French Revolution

Based on Wikipedia: French Revolution

The Day They Stormed a Nearly Empty Prison

On July 14, 1789, a crowd of Parisians attacked the Bastille, a medieval fortress that loomed over the city as a symbol of royal tyranny. They fought for hours. Eighty-three attackers died. When they finally broke through, they found exactly seven prisoners: four forgers, one man who had tried to kill the king, one nobleman imprisoned for sexual deviancy, and a single lunatic.

It was, in a sense, the most successful marketing campaign in history. The Bastille held almost no one, but it represented everything the people despised about the old order. Within weeks, they had torn it down stone by stone. Today, Bastille Day is France's national holiday.

This peculiar mix of the symbolic and the practical, the world-changing and the absurd, runs through the entire French Revolution. It gave us the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It also gave us the guillotine. It proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity. It also executed sixteen thousand people in a single year. Understanding how both things could be true requires understanding what France had become by 1789.

A Kingdom That Couldn't Pay Its Bills

France in the 1780s was not poor. In fact, it was one of the wealthiest nations in Europe. Between 1715 and 1789, the population had grown from twenty-one million to twenty-eight million. The middle class had tripled in size. Paris alone held more than six hundred thousand people, making it one of the largest cities in the Western world.

The problem was not wealth. The problem was where the wealth went.

Imagine a tax system so chaotic that rates varied wildly from one province to another, where the official amounts rarely matched what collectors actually demanded, and where enforcement was inconsistent at best. Now imagine that the people most capable of paying taxes—the nobility and the clergy—were largely exempt from them. The burden fell almost entirely on peasants and the urban poor, the very people least able to bear it.

The nobility owned about a quarter of all land. The Catholic Church owned nearly ten percent and collected annual tithes on top of that. Both groups enjoyed exemptions that shielded most of their wealth from royal tax collectors. Meanwhile, peasant farmers who rented their land faced not only taxes to the king but also feudal dues to their landlords—payments that dated back to medieval times and persisted into the supposedly modern eighteenth century.

When the government tried to reform this system, it ran into a structural problem. New tax laws had to be approved by regional judicial bodies called parlements (not to be confused with the English Parliament—these were courts, not legislatures). The parlements were dominated by nobles who had no interest in taxing themselves. The king could theoretically override them by royal decree, but doing so risked open conflict with the entire aristocratic class.

Then came the war.

The Bill for American Independence

France's decision to support the American Revolution was popular at home and successful abroad. French money, ships, and soldiers helped the American colonies win their independence from Britain. But victory came at a staggering cost. France financed the war almost entirely through loans, and even after the fighting ended in 1783, the monarchy kept borrowing.

By 1788, half of all government revenue went to paying interest on debt.

This is worth pausing on. Not half to running the army. Not half to building roads or palaces or feeding the poor. Half of everything the government collected went straight to creditors before a single franc could be spent on anything else.

In 1786, the finance minister, a man named Calonne, proposed a radical solution: a universal land tax that would apply to everyone, including the nobility and clergy. He also wanted to abolish the internal tariffs and grain controls that made it expensive to move food around the country. These reforms would have modernized France's economy and put its finances on solid footing.

The nobility said no.

Calonne first presented his proposals to a hand-picked Assembly of Notables—prominent nobles and churchmen whom he expected to rubber-stamp his plans. Instead, they rejected the new taxes outright. When his successor, Brienne, tried to push the reforms through the parlements, they rejected them too.

The parlements and notables made a clever argument. They claimed that such fundamental changes to the tax system could only be approved by an Estates-General—a representative body that hadn't met since 1614. They framed themselves as defenders of ancient liberties against royal overreach. The public, tired of arbitrary taxation and royal spending, sided with them.

On August 8, 1788, Brienne gave up. He announced that the king would summon an Estates-General the following May. Then he resigned. No one quite knew what they had set in motion.

Three Estates, Two Problems

To understand what happened next, you need to understand how the Estates-General worked—or rather, how it had worked the last time anyone remembered.

French society was officially divided into three estates. The First Estate was the clergy. The Second Estate was the nobility. The Third Estate was everyone else—a category that ranged from wealthy bankers and lawyers down to the poorest peasants. When the Estates-General met, each estate deliberated separately and cast a single collective vote.

Here was the problem: the clergy and nobility together represented less than five percent of the population, but they controlled two of the three votes. On any issue where their interests aligned against the common people, they would win two to one.

