• Women of the French Revolution: A Resource Guide

People - French Revolution

• Bonaparte, Napoleon (Napoleon I, Emperor of the French)
• Burke, Edmund
• Josephine (Empress, consort of Napoleon I)
• Louis XVI (King of France)
• Marie Antoinette (Queen, consort of Louis XVI)
• Robespierre, Maximilien Robespierre

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The execution of Robespierre and his accomplices, 17 July 1794 (10 Thermidor Year II). Robespierre is depicted holding a handkerchief and dressed in a brown jacket in the cart immediately to the left of the scaffold. Photo courtesy the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Vive la révolution!

Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence the french revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale.

by Jeremy Popkin   + BIO

If the French Revolution of 1789 was such an important event, visitors to France’s capital city of Paris often wonder, why can’t they find any trace of the Bastille, the medieval fortress whose storming on 14 July 1789 was the revolution’s most dramatic moment? Determined to destroy what they saw as a symbol of tyranny, the ‘victors of the Bastille’ immediately began demolishing the structure. Even the column in the middle of the busy Place de la Bastille isn’t connected to 1789: it commemorates those who died in another uprising a generation later, the ‘July Revolution’ of 1830.

The legacy of the French Revolution is not found in physical monuments, but in the ideals of liberty, equality and justice that still inspire modern democracies. More ambitious than the American revolutionaries of 1776, the French in 1789 were not just fighting for their own national independence: they wanted to establish principles that would lay the basis for freedom for human beings everywhere. The United States Declaration of Independence briefly mentioned rights to ‘liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness’, without explaining what they meant or how they were to be realised. The French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ spelled out the rights that comprised liberty and equality and outlined a system of participatory government that would empower citizens to protect their own rights.

Much more openly than the Americans, the French revolutionaries recognised that the principles of liberty and equality they had articulated posed fundamental questions about such issues as the status of women and the justification of slavery. In France, unlike the US, these questions were debated heatedly and openly. Initially, the revolutionaries decided that ‘nature’ denied women political rights and that ‘imperious necessity’ dictated the maintenance of slavery in France’s overseas colonies, whose 800,000 enslaved labourers outnumbered the 670,000 in the 13 American states in 1789.

As the revolution proceeded, however, its legislators took more radical steps. A law redefining marriage and legalising divorce in 1792 granted women equal rights to sue for separation and child custody; by that time, women had formed their own political clubs, some were openly serving in the French army, and Olympe de Gouges’s eloquent ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman’ had insisted that they should be allowed to vote and hold office. Women achieved so much influence in the streets of revolutionary Paris that they drove male legislators to try to outlaw their activities. At almost the same time, in 1794, faced with a massive uprising among the enslaved blacks in France’s most valuable Caribbean colony, Saint-Domingue, the French National Convention abolished slavery and made its former victims full citizens. Black men were seated as deputies to the French legislature and, by 1796, the black general Toussaint Louverture was the official commander-in-chief of French forces in Saint-Domingue, which would become the independent nation of Haiti in 1804.

The French Revolution’s initiatives concerning women’s rights and slavery are just two examples of how the French revolutionaries experimented with radical new ideas about the meaning of liberty and equality that are still relevant. But the French Revolution is not just important today because it took such radical steps to broaden the definitions of liberty and equality. The movement that began in 1789 also showed the dangers inherent in trying to remake an entire society overnight. The French revolutionaries were the first to grant the right to vote to all adult men, but they were also the first to grapple with democracy’s shadow side, demagogic populism, and with the effects of an explosion of ‘new media’ that transformed political communication. The revolution saw the first full-scale attempt to impose secular ideas in the face of vocal opposition from citizens who proclaimed themselves defenders of religion. In 1792, revolutionary France became the first democracy to launch a war to spread its values. A major consequence of that war was the creation of the first modern totalitarian dictatorship, the rule of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror. Five years after the end of the Terror, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had gained fame as a result of the war, led the first modern coup d’état , justifying it, like so many strongmen since, by claiming that only an authoritarian regime could guarantee social order.

The fact that Napoleon reversed the revolutionaries’ expansion of women’s rights and reintroduced slavery in the French colonies reminds us that he, like so many of his imitators in the past two centuries, defined ‘social order’ as a rejection of any expansive definition of liberty and equality. Napoleon also abolished meaningful elections, ended freedom of the press, and restored the public status of the Catholic Church. Determined to keep and even expand the revolutionaries’ foreign conquests, he continued the war that they had begun, but French armies now fought to create an empire, dropping any pretence of bringing freedom to other peoples.

T he relevance of the French Revolution to present-day debates is the reason why I decided to write A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution (2020), the first comprehensive English-language account of that event for general readers in more than 30 years. Having spent my career researching and teaching the history of the French Revolution, however, I know very well that it was more than an idealistic crusade for human rights. If the fall of the Bastille remains an indelible symbol of aspirations for freedom, the other universally recognised symbol of the French Revolution, the guillotine, reminds us that the movement was also marked by violence. The American Founding Fathers whose refusal to consider granting rights to women or ending slavery we now rightly question did have the good sense not to let their differences turn into murderous feuds; none of them had to reflect, as the French legislator Pierre Vergniaud did on the eve of his execution, that their movement, ‘like Saturn, is devouring its own children’.

It is hard to avoid concluding that there was a relationship between the radicalism of the ideas that surfaced during the French Revolution and the violence that marked the movement. In my book, I introduce readers to a character, the ‘Père Duchêne’, who came to represent the populist impulses of the revolution. Nowadays, we would call the Père Duchêne a meme. He was not a real person: instead, he was a character familiar to audiences in Paris’s popular theatres, where he functioned as a representative of the country’s ordinary people. Once the revolution began, a number of journalists began publishing pamphlets supposedly written by the Père Duchêne, in which they demanded that the National Assembly do more to benefit the poor. The small newspapers that used his name carried a crude woodcut on their front page showing the Père Duchêne in rough workers’ clothing. Holding a hatchet over his head, with two pistols stuck in his belt and a musket at his side, the Père Duchêne was a visual symbol of the association between the revolution and popular violence.

The elites had enriched themselves at the expense of the people, and needed to be forced to share their power

Although his crude language and his constant threat to resort to violence alienated the more moderate revolutionaries, the Père Duchêne was the living embodiment of one of the basic principles incorporated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The sixth article of that document affirmed that ‘the law is the expression of the general will’ and promised that ‘all citizens have the right to participate personally, or through their representatives, in its establishment’. The fictitious Père Duchêne’s message to readers, no matter how poor and uneducated they might be, was that an ordinary person could claim a voice in politics.

Like present-day populists, the Père Duchêne had a simple political programme. The elites who ruled France before 1789 had enriched themselves at the expense of the people. They needed to be forced to share their power and wealth. When the revolution did not immediately improve the lives of the masses, the Père Duchêne blamed the movement’s more moderate leaders, accusing them of exploiting it for their own benefit. The journalists who wrote under the name of the Père Duchêne used colourful language laced with obscenities; they insisted that their vulgarity showed that they were ‘telling it like it is’. Their tone was vindictive and vengeful; they wanted to see their targets humiliated and, in many cases, sent to the guillotine. The most successful Père Duchêne journalist, Jacques-René Hébert, built a political career through his success in using the media. At the height of the Reign of Terror, he pushed through the creation of a ‘revolutionary army’ controlled by his friends to intimidate enemies of the revolution, and seemed on the verge of taking over the government.

Maximilien Robespierre and his more middle-class colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety feared that Hébert’s populist movement might drive them from power. They decided that they had no choice but to confront Hébert and his followers, even if it meant alienating the ‘base’ of ordinary Paris residents, the famous sans-culottes . Using the same smear tactics that the Père Duchêne had perfected, they accused Hébert of dubious intrigues with foreigners and other questionable activities. Like many bullies, Hébert quickly collapsed when he found himself up against serious opponents determined to fight back; the crowd that cheered his dispatch to the guillotine in March 1794 was larger than for many of the executions that he had incited. But he and the other Père Duchênes, as well as their female counterparts, the Mère Duchênes who flourished at some points in the revolution, had done much to turn the movement from a high-minded crusade for human rights into a free-for-all in which only the loudest voices could make themselves heard.

T he ambivalent legacy of the French Revolution’s democratic impulse, so vividly brought to life in the figure of the Père Duchêne, underlines the way in which the movement begun in 1789 remains both an inspiration and a warning for us today. In the more than 200 years since the storming of the Bastille, no one has formulated the human yearning for freedom and justice more eloquently than the French revolutionaries, and no one has shown more clearly the dangers that a one-sided pursuit of those goals can create. The career of the most famous of the radical French revolutionaries, Robespierre, is the most striking demonstration of that fact.

Robespierre is remembered because he was the most eloquent defender of the dictatorship created during the revolution’s most radical period, the months known as the Reign of Terror. Robespierre’s speech on the principles of revolutionary government, delivered on 25 December 1793, made an uncompromising case for the legitimacy of extreme measures to defeat those he called ‘the enemies of liberty’. Paradoxically, he insisted, the only way to create a society in which citizens could exercise the individual freedoms promised in the Declaration of Rights was to suspend those rights until the revolution’s opponents were conclusively defeated.

Robespierre’s colleagues on the all-powerful Committee of Public Safety chose him to defend their policies because he was more than just a spokesman for harsh measures against their opponents. From the time he first appeared on the scene as one of the 1,200 deputies to the Estates General summoned by Louis XVI in May 1789, his fellow legislators recognised the young provincial lawyer’s intelligence and his unswerving commitment to the ideals of democracy. The renegade aristocrat the comte de Mirabeau, the most prominent spokesman of the revolutionary ‘patriots’ in 1789 but an often cynical pragmatist, quickly sized up his colleague: ‘That man will go far, because he believes everything he says.’ Unlike the Père Duchêne, Robespierre always dressed carefully and spoke in pure, educated French. Other revolutionary leaders, like the rabblerousing orator Georges Danton, were happy to join insurrectionary crowds in the streets; Robespierre never personally took part in any of the French Revolution’s explosions of violence. Yet no one remains more associated with the violence of the Reign of Terror than Robespierre.

