Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (16 page)

But if reformers at Versailles and their agents in the provinces had to

contend with the class prejudices and insecurities of traditionalist nobles,

they may have faced an even more insurmountable challenge in the form

of the innumerable privileged “corporations” in the kingdom. Obviously,

the crown had the most to fear from those corps – for instance, the com-

panies of financiers and the parlements – in which
esprit de caste
and
esprit
de corps
intersected and proved mutually reinforcing. Just as the ministers could no longer launch extrajudicial inquests against “capitalists” who were

no longer of the commonalty, so they found it difficult to overawe mag-

istrates of impeccably noble lineage. But the dilemma went beyond even

that. For how could Calonne or Loménie de Brienne or Lamoignon have

possibly slain the hydra of parasitical corporate privilege that was suffocat-

ing the monarchy? It was truly the case that, as Rabaut Saint-Etienne had

it, “one hears talk of nothing but rights, concessions, immunities, special

agreements, privileges, prerogatives. Every town, every community, every

province, every ecclesiastical or judicial body, has its interest to defend in

this confusion. . . . A minister who wants to disentangle the wires does not

know where to begin because as he touches them he makes the interest cry

129 See Stone,
Parlement of Paris
, pp. 161–63, for a discussion of the Parlement’s stance on these issues.

130 Egret,
French Prerevolution
, pp. 47–54. For a detailed corroboration of Egret on this point, see Scott,
Response of the Royal Army
, pp. 27–33.

60

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

out to which they are attached.”131 The ministers striving in the late 1780s

to “disentangle the wires,” to enhance the efficiency of a state regarding

itself still as the “arbiter of Europe,” found that the proliferation of special

corporate interests had deprived them of any rational basis on which to

act.

But there was, ideologically speaking, yet another aspect to this. Some

of the privileged corps were being tugged and pulled in opposing ideo-

logical directions during 1787 and 1788. If the parlements, for instance,

were notorious strongholds of “aristocratic” reaction to the crown’s me-

liorist legislation, they also won popular plaudits for their arraignment

of “ministerial despotism” and (in some cases) for their idealistic renun-

ciations of corporate rights and their stirring invocations of a renascent

national interest.132 But possibly just as significant (if not yet as methodi-

cally studied) were similar ideological tendencies in the lower echelons of

French venal officialdom. Tentatively, it seems that some corporate bodies

in these ranks were beginning to accustom their members to think in terms

of legal rights – and statist threats posed to those rights. Hence, in their

prescribed, humdrum activities such corps may have been, in a sense, sem-

inars in modern notions of citizenship. In 1787–88, corporate forays into

a universalistic discourse that played up the notions of popular consent

to taxation, property rights, and above all else civic activism in all likeli-

hood helped to erode the government’s legitimacy while at the same time

undermining the particularistic privileges of the corps themselves.133

It seems fair to conclude that, in 1787–88, Calonne and his successor

Loménie de Brienne were both undone by a convergence of crises rooted

deeply in expansionistic French absolutism – an absolutism that reflected

and mediated sociocultural contention even as it initiated public policy. Just

conceivably, a stronger economy in the 1770s and 1780s might have delayed

the government’s fiscal collapse by augmenting the tributes of noble and

peasant taxpayers and by sustaining venal accountants’ and bankers’ short-

term advances of capital to the crown. But, again, the chief conclusion to

be derived from this chapter’s analysis would seem to be that Louis XVI’s

ministers had to confront problems of a far more fundamental nature than

whatever weaknesses might inhere in France’s preindustrial economy.

Perhaps it would be best to close here with a few lines offering both

retrospection and anticipation. In attempting to execute unprecedentedly

ambitious policies abroad while simultaneously opting for absolutist prin-

ciples and policies at home, France’s rulers ensured that one day, against

131 Quoted in Behrens,
Ancien Régime
, p. 179.

132 This was most notably the case at Paris. See Stone,
French Parlements
, esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

133 Gail Bossenga,
The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution at Lille
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 202–5.

The ancien régime

61

a threatening backdrop of overextended foreign policy gone wrong, the

crown would have to seek to “relegitimize” its finances (and therefore its

policies) by accommodating its subjects’ sociopolitical aspirations. But that

would prove exceedingly difficult, since the French state’s ongoing roles

as an initiator of divisive constitutional and social change, and as a venue

for debate over that change, would leave it exposed both to the nostal-

gic recriminations of sociopolitical conservatives and to the rapidly rising

expectations of sociopolitical progressives. In such a condition of vulner-

ability abroad and at home, only a godlike combination of firmness and

flexibility at Versailles could have enabled Louis XVI’s government to raise

a new structure of stability and glory upon the ruins of the past.

2

The descent into revolution:

from August 1788 to October 1789

On 5 July 1788, the French government by decree invited “all Frenchmen,

through provincial Estates or assemblies,” to signify their opinions “on the

appropriate rules to be followed” in the convocation of the Estates General.

