Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (13 page)

ratified a situation already introduced by the imperious demands of war.

“A large number of non-nobles did serve as naval officers throughout

the eighteenth century,” William Cormack has observed. “This was par-

ticularly true during the War of American Independence when the naval

establishment was unable to provide sufficient officers for the expansion

98 Scott,
Response of the Royal Army
, pp. 30–31.

The ancien régime

47

of France’s maritime war effort. The fleet had to use a great number of

auxiliary officers, most of whom came from the merchant service. . . . Many

of these men distinguished themselves during the American War and a sig-

nificant number became Revolutionary naval commanders.”

Yet even if the prerevolutionary French navy was tending increasingly

to select its officers on the basis of merit as well as privilege, this trend was

by no means welcomed in all naval quarters; indeed, antagonisms contin-

ued to fester within the naval officer corps.99 Another specialist on this

topic, Norman Hampson, is even bleaker in his assessment: “The
Grand

Corps
, like the army, was convinced that the aristocracy embodied specific

military virtues that were neither expected nor demanded of the com-

moner. . . . Under pressure, they were prepared to admit commoners . . . but

their intention was that the service should retain its predominantly aristo-

cratic character, to which the newcomers would be assimilated.”100 In the

armed forces, then, as in other state institutions, geopolitical and other

pressures induced necessary – but not, in the end, sufficient – social

change.

Venal officeholders whose numbers testified so eloquently to the French

state’s expanding financial and administrative needs also figured centrally

in the elite of “notables” that was starting to emerge in communities all

over the realm. Yet here again our most salient impression is one of social

evolution that, up to 1789, could progress only so far and no farther.

The best scholarship on eighteenth-century urban elites indicates this

time and again. At Orléans, for example, it is undeniably possible to find

officiers
and other respectable Frenchmen making up an “oligarchy” that

was something other than the old noblesse. These oligarchs shared a cer-

tain way of life, and they tended to monopolize the urban administration.

Yet, though such “notables” were destined to make up the ruling class in

France once the revolutionary storm was spent, in the years before 1789

the privileges of the nobility remained a potent barrier within this elite,

“dividing men whom so many other bonds united.”101 A like situation

appears to have obtained at Dijon, Châlons-sur-Marne, Bordeaux, and

twenty-nine other communities vaunting provincial academies. In these

cities and towns, an economically and politically influential noblesse and a

bourgeoisie of office, of administration, and of the liberal professions con-

verged in a “society of elites” that prefigured in many ways the proprietary

ruling class of nineteenth-century France. Still, these civic-minded nobles

99 William S. Cormack,
Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789–1794

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 35–48.

100 Norman Hampson, “The ‘Comité de Marine’ of the Constituent Assembly,”
The

Historical Journal
2 (1959): 131.

101 Georges Lefebvre, “Urban Society in the Orléanais in the Late Eighteenth Century,”

Past and Present
19 (1961), 50–51.

48

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

and bourgeois never really challenged the “barrier of privilege” within

their academic societies.102 At prerevolutionary Lyons, it seems, a similar

situation existed. In general terms, Lyonnais society may have witnessed

the ascendancy of a modernized
notabilité
, in which bourgeois of various

types were seeking a niche. On the other hand, relations between nobles

and even the most affluent bourgeois, never very cordial, may have been

growing even more distant as the Revolution approached.103

Whether, therefore, we look at state civilian and military institutions

or at urban ruling elites in the ancien régime, we encounter realities

more complex than those portrayed by either neo-Marxist theorists of

“class” revolt or revisionists stressing “fusionist” social change. On the

one hand, there is no blinking the fact that the old hierarchical values

were being undermined in France. Of the many factors contributing to

this process, one in particular stands out: the building of bourgeois for-

tunes in fields such as maritime trade (which, we note, was protected

and even subsidized by the war-prone state), textiles and metallurgi-

cal ventures (stimulated chiefly by state military requirements), and –

most strikingly – the lucrative business of state war finance. Private

wealth thereby created continued to buy offices,
lettres d’anoblissement
,

and landed estates, and so continued to pay off handsomely in terms

of social advancement. This is really to say that the state’s geopolitical

and related financial needs, more than anything else, drove the process

onward.

Where, then, did this leave those unrepentant conservatives in the first

two orders who hoped somehow to “hold the line” against the menacing

outriders of social change in the twilight of the ancien régime? Were there

not Frenchmen of caste who despised newly ennobled or bourgeois as-

pirants to office in the parlements and the intendancies, in the army and

navy, and in the cities and towns of the realm? Were there not Frenchmen of

“race” who, in their thousands, looked out fearfully and disparagingly at the

“century of Enlightenment” from their venerable but moldering châteaux

in the custom-bound countryside? With these subjects, too, the govern-

ment would have to reckon when it became irredeemably bankrupted by

its policies pursued so arrogantly abroad.

This eventuality seemed to loom in 1787–88. The government was

brought to the brink of collapse by the fiscal aftermath of war. Accordingly,

it was also propelled to the threshold of an excruciating choice between

sociopolitical ideals for which it had always stood and the more “modern”

sociopolitical principles which it had – inadvertently? – done so much to

advance.

102 Roche,
Siècle des lumières en province
, esp. pp. 255, 393–94.

103 Bill Edmonds,
Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon, 1789–1793
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 22–25.