To reduce Robespierre’s legacy to his association with the Terror is to overlook the importance of his role as a one of history’s most articulate proponents of political democracy. When the majority of the deputies in France’s revolutionary National Assembly tried to restrict full political rights to the wealthier male members of the population, Robespierre reminded them of the Declaration of Rights’ assertion that freedom meant the right to have a voice in making the laws that citizens had to obey. ‘Is the law the expression of the general will, when the greater number of those for whom it is made cannot contribute to its formation?’ he asked. Long before our present-day debates about income inequality, he denounced a system that put real political power in the hands of the wealthy: ‘And what an aristocracy! The most unbearable of all, that of the rich.’ In the early years of the revolution, Robespierre firmly defended freedom of the press and called for the abolition of the death penalty. When white colonists insisted that France could not survive economically without slavery, Robespierre cried out: ‘Perish the colonies rather than abandon a principle!’

The majority of the population was not ready to embrace a radical secularist movement

Explaining how Robespierre, the principled defender of liberty and equality, became in just a few short years the leading advocate of a system of revolutionary government that foreshadowed the 20th century’s totalitarian dictatorships is perhaps the greatest challenge in defending the legacy of the French Revolution. Robespierre was no innocent, and in the last months of his short political career – he was only 36 when he died – his clumsy confrontations with his colleagues made him a dangerous number of enemies. Unlike the Père Duchêne, however, Robespierre never embraced violence as an end in itself, and a close examination of his career shows that he was often trying to find ways to limit the damage caused by policies he had not originally endorsed. In 1792, when most of his fellow Jacobin radicals embraced the call for a revolutionary war to ensure France’s security by toppling the hostile monarchies surrounding it, Robespierre warned against the illusion that other peoples would turn against their own governments to support the French. ‘No one loves armed missionaries,’ he insisted, a warning that recent US leaders might have done well to heed.

When radicals such as Hébert started a campaign to ‘de-Christianise’ France, in order to silence opposition to the movement’s effort to reform the Catholic Church and sell off its property for the benefit of the revolution, Robespierre reined them in. He recognised that the majority of the population was not ready to embrace a radical secularist movement bent on turning churches into ‘temples of reason’ and putting up signs in cemeteries calling death ‘an eternal sleep’. Robespierre proposed instead the introduction of a purified and simplified ‘cult of the Supreme Being’, which he thought believers could embrace without abandoning their faith in a higher power and their belief in the immortality of the soul.

Robespierre knew that many of the revolution’s bitterest opponents were motivated by loyalty to the Catholic Church. The revolution had not begun as an anti-religious movement. Under the rules used in the elections to what became the French National Assembly in 1789, a fourth of all the deputies were clergy from the Catholic Church, an institution so woven into the fabric of the population’s life that hardly anyone could imagine its disappearance. Criticism that the Church had grown too wealthy and that many of its beliefs failed to measure up to the standards of reason promoted by the Enlightenment was widespread, even among priests, but most hoped to see religion, like every other aspect of French life, ‘regenerated’ by the impulses of the revolution, not destroyed.

The revolutionaries’ confrontation with the Church began, not with an argument about beliefs, but because of the urgent need to meet the crisis in government revenues that had forced king Louis XVI to summon a national assembly in the first place. Determined to avoid a chaotic public bankruptcy, and reluctant to raise taxes on the population, the legislators decided, four months after the storming of the Bastille, to put the vast property of the Catholic Church ‘at the disposition of the nation’. Many Catholic clergy, especially underpaid parish priests who resented the luxury in which their aristocratic bishops lived, supported the expropriation of Church property and the idea that the government, which now took over the responsibility for funding the institution, had the right to reform it. Others, however, saw the reform of the Church as a cover for an Enlightenment-inspired campaign against their faith, and much of the lay population supported them. In one region of France, peasants formed a ‘Catholic and Royal Army’ and revolted against the revolution that had supposedly been carried out for their benefit. Women, who found in the cult of Mary and female saints a source of psychological support, were often in the forefront of this religiously inspired resistance to the revolution.

To supporters of the revolution, this religious opposition to their movement looked like a nationwide conspiracy preventing progress. The increasingly harsh measures taken to quell resistance to Church reform prefigured the policies of the Reign of Terror. The plunge into war in the spring of 1792, justified in part to show domestic opponents of the revolution that they could not hope for any support from abroad, allowed the revolutionaries to define the disruptions caused by diehard Catholics as forms of treason. Suspicions that Louis XVI, who had accepted the demand for a declaration of war, and his wife Marie-Antoinette were secretly hoping for a quick French defeat that would allow foreign armies to restore their powers led to their imprisonment and execution.

A ccusations of foreign meddling in revolutionary politics, a so-called foreign plot that supposedly involved the payment of large sums of money to leading deputies to promote special interests and undermine French democracy, were another source of the fears that fuelled the Reign of Terror. Awash in a sea of ‘fake news’, political leaders and ordinary citizens lost any sense of perspective, and became increasingly ready to believe even the most far-fetched accusations. Robespierre, whose personal honesty had earned him the nickname ‘The Incorruptible’, was particularly quick to suspect any of his colleagues who seemed ready to tolerate those who enriched themselves from the revolution or had contacts with foreigners. Rather than any lust for power, it was Robespierre’s weakness for seeing any disagreement with him as a sign of corruption that led him to support the elimination of numerous other revolutionary leaders, including figures, such as Danton, who had once been his close allies. Other, more cynical politicians joined Robespierre in expanding the Reign of Terror, calculating that their own best chance of survival was to strike down their rivals before they themselves could be targeted.

Although the toxic politics of its most radical phase did much to discredit the revolution, the ‘Reign of Terror’, which lasted little more than one year out of 10 between the storming of the Bastille and Napoleon’s coup d’état , was also a time of important experiments in democracy. While thousands of ordinary French men and women found themselves unjustly imprisoned during the Terror, thousands of others – admittedly, only men – held public office for the first time. The same revolutionary legislature that backed Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety took the first steps toward creating a modern national welfare system and passed plans for a comprehensive system of public education. Revolutionary France became the first country to create a system of universal military conscription and to promise ordinary soldiers that, if they proved themselves on the battlefield, there was no rank to which they could not aspire. The idea that society needed a privileged leadership class in order to function was challenged as never before.

Among the men from modest backgrounds who rose to positions they could never have attained before 1789 was a young artillery officer whose strong Corsican accent marked him as a provincial: Napoleon. A mere lieutenant when the Bastille was stormed, he was promoted to general just four years later, after impressing Robespierre’s brother Augustin with his skill in defeating a British invasion force on France’s southern coast. Five years after the overthrow of Robespierre on 27 July 1794 – or 9 Thermidor Year II, according to the new calendar that the revolutionaries had adopted to underline their total break with the past – Napoleon joined with a number of revolutionary politicians to overthrow the republican regime that had come out of the revolution and replace it with what soon became a system of one-man rule. Napoleon’s seizure of power has been cited ever since as evidence that the French Revolution, unlike the American, was essentially a failure. The French revolutionaries, it is often said, had tried to make too many changes too quickly, and the movement’s violence had alienated too much of the population to allow it to succeed.

To accept this verdict on the French Revolution is to ignore a crucial but little-known aspect of its legacy: the way in which the movement’s own leaders, determined to escape from the destructive politics of the Reign of Terror after Robespierre’s death, worked to ‘exit from the Terror’, as one historian has put it, and create a stable form of constitutional government. The years that history books call the period of the ‘Thermidorian reaction’ and the period of the Directory, from July 1794 to November 1799, comprise half of the decade of the French Revolution. They provide an instructive lesson in how a society can try to put itself back on an even keel after an experience during which all the ordinary rules of politics have been broken.

The post-Robespierre republic was brought down by the disloyalty of its own political elite

One simple lesson from the post-Terror years of the revolution that many subsequent politicians have learned is to blame all mistakes on one person. In death, Robespierre was built up into a ‘tiger thirsty for blood’ who had supposedly wanted to make himself a dictator or even king. All too aware that, in reality, thousands of others had helped to make the revolutionary government function, however, Robespierre’s successors found themselves under pressure to bring at least some of the Terror’s other leaders to justice. At times, the process escaped from control, as when angry crowds massacred political prisoners in cities in the south during a ‘white terror’ in 1795. On the whole, however, the republican leaders after 1794 succeeded in convincing the population that the excesses of the Terror would not be repeated, even if some of the men in power had been as deeply implicated in those excesses as Robespierre.

For five years after Robespierre’s execution, France lived under a quasi-constitutional system, in which laws were debated by a bicameral legislature and discussed in a relatively free press. On several occasions, it is true, the Directory, the five-man governing council, ‘corrected’ the election results to ensure its own hold on power, undermining the authority of the constitution, but the mass arrests and arbitrary trials that had marked the Reign of Terror were not repeated. The Directory’s policies enabled the country’s economy to recover after the disorder of the revolutionary years. Harsh toward the poor who had identified themselves with the Père Duchêne, it consolidated the educational reforms started during the Terror. Napoleon would build on the Directory’s success in establishing a modern, centralised system of administration. He himself was one of the many military leaders who enabled France to defeat its continental enemies and force them to recognise its territorial gains.

Although legislative debates in this period reflected a swing against the expanded rights granted to women earlier in the revolution, the laws passed earlier were not repealed. Despite a heated campaign waged by displaced plantation-owners, the thermidorians and the Directory maintained the rights granted to the freed blacks in the French colonies. Black men from Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe were elected as deputies and took part in parliamentary debates. In Saint-Domingue, the black general Louverture commanded French forces that defeated a British invasion; by 1798, he had been named the governor of the colony. His power was so great that the American government, by this time locked in a ‘quasi-war’ with France, negotiated directly with him, hoping to bring pressure on Paris to end the harassment of American merchant ships in the Caribbean.