In August, the crown effectively acknowledged its own “temporary” in-

solvency but assured its creditors that the impending session ofthe Estates,

now formally set for 1 May 1789 at Versailles, would permanently secure

their investments. Yet, by October 1789, both king and Estates General

(the latter now renamed the National “Constituent” Assembly) would be

taking up new, Parisian quarters in the midst ofa full-fledged revolution.

Over the intervening period, dramatic events had transpired; most sym-

bolically potent ofthem, for sure, was the Parisians’ seizure ofthe Bastille

on 14 July 1789.

This much is uncontested; but
why
events unfolded the way they did

remains as controversial as ever. Georges Lefebvre, in what was for a

long time the standard account ofthe coming ofthe Revolution, sug-

gested that Louis XVI’s government was determined on the eve ofthe

July Days of1789 to dissolve the increasingly rebellious Estates General,

rely henceforth upon the support ofthe parlements, and “resign itselfto

bankruptcy.”1 Yet such a hypothesis, viewed from our global-historical

perspective, seems wildly unrealistic. In late 1788 and 1789,
any
French

king would very likely have been impaled on the horns ofa dilemma re-

calling to us that which had faced Charles I of England and anticipating

that which would confront Nicholas II ofRussia. In each ofthese situa-

tions the sovereign was challenged both by history and by contemporary

circumstances to uphold the integrity, and thus the financial viability,

ofhis state; and yet doing so, in each case, required him to sanction

domestic reforms subversive of his forebears’ – and his own – public

philosophy!

1 As cited in Lefebvre,
Coming of the French Revolution
, p. 91.

62

The descent into revolution

63

Cruel predicaments, to be sure; and, in the French case, this dilemma,

recalling as well the challenge that the ancien régime had been unable in

the end to meet, loomed in its initial revolutionary incarnation behind the

events of August 1788–October 1789. After summarizing those events for

the convenience ofthe reader, this chapter will analyze the onset ofthe

French Revolution. It will start to do that by establishing the diplomatic

and military backdrop to the historic drama of1788–89. It will then

reassess the failure of Louis XVI to make sociopolitical concessions that

were probably crucial for the restoration of the French state’s credibility

(most imperatively, its international credibility) in the summer of1789.

Finally, it will show how that pivotal royal failure interacted with polarized

elitist “sociopolitics” and with popular insurrection, thereby allowing

the initiative in French policy-making to begin to pass from royal and

ministerial hands into those ofa revolutionary legislature.

p r o l o g u e : n a r r a t i v e o f e v e n t s

On 8 August 1788, the French government formally announced that the

Estates General would meet at Versailles on 1 May 1789. This announce-

ment was followed on 25 August by the resignation of Finance Minister

Loménie de Brienne and his replacement by Jacques Necker. Necker

confirmed the meeting ofthe Estates; he also restored the old judiciary.

But the Paris Parlement’s call (on 25 September) for Estates organized

along traditional lines forced a hastily reconvened Assembly of Notables

to consider this controversial question. When, however, the Notables

themselves adopted a stubbornly traditional position on the Estates, and

after the Princes of the Blood issued a fiercely reactionary commentary on

public affairs, Necker brought about a royal intervention. But the king’s

decree (
Résultat du Conseil
) of27 December only stoked the fires of

controversy: although it called for twice as many Third Estate delegates as

clerical or noble deputies to the impending national convocation, it failed

to specify whether voting in that body would be “by order” or “by head.”

A war of pamphlets ensued, and sharpened already serious differences

between adversaries and advocates ofsociopolitical change.

In the early months of1789, deputies to the Estates General were cho-

sen, and grievance lists (
cahiers de doléances
) drafted, by electors at Paris and in the provinces. Once assembled at Versailles on 5 May, the Estates became swiftly bogged down in procedural disputes reflecting the deepening

nationwide split between conservatives and “Patriots” or “Nationals.” In

the absence of effective royal/ministerial leadership, the Patriots decided to

forcearesolutionof issues in June. On the seventeenth,progressivedeputies

induced the Third Estate to rename itselfthe National Assembly. On the

nineteenth, a majority ofclerical delegates voted to join the Third Estate

64

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

in this endeavor. The next day, the members ofthe Assembly, excluded

from their meeting place, swore a famous oath in a nearby tennis court

not to disband before establishing a constitution for the country. At this

point, Louis XVI once again intervened; but his rejection offundamen-

tal sociopolitical change at the
séance royale
of23 June only emboldened

the Patriots to defy his will, and on the twenty-seventh the king felt

constrained to order noble and clerical deputies to join the Third Estate in

the newly designated National Assembly.

Louis, however, was not yet ready to yield to the progressive notables.

In early July, troops were summoned to the environs ofVersailles and the

capital. Necker and several other reformist ministers were dismissed; their

places were taken by individuals apparently supportive ofa harder line

on contentious social and constitutional issues. The popular response to

this move (and to economic difficulties highlighted by the soaring price and

localized scarcities ofgrain) was to seize the Parisian Bastille and the capital

itselfon 14 July. Once again, the king had no alternative but to back down:

Necker and his disgraced colleagues were reinstated over the next few

days. The Assembly was free to continue its work of national regeneration.

Meanwhile, power in the provinces passed from the intendants and the