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The most celebrated
French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late
18th-century
Neoclassical reaction
against the Rococo style.
David won wide acclaim with his huge
canvases on classical themes (e.g., "Oath of the Horatii," 1784.
When the French Revolution began in 1789, he served briefly as its
artistic director and painted its leaders and martyrs ("The Dead Marat,"
1793) in a style that is more realistic than classical. Later he was
appointed painter to Napoleon. Although primarily a painter of
historical events, David was also a great portraitist (e.g.,
"Portrait de Mme Récamier," 1800).
Formative years
David was born in the year when new
excavations at the ash-buried ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum were beginning to encourage
a stylistic return to antiquity (without being, as was long supposed, a principal cause of
that return). His father, a small but prosperous dealer in textiles, was killed in a duel
in 1757, and the boy was subsequently raised, reportedly not very tenderly, by two uncles.
After classical literary studies and a course in drawing, he was placed in the studio of
Joseph-Marie Vien, a history painter who catered to the growing Greco-Roman taste without
quite abandoning the light sentiment and the eroticism that had been fashionable earlier
in the century. At age 18, the obviously gifted budding artist was enrolled in the school
of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. After four failures in the official
competitions and years of discouragement that included an attempt at suicide (by the stoic
method of avoiding food), he finally obtained, in 1774, the Prix de Rome, a government
scholarship that not only provided a stay in Italy but practically guaranteed lucrative
commissions in France. His prize-winning work, "Antiochus and Stratonice,"
reveals that at this point he could still be influenced slightly by the Rococo charm of
the painter François Boucher, who had been a family friend.
In Italy there were many
influences, including those of the dark-toned 17th-century Bolognese school, the serenely
classical Nicolas Poussin, and the dramatically realistic Caravaggio. David absorbed all
three, with an evident preference for the strong light and shade of the followers of
Caravaggio. For a while he seemed determined to fulfill a prediction he had made on
leaving France: "The art of antiquity will not seduce me, for it lacks liveliness . .
. ." But he became interested in the Neoclassical doctrines that had been developed
in Rome by, among others, the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs and the art historian
Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the company of Quatremère de Quincy, a young French
sculptor who was a strong partisan of the return to antiquity, he visited the ruins of
Herculaneum, the Doric temples at Paestum, and the Pompeian collections at Naples. In
front of the ancient vases and columns, he felt, he said later, that he had just been
"operated on for cataract of the eye."
Rise to
fame:
1780-94
Back
in Paris in 1780, he completed and successfully exhibited "Bélisaire demandant
l'aumône" ("Belisarius Asking Alms"), in which he combined a nobly
sentimental approach to antiquity with a pictorial technique reminiscent of Poussin. In
1782 he married the rather plain but spirited Marguerite Pécoul, whose father was a
wealthy building contractor and the superintendent of construction at the Louvre--a
position that carried considerable influence. From this date David prospered rapidly. The
pathos and painterly skill of "Andromache Mourning Hector" brought him election
to the Académie Royale in 1784; and that same year, accompanied this time by his wife and
studio assistants, he returned to Rome with a commission to complete a painting that
appears to have been originally inspired by a Paris performance of Pierre Corneille's
Horace.
The result, finally not based on any of the incidents in the play, was
the
"Oath of the Horatii". The subject is the solemn moment, charged with stoicism
and simple courage, when the three Horatii brothers face their father and offer their
lives to assure victory for Rome in the war with Alba; the pictorial treatment--firm contours,
bare cubic space, sober colour, frieze-like composition, and clear lighting--is as
austerely non-Rococo as the subject. Exhibited first in David's studio in Rome and then,
following his return to France, in the official Paris Salon of 1785, the picture created a
sensation; it was regarded as a manifesto for an artistic revival (the term Neoclassicism
was not yet in use) that would cure Europe of the lingering addiction to dainty curves and
boudoir themes. Eventually, it came to be regarded, although such was almost certainly not
the first intention, as a manifesto for an end to the corruption of an effete aristocracy
and for a return to the stern, patriotic morals attributed to republican Rome.
David became a culture hero; he was even
referred to in some quarters as a messiah. He added to his fame by producing in 1787 the
morally uplifting "Death of Socrates," in 1788 the less uplifting but
archaeologically interesting "Amours de Paris et d'Hélene" ("Paris and
Helen"), and in 1789 another lesson in self-sacrifice
"Les Licteurs rapportent à Brutus les corps de ses fils" ("The Lictors
Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons"). By the time the "Brutus" was
on view, the French Revolution had begun, and this picture of the patriotic Roman consul
who condemned his traitorous sons to death had an unanticipated political significance. It
also had, through its presumably accurate reconstitution of the details of everyday Roman
life, an effect that was perhaps equally unexpected, for with it David began the long and
extensive influence he was to have on French fashions. Up-to-date homes began to display
imitations of his Roman furniture; men cut their hair short in the Roman style; and women
adopted the dresses and the coiffures of Brutus' daughters. Later on, even the flimsy
Sabine dress, which left the breasts exposed, was adopted by the ultramodern.
In the early years of the Revolution,
David was a member of the extremist Jacobin group led by Robespierre, and he became an
energetic example of the politically committed artist. He was elected to the National
Convention in 1792, in time to vote for the execution of Louis XVI. By 1793, as a member
of the art commission, he was virtually the art dictator of France and was nicknamed
"the Robespierre of the brush." He preached moral and aesthetic sermons to the
Convention:
The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates
the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin,
tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an
artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.
Guided supposedly by the torch of reason
and perhaps also by bitter memories of his many unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de
Rome, he succeeded in abolishing the Académie Royale and with it much of the old regime's
system for training artists and providing them with patronage. The Académie was replaced
briefly by a body called the Commune des Arts, then by a group called the Popular and
Republican Society of the Arts, and then, finally, in 1795, after David was out of power,
by the beginning of the system--a combination of the Institut de France and the École des
Beaux-Arts--that dominated French artistic life during most of the 19th century.
As an artist during these years of his
dictatorship, David was frequently busy with revolutionary propaganda. He had
commemorative medals struck, set up obelisks in the provinces, and staged national
festivals and the grandiose funerals the new government gave its martyrs. Some of his
projects for paintings at this time were never completely carried out: one of these is the
unfinished "Joseph Bara," which is a tribute to a drummer boy shot by the
royalists, and another is the sketched "Oath of the Tennis Court" (Louvre,
Musée National de Versailles et des Trianons, and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.),
which was to commemorate the moment in 1789 when the Third Estate (the commoners) swore
not to disband until a new constitution had been adopted. The "Death of Lepeletier de
Saint-Fargeau," painted to honour a murdered deputy and regarded by David as one of
his best pictures, was eventually destroyed. The result of all this is that the artist's
Jacobin inspiration is represented principally by "The Dead Marat", painted in
1793 shortly after the murder of the revolutionary leader by Charlotte Corday. This
"pietà of the Revolution," as it has been called, is generally considered
David's masterpiece and an example of how, under the pressure of genuine emotion,
Neoclassicism could turn into tragic Realism.
Later years:
1794-1825
In 1794, after his friend Robespierre had
been sent to the guillotine, David was arrested. At his trial he is said to have defended
himself badly, mumbling that in the future he intended to attach himself "to
principles and not to men." He was imprisoned twice, for four months in 1794 and for
two more the next year, apparently most of the time in the not uncomfortable Palais du
Luxembourg in Paris. He was consoled by being allowed to paint and also by the fact that
his wife, who had divorced him two years earlier for having voted for the death of the
King, now loyally returned in his hour of trouble and remarried him, on this occasion for
good. During his first period in prison, he painted from his window his only landscape,
the "Vue du jardin du Luxembourg à Paris" ("View of the Luxembourg
Gardens"). While he was held temporarily in another Paris building, he did an
unfinished "Self-Portrait." At 46 he appears as a boyish young man with
romantically disheveled hair, brown eyes, and a generally aggressive, if worried, look; a
cheek tumour from which he suffered all of his adult life and which is said to have
impeded his speech gives his face a slight twist.
Even during his imprisonment, he had
retained three studios in the Louvre, and, after the amnesty of 1795, he devoted to
teaching the same energy he had been devoting to revolutionary politics. Eventually,
between the "Oath of the Horatii" and the Battle of Waterloo, he was responsible
for the training and indoctrination of hundreds of young painters from all over Europe,
among them such future masters as Baron François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros, and
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The indoctrination began with the premise that the basis of
art was the contour, and so it can be held partly responsible for the excessive emphasis
on drawing that characterized European academic painting in the 19th century. But David
himself, as his works show, was not always hostile to rich chromatic effects; as late as
1860 he could be called, by no less a colourist than Eugène Delacroix, "the father
of the whole modern school."
Neoclassicism was presumably inclined to
scorn portraiture, because a contemporary sitter would normally lack both the universality
and the nudity of an ancient statue. David, however, had done portraits, remarkable for
their psychological individuality and their look of solid flesh, since the beginning of
his career: in 1782-83 his sitter had been Alphonse Leroy, a Paris medical professor; in
1784 Mme Pécoul, his mother-in-law; in 1788 the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, with
Mme Lavoisier. In 1795 the freed artist portrayed his pretty, elegant sister-in-law, Mme
Sériziat, and her dandyish husband. In 1799 he produced his famous period piece,
"Portrait de Mme Récamier," which he left unfinished because the sitter, then
at the start of her career as a reigning Paris beauty, proved unreliable about hours for
posing.
But David was not a man for the life of a
mere teacher and portraitist. In 1799 he made a spectacular reentry into public notice
with a new giant canvas, "Les Sabines" ("The Intervention of the Sabine
Women"). The picture, often mistakenly referred to as "The Rape of the
Sabines," represents the moment, a few years after the legendary abduction, when the
women, now contented wives and mothers, halt a battle between their Roman husbands and the
Sabine men who have come on an unwanted rescue mission; in the middle of the melee stands
the lovely Sabine woman Hersilia, appealing with one arm toward the Roman Romulus and the
other toward the bearded Sabine Tatius. The artist had said that his aim was to move away
from the allegedly crude Roman manner of the "Oath of the Horatii" into a more
graceful Greek manner, and he did win enthusiastic applause for the elegance of his
figures. He also won some approval for his supposed intention to preach conciliation after
10 years of bloodletting in France. But he attracted perhaps the most attention with the
nakedness of his ancient warriors; having ceased to be the Robespierre of the brush, he
now became, in a popular jingle, "the Raphael of the sans-culottes"
("without breeches"; the radical Republicans).
Napoleon admired "The Intervention of
the Sabine Women" and saw possibilities for self-aggrandizement in the talent
displayed. Soon David, without acquiring political office, was again a government painter,
first under the Consulate and then, after 1804, under the Empire. He was not, however, the
only prominent Frenchman to move from the Jacobin left to the Bonapartist right, and he
had evidently always been a worshiper of historical heroes. His most important Napoleonic
work is the huge "Coronation" of 1805-07, sometimes called "Napoleon
Crowning the Empress Josephine"; in it Neoclassicism gives way to a style that
combines the official portraiture of the old French monarchy with overtones--and
occasional straight imitation--of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. This picture was
followed in 1810 by the large "Napoleon Distributing the Eagles" and in 1812 by
"Napoleon in His Study", a sharply perceptive portrait notwithstanding its
conspicuously propagandistic intention.
After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, David
was exiled to Brussels. Cut off from the excitement and stimulus of the great events he
had lived through, he lost much of his old energy. Toward the end of his life, he
executed, probably with considerable help from a Belgian pupil, François-Joseph Navez,
one more remarkably convincing portrait: "Les Trois Dames dites de Gand"
("Three Women of Ghent").
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Painter, whose use of colour was influential in the development of
both Impressionist and Postimpressionist painters. His inspiration came chiefly from
historical or contemporary events or literature, and a visit to Morocco in 1832 provided
him with further exotic subjects.
Early life
Delacroix was the fourth child of Victoire
Oeben, a descendant of the Oeben-Riesener family, which had created furniture for the king
and court in the 17th and 18th centuries, and of Charles Delacroix, a government official
who was ambassador to Holland in 1798 and who died in 1805 while prefect of Bordeaux. One
tradition attributes Eugène's true paternity to the statesman Charles-Maurice de
Talleyrand-Périgord. This belief is strengthened both by Delacroix's strong physical
resemblance to Talleyrand and by the fact that the future painter would consistently
receive important patronage from the French government despite the nonconformist character
of his art. Whatever the truth of his parentage, Delacroix's childhood was untroubled, and
he would always maintain great affection and admiration for his father. Up to the age of
17 he pursued classical studies. Within his distinguished and artistic family he formed a
passion for music and the theatre. In 1815 he became the pupil of a renowned academic
painter, Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. He knew the historical painter Antoine-Jean Gros,
and as a young man he visited the salon of the royalist and painter Baron François
Gérard. As early as 1822 he received the backing of Louis Thiers, the statesman and
historian, who, as interior minister in the 1830s, put Delacroix in charge of
architectural decorations.
A child of his century, Delacroix was
affected by the Romanticism of the painter Théodore Géricault and of his friends the
English painter Richard Parkes Bonington, the Polish-born composer and pianist Frédéric
Chopin, and the French writer George Sand. He did not, however, take part in the battles
of the Romantic movement waged by Victor Hugo, Hector Berlioz, and others.
Development of mature style
Delacroix's debut at the Paris Salon of
1822, in which he exhibited his first masterpiece, "Dante and Virgil in Hell"
(Louvre Museum, Paris), is one of the landmarks in the development of French 19th-century
Romantic painting. "Dante and Virgil in Hell" was inspired by Dante's
Divine
Comedy, but its tragic feeling and the powerful modeling of its figures are
reminiscent of Michelangelo, and its rich colour shows the influence of Peter Paul Rubens.
Among Delacroix's contemporaries, the influence of Géricault, who was the young painter's
best friend until his sudden death in 1824, was also important.
In his subsequent choice of subjects,
Delacroix showed an affinity with Lord Byron and other Romantic poets of his time, and
also drew subjects from Dante, William Shakespeare, and medieval history. In 1824,
however, he exhibited at the Salon the "Massacre
at Chios" (Louvre), a large canvas depicting the dramatic contemporary massacre of
Greeks by Turks on the island of Chios. The haughty pride of the conquerors, the horror as
well as despair of the innocent Greeks, and the splendour of a vast sky create an
expressive unity in which the nature of his genius is evident.
Delacroix had already become interested in
the delicate technique of his English painter friends Richard Parkes Bonington and the
Fielding brothers (Thales, Copley, Theodore, and Newton), and he also admired the English
landscapes of John Constable, which were exhibited in Paris in 1824. Indeed, the luminous
tonalities evident in the "Massacre at Chios" are said to have been inspired by
Constable's style. To round out his technical and cultural education, Delacroix left for
London in 1825. There, his technique, developed by contact with Turner, Constable, and Sir
Thomas Lawrence, acquired the freedom and suppleness that until then he had been seeking
in Rubens.
Between 1827 and 1832, masterpieces
appeared in quick succession. Chief among them is "The Death of Sardanapalus"
(1827; Louvre), a violent and voluptuous Byronic subject in which women, slaves, animals,
jewels, and rich fabrics are combined in a sensuous but somewhat incoherent scene. One of
his finest paintings on historical subjects, "The Execution of the Doge Marino
Faliero" (1826-27; Wallace Collection, London), dates from this period, as do two
works on medieval history, "The Battle of Nancy" (1831) and "The Battle of
Poitiers" (1830; Louvre). He also painted the typically Byronic subject of
"Combat Between the Giaour and the Pasha" (1827; Art Institute of Chicago). Like
Géricault, Delacroix explored the newly invented medium of lithography and made a set of
17 lithographs (1827) illustrating a French edition of J.W. von Goethe's Faust. In
1830 Delacroix painted "Liberty
Leading the People" (Louvre) to commemorate the July Revolution that
had just brought Louis-Philippe to the French throne. This large canvas
mixes allegory with contemporary realism in a highly successful and
monumental manner and is still perhaps the most popular of all
Delacroix's paintings. The relatively subdued manner of "Liberty Leading
the People" also reflects a change in Delacroix's style, which became
somewhat quieter while still retaining elements of animation and
grandeur.