The post-Robespierre French republic was brought down, more than anything else, by the disloyalty of its own political elite. Even before Napoleon unexpectedly returned from the expedition to Egypt on which he had been dispatched in mid-1798, many of the regime’s key figures had decided that the constitution they themselves had helped to draft after Robespierre’s fall provided too many opportunities for rivals to challenge them. What Napoleon found in the fall of 1799 was not a country on the verge of chaos but a crowd of politicians competing with each other to plan coups to make their positions permanent. He was able to choose the allies who struck him as most likely to serve his purposes, knowing that none of them had the popularity or the charisma to hold their own against him once the Directory had been overthrown.

One cannot simply conclude, then, that the history of the French Revolution proves that radical attempts to change society are doomed to failure, or that Napoleon’s dictatorship was the inevitable destination at which the revolution was doomed to arrive. But neither can one simply hail the French movement as a forerunner of modern ideas about liberty and equality. In their pursuit of those goals, the French revolutionaries discovered how vehemently some people – not just privileged elites but also many ordinary men and women – could resist those ideas, and how dangerous the impatience of their own supporters could become. Robespierre’s justification of dictatorial methods to overcome the resistance to the revolution had a certain logic behind it, but it opened the door to many abuses.

Despite all its violence and contradictions, however, the French Revolution remains meaningful for us today. To ignore or reject the legacy of its calls for liberty and equality amounts to legitimising authoritarian ideologies or arguments for the inherent inequality of certain groups of people. If we want to live in a world characterised by respect for fundamental individual rights, we need to learn the lessons, both positive and negative, of the great effort to promote those ideals that tore down the Bastille in 1789.

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Intellectual History and the Causes of the French Revolution

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Jack R Censer, Intellectual History and the Causes of the French Revolution, Journal of Social History , Volume 52, Issue 3, Spring 2019, Pages 545–554, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shy082

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From the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, historians, politicians, and even the interested public believed radical ideas to be at the bottom of this upheaval. Upstaged by social explanations, particularly in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, intellectual accounts have regained prominence, as recent scholarship has reiterated that ideas mattered. But what ideas? This essay focuses on those ideas that became evident at and around the outbreak of the revolution in 1788–89. For this period, a new wave of scholarship emphasizes not the idea of equality but rather historic rights and patriotism. In these accounts, Enlightenment notions of natural law provided the central justification for radicalizing the revolution as the decade proceeded. Beyond patriotism and rights, this essay also examines other competing discourses, especially those that challenged the church.

Many histories of the French Revolution, beginning with those written in the era itself, assumed, almost axiomatically, that the ideas of the philosophes had caused the “coming” of the event. 1 As social and other historians undermined that theory, intellectual historians moved in new directions, particularly toward the social history of ideas. Most visibly, in the 1960s, Robert Darnton and François Furet showed how subversive (even if not actually revolutionary) ideas had seeped into political culture through pornography and porous state borders. 2 Jürgen Habermas enlarged this vision by arguing that a “public sphere” had emerged in France that allowed subversive ideas and practices in various milieus, such as Freemasonry, the growing periodical press, and learned societies. 3 Still, few scholars claimed a direct link between these ideas and revolution.

Nonetheless, scholarly interest in ideas radically sharpened after the publication of François Furet’s Penser la revolution française in 1978, which opened up a new approach to intellectual history. 4 The first half of the book lambasted the Marxist explanation for the Revolution, which Furet labeled a “catechism” with class struggle at its absolute, immutable center. The twentieth-century Marxists who advocated this view saw themselves as the obvious heirs to the founding of the French republic, but Furet dismissed the Marxist interpretation as sheer fabrication.

Having pushed aside class conflict as the Revolution’s central dynamic, Furet succinctly posited his own theory that even before 1789 the monarchy was toothless. Into that power vacuum, sailed Rousseau’s Social Contract , a tract so powerful that its message eclipsed other ideologies and installed a potent logic—the absolute dominance of popular sovereignty. Yet, activating popular sovereignty required an advocate, an individual who could claim to embody the people’s will. Robespierre filled this role admirably, but he also created the potential for individual tyranny far more potent than that of a king whose authority was inherent in his body but surely did not represent the France of millions of people. From this fatal flaw eventually followed the Committee of Public Safety and the Terror. Furet’s theory was novel: by reducing the Revolution to the Terror, and blaming all of it on the logic of popular sovereignty derived from Rousseau, he tied the philosophe directly to the Revolution. Furet’s approach, drawn sharply to make a criticism of the Revolution as well as a scholarly point, was more specific than those that more generally connected the Enlightenment to the Revolution.

Although Furet’s interpretation did much to supplant Marxist and more traditional intellectual interpretations, it was criticized by scholars who contended that Rousseau’s fame had sprung far more from his sentimental writings than from the Social Contract . More recently, however, some scholars have resuscitated Rousseau’s influence. 5 Nonetheless, Furet provided no explanation for the revolutionaries’ acceptance of Rousseauian ideas other than the political vacuum and the rigorous logic springing from Rousseau’s belief that equality had no limits. How could these specific ideas hijack the mindset of a population?

Keith Baker articulated a parallel but different explanation for the acceptance of revolutionary ideology. 6 He put forth the abstract concept that every individual lives in an environment with discourses—ideational resources—that compete for attention. Facing these choices, people rather unconsciously pick and assemble notions that provide concrete solutions to material problems. In 1789, as governmental problems abounded, the elite—particularly dissatisfied elites—adopted three somewhat disparate discourses to frame their response. Baker labeled these three languages justice (opposition to despotism), reason (opposition to political views accepted because of their antiquity), and will (the right to implement enlightened concepts). The discourse of will approximated Furet’s notion of the role of equality and popular sovereignty. Yet Baker departed from Furet’s understanding of the way that ideology worked, adopting a more complex explanation for the creation of revolutionary ideology that included both chance and an alignment with material conditions. Nonetheless, Furet and Baker generally agreed on the important role of ideas or, more precisely, cultural change as a logic for revolution. 7

Continued work by Keith Baker, now collaborating with Dan Edelstein, remains highly visible, thanks in part to the impressive development of Stanford’s Digital Archive. 8 The architecture of the website springs from Edelstein’s and Baker’s priorities, which reflect their own understanding of the Revolution’s origins. Now, with a twenty-first century digital toolbox, Baker, Edelstein, and others at Stanford oversee technologists who are able to create algorithms that help scholars discover word associations, the building blocks for political discourse, on a far grander scale than what was possible even a few years ago. Still more important in extending their view of the power of ideas has been their new book Scripting Revolution , whose introduction confidently asserts that a revolution only assumes that form after being named a revolution. In practice, this theory implies that the French Revolution did not actually begin after the elections and the seizure of the Bastille in 1789 but instead only commenced later that year when Louis-Marie Prudhomme’s periodical Révolutions de Paris published a contemporary history of the events that labeled them revolutionary. Although Baker’s essay on the eighteenth-century use of the term “revolution” indicated the necessity of naming or “scripting,” he asserted this stronger point after Pierre Rétat pointed out Prudhomme’s essay. But what Rétat had begun in a fairly obscure article (that Baker carefully acknowledged and credited), Baker emphatically embraced and applied to all subsequent revolutions. In short, events called for the label; then, the label “revolution” defined subsequent actions. 9

Despite the significant achievements of Furet and Baker in reconceptualizing the intellectual origins of the Revolution, a new paradigm—classical republicanism—has exerted significant influence since 2000, at least in the English-speaking wing of the field. Baker would hardly contest this, it seems to me, since the convergence between the newer notion and his own arguments is considerable. In fact, he and his former student Johnson Kent Wright have done much to introduce this perspective to explain the French Revolution. 10 What neither they nor anyone else has provided is a standard definition of classical republicanism. For the purposes of this essay, one might assert that the essence of the term lies in the Greek and Roman defense of virtue and personal liberty against an empire. In the eighteenth century, according to this view, resistance fell to the nobility, which, motivated by honor, defended a populace that was itself only motivated by interest and largely incapable of taking up this necessary battle.

The ascendance of classical republicanism in accounts of the events of 1788–89 has tended to relegate the emphasis on natural rights (that Baker links to the language of “will”) to the subsequent radicalization of the Revolution. But this relationship was never quite settled, as Rousseau’s Social Contract advocated both republicanism and natural rights. Furthermore, advocates of classical republicanism also had their eye on equality, although they conceived of it more as the ennobling of all rather than leveling. In short, the equality born of natural law was minimized in 1788–89. Equality had proved difficult to accommodate consistently, much less realize, in the early part of revolutionary struggle driven by classical republicanism. 11

Worth noting as an aside is the prescience of two of the canonical works from a previous generation of scholars. Peter Gay clearly recognized the philosophes’ interest in the ancients but focused on their views that castigated religion, while Robert R. Palmer’s “intermediate bodies” are congruent with the resistance of elites, though clearly he imagined a social elite wider than the nobility of classical republicanism. 12

Evidence for how broad has been the reach of classical republicanism as an explanation for revolution are two distinguished studies in the related fields of fiscal policy and the economy. John Shovlin’s book, The Political Economy of Virtue details the debates beginning in the 1740 s between those who favored “virtuous” small producers over the wealthier, parasitic echelons of society. 13 His study depicts a battle between producers on one side and financiers and the comfortable on the other. Contemporaries believed that luxury and profit were derived from the exploitation of honest workers. Shovlin follows this division through the decades of the eighteenth century; though positions evolved, the rich and the oppressed remained opposed. To be sure, the author sometimes resorts to fancy footwork, as some entrepreneurial activities dropped by the rich and adopted by the poor apparently change from despicable to honored simply by virtue of who performed the work. He praises profit well earned by the hands of the poor and attacks that when the rich become the recipients.

