The French Revolution - Essay Example

Popular Protest in the French Revolution The French Revolution generally refers to a period of social unrest and political reorganizations that occurred between the years 1787 and 1795. The activities leading up to this period have been widely discussed and studied, with a variety of theories and examinations claiming differing factions as playing a large part in the turmoil. One of the most popular theories includes the idea that the fall of the monarchy was simply a result of the fall of the social class with which it was most closely associated, that of the feudal nobles. According to this view, the nobility, led by the parliaments, challenged the monarchy as it had done several times in the past. This time, though, the rising urban class of shopkeepers and artisans, known as the bourgeoisie, continued the struggle, focusing it against the noble landowning class that had traditionally been the support of the monarchy. With the bourgeoisie success, the noble class was pulled down, the king along with it as its figurehead, and replaced by the First Republic. This, however, is not the view of modern historians such as E.J. Hobsbawn and George Rude, who feel the populace and small traders had at least an equal part in the disruption. Studies have indicated that the percentage of urban capitalist shopkeepers and artisans made up perhaps half of the revolutionary forces. “Cobb … found that the rank and file of the Parisian armies revolutionnaires was 35 percent artisan and 25 percent shopkeeper and smaller merchants” (Lewis 1998). Hobsbawm (1969) claims perhaps as many as one European out of every five was a Frenchman and the majority of these Frenchmen were rural farmers or small shop workers. Other reports indicate the monarchy enjoyed wide public approval (outside of the close court political circles) less than five years before the king was made powerless (Bosher, 1988). For these scholars, then, the search for the reasons and participants in the revolution had to be found elsewhere, such as in the popular protest movements of the day which provide a more accurate view of both how the monarchy lost its favor and who was most in control of the political and social changes that were happening in those years. French society at the time of the Revolution was very similar to most of the other countries of Europe of the period in that it had an absolute monarchy that followed much the same pattern of rule that had been established by Louis XIV in the early 1700s. As a part of this system, there was an aristocratic class that held most of the status and wealth of the nation in a feudal-type system and a merchant class called the bourgeoisie that, at times, held enough wealth to rival the nobles, but had none of the political clout. There was “a vast peasantry accounting for one in seven or one in eight of the population, most of whom were legally free but bound to their seigneur … by a myriad of services and obligations surviving from the medieval past. … And, in cities, … a great urban population of innumerable crafts and occupations, for the most part poor and depending for survival on cheap and plentiful bread” (Rude 1995). What made France different from these other countries that shared so many attributes was the fact that the French bureaucracy had been allowed to gain enough wealth to make them independent of the crown that had given them such success. “All these social groups and classes were potentially revolutionary or committed to some form or other of political and social change. … The bourgeoisie wanted a higher social status and a share in government commensurate with their wealth” (Rude 1995) while the aristocracy was continuing its centuries long struggle to regain political power that had been taken from them by King Louie XIV. “Throughout the eighteenth century … [the nobles] encroached steadily upon the official posts which the absolute monarchy had preferred to fill with technically competent and politically harmless middle class men. … Consequently, the nobility not merely exasperated the feelings of the middle class by their successful competition for official posts; they also undermined the state itself by an increasing tendency to take over provincial and central administration. Similary, they … attempted to counteract the decline in their income by squeezing the utmost out of their very considerable feudal rights to exact money from the peasantry” (Hobsbawm, 1969). With the country in financial ruin, the beginning of the revolution has actually been traced back to May of 1787, with the ‘revolte nobiliaire’, which forced the king to convene the States General which has been shown to have opened the doors to revolution. This attempt to recapture the state backfired because it underestimated the intentions of the as yet quiet majority group of individuals representing the non-noble middle class and it overlooked the economic and social crises occurring during that time period. “The country poor were therefore desperate and restless with riot and banditry; the urban poor were doubly desperate as work ceased at the very moment that the cost of living soared. Under normal circumstances little more than blind rioting might have occurred. But in 1788 and 1789, a major convulsion in the kingdom, a campaign of propaganda and election, gave the people’s desperation a political perspective. They introduced the tremendous and earth-shaking idea of liberation from gentry and oppression. A riotous people stood behind the