HY 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 33: Assignat, Sovereign People, Everyman
1. The American Revolution (1775-1789)
2. The French Revolution (1789-1791)
1. The Breakdown of the Old Order
1. Many French soldiers, such as Marquis de Lafayette, left to fight
France’s traditional enemy, served in America and were impressed by
the ideals of the Revolution
2. The French Revolution was more radical and more complex, more
influential and more controversial, more loved and more hated (opened
the modern era in politics)
3. The French Revolution origin was the financial difficulties of the
government and the efforts of monarchy to raise taxes stopped by the
Parlement (popular support)
4. The government was forced to finance all its expenditures during the
American war with borrowed money and the national debt and annual
budget deficit soared
1. By 1780s, 50 percent of France’s annual budget went for ever-
increasing interest payments, another 25 percent when tot maintain
the military, 6 percent absorbed by Versailles, and less than 20
percent left for productive functions of state
2. One way out would have been for the government to declare partial
bankruptcy, forcing its creditors to accept greatly reduced payments
on the debt and France declared this after an attempt to establish a
French national bank ended in 1720
3. By the 1780s, the French debt was being held by an army of
aristocratic and bour-geois creditors, and the French monarchy had
become far too weak for this action
5. King and his ministers could not print money creating inflation to cover
their deficits because France had no central bank, non paper currency,
and could not create credit
6. In 1786, France had no alternative but to try increasing taxes and
increased revenues were possible only through fundamental reforms
(opens social and political demands)
2. Legal Orders and Social Realities
1. France’s twenty-five million inhabitants were still legally divided into three
orders, or estates, the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else
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2. The first estate, the clergy, numbered about 100,000, owned about 10
percent of the land, paid little taxes to the government every five years
1. Church levied a tax (tithe) on landowners, which averaged less than
10 percent
2. Much of the church’s income was drained from local parishes by
political appointees and worldly aristocrats at the top of the church
hierarchy
3. The second legally defined estate consisted of some 400,000 nobles, the
descendents of those who had fought in the Middle Ages (owned about
25 percent of France)
1. Taxed lightly, nobles enjoyed certain privileges of lordship (manorial
rights) which allowed them to tax the peasantry for their won profit
done by exclusive rights to hunt, fish, monopolies on baking bread
and making wine, fees for justice
2. Nobles had honorific privileges, such as the right to precedence on
public occasions and the right to wear a sword (legal superiority and
social position)
4. Everyone else was a commoner, a member of the third estate; a few
commoners were merchants or lawyers and officials (could buy manorial
rights), others were urban artisans and unskilled day laborers, but the
vast majority consisted of peasants and agricultural workers in the
countryside (united by their shared legal status)
5. There were growing tensions between the nobility and
the bourgeoisie (middle class)
6. Aided by general economic expansion, the middle class tripled to about
2.3 millions people (8 percent) and became exasperated by feudal laws
restraining the economy and by the growing pretensions of reactionary
nobility (closing ranks on bourgeoisie)
1. The French bourgeoisie eventually rose up to lead the entire third
estate in a great social revolution that destroyed feudal privileges
and established a capitalist order based on individualism and a
market economy
2. Revisionist historians see both bourgeoisie and nobility as highly
fragmented as the nobility was separated by differences in wealth,
education
7. Revisionist historians stress three development, in particular
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1. The nobility remained a fluid and relatively open order (commoners
continued to obtain noble status through government service and
purchase of positions)
2. Key sections of the nobility and bourgeoisie formed together the
core of the book-hungry Enlightenment public and both groups saw
themselves forming part of the educated elite standing well above
the common people (peasants and urban poor)
3. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were not really at odds in the
economic sphere in that both looked to investment in land and
government services
4. The ideal of the merchant capitalist was to gain wealth, to retire from
trade, purchase estates, and live as a large landowner (mining,
metallurgy, foreign trade)
8. The old Regime had ceased to correspond with social reality by the
1780s and France had already moved toward a society based on wealth
and education
3. The Formation of the National Assembly
1. The Revolution was under way by 1787 and spurred by a depressed
economy and falling tax receipts, Louis XVI’s minister of finance
proposed to impose a general tax on all landed property as well as
provincial assemblies to help administer the tax
1. Called an assembly of notables to gain support and the assembled
notables, noblemen and clergy, were not in favor and in return for
their support, demanded that control over all government spending
be given to the provincial assemblies
2. Government refused and the notables responded that tax changes
required the approval of the Estates General, the representative
body of all three estates (had not met since 1614); dismissed the
notables and established new taxes by decrees
3. The Parlement specified the fundamental laws against which no
king could transgress, such as national consent to taxation and
freedom for arbitrary arrest
4. In July 1788, Louis XVI bowed to public opinion, called for the
Estates General
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