During the revolutionary crisis, Shovlin argues, the advocates for the peasantry and the workers seized the upper hand. Dealing with the deficit, their representatives came to believe that piecemeal reforms would not do and the problem at bottom was an excess of luxury. At the center of this attack was Mirabeau, who argued that “speculation creates a false wealth which undermines real sources of riches in agriculture and in commerce.” 14 Further, Shovlin states that patriotism had influenced and shaped how ordinary citizens understood political economy. Although the author seldom acknowledges the link between patriotism and classical republicanism, the rhetoric he uncovers fits neatly with the broader theory of classical republicanism. 15

In his valuable work Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth Century France , Michael Kwass analyzes the resistance to royal taxation that boiled over in the Old Regime and into the Revolution and directly points out the immediate relevance of classical republicanism to the debate. Kwass notes that the contemporary meaning of classical republicanism included a king and “representative bodies” that coexisted in a milieu where a “vigilant” mistrust of authority and hostility to finance were augmented by the embrace of an authentic rustic existence in which virtue reigned. Watchfulness was necessary, even though somewhat powerless against the encroachment of the sovereign. But Kwass believes that Mireabeau, in the long term struggle of this scenario, articulated in 1750–51 the possibility of coexistence. Morally, the king was obliged toward restraint. Royal taxation had produced crises; only an end to arbitrary rule and its replacement could be successful. 16

Decades later, according to Kwass, Jacques Necker mobilized a similar rhetoric. Brought into government to address the deficit, Necker appealed to patriotism rather than duty to the king, whom he advised to encourage public involvement. As Kwass notes: “By publicizing the working of the state . . . both patriotism and public opinion would emerge to guide the nation to reform, stability, and fiscal strength.” 17 Such remarks were more than just a rhetorical similarity to classical republicanism, as shown by a popular engraving, which linked the minister and his fiscal plan to antiquity. Hallmarks of this classical allusion are the cupids who crowned Necker and his policies with garlands. Central to the piece is a monument labeled as a pyramid, whose lettering indicated that taxes linked to the king were to be eliminated, replaced by charity, equity, and abundance. 18

Although classical republican ideals were thus supposed to inhabit the economy and fiscal policy, they were, compared to the rhetoric of the political sphere, limited at best. Jay M. Smith’s provocative Nobility Reimagined asserts that the revolutionaries desired but failed to construct a republic based on the antique values of honor and virtue. The study describes the nobles’ hostility to Louis XIV’s absolutism and their desire to base society on patriotism and political virtue. As Smith notes, the French were familiar with ancient authors such as Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch and “the ‘civic humanism’ idiom that served as an important vehicle for transmitting the values of the ancient republics to the early modern Atlantic world.” 19 The embrace of antiquity fueled the pride of nobles but also reminded them of family heritage and their disproportionate political and economic power. This cauldron yielded a compensatory embrace of virtue.

According to Smith, an increased interest in adding equality to the mix of values emerged at mid-century. In particular, commerce, premised on equality in moral and physical goods, was widely considered valuable. The publication in 1756 of Gabriel-François Coyer’s La Noblesse commerçante , which elevated the dignity of the merchant’s profession, furthered change. The contemporary Pierre Jaubert claimed even more as he asserted that “virtue, valor, zeal for the patrie , probity, ability, talent, experience, scorn for dangers, the honor of becoming a martyr for one’s patrie . . . in short, personal merit, are always hereditary in families.” 20 Smith claimed that such attributes were intended to incorporate commoners into the elite. Antique republicanism was socially expansive. In fact, by the 1760 s, the French had turned to ennobling the nation.

Despite all of these signs of inclusivity, Smith also indicates that many nobles were uneasy with this change. With the Revolution opening the door to unimaginable equality, the nobles asserted their difference, particularly by refusing to double the number of commoner representatives to the Third Estate. This action gave rise to a bitter struggle that animated the Revolution. Despite the ultimate demolition of the ideal of classical republicanism in revolutionary France, the passions ignited in 1788–89 reveal its importance to contemporaries and its relevance to history.

The monarch’s multiple foreign policy failures, the subsistence crises of 1788–89, the credit crunch of the 1780s, and the institutional paralysis that undermined all royal efforts at reform would also need to be integrated into any comprehensive analysis of the causes of the Old Regime’s collapse in 1789. 21

Agreeing with Kwass, Smith argues that in the end, these events and discourses cannot be “easily separated.” 22 Thus, politics and circumstances led to a radical division in which the nobility and the king ended up as the opponents of republican morality. To judge by the work of Shovlin, Kwass, and Smith, the central role of ideas in the complex crises of the late 1780 s seems well established. These scholars have begun to connect classical republicanism to the actions taken during this key historical conjuncture.

Ushered by classical republicanism into a smaller space in the intellectual ferment, the role of natural law requires reevaluation. Scholars who focus on classical republicanism in the origins of the Revolution sometimes imply through offhand remarks that natural law exerted a major impact as the Revolution continued. More work needs to be done to chart natural law and connect it to revolutionary events. Historians’ use of these two separate logics undermines the fundamental coherence of revolutionary thinking and perhaps that of the Enlightenment itself. Whereas classical republicanism is premised on the historic resistance to central control, natural law focuses on human equality, yielding a contradiction—perhaps even a useful one—that still resonates throughout modern politics.

Largely outside the political maelstrom, other ideas flourished. Particularly impressive is the study by Darrin McMahon on the “counter enlightenment,” a group that absorbed some progressive notions. 23 Even more astonishing—as it certainly would have been to Voltaire—has been the work on the Catholic enlightenment. Important new books by Jeffrey Burson and Ulrich Lehner have revivified an effort whose roots lie in R. R. Palmer’s Catholics and Unbelievers , which illuminated the balance of tradition and change. 24 Also relevant in this vein are Alan Kors’s studies of the Catholic Church. In his earliest work on Baron d’Holbach, Kors focused on the loneliness of atheists. More recently, he produced two important books that unequivocally revealed that notions of atheism circulated far more widely than even he earlier imagined. In seeking to reject atheism, the Church amplified the reach of what it sought to repress. 25 A new book by Anton Matysin on scepticism and doubt takes a similar tack. 26 Nonetheless, John Robertson’s persuasive The Case for the Enlightenment concludes that the Enlightenment, linked as it was to critiquing religion, was fundamentally reformist. 27 Nevertheless, none of these books on religious doubt attempt to relate their subjects directly to the upheaval in 1789.

None of these recent approaches seems to have raised the importance of intellectuals to quite the level achieved in France’s sister rebellion in North America. Sophia Rosenfeld has chronicled how Tom Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense , highlighting the acuity and value of the thinking of the common man, galvanized public opinion and incited the North American Revolution. Scholars, including Rosenfeld herself, have found no similar impact on the French Revolution. In fact, counterrevolutionaries actually marshaled the notion of common sense to sway the people against the uprising. The complexity and abstractness of many revolutionary plans created an opportunity for reactionaries to argue that common sense did not embrace, or in fact even respect, revolutionary goals. 28

Nonetheless, scholars, including Jay Smith, have noted the pamphlet war preceding 1788–89, in which Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate? was most visible. 29 William Sewell’s work on Sieyès and Kenneth Margerison’s on pamphlets more generally provide additional evidence for the importance of these texts. 30 Doubtless, these publications could prove to be the most promising place to link the various prerevolutionary languages to the revolutionary plans enacted in Versailles, Paris, and throughout the country, though little evidence exists that the rural population knew much of this exchange among propagandists. Nonetheless, this explosion of print may provide fertile ground to examine the role of ideas.

Entering the crowded arena regarding the intellectual origins of the French Revolution has been Jonathan Israel, who approaches the role of ideas by postulating a direct connection between individual Enlightenment thinkers and specific views that would compete in the Revolution. In this way, Israel is rehabilitating the older approach that focuses not on languages or presuppositions but on on individuals and the power of ideas. Although his work (five books totaling four thousand pages published from 2001 to 2014) could be useful, its combativeness, the overemphases of its argument, and its length all undercut that potential contribution. In fact, his corpus has inspired the most acrimonious debate on the intellectual history of the Revolution in recent years. Largely because of the prominence of this debate, Israel’s work has somewhat obscured the previous decades of more sober, though still contentious scholarship. For this reason, both its arguments and the reactions it has provoked thus require a brief review. 31

To pursue the connection between ideas and the Revolution, Israel sorted the philosophes into two camps. Beginning in the seventeenth century with Spinoza, whose theory denied the spiritual and insisted on atheism, Israel focuses on Spinoza’s belief in “monism,” which held that only one substance (material not spiritual) made up the universe. The philosopher opposed “deists” and others—very prominently Rousseau—who posited a creator who fashioned the universe. From this sharp division, Israel finds two separate logics. The deists, believing in God, held that little could be done to improve on his perfection; monists, holding all matter to be equal, averred that everyone could participate in making life better. In this analysis, the atheists become the source of the moderate, incremental revolution, while the religious appear as political fanatics and authors of the Terror.

Israel presents his thesis forcibly, and the rebuttals have shown similar intensity. Although Furet attacked the Marxists and offended others by insisting that the Jacobin dictatorship was the logical end of the Revolution, even that of 1789, Israel undertakes a far larger, even compulsive effort to organize the Revolution around his Manichaean notion and refute other interpretations.

A storm of criticism greeted Israel’s work. 32 Kent Wright, Carolina Armenteros, Keith Baker, and Harvey Chisick found much to criticize and little to praise in the book. Israel seemingly found it impossible to acknowledge any of their critiques, which he completely rejected. For an example, consider the interchange between Baker and Israel. As author of the iconic biography of Condorcet, Baker had noted that that philosophe did not even include Spinoza in his narrative of human progress. Such a challenge to Israel’s linkages led the latter to remark condescendingly that this could “conceivably” be right, but nonetheless, the two philosophes still strongly shared goals. 33

Possibly, Israel’s resistance to criticism accounts for even more critical reviews that followed, by highly distinguished scholars Lynn Hunt, Jeremy Popkin, and David Bell. 34 In his review, Bell remarked that “Israel, in some remarkably cavalier pages, treats . . . popular actions almost with annoyance. . . . He takes no interest in the common people’s culture.” Israel’s unwillingness to engage with the work of other scholars piqued Lynn Hunt who derided his one-sided accounts: “Israel’s palette is too black and white for . . . subtleties. He is always right, and so are his heroes.” 35

Despite all its faults, Israel’s work does suggest the value in plumbing the ideas of individual intellectual predecessors of the French Revolution. Though few will follow his precise path, a focus on the use of ideas, from the Greeks to the physiocrats, could help illuminate the intellectual history of the revolutionary maelstrom. With this narrower focus, scholars just might be able to supplement the interplay of discourses and embedded presuppositions by seeing ideas at work among intellectuals.

