10.3 — France

By 1788, roughly half of French government revenue was going on interest payments.

The state was not poor. France was the richest and most populous country in western Europe. It was insolvent, which is a different thing, and the reason was structural: the people with money were largely exempt from tax.

The nobility and the clergy — the First and Second Estates — held a large share of the land and paid little direct taxation. The burden fell on the Third Estate, which was everyone else, from peasants to wealthy merchants and lawyers.

And the crown could not fix it, because every attempt at tax reform was blocked by the parlements, the regional law courts staffed by nobles, which had to register royal edicts.

Chapter 9.2 gave the contrast. Britain, with a third of France's population, could borrow more cheaply because Parliament — which contained the taxpayers — guaranteed the debt. France borrowed at high rates from individual financiers and had no such credibility, and the American war (Chapter 10.2) had added enormously to the debt.

So in 1788 Louis XVI called the Estates-General, an assembly that had not met since 1614, because he had run out of alternatives.

From a tax crisis to a revolution

The Estates-General had a procedural question that turned out to be everything: did the three estates vote separately or together?

Separately, the two privileged estates could always outvote the Third. Together, with the Third Estate holding as many delegates as the other two combined and having allies among liberal nobles and parish clergy, it would carry.

In June 1789 the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly — asserting that it represented the nation rather than an order — and, locked out of its meeting hall, swore the Tennis Court Oath not to disperse until France had a constitution.

The Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789. It held seven prisoners. It was attacked for its gunpowder and because it was the visible symbol of arbitrary imprisonment by royal warrant. The governor was killed and his head carried on a pike, which is the point at which the revolution's character became visible.

In the countryside, the Great Fear — rumours of aristocratic plots and brigands — produced attacks on manor houses and the burning of the documents recording feudal dues, which is a precise target: peasants destroyed the paperwork.

On the night of 4 August the Assembly abolished feudal privileges in a session in which nobles rose one after another to renounce their own rights.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

Adopted 26 August 1789, seventeen articles, and it is the most consequential political document produced in Europe.

Its core claims. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Sovereignty resides in the nation. Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm another. Law is the expression of the general will and must be the same for all. No one may be arrested except as the law provides. Everyone is presumed innocent until declared guilty. Free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights. Taxation must be commonly apportioned among all citizens in proportion to their means. And property is inviolable.

The difference from the American Declaration is worth noting. The American document justified a separation from a particular king. The French one states general principles as applying to all people, which is why it travelled further and faster.

And its limits were named immediately, by the people it excluded. Olympe de Gouges published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791, restating each article with women included; she was guillotined in 1793. The Society of the Friends of the Blacks argued for abolition; slavery in the colonies was abolished in 1794 after the Haitian revolt forced the issue (Chapter 10.5) and was restored by Napoleon in 1802.

Why it became violent

This is the question, and the honest answer is a combination of external threat, internal division and food.

Bread. The harvest of 1788 was catastrophic — hail in July destroyed crops across a wide area, followed by a severe winter. Bread prices reached their peak of the century in July 1789, in a society where a labouring family spent around half its income on bread in an ordinary year. The Laki eruption in Iceland in 1783–84 (Chapter 1.7) is implicated in the run of bad weather.

The women's march to Versailles in October 1789 was about bread, and it brought the royal family back to Paris under effective guard.

War. In April 1792 France declared war on Austria, and Prussia joined. The Brunswick Manifesto threatened Paris with destruction if the royal family were harmed, which had the opposite of its intended effect and confirmed that the king was in contact with the enemy.

The king's flight to Varennes in June 1791 — an attempt to escape to the frontier, halted by a postmaster who recognised him from a coin — destroyed the case for constitutional monarchy. A king who flees is not a king who has accepted the constitution.

And the invasion produced the September Massacres of 1792, in which crowds killed over a thousand prisoners in Paris on the belief that they would rise when the army left. This is the point at which revolutionary violence became mass killing.

The king was tried and executed in January 1793.

The Terror

From roughly September 1793 to July 1794.

The mechanism. France was at war with most of Europe, had a royalist rebellion in the Vendée, federalist revolts in Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux, and food shortages in Paris. The Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Robespierre, governed by emergency decree.

The numbers. Around 17,000 official executions after trial, and estimates of total deaths from repression including deaths in prison and summary killings run considerably higher. The war in the Vendée was far bloodier than the guillotine — estimates of deaths there run to well over a hundred thousand, and whether it constituted genocide is a live and heated argument among French historians.

The Law of 22 Prairial in June 1794 removed defence counsel and reduced verdicts to acquittal or death. Executions accelerated sharply in the following weeks.

And the Terror consumed its own. Danton, who had been among its architects, was executed in April 1794 having argued for moderation. Robespierre was arrested and guillotined in July 1794 by a Convention that feared it was next.

What made it possible, in terms this volume can use.

Rousseau's general will (Chapter 8.9) supplied a doctrine under which opposition is not a legitimate difference of opinion but a betrayal of the nation's true will. If the general will is the real interest of the people, and you disagree with it, you are either mistaken or an enemy. Robespierre's speeches use exactly this structure, and his formulation that terror is nothing other than justice, prompt and severe, is the clearest statement of it.

Emergency and external threat provided the justification, as they always do.

And the absence of any settled institution for transferring power meant every faction knew that losing meant death, which removes every incentive to compromise.

What the Revolution actually achieved

A chapter that dwells only on the Terror gets it wrong, because the durable achievements are enormous.

Feudalism was abolished — seigneurial dues, the tithe, noble legal privilege, the sale of offices — and it did not come back, in France or in the territories French armies reached.

Legal equality. One law for all citizens, replacing a patchwork of provincial customs and estate privileges.

Careers open to talent, ending the reservation of offices to the nobly born.

The metric system, devised in this period and now used by almost every country on Earth.

Civil registration of births, marriages and deaths by the state rather than the church.

The idea of the citizen — a person with rights and obligations in relation to a nation, rather than a subject of a lord.

And the language. Left and right come from the seating in the National Assembly. Nation, citizen, revolution, terrorism, ideology, conservative and radical in their modern political senses all date from this period or were fixed by it.

The counter-argument

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790 — before the Terror — predicted it (Chapter 8.9).

His argument was that a society is an inheritance of accumulated practical arrangements that nobody designed and nobody fully understands, that abstract reasoning cannot reconstruct it, that destroying institutions leaves nothing to restrain power, and that the result would be a military dictator.

He was right about the outcome and his method has its own weakness, which Thomas Paine pointed out in reply: an argument that inherited arrangements should be respected because they are inherited defends whatever exists, including slavery and hereditary privilege.

Both positions are live and Chapter 16.1 treats the argument between them as one of the permanent ones.

Where this shows up in your life

The metric system, in every measurement you make.

The vocabulary of politics.

And the pattern, which recurs throughout this volume. A revolution against arbitrary power that produces, within four years, a government exercising more arbitrary power than the one it replaced. Russia in 1917 (Chapter 11.5), China after 1949 (Chapter 12.3) and Iran after 1979 (Chapter 12.5) all follow a recognisable version of it.

The variable that seems to distinguish the cases where it does not happen — England in 1688, America in 1787, India in 1947 — is whether there was an existing representative institution to inherit power, and whether the winners were willing to let the losers survive and stand again. Chapter 16.3 develops this.

What the next page covers

Burke's predicted general arrived in 1799. Chapter 10.4 covers Napoleon — how a Corsican artillery officer took power, what he actually built that lasted, how his armies spread the Revolution's institutions across Europe at the point of a bayonet, why he lost, and what the settlement after him was designed to prevent.