Six on History: Vive la France-Bastille Day
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1) A Guide to the French Revolution, JACOBIN
But what was the French Revolution, how did it reshape Europe and the world, and what relevance does it have to the workers’ movement today? Here’s a short primer, lovingly compiled by Jacobin to mark the occasion.
What was the French Revolution?The French Revolution was one of the most dramatic social upheavals in history. In 1856, French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville reviewed the so-called “grievance books” — lists of demands made by the various social layers of France in anticipation of the Estates-General, the assembly that would undermine Louis XVI’s reign and lead ultimately to revolution. What he discovered startled him.
When I came to gather all the individual wishes, with a sense of terror I realized that their demands were for the wholesale and systematic abolition of all the laws and all the current practices in the country. Straightaway I saw that the issue here was one of the most extensive and dangerous revolutions ever observed in the world.
The revolutionary process started with open rebellion in the summer of 1789 — including the storming of the Bastille on July 14. It would before long topple the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI, divest the nobility of their hereditary power, and completely undermine the political influence of the Catholic Church.
This dramatic revision in French society unleashed a chaotic process of revolutionary advance and reactionary blowback. The forces of property were unwilling to stand idly by as their enormous privileges were threatened; they attempted to undo all the radical changes brought on by the revolution and restore the old social hierarchies even as the revolutionaries worked to cohere an entirely different kind of society based on more egalitarian ideals.
From this unstable crucible ultimately emerged Napoleon, who would construct the Bonapartist state through war and empire, ultimately leading to France’s renewed subjugation by the old powers of Europe and the restoration of the monarchy.
What was France like before the revolution?The vast majority of people in France lived in destitution, with little chance of escaping their condition. Peasants were entirely at the mercy of the nobility, who had preserved much of the fundamental power relationship of feudalism. As Jean Jaurès described in 1901, the economic subjugation in the countryside was profound:
There was not one action in rural life that did not require the peasants to pay a ransom… Feudal rights thus extended their clutches over every force of nature, everything that grew, moved, breathed […] even over the fire burning in the oven to bake the peasant’s poor bread.
This led to near-universal poverty in the countryside. English agriculturalist Arthur Young remarked at the time:
The poor seem poor indeed; the children terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than if with no clothes at all; as to shoes and stockings they are luxuries… One third of what I have seen of this province seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery. What have kings, and ministers, and parliaments, and states, to answer for their prejudices, seeing millions of hands that would be industrious, idle and starving, through the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility?
The urban population of artisans and journeymen laborers experienced similar hardship. Economic reorganizations in the kingdom threatened the apprenticeship system, jeopardizing the ability of craftsmen to control their own work. Day laborers — permitted to exist in the cities only when they could produce papers proving their employment — were stalked by royal police.
At the same time, a wave of immigration brought dramatic demographic changes to Paris. Historian Eric Hazan estimates that in 1789 immigrants numbered about two thirds of the city’s population, and they each had to “request a passport in their region of origin to avoid being arrested en route as vagabonds and sent to beggars colonies.”
The clergy and nobility, together comprising about 1.6 percent of the population, were doing just fine — most nobles lived in extreme opulence and inherited their positions hereditarily. The Catholic Church controlled by some estimates 8 percent of total private wealth.
But in the years immediately prior to the revolution, a new class of financiers — generally upwardly mobile craftsmen or landholding peasants — began to grow in the cities, threatening to replace the nobility as the most decadent of social layers.
Meanwhile, the kingdom was in the midst of a catastrophic financial crisis. The king was broke, and the system of accounting that had developed chaotically during the Seven Years War left the his functionaries unable to account for the kingdom’s wealth until it had almost disappeared. Foreign financiers were recalling their debts, the harvest of 1788 was decimated by a drought and a series of hailstorms, and the free trade agreement brokered between France and Great Britain at the end of the Seven Years War flooded the French market with British textiles, ruining French garment production.
But there were rumblings of resistance, in the cities as well as the countryside. Elites like Louis-Sébastien Mercier expressed dismay at the insubordination of urban workers:
There has been visible insubordination among the people for several years now, and especially in the trades. Apprentices and lads want to display their independence; they lack respect for the masters, they form corporations [associations]; this contempt for the old rules is contrary to order… The workers transform the print shop into a real smoke den.
And peasants, still expected to sacrifice even their most basic of foodstuffs as tribute to king and church, took matters into their own hands as famine loomed. As one mayor of a rural district remarked, “It is impossible to find within half a league’s radius a man prepared to drive a cartload of wheat. The populace is so enraged they would kill for a bushel.” The starving peasants were unwilling to deliver flour to their feudal masters to satisfy the demands of an enormous war debt; they prefered to eat it instead.
