How did political matters stand in 1700?  At that time kings had so raised their status that the former governing principle --first among equals-- had given way to a degree of royal ascendancy over the aristocracy and a group of intermediate political authorities. To be certain, the claim to absolute power was massively overstated, but kings could argue that they had certainly expanded their  lead over other competitors for power.  This pattern predominated over Europe, though England, Holland, and other places avoided it. But things were to change.  In 1776, the Americans declared their independence and rejection of George III.   By 1789, France was convulsed in revolution, and they executed king and queen only four years later.  Through war and revolutionary ideas, revolutionary fever crossed the Rhine and the Alps heading east and south.  Napoleon would contain the revolution at home but spread it further abroad until his defeat at Waterloo.  By 1815 the monarchs had survived an incredible threat to their governance, but even they would have to be more attentive to popular demands.

How could this happen? To answer this question, this lecture focuses on the French Revolution and encompasses the Enlightenment as well.  It covers a number of related topics, including social change and the Scientific Revolution.  But to arrive at all these topics, we may begin by considering the remarkable political developments of the eighteenth century.  This period witnessed a long series of political shifts that mark a huge change in the West and in the world as well.

Political Developments

First, all this massive political upheaval cannot be imagined in the absence of social and economic changes. Impossible to describe or even indicate quickly, the economic changes of the early modern period (1500-1800) gave rise to a magnitude of trade far larger than anything in the medieval period.  For example, so great was the demand for wood in England that it was economically advantageous to build a ship in Germany, fill it with wood, sail it to England, and finally add the ship's wood to the cargo of lumber.  Such opportunities created greater opportunities for investment, and stock companies were formed to accumulate capital to deploy new ventures.  Along the sea coasts, society changed as more of the population became involved in trade.  Self-reliance gave way increasingly to economic interchange.   Although this was a matter of degree and not something wholly novel, the early modern period did experience economic shifts that included the growth of banking and more integrated geographical areas.

Another shift, even more important to the average person, occurred -- the end of population catastrophes caused by plague and, at times, massive crop failures.  From the advent of the Black Death (1347  - 50) on until the turn of the eighteenth century, Europe had faced a series of population crises every generation or so.  Unlike the Black Death, large losses of population did not occur everywhere at once, but most places experienced a sharp rise in mortality (for example, the death of a fifth of the population in a few months) once every twenty years or so.  But beginning in the late seventeenth century and spreading virtually everywhere by the middle of the eighteenth century, these crises ended.  Certainly biological shifts in the rat population explain the end of the problem, but we know less why this occurred than that it did.  And, indeed, population, which had been flat or nearly so, began in the eighteenth century to expand.  For example, in 1600 England had a population of five million; by 1700 growth had made the country arrive at 6 million; explosively England's population expanded by more than three million in the next century.

Both of these factors --a declining mortality and some economic progress -- likely contributed to a feeling of progress, bolstered by a spread of consumerism. Mass produced products for a large audience began to make their way into the lives of many.  Even the poor people saw a small increase in their standard of living.  The Parisian poor at the beginning of the eighteenth century might have a Bible or a catechism; by the end of the century they had a few books.  Even religious artifacts were more likely to be mass produced.  Many peasants picked their mattresses off the dirt floor and put them on a frame.  Such conveniences also helped create an environment that seemed to be changing.

Indeed, many scholars--Marxists and others---have seen these social and economic changes as the root cause of the French Revolution.  The Marxists pioneered the notion that the rise of trade created a social class -- the middle class or, in French, the bourgeoisie -- that accumulated large wealth and chafed under the control of the nobility and the king.  The bourgeoisie became angry that free loaders like the aristocrats who paid few or no taxes but lived on royal payments had it all over them.  A modern version of this same argument shows a highly literate middle class, linked by business connections, that constructed an alternative public sphere, or arena for discussion.  This new sphere had legitimacy to rule because its creators -- businessmen -- created wealth and deserved more.  Widespread production of periodicals and books made for a shared culture.

The Enlightenment

Yet, in fact, when it comes to explaining the political fireworks at the end of the century, historians increasingly look toward the intellectual fireworks that preceded it.  Defining the Enlightenment is a challenge but perhaps we can find a few characteristics.  At base was a belief in the equality of people or as Thomas Jefferson stated it in the Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal." The Enlightenment thinkers argued that humans were naturally good and deserved to be treated as such.  Although these thinkers recognized a difference in ability, this still implies that all should enjoy similar basic rights.  Yet, as we shall see, even these rights were not all they might seem.  These philosophers generally insisted that a lack of education meant that most men could not participate in government, but that their needs would still be preeminent.  Even monarchy would be judged by its ability to serve.  In their political schemes, they considered democracy, mixed government, constitutional monarchy, enlightened despotism, utopias, and more, but ultimately all were to provide for the welfare of all.  But, first let us examine their related beliefs more thoroughly.

The philosophes had a social message to deliver that was related to their commitment to legal equality.  Accepting that there would be differences in condition among people, they wanted to base these variations on talent, not birth.  They did believe that merit ought to be rewarded by remuneration.  As such, they were not at all socialists.  But they also were opposed to a system of nobility which emphasized birth.  For example, nobles in France enjoyed substantial tax exemptions, were the only ones permitted to carry a sword or display a coat of arms, and had exclusive rights to a number of government offices.  This, the philosophes strongly opposed.  In sum,  they accepted inequality based on talent, but not birth. They had not abandoned the commitment to equality, but they meant only equal legal rights.  Even here they hedged on women and blacks.  And they were adamantly in favor of the right of personal enrichment.  In fact, they believed the working classes, both urban and rural, were condemned to a life of poverty.

The Enlightenment had a particular epistemology.  An epistemology is the method we use to know things.  For these thinkers, that way of knowing was empiricism.  What does this mean?  Empiricists learned what they knew by examining individual bits of data and constructing laws about it. They were devotees of what we call the scientific method because they wanted to use the observations from experiments and make generalizations which would constitute truths to be relied upon.