The author wishes to thank Jane Turner Censer and Gary Kates for their advice and assistance.

See, for example, Edmund Burke’s early assertions in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; rept. ed., Garden City, NY, 1961), first published in 1790.

Over the last several decades, Robert Darnton and François Furet have published numerous works in this area. See especially, Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-revolutionary France (New York, 1995); and François Furet et al., Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1965–70), 2 vols.

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger (Boston, MA, 1993). See also Ran Halévi, Les Loges maçonniques dans la France d’Ancien Régime: Aux origins de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris, 1984).

François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution , trans. Elborg Forster (New York, 1981).

See for example, Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1986); and more recently, Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, & the French Revolution (Chicago, 2010). See below for a discussion of Jonathan Israel’s work.

Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990).

For an even more poignant criticism of the role of ideas, consult Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution , trans Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 67–91. Chartier argues that “books” do not make revolutions; rather it is the cultural act of reading that possesses power.

The website can be found at: https://frda.stanford.edu .

Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolution (Stanford, CA, 2015). See Rétat’s article, “Forme et discours d’un journal Révolutionnaire: Les Révolutions de Paris en 1789,” in Claude Labrosse, Pierre Rétat, and Henri Duranton, L’Instrument périodique: La function de la presse au XVIIIe siècle (Lyon, France, 1985), 139–66. One can see Baker’s use of the article in Scripting Revolution , 96–97. Baker was even more emphatic on this point in a discussion at a conference at Haifa University in 1989.

Keith Michael Baker, “A Script for a French Revolution: The Political Consciousness of the Abbé Mably,” in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); and Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, CA, 1997). See also Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester, England, 2010). For more on the mixture of natural law and the right to resist overweening monarchs in the Atlantic world, consult Jack R. Censer, Debating Modern Revolution: The Evolution of Revolutionary Ideas (London, 2016), 7–52.

Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right .

Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation , 2 vols. (New York, 1967, 1969); and R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 , 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1959, 1964).

John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2006). Marisa Linton, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (New York, 2001); Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY, 2008).

Shovlin, The Political Economy , 171.

Henry C. Clark, Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old Regime France (Lanham, MD, 2007) shows how resistance and accommodation limited at first the liberty of both producers and polity. However, it must be said that such values triumphed as the nineteenth century rolled along. In fact, James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2001) argues persuasively that already in the Directory (1795–99), both liberal economy and politics had revived, if only briefly before dominating in a later period.

Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000), 234–38.

Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation , 251.

Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation , 245.

Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 32.

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 133.

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 265.

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 266.

Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2001).

Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (South Bend, IN, 2010); Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (New York, 2016); and R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France (Princeton, NJ, 1939).

Alan Charles Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, 1976); Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge, 2016); and Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge, 2016).

Anton M. Matysin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD, 2016).

John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). In fact, in his The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2015), 116, Robertson goes farther to note that “the Revolution was the antithesis of Enlightenment.”

Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

Smith, Nobility Reimagined , 255–57. Of course, Peter Gay found group solidarity in the eighteenth-century philosophes in his The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1964).

William H. Sewell, Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC, 1994); and Kenneth Margerison, Pamphlets & Public Opinion: The Campaign for a Union of Orders in the Early French Revolution (West Lafayette, IN, 1998).

Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006); A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010); Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011); and Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton, 2014).

H-France Forum 9, no. 1 (Winter 2014).

H-France Forum 9, no. 1, 80.

This paragraph is based on the following reviews and responses: David A. Bell, “A Very Different French Revolution,” New York Review of Books (July 10, 2014); Jonathan Israel, “The French Revolution: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books , October 10, 2014; Lynn Hunt, “Louis XVI Wasn’t Killed by Ideas,” New Republic , June 27, 2014; Jonathan Israel and Lynn Hunt, “Was Louis XVI Overthrown by Ideas?” New Republic , July 31, 2014; Jeremy D. Popkin, “Review of Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas,” H-France Review 15, no. 66 (May 2015); Jonathan Israel, “Response to Jeremy Popkin’s Review, H-France Review 15, no. 67 (May 2015).

Bell, “A Very Different French Revolution,” 2; Hunt, “Louis XVI,” 8.

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The French Revolution Role in the History Essay

Introduction.

The French Revolution was a major event not only in the history of the French Empire but also in the history of the world. The tumultuous events of the revolution resulted in the spread of ideas of liberty and equality, thereby helping to create a popular movement. This paper aims to discuss social transformations that the revolution sought to achieve.

Three Estates

The French Revolution came on the heels of the American Revolution of 1776 (Cole et al. 426). Many subjects of the French Empire were inspired by the success of the American uprising. However, unlike American society that was divided into proponents and opponents of British rule, its French counterpart was characterized by conflicts between many social groups. French society was comprised of three legally-recognized classes that were commonly referred to as Three Estates. Whereas the first two estates consisted of the clergymen and the nobility, the third group subsumed remaining social strata. Interestingly enough, legal distinctions between disparate members of the Third Estate were poorly defined.

The group was comprised of layers, entrepreneurs, laborers, and peasants among others (Cole et al. 427). Wealthy members of the Third Estate were unwilling to identify with manual workers whom they despised. Furthermore, legal distinctions between the nobility and rich entrepreneurs who were jealous of their position resulted in social tensions. Abbe Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, a distinguished politician of that time, understood the source of the social discontent and argued that the Third Estate contained “within itself everything needful to constitute a complete nation” (qtd. in Cole et al. 431).

Social Conditions

To better understand the change promised by the uprising, it is necessary to explore the social conditions of the constituents of the Third Estate. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other privileged members of the group criticized the government for a complicated tax code. They believed that undue regulations stifled the country’s economy and “interfered with the natural workings of the market” (Cole et al. 428). Peasants also had their fair share of grievances with the state. Residents of the countryside were subject to tithes, levies, fees, rents, and other forms of taxation. In addition to these financial obligations, peasants had to maintain public roads. Also, they were deprived of hunting privileges, which was a major source of discontent.

Before the revolution, the deterioration of economic conditions resulted in the corrosion of social cohesion. In the 1780s, the empire experienced a rapid increase in bread prices, which was caused by poor harvests (Cole et al. 428). Following the law of supply and demand, the production of manufactured goods rapidly decreased, thereby reducing the incomes of wealthy members of the Third Estate.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was issued by the National Assembly in 1789, was a perfect example of social transformations that the revolution attempted to achieve (Cole et al. 431). The document was based on the philosophical concept of natural rights and sought to guarantee liberty, freedom of speech, and equality before the law for all citizens of the future republic (Cole et al. 433). Due process of law was an extremely important aim of the French Revolution because, before the uprising, social distinctions between the country’s residents were associated with the unequal application of laws. The Declaration also introduced a concept of religious toleration, which helped to end the persecution of Jews (Cole et al. 432). Furthermore, the document intended to ban slavery in some regions of France, which was an enormous social change.

Women’s Rights

The women’s rights movement around 1790 was another instance of the transformation of French society that was facilitated by the revolution (Cole et al. 432). Even though not all prominent thinkers of the era supported the movement, many women wanted to assert their rights and fought to legalize divorce. Unfortunately, revolutionaries were opposed to the emergence of the political consciousness of French women; therefore, female organizations and clubs were forcefully shut down.

Another area of the social transformation was the church. The revolutionaries desired to deprive religious authorities of their lands, thereby solving the economic crisis. Moreover, the National Assembly wanted to institutionalize the church and make it free from the political interference of the pope. Unfortunately, this avenue of change was utterly divisive: many peasants who opposed the reform were forced to revolt. Even though revolutionary leaders espoused egalitarian principles, the Committee of Public Safety, which was formed to crack down on the opposition, gave rise to a reign of terror. In the period between 1792 and 1794, the revolutionary progress was drowned in dictatorial bloodshed (Cole et al. 436). Approximately 40, 000 people were murdered in that period (Cole et al. 436).

The paper has shown that the French Revolution was a popular uprising the aim of which was to introduce major social transformations. Despite the substantial progress of the revolutionaries, many peasants and laborers bore the brunt of the tumultuous events. The revolutionary progress was driven not only by the ideas of freedom and equality but also by tyranny and despotism.

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History Grade 10 - Topic 3 Essay Questions

Causes of the French Revolution

Based on the 2012 Grade 10 NSC Exemplar Paper:

Grade 10 Past Exam Paper

Grade 10 Source Addendum

Grade 10 Past Exam Memo

Essay 1: What were the causes of the French Revolution?

In 1789 the bloody French Revolution began, which would continue till the late 1790’s. The aim of the revolution was to overthrow the monarchy and uproot the system of feudalism, and replace it with ideas of equality, liberty and fraternity. [1] The French revolution occurred for various reasons, including poor economic policies, poor leadership, an exploitative political- and social structures. 

Political Causes

The political causes of the French revolution included the autocratic monarchy, bankruptcy and extravagant spending of royals. To understand the causes of the French Revolution, one needs to understand France’s political structure before the revolution began. An autocratic monarchy means that French society was governed by an all-powerful king or queen, believed to have been given divine right to rule by God. [2] These monarchs were hereditary rulers, which meant that the son or daughter of the monarch would be the next ruler. [3] As many believed the monarchs to be a “representative of God”, they did not question the orders of their rulers. But this unlimited power of the monarchs soon led to abuse. Under King Louis XIV reign all monarchs could have anyone arrested and imprisoned by the Letter de Cachet. The monarchs did not care for their subjects as even the innocent could be arrested and imprisoned at any time. This caused anxiety, panic and fear in France.