From January to July 1832 Delacroix toured
in Algeria, Spain, and Morocco with the Count de Mornay, King Louis-Philippe's diplomatic
representative to the sultan. Morocco proved to be a revelation to Delacroix, who found in
its people and way of life the Homeric nobility and beauty that he had never seen in
French academic Neoclassicism itself. The sights of exuberant nature and the beauty of the
horses, the Arabs, and their flowing costumes would henceforth inspire his visual memory,
even in his last works. Delacroix made copious sketches and notes during the trip that he
used to good effect upon his return to Paris. After Morocco, his drawing and paint
handling became freer and his
use of colour even more sumptuous. The first fruits of his
Moroccan impressions are collected in "Women of Algiers in Their Apartment"
(1834; Louvre), in which three sumptuously costumed Arab women and their surroundings are
portrayed in a blaze of exquisitely warm colour harmonies. Delacroix's other
recapitulations of his North African experiences include "Fanatics of Tangier"
(1838) and "Jewish Wedding" (1839; Louvre). He continued to paint Arab subjects
almost to the end of his life.
Building
decoration
In the latter part of his career Delacroix
was favoured with a string of important commissions to decorate government buildings. His
first commission, in 1833-36, was to paint a group of murals for the Salon du Roi at the
Palais-Bourbon. He was subsequently commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Library of
the Palais-Bourbon (1838-47), the Library of the Palais Luxembourg (1840-47), the ceiling
of the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre (1850), the Salon de la Paix at the Hotel de Ville
(1849-53; burned in 1871), and the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the Church of
Saint-Sulpice (1849-61). His murals represent the last great effort of this kind in the
tradition of the Baroque ceiling painters.
During this period Delacroix also painted
several canvases on the largest scale, notably two for the museum of history at
Versailles: "The Battle of Taillebourg" (1837; Louvre) and "Entry of the
Crusaders into Constantinople" (1840; Louvre). Among his later easel paintings are
ones on Arab, religious, and classical subjects and several superb scenes of wild animals
and hunts, among them the "Lion Hunt" of 1858 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and
the "Lion Hunt" of 1861 (Art Institute of Chicago). Delacroix painted several
notable self-portraits during the course of his long career and occasionally produced
portraits of such friends as Frédéric Chopin (1838; Louvre) and George Sand (1838;
Øregaard Museum, Copenhagen).
Delacroix died in 1863, leaving more than
6,000 drawings, watercolours, and prints to be sold. His Journals are among the
most penetrating of artists' notebooks since those kept by Leonardo da Vinci. A selective
edition of them in English by Hubert Wellington was published in 1951 as The Journal of
Eugène Delacroix.
With the English painter J.M.W. Turner,
Delacroix was the forerunner of the bold technical innovations that culminated in
Impressionism and subsequent modernist movements. The uninhibited expression of energy and
movement in his works; his fascination with violence, destruction, and the more tragic
aspects of life; and the sensuous virtuosity of his colouring have helped make him one of
the most fascinating and complex artistic figures of the 19th century.
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Encyclopædia Britannica
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime 1789:
the convergence of revolutions
The juridical revolution Louis XVI's decision to convene the
Estates-General in May 1789 became a turning point in French
history. When he invited his subjects to express their opinions and
grievances in preparation for this event—unprecedented in living
memory—hundreds responded with pamphlets in which the liberal
ideology of 1789 gradually began to take shape. Exactly how the
Estates-General should deliberate proved to be the pivotal
consciousness-raising issue. Each of the three Estates could vote
separately (by order) as they had in the distant past, or they could
vote jointly (by head). Because the Third Estate was to have twice
as many deputies as the others, only voting by head would assure
itspreponderant influence. If the estates voted by order, the clergy
and nobility would effectively exercise a veto power over important
decisions. Most pamphleteers of 1789 considered themselves
“patriots,” or reformers, and (though some were nobles themselves)
identified the excessive influence of “aristocrats” as a chief
obstacle to reform. In his influential tract Qu'est-ce que le tiers
état? (1789; What is the Third Estate?) the constitutional theorist
Emmanuel-Joseph Abbé Sieyès asserted that the Third Estate really
was the French nation. While commoners did all the truly laborious
and productive work of society, he claimed with some exaggeration,
the nobility monopolized its lucrative sinecures and honours. As a
condition of genuine reform, the Estates-General would have to
change that situation.
A seismic shift was occurring in elite public opinion. What began in
1787–88 as a conflict between royal authority and traditional
aristocratic groups had become a triangular struggle, with “the
people” opposing both absolutism and privilege. A new kind of
political discourse was emerging, and within a year it was to
produce an entirely new concept of sovereignty with extremely
far-reaching implications.
Patriots were driven to increasingly bold positions in part by the
resistance and bad faith of royal and aristocratic forces. It is not
surprising that some of the Third Estate's most radical deputies
came from Brittany, whose nobility was so hostile to change that it
finally boycotted the Estates-General altogether. Hoping that the
king would takethe lead of the patriot cause, liberals were
disappointed at the irresolute, business-as-usual attitude of the
monarchy when the Estates opened at Versailles in May 1789. While
the nobility organized itself into a separate chamber (by a vote of
141 to 47), as did the clergy (133 to 114), the Third Estate refused
to do so. After pleading repeatedly for compromise and debating
their course of action in the face of this deadlock, the Third
Estate's deputies finally acted decisively. On June 17 they
proclaimed that they were not simply the Third Estate of the
Estates-General but a National Assembly, which the other deputies
were invited tojoin. A week later 150 deputies of the clergy did
indeed join the National Assembly, but the nobility protested that
the whole notion was illegal.
Now the king had to clarify his position. He began by closing the
hall assigned to the Third Estate and ordering all deputies to hear
a royal address on June 23. The deputies, however, adjourned to an
indoor tennis court on the 21st and there swore a solemn oath to
continue meeting until they had provided France with a constitution.
Two days laterthey listened to the king's program for reform. In the
“royalsession” of June 23 the king pledged to honour civil
liberties, agreed to fiscal equality (already conceded by the
nobility in its cahiers, or grievance petitions), and promised that
the Estates-General would meet regularly in the future.But, he
declared, they would deliberate separately by order. France was to
become a constitutional monarchy, but one in which “the ancient
distinction of the three orders will be conserved in its entirety.”
In effect the king was forging an alliance with the nobility, who
only a year before had soughtto hobble him. For the patriots this
was too little and too late.
In a scene of high drama, the deputies refused to adjourn to their
own hall. When ordered to do so by the king's chamberlain, the
Assembly's president, astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–93),
responded—to the official's amazement—that “the assembled nation
cannot receive orders.” Such defiance unnerved the king. Backing
down, he directed the nobles several days later to join a National
Assembly whose existence he had just denied. Thus the Third Estate,
with its allies in the clergy and nobility, had apparently effected
a successful nonviolent revolution from above. Having been elected
in the bailliages (the monarchy's judicial districts which served as
electoral circumscriptions) to represent particular constituents to
their king, the deputies had transformed themselves into
representatives of the entire nation. Deeming the nation alone to be
sovereign, they as its representatives claimed sole authority to
exercise that sovereignty. This was the juridical revolution of
1789.
Parisian revolt
In fact, the king had by no means reconciled himself to this
revolutionary act. His concession was a strategic retreat until he
could muster the military power to subdue the patriots. Between June
27 and July 1 he ordered 20,000 royal troops into the Paris region,
ostensibly to protect the assembly and to prevent disorder in the
restive capital. Theassembly's pleas to the king to withdraw these
menacing and unnecessary troops fell on deaf ears. For all their
moral force, the deputies utterly lacked material force to counter
the king's obvious intentions. The assembly was saved from likely
dissolution only by a massive popular mobilization.
During the momentous political events of 1788–89 much of the country
lay in the grip of a classic subsistence crisis. Bad weather had
reduced the grain crops that year by almost one-quarter the normal
yield. An unusually cold winter compounded the problem, as frozen
rivers halted the transport and milling of flour in many localities.
Amidst fears of hoarding and profiteering, grain and flour reserves
dwindled. In Paris the price of the four-pound loaf of bread—the
standard item of consumption accounting for most of the population's
calories and nutrition—rose from its usual 8 sous to 14 sous by
January 1789. This intolerable trend set off traditional forms of
popular protest. If royal officials did not assure basic food
supplies at affordable prices, then people would act directly to
seize food. During the winter and spring of 1789 urban consumers and
peasants rioted at bakers and markets and attacked millers and grain
convoys. Then, in July, this anxiety merged with the looming
political crisis at Versailles. Parisians believed that food
shortages and royal troops would be used in tandem to starve the
people and overwhelm them into submission. They feared an
“aristocratic plot” to throttle the patriot cause.
When the king dismissed the still-popular finance minister Jacques
Necker on July 11, Parisians correctly read this as a signal that
the counterrevolution was about to begin. Instead of yielding,
however, they rose in rebellion. Street-corner orators such as
Camille Desmoulins stirred their compatriots to resist. Confronting
royal troops in the streets, they won some soldiers over to their
side and induced officers to confine other potentially unreliable
units to their barracks. On July 13, bands of Parisians ransacked
armourers' shops in a frantic search for weapons. The next day a
large crowd invaded the Hôtel des Invalides and seized thousands of
rifles without resistance. Then they moved to the Bastille, an old
fortress commanding the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which had served as
a notorious royal prison earlier in the century but was now
scheduled fordemolition. Believing that gunpowder was stored there,
thecrowd laid siege to the Bastille. Unlike the troops at the
Invalides, the Bastille's tiny garrison resisted, a fierce
battleerupted, and dozens of Parisians were killed. When the
garrison finally capitulated, the irate crowd massacred several of
the soldiers. In another part of town two leading royal officials
were lynched for their presumed role in the plot against the people.
Meanwhile the electors of Paris, who had continued to meet after
choosing their deputies to the Estates-General, ousted the royal
officials of the city government, formed a revolutionary
municipality, and organized a citizens' militia or national guard to
patrol the streets. Similar municipal revolutions occurred in 26 of
the 30 largest French cities, thus assuring that the capital's
defiance would not be an isolated act.
By any standard, the fall of the Bastille to the Parisian crowd was
a spectacular symbolic event—a seemingly miraculous triumph of the
people against the power of royalarms. The heroism of the crowd and
the blood of its martyrs—ordinary Parisian artisans, tradesmen, and
workers—sanctified the patriot cause. Most importantly, the elites
and the people of Paris had made common cause,despite the inherent
distrust and social distance between them. The mythic unity of the
Third Estate—endlessly invoked by patriot writers and orators—seemed
actually to exist, if only momentarily. Before this awesome material
andmoral force Louis XVI capitulated. He did not want civil war
inthe streets. The Parisian insurrection of July 14 not only saved
the National Assembly from dissolution but altered the course of the
Revolution by giving it a far more active,popular, and violent
dimension. On July 17 the king traveled to Paris, where he publicly
donned a cockade bearing a new combination of colours: white for the
Bourbons and blue andred for the city of Paris. This tricolour was
to become the new national flag.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
1789: the convergence of revolutions
Peasant insurgencies
Peasants in the countryside, meanwhile, carried on their own kind of
rebellion, which combined traditional aspirationsand anxieties with
support of the patriot cause. The peasantrevolt was autonomous, yet
it reinforced the urban uprising to the benefit of the National
Assembly.
Competition over the ownership and the use of land had intensified
in many regions. Peasants owned only about 40 percent of the land
(see above Agricultural patterns), leasing or sharecropping the rest
from the nobility, the urban middle class, and the church.
Population growth and subdivision of the land from generation to
generation was reducing the margin of subsistence for many families.
Innovations in estate management—the grouping of leaseholds,
conversion of arable land to pasture, enclosure of open fields,
division of common land at the lord's initiative, discovery of new
seigneurial dues or arrears in old ones—exasperated peasant tenants
and smallholders. Historians debate whether these were capitalistic
innovations or traditional varieties of seigneurial extraction,but
in either case the countryside was boiling with discontent over
these trends as well as over oppressive royal taxes and food
shortages. Peasants were poised between great hopes for the future
raised by the calling of the Estates-General and extreme
anxiety—fear of losing land, fear of hunger (especially after the
catastrophic harvest of 1788), and fear of a vengeful and mighty
aristocracy.
In July peasants in several regions sacked the castles of nobles and
burned the documents that recorded their feudal obligations. This
peasant insurgency eventually merged into the movement known as the
Great Fear. Rumours abounded that these vagrants were actually
brigands in the pay of nobles, who were marching on villages to
destroy the new harvest and coerce the peasants into submission. The
fear was baseless, but hundreds of false alarms and panics stirred
up hatred and suspicion of nobles, led peasants to arm themselves as
best they could, and set off widespread attacks on chateaus and
feudal documents. The peasant revolt suggested that the unity of the
Third Estate against “aristocrats” extendedfrom Paris to villages
across the country. The Third Estate truly seemed invincible.
The abolition of feudalism
Of course the violence of peasant insurgency worried the deputies of
the National Assembly; to some it seemed as if the countryside were
being engulfed by anarchy that threatened all property. But the
majority was unwilling to turn against the rebellious peasants.
Instead of denouncing their violence, they tried to appease peasant
opinion. Liberal nobles and clergy began the session of August 4th
by renouncing their ancient feudal privileges. Within hours the
Assembly was propelled into decreeing “the abolition of feudalism”
as well as the church tithe, venality of office,regional privilege,
and fiscal privilege. A few days later, to besure, the Assembly
clarified the August 4th decree to assure that “legitimate”
seigneurial property rights were maintained. While personal feudal
servitudes such as hunting rights, seigneurial justice, and labour
services were suppressed outright, most seigneurial dues were to be
abolished only if the peasants paid compensation to their lords, set
at 20 to 25 times the annual value of the obligation. The vast
majority of peasants rejected that requirement by passive
resistance, until pressure built in 1792–93 for the complete
abolition of all seigneurial dues without compensation.
The abolition of feudalism was crucial to the evolution of a modern,
contractual notion of property and to the development of an
unimpeded market in land. But it did not directly affect the
ownership of land or the level of ordinaryrents and leases.
Seigneurs lost certain kinds of traditional income, but they
remained landowners and landlords. While all peasants gained in
dignity and status, only the landowning peasants came out
substantially ahead economically. Tenant farmers found that what
they had once paid for the tithe was added on to their rent. And
theAssembly did virtually nothing to assure better lease terms for
renters and sharecroppers, let alone their acquisition of the land
they tilled.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
The new regime
By sweeping away the old web of privileges, the August 4thdecree
permitted the Assembly to construct a new regime. Since it would
take months to draft a constitution, the Assembly on August 27
promulgated its basic principles in a Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen. A rallying point for the future, the
declaration also stood as the death certificate of the ancien
régime. The declaration's authors believed it to have universal
significance. “In the new hemisphere, the brave inhabitantsof
Philadelphia have given the example of a people who reestablished
their liberty,” conceded one deputy, but “France would give that
example to the rest of the world.” At the same time the declaration
responded to particular circumstances and was thus a calculated
mixture of general principles and specific concerns. Its concept of
natural rightsmeant that the Revolution would not be bound by
history and tradition but could reshape the contours of society
according to reason—a position vehemently denounced by Edmund Burke
in England.