This mode of understanding was very important for the thinkers of the Enlightenment or the philosophes as they are also known.  To understand empiricism's significance for them requires looking at the religious situation.  The philosophes saw themselves in opposition, not so much to the existence of God, but to organized religion, particularly Catholicism.  Catholics had embraced rationalism as their epistemology.  Rationalism stated that humans had abstract, innate ideas and it was from these notions that they learned something.  For a modern example, you cannot customarily teach algebra to a three-year-old no matter how hard you try.  This is because the brain structures have not yet sufficiently developed. When they do, then the person can learn.  So truth, or the ability to organize and comprehend experience, comes from developments in the mind.  Now, the Catholic approach seemed, to contemporaries, to say that knowledge comes from the Creator because God instilled those characteristics that make us human.  So the philosophes hung on even harder to empiricism because that approach placed the human observer at the center of knowledge.   Although it will be easy for us to see the flaws in each argument, it was important to each side to stand up for a particular epistemology.

Another facet of the philosophy of the Enlightenment was humanitarianism. The philosophes wanted to improve the world as they found it.  For example, although slavery had been eliminated among Europeans, few challenged the practice of enslaving Africans. But at the end of the eighteenth century an anti-slavery movement occurred.  Less spectacularly but still important, the Enlightenment favored improved charitable facilities and a better judicial system.  The thinkers opposed torture.  Ironically, this generosity toward others did not extend toward women.  In fact, many have argued that the Enlightenment, rather than embracing women, positively discriminated against them.  Explanations for this attitude run the gamut, including psychological and political factors, but there is little difficulty in locating extraordinarily hostile remarks directed at women.  Yet women themselves and some men, have ignored the sexism of the Enlightenment and focused on its humanitarianism and egalitarianism.  While most philosophes like Rousseau advanced powerful notions of female inferiority, based on nature as they empirically saw it, others tried to use basic premises of the Enlightenment to advance the cause of women.  Keep in mind this limit as we shall return to it and others.

A belief in God was also a very important issue for the Enlightenment.  As previously mentioned they were, for the most part, skeptical of organized religion.  For example, George Washington accepted stoically his painful death, never asking to see a minister. Yet the philosophes did believe in a benevolent God who had at least created a good universe.  This approach we label Deism. This was a central tenet because without it, they had no guarantee that man was good.

Further, Deism provided that the world was essentially good as well.This promise led the philosophes in another important direction -- the study of natural law. Considering nature benevolent, philosophes pursued the quest to determine the state of nature.  Relying on empiricism, they worked on biology, zoology, history, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines whose findings would reveal the laws instilled by the creator God.  Unearthing this knowledge would show how civilization had corrupted mankind and provide guidance for a better life.  The quest for information encouraged an expansion in knowledge and an explosion in local academies, publishing, the press, and the completion of the greatest compendium of knowledge of its day, the  French Encyclopédie.  Here we see a public lecture that was delivered about scientific experimentation.

Overall, hallmarks of the Enlightenment were legal equality, talent over birth, empiricism, humanitarianism, deism, and natural law.  Taken together, these principles characterized many of the political innovations that would shape the next two centuries and that would overthrow the traditions of the Old Regime.  At the same time, one must recall that the philosophes hedged on the full implications of their own commitments.  The targets were clearer: the aristocracy and the church. For Voltaire, the most important of the philosophes to the men and women of the eighteenth century, the Church became nearly an obsession.  He saw organized religion of all brands -- Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims -- as sponsors of intolerance which he wanted to destroy. He was capable of incredibly critical remarks.  In his Philosophical Dictionary, published in 1734, Voltaire remarked, "A . . . religion, far from being healthy food for infected brains, turns to poison in them. . . ."  He also focused on a terrible case in Catholic France in which the authorities wrongly persecuted a Protestant family accused of killing their own son.  Voltaire demonstrated that it was prejudice alone that had made the authorities pursue this hapless family.

The philosophes, in fact, believed religion to be a roadblock to that better world they sought.  They believed that their enlightened commitment to empiricism promised that assertions would be subjected to objective verification, whereas religion provided dogma and doctrine, both of which favored the status quo instead of improvement.  So the church appeared to be the biggest enemy of all. 

Perhaps the most important characteristic of the philosophes is that they were not armchair philosophers.  They were activists.  Most of all, their writings were very accessible.  As authors, they were among the first in the Western world to make a good living from selling their work.  Previously, writers depended on sponsors or patrons, and so did the philosophes.  But they also sold a lot of  books  Perhaps, coincidentally, the press and the academy grew enormously in importance in this period.  This gave the philosophes and their supporters a large venue to spread their views. 

Consequently, rather spontaneously, the Enlightenment emerged in the late seventeenth century.  By the second half of the eighteenth century, it dominated European and North American elites. These beliefs of the Enlightenment were novel within European society in which a traditionalism held sway.  To be certain, the Renaissance, Reformation, and counter reformation had promoted an individualism and internal reflection, but such a challenge had not shaken political or social hierarchies.  And while religion was much disagreed about, the ultimate value of receiving salvation by God was unquestioned prior to the Enlightenment.

But then what led to the Enlightenment?  In fact, it had been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Catholic response to the Reformation that served eventually to promote change, especially when tied to the Scientific Revolution.  In fact, if one thinks not of causes of the Enlightenment but of predecessors, one will perhaps make more progress just by looking for the early development of what was to follow.  This takes us to the Scientific Revolution, which in many ways did resemble what the philosophes tried to do.  The scientific revolution included an incredible burst of discoveries in many areas. In 1628 William Harvey discovered that blood circulated in the body, and a series of astronomers including Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo all rewrote our understanding of the heavens.  And the scientific method, as we still understand it, was articulated by Francis Bacon.  But for our purposes, we only wish to see how the Scientific Revolution laid some groundwork for the Enlightenment. 

