Chapter 21 The Revolution in Politics (1775-1815) PDF

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Chapter 21 The Revolution in Politics (1775-1815)...

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1. Liberty 1. Introduction 1. Two ideas fueled the revolutionary period in the world: liberty and equality 2. The call for liberty was first of all a call for individual human rights and liberals of the revolutionary era protested the way the most enlightened monarchs regulated what people wrote and believed (demanded an end to censorship, written and spoken) 1. Called for a new government and believed that the people were sovereign and alone had the authority to make laws limiting the individual’s freedom of action 2. Liberals believed that every nation, every ethnic group, had this right of self-determination and thus a right to form a free nation 3. Liberals argued, in theory, all citizens should have identical rights and civil liberties and above all, the nobility had no right to special privileges based on birth 4. Most eighteenth-century liberals were men and generally shared with other men the belief that equality between men and women was neither practical nor desirable 1. Men of the French Revolution limited formal political rights of women, the right to vote, to run for office, to participate in government 2. Liberals never believed that everyone should be equal economically 3. The essential point was that everyone should legally have an equal chance 5. The economic inequality based on artificial legal distinctions were criticized by liberals, not economic inequality itself 2. The Roots of Liberalism 1. The ideas of liberty and equality had deep roots in Western history; the ancient Greeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition had affirmed for hundreds of years the sanctity and value of the individual human being 2. Classical liberalism first crystallized at the end of the seventeenth century and during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and reflected the stress on human dignity and human happiness on earth (faith in science, rationality, and progress) 3. Writers of the Enlightenment preached religious toleration, freedom of press and speech, and fair and equal treatment before the law

4. John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu were the two important thinkers responsible for joining the Enlightenment’s concern for personal freedom and legal equality to a theoretical justification of liberal self-government 1. John Locke maintained that England’s long political tradition rested on “the rights of Englishmen” and on representative government through Parliament 2. Montesquieu believed that powerful intermediary groups, such as the judicial nobility, offered the best defense of liberty against despotism 3. The Attraction of Liberalism 1. The belief that representative institutions could defend their liberty and interests appealed powerfully to well-educated, prosperous groups as well as liberal ideas about individual rights and political freedom 2. Representative government did not mean democracy, which liberal thinkers tended to frown upon, but they envisioned voting for representatives as being restricted to those who owned property (liberalism found broad support among elites in western Europe) 3. Liberalism lacked from the beginning because of weak popular support 1. Liberals questioned theoretical and political ideas while common people’s questions were immediate and economic (enough to eat?) 2. Traditional practices and institutions that they wanted to abolish were important to peasants and urban workers (enclosure of lands and regulation of food prices) 2. The American Revolution (1775-1789) 3. The French Revolution (1789-1791) 1. The Breakdown of the Old Order 1. Many French soldiers, such as Marquis de Lafayette, left to fight France’s traditional enemy, served in America and were impressed by the ideals of the Revolution 2. The French Revolution was more radical and more complex, more influential and more controversial, more loved and more hated (opened the modern era in politics) 3. The French Revolution origin was the financial difficulties of the government and the efforts of monarchy to raise taxes stopped by the Parlement (popular support) 4. The government was forced to finance all its expenditures during the American war with borrowed money and the national debt and annual budget deficit soared

