As a result law codes varied between different regions and provinces. Some regions enjoyed special privileges. Brittany, for example, was exempt from the unpopular salt tax, the gabelle. The jurisdiction of the thirteen parlements also varied widely.
The parlement of Paris, for example, encompassed around a third of France, but the others covered much smaller areas. The complexity of the this system hindered attempts at reform. Fifth, demographic and social changes also created their own problems. The growth of the population and the widespread system of partible inheritance, whereby land was divided among sons, created pressure of agricultural land.
Some peasants were able to purchase extensive tracts of land and enjoy considerable prosperity, but a much larger segment led a more precarious existence.
Around half the peasantry were landless or farmed just a small plot. A poor harvest could have devastating consequences for these communities. Stagnating agricultural production and rising inflation further eroded the purchasing power of the peasantry. This undermined demands for manufactured goods fell, which in turn had a negative impact on textiles and other industries. In Troyes, for example, some 10, textile workers were unemployed by A process of polarisation was also evident at the other end of the social scale.
The nobility dominated the higher echelons of the Catholic Church, but the parish priests were relatively poor.
They were also more intimately connected with the local peasant and urban communities. Meanwhile, the traditional nobility was often resentful of the entry of rich commoners into the ranks of the aristocracy.
Meanwhile, rising land rents meant that those aristocrats with larger estates were becoming less dependent on royal appointments, sinecures and pensions, than they had been in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
The failure to reform taxation meant that although France was a wealthy country the Crown had to turn increasingly to borrowing to meet its expenditures.
France suffered a series of military and diplomatic reversals in second half of the eighteenth century. France suffered a serious of heavy defeats on all fronts in this first global conflict.
The British conquered New France to create the colony of Canada. In Europe, meanwhile, the French army was humiliated by Frederick the Great and the Prussians at the battle of Rossbach in Napoleon Bonaparte would later claim the Revolution had began , when Prussia had humbled Bourbon military might.
France enjoyed more military success in the s when it allied itself with the American rebels against the British Crown. As a result the state debt ballooned to between 8 and 12 billion livres by Serving that debt consumed an increasing share of state revenue. Fiscal and diplomatic problems came together in The international prestige of the monarchy was undermined when it was unable to intervene in the conflict between republican and Orangist forces in the neighbouring United Provinces because of a lack of funds.
The French involvement in the American War of Independence had an impact beyond the financial. Yet the French officers and soldiers did not enjoy the same political rights that their American allies were fighting for. The incongruity of an absolute monarchy fighting in defence of a republic founded on universal male suffrage excluding slaves was not lost on many commentators in France and Europe. The Marquis de Lafayette, who had served alongside George Washington, became a hero on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Declaration of Independence provided inspiration to would-be reformers and revolutionaries in France. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence would provide a template for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in Debate over domestic political reform was conducted in the pages of periodicals, books, pamphlets and journals that mushroomed in the eighteenth century.
Rising literacy levels meant an increased audience for the written word. The literate began to read more widely rather then reading and rereading a small number of work, such as the Bible. This argument has been challenged.
The Bible and other religious works remained very popular. However, the number of books published in Europe did rise exponentially during the eighteenth century. Banned works were, however, smuggled across the border from the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, regimes with more liberal attitudes towards publishing.
This vibrant literary world was crucial to the spread of the public sphere. The development of the public sphere was also fostered by the spread of coffee shops. These often offered newspapers and periodicals to read as well as food and drink. They were, thus, spaces were ideas could circulate and be discussed.
The salon, usually hosted by an aristocratic lady, provided a similar forum for discussion, albeit a more exclusive one than the coffee shop. Masonic lodges also spread in the eighteenth century and provided a network for the dissemination of ideas. It was through literature and in the public sphere that ideas for political and social reform were articulated.
Foreign philosophers, particularly the work of John Locke, was also influential. All these intellectual currents fed into the intellectual ferment in the run up to the French Revolution and deeply influenced the attitudes of deputies of the National Assembly.
The public sphere, however, was not limited to high-minded discussion of political reforms and social matters. Several historians have pointed to the growth of politicised pornography in the later eighteenth century. Much of this literature featured those in positions of authority, such as clergymen and leading aristocratic statesmen. The royal family itself was also subject to this kind of writing. The Queen, Marie-Antoinette, was a particular target of slander and satire.
She and Louis XVI also failed to produce a male heir until October , eleven years after their marriage. Libels accused Marie-Antoinette of decadence, promiscuity, adultery and homosexuality.
In Cardinal de Rohan was duped in to buying a diamond necklace in order to curry favour with the Queen. The conmen, however, stole the necklace. The extravagance of the jewellery solidified the image of the Queen as a spendthrift, more interested in her own luxury than the welfare of France.
