FrenchRevolution, also calledRevolution of 1789, the revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787and 1799 and reached its first climax there in 1789. Hence the conventionalterm “Revolution of 1789,” denoting the end of the ancient régime in France andserving also to distinguish that event from the later French revolutions of1830 and 1848.Althoughhistorians disagree on the causes of the Revolution, the following reasons arecommonly adduced: (1) the increasingly prosperous elite of wealthycommoners—merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called thebourgeoisie—produced by the 18th century’s economic growth resented itsexclusion from political power and positions of honor; (2) the peasants wereacutely aware of their situation and were less and less willing to support theanachronistic and burdensome feudal system; (3) the philosophes, who advocated social and political reform, hadbeen read more widely in France than anywhere else; (4) French participation inthe American Revolution had driven the government to the brink ofbankruptcy; and (5) crop failures in much of the country in 1788, coming on topof a long period of economic difficulties, made the population particularlyrestless.Aristocraticrevolt, 1787–89The Revolutiontook shape in France when the controller general of finances, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, arranged thesummoning of an assembly of “notables” (prelates, great noblemen, and a fewrepresentatives of the bourgeoisie) in February 1787 to propose reformsdesigned to eliminate the budget deficit by increasing the taxation of theprivileged classes. The assembly refused to take responsibility for the reformsand suggested the calling of the Estates-General, which represented the clergy,the nobility, and the Third Estate (the commoners) and which had notmet since 1614. The efforts made by Calonne’s successors to enforce fiscalreforms in spite of resistance by the privileged classes led to the so-calledrevolt of the “aristocratic bodies,” notably that of the parlements (the most important courts of justice), whosepowers were curtailed by the edict of May 1788. During the spring and summer of1788, there was unrest among the populace in Paris, Grenoble, Dijon, Toulouse,Pau, and Rennes. The king, Louis XVI, had to yield; reappointingreform-minded Jacques Necker as the finance minister, hepromised to convene the Estates-General on May 5, 1789. He also, in practice,granted freedom of the press, and France was flooded with pamphlets addressingthe reconstruction of the state. The elections to the Estates-General, heldbetween January and April 1789, coincided with further disturbances as theharvest of 1788 had been a bad one. There were practically no exclusions fromthe voting; and the electors drew up cahiers de doléances, which listedtheir grievances and hopes. They elected 600 deputies for the Third Estate, 300for the nobility, and 300 for the clergy.
TheEstates-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789. They were immediately dividedover a fundamental issue: should they vote by head, giving the advantage to theThird Estate, or by estate, in which case the two privileged orders of therealm might outvote the third? On June 17 the bitter struggle over this legalissue finally drove the deputies of the Third Estate to declare themselves the National Assembly; they threatened to proceed,if necessary, without the other two orders. They were supported by many of theparish priests, who outnumbered the aristocratic upper clergy among thechurch’s deputies. When royal officials locked the deputies out of theirregular meeting hall on June 20, they occupied the king’s indoor tennis court (jeude paume) and swore an oath not to disperse until they had given France a newconstitution. The king grudgingly gave in and urged the nobles and theremaining clergy to join the assembly, which took the official title of National Constituent Assembly on July 9;at the same time, however, he began gathering troops to dissolve it.These two monthsof prevarication at a time when the problem of maintaining food supplies hadreached its climax infuriated the towns and the provinces. Rumors of an“aristocratic conspiracy” by the king and the privileged to overthrow the ThirdEstate led to the Great Fear of July 1789, when the peasants werenearly panic-stricken. The gathering of troops around Paris and the dismissalof Necker provoked insurrection in the capital. On July 14, 1789, the Parisiancrowd seized the Bastille,a symbol of royal tyranny. Again the king had to yield; visiting Paris, heshowed his recognition of the sovereignty of the people by wearing the tricolor cockade.In the provinces,the Great Fear of July led the peasants to rise against their lords. The noblesand the bourgeois now took fright. The National Constituent Assembly could seeonly one way to check the peasants; on the night of August 4, 1789, it decreedthe abolition of the feudal regime and of the tithe. Then on August 26 itintroduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming liberty, equality, theinviolability of property, and the right to resist oppression.The decrees ofAugust 4 and the Declaration were such innovations that the king refused tosanction them. The Parisians rose again and on October 5 marched to Versailles.The next day they brought the royal family back to Paris. The NationalConstituent Assembly followed the court, and in Paris it continued to work onthe new constitution.The Frenchpopulation participated actively in the new political culture created by theRevolution. Dozens of uncensored newspapers kept citizens abreast of events,and political clubs allowed them to voice their opinions. Public ceremoniessuch as the planting of “trees of liberty” in small villages and the Festivalof Federation, held in Paris in 1790 on the first anniversary of the stormingof the Bastille, were symbolic affirmations of the new order.
