The World of the French Revolution

Robert R Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317189565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

This book examines the European world before 1789, recounts the history of the revolution in France itself and then explores its monumental impact on European society. The book focusses on the causes of this impact and discusses the levels of thinking, communication, social, political, and economic conditions in France at the time, which combined to make the revolution possible and which were similar to those developments elsewhere in Europe.

[1] The Old Order

DOI: 10.4324/9781315564265-1

The Old Order was not “old” until it was superseded. It was a young man's world. Not only were the revolutionaries of 1789 predominantly young men—Robespierre being only thirty-one when he came to Paris in that year, and Mirabeau and the Abbé Sieyès seeming elder statesmen among them at forty—but those reaching power through legitimate channels were often also surprisingly young: Joseph II was co-emperor with his mother at twenty-four, William Pitt was prime minister of Great Britain at the same age, half the members of the conservative Parlement of Paris were under thirty-five, and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, having reigned for almost twenty years, were both dead before their fortieth birthdays.

The Old Order abounded in new developments and new ideas. Population was growing substantially for the first time since the Middle Ages, but since it apparently grew about as much in China as in Europe, and as much in southern Italy as in France or England, it is hard to see it as a specific determinant of events. Combined with other conditions, however, the increase in human numbers can have serious consequences. If on the one hand it produces more customers for trade and more taxpayers for governments, it might also, through swelling the younger age groups, make it more difficult for young men of the educated classes to find suitable careers, and could impoverish many of the agricultural population by heightening the pressure upon the land. City life was becoming more common, with all the increased awareness that it brought with it. London had a million inhabitants, Paris about 600,000. As centers of culture, fashion, serious thinking, government, and business, both cities overshadowed their respective countries more than they ever had in the past. More important, however, than such huge agglomerations (Constantinople was probably even larger) was the network of smaller cities throughout Central and Western Europe. As administrative, judicial, educational, commercial, and residential centers they possessed more vitality, in comparison with the capitals, than under the more centralized conditions of later times. Communications were improving, a few of the main roads were paved, and the road system, though still rudimentary, was the best seen in Europe since Roman times. Regular mail service had recently been introduced, and coaches now served the public on regular schedules.

Much that still stands and now seems old was new in the generation before the Revolution. Cities such as Bath and Mannheim had recently been built or reconstructed. St. Petersburg, the Russian capital (now Leningrad), was no older than Philadelphia. French provincial towns were adorned with handsome new government buildings and townhouses of leading landowners, merchants, and lawyers. It was estimated in 1788 that 10,000 new buildings had been put up in Paris in the preceding thirty years. There was some talk of tearing down the ancient Bastille, and at the opposite edge of the city the architect Gabriel built the Ecole Militaire and laid out the vast Champ-de-Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower), which was to be the scene of many revolutionary celebrations. Churches were built or improved despite the secularism of the Enlightenment. While Mont-Saint-Michel and Notre Dame de Paris were neglected even by their own clergy because they were old-fashioned, new churches were erected in the classical or modern taste, such as Ste. Geneviève, now the Pantheon. Versailles itself, when abandoned by the royal family in 1789, was less old than the United States Capitol today. The “royal squares,” such as the magnificent Place Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde) and similar works of urban planning in Nancy, Turin, and elsewhere, testified to the vigor of the institution of monarchy.

All this new growth was made possible, in general, by the changes summarized as the commercial revolution, which for several centuries had been shifting Europe to a money-and-market economy. It is not enough to speak of the rise of capitalism, still less of a “bourgeoisie,” if only because the rise of the money-and-market economy was as much a part of political as of economic development, depending as much on state power as on the incentives of trade, and because the owners of “capital,” or of wealth valued for the money income it might produce, were an extremely heterogeneous lot, among whom the differences were more important than the resemblances. The old landed aristocracies were much affected by the need for money, which was the more desirable because of the increasing array of luxuries and services it could buy. They tried to obtain it from their tenants. The poor were affected; there was a difference in the potential behavior of a peasant on a subsistence estate, who in time of bad harvest simply starved, and one whose problem, in a time of falling prices, was that he could not obtain enough cash to pay his rents and taxes. City populaces were sensitive to variations in the price of bread. Governments were voracious consumers of money; the kings were great builders, and the style of life at court had become very costly. Wars, though less destructive than in the past, were more expensive, for soldiers now had to be carefully drilled, kept in service for years, paid a wage, and housed in new barracks. Navies also had to be maintained; the whole structure of the American and Asian trade was won and kept up by sea power as much as by commercial enterprise or investment. Taxes increased but were never sufficient. Governments borrowed incessantly, and then had to carry the debt. Nothing was more common in the eighteenth century, from the American colonies to the Hapsburg empire, than for constitutional and political crises to arise out of problems of government finance.