King Louis XIV reigned from 1643 to 1713. [4] After his death, his great-grandson, King Louis XV became king at the age of five. Both his parents and brother had passed away in 1712, and a regent, Philippe II, was appointed who would govern till he came of age. [5] When King Louis XV finally took the throne, he was a lazy leader who lacked self-confidence and spent more time with his mistresses than with the affairs of state. [6] His national policies never had firm direction. He became known as the “butterfly monarch”. [7] His involvement in the Seven Years War (1756 – 1763) drained France’s treasury. [8] While the country was bankrupt and many citizens were impoverished, taxes were generated to sustain a large army. [9] King Louis XV contributed to France’s bankruptcy due to overspending on his luxurious lifestyle and wars. [10]

The next leader, Louis XVI (1774 – 1793) reign also set the stage for a revolution. King Louis XVI is remembered as a simple man, but his wife Marie Antoinette lived in the lap of luxury. [11] Louis XVI inherited the kingdom and all the debt of France when he became king. He failed to fix the financial situation. The expensive upkeep of his palace and the unnecessary spending of Marie Antoinette angered the French population. Especially as the tax system excluded nobility from paying tax, while the poor paid for the royals’ luxurious lifestyles. By 1786 Charles de Calonne, the general of finances, warned against raising taxes of the poor as it could lead to unrest. [12] As King Louis XVI did not want to tax nobility, De Calonne had to approach European Banks for loans. [13] While King Louis was unable to fix France’s financial situation, his wife continued with her extravagant lifestyle. Marie-Antoinette’s never-minded response to the poor suffering is mostly reflected in the quote: “Let them eat cake”. [14]   Even though no evidence could be found that she truly said it, the famous quote does portray the monarchy’s attitude. While many were starving, the monarchy turned a blind eye. This quote shows how oblivious they were to the suffering of their people.

The defective administration of generations of monarchs set the stage for a French revolution. The poor were no longer willing to pay for the monarchy’s extravagant lifestyles and unwise foreign policies. People were starting to revolt against the idea of “divine rule” and started to question the authority and wisdom of their monarchs.

Social Causes:

The second cause of the French revolution was based on the social structure of France. French society was based on the relics of feudalism, which divided the French population in to three classes based on the Estate System. [15]   According to the Estate System, people’s status and rights were determined by the estate they owned. [16] The three estates included the clergy, the nobility and the peasants.

The first estate consisted of the clergy, which was subdivided into two groups, the upper and lower clergy. The higher clergy were at the top of the hierarchy in French society, while the lower clergy were impoverished. The higher clergy lived extravagantly, exploiting people and exempt from paying taxes. [17] While the lower clergy was also employed as workers of the church, monasteries and educational institutions, but not in high positions such as the higher clergy. [18]

The second estate consisted of the nobility, which included two groups, namely the court nobles and the provincial nobles. [19] They were also exempt from paying taxes. However, the provincial nobles actually cared for the people, while the court nobles only focused on leading scandalously wealthy lives. [20]

The third estate consisted of the peasants, which included the sweepers, farmers and cobblers. [21] They were the lowest classes in French society, who were forced to pay taxes to sustain the luxuriously living of the first and second estate.

But besides the unequal taxing given to the third estate, they were also unequally represented in court. The third estate represented 98% of the French population, yet they were outvoted by the first two estates. The third estate fought against this unequal representation and began to mobilize support for abolishing the noble veto. This meant that votes would be counted by the amount of people in favor or against a law, rather than nobles dictating laws. This led to opposition from the first two estates, who wanted to remain in control.

To fight against the current voting system, the Third Estate met on 17 June 1789 alone to change the title of National Assembly. [22] Three days later, they met at an indoor tennis court and undertook the Tennis Court Oath, declaring that would not end their fight until they achieved judicial, fiscal and governmental reform. [23] On 27 June, after 47 liberal nobles joined the Third Estate’s cause, Louis XVI accepted all three orders into a new assembly.

The rise of the third estate against the Estate System and unequal representation due to the class structure also gave rise to the French Revolution. The poor were angered to pay for the luxurious lifestyles of first and second estate. They were also tired of having 2% of the population veto all their rights and having inequal representation in court even though they made up 98% of French society.

Economic Causes

Another cause of the French revolution was the economic conditions of France. King Louis XIV “Seven Years War” left France bankrupt. His foreign policies led to expensive foreign wars, which emptied the coffers of the royal treasury. After his death, he was succeeded by Louis XVI. But as previously shown, even though the king was simple, his wife continued with frivolous spending. King Louis XVI also refused to listen to the economic counsel given to him, which led to necessary economic changes being ignored.

Firstly, when Louis XVI took the throne, Turgot was appointed Minister of Finance in 1774. Turgot’s first duty was to rid France of their debt. [24] He came up with a solution to appease the peasants and fix France’s financial situation by minimizing spending of the royal court and imposing taxes on all three estates. [25] However, Turgot’s solution was dismissed after Marie Antoinette intervened. Turgot was fired and Necker was appointed as the new Finance Minister in 1776. Necker remained King Louis XVI Finance Minister for seven years. [26] During his time he published a report of the income and expenses of the government, to appease the French population. [27] But in 1783, he was also fired. Finally, Calonne was appointed Minister of Finance in 1783. Calonne advised the king to improve France’s financial situation by approaching European banks for a loan. [28] The European banks were not keen to lend money to France, but Calonne was able to obtain a loan. Calonne’s solution proved problematic. When France finally did receive a loan, their debt doubled within three years from 300, 000, 000 to 600, 000, 000. [29] Thereafter, Calonne realized that his solution was not feasible and urged the king to impose taxes on all three classes. Finally, Calonne was also dismissed.

King Louis XVI economic decisions finally set the stage for the revolution. The monarchy refused to impose taxes on all three estates, while the royals continued living in a lap of luxury. These decisions created economic instability in France. The peasants were angered, as while they were starving, they had to maintain the standard of living for the rich. Therefore, the economic conditions in France was one of the main reasons for the revolution.

Ultimately, there was three main reasons for the French Revolution. The Estate System, economic policies and autocratic monarchy gave rise to a bloody revolution, which led to the need for equality, liberty and fraternity in France. 

Essay 2:  What is the Legacy of the French Revolution of 1789 or What were the consequences of the French Revolution? 

Tip:  If there is a term that is unfamiliar to you, please check out our French Revolution Glossary some definitions.

The Bloody French Revolution officially began when hundreds of French city workers stormed the Bastille fortress in Paris in 1789. [30]   Although the revolution came to an end in the late 1790’s, its legacy (or consequences) had a significant impact on the World, especially other European countries.  This statement will be examined by discussing various political and socio-economic legacies of the French Revolution of 1789, while discussing how the idea of the possibility that popular mobilization can overthrow established monarchies and aristocracies rose from the French Revolution of 1789.

Political Legacies:

When discussing the legacy of the French Revolution, it is important to understand the causes of the revolution as it gives one a better understanding of the desired outcomes.  For example, one of the main causes was that French citizens who belonged to the Third Estate . grew significantly tired of the absolute power and wealth of the French monarchy and wanted a political system that represented the popular interests.  Consequently, one of the direct consequences of the revolution was that France became a Republic; which indicated a step towards liberty, equality and democracy. [31]   This need for liberty and equality spread to many other countries and especially to countries in central Europe, where popular protest  and movements called for the election of parliaments and to ultimately demolish the feudalistic-approach of European life. [32]

As briefly mentioned, the French Revolution of 1789 demonstrated that an organized group of popular protest and mutual interests could demolish something as established as old monarchies and aristocracies. [33]   This idea significantly led to the revolution of the slaves of Saint-Domingue, a French Colony on one of the Caribbean Islands, who mobilized themselves for the fight for their independence. [34]   In 1804 this movement was able to finally break free from French colonial rule and establish the Republic of Haiti.

Socio-Economic Legacies:

When discussing the political movements that were influenced by the French Revolution, it is also important to discuss the Socio-Economic legacies that were influenced by the changes in the political environments.  For example, the fall of the monarchy also meant that the French system of estates (based on Feudalism) also crumbled.  This meant that the French middle class were able to gain better opportunities through acquiring more land (as the Church’s lands were nationalized) and having to pay less taxes (as they did not have to pay Feudal taxes anymore). [35]   Furthermore, the elite classes (such as the nobles and corrupt clergy) lost most of their power and privileges.  Therefore, it is evident that the revolution led to a significant change in the political, social and economic structures of France.

Growth of Nationalism

With the middle class and “peasants” (in this context, French farmers) gaining more opportunities and a better standard of living and the decline of Feudalism, as well as the loss of extreme privileges of the clergy and nobleman, a need for the growth in Nationalistic sentiments continued.  Consequently, instead of the protection provided by the Feudalistic-structure , a French army was established. [36] Other examples of the lasting spread of French Nationalism, is the change of France’s flag (the Tricolore), the National anthem (the Marseillaise) and the creation of France’s National Day (Bastille Day). [37]   The legacy of French Nationalism out of the French Revolution still exists today.

Conclusion:

When discussing the causes and outcomes of the French Revolution of 1789, it evident that the outcomes of the revolution had a lasting impact on the French political, social and economic way of life.  As seen in the examples of the changing social structures, the change in the tax system and finally the strong rise in French Nationalism.  It is also important to note the legacy created by the ideology of the French Revolution and its effect on many European countries.  For example, as seen in the growth of the Jacobin movements.  One of the most significant phenomena surrounding the French Revolution of 1789 and its legacy, is that the world was able to witness how people were able to organize themselves to fight for National interest and take down century old ways of life.  This ultimately led to the legacy and the birth of the idea of the possibility of differing political ideologies. [38]

Tips & Notes:

• Check out our Essay Writing Skills  for more tips on writing essays.
• Remember, this is just an example essay.  You still need to use the work provided by your teacher or learned in class.
• It is important to check in with your teacher and make sure this meets his/her requirements.  For example, they might prefer that you do not use headings in your essay.

