Reasons for the French Revolution, Essay Example

Historians have debated the reasons for the start of the Revolution for decades and probably will continue the debate for decades to come. A common theory among Marxist historians is that the Revolution was a social one and a natural process of historical development — a result of Enlightenment. According to William Doyle, in his Introduction à la Révolution Française in 1792, Barnave, proposed that, “Commercial property was totally different from and much more valuable than traditional landed property; thus the Revolution aimed to align political power with economic wealth.”^[1] Doyle also looks at what Lefebvre, wrote, “The Revolution is only the crown of a long economic and social evolution which has made the bourgeois the mistress of the world.”^[2] And, for the Marxists Manifesto, “…the bourgeois revolution is the inevitable precursor of the proletariat revolution, since the bourgeois, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.”^[3]

Historians who reject the Marxist views generally argue that the Revolution was started by ideas such as: organization, egalitarianism, justice, rationalism and anticlericalism. These ideas, they claim, naturally led to the quest for a better society. Claude Manceron, R. R. Parmer and Jacques Godechot have written that the Revolution was “needed to restore justice.”^[4] Other historians argue that the privileged class alienated the rest of French society causing the Revolution. While the reasons for revolution are usually complex and multi-layered, this paper will consider two aspects of the many arguments: Was the start of the French Revolution as a result of the privileged classes? Did the French Revolution begin because of the middle class and Enlightenment?

“The revolution that was to sweep away the political institutions of France did not begin on 14 July 1789,” writes William Doyle in Origins of the French Revolution.^[5] The French Revolution began before the meeting of the Estates General in May 1789. All of the groups represented at the meeting expected to have their concerns satisfied. Frustration mounted as the meeting went on, leading to the beginning of the Revolution. The facts that the meeting was even held reflected the desperation of the French government over its financial condition. The financial condition in France may have been the catalyst that crystallized the revolutionary sentiment.

From his accession of Louis XVI to the throne in 1774, the financial situation in France worsened. The situation was made worse, in large part, by the troops and money sent to the Americans to help them fight the British. Further exacerbating the situation was the result of the newly liberated American colonists continued trade with England and the slow payment of loans. France thought it would gain a favored trade position with America since it sent troops and money to the continent. When it didn’t, the financial situation got worse. Finally, the King appointed Jacques Necker as Director of Finances in 1776, a popular move since he financed the war borrowing, issuing five and seven-year bonds at rates of 8 percent or more. Necker’s inability to convince Parlement to accept his reforms caused the King to look to others for help. Additionally, the availability of money was shrinking. By the time Charles Alexandre de Calonne was appointed Finance Minister in 1783, willing lenders were hard to find.

Necker’s successor, Calonne came to even more revolutionary conclusions, as the crisis mounted. Calonne presented to the Assembly of Notables a number of money-savings proposals, but Parlement could not agree on reducing major items of public expenditure. The greatest expenditure was debt service which, could only be reduced by reducing the capital of the debt. In order to reduce the debt, Calonne established a sinking fund in 1784 in the hope of paying off 3 million livres (French currency up to the Revolution) a year.^[6]

The second major item of public expenditure was the armed forces. This could only be reduced at the cost of threatening France’s position during a time of international uncertainty, a move not popular with the King or Parlement. Another possibility of affecting the national debt was to raise taxes. According to Doyle, “[The citizens of] France already thought of itself as one of the most highly taxed nations in Europe.” In 1749, a new tax, vingtiéme (income tax), of 5 percent on property was introduced. It proved to be a permanent tax. In 1756 the land tax was doubled and it too became permanent. Doyle goes on to explain that a third vingtiéme was levied:

Between 1760 and 1763, the most costly period of the Seven Years War, a third vingtiéme was levied; and in 1782, it was reintroduced with the assurance at it would end three years after peace was concluded. That moment came at the end of 1786, and this imminent fall in revenue was another of the factors which led Calonne to confront the crisis when he did.^[7]

Calonne had many courses of action closed to him or they were considered impractical based of the political structure and due to in influences of the privileged class. Realizing the challenges that confronted him he said to the king:

I shall easily show that it is impossible to tax further, ruinous to be always borrowing and not enough to confine ourselves to economical reforms and that, with matters as they are, ordinary ways being unable to lead us to our goal, the only effective remedy, the only course left to take, the only means of managing finally to put the finances truly in order, must consist in revivifying the entire state by recasting all that is vicious in its constitution.^[8]

Reforming the entire French tax system was another strategy of Calonne. The Parlement was most unlikely to agree to these reforms, so he proposed an Assembly of Notables meet to discuss the problem. This proved to be a mistake as they did not support his reforms and attempted to gain a constitutional position for them. The King replaced Calonne with Archbishop Brienne. The Archbishop was himself a Notables member. He, too, failed to persuade the Notables. The Assembly demanded that the entire nation be consulted about the reforms.