The Scientific Revolution

For this we can look at the work of Galileo in astronomy.  Even before his studies, which took place in the decade after 1609, the battle had already begun between the Catholic Church and the scientists. The Church accepted views articulated in Greece centuries before by Aristotle and Ptolemy. They held that the universe tended to be at rest except for the intervention of God. Further, the universe consisted of a central Earth surrounded by spheres that held stars. God's force moved his entire apparatus forward.  To the contrary, Copernicus and Kepler, most notably, had already replaced the earth as the center of the universe with the sun. But Galileo, using new more powerful telescopes, went further as he argued that the heavenly bodies moved through empty space, governed by mathematical laws.  Thus, motion was continuous unless interrupted and required no intervention by God.  He stated:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.  But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.  It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

Through all these contentions, God was displaced by math!

Cognizant of this challenge, the Catholic Church in 1616 forbade Galileo from teaching that the earth moves around the sun.  He later stood accused of failing to abide by this order, and in 1633 he had to publicly recant his hypotheses. Even though many Catholics and even the Church would eventually subscribe to Galileo's views, a pattern of science's confrontation with a recalcitrant Church had been established. 

The Scientific Revolution continued apace into even the eighteenth century with Isaac Newton explaining gravity, René Descartes analytic geometry, and G. W. Leibnitz as well in Mathematics.  For our purposes, we should also look at the work of John Locke. Locke was a social scientist, not a physicist, mathematician, or astronomer.  But he believed in and practiced the scientific revolution in the fields of psychology and political science.  He argued that the mind was a receptacle open to exterior sensations.  As such, humans were not scared by original sin and were, in effect, equal.  Government was intended to protect the individual and when a government did not, it might be dissolved.  In such cases, argued Locke in his Second Treatise on Government (1681-83):

the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative, differing from the other, by the change of persons, or form, or both, as they shall find it most for their safety and good.  For the society can never, by the fault of another, lose the native and original right it has to preserve itself; which can only be done by a settled legislative, and a fair and impartial execution of the laws made by it.

Here again, the Scientific Revolution blazed paths which the Enlightenment was to follow.  Just as Jefferson would proclaim in the Declaration of Independence that individuals have the right to good government, so Locke had done this before him. 

We can see how the Scientific Revolution cleared the way for the philosophes. The words of Copernicus, Galileo, Locke, and Newton, by emphasizing empiricism, legal equality, as well as the battles within the Church, all acted as the philosophes would have to do.  Other scholars have relied on social and economic explanations like those I mentioned before for the Enlightenment.  And historians have put forward other ideas to explain the Enlightenment, including the effect of world exploration.  World voyagers, by seeing new lands and showing new methods for organizing society had destabilized monarchy and Christianity.  Furthermore, the seventeenth century decline of the greatest monarchies, the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs, made other political forms seem possible.  But there is no smoking gun that can explain the Enlightenment, and competing theories will continue to abound.

Before returning to our first question -the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution -- we must investigate much more thoroughly the political views of the philosophes. There were three giants who greatly influenced political thought.  By examining their works, we can appreciate the range of Enlightenment thinking.

In 1748 Charles-Louis Montesquieu (1685-1755) published his most important systematic approach. Entitled The Spirit of the Laws, it argued that the nature of government depended on the size and tradition of the people to be governed. He thought that a small highly educated, homogeneous society could govern itself in a republic (a form of government that had no king).  On the other end of the spectrum were large, diverse, untutored populations that required the tight control only available from a powerful monarchy.  Montesquieu most admired the mixed government, the situation in England.  There he found a medium sized country with a relatively educated population, and he endorsed the mixed government of a king dependent on a Parliament divided between commons and lords.  For France, which he pegged as somewhat less adept than England, he still advocated the checks and balances he admired across the Channel; but he saw the competing groups as the king and aristocracy.

Yet, in all Montesquieu's prescriptions, government was constructed to suit the population.  Of course, Montesquieu revealed his doubts, widely shared at that, about the abilities of the general society to participate in government, but still he was trying to construct a system that would serve the needs of the country.

Montesquieu also wrote another brilliant work, the Persian Letters (1721) that will give us some notion of the attack that the philosophes launched against the society.  This little book, published anonymously, seems to be a group of letters from two Persian travelers who viewed France naively without accepting the prevailing viewpoints.  In this way, just by describing what they see, the travelers rip the veil off common practices, showing them to be misanthropic at best.  Everything comes under this withering fire.  For example, one of the Persians is sent to meet the most important noble in France whom he describes thusly: AI met a little man who was so proud, who took snuff with such haughtiness, blew his nose so mercilessly, spit with such composure, and who caressed his dogs in such an offensive way. . . .   Seemingly  amazed by all this, the Persian then used the example to paint a contrary view of how an aristocrat ought to behave.  For all the Persians' clearsightedness, however, they could not see their own foibles.  During their voyage, they receive repeated news that the harem at home, which completely resembles a despotic monarchy, is disintegrating.  They cannot understand this, but the reader is meant also to see the problem in unresponsive monarchy.

Voltaire (1694-1778), more a satirist than a formal philosopher, subjected his adversaries to withering fire. No other philosophe could match the rapier pen of Voltaire, as we can see in his attack on the propensity of the monarchs of the day to engage in warfare.  Part and parcel of being a king or queen in this period was waging war, and Voltaire's negative opinion of this could not be more evident.  Although Voltaire's two battling kingdoms in battle were the Bulgarians and the Abares, these were just pseudonyms for any number of warring monarchs.  Let us see how Candide, the hero of Voltaire's short novella of the same name witnessed matters:

Nothing could be smarter, more splendid, more brilliant than the two armies.  The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; then the musketry removed some nine or ten thousand [more].  The bayonet was the reason for the death of some more thousands.  Candide fled to a ravaged village . . . .  Here old men, dazed with blows, watched the dying agonies of their murdered wives . . .  others half burned, begged to be put to death.  Brains were scattered on the ground among dismembered arms and legs.

Indeed, Voltaire proved a scathing critic of the political practice of his own time.