This content was originally produced for the SAHO classroom by Ilse Brookes, Amber Fox-Martin & Simone van der Colff

[1] Author Unknown, “French Revolution”, History, (Uploaded: 9 November 2009), (Accessed: 29 April 2020), Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution

[2] Author Unknown, “France Before the Revolution”, History Crunch, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 29 April 2020), Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution

[3] Author Unknown, “France Before the Revolution”, History Crunch, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 29 April 2020), Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution

[4] Author Unknown, “Louis XV”, Encyclopedia Britannica, (Uploaded: 11 February 2020), (Accessed 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-XV

[7] V. Rana, “Causes of the French Revolution: Political, Social and Economic Causes’, History Discussion, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.historydiscussion.net/world-history/french-revolution/causes-of-french-revolution-political-social-and-economic-causes/1881

[8] Author Unknown, “The French Revolution (1789 – 1799)”, Sparknotes, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.sparknotes.com/history/european/frenchrev/section1/

[10] V. Rana, “Causes of the French Revolution: Political, Social and Economic Causes’, History Discussion, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.historydiscussion.net/world-history/french-revolution/causes-of-french-revolution-political-social-and-economic-causes/1881

[12] Author Unknown, “The French Revolution (1789 – 1799)”, Sparknotes, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.sparknotes.com/history/european/frenchrev/section1/

[14] J. M. Cunningham, “Did Marie-Antoinette really say “Let them eat Cake”?”, Encyclopedia Britannica, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.britannica.com/story/did-marie-antoinette-really-say-let-them

[15] Author Unknown, “France Before the Revolution”, History Crunch, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 29 April 2020), Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution

[17] V. Rana, “Causes of the French Revolution: Political, Social and Economic Causes’, History Discussion, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.historydiscussion.net/world-history/french-revolution/causes-of-french-revolution-political-social-and-economic-causes/1881

[22] Author Unknown, “French Revolution”, History, (Uploaded: 9 November 2009), (Accessed: 29 April 2020), Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution

[24] V. Rana, “Causes of the French Revolution: Political, Social and Economic Causes’, History Discussion, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.historydiscussion.net/world-history/french-revolution/causes-of-french-revolution-political-social-and-economic-causes/1881

[28] Author Unknown, “The French Revolution (1789 – 1799)”, Sparknotes, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.sparknotes.com/history/european/frenchrev/section1/

[29] V. Rana, “Causes of the French Revolution: Political, Social and Economic Causes’, History Discussion, (Uploaded: Unknown), (Accessed: 30 April 2020), Available at: https://www.historydiscussion.net/world-history/french-revolution/causes-of-french-revolution-political-social-and-economic-causes/1881

[30] South African History Online, (2011), “The French Revolution,” Grade 10 – Topic 3, South African History Online (online), Available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/grade-10-topic-3-french-revolution-0 (Accessed:  6 June 2020)

[31] J. Battaro & P. Visser & N. Worden, (2011), “Grade 10 Learner’s Book,” Oxford in Search of History.  Oxford University Press, South Africa.

[32] UKEssays, November 2018, “Legacies of the French Revolution,” UKEssays (online). Available at https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/the-major-legacies-of-the-frenc… (Accessed 5 June 2020).

[33] UKEssays, November 2018, “Legacies of the French Revolution,” UKEssays (online). Available at https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/the-major-legacies-of-the-frenc… (Accessed 5 June 2020).

[34] UKEssays, November 2018, “Legacies of the French Revolution,” UKEssays (online). Available at https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/the-major-legacies-of-the-frenc… (Accessed 5 June 2020).

[35] J. Battaro & P. Visser & N. Worden, (2011), “Grade 10 Learner’s Book,” Oxford in Search of History.  Oxford University Press, South Africa.

[36] J. Battaro & P. Visser & N. Worden, (2011), “Grade 10 Learner’s Book,” Oxford in Search of History.  Oxford University Press, South Africa.

[37] J. Battaro & P. Visser & N. Worden, (2011), “Grade 10 Learner’s Book,” Oxford in Search of History.  Oxford University Press, South Africa.

[38] UKEssays, November 2018, “Legacies of the French Revolution,” UKEssays (online). Available at https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/the-major-legacies-of-the-frenc… (Accessed 5 June 2020).

[1] Battaro, J. & Visser, P. & Worden, N., 2011, Oxford in Search of History:  Grade 10 Learner’s Book, Oxford University Press, South Africa.

[2] Goldstone, J.A. “A Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory”, Annual Reviews, (Vol. 4), 139 – 187. 

[2] Schwartz, M.  “History 151: The French Revolution: Causes, Outcomes, Confliction Interpretations”, (Accessed: 28 April 2020), Mount Holyoke Available at: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist151s03/french_rev_causes_consequences.htm

[3] South African History Online, November 2011, “The French Revolution”, Grade 10 – Topic 10 (online).  Available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/grade-10-topic-3-french-revolution-0 (Accessed:  6 June 2020).

[4] Tulloch, S., Reader’s Digest Oxford Complete Wordfinder: A Unique and Powerful Combination of Dictionary and Thesaurus, London: The Reader’s Digest Association Limited, date unknown. 

[5] UKEssays, November 2018, “Legacies of the French Revolution,” UKEssays (online). Available at https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/the-major-legacies-of-the-frenc… (Accessed 5 June 2020).

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Pleasantview DAR announces essay winners

River City Middle School's Faith Harmon is the eighth grade winner of the Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution's American History Essay Contest. From left: Andy Preiss, Mark Harmon, Faith Harmon, Staci Harmon, Nancy Hicks and Janey Ortega. Courtesy photo

Hailey Jenny-Jeanne Farr of River City Middle School is the seventh grade winner of the Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution's American History Essay Contest. From left: Andy Preiss, Trina Caudle, Hailey Jenny-Jeanne Farr and Deb Tierney.

Milli’on Horfelt of Post Falls Middle School is the sixth grade winner of the Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution's American History Essay Contest. From left: Sally Holtz, Milli’on Horfelt, Vicki Horfelt and Mark Mason.

The Pleasantview Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution has announced the winners of the American History essay contest for 2024.

The Pleasantview American History essay contest was open to students in sixth through eighth grades in all accredited schools in the Post Falls area.

The topic of the American History contest this year was:

"On May 14, 1897, John Phillip Sousa played his new march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” This song would become the national march of the United States on Dec. 11, 1987. Imagine it is 1897 and you are a newspaper reporter for “The Philadelphia Times.” Your newspaper editor has asked you to write an article about the song being performed that day. Your article needs to tell us about Sousa’s life and the story behind the song. It is the first performance of the song, so make sure your article includes your thoughts about the music and how the audience reacts to what is seen and heard that day."

The entries were judged by grade level. The winners of the contest are:

• Sixth grade — Milli’on Horfelt, Post Falls Middle School

• Seventh grade — Hailey Jenny-Jeanne Farr, River City Middle School

• Eighth grade — Faith Harmon, River City Middle School

Winners earned certificates, bronze medals and monetary awards. Pleasantview Chapter winners will be submitted to the Idaho State Society for consideration in the state and national contests.

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North Jersey manor listed for $1.385M linked to NJ pioneers and revolutionary figures

4-minute read.

A red brick Colonial Revival in northern Newark's Forest Hill community might be the Kevin Bacon of North Jersey homes.

The three-story manor boasts a family tree begging to play six degrees of separation. Listed this month for $1.385 million by Frances Egan of Weichert Realtors, 480 Parker St. has ties to early French Huguenot settlers who became some of the area's largest landowners, New York City trade merchants who were close with one of the founding fathers and a British officer who was taken prisoner during the American Revolution.

The home was built circa 1920 for Mary Amelia Wilde Campbell, a philanthropist and sister of Jennie Wilde Pilch, a state legislator in the late 1930s. A Bloomfield High School graduate who studied violin with New York Symphony Orchestra veteran Otto K. Schill, Pilch was the first woman to be appointed to the Legislature's Special Joint Conference Committee and the first chair of the Committee on Housing.

The sisters were the daughters of Samuel Wilde Jr., a singer, choir master and Civil War soldier born in England and taken prisoner at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Harriet Amelia Cadmus, who helped organize Christ Episcopal Church in Bloomfield and St. Paul's Church in East Orange. Cadmus was the descendent of Thomas Fredericksen De Cuyper Cadmus, the Holland-born magistrate of Bergen County in the 1670s, and Henry Cadmus, a private in the Essex Co. militia during the American Revolution.

At one point, the sisters' ancestors owned modern day Nutley, Bloomfield and Belleville.

"[Their] maternal ancestors were among the earliest settlers of Manhattan Island, Albany, New England and Long Island, most of them arriving between the years 1623 and 1649; many of them holding high positions in the Dutch settlements," according to 1945's Prominent Families of New Jersey edited by William Starr Myers. "Several became early patentees of New Jersey, where they later settled and became … deeply interested in the first Dutch Churches at Bergen, Belleville, Passaic and Hackensack."

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While Mary Amelia Wilde Campbell's ancestors battled under General George Washington, her husband, Thomas Pearsall Campbell was among the last descendants of Major Patrick Campbell. Descended from the builders of Barcaldine Castle in Scotland, Campbell came to North America to participate in a series of British campaigns from 1776 to 1779. That November, he was captured aboard a sloop sailing to New York and held prisoner in Rhode Island, according to an account kept by the National Archives.

From there, Campbell wrote General George Washington, claiming he was bound for New York from Georgia to recuperate from his "valetudinary state of health" and requesting his "immediate exchange." Washington replied from Morristown saying he would be happy to trade and ultimately exchanged Campbell for an American officer in 1780, according to records kept by the National Archives. Rather than return to the British Isles, Campbell on Jan. 1, 1781 married Sarah Pearsall, the descendent of Loyalist Quakers from New York City.

The Campbell and Pearsall families were tied through marriage and Loyalist views with a third family, the Bayards. Also related to the Schuyler and Van Cortlandt families, the Bayards in the early 1700s were among the region's largest landholders. While disrupted if not displaced during the Revolution, many members of the family returned following the war.