The very first article of the declaration resoundingly challenged
Europe's old order by affirming that “men are born and remain free
and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common
utility.” Most of its articles concerned individual liberty, but the
declaration's emphasisfell equally on the prerogatives of the state
as expressed through law. (Considering how drastically the erstwhile
delegates to the Estates-General had exceeded their mandates, they
certainly needed to underscore the legitimacy of their new
government and its laws.) The declaration, and subsequent
revolutionary constitutions, channeled the sovereignty of the nation
into representative government, thereby negating claims by
parlements, provincial estates, or divine-right monarchs as well as
any conception of direct democracy. Though the declaration affirmed
the separation of powers, by making noprovision for a supreme court,
it effectively left the French legislature as the ultimate judge of
its own actions. The declaration defined liberty as “the ability to
do whatever does not harm another . . . whose limits can only be
determined by law.” The same limitation by positive law was attached
to specific liberties, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest,
freedom of expression, and freedom of religious conscience. The men
of 1789 believed deeply in these liberties, yet they did not
establish them in autonomous, absolute terms that would insure their
sanctity under any circumstances.
Restructuring France
From 1789 to 1791 the National Assembly acted as a constituent
assembly, drafting a constitution for the new regime while also
governing from day to day. The constitution established a limited
monarchy, with a clear separation of powers in which the king was to
name and dismiss his ministers. But sovereignty effectively resided
in the legislative branch, to consist of a single house, the
Legislative Assembly, elected by a system of indirect voting.(“The
people or the nation can have only one voice, that of the national
legislature,” wrote Sieyès. “The people can speak and act only
through its representatives.”) Besides failing to win a bicameral
system, the moderate Anglophile, or monarchien, faction lost a
bitter debate on the king's vetopower: the Assembly granted the king
only a suspensive or delaying veto over legislation; if a bill
passed the Legislative Assembly in three successive years, it would
become law even without royal approval.
Dismayed at what he deemed the ill-considered radicalism of such
decisions, Jean-Joseph Mounier, a leading patriot deputy in the
summer of 1789 and author of the Tennis Court Oath, resigned from
the Assembly in October. In a similar vein, some contemporary
historians (notably François Furet) have suggested that the
Assembly's integralconcept of national sovereignty and legislative
supremacy effectively reestablished absolutism in a new guise,
providing the new government with inherently unlimited powers. Nor,
they believe, is it surprising that the revolutionaries abused those
powers as their pursuit of utopian goals encountered resistance. In
theory this may well be true, but it must be balanced against the
actual institutions created to implement those powers and the spirit
in which they were used. With a few exceptions—notably the religious
issue—the National Assembly acted in a liberal spirit, more
pragmatic than utopian, and was decidedly more constructive than
repressive.
The revolutionaries took civil equality seriously but created a
limited definition of political rights. They effectively transferred
political power from the monarchy and the privileged estates to the
general body of propertiedcitizens. Nobles lost their privileges in
1789 and their titles in 1790, but as propertied individuals they
could readily join the new political elite. The constitution
restricted the franchise to “active” citizens who paid a minimal sum
in taxes, with higher property qualifications for eligibility for
public office (a direct tax payment equivalent to three days' wages
for voting and 10 days' wages for electors and officeholders). Under
this system about two-thirds of adult males had the right to vote
for electors and to choose certain local officials directly.
Although it favoured wealthier citizens, the system was vastly more
democratic than Britain's.
Predictably, the franchise did not extend to women, despite
delegations and pamphlets advocating women's rights. The Assembly
responded brusquely that, because women were too emotional and
easily misled, they must be kept out of public life and devote
themselves to their nurturing and maternal roles. But the formal
exclusion of women from politics did not keep them on the sidelines.
Women were active combatants in local conflicts that soon erupted
over religious policy, and they agitated over subsistence
issues—Parisian women, for example, made a mass march toVersailles
in October that forced the king to move back to the capital. In the
towns, they formed auxiliaries to local Jacobin clubs and even a
handful of independent women's clubs, participated in civic
festivals, and did public relief work.
The Assembly's design for local government and administration proved
to be one of the Revolution's most durable legacies. Obliterating
the political identity of France's historic provinces, the deputies
redivided the nation's territory into 83 départements of roughly
equal size. Unlike the old provinces, each department would
haveexactly the same institutions; departments were in turn
subdivided into districts, cantons, and communes (the common
designation for a village or town). On the one hand, this
administrative transformation promoted decentralization and local
autonomy: citizens of each department,district, and commune elected
their own local officials. On the other hand, these local
governments were subordinated to the national legislatureand
ministries in Paris. The departments therefore became instruments of
national uniformity and integration, which is to say,
centralization. This ambiguity the legislators fully appreciated,
assuming that a healthy equilibrium could be maintained between the
two tendencies. That the revolutionary government of 1793 and
Napoleon later used these structures to concentrate power from the
centrewas not something they could anticipate.
The new administrative map also created the parameters for judicial
reform. Sweeping away the entire judicial systemof the ancien
régime, the revolutionaries established a civil court in each
district and a criminal court in each department. At the grass roots
they replaced seigneurial justice with a justice of the peace in
each canton. Judges on all these tribunals were to be elected. While
rejecting the use of juries in civil cases, the Assembly decreed
that felonies would be tried by juries; if a jury convicted, judges
would merely apply the mandatory sentences set out in theAssembly's
tough new penal code of 1791. Criminal defendants also gained the
right to counsel, which had beendenied them under the jurisprudence
of the ancien régime.In civil law, the Assembly encouraged
arbitration and mediation to avoid the time-consuming and costly
processes of formal litigation. In general, the revolutionaries
hoped to make the administration of justice more accessible and
expeditious.
Guided by laissez-faire doctrine and its hostility to privileged
corporations, the Assembly sought to open up economic life to
unimpeded individual initiative and competition. Besides proclaiming
the right of all citizens to enter any trade and conduct it as they
saw fit, the Assemblydismantled internal tariffs and chartered
trading monopoliesand abolished the guilds of merchants and
artisans. Insisting that workers must bargain in the economic
marketplace as individuals, the Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 banned
workers' associations and strikes. The precepts of economic
individualism extended to rural life as well. In theory, peasants
and landlords were now free to cultivate their fields as they
wished, regardless of traditional collective routines and
constraints. In practice, however, communal restraints proved to be
deep-rooted andresistant to legal abolition.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
The new regime
Sale of national lands
The Assembly had not lost sight of the financial crisis that
precipitated the collapse of absolutism in the first place. Creating
an entirely new option for its solution, the Assembly voted to place
church property—about 10 percent of the land in France—“at the
disposition of the nation.” This property was designated as biens
nationaux, or national lands. The government then issued
large-denomination notes called assignats, underwritten
andguaranteed by the value of that land. It intended to sell off
national lands to the public, which would pay for it in assignats
that would then be retired. Thus church property would in effect pay
off the national debt and obviate the need for further loans.
Unfortunately the temptation to print additional assignats proved
too great. Within a year the assignat evolved into a paper currency
in small and large denominations, with sharp inflationary effects.
As the national lands went on sale, fiscal needs took priorityover
social policy. Sales were arranged in large lots and at auction in
the district capitals—procedures that favoured wealthier buyers.
True, for about a year in 1793–94, after émigré property was added
to the biens nationaux, large lots were divided into small parcels.
In addition, small peasants acquired some of this land through
resale by the original buyers. But overall the urban middle classes
and large-scale peasants emerged with the bulk of this land, to the
intense frustration of small peasants. The French historian Georges
Lefebvre's study of the Nord department, for example, found that
7,500 bourgeois purchased 48 percent of the land, while 20,300
peasants bought 52 percent. But the top 10 percent of these peasant
purchasers accounted for 60 percent of the peasants' total. Whatever
the social origins of the buyers, however, they were likely to be
reliable supporters of the Revolution if only to guarantee the
security of their new acquisitions.
Seeds of discord
Security could not be taken for granted, however, because the
Revolution progressively alienated or disappointed important
elements of French society. Among the elites, opposition began
almost immediately when some of the king's close relatives left the
country in disgust after July 14,thus becoming the first émigrés.
Each turning point in the Revolution touched off new waves of
emigration, especially among the nobility. By 1792 an estimated
two-thirds of the royal officer corps had resigned their commissions
and most had left the country. A contentious royalist press bitterly
denounced the policies of the Assembly as spoliation and the
revolutionary atmosphere as a form of anarchy. Abroad, widespread
enthusiasm for the events in France among the general public from
London to Vienna was matched by intense hostility in ruling circles,
fearful of revolutionary contagion within their own borders.
After the first months of solidarity, long-standing urban-rural
tensions took on new force. Though peasants might vote in large
numbers, the urban middle classes predictably emerged with the
lion's share of the new district and departmental offices after the
first elections of 1790. Administrative and judicial reform gave
these local officials more powers for intrusion into rural society
than royal officials ever had, with battalions of armed national
guards to back them up. Peasants might easily view urban
revolutionary elites as battening on political power and national
lands. And, while the Assembly made the tax system more uniform and
equitable, direct taxes remained heavy and in formerly privileged
regions actually rose, whilenothing was done to relieve the plight
of tenant farmers. Later, when the revolutionary government sought
to draft young men into the army, another grievance was added to the
list.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The destruction of the ancien régime
Seeds of discord
Religious tensions
But it was religious policy that most divided French society and
generated opposition to the Revolution. Most priests had initially
hoped that sweeping reform might return RomanCatholicism to its
basic ideals, shorn of aristocratic trappingsand superfluous
privileges, but they assumed that the church itself would
collaborate in the process. In the Assembly's view, however,
nationalization of church property gave the state responsibility for
regulating the church's temporal affairs, such as salaries,
jurisdictional boundaries, and modes of clerical appointment. On its
own authority the Assembly reduced the number of dioceses and
realigned their boundaries to coincide with the new departments,
while requesting local authorities to redraw parish boundaries in
conformity with population patterns. Under its Civil Constitution of
the Clergy (July 1790) bishops were to be elected by departmental
electoral assemblies, while parish priests were to be chosen by
electors in the districts. Clerical spokesmen deplored the notion of
lay authority in such matters and insisted that the Assembly must
negotiate reforms with a national church council.
In November 1790 the Assembly forced the issue by requiring all
sitting bishops and priests to take an oath of submission. Those who
refused would lose their posts, be pensioned off, and replaced by
the prescribed procedures. Throughout France a mere seven bishops
complied, while only 54 percent of the parish clergy took the oath.
Contrary to the Assembly's hopes, the clergy had split in two, with
“constitutional” priests on one side and “refractory” priests on the
other. Regional patterns accentuated this division: in the west of
France, where clerical density was unusually high, only 15 percent
of the clergy complied.
The schism quickly engulfed the laity. As refractories and
constitutionals vied for popular support against their rivals,
parishioners could not remain neutral. Intense local discord erupted
over the implementation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
District administrations backed by urban national guards intervened
to install “outsiders” chosen to replace familiar or even beloved
refractory priests in many parishes; villagers responded by
badgering or boycotting the hapless priests who took the oath.
Opinion on both sides tended to fateful extremes, linking either the
Revolution with impiety or the Roman Catholic church
withcounterrevolution.
Political tensions
The political life of the new regime was also proving more
contentious than the revolutionaries had anticipated. With courage
and consistency, the Assembly had provided that officials of all
kinds be elected. But it was uncertain whether these officials, once
the ballots were cast, could do their duty free from public pressure
and agitation. Nor was it clear what the role of “public opinion”
and the mechanisms for its expression would be. The spectacular
development of a free press and political clubs provided an answer.
Fearful that these extraparliamentary institutions could be abused
by demagogues, the Assembly tried to curbthem from time to time but
to no avail. Freed entirely from royal censorship, writers and
publishers rushed to satisfy the appetite for news and political
opinion. The first journalists included deputies reporting to their
constituentsby means of a newspaper. Paris, which had only four
quasi-official newspapers at the start of 1789, saw more than 130
new periodicals by the end of the year, most admittedly short-lived,
including 20 dailies. As the journalistJacques-Pierre Brissot put
it, newspapers are “the only way of educating a large nation
unaccustomed to freedom or to reading, yet looking to free itself
from ignorance.” Provincial publishers were as quick to found new
periodicals in the larger towns. Bordeaux, for example, had only one
newspaper in 1789, but 16 appeared within the next two years. While
some papers remained bland and politically neutral, many had strong
political opinions.
Like the National Assembly, revolutionary clubs also began at
Versailles, when patriot deputies rallied to a caucusof outspoken
Third Estate deputies from Brittany. This Breton Club, complete with
by-laws, minutes, committees, correspondence, and membership
requirements, began to call itself “The Society of the Friends of
the Constitution.” Soon it was known as the Jacobin Club, after the
Dominican convent where the club met when the assembly transferredto
Paris in October. Most prominent revolutionaries belonged to the
Jacobin Club, from constitutional royalists such as Mirabeau,
Lafayette, and Barnave to radicals like Brissot, Pétion, and
Robespierre. By mid-1791, however, moderates became uncomfortable at
the Jacobin Club, where Maximilien Robespierre was emerging as a
dominant figure.
The Jacobin Club was pushed from the left by the Cordeliers Club,
one of the neighbourhood clubs in the capital. The Cordeliers
militants rejected the Assembly's concept of representation as the
exclusive expression of popular sovereignty. They held to a more
direct vision of popular sovereignty as relentless vigilance and
participationby citizens through demonstrations, petitions,
deputations, and if necessary insurrection. In his newspaper L'Ami
du peuple (“The Friend of the People”) Jean-Paul Marat injected an
extreme rhetoric about alleged conspiracies and the need for
violence against counterrevolutionaries that exceeded anything heard
in the Assembly's political discourse.
Like the press, clubs quickly spread in the provinces. Building no
doubt on old-regime patterns of sociability—reading clubs,
Freemasonry, or confraternities—political clubs became a prime
vehicle for participation in the Revolution. More than 300 towns had
clubs by the end of 1790, and 900 by mid-1791. Later clubs spread to
the villages as well: a study has counted 5,000 localities that had
clubs at one time or another between 1790and 1795. Many clubs
affiliated with the Paris Jacobin Club, the “mother club,” in an
informal nationwide network. Most began with membership limited to
the middle class and a sprinkling of liberal nobles, but gradually
artisans, shopkeepers, and peasants joined the rolls. Initially the
clubs promoted civic education and publicized the Assembly's
reforms. But some became more activist, seeking to influence
political decisions with petitions, to exercise surveillance over
constituted authorities, and to denounce those they deemed remiss.
By 1791 the assembly found itself in a cross-fire between the
machinations of counterrevolutionaries—émigrés, royalist newspapers,
refractory clergy—and the denunciations of radicals. Its ability to
steer a stable course depended in part on the cooperation of the
king. Publicly Louis XVI distanced himself from his émigré
relatives, but privately he was in league with them and secretly
corresponded with the royal houses of Spain and Austria to enlist
their support. On June 21, 1791, the royal family attempted to flee
its “captivity” in the Tuileries Palace and escape across the
Belgian border. Rashly, Louis left behind a letter revealing his
utter hostility to the Revolution. At the last minute, however, the
king was recognized at the town of Varennes near the border, and the
royal party was forcibly returned to Paris.
A great crisis for the Revolution ensued. While the Assembly
reinforced the frontiers by calling for 100,000 volunteers from the
national guard, its moderate leaders hoped that this fiasco would
end Louis's opposition once and for all. In order to preserve their
constitutional compromise, they turned a blind eye to the king's
manifest treason by inventing the fiction that he had been
kidnapped. As Antoine Barnave put it: “Are we or are we not going to
terminate the Revolution? Or are we going to start it all over
again?” Outside the Assembly, however, Jacobins and Cordeliers
launched a petition campaign against reinstating the king. A mass
demonstration on July 17 at the Champ de Mars against the king ended
in a bloody riot, as the authorities called out the national guard
under Lafayette's command to disperse the demonstrators. This
precipitated vehement recriminations in the Jacobin Club, which
finally split apart under the pressure. The mass of moderate
deputies abandoned the club to a rump of radicals and formed a new
association called the Feuillant Club. Under the leadership of
Robespierre and Jérôme Pétion (who later became mortal enemies), the
purged Jacobin Club rallied most provincial clubs and emerged from
the crisis with a more unified, radical point of view. For the time
being, however, the moderates prevailed in the Assembly. They
completed the Constitution of 1791, and on the last day of September
1791 the National Assembly dissolved itself, having previously
decreed the ineligibility of its members for the new Legislative
Assembly.
