Chapter 18: The French Revolution
Chapter Summary
We should perhaps be surprised that it was in France, Europe's strongest nation at the end of the 18th century, that a revolution would strike first. The result of that Revolution was nothing less than the destruction of the ancien regime, a social order that had been built over centuries but which crumbled in a handful of years. The Revolution was also modern in its nature and scope, and bequeathed a political vocabulary to the 19th century that included words like citizen, liberty, equality, and nation. The Revolution began as a solution to the fiscal crisis France endured at the end of the 18th century but quickly developed into a constitutional struggle to rid the nation of aristocratic prestige and status. The natural and inalienable rights of man, perhaps one of the great hallmarks of Enlightenment thought, were raised to the forefront of political argument. New political elements entered the political stage and wanted their grievances redressed and their voices heard.
The Revolution was not about king-killing and destruction. Louis XVI would not be the first king to lose his life at the hands of his subjects. But Louis was the king of a country in torment, and within the ranks of the three estates were men whose cries were ones of desperation. "If only the king knew," they may have exclaimed as they drew up their cahiers et doléances and elected delegates to the Estates General. But very quickly, Louis revealed his duplicity and his weakness led to the establishment of the National Assembly and later, popular resentment that would turn to popular revolution, both in cities and in the countryside. The great experiment in making Louis a constitutional monarch ground to a halt in September 1792, when the monarchy was dissolved and a republic declared. And at the end of January 1793, Louis was guillotined like a common criminal.
With Louis out of the way, the Jacobins had their hands full with domestic crises and foreign wars. The twelve apostles of the Committee of Public Safety, led by the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, made "terror the order of the day," bringing before revolutionary tribunals anyone who was suspected of being against the Revolution. However, even the Jacobins eventually had enough of the Terror -- on the Ninth of Thermidor, Robespierre was shouted down in the Convention and was guillotined the following day.
As the Directory dismantled the radical republic and replaced it with a more moderate version of the principles of 1789, France faced its deepest challenge -- war. Proclaiming himself the savior of France, Napoleon Bonaparte entered the scene in 1799 as First Consul of the Republic. Five years later he declared himself the emperor of France. As François Furet has aptly concluded: "In 1789, the French had created a Republic, under the name of a monarchy. Ten years later, they created a monarchy, under the name of a Republic."
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