Such slurs may not have led directly to the fall of the monarch, they nevertheless undermined the majesty and prestige of the Bourbons. In the lead-up to the May 5 meeting, the Third Estate began to mobilize support for equal representation and the abolishment of the noble veto—in other words, they wanted voting by head and not by status. While all of the orders shared a common desire for fiscal and judicial reform as well as a more representative form of government, the nobles in particular were loath to give up the privileges they enjoyed under the traditional system.
By the time the Estates-General convened at Versailles , the highly public debate over its voting process had erupted into hostility between the three orders, eclipsing the original purpose of the meeting and the authority of the man who had convened it. On June 17, with talks over procedure stalled, the Third Estate met alone and formally adopted the title of National Assembly; three days later, they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and took the so-called Tennis Court Oath serment du jeu de paume , vowing not to disperse until constitutional reform had been achieved.
Within a week, most of the clerical deputies and 47 liberal nobles had joined them, and on June 27 Louis XVI grudgingly absorbed all three orders into the new assembly. On June 12, as the National Assembly known as the National Constituent Assembly during its work on a constitution continued to meet at Versailles, fear and violence consumed the capital.
Though enthusiastic about the recent breakdown of royal power, Parisians grew panicked as rumors of an impending military coup began to circulate. A popular insurgency culminated on July 14 when rioters stormed the Bastille fortress in an attempt to secure gunpowder and weapons; many consider this event, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution.
The wave of revolutionary fervor and widespread hysteria quickly swept the countryside. Revolting against years of exploitation, peasants looted and burned the homes of tax collectors, landlords and the seigniorial elite. Drafting a formal constitution proved much more of a challenge for the National Constituent Assembly, which had the added burden of functioning as a legislature during harsh economic times.
For instance, who would be responsible for electing delegates? Would the clergy owe allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church or the French government?
Perhaps most importantly, how much authority would the king, his public image further weakened after a failed attempt to flee the country in June , retain? This compromise did not sit well with influential radicals like Maximilien de Robespierre , Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, who began drumming up popular support for a more republican form of government and for the trial of Louis XVI.
On the domestic front, meanwhile, the political crisis took a radical turn when a group of insurgents led by the extremist Jacobins attacked the royal residence in Paris and arrested the king on August 10, The following month, amid a wave of violence in which Parisian insurrectionists massacred hundreds of accused counterrevolutionaries, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the French republic.
On January 21, , it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.
Nobody knows who to believe. Much like the past 40 years in the United States and Western Europe, the s were a period of remarkable economic, social, and technological transformation. As sources of information proliferated, long-standing sources of authority monarchy, aristocracy, and the established Church feared losing power and turned reactionary.
At the same time, the longer-term transformations on which these social and cultural innovations were built—the growth of European overseas empires and the emergence of settler colonialism, massive silver exports from South and Central America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade—continued, and in ever more brutal forms.
In truth, it had been disintegrating for decades. Today, as in the s, an old order is ending in convulsions. Even before the coronavirus prompted flight cancellations and entry bans, climate activists were rightly telling us to change our modes and patterns of travel.
Even before nonessential businesses were shut by government orders, online shopping and same-day deliveries were rapidly remaking retail commerce, while environmental concerns and anti-consumerism were revolutionizing the fashion industry. The pandemic and resulting public-health crisis have caused an abrupt and salutary revaluation in which cleaners, care workers, grocery-store stockers, and delivery drivers are gaining recognition for the essential work they have been doing all along.
Taken together, these changes may not look like a revolution—but real revolutions are the ones that nobody sees coming. Shadi Hamid: The coronavirus killed the revolution. The men and women who made the French Revolution—a revolution which, in a few short and hectic years, decriminalized heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft; replaced one of the oldest European monarchies with a republic based on universal male suffrage; introduced no-fault divorce and easy adoption; embraced the ideal of formal equality before the law; and, for a short time at least, defined employment, education, and subsistence as basic human rights—had no model to follow, no plans, no platform agreed upon in advance.
Hunt has argued, they made it up as they went along. At the junction Americans face today, however, we need to imitate not the outcome of the French revolution but the energy, creativity, and optimism of the French revolutionaries. Human beings are responsible both for much of what is wrong and for much of what could be right about the world today.
But we have to take responsibility. In hindsight a revolution may look like a single event, but they are never experienced that way. Instead they are extended periods in which the routines of normal life are dislocated and existing rituals lose their meaning. They are deeply unsettling, but they are also periods of great creativity.
As some Americans take shelter in their homes from a newly arrived threat and others put their health at risk to combat it, we can all mourn lost certainties, but we can also set about intentionally creating new possibilities.
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