The rise of the money-and-market economy, over a period of several centuries, had produced four recognizably distinct zones in the area of European civilization. One was England, the second was the general region of Western Europe, to the north of Spain and central Italy; the third was Eastern Europe; and the transatlantic region of European settlement or exploitation may be considered a fourth. The four zones were to react very differently to the French Revolution.

England was the most advanced and successful country under eighteenth-century conditions. It had had its great revolution a century before, the Puritan revolution, in the course of which a king had been put to death; but these events were hardly remembered and when remembered were called a rebellion, not a revolution. In England the “revolution” referred to the proceedings by which Parliament had replaced James II with William and Mary in 1689. Important constitutional liberties had been won, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest, and toleration, though not equal rights, for Protestants outside the Church of England. The most important consequence of the English seventeenth-century troubles was that Parliament became supreme over the Crown, and that the British landowning aristocracy (Scotland having been joined with England in 1707) became supreme in Parliament. Though the House of Lords was hereditary (except for the bishops), and the House of Commons was in principle elective, the difference between the two was not very great; both were based on the ownership of land, and members of the same families sat in both houses. Lords and Commons were subject to the same taxes; and the landowners who governed the country, though they increasingly threw the burden upon others in various ways, accepted in principle the direct taxation of their own incomes from landed rents. In these circumstances there was an aristocracy in the true sense of a mainly hereditary governing class which actually governed, but there was practically no nobility as known on the Continent. It was possible for landowners to work with men enriched by commerce, especially if the latter bought landed estates and adopted or respected the manners of the aristocracy.

In England, through the institution of Parliament, economic and political power coincided, and the elites of wealth and government were the same people. This fact, peculiar to England, had many very important consequences. It made the government financially very strong. The Bank of England was founded in 1694, chiefly to provide a channel by which private wealth could be made available to William III in his wars against Louis XIV. Men of means would more readily lend to a government whose policies and finances they could control. The government, in sharp contrast to France, could draw on the full resources of the country. The credit of the British government, seemingly inexhaustible, became a puzzle to the rest of the world, where the mechanism of credit was not so well understood. It was widely expected, during the French Revolutionary wars, that England would soon collapse in a pile of worthless paper, but the truth is that British credit, as much as anything else, defeated not only Louis XIV but also Napoleon.

The wealthy in England, and those hoping to become wealthy, having a strong voice in Parliament, could use political power effectively for economic advancement. They built up an unparalleled colonial empire in the long series of wars against France. They built a navy to police and extend the empire. The volume of trade with America, with Asia, with Europe, increased rapidly, and with it the supply of liquid wealth seeking further investment. At the same time the landowners, through acts of Parliament, were able to extinguish old common-law rights in the land, convert common fields to private property, enclose the old open fields, and buy up the smaller owners, until England became a country in which most of the land was owned by a few thousand families. The owners leased it to a relatively small middle class of farmers, while converting the bulk of the rural population into wage laborers. There was no landowning peasantry or mass of small farmers cultivating small parcels, as in neighboring parts of the Continent. Large landowners, having the necessary capital, open to new ideas, and susceptible to motives of future profit, carried through an agricultural revolution by which the productivity of the soil was greatly increased and the number of necessary agricultural workers were greatly reduced. Thus the food supply was enlarged while men became available to seek other employments, in new factories or in growing cities, to which they were more willing to move because neither property nor tradition held them in their rural homes. Capital, labor, food, new ideas, enterprise, and the profit motive produced a readiness to finance and support problematical new devices such as the steam engine; the elements were present by which England was the first country to enter, with no previous model, upon the process of industrialization, the famous Industrial Revolution, which was evident about 1760 or 1780.