Thomas Pearsall Campbell's other grandfather, New York City banker William Bayard Jr., never left the area. After the war, Bayard helped found Bayard, LeRoy and McEvers. An importer and exporter based in New York City, the firm shifted goods among New York City, England, the Caribbean and South America, managed farmland and traded in property. Eventually becoming a member of The Society of the New York Hospital and a close friend of Alexander Hamilton's, Bayard brought Hamilton to his Greenwich Village boarding house following the ultimately fatal duel with Aaron Burr in a failed attempt to secure lifesaving aide.

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Hamilton was buried in the churchyard outside of Trinity Church on Wall Street in Manhattan, according to church records. The churchyard also holds Bayard's grave and the old Bayard family vault where Thomas Pearsall Campbell was interred in 1906, a year after he paid off the mortgage for St. Paul's Church. His wife, a regular donor to St. Barnabas Hospital, lived for nearly 49 more years. Roughly 35 were spent at 480 Parker St.

The custom 15-room home she had built more than a decade after her husband's death covers about 5,700 square feet. It sits less than two blocks from Branch Brook Park amid the neighborhood with the most tree cover in the city, aptly named Forest Hill. Inside are eight bedrooms, five bathrooms and plenty of history.

Included on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Forest Hill Historic District, 480 Parker St. features Tiffany light fixtures, a veranda overlooking its landscaped grounds and a large butler's pantry off the kitchen. There is original woodwork and hardwood floors, limestone sills and keystones and marble fireplace surrounds.

Maintained by only two families since its construction, according to Egan, the home was also once the residence of Maria Theresa Braga, the former assistant director of the Newark Public Library, and her husband Antonio S. Braga, the former assistant director of the Portuguese Trade Commission in New York City.

Haiti’s ‘deal with the Devil’: A malicious tale that emerges each crisis

It comes up every time Haiti suffers a crisis .

Take 2010, when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake shook Port-au-Prince flat , killing some 220,000 people. Aftershocks were still rattling the capital when Pat Robertson took to the Christian Broadcasting Network to pinpoint the disaster’s cause .

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” the televangelist turned seismologist told viewers of “The 700 Club,” his news and talk show. “They were under the heel of the French … and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’”

Robertson continued, “True story. And so the Devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal.’ But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

Robertson, who died last year, might not have been the most reliable authority: He endorsed the claim that feminists and gay people were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and predicted, at various points, the imminent arrival of an Earth-destroying asteroid , “something like” a terrorist nuclear strike on the United States, and a Mitt Romney presidency .

But he didn’t invent the tale of Haiti’s supposed deal with the Devil. Versions of it have been circulating for centuries.

In its current form, according to the Yale scholar Marlene Daut , the claim has been around for at least 30 years, popular among evangelicals intent on spreading their interpretation of Christianity in the Caribbean country. (I first heard it from a group of young American missionaries in Port-au-Prince in early 2004 — another turbulent moment for Haiti , with a rebel uprising in the countryside, deadly violence in the capital and the flight of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile .)

But it goes back much further than that, to what many historians believe was a real event: a clandestine assembly of Africans in 1791 plotting against their European enslavers in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. As practitioners of Vodou , the admixture of West African and Catholic beliefs indigenous to the country, they sacrificed an animal.

The gathering has been misrepresented by frightened White people ever since.

Now, as criminal violence in Haiti spikes , its embattled prime minister prepares to step down and the United States tries once again to stand up a new government , the tale is resurfacing — aided, this time, by social media.

“Reminder that the Haitian rebels made a deal with a demon (potentially Satan himself) to gain their independence,” one X user wrote this month. “Haiti’s endless suffering is simply the devil collecting payment.”

“Haiti is hell based on the voodoo ceremony pre-Haitian Revolution,” another agreed. A third offered advice: The country “needs to repent of their deal with the devil, that Christ may void it.”

That night in the Bois Caïman

As theology, the story has holes. “In Haitian Vodou , there is no Satan,” said Daut, a professor of French and African diaspora studies. “There is a god, but he’s Bondye, a god of everyone, a good god. There’s not a devil.”

But as history, it’s worse: It turns the triumph of the Haitian Revolution — a successful slave revolt to create the world’s first Black republic, a key achievement in the history of human rights — into a cautionary tale. And it absolves, by omission, the United States, France and others of their efforts to strangle the young nation in its cradle — the destabilizing foreign interference that actually has bedeviled Haiti since its founding.

“It’s a lazy way of explaining the complexity of what happened and what’s happening now,” said Bertin M. Louis Jr., an anthropologist at the University of Kentucky . “It obscures the actual evil that’s been done and perpetrated against Haitians.”

So what really happened that stormy August night in the wooded mountains outside the northern city of Cap-Français?

For Haitians, the gathering in the Bois Caïman — Alligator Forest — is a moment of glory: the first step in the nation’s 12-year march from slavery and colonization to freedom and independence.

There’s no known eyewitness testimony of the ceremony, and some scholars have argued it’s a legend, created to unify and motivate the rebels. But there are several near-contemporary reports, from French settlers as well as Africans, asserting that some sort of meeting was convened on or around Aug. 14, 1791, outside the city now called Cap-Haïtien, at which the participants sought a blessing for an uprising.

Most agree on key points. As many as hundreds of Africans, representing several area plantations, met at a prearranged time and place to hear Dutty Boukman, a houngan, or Vodou priest, and Cécile Fatiman, a mambo, or priestess.

“It was raining and the sky was raging with clouds,” according to an account published by the Haitian government. “The slaves then started confessing their resentment of their condition.”

Fatiman, “taken by the spirits of the loas” — supernatural intermediaries between humans and Bondye — “started dancing languorously.” She sliced open the throat of a black Creole pig to honor Èzili Dantò, the feminine loa of love. Then the attendees “swore to kill all the whites on the island.”

A brutal revolution

To make Saint-Domingue the world’s most lucrative colony — by the end of the 18th century, it was the leading producer of coffee and sugar, and a major source of cotton, indigo and cacao — the French practiced slavery with notorious violence .

Men and women were forced to labor in the tropical sun for 12 hours or more a day to fulfill ever-rising production quotas. Those who were injured or became sick were often discarded; the French could import replacements. Punishments for alleged transgressions — working too slowly, feigning illness, running away — included rape, amputation and being burned or buried alive.

When the Africans rose up, they returned the brutality in kind, invading homes to rouse and kill their enslavers and looting and burning plantations. Over the next dozen years, Haitian rebels and French soldiers waged a vicious war of attrition. Each side lost tens of thousands of fighters — several times the casualties suffered by the United States and Britain in the American Revolution.

France eventually surrendered, and on Jan. 1, 1804, the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence. But Paris wasn’t done with its former prize colony. At first, the French refused to recognize the new state. So did the United States and the European powers, fearful that the Haitians’ success would inspire similar revolts among the people they were enslaving in their own territories.

Finally, in 1825, France’s King Charles X offered a way forward: reparations — for the former enslavers. The price of admission to the family of nations, he said, would be 150 million francs — an indemnity, ostensibly, to repay the French colonizers for property, including enslaved people, they had lost in the revolution.

This literal king’s ransom has been estimated at 10 times Haiti’s annual government revenue at the time. Charles sent warships to Port-au-Prince to collect the first installment.

With more than 500 French cannon pointed at the capital, President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed — and immediately took out a loan from a Parisian bank to cover the initial payment. Thus began the double debt, a snowball of compounding interest owed to French and later American lenders that effectively arrested the development of the war-ravaged new country.

The U.S. reimposes forced, unpaid labor

While Latin American neighbors spent the 19th century gaining independence, building infrastructure and modernizing their economies, the Haitian government was sending the bulk of its income to France. Poverty spread, corruption flourished, public discontent grew.

France didn’t establish diplomatic relations with Haiti until 1838; Britain, not until 1859. The United States held out until 1862, when the Civil War reframed the national debate over slavery.

Continuing claims about a Faustian bargain, meanwhile, kept Haiti isolated from its neighbors.

“It’s the idea that the American Revolution is providential and has resulted because the founders made a pact with God,” Daut said, “and the Haitian Revolution is satanic because the Haitian revolutionaries made a pact with Satan.”

It took Haiti more than 60 years to finally satisfy the indemnity, in 1888, and nearly 60 more to pay off the associated interest, in 1947. The cost of this burden in money spent and development lost, the New York Times reported in 2022, amounts to $115 billion — eight times the size of Haiti’s economy in 2020.

But the loss doesn’t end there. Indemnity-related debt held by Americans provided a pretext for President Woodrow Wilson to order the Marines into Port-au-Prince in 1915, establish martial law and occupy the country for the next 19 years .

In a tragic irony, the United States subjected Haitians to corvée — forced, unpaid labor — for public building projects. To Haitians, it was the reimposition of slavery. But rebellions were swiftly put down; Marines and the U.S.-trained Gendarmarie killed thousands of Haitians.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the occupation in 1934. Still, Washington would remain closely involved in Haiti’s affairs, funding development but also supporting despots who promised to back U.S. interests. These included, initially, François “Papa Doc” and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier , murderous kleptocrats who terrorized and plundered the country from 1957 to 1986.

In a more recent example, U.S. officials pushed the Haitian government to include Michel Martelly in the 2011 presidential runoff . The popular singer’s five-year term was marred by allegations of corruption and violence. A U.N. panel last year accused him of using “gangs to expand his influence over neighborhoods to advance his political agenda, contributing to a legacy of insecurity, the impacts of which are still being felt today.”

That’s enough devilry to explain at least much of Haiti’s challenges without resorting to tales of satanic influence. But Daut sees another purpose to that claim.

“It’s really a way to take attention off the fact that the Haitian revolutionaries did something the world had never seen by permanently abolishing slavery and creating a slavery-free state in the middle of all these other slaving empires,” she said.

“If you say the Haitian Revolution was the most radical revolution the Western world had ever seen, people will say, ‘Yeah, but look at Haiti now. How can you say the Haitian Revolution was successful?’

“But of course it is! We live in a world now where everyone agrees that slavery is bad, and for the Haitians to be the first ones to bring that narrative forward is powerful and important, and should not be allowed to be obscured by charlatans out there peddling theories that really are just meant to convert more people to their religion.”

Widlore Mérancourt contributed to this report.

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