Voltaire also saw himself as a realist and believed that in the world in which he lived, reform would most likely come through the intervention of monarchs. Later historians termed his approach Aenlightened despotism. Although the accuracy of this term has been questioned, it does give us a useful handle on what Voltaire was trying to do. Part of being a monarch had always been to be a good steward for the people of a country. Yet there had been no doubt that when needs of the state and the individual conflicted, they would be resolved in favor of the state. What Voltaire tried to do was to reverse this equation, encouraging monarchs to work for the benefit of the population.  And, indeed, many kings and queens -- most notably the Austrians, Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the Prussian Frederick the Great, and the Russian Catherine the Great -- undertook such a role.  Although the effect proved to be more style than substance, it did seem that enlightenment was penetrating to even the most resistant quarters.  Voltaire himself did much to promote this, but he was not exclusively devoted to this means.  In other situations, he encouraged more radical solutions.

And the most systematically radical philosophe was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Like Montesquieu and Voltaire, Rousseau varied his prescriptions for good government.  For example, when he considered Poland, Rousseau leaned toward monarchy.  However, in his most daring political work, The Social Contract (1762), he laid out the most ambitious plan of all for the rights of the individual.  He began this entire line of thought with the quandary: Man is born free, yet he is universally enslaved.  Rousseau's goal was to understand this problem and propose a solution.  He immediately discounted returning to the state of nature and doing away with government as impractical.  So, asked Rousseau, how could individuals be free yet submit to the power of the state?

To this question, he provided an ingenious solution.  He created a concept, "The General Will" that represented the goal or goals that would best serve everyone in society.  Then Rousseau argued that if everyone cared enough about their society, they would want the General Will.  In this situation, the individual's will would be same as the general will.  In other words, you could be free because what you wanted was what was best for everyone.  There would be no conflict between you and the state.

In the Social Contract Rousseau argued that this link between the individual and general wills would be very difficult to achieve and would be possible only in small, homogeneous societies that did not already possess large inequalities within them.  He never thought France a possibility for this sort of arrangement. But he did, at least in the abstract, demarcate a new outer boundary for the place of the individual in the state.  In retrospect, we see the potential for the state to use the notion of following the general will as a method for controlling the individual; but contemporaries saw the freedom that highly motivated ethical people would have.  And, in fact, many contemporaries thought it applicable to big states.

Only twenty or thirty years ago, we could have ended our discussion of the philosophes through examining  ideas, but in these intervening years scholars have defined cultural activities as well that may be generally linked to the ferment caused by the Enlightenment.  Although the connection between the Enlightenment and these practices -- to be described next -- is not always clear, it is important to outline a series of cultural changes that many attribute to the philosophes.

Some scholars have sought to define the Enlightenment as an enhanced process of communication.  In the eighteenth century, publishing multiplied, and millions outside of the narrow elite began to own reading material beyond that which was religious.  This widespread practice of reading gave an independence.  Moreover, the spread of a reliably produced political press, even though often censored, created a calendar for the dissemination of political news.  The practice of reading newspapers gave the public a sense that governments were reporting to them.  Public places for discussion of political matters also increased as cafes with newspapers, reading clubs, academies, and salons proliferated.  All this worked together to generate a practice and place for informed and demanding public opinion.

Interestingly, the spread of free masonry contributed to change.  Constituted as a network of clubs whose purposes were social and intellectual, this organization included only the aristocracy and the top of the commoners.  Yet, importantly, in the freemason orders, all classes mixed without distinction.  Discussion was secular, so an elite, far less stratified than general, also emerged. A contemporary cartoon emphasized the Masonic commitment to rational and scientific thought.

In addition, there was a general desacralization of the pillars of the Old Regime in France.  Kings had always held demi-god status, certainly he was not a full god but with some supernatural mystique.  In particular, kings were thought to be able to cure leprosy by touch.  But Louis XVI abandoned this practice because contemporaries no longer believed that he possessed such powers.  Indeed, both king and queen became the target of demeaning, sometimes pornographic political tracts.  Likewise, those writing legacies in wills left fewer donations for religious purposes and chose more secular ends.  And individuals began to defy the Church and use birth control.  Personal hostility to the clergy may have also been on the rise.

Thus, by the late eighteenth century, substantial change had occurred including social and economic shifts, demographic change, and consumerism.  Furthermore, there was  a startling transformation in ideas and practices.  Many of those pointed away from the past regime and toward legal equality, talent, empiricism, humanitarianism, deism and natural law as well as attacks on the Church and the nobility.  Rousseau had even defined a government without a king.  The freemasons practiced a new kind of society lacking social distinctions. Yet in 1770 no one would have predicted revolution.  Even when the Americans successfully rebelled from 1775 to 1783, this seemed to have few implications for Europe.  America was so different and unusual.  Moreover, many saw that revolution as the rebellion of a captive colony against an oppressive mother country  rather than an internal revolution.  So, what happened to change things?  It is to the relatively short term factors that we must turn.  As these circumstances emerge, it will become evident how long term shifts in the economy and ideas interrelate with these immediate issues.

The Unwinding of the Old Regime

The problem that would really lead to the unwinding of the Old Regime was essentially budgetary. Participating in the American Revolution had proven extremely costly to the French Bourbon monarch.  Creditors became worried, not only by the size of the debt, but also because of the mounting critique of the monarchy from the Enlightenment and elsewhere.  At first, the ministers -- specifically Jacques Necker, the Controller General-- kept up the confidence of investors.  But by the mid-1790's, resistance to buying government bonds had mounted.

To remedy this problem, the king proposed cutting expenditures and increasing taxes.  Both were resisted, but the latter more strenuously.  Indeed, the top law courts of France (the parlements spelled parlements as opposed to the English parliament)possessed the right to promulgate or announce all laws, including tax legislation. Although the king could force promulgation, there were many legal technicalities as well as the force of public opinion on the magistrates= side.  As the king, Louis XVI, endeavored to enforce his will, the parlements resisted, stating that they would not be willing to register such legislation unless the king promised more responsible government.  By this they meant the glorious Bourbon monarchs were to share power, somewhat like the constitutional kings in England.

In fact, the proposal circulated to trim royal power forced the meeting of the Estates-General, an elected body that had not met since 1614. Like the British parliament, it had the power to vote in any new taxes.  This was a huge event because, even though the parlements could delay and be difficult, the Estates actually wielded some power.  And the power to tax reduced monarchical authority considerably.  At first, Louis XVI resisted calling the Estates, but as his fiscal problems mounted, he reluctantly agreed in 1788 to have this ancient body, the Estates-General, meet in Versailles in May 1789.  In effect, without a shot being fired, royalty was considerably diminished.