The NationalConstituent Assembly completed the abolition of feudalism, suppressed the old“orders,” established civil equality among men (at least in metropolitanFrance, since slavery was retained in the colonies), and made more than halfthe adult male population eligible to vote, although only a small minority metthe requirement for becoming a deputy. The decision to nationalize the lands ofthe Roman Catholic church in France to pay off the publicdebt led to a widespread redistribution of property. The bourgeoisie and thepeasant landowners were undoubtedly the chief beneficiaries, but some farmworkers also were able to buy land. Having deprived the church of itsresources, the assembly then resolved to reorganize the church, enacting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy,which was rejected by the pope and by many of the French clergy. This produceda schism that aggravated the violence of the accompanying controversies.The complicatedadministrative system of the ancient régime was swept away by the NationalConstituent Assembly, which substituted a rational system based on the divisionof France into départements, districts, cantons, and communesadministered by elected assemblies. The principles underlying theadministration of justice were also radically changed, and the system wasadapted to the new administrative divisions. Significantly, the judges were tobe elected.The NationalConstituent Assembly tried to create a monarchical regime in which thelegislative and executive powers were shared between the king and an assembly.This regime might have worked if the king had really wanted to govern with thenew authorities, but Louis XVI was weak and vacillating and was the prisoner ofhis aristocratic advisers. On June 20–21, 1791, he tried to flee the country,but he was stopped at Varennes and brought back to Paris.
The events inFrance gave new hope to the revolutionaries who had been defeated a few yearspreviously in the United Provinces, Belgium, and Switzerland. Likewise, allthose who wanted changes in England, Ireland, the German states, the Austrianlands, or Italy looked upon the Revolution with sympathy.A number ofFrench counterrevolutionaries—nobles, ecclesiastics, and somebourgeois—abandoned the struggle in their own country and emigrated. As “émigrés,”many formed armed groups close to the northeastern frontier of France andsought help from the rulers of Europe. The rulers were at first indifferent tothe Revolution but began to worry when the National Constituent Assemblyproclaimed a revolutionary principle of international law—namely, that a peoplehad the right of self-determination. In accordance with this principle, thepapal territory of Avignon was reunited with France on September 13, 1791. Byearly 1792 both radicals, eager to spread the principles of the Revolution, andthe king, hopeful that war would either strengthen his authority or allowforeign armies to rescue him, supported an aggressive policy. France declaredwar against Austria on April 20, 1792.In the firstphase of the war (April–September 1792), France suffered defeats; Prussiajoined the war in July, and an Austro-Prussian army crossed the frontier andadvanced rapidly toward Paris. Believing that they had been betrayed by theking and the aristocrats, the Paris revolutionaries rose on August 10, 1792,occupied Tuileries Palace, where Louis XVI was living, and imprisoned the royalfamily in the Temple. At the beginning of September, the Parisian crowd brokeinto the prisons and massacred the nobles and clergy held there. Meanwhile,volunteers were pouring into the army as the Revolution had awakened Frenchnationalism. In a final effort the French forces checked the Prussians onSeptember 20, 1792, at Valmy. On the same day, a new assembly, the National Convention, met. The next day it proclaimedthe abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic.In the secondphase of the war (September 1792–April 1793), the revolutionaries got thebetter of the enemy. Belgium, the Rhineland, Savoy,and the county of Nice were occupied by French armies. Meanwhile, the NationalConvention was divided between the Girondins, who wanted to organize a bourgeois republic inFrance and to spread the Revolution over the whole of Europe, and the Montagnards (“Mountain Men”), who, with Robespierre, wanted to give the lower classes agreater share in political and economic power. Despite efforts made by theGirondins, Louis XVI was judged by the Convention, condemned to death fortreason, and executed on January 21, 1793; the queen, Marie-Antoinette, was guillotined nine months later.In the spring of1793, the war entered a third phase, marked by new French defeats. Austria,Prussia, and Great Britain formed a coalition (latercalled the First Coalition), to which most of the rulers of Europe adhered.France lost Belgium and the Rhineland, and invading forces threatened Paris.These reverses, as those of 1792 had done, strengthened the extremists. TheGirondin leaders were driven from the National Convention, and the Montagnards,who had the support of the Paris