Case Study: The Meaning of the French Revolution 1789
Reading: For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 19 Revolution in France 1789 - 1791 (pgs. 566 - 572) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
In a 1790 treatise entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France, English statesmen Edmund Burke uncannily predicted the future course of the revolution and its catastrophic consequences for both France and Europe. He also argued in favor of the slow, evolutionary style of change that was taking place in his own country, rather than the sudden, spasmodic one that was beginning to envelop France. Burke’s message was simple: the revolution in France will be costly and counterproductive.
Key Concept:
Guiding Question:
Directions: Using both information and evidence from your book and the events listed below find specific historical details to answer the guiding question.
Reading: For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 19 Revolution in France 1789 - 1791 (pgs. 566 - 572) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
In a 1790 treatise entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France, English statesmen Edmund Burke uncannily predicted the future course of the revolution and its catastrophic consequences for both France and Europe. He also argued in favor of the slow, evolutionary style of change that was taking place in his own country, rather than the sudden, spasmodic one that was beginning to envelop France. Burke’s message was simple: the revolution in France will be costly and counterproductive.
Key Concept:
- The first, or liberal, phase of the French Revolution established a constitutional monarchy, increased popular participation, nationalized the Catholic Church, and abolished hereditary privileges.
Guiding Question:
- To what extent and in what ways was the French Revolution during the period 1789 an attempt to create a government based on Enlightenment ideals?
Directions: Using both information and evidence from your book and the events listed below find specific historical details to answer the guiding question.
- The nobility, through the Parliament, thus revealed its aim. It had forced the summoning of the Estates General to protect and enhance its own political influence, and in this way the French nobility initiated the Revolution. The Revolution began as another victory in the aristocratic resurgence against the earlier absolutism of the king. The nobles actually had a liberal program: they demanded constitutional government, guarantees of personal liberty for all, freedom of speech and press, freedom from arbitrary arrest and confinement. Many now were even prepared to give up special privileges in taxation; this might have worked itself out in time. But in return they hoped to become the preponderant political element in the state.
- The Estates General met as planned in May 1789 at Versailles. The Third Estate, most of whose representatives were lawyers, would not accept the division of the orders into three separate chambers. It insisted that deputies of all three orders should sit as a single house and vote as individuals; this procedure would give an advantage to the Third Estate.
- On June 17th, the Third Estate declared itself the “National Assembly.” Louis XVI, under pressure from the nobles, closed the hall in which it met. The members found a neighboring indoor tennis court and there…swore and signed the Oath of the Tennis Court on June 20th, 1789, affirming that wherever they gathered, there were the actually existing National Assembly and they would not disband until they had drafted a constitution. Thus the National Assembly assumed virtually sovereign power for a body that had no legal authority.
- The King presented a reforming program of his own, too late to win the confidence of the disaffected and in any case continuing the organization of French society in legal classes. What had happened was that the king of France, in the dispute raging between nobles and commoners, chose nobles. It was traditional in France for the king to oppose and reduce the autonomous powers of the nobility. For centuries the French monarchy had drawn strength from urban or bourgeois social groups.
- The capture of the Bastille, though not so intended, had the effect of saving the Assembly at Versailles. The king, not knowing what to do, accepted the new situation in Paris. He recognized a citizens’ committee, which had formed there, as the new municipal government. He sent away the troops that he had summoned and commanded the recalcitrant among nobles and clergy to join the National Assembly.
- In a decree summarizing the resolutions of August 4th the assembly declared flatly that “feudalism is abolished.” With legal privilege replaced by legal equality, it proceeded to map the principles of the new order.
- On August 26, 1789, the Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The Declaration of 1789 consisted of 17 articles that affirmed the general principles of the new state, which were essentially the rule of law, the equality of individual citizenship, and the collective national sovereignty of the people. “Men are born and remain,” declared Article I, “free and equal in rights.” Man’s natural rights were held to be “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” Freedom of thought and religion were guaranteed; no one might be arrested or punished except by process of law. Law was the expression of the general will, to be made by all citizens or their representatives.
- Among the leaders of the Revolution, only Condorcet argued for legal equality of the sexes. Intent on political change, the revolutionaries thought that politics, government, law and war were a masculine business, for which only boys and young men needed to be educated or prepared. The Revolution generally reduced or restricted the cultural and political influence that some women had exercised in the elite circles of Old Regime society.
- In September 1789 the Assembly began the actual planning of the new government. Some wanted a strong veto power for the king and a legislative body in two houses, as in England. Others, the “patriots,” wanted only a delaying veto for the king and a legislative body of one chamber. Here, again it was suspicion of the nobles that proved decisive.
- On October 4th, 1789, a crowd of market women and revolutionary militants, followed by the revolutionary Paris National Guard, took the road from Paris to Versailles. Besieging and invading the chateau, they forced Louis XVI and his family to take up residence in Paris, where he could be watched. The National Assembly also moved to Paris, where it soon fell under the influence of radical elements in the city.
- The more conservative revolutionaries, if such they may be called, disillusioned at seeing constitutional questions settled by mobs, began to drop out of the Assembly. Men who on June 20th had bravely sworn the Oath of the Tennis Court now felt that the Revolution was falling into unworthy hands.
- The Assembly soon discarded most of the political and legal institutions that had governed French affairs for centuries—the old monarchical ministries, the reorganization of government bureaus, the taxes and tax exemptions, the private ownership of government positions, the titles of nobility, the parlements, the hundreds of regional systems of law, the internal tariffs, the provinces, and the urban municipalities.
- In place of the provinces the Constituent Assembly (named so for creating a constitution) divided France into 83 equal “departments.” In place of the old towns, with their quaint old magistrates, it introduced a uniform municipal organization, all towns henceforth having the same form of government, varying only according to size. Administratively the country was decentralized in reaction against the bureaucracy of the Old Regime.