When the newly elected Legislative Assembly convened in October, the
question of counterrevolution dominated itsproceedings. Jacobin
deputies like Brissot argued that only war against the émigré army
gathering at Coblenz across the Rhine could end the threat: “Do you
wish at one blow to destroy the aristocracy, the refractory priests,
and the malcontents: then destroy Coblenz.” Whereas the Feuillants
opposed this war fever, Lafayette saw a successful military campaign
as a way to gain power, while the king's circle believed that war
would bring military defeat to France and a restoration of royal
authority. On the other side, the Habsburg monarch, Leopold II, had
resisted the pleas of his sister Marie-Antoinette and opposed
intervention against France, but his death in March 1792 brought his
bellicose son Francis II to the throne and the stage was set for
war.
In April 1792 France went to war against a coalition of Austria,
Prussia, and the émigrés. Each camp expected rapidvictory, but both
were disappointed. The allies repulsed a French offensive and soon
invaded French territory. The Legislative Assembly called for a new
levy of 100,000 military volunteers, but, when it voted to
incarcerate refractory clergy, the king vetoed the decree. Though
manyFrenchmen remained respectful of the king, the most vocal
elements of public opinion denounced Louis and demonstrated against
him; but the Legislative Assembly refused to act. As Prussian forces
drove toward Paris, their commander, the Duke of Brunswick,
proclaimed his aim of restoring the full authority of the monarchy
and warned that any action against the king would bring down
“exemplary and memorable vengeance” against the capital. Far from
terrifying the Parisians, the Brunswick Manifesto enraged them and
drove them into decisive action.
Militants in the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government of
Paris set up by the capital's 48 wards or sections, gave the
Legislative Assembly a deadline in whichto suspend the king. When it
passed unheeded, they organized an insurrection. On Aug. 10, 1792, a
huge crowd of armed Parisians stormed the royal palace after a
fierce battle with the garrison. The Legislative Assembly then had
no choice but to declare the king suspended. That night more than
half the deputies themselves fled Paris, for theLegislative Assembly
too had lost its mandate. Those who remained ordered the election by
universal male suffrage ofa National Convention. It would judge the
king, draft a new republican constitution, and govern France during
the emergency. The Constitution of 1791 had lasted less than a year,
and the second revolution dreaded by the Feuillantshad begun.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The second revolution
The insurrection of Aug. 10, 1792, did not of course stop the
Prussian advance on the capital. As enthusiastic contingents of
volunteers left for the front, fear of counterrevolutionary plots
gripped the capital. Journalists like Jean-Paul Marat pointed to the
prisons bursting with vagrants and criminals as well as refractory
clergy and royalists and asked what would happen if traitors forced
open the jails and released these hordes of fanatics and brigands.
In response Parisians took the law into their own hands with an orgy
of mass lynching.
On their own initiative, citizens entered the prisons, set up
“popular tribunals” to hold perfunctory trials, and summarily
executed between 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners out of a total of 2,800,
stabbing and hacking them to death with any instruments at hand.
These prison massacres were no momentary fit of frenzy but went on
for four days. At the time no one in authority dared try to stop the
slaughter. Officials of the provisional government and the Paris
Commune “drew a veil” over this appalling event as it ran itscourse,
though soon political rivals were accusing each otherof instigating
the massacres. In a different vein, Robespierreamong others
concluded that popular demands for vengeance and terror had to be
channeled into legal forms; to prevent such anarchy, the state
itself must become the orderly instrument of the people's punitive
will.
The next two weeks brought this period of extreme uncertainty to a
close. On September 20 the French army turned back the invaders at
the Battle of Valmy, and in November at the Battle of Jemappes it
won control of the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium). On September
21 the National Convention convened, ending the vacuum of authority
that had followed the August 10 insurrection. Its first major task
was to decide the fate of the ex-king. The Convention's trial of
Louis became an educational experience for the French people in
which the institution of monarchy was to be completely desacralized.
Hard evidence of Louis's treason produced a unanimous guilty
verdict, but the issue of punishment divided the deputies sharply.
In a painstaking and solemn debate each deputy cast his vote
individually and explained it. At the endthe Convention voted the
death sentence, 387 to 334. A motion for reprieve was defeated (380
to 310), and one to submit the verdict to a national referendum was
rejected (425 to 286). This ill-considered proposal left the
impressionthat certain deputies were frantic to save the king's
life, andtheir Jacobin opponents were quick to raise vague
accusations of treasonous intent against them. In any event, the
former King Louis XVI, now known simply as “Citizen Capet,” was
executed on Jan. 21, 1793, in an act of immense symbolic importance.
For the deputies to the National Convention, now regicides, there
could be no turning back. Laws to deport the refractory clergy, to
bar the émigrés forever upon pain of death, and to confiscate their
property rounded out the Convention's program for eliminating the
Revolution's most determined enemies.
A republic in crisis
By the spring of 1793, however, the republic was beleaguered. In the
second round of the war, the coalition—now reinforced by Spain,
Piedmont, and Britain—routed French forces in the Austrian
Netherlands and the Rhineland and breached the Pyrenees. Fighting on
five different fronts and bereft of effective leadership, French
armies seemed to be losing everywhere. Even General Charles-François
Dumouriez, the hero of the first Netherlands campaign, had gone over
to the enemy in April after quarreling with the Convention.
Meanwhile, civil war had broken out within France. Rural
disaffection in western France, especially over the religious
question referred to earlier, had been building steadily, leaving
republicans in the region's cities and small towns an unpopular and
vulnerable minority. Rural rage finally erupted into armed rebellion
when in March 1793 the Convention decreed that each department must
produce a quota of citizens for the army. In four departments south
of the Loire River the Vendée rebellion began with assaults on the
towns and the massacre of patriots. Gradually royalist nobles
assumed theleadership of the peasants and weavers who had risen on
their own initiative. Forging them into a “Catholic and Royalist
Army,” they hoped to overthrow the republic and restore the
Bourbons.
The Convention could take no comfort from the economic situation
either. An accelerating depreciation of the assignats compounded
severe shortages of grain and flour in1793. Inflation, scarcity, and
hoarding made life unbearable for the urban masses and hampered
efforts to provision therepublic's armies. In reaction to such
economic hardships and to the advance of antirepublican forces at
the frontiers and within France, Parisian radicals clamoured
relentlessly for decisive action such as price controls and the
repressionof counterrevolutionaries.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
Girondins and Montagnards
The Convention, however, was bitterly divided almost to the point of
paralysis. From the opening day, two outspokengroups of deputies
vied for the support of their less factional colleagues. The roots
of this rivalry lay in a conflictbetween Robespierre and Brissot for
leadership of the Jacobin Club in the spring and summer of 1792. At
that time Robespierre had argued almost alone against the war that
Brissot passionately advocated. Later, when the war went badly and
the Brissotins, anxious to wield executive power, acted equivocally
in their relations with the king, the Jacobins turned on them.
Brissot was formally expelled fromthe club in October, but his
expulsion merely formalized a division that had already crystallized
during the elections tothe Convention in the previous month.
The Paris electoral assembly sent Robespierre, Marat,
Georges-Jacques Danton, and other stalwarts of the Paris Commune and
the Jacobin Club to the Convention, while systematically rejecting
Brissot and his allies such as the former mayor of Paris, Pétion.
The Parisian deputies and their provincial supporters, numbering
between 200 and 300 (depending on which historian's taxonomy one
accepts),took seats on the Convention's upper benches and came to be
known as the Montagnards, or the Mountain.
Supported by a network of journalists and by politicians suchas
Interior Minister Jean-Marie Roland, however, the Brissotins
retained their popularity in the provinces and were returned as
deputies by other departments. In the Convention the Brissotin group
included most deputies fromthe department of the Gironde, and the
group came to be known by their opponents as the Girondins. The
inner core of this loose faction, who often socialized in
Jeanne-Marie Roland's salon, numbered about 60, and with their
supporters perhaps 150 to 175.
At bottom the Girondin-Montagnard conflict stemmed from a clash of
personalities and ambitions. Over the years, historians have made
the case for each side by arguing that their opponents constituted
the truly aggressive or obstructive minority seeking to dominate the
Convention. Clearly most deputies were put off by the bitter
personal attacks that regularly intruded on their deliberations. The
two factions differed most over the role of Paris and the best way
to deal with popular demands. Though of similar middle-class
background as their rivals, the Montagnards sympathized more readily
with the sansculottes (the local activists) of the capital and
proved temperamentally bolder in their response to economic,
military, and political problems. United by an extreme hostility to
Parisian militance, the Girondins never forgave the Paris Commune
for its inquisitorial activity after August 10. Indeed, some
Girondins did not feel physically secure in the capital. Theyalso
appeared more committed to political and economic liberties and
therefore less willing to adopt extreme revolutionary measures no
matter how dire the circumstances. Ready to set aside similar
constitutional scruples, the Montagnards tailored their policies to
the imperatives of “revolutionary necessity” and unity.
While the Girondins repeatedly attacked Parisian militants—at one
point demanding the dissolution of the Paris Commune and the arrest
of its leaders—the Montagnards gradually forged an informal alliance
with the sansculottes. Similarly, the Montagnards supported deputies
sent on mission to the departments when they clashed with locally
elected officials, while the Girondins tended to back the officials.
The Montagnards therefore alienated many moderate republicans in the
provinces. As deputies of the centre, or “Plain,” such as Bertrand
Barère, vainly tried to mediate between the two sides, the
convention navigated through this factionalism as best it could and
improvised new responses to the crisis: a revolutionary tribunal to
try political crimes; local surveillance committees to seek out
subversives; and a Committee of Public Safety to coordinate measures
of revolutionary defense. By the end of May 1793 a majority seemed
ready to support the Mountain.
Believing that the Girondins had betrayed and endangered the
republic, the Paris sections (with the connivance of theMontagnards
and the Paris Jacobin Club) demanded in petitions that the
Convention expel the “perfidious deputies.” On May 31 they mounted a
mass demonstration and on June 2 forced a showdown by deploying
armed national guards around the convention's hall. Backed by a huge
crowd of unarmed men and women, their solid phalanxof fixed bayonets
made it impossible for the deputies to leave without risking serious
violence. Inside, the Montagnards applauded this insurrection as an
expression of popular sovereignty, akin to that of July 14 or August
10. When the people thus spoke directly, they argued, its deputies
had no choice but to comply. Centrists did everything they could to
avoid a purge but in the end decided that only this fateful act
could preserve the Revolution's unity. Barère composed a report to
the French people justifying the expulsion of 29 Girondins. Later
120 deputies who signed a protest against the purge were themselves
suspended from the Convention, and in October the original Girondins
stood trial before the revolutionary tribunal, which sentenced them
to death. The Montagnard ascendancy had begun.
Though the deadlock in the Convention was now broken, the balance of
forces in the country was by no means clear. The Parisian
sansculottes might well continue to intimidate the convention and
emerge as the dominant partner in their alliance with the
Montagnards—just as Girondin orators had warned. Conversely,
provincial opinion might rebel against this mutilation of the
National Convention by Paris and its Montagnard partisans. Purged of
the Girondins,the Convention itself could reach consensus more
readily, but the nation as a whole was more divided than ever.
At first it seemed as if the expulsion of the Girondins would indeed
backfire. More than half of the departmental directories protested
against the Convention's purge. But, faced with the pleas for unity
and the threats from the Convention, most of this opposition
subsided quickly. Only 13 departments continued their defiant
stance, and only 6 of these passed into overt armed rebellion
against the Convention's authority. Still, this was a serious threat
in a country already beleaguered by civil war and military
reversals. The Jacobins stigmatized this new opposition as the
heresy of federalism—implying that the “federalists” no longer
believed in a unified republic. Jacobin propaganda depicted the
federalists as counterrevolutionaries. In fact, most were moderate
republicans hostile to the royalists andcommitted to constitutional
liberties. They did not intend to overthrow the republic or separate
from it. Rather they hoped to wrest power back from what they deemed
the tyrannical alliance of Montagnards and Parisian sansculottes.
In Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, and Bordeaux, bitter conflicts between
local moderates and Jacobins contributed decisively to the
rebellion. Uprisings in Lyon and Marseille (France's second- and
third-largest cities) began in late May when moderates seized power
from local Jacobin authorities who had threatened their lives and
property—Jacobins like the firebrand Marie-Joseph Chalier in Lyon
who was supported by Montagnard representatives-on-mission. The
expulsion of the Girondins was merely the last straw. Whatever its
causes, however, “federalist” rebellion did threaten national unity
and the Convention's sovereign authority. Royalists, moreover, did
gain control of the movement in Toulon and opened that port to the
British. Holding out no offer of negotiation, the Convention
organized military force to crush the rebellions and promised the
leaders exemplary punishment. “Lyon has made war against liberty,”
declared the Convention; “Lyon no longer exists.” When the
republic's forces recaptured the city in October, they changed its
name to “Liberated City,” demolished the houses of the wealthy, and
summarily executed more than 2,000 Lyonnais, including many wealthy
merchants.
The Reign of Terror
After their victory in expelling the Girondins, Parisian militants
“regenerated” their own sectional assemblies by purging local
moderates, while radicals like Jacques-René Hébert and Pierre-Gaspard
Chaumette tightened their grip on the Paris Commune. On Sept. 5,
1793, they mounted another mass demonstration to demand that the
Convention assure food at affordable prices and “place terror on the
order of the day.” Led by its Committee of Public Safety, the
Convention placated the popular movement with decisive actions. It
proclaimed the need for terror against the Revolution's enemies,
made economic crimes such as hoarding into capital offenses, and
decreed a system of price and wage controls known as the maximum.
The Law of Suspects empowered local revolutionary committees to
arrest “those who by their conduct, relations or language spoken or
written, have shown themselves partisans of tyranny or federalism
and enemies of liberty.” In1793–94 well over 200,000 citizens were
detained under this law; though most of them never stood trial, they
languished in pestiferous jails, where an estimated 10,000 perished.
About 17,000 death sentences were handed down by the military
commissions and revolutionary tribunals of the Terror, 72 percent
for charges of armed rebellion in the two major zones of civil
war—the federalist southeast and the western Vendée region.
One-third of the departments, however, had fewer than 10 death
sentences passed on their inhabitants and were relatively tranquil.
To help police the maximum and requisition grain in the countryside,
as well as to carry out arrest warrants and guardpolitical
prisoners, the Convention authorized local authorities to create
paramilitary forces. About 50 such armées révolutionnaires came into
being as ambulatory instruments of the Terror in the provinces.
Fraternizing withpeasants and artisans in the hinterland, these
forces helped raise revolutionary enthusiasm but ultimately left
such village sansculottes vulnerable to the wrath of the wealthy
citizens whom they harassed.
Back in June the Convention had quickly drafted a new democratic
constitution, incorporating such popular demands as universal male
suffrage, the right to subsistence, and the right to free public
education. In a referendum this Jacobin constitution of 1793 was
approved virtually without dissent by about two million voters.
Because of the emergency, however, the Convention placed the new
constitution on the shelf in October and declared that “the
provisional government of France is revolutionary until the peace.”
There would be no elections, no local autonomy, no guarantees of
individual liberties for the duration of the emergency. The
Conventionwould rule with a sovereignty more absolute than the old
monarchy had ever claimed. Nor would serious popular protest be
tolerated any longer, now that the Jacobins had used such
intervention to secure power. The balance in the alliance between
Montagnards and sansculottes gradually shifted from the streets of
Paris to the halls and committee rooms of the Convention.