After months of trying to convince Parlement to agree to the reforms and a worsening financial crisis, the King was finally forced to concede to the demands of the Assembly and called a new Estates General (representing all three estates) in 1788. He re-appointed Necker as Finance Minister. Jocelyn Hunt, writes, “The Assembly which had seemed impossible in 1786 met at Versailles in May 1789.”[9]

The Privileged Class

Jocelyn Hunt, in French Revolution, clearly describing the French class system before the Revolution:

The Ancien Régime [old regime] system was based on the concentration of all political, social and economic power between three classes, the monarchy, the clergy, and the aristocracy. The First estate represented the Roman Catholic clergy. The Second estate represented the nobility, with its main governor, King Louis XVI and his court. The Third estate represented the rest of the population, the poorest and largest group of people.^[10]

France was governed by privileged groups, the nobility and the clergy, while the poor classes were taxed heavily to pay for foreign wars, court extravagance and a rising national debt. For the most part, peasants were small landholders or tenant farmers, subject to feudal dues payable to the royal agents, indirect farming taxes, to the corvée (forced labor), and to tithes and other impositions. Backward agricultural methods and internal tariff barriers caused recurrent food shortages, which netted fortunes to grain speculators, and rural over population created great demand for land. None of these things benefited the poor. Their circumstance just grew worse.

There was very little opportunity for upward mobility the poor in third estate. Privilege was acquired at birth. Privilege was a complex concept in ancien régime France. France’s first two estates were defined by privilege. In Blood of the Bastille, Manceron has this to say about the First Estate, the Church:

The clergy in the first order of France, even richer in land and money than the nobility, as well as the powerful abbots of the great monasteries, hold almost half the real estate of France. Property is presumed to be a product of accumulated centuries of endowments and is regarded as sacred, untouchable by any form of taxation. Every year, thanks to the tithe [10 percent tax] system…it grows.[11]

The Church did make its ‘free gift’ to the government every year, but it decided the amount itself, and was often in arrears.

The Second Estate, the nobility, for long had exemption from many taxes. Capitation, or tax per head, was paid by the nobility, but was divided into only four grades, and so did not hurt the rich. Nobles paid the taille (land tax), but calculated their own contribution. The only proportional tax paid by nobility was the vingtiéme (income tax). They resisted Calonne’s new tax that would tax land according to size, regardless of the social statue of the land holder.[12]

France was potentially a very rich country. France had a range of climate and ample crops which would have guaranteed its wealth. Additionally, it had a growing population, rich mineral resources, colonial possessions abroad and harbors on both the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. Despite this abundant wealth, the French government could not take advantage of it. The French tax system dated from the middle-ages, where land was the measurement of wealth. The land was protected from taxation. Therefore, either directly or indirectly, it was the common folk to pay the taxes. Some town bought exemptions to the taxes. The village people did not pay the most oppressive taxes. Those who did were the French country folk. The King and the French government had no choice to tax the poor, while taking very little from the wealthy. The privileged classes could be held responsible for the Revolution in three ways, writes Doyle:

They helped cause the problems since their wealth was not subject to serious taxation; they provoked the hatred of the groups below them in society; and they used the strength of their position to resist attempts at change, while demanding, for their own ends, the meeting of the Estates General with gave voice to the Third Estate [peasants and urban artisans] and ensured their downfall.^[13]

Manceron sums it up well with this statement: “The failure of these sums to add up brought about the crisis which began the Revolution.”[14] The excesses of the privileged class certainly contributed to the start of the Revolution. Other factors contributing to the Revolution was the educated class and ‘Enlightenment.’

The Middle Class and Enlightenment

For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘middle class’ is defined. The term refers to the people in France at the time who were neither a member of the privileged class or very poor. The term bourgeoisie is often used but this term does not adequately describe the educated people who had enough income that they could afford books and papers. Also, they had the leisure time to follow current affairs. While much of the middle class was comprised of professionals and those from the commercial class, some wealthier peasant belonged.