But matters would expand further, and the election to the Estates-General would provide the forum.  The Estates-General had three groups of delegates -- the Clergy, the Nobility, and the Commons.  As these names imply, the electorate was similarly divided to vote for each group.  When the three estates would meet, each would have one vote.  This gave dominance to the nobility, a two-to-one majority, because they had their vote and the clergy's as well because so many nobles held influence over that set of delegates.  And in fact, this was the traditional arrangement.  But much had transpired since the last election in 1614.  Controlling the commoner delegation was the middle class, or bourgeoisie, which had been much influenced by the philosophes' view that talent not birth ought to prevail.  They were not about to take a backseat to the nobility.

And indeed, the commoners saw the solution as doubling their number of delegates to equal the other two estates and then vote by head instead of order.  This plan would have created a 600 to 600 tie but the bourgeois delegates felt confident that some liberal nobles and members of the lower clergy would come to their side.  The king agreed to the doubling but not the vote by head which was left undecided.  And so the commoner delegates arrived at Versailles in early May with the idea of taking over the Estates.  In an important sense they had added the nobility to the king as their target.

The last piece to this combustible pile was the working people, both rural and urban.  Although they had taken a back seat to the middle class in the elections, they did participate, especially in the drawing up of a list of grievances prepared at the beginning steps of the election.  The working people believed that the Estates-General would tend to their problems which consisted of the usual poverty worsened by a sharp upturn in the cost of bread and the collapse of the textile industry.  Costs of renting land had also been rising.

Facing the restless commoners, the king and a large part of the nobility endeavored to quash this incipient rebellion.  Things got worse on June 17 when the commoners proclaimed themselves no longer the Third Estate, but the National Assembly, laying claim to sovereignty over the country. The king moved troops in to dismantle the National Assembly and then fired Jacques Necker who had returned and seemed to favor the changes.  Springing into action, the radicals and the working people moved in mid-July to seize weapons to defend the reforms and the National Assembly.  Their three-day riot climaxed on July 14, 1789, with the seizure of the Bastille, a medieval prison that in the popular mind was equated with despotic power. This action transformed everything and contemporaries started labeling the events of 1789 as a revolution in the sense that we use the term.  In fact, when news of the seizure of the Bastille reached Louis, he inquired: Is it a revolt?  No, came the answer, it's a revolution.

It's a Revolution

Echoes of the seizure of the Bastille cascaded through the countryside where villagers also struck out to save the revolution. The target here was the aristocrats who were believed to be organizing a counterrevolution. In addition, the peasantry added goals of their own.  In particular, they wanted an end to the legal rights of the lords who through ancient privileges could tax the peasantry for a multitude of practices.  At the least, these actions made the revolution a national one.

Time does not permit describing the ways that long term stresses affected the revolutionary events of the 1780's, but clearly the Enlightenment encouraged the middle classes' demands. A contemporary cartoon shows the bourgeoisie overcoming past limits and their social superiors.  But we will be able to see even better the effect of the Enlightenment on the next phase of the revolution.  From the summer of 1789 to September of 1791, the National Assembly consolidated their hold on the country.  What did these largely middle class deputies do to fix a revolution?  We can see this by observing three critical documents: the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen (August 22, 1789), the August Decrees (August 4, 1789), and the Constitution of 1791.

Of these three, the Declaration of Rights can tell us the most about the intentions of the National Assembly, which was after all leading the revolution.   Although we know relatively little about the discussions that eventually produced this document, we do know that the revolutionaries had grand ambitions.  As they were working on this document, they were aware that the Americans were deciding about the first ten amendments to the Constitution, customarily known as the Bill of Rights.  But there is an important contrast.  The Americans had already constructed a government with the constitution which had been accepted with only a promise that the Bill of Rights would be added later as amendments.  The amendments themselves were designed only to limit governmental powers.  Understanding this notion, the French wanted to set up a standard of rights before a constitution was passed.  In this way the government would be formed to defend the rights already enumerated.  Rights would frame the government.  Some deputies worried about this expansive notion and wanted to add duties as well.  But they were overruled by those who wanted to make a statement.

The preamble of the French Declaration promises, in fact, to construct a government on rights.  The delegates proclaimed that their Declaration would include the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man.  Following the philosophes, they turned to natural law and sought to enumerate what rights they found.  Then the revolutionaries proclaimed that, as these rights would be always available to the government, they Amay remind [officials] unceasingly of their rights and duties.  Here they insisted on the preeminence of rights over the action of the government.

But what rights were granted?  The first article calls for freedom and equality. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.  Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.  But in fact the document contains more important discussion of what is meant by liberty.  Consider the language of Article 2.  The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.  These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety and Resistance to Oppression. After reiterating the assertion made in the Preamble regarding natural law, the Declaration states four important rights.  The most amazing of these is the AResistance to Oppression. Having just made a revolution of their own, the revolutionaries were promising that future people who felt oppression were entitled to resist.  This is a very strong statement guaranteeing the right to ignore, no destroy, the ruling authority.

Further strong evidence of this libertarian bent may be located in Article 4. Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights.  These bounds may be determined only by Law.  This item stated forthrightly that the only limit to rights was the rights of others.  Ruled out were restrictions on what has come to be called Avictimless crimes. For someone in the twentieth century, such an article would seem to make legal the taking of drugs or wearing no clothes or other such conduct. 

Article 5 reiterates this libertarian approach: The Law has the right to forbid only those actions that are injurious to society.  Nothing that is not forbidden by Law may be hindered, and no one may be compelled to do what the Law does not ordain.  Together with its preceding article, it gives law a limited scope leaving a broad field of interaction to individuals.  Further, there can be no retroactive laws.  In fact, all these articles, when put together, make the state subject to rights but indeed even define the rights of the state in the most limited way possible.  Such articles appear an effort to put the would-be powerful monarch as far into the past as possible.  Article 15 confirms this point by making public officials strictly accountable. 