From the beginning a popular terrorist mentality had helped shape
the Revolution. Peasants and townspeople alike had been galvanized
by fear and rage over “aristocratic plots” in 1789. Lynchings of
“enemies of the people” punctuated the Revolution, culminating in
the September massacres, which reflected an extreme fear of betrayal
and an unbridled punitive will. Now the Revolution's leaders were
preempting this punitive will in order to control it: they conceived
of terror as rational rather than emotional and as organized rather
than instinctive. Paradoxically they were trying to render terror
lawful—legality being an article of faith among most
revolutionaries—but without the procedural safeguards that
accompanied the regular criminal code of 1791.
For the more pragmatic Montagnards that deviation was justified by
the unparalleled emergency situation confronting France in 1793:
before the benefits of the Revolution could be enjoyed, they must be
secured against their enemies by force. (“Terror is nothing other
than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible . . . . Is force made only
to protect crime?” declared Robespierre.) For the more ideologically
exalted Jacobins like Robespierre and Saint-Just, however, the
terror would also regenerate the nation by promoting equality and
the public interest. In their minds a link existed between terror
and virtue: “virtue,without which terror is fatal; terror, without
which virtue is powerless.” Whoever could claim to speak for the
interests of the people held the mantle of virtue and the power of
revolutionary terror.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The Jacobin dictatorship
The Convention consolidated its revolutionary government in the Law
of 14 Frimaire Year II (Dec. 4, 1793; for a discussion of the
Revolutionary calendar, see below). To organize the Revolution, to
promote confidenceand compliance, efficiency and control, this law
centralized authority in a parliamentary dictatorship, with the
Committee of Public Safety at the helm. The committee already
controlled military policy and patronage; henceforthlocal
administrators (renamed national agents), tribunals, and
revolutionary committees also came under its scrutiny and control.
The network of Jacobin clubs was enlisted to monitor local
officials, nominate new appointees,and in general to serve as
“arsenals of public opinion.”
Opposed to “ultrarevolutionary” behaviour and uncoordinated actions
even by its own deputies-on-mission, the committee tried to stop the
dechristianization campaigns that had erupted during the anarchic
phase of the Terror in the fall of 1793. Usually instigated by
radical deputies, the dechristianizers vandalized churches or closed
them down altogether, intimidated constitutional priests into
resigning their vocation, and often pressured them into marrying to
demonstrate the sincerity of their conversion. Favouring a diestic
form of civil religion, Robespierre implied that the atheism
displayed by some dechristianizers was a variant of
counterrevolution. He insisted that citizens must be left free to
practice the Roman Catholic religion, though for the time being most
priests were not holding services.
The committee also felt strong enough a few months later tocurb the
activism of the Paris sections, dissolve the armées révolutionnaires,
and purge the Paris Commune—ironically what the Girondins had hoped
to do months before. But in this atmosphere no serious dissent to
official policy was tolerated. The once vibrant free press hadbeen
muzzled after the purge of the Girondins. In March 1794 Hébert and
other “ultrarevolutionaries” were arrested, sent to the
revolutionary tribunal, and guillotined. A month later Danton and
other so-called “indulgents” met the same fate for seeking to end
the Terror—prematurely inthe eyes of the committee. Then the
Convention passed the infamous law of 22 Prairial Year II (June 10,
1794) to streamline revolutionary justice, denying the accused any
effective right to self-defense and eliminating all sentences other
than acquittal or death. Indictments by the public prosecutor, now
virtually tantamount to a death sentence, multiplied rapidly.
The Terror was being escalated just when danger no longer threatened
the republic—after French armies had prevailed against Austria at
the decisive Battle of Fleurus on June 26 and long after rebel
forces in the Vendée, Lyon, and elsewhere had been vanquished. By
June 1794 the Jacobin dictatorship had forged an effective
government andhad mobilized the nation's resources, thereby
mastering the crisis that had brought it into being. Yet, on 8
Thermidor, Robespierre took the rostrum to proclaim his own probity
and to denounce yet another unnamed group as traitors hatching “a
conspiracy against liberty.” Robespierre had clearly lost his grip
on reality in his obsession with national unity and virtue. An
awkward coalition of moderates, Jacobin pragmatists, rival deputies,
and extremists who rightly felt threatened by the Incorruptible (as
he was known) finally combined to topple Robespierre and his closest
followers. On 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) the Convention ordered the
arrest of Robespierre and Saint-Just, and, after a failed resistance
by loyalists in the Paris Commune, they were guillotined without
trial the following day. The Terror was over.
The Army of the Republic
The Jacobin dictatorship had been an unstable blend of exalted
patriotism, resolute political leadership, ideological fanaticism,
and populist initiatives. The rhetoric and symbolism of democracy
constituted a new civic pedagogy, matched by bold egalitarian
policies. The army was a primary focal point of this democratic
impetus. Back in 1790 the National Assembly had opted for a small
military of long-term professionals. One-year volunteers bolstered
the line army after the outbreak of war, and in March 1793 the
convention called for an additional 300,000 soldiers, with quotas to
be provided by each department. Finally, in August1793 it decreed
the lévee en masse—a “requisition” of all able-bodied, unmarried men
between the ages of 18 and 25. Despite massive draft evasion and
desertion, within a year almost three-quarters of a million men were
under arms, the citizen-soldiers merged with line-army troops in new
units called demibrigades. This huge popular mobilization reinforced
the revolution's militant spirit. The citizen-soldiers risking their
lives at the front had to be supported by any and all means back
home, including forced loans on the rich and punitive vigilance
against those suspected of disloyalty.
Within the constraints of military discipline, the army became a
model of democratic practice. Both noncommissioned and commissioned
officers were chosen by a combination of election and appointment,
in which seniority received some consideration, but demonstrated
talent on the battlefield brought the most rapid promotion. The
republic insisted that officers be respectful toward their men and
share their privations. Jacobin military prosecutors enforced the
laws against insubordination and desertion but took great pains to
explain them to the soldiers and to make allowances for momentary
weakness indeciding cases. Soldiers received revolutionary
newspapers and sang revolutionary songs, exalting the
citizen-soldier as the model sansculotte. Meanwhile, needy parents,
wives, or dependents of soldiers at the front received subsidies,
while common soldiers seriously wounded in action earned extremely
generous veterans' benefits.
The Revolution's egalitarian promise never involved an assault on
private property, but its concept of “social limitations” on
property made it possible for the Conventionto abolish all
seigneurial dues without compensation, abolish slavery in the
colonies (where slave rebellions had already achieved that result in
practice), endorse the idea ofprogressive taxation, and temporarily
regulate the economyin favour of consumers. In 1793–94 the
Convention enacted an unprecedented national system of public
assistance entitlements, with one program allocating small pensions
to poor families with dependent children and another providing
pensions to aged and indigent farm workers, artisans, and rural
widows—the neediest of the needy. “We must put an end to the
servitude of the most basic needs, the slavery ofmisery, that most
hideous of inequalities,” declared Bertrand Barère of the Committee
of Public Safety. The Convention also implemented the Revolution's
long-standing commitment to primary education with a system of free
public primary schooling for both boys and girls. The Lakanal Law of
November 1794 authorized public schools in every commune with more
than 1,000 inhabitants, the teachers to be selected by examination
and paid fixed salaries by the government.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The Thermidorian reaction
With control passing from the Montagnards after Robespierre's fall,
moderates in the convention hoped to put the Terror and sansculotte
militance behind them while standing fast against counterrevolution
and rallying all patriots around the original principles of the
Revolution. But far from stabilizing the Revolution, the fall of
“the tyrant” on 9 Thermidor set in motion a brutal struggle for
power. Those who had suffered under the Terror now clamoured for
retribution, and moderation quickly gave way to reaction. As
federalists were released, Jacobins were arrested; as the suspended
Girondins were reinstated, Montagnards were purged; as moderates
could feel safe, Jacobins and sansculottes were threatened. Like the
Terror, the Thermidorian reaction had an uncontrollable momentum of
its own. Antiterrorism—in the press, the theatre, the
streets—degenerated into a “white terror” against the men of the
Year II. In the south, especially in Provence and the Rhône valley,
the frontier between private feuds and political reaction blurred as
law and order broke down. Accounts were settled by lynchings, murder
gangs, and prison massacres of arrested sansculottes.
Alongside this political reaction, Thermidor set off a new economic
and monetary crisis. Committed to free-trade principles, the
Thermidorians dismantled the economic regulation and price controls
of the Year II, along with the apparatus of the Terror that had put
teeth into that system. The depreciation of the assignats, which the
Terror had halted, quickly resumed. By 1795 the cities were
desperately short of grain and flour, while meat, fuel, dairy
products, and soap were entirely beyond the reach of ordinary
consumers. By the spring of 1795 scarcity was turning into famine
for working people of the capital and other cities. Surviving cadres
of sansculottes in the Paris sections mobilized to halt the reaction
and the economic catastrophe it had unleashed. After trying
petitions and demonstrations, a crowd of sansculottes invaded the
Convention on 1 Prairial Year III (May 20, 1795) in what was to
prove the last popular uprising of the French Revolution. “Bread is
the goal of their insurrection, physically speaking,” reported a
police observer, “but the Constitution of 1793 is its soul.” This
rear-guard rebellion of despair was doomed to fail, despite the
support of a few remaining Montagnard deputies, whose fraternization
with the demonstrators was to cost them their lives after the
insurgents were routed the following day.
Instead of implementing the democratic Constitution of 1793, the
Thermidorian Convention was preparing a new, more conservative
charter. Anti-Jacobin and antiroyalist, theThermidorians clung to
the elusive centre of the political spectrum. Their constitution of
1795 (Year III) established a liberal republic with a franchise
based on the payment of taxes similar to that of 1791, a two-house
legislature to slow down the legislative process, and a five-man
executive Directory to be chosen by the legislature. Within a
liberal framework, the central government retained great power,
including emergency powers to curb freedom of the press and freedom
of association. Departmental and municipal administrators were to be
elected but could be removed by the Directory, and commissioners
appointed by the Directory were to monitor them and report on their
compliance with the laws.
The Directory
The new regime, referred to as the Directory, began auspiciously in
October 1795 with a successful constitutional plebiscite and a
general amnesty for political prisoners. But as one of its final
acts the Convention added the “Two-thirds Decree” to the package,
requiring for the sake of continuity that two-thirds of its deputies
must sit by right in the new legislature regardless of voting in the
departments. This outraged conservatives and royalists hoping to
regain power legally, but their armed uprising in Paris was easily
suppressed by the army. The Directory also weathered a conspiracy on
the far left by a cabal of unreconciled militants organized around a
program of communistic equality and revolutionary dictatorship. The
Babeuf plot was exposed in May 1796 by a police spy, and a lengthy
trial ensued in which François-Noël (“Gracchus”) Babeuf, the
self-styled “Tribune of the People,” was sentenced to death.
Apart from these conspiracies, the political life of the Directory
revolved around annual elections to replace one-third of the
deputies and local administrators. The spirit of the “Two-thirds
Decree” haunted this process, however, since the directors believed
that stability required their continuation in power and the
exclusion of royalists or Jacobins. The Directory would tolerate no
organized opposition. During or immediately after each election, the
government in effect violated the constitution in order to save it,
whenever the right or the left seemed to be gaining ground.
As a legacy of the nation's revolutionary upheavals, elections under
the Directory displayed an unhealthy combination of massive apathy
and rancorous partisanship by small minorities. When the elections
of 1797 produced a royalist resurgence, the government responded
with the coup of Fructidor Year V (September 1797), ousting two of
the current directors, arresting leading royalist politicians,
annulling the elections in 49 departments, shutting down the
royalist press, and resuming the vigorous pursuit of returned
émigrés and refractory clergy. This heartened the Neo-Jacobins, who
organized new clubs called “constitutional circles” to emphasize
their adherence to the regime. But this independent political
activism on the left raised the spectre of 1793 for the Directory,
and in turn it closed down the Neo-Jacobin clubs and newspapers,
warned citizens against voting for “anarchists” in the elections of
1798, and promoted schisms in electoral assemblies when voters
spurned this advice. When democrats (or Neo-Jacobins) prevailed
nonetheless, the Directory organized another purge in the coup of
Floréal Year VI (May 1798) by annulling all or some elections in 29
departments. Ambivalent and faint-hearted in its republican
commitment, the Directory was eroding political liberty from within.
But as long as the Constitution of 1795 endured,it remained possible
that political liberty and free elections might one day take root.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The First French Republic
The Directory
Sister republics
Meanwhile the Directory regime successfully exported revolution
abroad by helping to create “sister republics” inwestern Europe.
During the Revolution's most radical phase, in 1793–94, French
expansion had stopped more or less at the nation's self-proclaimed
“natural frontiers”—the Rhine, Alps, and Pyrenees. The Austrian
Netherlands (now Belgium) and the left bank of the Rhine had been
major battlefields in the war against the coalition,and French
victories in those sectors were followed by military occupation,
requisitions, and taxation, but also by the abolition of feudalism
and similar reforms. In 1795 both areas were annexed to France, and
their territories were divided into departments, which would
henceforth be treatedlike other French departments.
Strategic considerations and French national interest were the main
engines of French foreign policy in the revolutionary decade but not
the only ones. Elsewhere in Europe native patriots invited French
support against theirown ruling princes or oligarchies. As the
historian R.R. Palmer has argued, Europe was divided not simply by a
conflict between Revolutionary France and other states but by
conflicts within various states between revolutionary or democratic
forces and conservative or traditional forces. Indeed, abortive
revolutionary movements had already occurred in the Austrian
Netherlands and in the United Provinces (Dutch Netherlands). The
ideals of liberty, equality, or popular sovereignty knew no borders.
By 1797 Prussia and Spain had made peace with France, but Austria
and Britain continued the struggle. In a new strategy the French
launched an attack across the Alps aimed at Habsburg Lombardy, from
which they hoped to drive north toward Vienna. Commanded by General
Napoleon Bonaparte, this campaign succeeded beyond expectations. In
the process northern Italy was liberated from Austria, andthe
Habsburgs were driven to the peace table, where they signed the
Treaty of Campo Formio on Oct. 17, 1797. An invasion of the
Netherlands, home base of British forces on the Continent, produced
a similar victory. In short order two “sister republics” were
proclaimed by native revolutionaries under French protection—the
Cisalpine Republic in northern Italy and the Batavian Republic
(formerly the Dutch Netherlands). These were later joined by the
Helvetic Republic in Switzerland, and twovery shaky republics—the
Roman Republic in central Italy and the Parthenopean Republic in the
south around Naples.All these republics were exploited financially
by the French, but then again their survival depended on the costly
presence of French troops. The French interfered in their internal
politics, but this was no more than the Directory was doing at home.
Because these republics could not defend themselves in isolation,
they acted as sponges on French resources as much as they provided
treasure or other benefits to France. France's extended lines of
occupation made it extremely vulnerable to attack when Britain
organized a second coalition in 1798 that included Russia and
Austria. But, when the battles were over, Switzerland, northern
Italy, and the Netherlands remained inthe French sphere of
influence.
The treasure coming from the sister republics was desperately needed
in Paris since French finances were in total disarray. The collapse
of the assignats and the hyperinflation of 1795–96 not only
destroyed such social programs as public assistance pensions and
free public schooling but also strained the regime's capacity to
keep its basic institutions running. In 1797 the government finally
engineered a painful return to hard currency and in effect wrote
down the accumulated national debt by two-thirds of its value in
exchange for guaranteeing the integrity of the remaining third.