Obviously these beginnings of industrialization were of the utmost importance for the future. In the period of the French Revolution they showed their effects indirectly. Both the owners and the employees of new factories were few in number, and they played no distinctive political role. There was no revolution in transportation or communications until well after 1800. Ships continued to be made of wood, in England as elsewhere. Except for improvements in cannon, in which the French excelled, the firearms in all armies were much the same in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as in the War of the Spanish Succession. Indeed, no century since the introduction of gunpowder has seen such stability in military technology as the eighteenth. It was essentially only in textiles, and above all in cotton, that the use of new machinery and of steam power was lowering costs and enormously increasing the volume of production in England. This meant an astronomical increase in the export of British cotton goods for several generations after about 1760. Profits from the export of cotton were now added to those from agriculture and from the older international trade, such as the resale to Europe of American sugar, tobacco, and coffee and Asian tea. The economic advantage of England, in comparison to the most developed parts of the Continent, still lay in the greater productivity of its land and hence the affluence of its upper classes, and in the institutions of banking, sea power, and foreign trade, which increased the wealth on which the British treasury could draw.

But precisely because of its great successes—its wealth, its empire, its toleration, its high level of life for the upper classes, its identification of economic and political elites, its revolution enshrined in the past—England in the eighteenth century was a highly conservative country, somewhat like the United States two centuries later. The British constitution was a source of great self-satisfaction. Economically flexible and expansive, Britain was politically rigid. It was unable to meet the demands of its American colonies, which it lost in the American Revolution. Toward Ireland it was more accommodating, but really satisfied only the Anglo-Irish and Anglican “ascendancy” in that island. English reformers, even William Pitt when he became prime minister, were unable to broaden the basis of selection to the House of Commons. English Dissenters, or non-Anglican Protestants, were again refused equal political rights in 1789, at the very time when non-Catholics were receiving them in France. Not even the game laws could be relaxed. British conservatism was to be a constant factor in the world of the French Revolution.

The second zone comprised France, Germany as far east as the Elbe river and the Bohemian border, northern Italy, and the intervening Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss regions. As in England, there was a good deal of commercial and urban development, especially in the seaports from Hamburg and Amsterdam down through Nantes and Bordeaux to Marseilles, and hence a large merchant and professional class. There were two great differences from England. Politically, in this area the French were the only people who had arrived at a national unity on a large scale, and they had done so under a so-called absolute monarchy. The rest of the zone was politically fragmented into small states susceptible to influences from outside. The United Provinces (the Dutch) were very wealthy but in many ways were dependent on England, in which much of their wealth was invested. The Belgian provinces (or Austrian Netherlands), like the duchies of Milan and Tuscany, were associated with the Hapsburg empire, within which they enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy. Genoa and Venice were patrician republics, Piedmont a compact little monarchy with its capital at Turin. Germany west of the Elbe was a mosaic of heterogeneous jurisdictions—free cities like Hamburg; small monarchies like Hanover, which belonged to the king of England, and Bavaria, which was usually allied to France; bishoprics and archbishoprics, where the prelates were the temporal rulers, together with much else, all gathered into the Holy Roman Empire, an obsolescent and almost nonfunctioning organization of which the reigning Hapsburg was usually the head.

The distinctive characteristic of this second zone, however, regardless of political forms, was in its land use and land tenure. Here the rise of the money-and-market economy had left a strong peasantry in occupation of the soil, from which, at the same time, a class of lords, or seigneurs, drew an income by the collection of miscellaneous dues, fees, and rents. The peasants, or rural laboring population, were legally free, not serfs as in Eastern Europe, nor were they predominantly wage laborers as in England. Some peasants owned parcels of land, in the sense in which their property was then legally understood. They could inherit, bequeath, buy, sell, or lease out these parcels as they wished. They owned and marketed the product and received the income, subject to the payment of customary and perpetual dues to the seigneur, which if paid in money might be quite insignificant, because of the decline in the value of money since the Middle Ages, but if paid in kind would be more of a burden. Other peasants, or indeed the same ones, worked pieces of land on modern leasehold terms, for periods of about nine years, at money rentals subject to renegotiation upward or downward upon expiration of the lease. Others worked on shares, dividing the proceeds of cultivation with the landlord. And many were landless, obliged to seek employment from other peasants, or from the lords, or in the weaving and other handicraft industries which were still located in the country though managed from the towns. In any case the actual cultivation or management of agriculture was in the hands of the peasants either as individuals or as village communities. It tended therefore to be traditional and relatively unproductive. The investment and experimentation which were revolutionizing agriculture in England were, though not unknown, much less common on the Continent. On the other hand, the countryman in this second zone was a more socially sensitized being than the British or Irish agricultural laborer or the East European serf. He made visits to town to sell his produce. He might have legal business, or rights to defend against the seigneur. He was directly exposed to, and could himself perceive, the fluctuations of agricultural prices and wages, the level of rents, and the mounting burden of taxes. Peasants were still mostly illiterate, and hardly shared in the glories of eighteenth-century civilization, but in this second zone they were not insulated from the social forces around them.