Nonetheless, the Declaration has other things to say about liberty which, at least from our point of view, contradict the libertarianism thus defined.  Importantly the concluding phrase of article 7 states:" any citizen summoned or apprehended by virtue of the law, must give instant obedience; resistance makes him guilty."  This would seem a far cry from the resistance to oppression offered before.  Indeed, this principle of right seems restrictive even in a non-revolutionary atmosphere.  To be guilty of a crime just because one flees arrest seems quite restrictive.

Article 10 continues the reduction of rights.  It states: "No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order." Here are a number of phrases worthy of note.  Singling out religious from other opinions already highlights a wariness toward allowing religious difference.  But the article also indicates that such religious opinions were acceptable only as long as they do not interfere with Law and Order. The Declaration seems clearly to anticipate outlawing some religious opinions; this is far short of toleration.  As far as other views, they may be suspect as well.  What does it mean to be allowed to have only those opinions that do not disrupt?  Is this much freedom?

The very next article deepens such concerns as it states: The free communication of ideas and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man.  "Any citizen may therefore speak, write and publish freely, except what is tantamount to the abuse of the liberty in the cases determined by Law." This seems to me to be a very explicit and destructive limit on free expression.  If one still regards the Law as limited as specified in preceding articles, then the limit on expression would not be great.  But in the context of Article 10 in which not only law, but order as well, provide a straitjacket for opinions, it becomes easy to imagine this article as undermining the freedom of the press.

Despite these limits, the Declaration remains more libertarian than restrictive.   Still how did this happen?  Was this born of haste?  Or of the conflict between those who wanted rights and those who wanted duties?  Perhaps it can best be explained by reconsidering the effect of Rousseau who believed it possible to combine the individual and the general will through the idealism of the individual.  In short, for the framers of the French Declaration, individual wills and society's goals would conform to the general will.  Further, they seem to have assumed that any conflict with Law and Order (which was clearly already in conformance with the general will) was the fault of the individual who had to be constrained.   Freedom, conceived in Rousseauian terms, would not challenge Law and Order.  Thus, the constraints conceived in the Declaration did not undermine freedom.

My interpretation stresses then that contemporaries saw the expansive side of the 1789 Declaration without imagining that the language of the document was repressive.  Only with the subsequent violence of the French Revolution -- after 1791 and in particular during the Terror in 1793-94--and yet other revolutions do these restrictions loom large as harbingers of repression.

In fact, the August decrees seemed more problematic at the time. Following the revolution against the nobility in the countryside in July 1789, the National Assembly had to mollify the peasantry which was, you will recall, angry about the exactions levied on them by the manor lords.  These complaints took the form of an attack on feudalism.  For contemporaries, feudalism consisted of the monetary and symbolic advantages of owning a manor, such as head taxes, monopolies on milling, and the exclusive right to raise pigeons.  Purportedly, these manorial rights dated from medieval times.

The National Assembly had to respond to this pressure and they did so by abolishing feudalism but they took a very broad stroke.  Not only did they eliminate financial advantages enjoyed by lords, but they also ended the system of privileges which were endemic to the Old Regime. An engraving of the revolution shows the dismantling of aristocratic privileges.  Here the king is still honored, but he was, as we shall see, only temporarily restored.  Specifically,  the National Assembly destroyed guilds that held monopolies over certain manufactures.  They wiped out the rights that certain cities held.  Consider the following articles in the August Decrees:

Financial, personal, or real privileges are abolished forever.  Every citizen will pay the same taxes on everything. Every specific privilege of provinces, principalities, regions, districts, cities and communities of inhabitants, either in the form of money or otherwise, are abolished.

It is apparent that the delegates made everyone equal before the law like the philosophes would have wanted.  The use of the term citizen implied a uniform relationship to the law.  But, also like the philosophes, the delegates definitely accepted -- even insisted -- on economic differences.  Private property was rigorously maintained, and they did not contemplate land reform to give more to the peasants.  Ostentation concerned the revolutionaries, but taking away property to even things out appalled them even more.

The final document to put in place was the Constitution which would set up the governmental institutions of the revolution.  Essentially, the document entrusted sovereignty in the French nation, essentially demoting the king to executing the laws.  Although still possessing some power through his veto power, the king was largely removed from the legislative process.  Otherwise, the government was structured to benefit the wealthy far more than the poor.  To be certain, more people were involved in politics than anyone would have contemplated before 1789.  Yet through limiting suffrage to the propertied and using indirect elections which also favored those who could travel to intermediate voting places, the Constitution attempted to discourage participation of the poor.  Although suffrage limits were not well enforced, the intent of the National Assembly remains clear.  Not surprisingly, these policies altogether favored the wealthy commoners, a far larger group than the nobles.

In sum, the revolutionaries launched France in a new direction.  As France was then large and influential, this change had enormous impact.  It consisted of liberty, equality before the law but not economic equality, political participation, and a middle class that was in control of government.  If these attributes look familiar, it is because they mimicked elements of the Enlightenment. This list surely indicates the impact of the philosophes.  Even though the immediate crisis of the revolution sprang from recurrent battles over money, the use of the traditional Estates-General, and an involvement of the working classes that certainly did not depend on the philosophes, the construction of a new France after 1789 would depend heavily on the Enlightenment.

The revolutionary goals may look very familiar for a second reason: much of this political approach still resonates today.  The call for liberty and equality before the law form an important legacy that people still fight for today.  Indeed, in embodying these concepts in the West in a new and dramatic way, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment signal their value as a key subject in the study of Western Civilization.

But the underlining of  liberty and equality in the political vocabulary of the West only heralded more political experiments, which the Revolution would undertake.  While most Americans would hail the first efforts of the French Revolution in 1789, later attempts drew mixed reviews, even two hundred years ago.  This last section of this lecture will attempt to describe a succession of changes and viewpoints that occurred through the Revolution and its aftermath.