A group of reform-minded nobles and middle-class activists called the Society of Thirty launched a campaign to change the rules. They demanded that the Third Estate receive double representation and that votes be counted by head rather than by estate. If those changes passed, the common people would actually have a voice.

The public debate was explosive. After years of strict censorship, the government had relaxed its controls, and political pamphlets flooded the country—an average of twenty-five new ones every week through the fall of 1788. The most influential was written by a clergyman named Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. Its title asked a simple question: "What Is the Third Estate?"

Sieyès answered his own question bluntly. The Third Estate was everything. The nobility and clergy were parasites. The common people should stop waiting for the other estates to grant them representation. They should simply declare themselves the National Assembly and govern alone.

In December, the king made a partial concession. He agreed to double the Third Estate's representation. But he left the crucial question of how votes would be counted for the Estates-General itself to decide. It was a fuse waiting for a match.

The Tennis Court

The Estates-General convened at Versailles on May 5, 1789. Almost immediately, it deadlocked over procedure. The king's finance minister, Necker, told each estate to decide separately how it wanted to handle verification of credentials and voting. The Third Estate refused. They invited the clergy and nobility to join them in a common verification of all representatives.

For five weeks, negotiations went nowhere. Then, on June 12, the Third Estate simply started verifying its own members without waiting for the other estates. Five days later, they took the step Sieyès had proposed months earlier. They declared themselves the National Assembly of France—the sole legitimate representative body of the French nation. They also declared that all existing taxes were illegal unless they approved them.

It was a revolution in parliamentary procedure. Within a week, more than a hundred members of the clergy had crossed over to join them.

The king tried to regain control. He ordered the hall where the Assembly met closed for repairs, planning to present a reform package at a joint session of all three estates. But no one told the Assembly members in advance. When they arrived on June 20 and found the doors locked, they assumed the worst—that the king was trying to dissolve them by force.

Instead of dispersing, they walked to a nearby indoor tennis court. There, they swore an oath not to separate until they had given France a constitution. The Tennis Court Oath became one of the defining moments of the Revolution.

At the joint session three days later, Louis XVI announced a series of reforms: no new taxes or loans without the Estates-General's consent, regular meetings of the assembly, and various other concessions. Under other circumstances, these might have been welcomed as major steps toward constitutional monarchy. But then the king made a fatal mistake. He reiterated his demand that the three estates meet and vote separately.

The Third Estate refused to leave the hall. More clergy joined them. Faced with growing mutinies among his own guards, Louis XVI finally capitulated. On June 27, he ordered the First and Second Estates to join the National Assembly.

The king had lost.

Blood in the Streets

Losing gracefully was never really an option. Within two weeks, conservative forces around the king convinced him to fight back. His wife, Marie Antoinette, and his younger brother, the Comte d'Artois, urged him to dismiss Necker and use military force to close the Assembly.

On July 11, Louis fired Necker. On July 12, word spread that Swiss Guards were moving toward Paris, probably to shut down the Assembly by force. The Assembly went into continuous session, refusing to adjourn even to sleep.

And then Paris exploded.

Crowds poured into the streets. Soldiers of the elite Gardes Françaises—French Guards, theoretically loyal to the king—refused to disperse them. Some soldiers joined the protesters. Others simply stepped aside.

The next day, July 13, rioters broke into gunsmiths' shops and military depots, seizing weapons. On July 14, they turned their attention to the Bastille, which held not only prisoners but also large stores of arms and ammunition.

The fortress was defended by about eighty soldiers. The crowd numbered in the thousands. After several hours of fighting and failed negotiations, the governor surrendered. He was dragged to the Hôtel de Ville—Paris's city hall—where the crowd killed him, put his head on a pike, and paraded it through the streets.

It was the first of many such scenes.

Three days later, Louis XVI came to Paris in person. He was accompanied by a hundred deputies and greeted by Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the newly appointed head of the city's revolutionary government, and the Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the new National Guard. The king accepted a tricolore cockade—the symbol of the Revolution—to loud cheers. But the nature of his welcome made clear how much had changed. He was announced not as Louis XVI, King of France, but as "Louis XVI, father of the French and king of a free people."

Power had shifted. Everyone knew it. Including the king.

The Great Fear

What happened in Paris did not stay in Paris. As news of the Bastille's fall spread across France, something strange and terrifying occurred in the countryside.

Rumors flew from village to village. Brigands were coming. The aristocrats had hired them to destroy the harvest and starve the peasants into submission. Armed bands were on the march. No one knew exactly where the threat was coming from, but everyone believed it was imminent.

In response, peasants formed militias. And once they were armed, they didn't wait for imaginary brigands. They attacked the manor houses of real aristocrats, burning the records that documented feudal dues and sometimes burning the buildings themselves.

This wave of agrarian insurrection, known as the Great Fear, accomplished in weeks what reformers had failed to achieve in years. Faced with the choice between losing their records to fire and abolishing feudal dues voluntarily, many nobles chose the latter.

On the night of August 4, 1789, the National Assembly made it official. In a remarkable session that lasted until two in the morning, deputies renounced privilege after privilege. Feudal dues were abolished. Church tithes were abolished. Tax exemptions were abolished. Special privileges granted to provinces and towns were abolished. The entire medieval framework of French society was swept away in a single night.

Or so it seemed. The details were messier. Peasants were theoretically required to compensate their former lords for the lost feudal dues, but collecting these payments proved impossible. The obligation was quietly canceled in 1793.

Declaring Rights

While the countryside burned, the Assembly got to work on a constitution. But before they could design a government, they needed to establish principles. What rights did French citizens have? What limits should be placed on state power?

Twenty different drafts were submitted. A subcommittee synthesized them into a single document: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Published on August 26, 1789, it became one of the most influential statements of political philosophy in history.

The declaration's principles will sound familiar to anyone who has read the American Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights—and that's no coincidence. Many of the French revolutionaries had studied American ideas, and Lafayette himself had fought in the American Revolution. The intellectual current flowed both ways across the Atlantic.

"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights," the declaration proclaimed. Those rights included liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. The law was to be the same for all, whether it punished or protected. No one could be accused, arrested, or detained except in cases determined by law. Freedom of opinion, including religious opinion, was guaranteed. So was freedom of expression.

These ideas seem obvious now. They were not obvious then. For centuries, European society had been built on the opposite assumptions: that people were born into fixed ranks, that the law should treat different classes differently, that authority flowed downward from God through the king to his subjects. The declaration didn't just propose a different government. It proposed a different universe.

A Suspensive Veto

Constitution-writing is where revolutions often go wrong. It's one thing to agree on abstract principles. It's another to design institutions that embody those principles while remaining functional.

The National Assembly immediately split into factions. The monarchists, led by Jean Joseph Mounier, wanted a bicameral legislature with an upper house appointed by the king. They also wanted the king to have an absolute veto over legislation—the power to block any law permanently.

The majority, led by Sieyès and the former bishop Talleyrand, rejected both ideas. On September 10, they voted for a single legislative body. The following day, they granted the king only a "suspensive veto"—the power to delay implementation of a law for up to four years, but not to block it forever.

This was a crucial compromise. An absolute veto would have made the king a genuine partner in legislation. A suspensive veto made him more of an obstacle to be waited out. The arrangement satisfied no one completely, which is perhaps a sign that it was reasonable.

More controversial was the Assembly's decision about who could vote. They distinguished between "active citizens"—French men over twenty-five who paid direct taxes equal to at least three days' wages—and "passive citizens" who had civil rights but couldn't participate in elections. Women were excluded entirely.

By the standards of the time, this was still revolutionary. Voting had previously been restricted to members of the estates or their appointed representatives. Now millions of ordinary Frenchmen could vote, at least for local electors who would choose the actual legislators. But the distinction between active and passive citizens created a new hierarchy even as the Revolution claimed to abolish the old ones.

The King Tries to Run

Through 1790 and into 1791, Louis XVI played along with the constitutional monarchy. He publicly accepted the new order. He wore the tricolore. He signed the decrees the Assembly sent him.

Privately, he was looking for a way out.

In June 1791, the king and his family attempted to flee Paris. Their plan was to reach the fortress of Montmédy, near the Austrian border, where royalist troops were stationed. From there, Louis could either negotiate from a position of strength or call in foreign armies to restore his power.

The escape was almost comically botched. The royal family traveled in an enormous, conspicuous coach. They were recognized at several points along the route. At the town of Varennes, a local official identified the king and stopped the carriage. National Guard troops arrived and escorted the family back to Paris.

The attempted flight destroyed what remained of Louis XVI's credibility. It was now clear that his acceptance of the Revolution had been a performance. He had never truly embraced the constitutional order. Given the chance, he would have undone everything.

For more radical revolutionaries, this was proof that constitutional monarchy was a contradiction in terms. How could you share power with someone who was actively trying to overthrow you? The only safe course was to abolish the monarchy entirely.

For moderates, the flight posed a terrible dilemma. They had built the entire new system around a constitutional king. Removing him would require starting over—and might unleash forces they couldn't control.

In the end, the Assembly chose a legal fiction. They declared that the king had been "abducted" rather than having fled voluntarily. He was briefly suspended from his functions but then reinstated. The constitution was completed in September 1791, and Louis XVI swore an oath to uphold it.

No one really believed him anymore. But no one had a better idea.

War

The new constitutional government lasted less than a year before stumbling into a war that would transform everything.

Many revolutionaries actually wanted war. They believed it would expose the enemies of the Revolution—both foreign monarchs who opposed it and domestic traitors who secretly hoped for its failure. War would force everyone to choose sides. It would unite the nation behind the revolutionary cause.

In April 1792, France declared war on Austria. Prussia soon joined on Austria's side. What the revolutionaries expected to be a quick campaign to spread liberty across Europe turned into a grinding disaster.

French armies, weakened by the emigration of noble officers and the general chaos of revolutionary reorganization, suffered defeat after defeat. By summer, enemy forces were advancing toward Paris. The Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussian army, issued a manifesto threatening to destroy Paris if the royal family was harmed.

The Brunswick Manifesto backfired spectacularly. Instead of intimidating the Parisians, it enraged them. If the foreign powers were threatening to protect the king, that meant the king was collaborating with foreign powers against his own people.

On August 10, 1792, a crowd stormed the Tuileries Palace, the king's residence in Paris. Louis XVI and his family fled to the nearby Legislative Assembly for protection. The Swiss Guards defending the palace were massacred—some six hundred of them killed in a few hours of fighting.

The Assembly had little choice but to suspend the king and call for elections to a new body, the National Convention, that would draft yet another constitution. This time, there would be no pretense of monarchy.

The Republic

The National Convention met for the first time on September 20, 1792—the same day French forces finally won a significant victory against the Prussians at Valmy. The next day, the Convention abolished the monarchy and declared France a republic.

The timing felt providential. After months of defeat and humiliation, the citizen armies of the Revolution had held their ground. Maybe the new order could survive after all.

But the Convention faced an immediate problem: what to do with Louis XVI. Keeping him alive was dangerous—he would always be a rallying point for royalists and foreign enemies. Killing him would be irreversible, a point of no return that might unite all of Europe against France.

The Convention debated for months. In December, Louis was put on trial for treason. He defended himself with dignity, arguing that as king he had been above the law and could not be judged by it. This was legally defensible under the old regime but politically tone-deaf under the new one.

On January 15, 1793, the Convention voted on the verdict: guilty, by a near-unanimous margin. The vote on the sentence was closer. Execution won by 361 to 360—a single vote.

Six days later, on January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution. The executioner held up his severed head for the crowd to see. Some spectators dipped handkerchiefs in his blood as souvenirs.

There was no going back now.

The Terror

The execution of the king did exactly what moderates had feared. It united most of Europe against France. Britain, Spain, the Dutch Republic, and various German and Italian states joined Austria and Prussia in a coalition to crush the Revolution.

At the same time, civil war erupted within France. In the Vendée region in the west, royalist and Catholic peasants rose against the revolutionary government. In major cities like Lyon and Marseille, local factions seized power and defied Paris. By the summer of 1793, the Republic was fighting enemies on every front.

In this crisis, power increasingly concentrated in a small group of deputies known as the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee was theoretically subordinate to the Convention, but in practice it became a revolutionary dictatorship, coordinating military strategy, economic policy, and internal security.

The dominant figure on the Committee was Maximilien Robespierre.

Robespierre was a lawyer from Arras who had been active in revolutionary politics since the Estates-General. He was known as "the Incorruptible" for his refusal to accept bribes and his austere personal life. He was also known for his rhetoric, which combined high idealism about virtue and the general will with chilling implications about what should happen to those who lacked virtue.

Under Robespierre's leadership, the Committee pursued what it called Terror as a deliberate policy. The Revolutionary Tribunal, a court with few procedural protections, tried suspected enemies of the Republic and sentenced them to death. About sixteen thousand people were officially executed during the Terror, most of them by guillotine. Many more died in prison or were killed without trial.

The guillotine was actually considered a humanitarian innovation. It was quick, reliable, and theoretically painless—a more dignified death than hanging or breaking on the wheel. Its inventor, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, opposed the death penalty entirely and hoped his device would at least make executions less cruel. Instead, its efficiency made mass execution practical in a way it had never been before.

The victims of the Terror included royalists, aristocrats, and priests—but also many revolutionaries who had simply backed the wrong faction or said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Georges Danton, one of the most popular leaders of the early Revolution, was executed in April 1794 after suggesting it was time to wind down the Terror. The Revolution was eating its own.

Thermidor

By July 1794, many members of the Convention lived in fear that they would be next. Robespierre had hinted at new purges. No one knew whose name might be on his lists.

On July 27—9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar—a coalition of deputies moved against him. When Robespierre rose to speak, he was shouted down. "Down with the tyrant!" deputies cried. A motion was passed for his arrest.

Robespierre and his allies briefly escaped and tried to organize resistance, but they had few supporters willing to fight. The next day, Robespierre was guillotined along with twenty-one of his followers. He had been in effective control of France for barely a year.

The fall of Robespierre—known as the Thermidorian Reaction—ended the Terror but did not end the Revolution. The Convention continued to govern, gradually dismantling the emergency measures of the previous year. The Committee of Public Safety was weakened. The Revolutionary Tribunal was reformed. Many prisoners were released.

What emerged was a more conservative regime, still republican in name but increasingly dominated by men of property who wanted order above all. In 1795, they wrote yet another constitution, creating a new government called the Directory—five directors who shared executive power, chosen by a bicameral legislature with elaborate property qualifications for voting.

The Directory was corrupt, unstable, and unpopular. It survived four years, lurching from crisis to crisis, suppressing royalist conspiracies on the right and radical democrats on the left. It relied increasingly on the army to maintain order.

That reliance would prove fatal.

Napoleon

On November 9, 1799—18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar—a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup. With the support of key politicians and the loyalty of his troops, he overthrew the Directory and established a new government called the Consulate, with himself as First Consul.

Napoleon claimed to be preserving the Revolution, not ending it. In some ways, he was right. The Napoleonic Code, which he later promulgated, enshrined many revolutionary principles: equality before the law, freedom of religion, the abolition of feudalism. The old regime was not coming back.

But in other ways, the coup of 18 Brumaire marked the end of the revolutionary experiment. There would be no more elected assemblies with real power. There would be no more committees debating rights and constitutions. There was only Napoleon, increasingly powerful, soon to crown himself Emperor.

The French Revolution had lasted exactly ten years, from the Estates-General of May 1789 to the coup of November 1799. In that decade, France had abolished feudalism, executed a king, declared the rights of man, and killed thousands of its own citizens. It had invented modern political ideologies—liberalism, conservatism, socialism all trace their origins to revolutionary debates. It had demonstrated that ancient institutions could be swept away and new ones created from abstract principles.

It had also demonstrated how quickly liberation could turn to terror, how easily virtue could become an excuse for murder, and how inevitably revolution seemed to produce a strongman who promised to restore order.

These lessons have echoed through every revolution since.

The Connection to Jane Austen's World

While blood flowed in Paris and French armies marched across Europe, Jane Austen was writing novels about balls and marriage proposals in English country houses. The contrast seems absurd. What could Sense and Sensibility possibly have to do with the Terror?

More than you might think.

The peculiar peace of Austen's world existed precisely because the Revolution existed. Britain spent most of Austen's adult life at war with France—first revolutionary France, then Napoleonic France. Two of her brothers served in the Royal Navy. The threat of French invasion was real.

Yet in Austen's novels, that war is almost invisible. Her characters worry about money and reputation, about who will marry whom and whether they can afford a carriage. They do not worry about guillotines.

This was partly a literary choice. Austen knew exactly what she was doing—focusing on "three or four families in a country village," as she put it, rather than trying to capture the sweep of history. But it was also a reflection of reality. For the English gentry, the French Revolution was something that happened elsewhere, to other people. The Channel provided a buffer that France's neighbors on the Continent did not enjoy.

Still, the Revolution haunted Austen's world in subtler ways. The fear of radical ideas, the emphasis on propriety and stability, the anxiety about social disruption—all of these made more sense in a context where nearby societies had recently collapsed into chaos. When Austen's characters enforce rigid rules about behavior and status, they are not just being snobbish. They are, on some level, trying to prevent their own world from flying apart.

The French Revolution showed what could happen when a society's foundations crumbled. Austen's novels are, in their quiet way, about making sure those foundations held.