The lords, or seigneurs, in this agrarian system, drew their income less from direct exploitation of their estates than from the collection, sometimes in large total amounts, of a variety of small dues and rents. Since the whole system had originated in the medieval manor, the lord also had certain vestiges of legal jurisdiction. He could hold a court for the settlement of legal disputes, presided over by his agent and so usually favorable to himself; or he had a monopoly right to maintain a village mill or oven, which could be leased to a miller or baker for the money income it would produce. Characteristically the lord was a noble—in his own eyes descended from the chivalry of the Middle Ages—but in truth the whole system had become a system of property, valued not only for the amount of the income but for its quality or status, since income of this kind conveyed more prestige than the profits of trade or the earnings of the professions. In France, anyone who could afford it, such as a new noble, a bourgeois, or an occasional rich peasant, could purchase a manor and enjoy a seigneurial income. In places where nobles were rare or unimportant, as in Holland, Switzerland, and some of the German free cities, well-to-do townspeople received incomes of substantially this same kind from the surrounding rural population. Church bodies, dioceses, convents, universities, schools, and hospitals might also be manor lords. But the manorial, or seigneurial, system, though a form of property, was economically no longer functional. The recipient of the income played no role in production; he made few decisions and provided little or no capital for improvement. Often he was an absentee. To the peasants the whole arrangement came increasingly to seem a useless superstructure. It was generally to be abolished in the Revolution, with no immediate loss to production, though in the long run the economy of small holdings, and of peasant proprietorship or cultivation, presented problems for the modernization of agriculture.

In the short run, for the period of the Revolution itself, the significance of the land system in the second zone was twofold. It provided a basis, especially in France, for cooperation between townspeople and peasants. And the older aristocracy, being less firmly fixed on the land, was in a far more precarious position than in either England or Eastern Europe. It was more dependent, to sustain its income, on certain privileges in taxation, or on appointments in church or state (preferably sinecures), or on squeezing more revenue out of the peasants while taking no corresponding measures to increase productivity, which is to say exploitation of the poor by the rich, under circumstances in which such exploitation could be resisted. It was in this second zone, and not merely because of proximity to France, that the most powerful waves of revolution were to be felt.

The third zone, for present purposes, may be taken to mean Eastern Europe except for the Balkans, which belonged to Turkey, and except for Scandinavia, whose history was different. Here, too, as in Western Europe, there had been great changes, though in an inverse direction. Formerly, in medieval times, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary had shared in the general life of Latin Christianity. With the reorientation of commercial activity which followed upon the opening of the Atlantic trade routes, and by which Western Europe had greatly prospered, the towns of Eastern Europe fell into relative decay. Towns were far apart, few in number, and with a few striking exceptions very small. Often they were of different nationality from the surrounding country; many towns in the Baltic provinces of Russia, in Bohemia, and in Hungary were ethnic islands of Germans, and in Poland and Russia many individual merchants, shop owners, architects, or government employees were German, French, English, or Scottish. Between town and country there was little communication; indeed, outright hostility and suspicion were more common. In the political assemblies, or diets, of Bohemia and Poland, where the towns had been represented until about the year 1500, they were now virtually excluded, in part because of old religious and ethnic quarrels, but mainly because of the triumph of an agrarian and antimercantile mentality in the landed gentry and nobles.

For the rise of a money-and-market economy in Eastern Europe had been more favorable to landowners and governments than to burghers, and it had been ruinous to the peasants. The governments—that is, the Prussian, Russian, and Hapsburg monarchies—so far as their machinery of state and the territories they ruled in 1789 were concerned, had all grown up rather rapidly since the beginning of the preceding century, and in developing their systems of taxation, their armies, and their policies of expansion they had obtained the loyalty of an unruly nobility by sacrificing the peasan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Dedication
• Original Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Preliminary Observations
• 1. The Old Order
• 2. The French Revolution, 1789–92
• 3. A World Aroused
• 4. France: The Revolution Invincible
• 5. Poland and the East: The Revolution Overwhelmed
• 6. The Sister Republics: The Revolution Expanded
• 7. The Batavian, Helvetic, and Italian Republics
• 8. The English-Speaking Countries: The Revolution Acclaimed and Detested
• 9. Germany: The Revolution Philosophized
• 10. The Explosive Inheritance: Myth and History
• Additional Readings
• Index