1. By 1780s, 50 percent of France’s annual budget went for ever-increasing interest payments, another 25 percent when tot maintain the military, 6 percent absorbed by Versailles, and less than 20 percent left for productive functions of state 2. One way out would have been for the government to declare partial bankruptcy, forcing its creditors to accept greatly reduced payments on the debt and France declared this after an attempt to establish a French national bank ended in 1720 3. By the 1780s, the French debt was being held by an army of aristocratic and bour-geois creditors, and the French monarchy had become far too weak for this action 5. King and his ministers could not print money creating inflation to cover their deficits because France had no central bank, non paper currency, and could not create credit 6. In 1786, France had no alternative but to try increasing taxes and increased revenues were possible only through fundamental reforms (opens social and political demands) 2. Legal Orders and Social Realities 1. France’s twenty-five million inhabitants were still legally divided into three orders, or “estates,” the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else 2. The first estate, the clergy, numbered about 100,000, owned about 10 percent of the land, paid little taxes to the government every five years 1. Church levied a tax (tithe) on landowners, which averaged less than 10 percent 2. Much of the church’s income was drained from local parishes by political appointees and worldly aristocrats at the top of the church hierarchy 3. The second legally defined estate consisted of some 400,000 nobles, the descendents of “those who had fought” in the Middle Ages (owned about 25 percent of France) 1. Taxed lightly, nobles enjoyed certain privileges of lordship (manorial rights) which allowed them to tax the peasantry for their won profit done by exclusive rights to hunt, fish, monopolies on baking bread and making wine, fees for justice 2. Nobles had “honorific privileges,” such as the right to precedence on public occasions and the right to wear a sword (legal superiority and social position)

4. Everyone else was a commoner, a member of the third estate; a few commoners were merchants or lawyers and officials (could buy manorial rights), others were urban artisans and unskilled day laborers, but the vast majority consisted of peasants and agricultural workers in the countryside (united by their shared legal status) 5. There were growing tensions between the nobility and the bourgeoisie (middle class) 6. Aided by general economic expansion, the middle class tripled to about 2.3 millions people (8 percent) and became exasperated by “feudal” laws restraining the economy and by the growing pretensions of reactionary nobility (closing ranks on bourgeoisie) 1. The French bourgeoisie eventually rose up to lead the entire third estate in a great social revolution that destroyed feudal privileges and established a capitalist order based on individualism and a market economy 2. Revisionist historians see both bourgeoisie and nobility as highly fragmented as the nobility was separated by differences in wealth, education 7. Revisionist historians stress three development, in particular 1. The nobility remained a fluid and relatively open order (commoners continued to obtain noble status through government service and purchase of positions) 2. Key sections of the nobility and bourgeoisie formed together the core of the book-hungry Enlightenment public and both groups saw themselves forming part of the educated elite standing well above the common people (peasants and urban poor) 3. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were not really at odds in the economic sphere in that both looked to investment in land and government services 4. The ideal of the merchant capitalist was to gain wealth, to retire from trade, purchase estates, and live as a large landowner (mining, metallurgy, foreign trade) 8. The old Regime had ceased to correspond with social reality by the 1780s and France had already moved toward a society based on wealth and education 3. The Formation of the National Assembly 1. The Revolution was under way by 1787 and spurred by a depressed economy and falling tax receipts, Louis XVI’s minister

of finance proposed to impose a general tax on all landed property as well as provincial assemblies to help administer the tax 1. Called an assembly of notables to gain support and the assembled notables, noblemen and clergy, were not in favor and in return for their support, demanded that control over all government spending be given to the provincial assemblies 2. Government refused and the notables responded that tax changes required the approval of the Estates General, the representative body of all three estates (had not met since 1614); dismissed the notables and established new taxes by decrees 3. The Parlement specified the “fundamental laws” against which no king could transgress, such as national consent to taxation and freedom for arbitrary arrest 4. In July 1788, Louis XVI bowed to public opinion, called for the Estates General 2. Clergy, nobles, and commoners came together in their respective orders to draft petitions for change and to elect their respective delegates to the Estates General 1. The local assemblies of the clergy frowned upon the church hierarchy and two-thirds of the delegates were chosen from among the parish priests 2. The nobles, split by wealth and education, remained politically divide and a majority was drawn from the poorer and numerous provincial nobility but one-third of the nobility’s representatives were liberals committed to major changes 3. There was great popular participation in the elections for the third estate because almost all male commoners twenty-five years or older had the right to vote but most of the representatives selected were well-educated, prosperous members of the middle class (lawyers and government officials) 4. Social status and prestige were matters of concern and no delegates were elected from the mass of laboring poor, that encouraged the peasants and urban artisans to intervene directly and dramatically at numerous points in the Revolution 3. The petitions of change coming from the three estates showed general agreement

1. Royal absolutism show give way to constitutional monarchy, in which laws and taxes would require the consent of the Estates General meeting regularly 2. Individual liberties would have to be guaranteed by law and that the economic position of the parish clergy would have to be improved 3. Thought that economic development required reforms (internal trade barriers) 4. During the electoral campaign: How would the Estates General vote, and who would lead in the political reorganization that was generally desired? 5. Any action had required the agreement of at least two branches, a requirement that virtually guaranteed control by the nobility and the clergy 6. The Parlement of Paris ruled that the Estates General should once again sit separately 7. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes argued in 1789 in his famous pamphlet What is the Third Estate? that the third estate constituted the true strength of the French nation 8. The government agreed that the third estate should have as many delegates as the clergy and nobility combined then negated the act by enforcing separate order 9. In May 1789 the twelve hundred delegates of the three estates went into Versailles but the delegates of the third estate demanded that the group sit as a single body 10. After six weeks, a few parish priests joined the third estate, which on June 17 called itself the “National Assembly” and on June 20, the third estate excluded because of “repairs” moved to a large indoor tennis court where they swore the famous Oath of the Tennis Court, pledging not to disband until they had written a new constitution 11. On June 23, he urged the estates to meet but at the same time following advice of court nobles called an army to Versailles and dismissed his liberal ministers 12. Facing opposition, Louis XVI resigned himself to bankruptcy and now sought to reassert his historic “Divine right” to rule (delegates disbanded at bayonet point) 4. The Revolt of the Poor and Oppressed 1. Grain was the basis of the diet of ordinary people in the eighteenth century and in 1788 the harvest had been poor and the price of bread began to soar (bread could cost 8 sous per pound even though the poor could barely afford to pay 2 sous per pound)

2. Harvest failure and bread prices unleashed a classic economic depression of the pre-industrial age and the demand for manufactured goods collapsed (half needed relief) 3. The people of Paris entered decisively onto the revolutionary stage and believed that the they should have steady work and enough bread at fair prices to survive and feared that the dismissal of the king’s moderate finance minister would put them at the mercy of aristocratic landowners and grain speculators 1. On July 13 the people began to seize arms for the defense of the city and marched to Bastille to search for gunpowder (gunpowder was in a medieval fortress) 2. The prison surrendered; the prison governor and the mayor of Paris were killed 3. The next day, a committee of citizens appointed the Marquis de Lafayette commander of the city’s armed forces and the king was forced to recall the finance minister and disperse his troops (uprising saved the National Assembly) 4. All across France, peasants began to rise in spontaneous, violent, and effective insurrection against their lords, ransacking manor houses and burning obligations 5. Fear of vagabonds and outlaws—called the Great Fear—seized the countryside and fanned the flames of rebellion (free themselves from manorial rights and exploitation) 6. Some liberal nobles and middleclass delegates responded to peasant demands at Versailles with a maneuver on the night of August 4, 1789 (duke of Aiguillon, one of France’s greatest nobles, urged equality in taxation and elimination of feudal dues) 7. All the old exactions imposed on the peasants—serfdom, hunting rights, fees for justice, village monopolies, and others—were abolished (without compensation) 8. Peasants never paid feudal dues and the French peasants now protected their triumph 5. A Limited Monarchy 1. On August 27, 1789, the National Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which states, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights” 1. Maintained that mankind’s natural rights are “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression” and “everyman is innocent until proven otherwise” 2. Law is an expression of the general will; all citizens have the right to concur personally or through their representatives in its formations”

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3. Every citizen may therefore speak, write, and publish freely (free expression) Call for the liberal revolutionary guaranteed equality before the law, representative government for a sovereign people, and individual freedom The questions of how much power the king should retain and whether he could permanently veto legislation led to another deadlock, decided by poor women of Paris 1. Women customarily bought the food and managed the poor family’s resources and in Paris great numbers of women also worked for wages (garments) 2. Plummeting demand for luxuries intensified the general economic crisis and increasing unemployment and hunger resulted in another popular revolt 3. On October 5, seven thousand desperate women marched to Versailles, demanding action, invaded the Assembly, invaded the royal apartments searching for the queen, Marie Antoinette, and the intervention of Lafayette and the National Guard saved the royal family (the king was ordered to live in Paris) The next day, the royal family and the National Assembly, followed the king to Paris until September 1791, saw the consolidation of the liberal Revolution 1. The National Assembly abolished the French nobility as a legal order and created a constitutional monarchy, which Louis XVI reluctantly agreed to in July 1790 2. In the final constitution, the king remained the head of state, but all lawmaking power was given to the National Assembly, elected by the economic males New laws broadened women’s rights to seek divorce, to inherit property, and to obtain financial support from fathers for illegitimate children 1. Majority of National Assembly believed that women should raise the child, complete domestic duties and leave politics and most public activities to men 2. Delegates were convinced that political life in absolutist France had been corrupt and one way was immoral aristocratic women had used their sexual charms

6. The National Assembly replaced the historic provinces with eighty-three departments of approximately equal size, introduced the metric system in 1793, promoted liberal concept of economic freedom and prohibited monopolies, guilds, and worker’s combinations and abolished barriers to trade within France 7. Assembly imposed a radical reorganization on the Catholic church by nationalizing the church’s property and abolished monasteries as useless relics of a distant past 8. The government used all former church property as collateral to guarantee a new paper currency, the assignats, then sold these properties to support the state’s finances 9. Reorganization of France brought the new government into conflict with the Catholic church and Christians, but many delegates harbored a deep distrust of popular piety 10. The Assembly established a national church, with priests chosen by voters then required the clergy to take a loyalty oath to the new government and this resulted in a division within both the country and the clergy on the religious question 11. Policy toward the church was the revolutionary government’s first important failure 4. World War and Republican France (1791-1799) 1. Foreign Reactions and the Beginning of War 1. France was seen as a mighty triumph of liberty over despotism and in Great Britain, people hoped that this would lead to a fundamental reordering of the political system 1. The system consolidated in the revolution of 1688 to 1689, placed Parliament in the hands of the aristocracy and a few wealthy merchants 2. Conservative leaders such as Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790) defend inherited privileges of English monarchy and aristocracy, glorified the unrepresentative Parliament, and predicted that thoroughgoing reform, like in France, would lead only to chaos and tyranny 3. Mary Wollstonecraft was incensed by Burke’s book and wrote (A Vindication of the Rights of Man) then developed for the first time the logical implications of natural-law philosophy in her masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 4. Wollstonecraft set high standards for women, advocated coeducation, and marked the birth of the modern women’s movement for equal rights (give women chance)

2. among European kings and nobility that revolution would spread resulted in the Declaration of Pillnitz (1791), which threatened the invasion of France by Austria and Prussia (expected to have a sobering effect on revolutionary France w/o causing war) 3. When the National Assembly disbanded, it sought popular support be decreeing that none of its members be eligible for election to the new Legislative Assembly 1. The great majority of the legislators were still middle-class men but were younger and less cautious than their predecessors (called “Jacobins,” after the name of their political club and were passionately committed to liberal revolution) 2. The Jacobins lumped “useless aristocrats” and “despotic monarch” together and believed that if the courts o Europe were attempting to incite war of kings against France, ten million Frenchmen would be able to change the face of the world 4. France declared war on Francis II, the Habsburg monarch but the crusade went poorly at first because Prussia joined Austria in the Austrian Netherlands and French forces broke and fled at first encounter with armies of this First Coalition 1. It is possi...