The educated people had a major part to play in the call for an Assembly and for the meeting of the Estate General. Over 2,500 leaflets were published by several groups within the middle class. The leaflets calling for liberty and representation were mainly read in the salons and discussion clubs that were shared by the middle class and nobles alike. New ideas of equality for all citizens were being discussed freely. According to Hunt, Raymond Birn’s essay[15] demonstrates that, by 1780, 40 percent of servants and 30 percent of Parisian workers in had one or more books. 74 percent officials in the provinces owned books. Censer explains in The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment:

Books which were banned in France were smuggled in from Switzerland and the Netherlands. The Philosophes of the Enlightenment were by no means in favor of equality for all. But they were vehemently anticlerical (Voltaire and Holbach); they demanded the equalization of justice (Condorcet and Diderot), fairer taxation (Quesnay) and the opportunity for all citizens to participate in government (Rousseau).[16]

The ideas expressed in the leaflets became the focus of conversation for the educated class by 1780. The discourse centered on what was possible instead of what was traditional. While the government had been influenced to some extent by Enlightenment, its actions were not always useful. For example, the Eden Treaty of 1787, for example, provided for free trade with England but it did not help France’s developing businesses. “It could be argued,” writes Palmer et al., “that the King’s desire for reform were a measure of his interest in the new ways: certainly few kings before him had consulted as many groups as he and his ministers did in 1787.”[17] This proved to be too little to stem the tide of revolution though. The public demands for government scrutiny along with the financial reports of Necker, exemplify the questioning mood on the time.

Conclusion

Historians have compared the French Revolution with similar events in north Italy, the Netherlands and in America. In these countries, the commercial classes attempted to increase their power at the expense of the ruling class. Historians have argued that the American war had a profound influence on the educated class, especially after France sent troops to help the American colonists. This accelerated the revolutionary mood in the country. There is little doubt that the middle class identified with the goals of the American Revolution as they looked at the tyranny they perceived in their own nation. Many French writers began writing about the injustice of the oppressive taxation on the poor and the lack of representation.

Once people began questioning the government, the impact of the educated class became substantial. For decades there had been discussion and criticism of the French government. Many groups had been in contact with reform groups in England British during the 1770s and 1780s. These British groups introduced to their French counterparts the concepts of political and constitutional change. The educated class adopted ideas of liberty and representation from the liberal British organizations and from the struggles of the colonists during the American Revolution. The educated class began to question the very structure of the government and to look for better ways.

For their part, the inflexibility of the privileged class provided a catalyst for the educated class to air their grievances. The distribution of power inequities and the unequal rights among the estates caused an explosion of anger among the Estate General members that belonged to the third estate.

The inequality in distribution of powers and rights between these different estates was the main cause of the explosion of anger amongst third estate representatives during the Estates General. In the French social system, there were few opportunities for the poor to climb the social ladder, as privilege was assigned at birth. Very few poor could purchase social mobility and were stuck with their miss-fortune and a large tax burden. To make matters worse, all political decision were made by the King and his advisers with no involvement of the French public. The financial crisis facing the nation before the Revolution pushed the poorest people to revolt. The poor bore the greatest tax burden with any representation in government.

Historians will undoubtedly debate the reasons for the French Revolution for years to come. While the reasons for the French Revolution are complex and many, it can be stated that two principle contributing factors were the accesses of privilege and the Enlightenment of the French educational class.

Bibliography

Censer, Jack R. The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 1994.

Doyle, William. Origins of the French Revolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hunt, Jocelyn. French Revolution. Florence, KY: Routledge, 1998.

Manceron, Claude: Blood of the Bastille. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1987.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.

Palmer, R.R., Colton, Joel, Kramer, Lloyd. A History of the Modern World, Ninth Edition. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

[1] William Doyle. Origins of the French Revolution. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One. (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 1969, 98.

[4] R.R. Palmer, Joel Colton, Lloyd Kramer. A History of the Modern World, Ninth Edition. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 301.

[5] William Doyle. Origins of the French Revolution. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45.

[6]Ibid.

[7]Doyle, 48.

[8]Ibid.

[9] Jocelyn Hunt. French Revolution. (Florence, KY: Routledge), 1998. p 1.

[10] Ibid, 22.

[11] Claude Manceron. Blood of the Bastille. (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1987), 309.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Doyle, 62.

[14] Ibid, 311.

[15] Hunt, 44.

[16] Jack R. Censer. The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment. (London: Routledge. 1994), 208.

[17] R. R Palmer, 348.