Despite the completion of the Constitution of 1791, France became increasingly troubled. An urban radicalism broke out among the working people of Paris and their supporters who resented the bourgeois tilt of the government.  They felt the revolution had not achieved its promise. In the countryside other problems loomed.  In order to solidify the governmental finances, the National Assembly had nationalized the lands of the Catholic Church.  While this was not very controversial, the subsequent reorganization of the Church was.  To mimic the political system, priests and other Church officials were to be elected.  And, even more problematic, they were to swear an oath of allegiance to the government.  This anti-hierarchial move, which detached priests from the Church, was resented by many parishioners, especially rural ones in western France.  Resentment of the government also grew because expectations were very high, and certain kinds of peasants benefited far less than their neighbors.

Into these rumbling complaints war intruded.  Fueled by political opportunism and ideology among the revolutionaries and monarchical solidarity among the crowned heads of Europe, war between the French and the crowned heads of Europe broke out in the spring of 1792.  The revolutionaries were in no way prepared and suffered a string of defeats.  Even after stabilizing the military front, they faced fear and suspicion at home from the radicals and Parisian workers about their loyalty.  On the other hand, resentful peasants had no desire to die in this fight. Once the government resorted to a large draft, civil war resulted.

Faced with armed resistance within and without, the revolutionaries moved to strengthen the government.  Enabling this was the overthrow of the monarch on August 10, 1792 and his execution in January 1793. The May 1793 elimination of his more moderate supporters from the legislature further allowed strong action by the now dominant party, the Jacobins, and their leader Maximilian Robespierre.  The Jacobins prosecuted the war from their power in extremely important committees, especially the Committee of Public Safety. Revolutionaries' efforts to repress opposition and mobilize power have been labeled the Terror.

The Terror

Most narrowly, the Terror may be defined as the use of a streamlined system to bring to justice those whom the regime labeled as criminals. Quick trials, often ending with a trip to the ominous guillotine, symbolized this approach.  But there were many means of dying, and, if one counts the deaths of counterrevolutionaries, between 200,000 and 500,000 people likely died during the Terror.

Furthermore, several ideological positions characterize the Terror.  First the revolutionaries insisted that they were one with the people.  In a sense they were stating that they were congruent with the General Will.  Since the General Will was that belief that was best for all, dissent was by definition suspicious.  And, indeed, that is how the Jacobins came to see matters. Robespierre even went so far as to say that the people were not yet capable of pursuing the General Will; it was the job of the revolutionary government to show them the way, by capital punishment if necessary.  Consequently, the Terror went beyond suppressing opposition to try to create patriots suitable for the nation.

This effort to create patriots was also a new departure coined in the revolutionary maelstrom.  Some have linked this tendency directly to fascist and communist regimes in the twentieth century.  But the connection is somewhat superficial as the French took this approach only briefly during the Terror.  As we have seen, the Declaration of Rights also shares at least general hostility to dissent.  Yet this was but a subtheme.  In sum, a connection exists but this tendency develops more strongly in the 1900's.

Another novel feature of the period of the Terror is the creation of a state religion -- the Cult of the Supreme Being.  This emerged from concerns about the virulence of anti-Christian feeling in which local radicals were sacking churches and attacking even the Church that followed revolutionary dictates.  Robespierre believed that this brazen anger created more enemies than it rallied supporters.  So he fashioned a new church whose dogma was the revolution.  Self anointed as high priest, Robespierre stated:

Generous people, do you want to triumph over all your enemies?  Practice justice and render to the Supreme Being the only form of worship worthy of his People, let us surrender ourselves today, under his auspices, to the just ecstasy of pure joy.  Tomorrow we shall again combat vices and tyrants; we shall give the world an example of republican virtues; and that shall honor the Supreme Being more.

Secularizing religion to benefit the state was something new in the Western world; the approach has found few direct imitations, though parallels exist in some insurgent and dissident movements.

The Terror did not long outlive its major reason for existence.  Once the French began to dominate Europe militarily, they lost interest in radical suppression.  When in August 1794, the Terrorists squabbled among themselves, the unaligned legislators grabbed power for themselves.  But still France was too unsettled in need of a strong state to repress the internal battles.  For this, the French would try another governmental approach: the military strongman in the form of Napoleon.

Born in 1769 in Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte was away from home in military school in France in 1789.  Swept up in the revolution, unwelcome for his politics back in Corsica, and willing to take advantage of the openings in the new revolutionary military, Napoleon swiftly rose to the rank of general.  Despite suspicions cast on him during the Terror, he led a victorious army in Italy in 1796-9.

Napolean Bonaparte

For our purposes, we need to consider Napoleon's political career which becomes significant only in 1795.  With the Terror over, the remaining revolutionaries resolved to avoid earlier mistakes.  As such, the new governmental structures they erected were weak and divided so that no one person could consolidate authority.  This approach disregarded the treacherous situation that confronted them.  Still at war, the revolutionaries had to mobilize society.  In addition, though the Jacobins had been tossed out of power and the counterrevolutionaries had been defeated, both of these groups still hoped for a comeback.  They too had to be managed.  To do this, the governing elite relied increasingly on the military; and Bonaparte, who from the beginning saw himself as a man of order, was only too willing to oblige.  Already, in 179_ he had dispersed an uprising that threatened the government.

Five years of this sort of governing left the revolutionaries with little confidence in divided authority.   A coup, led by Abbé Sieyès and Roger Ducos, aimed to replace the rickety democracy with a consular government modeled on Rome.  They would be the consuls.  But they needed help and, for this, they turned to Napoleon who they hoped would supply them with military muscle and then fade into the background.  And, when they sprang the trap on November 10, 1799, Napoleon did help them, but he would not let them have their way.   In fact, just after the New Year of 1800, he reemerged as the sole holder of power.  He would enhance his situation in 1802 by making himself consul for life and then later in 1804 the emperor. In 1810, he strengthened his control by eliminating sources of opposition.  For example, he had previously reduced the number of newspapers to less than a dozen; in 1810 he cut them to four.  In all these cases, it was not enough not to criticize the regime; one had to include sufficient amounts of praise.

