EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

1789: The Revolution Begins

In the face of the financial crisis and the refusal of the privileged classes to approve new taxes, Louis XVI decided to convoke the Estates General to address government reforms and the tax system.

An assembly representing the three estates-the clergy, nobility, and the Third Estate-the Estates General had not met since 1614. The twelve hundred delegates of the Estates General met at Versailles beginning in May 1789, bringing with them the cahiers de doléances, or list of grievances, that voters had drawn up in the electoral assemblies that selected the delegates. The cahiers generally called for rather moderate reforms of the judicial, tax, and seigneurial systems and were not on the whole revolutionary. Nevertheless, the very process of drawing up the lists had politicized the population and focused national attention on the assembly in Versailles.

Even before the delegates assembled, a debate arose on how voting was to be conducted at the Estates General. Traditionally, each of the three estates sent the same number of delegates to the Estates General, and the voting there was by order, not by head, meaning that the Third Estate, representing over 95 percent of the population, had only one vote of the three. But in some of the provincial assemblies meeting the previous summer, the Third Estate had been given half of all the delegates, and voting was by head, so there was some precedent for change. In an influential pamphlet entitled “What Is the Third Estate?” a theretofore obscure priest, Abbé Sieyès, answered the title question, “Everything,” and suggested a similar formula for voting. Sieyès’s pamphlet discussed more than voting procedures, though, and hinted at even more radical changes: “If the privileged order were abolished,” he wrote, “the nation would be not something less but something more.”

In June, the Third Estate essentially adopted the program set out in Sieyès’s pamphlet and declared itself the National Assembly. When they next tried to assemble, they found the doors of their meeting place locked, so they moved next door to an indoor tennis court, where they swore the famous Tennis Court Oath: “Wherever we meet, there is the nation,” they proclaimed and vowed not to adjourn until France was given a new constitution. As the delegates and the city of Paris became more unruly, the king began to move troops into the city. With rumors that the regime was intent on dissolving the National Assembly, armed militias began to form throughout the city. On July 14, a crowd of eighty thousand stormed the Bastille, the old royal prison, in hopes of seizing ammunition stored there. Royal troops opened fire, killing a hundred people, but the crowd prevailed, seized the governor of the fortress, cut off his head, and carried it about town on the end of a pike. The fall of the Bastille, like the fall of the Berlin Wall two hundred years later, became an important symbol of the Revolution, and that day, Bastille Day, is still celebrated as a French national holiday, complete with fireworks and parades.

The Bastille may have had mostly symbolic importance, but in revolutions, symbols are crucial. The vulnerability of the monarchy was exposed, and its authority quickly evaporated. Word about the fall of the Bastille spread to the provinces, where peasants followed the Parisians by raiding the chateaus of their landlords. In August, the newly styled National Constituent Assembly officially abolished the remnants of feudalism and freed peasants from their payments under the seigneurial system.

The assembly then turned to the task of determining the principles on which a new political regime would be based. The result, passed by the assembly on August 26, was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, similar in impact to the American Declaration of Independence and later the symbolic foundation of the French Republic. The declaration clearly reflects Enlightenment ideals and the ideas and language of Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Locke. It makes no mention of the authority of the monarch and declares instead “the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man.” “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights” and these rights include “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” King Louis XVI refused to sign the declaration, and most of the deputies at this point still assumed that his signature was necessary before the document could become official. Once again, the Parisian crowd took action, feeling that the king would be more responsive to the will of the people if he were in Paris rather than Versailles. A crowd of six thousand women, aggravated by the short supply of bread in city markets, marched the fifteen miles to Versailles and escorted the king back to Paris.

For the next two years, a kind of stalemate prevailed, with the Constituent Assembly working on a new constitution, debating the powers of the monarchy, and wrestling with the country’s continuing financial crisis, while Louis looked on as a sort of de facto constitutional monarch. In an effort to deal with the country’s continuing debts, the assembly confiscated all properties belonging to the church. They enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which required public election of clergy and bishops and forced the clergy to sign an oath of loyalty to the nation.

Finally, in June 1791, the new constitution was presented to the public, providing for an elected legislative assembly and granting the king only a suspensive veto; that is, the power to delay legislation but not to defeat it. Dismayed by these developments, Louis XVI fled Paris disguised as a commoner and attempted to reach the French border to rally those opposed to the Revolution. Among them were virtually all of the European monarchs, who saw events in France as an ominous portent for their own rule. The empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, declared that “the affairs of France were the concern of all crowned heads.” But Louis was captured and brought back to Paris. The new constitution was put into force, and a legislative assembly was elected. Prussia and Austria soon joined in a war against France, and when their troops began to move into France, charges that Louis was in collusion with foreign monarchs provoked a new insurrection in Paris. New elections were called, and in September 1792, the newly elected National Convention scrapped the recent constitution, abolished the monarchy, and declared the establishment of the first French republic.

Women on the Revolution

Women played an important part in the revolutionary events in France, including the march on Versailles to bring Louis XVI back to Paris, where he would be more accessible and accountable to the people. But the leaders of the Revolution were mostly men, and not all women were pleased with the accomplishments of the revolutionaries. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, for example, made no mention of women at all, leading French playwright Olympe de Gouges (1745–1793) to publish in 1791 a “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” paralleling the articles of the original declaration, but replacing “man” with “woman.” She addressed her appeal to the queen (Marie Antoinette) as a “mother and a wife,” hoping to win support for her cause from this influential woman.

In Britain, the teacher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) welcomed the Revolution and saw in it the possibility of a representative government that would respect the rights of both men and women. But she also was disappointed with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and even more angered when the French assembly limited the right to education to men only.

She published A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), in which she described marriage as “legal prostitution” and attacked educational restrictions that kept women in a state of “ignorance and slavish dependence.” It was the first book in Britain advocating women’s right to vote and hold public office.