sansculottes (workers, craftsmen, andshopkeepers), seized power and kept it until 9 Thermidor, year II, of the new French republican calendar (July 27,1794). The Montagnards were bourgeois liberals like the Girondins but underpressure from the sansculottes, and, in order to meet the requirements ofdefense, they adopted a radical economic and social policy. They introduced theMaximum (government control of prices), taxed the rich,brought national assistance to the poor and to the disabled, declared thateducation should be free and compulsory, and ordered the confiscation and saleof the property of émigrés. These exceptional measures provoked violentreactions: the Wars of the Vendée, the “federalist” risings in Normandy and inProvence, the revolts of Lyon and Bordeaux, and the insurrection of the Chouansin Brittany. Opposition, however, was broken by the Reign of Terror (19 Fructidor, year I–9Thermidor, year II [September 5, 1793–July 27, 1794]), which entailed thearrest of at least 300,000 suspects, 17,000 of whom were sentenced to death andexecuted while more died in prisons or were killed without any form of trial.At the same time, the revolutionary government raised an army of more than onemillion men.Thanks to thisarmy, the war entered its fourth phase (beginning in the spring of 1794). Abrilliant victory over the Austrians at Fleurus on 8 Messidor, year II (June 26, 1794), enabled theFrench to reoccupy Belgium. Victory made the Terror and the economic and socialrestrictions seem pointless. Robespierre “the Incorruptible,” who had sponsoredthe restrictions, was overthrown in the National Convention on 9 Thermidor,year II (July 27, 1794), and executed the following day. Soon after his fallthe Maximum was abolished, the social laws were no longer applied, and effortstoward economic equality were abandoned. Reaction set in; the NationalConvention began to debate a new constitution; and, meanwhile, in the west andin the southeast, a royalist “White Terror” broke out.Royalists even tried to seize power in Paris but were crushed by the younggeneral Napoleon Bonaparte on 13 Vendémiaire, year IV(October 5, 1795). A few days later the National Convention dispersed.The Directory and revolutionary expansionThe constitutionof the year III, which the National Convention had approved, placed executivepower in a Directory of five members and legislative power in two chambers, theCouncil of Ancients and the Councilof the Five Hundred (together called the Corps Législatif). This regime, a bourgeoisrepublic, might have achieved stability had not war perpetuated the strugglebetween revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries throughout Europe. The war,moreover, embittered existing antagonisms between the Directory and thelegislative councils in France and often gave rise to new ones. These disputeswere settled by coups d’état, chiefly those of 18 Fructidor, year V (September4, 1797), which removed the royalists from the Directory and from the councils,and of 18 Brumaire, year VIII (November 9, 1799), in which Bonaparte abolishedthe Directory and became the leader of France as its “first consul.”After the victoryof Fleurus, the progress of the French armies in Europe had continued. TheRhineland and Holland were occupied, and in 1795 Holland,Tuscany,Prussia, and Spain negotiated for peace. When the French army under Bonaparteentered Italy (1796), Sardinia came quickly to terms.Austria was the last to give in (Treaty of Campo Formio, 1797). Most of thecountries occupied by the French were organized as “sister republics,” withinstitutions modeled on those of Revolutionary France.Peace on thecontinent of Europe, however, did not end revolutionary expansion. The majorityof the directors had inherited the Girondin desire to spread the Revolutionover Europe and listened to the appeals of Jacobins abroad. Thus French troops in 1798 and 1799 enteredSwitzerland, the Papal States, and Naples and set up the Helvetic, Roman, andParthenopean republics. Great Britain, however, remained at war with France.Unable to affect a landing in England, the Directory, on Bonaparte’s request,decided to threaten the British in India by occupying Egypt.An expeditionary corps under Bonaparte easily occupied Maltaand Egypt, but the squadron that had convoyed it was destroyed by HoratioNelson’s fleet at the Battle of the Nile on 14 Thermidor, year VI (August 1,1798). This disaster encouraged the formation of a SecondCoalition of powers alarmed by the progress of the Revolution. This coalitionof Austria, Russia, Turkey, and Great Britain won great successes during thespring and summer of 1799 and drove back the French armies to the frontiers.Bonaparte thereupon returned to France to exploit his own great prestige andthe disrepute into which the military reverses had brought the government. Hiscoup d’état of 18 Brumaire overthrew the Directory and substituted theconsulate. Although Bonaparte proclaimed the end of the Revolution, he himselfwas to spread it in new forms throughout Europe.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder