The French Revolution: A Beginner's Guide

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The Old Regime

In France, the three Estates have their order and rank one after the other, the ecclesiastical order being first, followed by the nobility, and the Third Estate last. This is true even though there are no statutes to this effect, because laws are scarcely made in matters simply of honour.

Charles Loyseau, 1666

There was no inevitability about the French Revolution. The Old Regime had existed and survived for many centuries. It had been accepted and respected and ordinary people had been reasonably content. Of course, in the 1780s the mood turned slightly and there was a feeling that change and revolution could happen. But we should not assume that this atmosphere predated the 1780s to any great extent.

What was the Ancien Régime? The term translates as ‘Old Kingdom’, ‘Old Rule’ or, literally, ‘Old Regime’. After 1789, the term came to be applied retrospectively to the arrangements associated with the previous system of absolute government. Here I will explore the meaning and significance of the Old Regime as an era. Its main pillars will also come under the spotlight: the estates system, the King and monarchy, and the provincial parliaments – parlements.

A society of estates

A satirical print from 1789 depicts three men on a wagonette on their way to the opening of the Estates General. Each represents one of France’s three estates. At the front sits a priest who is dressed in black and steering the vehicle onwards. He is focused on the task in hand and does not seem to be communicating with his two passengers. Seated directly behind him is an aristocrat, dressed in a red and blue gown and wearing an extravagant, flowery hat; he is also flourishing a sword. At the back of the wagonette stands a simple peasant, without a seat and looking slightly forlorn; he seems to have some kind of agricultural implement in his hand. The peasant is looking up to the aristocrat, but the aristocrat has his right arm outstretched, as if slightly ignoring the peasant.

The idea of a ‘society of orders’ was well entrenched in Old Regime France and many prints and paintings of the day took it as their subject. It was a simple social system that everyone understood and no-one questioned. From the image in question we can glean that the clergy (the First Estate) had an accepted position at the top of society; that the aristocracy (the Second Estate) had a cherished military role and were next in line; and that the peasantry (who made up the bulk of the Third Estate) were the workers and also slightly forgotten about.

This was one caricaturist’s view of French society in 1789, but what was the reality? Medieval monarchs had divided the population of the country into three estates in order to form a representative body. This came to be known as the Estates General and the expectation was that the Crown would take key issues such as taxation to the forum. This rarely happened; but the point of significance is that society had been subdivided into three estates and this was to have serious ramifications later.

The First Estate comprised the clergy, around 130,000 of them. This made it the smallest estate. But on account of its responsibilities – looking after the moral and spiritual wellbeing of people – it could claim to be the estate that was closest to the King and God. According to Charles Loyseau, a renowned legal scholar who wrote A Treatise on Orders in 1610:

In this Christian kingdom, we have bestowed on God’s ministers the first rank of honour, rightly making the clergy (that is to say, the ecclesiastical order) the first of our three Estates of France … In nearly all the states of Christendom the clergy are similarly constituted as a distinct order, as in France, which has always been more Christian and has honoured the Church more than any other nation on earth.

In this period religion was the dominant force in society, and so the First Estate had a privileged position – literally and metaphorically. The Catholic Church was all enveloping. It owned ten per cent of all land, was a major employer, controlled education, carried much political weight, and dispensed patronage on a vast scale. It had also been unsettled by theological disputes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – in particular, the growth of Jansenism. This body of thought, associated with the teaching of Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres, incorporated notions of predestination and original sin. Jesuits and Jansenists clashed, and the latter were excommunicated from the Church in the second decade of the eighteenth century.

Next was the Second Estate. There were around 200,000 nobles in France at this time and between them they owned about a third of all land, with feudal rights over much of the rest. Their powerbase was the provinces. They had feudal domains, personal fiefdoms, and looked upon the parlements as a symbol of their power and independence from Paris. In terms of rank, members of the Second Estate ranged from simple gentlemen to knights and princes; and like the clergy, they thrived on privilege.

The aristocracy were fiercely protective of their access to the monarch. In the parlements and Assembly of Notables – which met first in February 1787 and again in November 1788 – they felt they had a right, and duty, to advise the King. They became more and more vociferous in this. By 1788, the princes of the blood were addressing the King in desperate language:

Sire, the state is in peril. Your person is respected, the virtues of the monarch assure him of the nation’s respect. But Sire, a revolution is brewing in the elements of government and is being brought about by rousing the people. Institutions thought to be sacred, through which the monarchy has flourished for so many centuries, are being questioned, seen as problems, or even disparaged as unjust.

The problem for the Second Estate was that, as his reign wore on, Louis felt less and less inclined to listen to what it had to say.

The Third Estate wasn’t an estate in the sense that the other two were. It was simply everyone else, the other ninety-five per cent of the population. At the top of the Third Estate were the educated, professional and merchant classes. The eighteenth century would be theirs; they would be at the forefront of an industrial and commercial boom and this would ultimately encourage their political ambitions. This bourgeoisie – to use the term employed by Marxist historians – owned twenty-five per cent of all land and at times almost merged into the aristocracy. Hence the phrase ‘bourgeois living nobly’. Because the Third Estate was so huge and diverse, there were going to be divisions. The middle classes had little in common with ordinary town dwellers and peasants, who comprised the vast majority of the population (and of the Third Estate). There was little outright antagonism, just a realisation that as social groups they had differing aspirations and expectations.

By 1789 the Third Estate had its champions. In January, Abbé Sieyès, the ‘vicar-general’ of Chartres, published a pamphlet which was provocatively entitled What is the Third Estate? In it he argued that the Third Estate was entitled to more respect on account of its hard work and toil:

It suffices here to have made it clear that the pretended utility of a privileged order for the public service is nothing more than a chimera; that with it all that which is burdensome in this service is performed by the Third Estate; that without it the superior places would be infinitely better filled; that they naturally ought to be the lot and the recompense of ability and recognised services, and that if privileged persons have come to usurp all the lucrative and honourable posts, it is a hateful injustice to the rank and file of citizens and at the same a treason to the public. Who then shall dare to say that the Third Estate has not within itself all that is necessary for the formation of a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man who has one arm still shackled. If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing less, but something more. Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can succeed without it, everything would be infinitely better without the others.

There was an attack on the other, ‘non-productive’ estates and a heartfelt plea for recognition and improved representation. It was this publication, and others like it, that helped to create an atmosphere in which political change was mooted.

Notwithstanding the new and obvious ambition of the Third Estate, French society had remained pretty static for centuries. Both nobles and peasants had bought into the feudal idea and the reciprocal obligations that it entailed. Land was the main currency. It is what the nobility owned and the peasantry worked. France was a large, predominantly agricultural country and this dynamic – between lord and vassal – was fundamental to the way that society operated.

King and monarchy

The King stood at the apex of the feudal system. He was a father figure, slightly aloof and detached, but accepted and, for much of the time, loved as France’s natural leader. He personified a political system that based itself on concepts such as succession and delegation, and ordinary people were ‘subjects’ and nothing more. Doyle says that French kings did not require coronations because they were divine and ruled by the grace of God. Shennan argues that the King was absolute rather than despotic and ruled in accordance with both God and the law – with the key point being that a true despot would not take account of the law.

In 1787, Chrétien-François de Lamoignon, Keeper of the Seals, spoke for the King at the Paris parliament. For him, ‘The principles of the French Monarchy’ were:

that the King alone must possess the sovereign power in his kingdom; that He is answerable only to God in the exercise of his power; that the tie which binds the King to the Nation is by nature indissoluble; that the interests and reciprocal obligations between the King and his subjects serve only to reassure that union; that the Nation’s interest is that the powers of its head not be altered; that the King is the chief sovereign of the Nation and everything he does is with her interests in mind; and that finally the legislative power resides in the person of the King independent of and unshared with all other powers.

These words were spoken in a specific context – the treasury wishing to borrow an extra 420 million livres – but the same sentiments could have been articulated in any decade of the preceding centuries.

French kings were absolute in the sense that, at a national level, they did not have to share power with a parliament, and the Estates General – the only body that could conceivably limit the power of the monarch – met infrequently to say the least (it had last been convened in 1614). But, however absolute they were in theory, monarchs did require some assistance. That is why they appointed gouverneurs and, later, intendants to look after day-to-day affairs in the provinces. As can be imagined, the individuals who worked for the King were anything but popular. The perception was that they were out of touch and arbitrary in their decision-making, and as a result they had to bear the brunt of local people’s unhappiness.

The French royal family resided at Versailles where they were surrounded by friends, relatives and advisors. Court politics were notoriously complex with the monarch of the day having to adjudicate between competing factions and personalities. Would the monarch be strong enough to stand up to particularly noisy cliques? Or would he become their prisoner? This varied according to the personalities involved. What rarely changed was the perception of the Court as a place of extravagance and corruption; and in time it came to epitomise the need for reform.

The monarchs of France had acquired a sizeable empire. They had accrued territory in North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, India and the Indian Ocean. This brought added influence but also the potential for disagreements and conflict. During the eighteenth century, France was involved in many wars, including the War of the Spanish Succession, War of the Austrian Succession, Seven Years’ War and American Revolutionary War. Some of these wars were as much about trade and empire as about disputed successions. In this era, warfare involved large standing armies, technically sophisticated weaponry and fortifications, as well as big, costly navies. Consequently, issues of taxation and finance were crucial to ministers and monarchs. If France was to be involved in a war, she would have to finance it through taxation or some other means, and this would often prove controversial.

For the most part, the monarchy ruled in amateurish fashion. This was nowhere better illustrated than in the realm of finance. Budgets, for example, were based on guesswork. And the background was not ideal. Louis XVI was heavily in debt; in fact, he was still paying off money spent by previous kings on foreign-policy expeditions. For this reason, taxation became the major issue of the day. It was not just a question of deciding on a rate. Basic questions also had to be asked, like: Who do we tax? Who gets exemptions? How do we collect the money? Needless to say, it was the Second Estate who felt most threatened when taxation was discussed.

Nevertheless, the monarchy was accepted. It had stood the test of time and there was no realistic alternative. But, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, issues had started to emerge. Was the monarchy in slow decline? Was it able to reform itself? Was it simply too extravagant?

The cloud on the horizon was the aristocracy. They had a strange relationship with the monarchy. On account of their shared outlook and value system they were natural bedfellows. But they were also rivals. The aristocracy thrived on status and privilege and were opposed to any attempt to reform ‘the system’ and reduce their privileges and exemptions. For this reason they did not agree with the idea of absolutism, because an absolute king might use his unchecked power to undermine their position in society.

The King was aware of this and on occasions felt the need to remind the aristocrats, in their provincial parlements, of their subservient status. For example, in 1788, he stated:

When I come to personally hold my Parlement it