What other solution but revolution?
What happened on July 14, 1789?The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 represents the popular revolution’s inaugural moment. Encouraged by the rapid pace of reforms — and exasperated with the National Assembly’s unwillingness to take a harder line with the intransigent king — masses of artisans and laborers assaulted the Bastille de Saint-Antoine, seized its gunpowder, and released the handful of prisoners held there.
Hazan describes it this way: ... "
"The word “gerrymander” is American, coined to describe the strange salamander-shaped congressional district carved by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry and his party to deliver an electoral advantage in 1812. Today, parties controlling state legislatures have used gerrymandering, refined with computing technology, to dilute the political efficacy of voters from the opposing party.
While gerrymandering may be uniquely American, the dynamics underlying the practice — in which purportedly representative political institutions are, in fact, anything but — have been found throughout history. The resulting political inequality can be more destabilizing to a government than outright repression or economic misery. Nowhere do we see this more clearly or profoundly than in France, where the practice provoked a revolution.
In 17th- and 18th-century France, the king enjoyed absolute rule. While a structure for political representation — the so-called Estates-General — existed, that body had not met since 1614. Kings theoretically ruled on the basis of “Divine Right,” or the idea that they were appointed by God, but their power in this period practically depended on weakening the nobility who, historically, exercised enormous local influence. Building a modern, centralized government, and especially the standing army and navy that were its key attributes, was costly — a problem when these noblemen were exempt from paying nearly all taxes.
Throughout the 18th century, France’s kings attempted (and largely failed) to tax the vast wealth of this class. In the 1770s and 1780s, aristocrats effectively resisted the monarchy’s latest plan for universal taxation by dismissing it as “despotism."
Thwarted in attempts to tax the rich and facing both a budget shortfall and political standoff, King Louis XVI agreed to convene the Estates-General. All across France, assemblies of the country’s three social “estates” (status groups into which France’s population was divided) met to select their representatives. The First Estate — as Roman Catholic clergymen were called because they were closest to God — chose a combination of bishops, archbishops and parish priests. The Second Estate, or nobility, was overwhelmingly represented by its wealthiest, titled members such as princes and dukes. Everyone else from landless peasants to urban artisans and wealthy merchants fell into the Third Estate.
The king and his advisers insisted the Estates-General follow the format and the procedures established in 1614, which were badly out of date. It was the equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives deciding today to elect members on the basis of laws from 175 years ago — which would mean women not voting; California, Michigan, Florida and 23 other states having no representatives, and race being legal grounds for denying suffrage.
This structure would be badly out of sync with social realities and Americans would howl — which is what happened in France in 1789. A famous pamphlet called “What is the Third Estate?” argued for more fair representation to reflect the current conditions. But reactionary aristocrats replied “all these new proposals should be forever outlawed and time-honored arrangements maintained” — as if nothing had happened over the previous 200 years.
Amid this activism, the monarchy grudgingly agreed to double the number of representatives elected by the Third Estate. But this concession did little to dilute the outsized power of the two more privileged groups, representing at most 5 percent of France’s population. They could always join forces to outvote the commoners. While many ordinary parish clergy had as much in common with the Third Estate as they did with ecclesiastical elites, it was widely expected that the Church’s tax-exempt status meant the First and Second Estates would always vote together.
Many of those elected as delegates of the Third Estate therefore simply refused to take part in this rigged system. Sent to their separate meeting room to verify membership, elect a presiding officer and begin their discussions of how best to raise funds and revive France, they stalled. One morning, they found they had been locked out of their usual meeting place. Certain this was a sign the whole body was about to be dissolved with military force, they hastily met instead at an empty tennis court, where they declared themselves to be a “National Assembly” — not representatives of the Third Estate alone, but of the nation as a whole.
The delegates quickly found it is one thing to call yourself a “National Assembly,” another to be recognized as such. The king met with them, but at the insistence of conservative nobles, he still addressed them as “the Third Estate,” and commanded they vote as such.
With the suturing together of these two developments — the demand for legitimate representation and the threat of popular violence — the French Revolution was born.
The men elected to represent the Third Estate in 1789 had been lawyers, merchants, physicians, wealthy farmers, even noblemen and slave dealers — not people with obvious motives for disturbing the status quo. But they became revolutionaries when they saw that supposedly representative institutions were corrupt and reactionaries blocked all efforts to reform them.
But it was not the end of the war. To win against the British, the US needed a powerful ally."