Alienation and coups
After the Fructidor coup of 1797 the Directory imprudently resumed
the republic's assault on the Roman Catholic religion. Besides
prohibiting the outward signs of Catholicism such as the ringing of
church bells or the display of crosses, the government revived the
Revolutionary calendar. Instituted in 1793, the new calendar
featured a 10-day week called the décade , designed to swallow up
the Christian Sunday in a new cycle of work and recreation. While it
had fallen into disuse after the Thermidorian reaction, the
Directory ordered in 1798 that the décadi be treated as the official
day of rest for workers and businesses as well as public employees
and schoolchildren. Forbidding organized recreation on Sundays, the
regime also pressured Catholic priests to celebrate mass on the
décadi rather than on ex-Sundays. This aggressive confrontation with
the habits and beliefs of mostFrench citizens sapped whatever shreds
of popularity the regime still had.
French citizens were already alienated by the Directory's foreign
policy and its new conscription law. Conscription became a permanent
obligation of young men between the ages of 20 and 25 under the Loi
Jourdan of Sept. 5, 1798. To fight the War of the Second Coalition
that began in 1799, the Directory mobilized three “classes,” or age
cohorts, of young men but encountered massive draft resistance and
desertion in many regions. Meanwhile, retreating armies in the field
lacked rations and supplies because, it was alleged,corrupt military
contractors operated in collusion with government officials. This
war crisis prompted the legislature to oust four of the directors
(the Prairial coup of June 18, 1799) and allowed a brief resurgence
of Neo-Jacobinagitation for drastic emergency measures.
In reality the balance of power was swinging toward a group of
disaffected conservatives. Led by Sieyès, one of the new directors,
these “revisionists” wished to escape from the instability of the
Directory regime, especially its tumultuous annual elections and its
cumbersome separation of powers. They wanted a more reliable
structure of political power, which would allow the new elite to
govern securely and thereby guarantee the basic reforms and property
rights of 1789. Ironically, the Neo-Jacobins, or democrats, stood as
the constitution's most ardent defenders against the maneuvers of
these “oligarchs.”
Using mendacious allegations about Neo-Jacobin plots as a cover, the
revisionists prepared a parliamentary coup to jettison the
constitution. To provide the necessary military insurance, the
plotters sought a leading general. Though he was not their first
choice, they eventually enlisted Napoleon Bonaparte—recently
returned from his Egyptian campaign, about whose disasters the
public knew almost nothing. Given a central role in the coup, which
occurred on the 18th Brumaire Year VIII (Nov. 9, 1799), General
Bonaparte addressed the legislature, and when some deputies balked
at his call for scrapping the constitution, histroopers cleared the
hall. A rump of each house then convened to draft a new
constitution, and during these deliberations Bonaparte shouldered
aside Sieyès and emerged as the dominant figure in the new regime.
Brumaire was not really a military coup and did not at first produce
a dictatorship. It was a parliamentary coup to createa new
constitution and was welcomed by people of differing opinions who
saw in it what they wished to see. The image of an energetic
military hero impatient with the abuses of the past must have seemed
reassuring.
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Encyclopædia Britannica
Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The Napoleonic era
The Consulate
The “revisionists” who engineered the Brumaire coup intended to
create a strong, elitist government that would curb the republic's
political turmoil and guarantee the conquests of 1789. They had in
mind what might be called a senatorial oligarchy rather than a
personal dictatorship. General Bonaparte, however, advocated a more
drastic concentration of power. Within days of the coup, Bonaparte
emerged as the dominant figure, an insistent and persuasive presence
who inspired confidence. Clearly outmaneuvered, Sieyès soon withdrew
from the scene, taking with him his complex notions of checks and
balances. While the regime, known as the Consulate, maintained a
republican form, Bonaparte became from its inception a new kind of
authoritarian leader.
Approved almost unanimously in a plebiscite by three million votes
(of which half may have been manufactured out of thin air), the
Constitution of the Year VIII created an executive consisting of
three consuls, but the First Consul wielded all real power. That
office was of course vested in Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1802, after a
string of military and diplomatic victories, another plebiscite
endowed him with the position for life. By 1804 Bonaparte's grip on
power was complete, and belief in his indispensability was pervasive
in the governing class. In April 1804 various government bodies
agreed “that Napoleon Bonaparte be declared Emperor and that the
imperial dignity be declared hereditary in his family.” The
Constitution of the Year XII (May 1804) establishing the empire was
approved in a plebiscite by more than 3,500,000 votes against about
8,000. (After this point General Bonaparte was known officially as
Napoleon.)
The Constitution of 1791, the Convention, and the Directory alike
had been organized around representation and legislative supremacy,
the fundamental political principles first proclaimed in June 1789
by the National Assembly. This tradition came to an end with the
Consulate. Its new bicameral legislature lost the power to initiate
legislation; now the executive branch drafted new laws. Onehouse
(the Tribunate) debated such proposals, either endorsed or opposed
them, and then sent deputies to present its opinion to the other
house, the Legislative Corps(Corps Législatif), which also heard
from government spokesmen. Without the right to debate, the
Legislative Corps then voted on whether to enact the bill. Even
these limited powers were rarely used independently, since both
houses were appointed in the first instance by the government and
later renewed by cooption. When certain tribunes such as Benjamin
Constant did manifest a critical spirit, they were eventually
purged, and in 1807 the Tribunate was suppressed altogether. On the
whole, then, the legislative branch of government became little more
than a rubber stamp.
After Brumaire, Sieyès had envisaged an independent institution
called the Senate to conserve the constitution by interpreting it in
the light of changing circumstances. In practice, the Senate became
the handmaiden of Bonaparte's expanding authority, sanctioning
changes such as the life consulship, the purge of the Tribunate, and
Napoleon's elevation to the rank of hereditary emperor. For creating
“legislation above the laws” at Bonaparte's behest,its 80 handpicked
members were opulently rewarded with money and honours. As power
shifted decisively to the executive branch, Bonaparte enlisted a new
institution called the Council of State to formulate policy, draft
legislation, and supervise the ministries. Appointed by the First
Consul, this body of experienced jurists and legislators was drawn
from across the former political spectrum. Talentand loyalty to the
new government were the relevant criteria for these coveted posts.
The Consulate did not entirely eliminate the electoral principle
from the new regime, but voters were left with no real power, and
elections became an elaborate charade. Citizens voted only for
electoral colleges, which in turn created lists of candidates from
which the government might fill occasional vacancies in the
Legislature or Senate. In the event, the primary assemblies of
voters were rarely convened, and membership in the electoral
colleges became a kind of honorific lifetime position. The judiciary
too lost its elective status. In the hope of creating a more
professional and compliant judiciary, the Consulate's sweeping
judicial reform provided for lifetime appointments of judges—which
did not prevent Napoleon from purging thejudiciary in 1808. Napoleon
was also disposed to eliminate criminal juries as well, but the
Council of State prevailed on him to maintain them.
Successive Revolutionary regimes had always balanced local elections
with central control, but the Consulate destroyed that balance
completely. The Local Government Act of February 1800 eliminated
elections for local office entirely and organized local
administration from the top down. To run each department, the
Consulate appointed a prefect, reminiscent of the old royal
intendants, who was assisted by subprefects on the level of the
arrondissements (subdistricts of the departments) and by appointed
mayors in each commune. The original Revolutionary commitment to
local autonomy gave way before the rival principles of
centralization and uniformity. The prefect became the cornerstone of
the Napoleonic dictatorship, supervising local government at all
levels, keeping careful watch over his department's “public spirit,”
and above all assuring that taxes and conscripts flowed in smoothly.
While even the most trivial local matter had to be referred to the
prefect, all major decisions taken by the prefect had in turn to be
sanctioned by the interior ministry in Paris.
Loss of political freedom
Politics during the Directory had been marked by an unwholesome
combination of ferocious partisanship and massive apathy. Weary of
political turmoil and disillusioned by politicians of all kinds,
most Frenchmen now accepted the disappearance of political freedom
and participation with equanimity. The few who still cared
passionately enough to resist collided with the apparatus of a
police state. A regime that entirely avoided genuine elections would
scarcely permit open political dissent. Where the Directory had been
ambivalent about freedom of association, for example, the Consulate
simply banned political clubs outright and placed Jacobin and
royalist cadres under surveillance by the police ministry. In 1801,
blaming democratic militants for a botched attempt to assassinate
him with a bomb as his carriage drove down the Rue Saint-Nicaise—a
plot actually hatched by fanatical royalists—Bonaparte ordered the
arrest and deportation to Guiana of about 100 former Jacobin and
sansculotte militants. In 1804 he had the Duke d'Enghien, a member
of the Bourbon family, abducted from abroad, convicted of conspiracy
by a court-martial, and executed.
Outspoken liberals also felt the lash of Bonaparte's intolerance for
any kind of opposition. After he purged the Tribunate, the consul
registered his displeasure with the salon politics of liberal
intellectuals by dissolving the Class of Moral and Political Science
of the National Institute in 1803. One of the most principled
liberals, Madame de Stäel, chose to go into exile rather than
exercise the self-censorship demanded by the regime. Meanwhile, the
only newspapers tolerated were heavily censored. Paris, for example,
had more than 70 newspapers at the time of the Brumaire coup; by
1811 only four quasi-official newspapers survived, ironically the
same number as had existed before 1789. In the provinces each
department had at most one newspaper, likewise of quasi-official
character. The reimposition of censorship was matched by Napoleon's
astute management of news and propaganda.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The Napoleonic era
Society in Napoleonic France
Religious policy
If the Consulate's motto was “authority from above, confidence from
below,” Bonaparte's religious policy helped secure that confidence.
The concordat negotiated with the papacy in 1802 reintegrated the
Roman Catholic church intoFrench society and ended the cycle of bare
toleration and persecution that had begun in 1792. Having
immediately halted the campaign to enforce the republican calendar
(which was quietly abolished in 1806), the Consulate then extended
an olive branch to the refractory clergy. The statecontinued to
respect the religious freedom of non-Catholics,but the concordat
recognized Catholicism as “the preferredreligion” of France—in
effect, though not in name, the nation's established religion.
Upkeep of the church became a significant item in local budgets, and
the clergy regained de facto control over primary education. The
state, however,retained the upper hand in church-state relations. By
signing the concordat, the pope accepted the nationalization of
church property in France and its sale as biens nationaux. Bishops,
though again consecrated by Rome, were named by the head of state,
and the government retained the right to police public worship.
The most conservative Catholics looked askance at the concordat,
which in their eyes promoted an excessively national or Gallican
church rather than a truly Roman Catholic church. They correctly
suspected that Bonaparte—personally a religious skeptic—would use it
as a tool of his own ambitions. Indeed, he declared that the clergy
would be his “moral prefects,” propagating traditionalvalues and
obedience to authority. Later, for example, the clergy was asked to
teach an imperial catechism, which would “bind the consciences of
the young to the august person of the Emperor.”
The Napoleonic regime also organized France's approximately one
million Calvinists into hierarchical “consistories” subject to
oversight by the state. Protestant pastors, paid by the state, were
designated by the elders who led local congregations and
consistories; the more democratic tendencies of Calvinism were thus
weakened in exchange for official recognition. France's 60,000 Jews,
residing mainly in Alsace and Lorraine, were also organized into
consistories. Like priests and pastors, their rabbis were enlisted
to promote obedience to the laws, though they were not salaried by
the state. Official recognition, however,did not prevent
discriminatory measures against Jews. A law of 1808, ostensibly for
“the social reformation of the Jews,” appeased peasant debtors in
Alsace by canceling their debts to Jewish moneylenders.
Napoleonic nobility
Napoleon cultivated the loyalty of the nation's wealthy landed
proprietors by a system of patronage and honours. He thereby
facilitated the emergence of a ruling class drawn from both the
middle classes and the nobility of the old regime, which had been
divided by the artificial barriers of old-regime estates and
privileges. The principal artifacts of Napoleon's social policy were
the lists he ordered of the 600 largest taxpayers in each
department, most having incomes of at least 3,000 livres a year.
Inclusion on these lists became an insignia of one's informal status
as a notable. Members of the electoral colleges and departmental
advisory councils were drawn from these lists. Although such
honorific positions had little power and no privileges, the
designees were effectively co-opted into the regime. Napoleon's
Legion of Honour, meanwhile, conferred recognition on men who served
the state, primarily military officers who largely stood outside the
ranks of the landed notables. By 1814 the Legion had 32,000 members,
of whom only 1,500 were civilians.
After Napoleon had himself crowned emperor in 1804, he felt the need
for a court aristocracy that would lend lustre and credibility to
his new image. He also reasoned that only by creating a new nobility
based on merit could he displace and absorb the old nobility, which
had lost its titles in 1790 but not its pretensions. By 1808 a new
hierarchy of titles had been created, which were to be hereditary
provided that a family could support its title with a large annual
income—30,000 livres, for example, in the case of a count of the
empire. To facilitate this, the emperor bestowed huge landed estates
and pensions on his highest dignitaries. The Napoleonic nobility, in
other words, would be a veritable upper class based on a combination
of service and wealth. Predictably, the new nobility was top-heavy
with generals (59 percent altogether), but it also included many
senators, archbishops, and members of the Council of State; 23
percent of the Napoleonic nobility were former nobles of the ancien
régime. These social innovations endured after Napoleon's fall—the
Bourbons adopted the system of high-status electoral colleges,
maintained the Legion of Honour, and even allowed the Napoleonic
nobles to retain their titles alongside the restored old-regime
nobility.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The Napoleonic era
Society in Napoleonic France
The Civil Code
The Napoleonic Civil Code, however, had a far greater impact on
postrevolutionary society than did the social innovations. This
ambitious work of legal codification, perhaps the crowning glory of
the Council of State, consolidated certain basic principles
established in 1789: civil equality and equality before the law; the
abolition of feudalism in favour of modern contractual forms of
property;and the secularization of civil relations. Codification
also made it easier to export those principles beyond the bordersof
France. In the area of family relations, however, the Napoleonic
Code was less a codification of revolutionary innovations than a
reaction against them. By reverting to patriarchal standards that
strengthened the prerogatives of the husband and father, it wiped
out important gains that women had made during the Revolution. The
code's spirit on this subject was summed up in its statement that “a
husband owes protection to his wife; a wife owes obedience to her
husband.” Wives were again barred from signing contracts without
their husbands' consent, and a wife's portion of the family's
community property fell completely under her husband's control
during his lifetime. The code also curbed the right of equal
inheritance, which the Revolution had extended even to illegitimate
children, and increased the father's disciplinary control over his
children.
The code also rolled back the Revolution's extremely liberal divorce
legislation. When marriage became a civil riterather than an
obligatory religious sacrament in 1792, divorce became possible for
the first time. Divorce could be obtained by mutual consent but also
for a range of causes including desertion and simple
incompatibility. Under the Napoleonic Code contested divorce was
possible only for unusually cruel treatment resulting in grave
injury and for adultery on the part of the wife. Faced with an
unfaithful husband, however, “the wife may demand divorce on the
ground of adultery by her husband [only] when he shall havebrought
his concubine into their common residence.”
Napoleonic policy frequently reacted against the Revolution's
liberal individualism. While the regime did not restore the guilds
outright, for example, it reimposed restrictive or even monopolistic
state regulation on such occupational groups as publishers and
booksellers, the Parisian building trades, attorneys, barristers,
notaries, and doctors. Napoleon wished to strengthen the ties that
bound individuals together, which derived from religion, the family,
and state authority. Napoleon's domestic innovations—the
prefectorial system, with its extreme centralization of
administrative authority; the University, a centralized educational
bureaucracy that scrutinized all types of teachers; the concordat
with the Vatican that reversed the secularizing tendencies of the
Revolution; the Civil Code, which strengthened property rights and
patriarchal authority; and the Legion of Honour, which rewarded
service to the state—all endured in the 19th century despite a
succession of political upheavals. Historians who admire Napoleon
consider these innovations as the “granite masses” on which modern
French society developed.
Campaigns and conquests: 1797–1807
Napoleon's sway over France depended from the start on hissuccess in
war. After his conquest of northern Italy in 1797 and the
dissolution of the first coalition, General Bonaparte intended to
invade Britain, France's century-long rival and the last remaining
belligerent. Concluding that French naval power could not sustain a
seaborne invasion, however,he launched a military expedition to
Egypt instead, hoping tochoke off the main route to Britain's Indian
empire. When the expedition bogged down in disease and military
stalemate, its commander quietly slipped past a British naval
blockade to return to France, where (in the absence of accurate news
from Egypt) he was received as the nation's leading military hero.
At the time of the Brumaire coup the republic's armies had been
driven from Italy by a second coalition, but they had halted a
multi front assault on France by the armies of Russia, Austria, and
Britain. The republic, in other words, wasno longer in imminent
military danger, but the prospect of an interminable war loomed on
the horizon. After Brumaire the nation expected its new leader to
achieve peace through decisive military victory. This promise
Bonaparte fulfilled, once again leading French armies into northern
Italy and defeating Austria at the Battle of Marengo in June 1800.
Subsequent defeats in Germany drove Austria to sign the peace treaty
of Lunéville in February 1801. Deprived of its continental allies
for the second time, a war-weary Britain finally decided to
negotiate. In March 1802 France and Britain signed the Treaty of
Amiens, and for the first time in 10 years Europe was at peace.
Within two years, however, the two rivals were again in a state of
war. Most historians agree that neither imperial power was solely
responsible for the breakdown of this peace since neither would
renounce its ambitions for supremacy. Napoleon repeatedly violated
the treaty's spirit—by annexing Piedmont, occupying the Batavian
Republic, and assuming the presidency of the Cisalpine Republic. To
Britain, the balance of power in Europe requiredan independent Italy
and Dutch Netherlands. Britain violatedthe letter of the treaty,
however, by failing to evacuate theisland of Malta as it had
promised.
Once again, British naval power frustrated Napoleon's attempt to
take the war directly to British soil. At the Battle of Trafalgar
(Oct. 21, 1805), British naval gunners decimated the French and
Spanish fleets. Against Britain's newly enlisted continental allies
Napoleon had better luck, as he confronted them one by one before
they could effectively unite. Moving his army rapidly across Europe,
Napoleon surprised the Austrians at Ulm and then smashed them
decisively at the Battle of Austerlitz (Dec. 2, 1805), probablyhis
most brilliant tactical feat. Under the Treaty of
Pressburg(criticized by the French foreign minister Talleyrand as
entirely too harsh), Austria paid a heavy indemnity, ceded its
provinces of Venetia and Tyrol, and allowed Napoleon to abolish the
Holy Roman Empire. Prussia, kept neutral for a time by vague
promises of sovereignty over Hanover, finallymobilized against
France, only to suffer humiliating defeats at the battles of Jena
and Auerstadt in October 1806. The French occupied Berlin, levied a
huge indemnity on Prussia,seized various provinces, and turned
northern Germany into a French sphere of influence. The ensuing
campaign against Russia's army in Europe resulted in a bloody
stalemate at the Battle of Eylau (Feb. 8, 1807), leaving Napoleon in
precarious straits with extremely vulnerable lines of supply. But,
when fighting resumed that spring, the French prevailed at the
Battle of Friedland (June 14, 1807), and Tsar Alexander I sued for
peace. The Treaty of Tilsit, negotiated by the two emperors, divided
Europe into two zones of influence, with Napoleon pledging to aid
the Russians against their Ottoman rivals, and Alexander promising
to cooperate against Britain.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The Napoleonic era
The Grand Empire
Napoleon now had a free hand to reorganize Europe and numerous
relativesto install on the thrones of his satellite kingdoms. The
result was known as the Grand Empire. Having annexed Tuscany,
Piedmont, Genoa, and the Rhineland directly into France, Napoleon
placed the Kingdom of Holland (which until 1806 was the Batavian
Commonwealth) under his brother Louis, the Kingdom of Westphalia
under his brother Jérôme, the Kingdom of Italy under his stepson
Eugène as his viceroy, the Kingdom of Spain under his brother
Joseph, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (carved out of Prussian
Poland) under the nominal sovereignty of his ally the king of
Saxony. To link his allied states in northern and southern Germany,
Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine. Even Austria seemed
to fall into Napoleon's sphere of influence with his marriage to
Archduchess Maria Louise in 1810. (Since the emperor had no natural
heirs from his marriage to Joséphine Beauharnais, he reluctantly
divorced Joséphine and in 1810 married the Austrian princess, who
duly bore him a son the following year.)
The continental system
Britain, however, was insulated from French military power;only an
indirect strategy of economic warfare remained possible. Thus far
Britain had driven most French merchant shipping from the high seas,
and in desperation French merchants sold most of their ships to
neutrals, allowing theUnited States to surpass France in the size of
its merchant fleet. But after his string of military victories
Napoleon believed that he could choke off British commerce by
closingthe Continent to its ships and products. With limited
opportunities to sell its manufactured goods, he believed, the
British economy would suffer from overproduction and unemployment,
while the lack of foreign gold in payment for British exports would
bankrupt the treasury. As France moved into Britain's foreign
markets, Britain's economic crisis would drive its government to
seek peace. Accordingly,Napoleon launched the “continental system”:
in the Berlin Decree of November 1806, he prohibited British trade
with all countries under French influence, including British
products carried by neutral shipping. When the British retaliated by
requiring all neutral ships to stop at British ports for inspection
and licenses, Napoleon threatened to seize any ship stopping at
English ports. Thus a total naval war against neutrals erupted.
Economic warfare took its toll on all sides. While France did make
inroads in cotton manufacturing in the absence of British
competition, France and especially its allies suffered terribly from
the British blockade, in particular from a dearth of colonial raw
materials. The great Atlantic ports of Nantes, Bordeaux, and
Amsterdam never recovered, as ancillary industries like shipbuilding
and sugar refining collapsed. The axis of European trade shifted
decisively inland. The continental system did strain the British
economy, driving down exports and gold reserves in 1810, but the
blockade was extremely porous. Since Europeans liked British goods,
smugglers had incentive to evade the restrictions in places like
Spain and Portugal. By 1811, moreover, a restive Tsar Alexander
withdrew from the continental system. Thus, the most dire effect of
the continental system was the stimulusit gave Napoleon for a new
round of aggressions against Portugal, Spain, and Russia.
By 1810 almost 300,000 imperial troops were bogged down in Iberia,
struggling against a surprisingly vigorous Spanish resistance and a
British expeditionary force. Then, in 1812, Napoleon embarked on his
most quixotic aggression—an invasion of Russia designed to humble
“the colossus of Northern barbarism” and exclude Russia from any
influence in Europe. The Grand Army of 600,000 men that crossed into
Russia reached Moscow without inflicting a decisive defeat on the
Russian armies. By the time Napoleon on October 19belatedly ordered
a retreat from Moscow, which had been burned to the ground and was
unfit for winter quarters, he had lost two-thirds of his troops from
disease, battle casualties, cold, and hunger. The punishing retreat
through the Russian winter killed most of the others. Yet this
unparalleled disaster did not humble or discourage the emperor.
Napoleon believed that he could hold his empire together and defeat
yet another anti-French coalition that was forming. He correctly
assumed that he could still rely on his well-honed administrative
bureaucracy to replace the decimated Grand Army.
The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
The Napoleonic era
Conscription
Building on the Directory's conscription law of September 1798, the
Napoleonic regime, after considerable trial and error, had created
the mechanisms for imposing on the citizens of France and the
annexed territories the distasteful obligation of military service.
Each year the Ministry of War Administration assigned a quota of
conscripts for every department. Using communal birth registers, the
mayor of each commune compiled a list of men reaching the age of 19
that year. After a preliminary examination to screen out the
manifestly unfit and those below the minimum height of five feet one
inch, the young men drew numbers in a lottery at the cantonal seat.
Doctors in the departmental capitals later ruled on other claims for
medical exemptions, and in all about a third of the youths avoided
military service legally as physically unfit. For obvious reasons,
married men were not exempt from the draft, but two other means of
avoiding induction remained, apart from drawing a high number: the
wealthy could purchase a replacement, and the poor could flee.
Initially the regime had a bad conscience about allowing
replacements, since this made its rhetoric about the duties of
citizenship sound hollow. But to placate prosperous peasants and
notables, it did permit the hiring of a replacement under strict
guidelines that made it difficult andcostly but not impossible.
Between 5 and 10 percent of all French draftees were replacements.
For Napoleon's prefects, the annual conscription levy was the top
priority and draft evasion the number one problem in most
departments. Persistence, routine stepped-up policing, and coercion
gradually overcame the chronic resistance. Heavy fines levied
against the parents of evaders did little good since most were too
poor to pay them. But billeting troops intheir homes was more
effective, and, if they could not feed the troops, the community's
wealthier taxpayers were required to do so. By 1811 the regime had
broken the habit of draft evasion even as the demand for conscripts
increased. In 1812, prefects all over France reported that theannual
levies were less contentious than ever.
Napoleon had begun by drafting 60,000 Frenchmen annually, but by
1810 the quota hit 120,000, and the first of many “supplementary
levies” was decreed to call up men from earlier classes who had
drawn high numbers. In January 1813, after the Russian disaster,
Napoleon replenished his armies by calling up the class of 1814 a
year early and by repeated supplementary levies. Because he could
still rely on his conscription machine, Napoleon consistently
rebuffedoffers by the allies to negotiate peace. Only after he lost
the decisive Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 and was driven back
across the Rhine did the machine break down. His call of November
1813 for 300,000 more men went largely unfilled. With the troops at
his disposal the emperor fought the Battle of France skillfully, but
he could not stop the allies. Shortly after Paris fell, he
abdicated, on April 6, 1814, and departed for the island kingdom of
Elba. France was reduced to its 1792 borders, and the Bourbons
returned to the throne. Altogether—along with large levies of
Italians,Germans, and other foreigners from the annexed territories
and satellite states—nearly 2.5 million Frenchmen had been drafted
by Napoleon, and at least 1 million of these conscripts never
returned.
The most sympathetic explanation for Napoleon's relentlessaggression
holds that he was responding to the irreducible antagonism of
Britain: French power and glory were the only antidotes to John
Bull's arrogance. Others have argued that Napoleon's vendetta
against Britain was merely a rationalization for a mad 10-year chase
across Europe to establish a new version of Charlemagne's empire.
This “imperial design” thesis, however, makes sense only in 1810, as
a way Napoleon might have organized his conquests and not as the
motivation for them. (Only retrospectively did Napoleon write:
“There will be no repose for Europe until she is under only one Head
. . . an Emperor who should distribute kingdoms among his
lieutenants.”) In the end one is thrown back on the explanation of
temperament. In his combination of pragmatism and insatiable
ambition, this world-historic figure remains an enigma. Increasingly
“aristocratic” at home and “imperial” abroad, Napoleon was obviously
something more than the “general of the Revolution.” And yet, with
Civil Code in one hand and sabre in the other, Napoleon could still
be seen by Europeans as a personification on both counts of the
French Revolution'sexplosive force.
Napoleon and the Revolution
The Revolutionary legacy for Napoleon consisted above all in the
abolition of the ancien régime's most archaic features—“feudalism,”
seigneurialism, legal privileges, and provincial liberties. No
matter how aristocratic his style became, he had no use for the
ineffective institutions and abuses of the ancien régime. Napoleon
was “modern” in temperament as well as destructively aggressive. But
in either guise he was an authoritarian with little patience for
argument, who profited from the Revolution's clearing operations to
construct and mobilize in his own fashion. His concept of reform
exaggerated the Revolution's emphasison uniformity and
centralization. Napoleon also accepted the Revolutionary principles
of civil equality and equality of opportunity, meaning the
recognition of merit. Other rights and liberties did not seem
essential. Unlike others before him who had tried and failed,
Napoleon terminated the Revolution, but at the price of suppressing
the electoral process and partisan politics altogether. Toward the
end of the empire, his centralizing vision took over completely,
reinforcing his personal will to power. France was merely a
launching pad for Napoleon's boundless military and imperial
ambition, its prime function being to raise men and money for war.
In utter contrast to the Revolution, then, militarism became the
defining quality of the Napoleonic regime.
Napoleon's ambiguous legacy helps explain the dizzying events that
shook France in 1815. When Louis XVI's brother returned as King
Louis XVIII, he courted popularity by ending conscription and by
agreeing to rule under a constitution (called the Charter), which
provided for legislative control over budgets and taxes and
guaranteed basic liberties. But the Bourbons alienated the officer
corps by retiring many at half pay and frightened many citizens by
not making clearhow much of their property and power the church and
émigrés would regain. As the anti-Napoleonic allies argued among
themselves about the spoils of war, Napoleon slipped back to France
for a last adventure, believing that he could reach Paris without
firing a shot. At various points along the way, troops disobeyed
royalist officers and ralliedto the emperor, while Louis fled the
country. Between Marchand June 1815—a period known as the Hundred
Days—Napoleon again ruled France. Contrary to his expectation,
however, the allies patched up their differences and were determined
to rout “the usurper.” At the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815)
British and Prussian forces defeated Napoleon's army decisively, and
he abdicated again a few days later. Placed on the remote island of
Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, he died in 1821. The “Napoleonic
legend”—the retrospective version of events created by Napoleon
during his exile—burnished his image in France for decades to come.
But in the final analysis Napoleon's impact on future generations
was not nearly as powerful as the legacy of the French Revolution
itself.
Isser Woloch
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Encyclopædia Britannica
The restoration and constitutional monarchy
Constitutionalism and reaction, 1815–30
Louis XVIII, 1815–24
King Louis XVIII's second return from exile was far from
glorious. Neither the victorious powers nor Louis's French
subjects viewed his restoration with much enthusiasm, yet there
seemed to be no ready alternative to Bourbon rule. The allies
avenged themselves for the Hundred Days by writing a new and
more severe Treaty of Paris. France lost several frontier
territories, notably the Saar basin and Savoy (Savoie), that had
been annexed in 1789–92; a war indemnity of 700 million francs
was imposed; and, pending full payment, eastern France was to be
occupied by allied troops at French expense.
Within France, political tensions were exacerbated by Napoleon's
mad gamble and by the mistakes committed during the First
Restoration. The problem facing the Bourbons would have been
difficult enough without these tensions—namely, how to arrive at
a stable compromise between those Frenchmen who saw the
Revolutionary changes as irreversible and those who were
determined to resurrect the ancien régime. The reactionary
element, labeled ultraroyalists (or simply “ultras”), was now
more intransigent than ever and set out to purge the country of
allthose who had betrayed the dynasty. A brief period of “white
terror” in the south claimed some 300 victims; in Paris, many
high officials who had rallied to Napoleon were dismissed, and a
few eminent figures, notably Marshal Michel Ney, were tried and
shot. The king refused, however, to scrap the Charter of 1814,
in spite of ultra pressure. Whena new Chamber of Deputies was
elected in August 1815, the ultras scored a sweeping victory;
the surprised king, who had feared a surge of antimonarchical
sentiment, greeted the legislature as la chambre introuvable
(“the incomparable chamber”). But the political honeymoon was
short-lived. Louis was shrewd enough, or cautious enough,
torealize that ultra policies would divide the country and might
in the end destroy the dynasty. He chose as ministers,
therefore, such moderate royalists as Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis,
Duke de Richelieu, and Élie Decazes—men who knew the nation
would not tolerate an attempt to resurrect the 18th century.
There followed a year of sharp friction between these moderate
ministers and the ultra-dominated Chamber—friction and unrest
that made Europe increasinglynervous about the viability of the
restored monarchy. Representatives of the occupying powers began
to express their concern to the king. At last, in September
1816, his ministers persuaded him to dissolve the Chamber and
order new elections, and the moderate royalists emerged with a
clear majority. In spite of ultra fury, several years of
relative stability ensued. Richelieu and Decazes, with solid
support in the Chamber, could proceed with their attempt to
pursue a moderate course. By 1818 they were able, thanks to
loans from English and Dutch bankers, to pay off the war
indemnity and thus to end the allied occupation; at the Congress
of Aix-la-Chapelle France was welcomed back into the concert of
Europe. In domestic politics there were somesigns that France
might be moving toward a British-style parliamentary monarchy,
even though the Charter had carefully avoided making the king's
ministers responsible tothe Chamber of Deputies. In the Chamber
something anticipating a party system also began to emerge:
ultras on the right, independents (or liberals) on the left,
constitutionalists (or moderates) in the centre. None of these
factions yet possessed the real attributes of a
party—disciplined organization and doctrinal coherence. The most
heterogeneous of all was the independent group—an uneasy
coalition of republicans, Bonapartists, andconstitutional
monarchists brought together by their common hostility to the
Bourbons and their common determination to preserve or restore
many of the Revolutionary reforms.
The era of moderate rule (1816–20) was marked by a slow but
steady advance of the liberal left. Each year one-fifth of the
Chamber faced reelection, and each year more independents won
seats, despite the narrowly restricted suffrage. The ultras, in
real or simulated panic, predicted disaster for the regime and
the nation; but the king clung stubbornly to his favourite,
Decazes, who by now was head of the government in all but name,
and Decazes, in turn, clung to his middle way.
The uneasy balance was wrecked in February 1820 by the
assassination of the king's nephew, Charles-Ferdinand, Duke de
Berry. The assassin, a fanatical Bonapartist, proudly announced
his purpose: to extinguish the royal line by destroying the last
Bourbon still young enough to produce a male heir. In this aim
he failed, for Caroline, Duchess de Berry, seven months later
bore a son, whom the royalists hailed as “the miracle child.”
But the assassin didbring to an end the period of moderate rule
and returned the ultras to power. In the wave of emotion that
followed, the king dismissed Decazes and manipulated the
elections in favour of the ultras, who regained control of the
Chamberand dominated the new Cabinet headed by one of their
leaders, Joseph, Count de Villèle.
This swing toward reaction goaded some segments of the liberal
left into conspiratorial activity. A newly formed secretsociety
called the Charbonnerie, which borrowed its name and ritual from
the Italian Carbonari, laid plans for an armed insurrection, but
their rising in 1822 was easily crushed. One group of
conspirators—“the four sergeants of La Rochelle”—became heroic
martyrs in the popular mythology of the French left. Subversion
gave the government an excuse for intensified repression: the
press was placed under more rigid censorship and the school
system subjected to the clergy.
Meanwhile, the ultras were winning public support through amore
assertive foreign policy. Spain had been in a state of
quasi-civil war since 1820, when a revolt by the so-called
liberal faction in the army had forced King Ferdinand VII to
grant a constitution and to authorize the election of a
parliament. The European powers, disturbed at the state of
semianarchy in Spain, accepted a French offer to restore
Ferdinand's authority by forcible intervention. In 1823 French
troops crossed the Pyrenees and, despite predictions of disaster
from the liberal left, easily took Madrid and reestablished the
king's untrammeled power. This successful adventure strengthened
the ultra politiciansand discredited their critics. In the
elections of 1824 the ultras increased their grip on the Chamber
and won a further victory in September 1824 when the aged Louis
XVIIIdied, leaving the throne to a new king who was the very
embodiment of the ultra spirit.
Charles X, 1824–30
Charles X, the younger brother of Louis XVIII, had spent the
Revolutionary years in exile and had returned embittered rather
than chastened by the experience. What France needed, in his
view, was a return to the unsullied principle ofdivine right,
buttressed by the restored authority of the established church.
The new king and his Cabinet—still headed by Villèle—promptly
pushed through the Chamber a series of laws of sharply partisan
character. The most bitterly debated of these laws was the one
that indemnifiedthe émigrés for the loss of their property
during the Revolution. The cost of the operation—almost one
billion francs—was borne by government bondholders, whose bonds
were arbitrarily converted to a lower interest rate. A severe
press law hamstrung the publishers of newspapers and pamphlets;
another established the death penalty for sacrilegious acts
committed in churches.
Along with these signs of reaction went a vigorous campaign to
reassert the authority of the Roman Catholic church, which had
been undermined by Enlightenment skepticism and by the
Revolutionary upheaval. Under theBourbons several new missionary
orders and lay organizations were founded in an effort to revive
the faith and to engage in good works. Catholic seminaries began
to draw increasing numbers of students away from the state
lycées. Charles X threw himself enthusiastically into the
campaign for Catholic revival. The anticlericals of the liberal
left were outraged, and even many moderates of Gallican
sympathies were perturbed. Rumours spread that the king had
secretly become a Jesuit and was planning to turn the country
over to “the men in black.”
King Charles and his ultra ministers might nevertheless
haveremained in solid control if they had been shrewd and
sensitive men, aware of the rise of public discontent and
flexible enough to appease it. Instead, they forged stubbornly
ahead on the road to disaster. Villèle, though a talented
administrator, lacked creative imagination and charismatic
appeal. As the years passed, his leadership wasincreasingly
challenged even within his own ultra majority. Abitter personal
feud between Villèle and François-Auguste-René, Viscount de
Chateaubriand, the most colourful of the ultra politicians,
undermined both the ministry and the dynasty. This internal
conflict contributed to Villèle's downfall; the elections of
1827 brought a sharp resurgence of liberal and moderate
strength. The king patched together a disparate ministry of
moderates and ultras headed by an obscure official, Jean-Baptiste,
Viscount de Martignac. But Martignac lacked Charles's confidence
andfailed to win the support of the more moderate leftists in
the Chamber. In 1829 the king brusquely dismissed him
andrestored the ultras to power.
The delayed consequences of this act were to be fatal to the
dynasty. The king, instead of entrusting power to an able ultra
such as Villèle or a popular one such as Chateaubriand, chose a
personal favourite, Jules-Auguste-Armand-Marie, Prince de
Polignac, a fanatical reactionary. The makeup of the Cabinet,
which included several members of the most bigoted faction of
“ultra-ultras,” seemed to indicate the king's determination to
polarize politics. That, in any case, was the immediate result.
On the left the mood turned aggressively hostile; the
republicans of Paris began to organize; an Orleanist faction
emerged, looking to a constitutional monarchy headed by the
king's cousin, Louis-Philippe, Duke d'Orléans. The liberal
banker Jacques Laffitte supplied funds for a new opposition
daily, Le National , edited by a young and vigorous team whose
most notable member was Adolphe Thiers. A confrontation of some
sort seemed inevitable.
Some of Polignac's ministers urged a royal coup d'état at once,
before the rejuvenated opposition could grow too strong.
Instead, the king procrastinated for several months, offering no
clear lead or firm policy. When the Chamber met at last in March
1830, its majority promptly voted an address to the throne
denouncing the ministry. The king retaliated by dissolving the
Chamber and ordering new elections in July. Both Charles and
Polignac hoped that pressure on the electors, plus foreign
policy successes, might shape the outcome. Such a success was
won at just the opportune moment: news came that Algiers had
fallen to a French expeditionary force sent to punish the Bey
for assorted transgressions. But even this brilliant victory
could not divert the fury of the king's critics. The opposition
won 274 seats, the ministry 143. Charles's alternatives were now
clear: to substitute a moderate for Polignac and accept the role
of constitutional monarch or to risk a royal coup d'état that
would leave the Charter of 1814 in tatters. Without hesitation
he chose the second path. King and ministers prepared a set of
decrees that dissolved the newly elected Chamber, further
restricted the already narrow suffrage, andstripped away the
remaining liberty of the press. These July Ordinances, made
public on the 26th, completed the polarization process and
ensured that the confrontation would be violent.
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Encyclopædia Britannica
The restoration and constitutional
monarchy
The Revolution of 1830
The July Revolution was a monument to the ineptitude of Charles X
and his advisers. At the outset, few of the king's critics imagined
it possible to overthrow the regime; they hoped merely to get rid of
Polignac. As for the king, he naively ignored the possibility of
serious trouble. No steps were taken to reinforce the army garrison
in Paris; no contingency plans were prepared. Instead, Charles went
off to the country to hunt, leaving the capital weakly
defended.During the three days known to Frenchmen as Les Trois
Glorieuses (July 27–29), protest was rapidly transmuted into
insurrection; barricades went up in the streets, manned by workers,
students, and petty bourgeois citizens (some of them former members
of the National Guard, which Charles,in pique, had disbanded in
1827). On July 29 some army unitsbegan to fraternize with the
insurgents. The king, on July 30,consented at last to dismiss
Polignac and to annul the July Ordinances; but the gesture came too
late. Paris was in the hands of the rebels, and plans for a new
regime were crystallizing rapidly.
As the insurrection developed, two rival factions had emerged. The
republicans—mainly workers and students—gained control of the
streets and took over the Hôtel de Ville, where on July 29 they set
up a municipal commission. They looked to the venerable Marquis de
Lafayette as their symbolic leader. The constitutional monarchists
had their headquarters at the newspaper Le National; their candidate
for the throne was Louis-Philippe, Duke d'Orléans. Louis-Philippe
was at first reluctant to take the risk, fearing failure and renewed
exile; Adolphe Thiers undertook the task of persuading him and
succeeded. On July 31 Louis-Philippe made his way through a largely
hostilecrowd to the Hôtel de Ville and confronted the republicans.
His cause was won by Lafayette, who found a constitutional monarchy
safer than the risks of Jacobin rule; Lafayette appeared on the
balcony with Louis-Philippe and, wrapped in a tricolour flag,
embraced the duke as the crowd cheered.Two days later Charles X
abdicated at last, though on condition that the throne pass to his
grandson, “the miraclechild.” But the parliament, meeting on August
7, declared the throne vacant and on August 9 proclaimed
Louis-Philippe “king of the French by the grace of God and the will
of the nation.”
The July monarchy
The renovated regime (often called the July monarchy or the
bourgeois monarchy) rested on an altered political theory and a
broadened social base. Divine right gave way to popular sovereignty;
the social centre of gravity shifted from the landowning aristocracy
to the wealthy bourgeoisie. The Charter of 1814 was retained but no
longer as a royal gift to the nation; it was revised by the Chamber
of Deputies and in its new form imposed on the king. Censorship was
abolished; the tricolour was restored as thenational flag, and the
National Guard was resuscitated. Roman Catholicism was declared to
be simply the religion “of the majority of Frenchmen,” the voting
age was lowered to 25, and the property qualification reduced to
include all who paid a direct tax of 200 (formerly 300) francs.The
suffrage was thus doubled, from about 90,000 to almost 200,000.
The new king seemed admirably suited to this new constitutional
system. The “Citizen King” was reputed to be a liberal whose tastes
and sympathies coincided with those of the upper bourgeoisie. He had
spent the Revolutionaryyears in exile but was out of sympathy with
the irreconcilable émigrés; and since his return, his house in Paris
had been a gathering place for the opposition. Yet, in spite of
appearances, Louis-Philippe was not prepared to accept the strictly
symbolic role of a monarch who (in Thiers's phrase) “reigns but does
not govern.” His authority, he believed, rested on heredity and not
merely on the will ofthe Chamber; his proper function was to
participate activelyin decision making and not merely to appoint
ministers who would govern in his name. As time went by, he was
increasingly inclined to choose ministers who shared his view of the
royal power. The Orleanist system thus rested on a basic ambiguity
about the real locus of authority.
In the Chamber two major factions emerged, known by the rather
imprecise labels right-centre and left-centre. The former group, led
by the historian François Guizot, shared the king's political
doctrines; it saw the revised Charter of 1814 as an adequate
instrument of government that needed no further change. The
left-centre, whose ablest spokesman was the kingmaker Adolphe Thiers,
saw 1830 as the beginning rather than the culmination of a process
of change. It favoured restricting the king's active role and
broadening the suffrage to include the middle strata of the
bourgeoisie. These differences of viewpoint, combined with the
king's tendency to intrigue, contributed to chronic political
instability during the 1830s.
The decade of the 1830s was marked also by repeated challenges to
the regime by its enemies on the right and the left and by a series
of attempts to assassinate the king. Both the ultras (who now came
to be called legitimists) and the republicans refused to forgive
“the usurper” of 1830. In1832 the Duchess de Berry, mother of “the
miracle child,” landed clandestinely in southern France in an effort
to spark a general uprising; but the scheme collapsed, and most
legitimists withdrew into sullen opposition. More serious wasthe
agitation of the republicans, fed by rising labour discontent. In
the most serious of these outbreaks (Lyon, 1831), 15,000 workers
confronted the National Guard in the streets and suffered some 600
casualties before capitulating. Again in 1834 there were serious
disturbances in Lyon and Paris. In 1836 it was the turn of the
Bonapartist pretender to challenge the regime. Since Napoleon's
death in 1821, a legend had rapidly taken shape around his name. No
longer detested as a ruthless autocrat who had sacrificed a
generation of young Frenchmen on the battlefield, he became
transmuted into the Little Corporal who had risen tothe heights by
his own talents and had died a victim of British jealousy. The
emperor's nephew Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte presented himself as the
true heir; he crossed the frontier in 1836 and called on French
troops in Strasbourg to join his cause. The venture failed
ignominiously, as did also a second attempt on the Channel coast in
1840. Louis-Napoleon was condemned to prison for life but managed in
1846 to escape to England. Interspersed with these attempts at
political risings were individual attacks on the king's person; the
most elaborate of these plots was the one organized by a Corsican
named Giuseppe Fieschi in 1835.
By 1840, however, the enemies of the regime had evidentlybecome
discouraged, and a period of remarkable stability followed. François
Guizot emerged as the key figure in the ministry; he retained that
role from 1840 to 1848. One of thefirst Protestants to attain high
office in France, Guizot possessed many of the moral and
intellectual qualities that marked this small but influential
minority. Hard-working and intelligent, Guizot was devoted to the
service of the king and to the defense of the status quo. He was
convinced thatthe wealthy governing class was an ideal natural elite
to which any Frenchman might have access through talent and effort.
To those who complained at being excluded by the property
qualification for voting and seeking office, Guizot's simple reply
was “Enrichissez-vous!” (“Get rich!”). His government encouraged the
process by granting railway and mining concessions to its bourgeois
supporters and by contributing part of the development costs. High
protective tariffs continued to shelter French entrepreneursagainst
foreign competition. The result was a modest economic boom during
the 1840s, beginning the transformation of France from a largely
rural into an industrial society.
Guizot shared with Louis-Philippe a strong preference for a safe and
sane foreign policy. The king, from the beginning of his reign, had
cautiously avoided risks and confrontations and had especially
sought friendly relations with Britain. In 1830, when the revolution
in Paris inspired the Belgians to break away from Dutch rule,
Louis-Philippe avoided the temptation of seeking to annex Belgium or
of placing one of his sons on the Belgian throne. Again in 1840,
when a crisis flared up in the Middle East and Thiers (then head of
the government) took an aggressive stance that threatened to
coalesce all of Europe against France, the king had found an excuse
to replace his firebrand minister. Guizot continued this cautious
line through the 1840s, with the single exception of an episode in
Spain. A long contest involving rival suitors for the Spanish
queen's hand finally tempted Guizot, in 1846, to try for a cheap
diplomatic victory; it infuriated the British and helped to destroy
the Anglo-French entente. One problem Guizot inherited from his
predecessors was that of Algeria. Since 1830 the French had
maintained an uneasy presence there, wavering between total
withdrawal and expanded conquest. The decision to remain had been
made in the mid-1830s; during the Guizot era, General Thomas-Robert
Bugeaud de La Piconnerie's forces broke the back of Algerian
resistance,pushed the native population back into the mountains, and
began the process of colonizing the rich coastal plain.
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