deputies of the Third Estate. … Counterrevolution turned a potential mass rising into an actual one” (Hobsbawm, 1969). It was the counter-revolution that propelled the working people into open revolt. Although obligatory, the King’s resistance to change had many individuals inciting negative reactions and stirring up the oppressed sentiment of the people. Tensions were high in Paris in July of 1789 as the King continued to block initiatives proposed by the Estates-General, rumors began circulating that the assembly was about to be disbanded and news spread that Jacques Necker, the popular finance minister, had been dismissed even as bread prices continued to skyrocket. “Certainly, in the days prior to the 14th, some Parisians called on the people to mobilize and prevent a royal or ‘aristocratic’ attack on the nascent Revolution. Most famously, the journalist Camille Desmoulins rose on a soapbox before a crowd assembled on the 12th in the public gardens of the Palais-Royal to urge ‘the people’ to take action” (Lewis 1998). As crowds gathered outside the Bastille to protest the rising cost of bread and troops sent to disband them instead chose to join them, the crowd of protestors seized the Bastille, “a state prison symbolizing royal authority, where the revolutionaries expected to find arms. In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols. … What is more to the point, the fall of the Bastille spread the revolution to the provincial towns and the countryside” (Hobsbawm 1969). A miscommunication in the surrender of the fortress resulted in shots being fired setting off a battle within the fortress’ outer walls that ended with the commander’s beheading. Rude (1959, p. 56) explains that “acts of popular vengeance” on July 14, “followed, a week later, by the murder of Foulon and Berthier—have, of course been picked upon to discredit the captors of the Bastille and to represent them as vagabonds, criminals, or a mercenary rabble hired in the wine-shops of the Saint-Antoine quarter.  This is a legend that dies hard; yet there is no evidence to support it, but all the evidence directly refutes it.” Although the fall of the Bastille was a momentous event in the history of France, many people throughout the country at the time were unsure of exactly what had happened until the radical press of the day began telling its version of the story – loudly and often – as a successful blow to despotism. As the rumors spread regarding the fall of the Bastille, people in twenty-eight of the largest thirty cities in France were reported to have staged uprisings and hundreds of thousands of peasants in the rural areas attacked lords’ manors and destroyed other symbols of the seigneurialism system throughout the summer of 1789. This gave rise to a wide-spread wave of mass panic, known now as the “Great Fear”, in which the people pulled down the old system of French feudalism “and the state machine of royal France lay in fragments” (Hobsbawm 1969) as the bourgeoisie drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and limited the King’s power. The King was forced to sign the document arguably as a result of the power of popular protest as groups of market women from Paris, along with National Guard soldiers, occupied the King’s palace in Versailles forcing him to return to Paris. Shortly after his return, he signed the declarative document giving the impression that popular protest again carried the Revolution movement forward. “Between 1789-1791, the victorious moderate bourgeoisie, acting through what had now become the Constituent Assembly, set about the gigantic rationalization and reform of France … its policy for the peasantry was the enclosure of common lands and the encouragement of rural entrepreneurs, for the working-class, the banning of trade unions, for the small crafts, the abolition of guilds and corporations”, but “[i]t gave little concrete satisfaction to the common people” (Hobsbawm 1969). Of most importance, the uncontrolled economic system that arose “accentuated the fluctuations in the level of food prices … The price of bread registered the political temperatures of Paris with the accuracy of a thermometer” (Hobsbawm 1969). Political commentary at this time was negatively directed at the bourgeois who led the National Assembly as well as the Commune of Paris, the National Guard and the King, culminating in July of 1791, when a demonstration crowd on the Champ de mars, responding to these appeals, was attacked by the Paris National Guard. The press continued to advise aggressive action, encouraging the people to defend themselves. In 1792, a group of Parisian artisans attacked the Tuileries Palace and arrested the royal family and dispersed the Legislative Assembly. This attack was followed a month later with a mass killing of thousands of political prisoners, referred to as the “September Massacres.” According to Lewis (1998), “the relatively large sections of the rural … and urban populations which propelled the Revolution forward in its early years were reduced to their much more ‘elite’ and organized cores after the summer of 1792, creating what historians often term ‘the Popular Movement.’” War with the rest of Europe and the establishment of the First French Republic marks the so-called “radical stage” of the revolution. It is at this time that the Sans-Culottes, a group of workers named to indicate they wore pants instead of the luxury-indicating knee breeches, demanded the revolutionary government do something about their poverty even as the clergy and aristocracy organized a counter-revolution to try to remove some of the reforms of the Revolution that were not working in their favor. “The sansculottes were organized … and provided the main striking-force of the revolution…. Through journalists like Marat and Hebert, through local spokesmen, they also formulated a policy, behind which lay a vaguely defined and contradictory social ideal, combining respect for (small) private property with hostility to the rich, government-guaranteed work, wages and social security for the poor man, an extreme, egalitarian and libertarian democracy, localized and direct. In fact, the Sans-Culottes were one branch of that universal and important political trend which sought to express the interests of the great mass of ‘little men’ who existed between the poles of the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘proletarian’, often perhaps rather nearer the latter than the former because they were, after all, mostly poor” (Hobsbawm 1969). The Sans-Culottes participated in the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, providing the necessary communication link between the working people and the new government. Within the popular press, Marat was beginning to stand out as among the most radical and vigorous commentator. “During the spring of 1793, Jean Paul Marat became the hero of the poorer people of Paris” (Rude 1959 p. 119). With the Revolution, Marat began publishing a controversial newspaper entitled LAmi du Peuple (The Friend of the People). In it, he argued for the rights of the working people, often saying sovereignty belonged to the nation. He viewed the artisans in their poverty as pure, having been removed from greed, and highly intelligent for seeking this lifestyle. “His newspaper promoted their cause with vehemence. In February, when there were riots throughout Paris over the price of goods in grocers shops, Marats paper recommended the rioters to hang a number of grocers by the neck over their own doorsteps” (Rude 1959 p. 118). After a failed attempt to expel him from the Convention in the spring of 1793 as well as his part in naming several deputies to be arrested in a later coup, his popularity among the poor people increased. His murder by Charlotte Corday later that year martyred him to the cause. With the silence of Marat and the increasing power of the Jacobin party, whose open, hostile criticism of the Girondins as well as the words of radical orators of the day led the people of Paris to surround the Convention’s meeting hall and demand the expulsion of the Girondins, providing new strength and force to the popular movement. In response to the war crisis, the Jacobins took power in 1793 and ushered in the Reign of Terror supervised by Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre was a member of the Committee of Public Safety, who arrested and executed many of their more active popular supporters in Paris, undermining the power of the Sans-Culottes. It is estimated the Terror was responsible for the death of 20-40,000 people, not all of them guilty. The Sans-Culottes, who had provided the Jacobins with the power they needed to maintain control, refused to take up arms against the Jacobin opposition and the Popular Movement represented by this faction fell in August (during the revolutionary calendar month of Thermidor) with the beheading of Robespierre and other radical figures at the hands of a more moderate bourgeois faction. “It was the largest, and the last, of the great holocausts of the revolution in Paris. With them perished not only a man or a group but a system. And what followed Thermidor was hardly what the most active of Robespierre’s opponents – and still less the passive bystanders, the Parisian Sans-Culottes – had expected or bargained for” (Rude 1964 p. 159). Throughout the French Revolution, then, one can see that it was the involvement of the popular classes and their continuous protest movements that propelled the revolution movement through the dissolution of the monarchy and beyond. Without the involvement of the peasant classes, the Revolution would not have brought any significant changes for the lower classes, just as previous rebellions among the nobles had not led to significant changes in the past. With the widespread news of the events in Paris, spread through various avenues, the peasants of the outlying districts and country sides also revolted, adding further impetus to a rapidly deteriorating system and forcing change at the legislative level. Further popular involvement led to the King’s capitulation on limiting his own powers and additional critical press further drove the people into more acts of aggression against a still broken system, finally leading to the emplacement of a popular government in place of the defunct kingdom. However, this popular government quickly lost its popular support, resulting in a similar defeat and opening the way for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. References Bosher, J.F. (1988). The French Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Hobsbawn, E.J. (1969). The Age of Revolution. New York: Praeger. Lewis, G. (1998). “The ‘People’ and the French Revolution.” University of Warwick. Retrieved 20 February 2006 from Rude, G. (1959). The Crowd in the French Revolution. London: Galaxy Books. Rude, G. (1964). Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815. New York: Harper & Row. Rude, G. (1995). Ideology and Popular Protest. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Read More