What was the French Revolution? Causes and consequences

The French Revolution was the upheaval from 1789 to 1799 in which the people of France overthrew their absolute monarchy and the legal privileges of the nobility and the Church, declared that all men are born free and equal in rights, and made France a republic. It began with a bankrupt king calling a national assembly, passed through war and the executions of the Terror, and ended when the general Napoleon Bonaparte took power in a coup in 1799.

In short

• A state bankruptcy, a tax system that spared the privileged, bad harvests and new ideas about rights came together in 1789.
• The Revolution moved in stages, from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, to the Terror, to a weak government that ended in military rule.
• It left modern ideas of citizenship, rights and the nation, and the political words "left" and "right".

What caused the French Revolution?

No single cause; several pressures arrived together. The first was money. France had fought expensive wars through the 1700s, most recently on the American side in the American Revolutionary War, and paid for them with loans. By 1788 about half of the state's revenue went on servicing its debt. The king, Louis XVI, could not raise taxes enough because the clergy and the nobility, the First and Second Estates, were largely exempt, and the courts, run by nobles, blocked reform.

The second was inequality written into law. Society was divided into three orders: the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate, which was everyone else, from rich lawyers and merchants to peasants, who made up the great majority of 28 million people. Peasants owed dues to lords and tithes to the Church as well as taxes to the king. The third was hunger: a hailstorm in July 1788 wrecked the harvest, and by the summer of 1789 bread prices in Paris were at their highest for decades. The fourth was ideas. The writers of the Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, had taught educated readers to question privilege and to ask by what right kings ruled.

How did the Revolution unfold?

The Revolution was not one event but a chain of them, each more radical than the last, until a reaction set in.

Date	What happened
5 May 1789	The Estates-General, an assembly of the three orders not called since 1614, opens at Versailles
17 June 1789	The Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly; three days later its members swear the Tennis Court Oath not to part until France has a constitution
14 July 1789	Crowds in Paris storm the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison
4 August 1789	The Assembly votes to abolish feudal privileges
26 August 1789	Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
5–6 October 1789	A crowd of Parisian women marches on Versailles and brings the royal family to Paris
June 1791	The king tries to flee and is caught at Varennes
April 1792	France declares war on Austria, beginning 23 years of almost constant war
10 August 1792	Crowds and National Guards storm the Tuileries palace; the monarchy falls
September 1792	Prisoners are massacred in Paris; the new National Convention declares a republic
21 January 1793	Louis XVI is guillotined
September 1793	The Law of Suspects; the Terror becomes official policy
27–28 July 1794	Robespierre is overthrown and executed; the Terror ends
November 1795	A five-man Directory takes over the government
9 November 1799	Napoleon's coup of 18 Brumaire ends the Revolution

The first stage tried to build a constitutional monarchy. The Assembly ended noble and Church privileges, sold Church land to pay the debt, divided France into departments, and in 1791 gave the country a written constitution with the king as head of a limited government. It also gave civil rights to Protestants and Jews. The king's attempted flight in 1791 destroyed trust in him, and the war of 1792 turned suspicion into panic as Austrian and Prussian armies approached.

What was the Terror?

The Terror was the period from September 1793 to July 1794 when the revolutionary government, led by the Committee of Public Safety and its best-known member, Maximilien Robespierre, used arrests, trials and executions to crush anyone it saw as an enemy of the Revolution. France was fighting most of Europe, civil war had broken out in the Vendée in the west, and cities such as Lyon had revolted. The Convention declared terror "the order of the day".

The numbers are grim. According to the World History Encyclopedia, between 300,000 and half a million people were arrested under the Law of Suspects; 16,594 were executed after trials, about 10,000 died in prison, and thousands more were killed without trial, for a total commonly estimated at 30,000 to 50,000. The war in the Vendée, fought alongside the Terror, was deadlier still: historians' estimates of the dead there, civilians and soldiers, run from about 117,000 to 250,000 and are still disputed. The victims included the queen, Marie Antoinette, and also many of the Revolution's own leaders, and most were not nobles but ordinary people. When Robespierre's colleagues feared they would be next, they turned on him, and he was guillotined on 28 July 1794.

Who were the left and the right?

The words come from the seating in the National Assembly in 1789. During debates over how much power the king should keep, members who wanted a strong royal veto sat to the right of the president's chair and those who wanted the king's power curbed sat to the left. The habit stuck, and "left" and "right" became the names for the two sides of politics worldwide. Later the most radical deputies, the Jacobin "Mountain", sat on the high benches on the left, and the more moderate Girondins lost the struggle with them in 1793.

What did the French Revolution change?

Its most lasting product was an idea. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen began: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." It held that sovereignty rests with the nation, that law is the expression of the general will, and that citizens have rights to liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. It is an ancestor of modern human rights law. Its limits were argued at the time: Olympe de Gouges answered it with a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791 and was guillotined in 1793. The Convention abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794, under pressure from the revolt of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti.

It also created the modern nation. In August 1793 the Convention ordered a mass mobilization of the whole population for war, and the citizen armies it raised carried revolutionary ideas across Europe. The Revolution gave France the metric system, a new map of departments, and the ideal of a citizen with equal rights before the law. Its experiments in democracy were short: under the 1793 constitution all adult men were to vote, but it was suspended and never used. Its most radical edge, such as Gracchus Babeuf's "Conspiracy of the Equals" in 1796, which wanted property held in common, is often counted among the forerunners of socialism and communism.

And it ended in a general's rule. The Directory was corrupt, divided and dependent on the army, and in 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew it. He kept many of the Revolution's changes, including the end of feudal privilege and equality before the law for men, while ending elected government. Even before it ended, the Revolution had inspired a durable conspiracy theory, which blamed it on a plot by Freemasons and the Illuminati.

Still argued

The Revolution's meaning has been fought over for more than two centuries. Marxist historians such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul saw it as a bourgeois revolution, the rise of a capitalist middle class against a feudal aristocracy. From the 1950s, "revisionist" historians such as Alfred Cobban and François Furet argued that the social classes did not line up that neatly, and that the Revolution was driven above all by political ideas and their own logic, with the Terror built into its language of popular will. Others see the Terror mainly as a response to war and civil war. Each reading can cite evidence, which is why the Revolution is a standard case of how history is argued.

Check yourself

• Why could a rich country like France go bankrupt, and why couldn't the king simply raise taxes?
• Trace the Revolution through its main stages, from the Estates-General to Napoleon's coup.
• Where do the political terms "left" and "right" come from?

Sources

• French Revolution — Harrison W. Mark, World History Encyclopedia, 2023
• Reign of Terror — Harrison W. Mark, World History Encyclopedia, 2022
• Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789 — Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution — Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, and American Social History Project, CUNY
• French Revolution — Wikipedia