The ancien régime

49

a c o n v e r g e n c e o f c r i s e s i n 1 7 8 7
−
1788

In the very month (August 1786) that Finance Minister Charles Alexandre

de Calonne submitted to Louis XVI a memorandum outlining fiscal and

administrative reforms urgently needed in France, the death of Frederick

the Great brought to power in Prussia a ruler, Frederick William II, who

was ready to plunge his kingdom into reckless new adventures abroad.

Meanwhile, Catherine II of Russia was persisting in an old endeavor to

convince her Austrian ally, Joseph II, to join her in a partition of Turkey’s

European territories. The French “prerevolution” of the next two years

was to unfold against a backdrop of war scares and actual armed conflict,

underscoring once again the critical nexus between international and

domestic affairs that has always haunted France’s rulers.

The accession of a new Hohenzollern sovereign in Prussia was of imme-

diate interest to Versailles because of French involvement in the troubled

internal politics of the United Provinces. This engagement began, in part,

as an offshoot of the endless Franco-British rivalry, but it was destined to

become in addition an issue of high continental politics. The French, whose

effort in the American War had been seconded by the Dutch, had commit-

ted themselves in November 1785 to a more formal alliance with the States

General of the United Provinces. The leaders of that assembly, the Patri-

ots, were able to seize power in 1787 from the pro-British “stadtholder”

William V of the house of Orange. The British, for their part, fearing the

possibility of French control of the Channel and North Sea coasts, wished

to restore the stadtholder to power on terms that would destroy French in-

fluence at The Hague. Crucially, London was able in this instance to count

on the strong arm of Prussia. The newly crowned Frederick William II,

brother-in-law to none other than William V, had no desire to see his own

sister, the princess of Orange, and her royal husband humiliated by the

pro-French Patriot party in the United Provinces.

Under these circumstances, diplomatic observers augured – and in short

order witnessed – the formation of an Anglo-Prussian coalition, and a mil-

itary intervention to protect the Orangists. This in turn meant that France,

to maintain its credibility with the Patriots – and in Europe generally –

would have to follow through militarily on the strategic commitment made

to the States General in 1785. But since, by 1787, “the French treasury was

exhausted, and French domestic affairs were rapidly approaching chaos,

warnings from Versailles that France would support the Patriots militar-

ily, were interpreted as bluffs, as indeed they were.”104 In short order,

events came to a head. The princess of Orange was stopped at Schoen-

hoven on the frontier of the province of Holland by a party of Patriots

104 Murphy,
Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes
, p. 471. On the crisis in the United Provinces, see also Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, pp. 50–51.

50

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

on 28 June; her royal Prussian brother sent the duke of Brunswick with

an army of twenty thousand men into the United Provinces six weeks

later; Amsterdam capitulated on 12 October; and William V, reinstated

essentially by an Anglo-Prussian stroke of power politics, repudiated the

Franco-Dutch alliance of 1785. Thousands of angry Dutch Patriots fled into

exile.

The French could do absolutely nothing for their Dutch republican

protégés. Moreover, they had to watch from the sidelines, impotently, as

a new diplomatic alliance arose from the ashes of their Dutch policy. An

Anglo-Prussian convention was signed at the start of October; Anglo-

Dutch and Prusso-Dutch compacts were concluded on 15 April 1788; and

a formal defensive alliance was signed between London and Berlin on

13 August 1788. “A powerful Anglo-Prussian combination had now

emerged as a factor in European affairs for the first time since 1761, and

seemed likely to take a hand in the affairs of the Near East.”105

That a new storm was brewing in that part of the world was largely

attributable to the insatiable ambitions of Russia’s Catherine the Great. Not

content with having scored stunning gains at Turkey’s expense around the

Black Sea, from the Crimean Peninsula to Georgia in the western Caucasus,

the Romanov tsarina endeavored to persuade Austria’s Joseph II to join

her in a new assault upon the Ottoman Porte. That Joseph, preoccupied

anew with Prussian machinations within Germany, was hesitant to cross

swords with the Turks in the Balkans did very little to relieve Russian

pressure upon Constantinople. The Ottoman government, unable to rely

on a traditional French ally that had deserted it twice in recent years, yet

desirous of counteracting the threat from St. Petersburg, decided upon a

desperate throw of the dice. It presented Catherine’s government with an

ultimatum demanding an immediate end to its meddling in the khanate of

Georgia. When this ultimatum was rejected, Turkey declared war on its

menacing neighbor in August 1787. Although the Russians were caught

temporarily with poorly prepared armies in the field, and soon faced a new

distraction in the form of a Swedish attack on their holdings in Finland, they

did not remain long on the defensive. In fact, within two years the Russians,

at last abetted by an Austrian push into the Balkans, would be resuming

their historic drive against the Ottoman Porte, thereby threatening the

European balance of power.

The French, erstwhile “arbiters of Europe,” were manifestly as pow-

erless to help their friends at Constantinople as they had been to aid the

Dutch Patriots against London and Berlin. Vergennes admitted as much

when, just a few weeks before his own death, he oversaw the conclusion of

a commercial treaty between France and Russia. Although there were those

105 Anderson, “European Diplomatic Relations,” pp. 274–76.

The ancien régime

51

at Versailles who were tempted to speculate about gains that might accrue

to France from some sort of Franco-Russian Near Eastern accommodation

at Turkish expense, Vergennes himself most assuredly did not see the trade

pact in that light. As one of the foreign minister’s biographers has cor-

rectly pointed out, Vergennes considered the commercial agreement with