But how should we understand Napoleon?  What was the deeper nature of his rule?  First, he was no traditional European monarch.  They derived their legitimacy -- their right to rule -- from heredity.  Any beginning of a monarchical line was shrouded in the mists of time.  But Napoleon simply established himself, like Caesar. He even took the crown and placed it on his own head.  But having made himself a consul, then an emperor, he did go on to make heredity very important, as he placed his family in high positions and planned on bequeathing his throne to his descendants.  Even though he was acting like a monarch, it was impossible to disguise that he was simply asserting his power..

But his claim to authority was, in fact, still more complex as he projected himself as a man of the people.  First, he accepted many of the results of the revolution, especially the land settlement devastating to the Church, and to a degree, the nobility.  By agreeing to this legacy, he cemented his ties with the population.  And he further underlined his difference with kings by destroying the old regimes that still existed outside of France.  Many subjugated groups regarded him as a liberator.

One way of understanding how Napoleon straddled the Old and the New is to understand that he had elected legislative bodies.  He also permitted plebiscites -- votes on various constitutional matters.  But increasingly both the votes and the legislatures were either engineered or ignored.  The strategy of having votes but not really counting them indicate the type of governmental theory that he introduced.  Perhaps it can be summarized: he was a man with power, connected to but not dominated by the people.

This method of governing has often been duplicated.  Louisiana's Huey Long in the United States and Italy's Mussolini seem the same.  Once again, the revolution was a seedbed for a political form that was then novel but would be seen again.

Napoleon did not last all that long as he lost power in 1815, but his method of governing was not the reason for his fall.  In fact, though the French came to chafe against his repressive policies, they also supported the order that he had created.  Indeed, he fell because he overreached militarily.  Although Napoleon in 1807 had created an uneasy truce with Alexander I, the Tsar of Russia,  it became increasingly evident that to dominate Europe, he would have to humble his Russian competitor.  Even though his advisors thought an attack risky, Napoleon decided to try to subdue his adversary. Napoleon already controlled an immense area; expansion would be difficult, but he went ahead. As the chart clearly indicates, he started out with approximately 400,000 men, saw his massive force dwindle by the arrival in Moscow to a bit over 100,000, and struggled back toward France with but a few thousand at his command in 1813. Although he raised another army, was defeated, and exiled, he escaped back to France in 1815.  Once again defeated, this time at Waterloo in modern day Belgium, he was sent to St. Helena, a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The fall of Napoleon did not end the political role of the French Revolution as these events continued to make an impact.  In literature, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Anatole France, and others all wrote extensively about the revolution.  Even in America, movie-makers have produced dozens of films on the revolution.  A & E television even produced a multi-night extravaganza on Napoleon.

But there are important and novel political effects that took place after 1815.  Of these, the two most interesting creations are the invention of liberalism and nationalism.  These ideas emerged after the revolution but relate heavily to it.  Liberalism looks very much like the ideology of 1789. In essence, liberals believed in elected government.  They wanted to make the inhabitants of a country sovereign. They also saw the Church as a menace and opposed a formal state religion. Though clearly influenced in all this by the revolution, liberals were wary of its destructive effects.  In particular they saw the Jacobin period as one that involved of the working people. They envisioned these latter as uneducated and impulsive, and most important lacking a sufficient stake in society. To remedy this, the liberals thought that voters and elected officials should all be propertied. The revolutionaries had at first held this view themselves but gradually came to favor universal suffrage.  But liberals, including men like Lafayette in France and John Stuart Mill in England, emphatically supported limiting the vote to the established.  In a sense, the liberals were chastened revolutionaries who wanted to celebrate and enjoy the revolution without its problems which they blamed on the poor.  One corollary of liberalism was its embrace of wealth. Although almost all revolutionaries believed in the sanctity of private property, they remained suspicious of those with fortunes. The liberals had no such qualms.  They hesitated before pretensions at times, but certainly not accumulation. This notion favored rich over poor as well and conformed to the liberals' idea of themselves as believing in responsible change.  Interestingly, this general approach predominated in Europe throughout the nineteenth century and still finds many supporters even now.

Most scholars also believe that nationalism emanated from the Revolution. By nationalism, they mean simply a belief that a homogeneous group, bound by its history, language, and ethnicity, ought to constitute a single nation and exercise autonomy.  Why do historians consider the revolution as the well spring of this movement?  It is a complicated story.  First, nations had been under construction for centuries.  Kings had been trying to assemble a coherent land mass whose inhabitants shared language and culture.  England and France had been most successful at this, while Germans and Italians had notably failed.  But kings did what they did to enhance dynastic power. They did not seek to create nationalism; they just wanted a coherent unit that they could dominate and use as a base for expansion.  Nationalism grew nonetheless, but without any intellectuals defining or leading it.

However, the example of the French nation from 1789 to 1815 inspired a definition of nationalism.  Because the French had rallied as a unit on the field of battle, they became exemplars of what a nation could do.  Their behavior gave impetus to the clear formulation of the idea of nationalism.  Another development contributing to the notion of nationalism came from the reverse impulse: local resistance to the French.  During the revolutionary era, the French moved through Europe and occupied large swaths of Western, Southern, and Central Europe.  They appeared with an arrogance and their unusual ways.  Their presence made the occupied understand the cultural similarities that these latter people shared.  In fact, resistance often emerged along ethnic and linguistic lines.  This too helped the formal notion of nationalism crystallize.  After the fall of Napoleon, writers began to imagine a nationalism for each group.  For example, Mazzini wanted Italians to unify in a single nation, even though the geographic area known then and now as Italy was then covered by several countries.  By 1870 his ideas would succeed.  Elsewhere these notions would be carried forward, and even used as the principles to settle World War I.

Conclusion

In short, this legacy reaffirms what we already know: the Enlightenment and the French Revolution period provided crucial notions to Western and World civilization.  One may quickly enumerate them. From the Enlightenment emerged, most significantly, legal equality, deism, and hostility to the Church. The Revolution took up some of these same causes and implemented them, creating a regime that by 1791, emphasized liberty, legal equality, political participation, and middle class dominance. Finally, new directions emerged including powerful interventions by the working classes both rural and urban as well as novel forms of control including the Terror and Napoleon. In the aftermath liberalism and nationalism would emerge. It is a list that we are still dealing with today.