Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (32 page)

tack upon the “general will” of society.47 This seeming adherence of all

or most politicians to a vision of politics in which factional pressures

were condemned a priori as subverting the voters’ ability to discover their

common interests may have made it easier for the French to accept extreme

centralization of government – namely, Terror – in 1793–94.48

The very ways in which the new electoral regime adopted in the 1790s

broke through old privileged and corporate barriers and brought citi-

zens together may have fortified this predisposition.Procedural guidelines

adopted by the Constituent Assembly facilitated the emergence of a polity

new to the French experience: they brought citizens together in the spring

of 1790 by neighborhood or arrondissement rather than by trade, profes-

sion, or corps – this, for the purpose of choosing electors for the assemblies

of the departments.When, for instance, in the old Breton parlementary city

of Rennes, Franc¸ois and Louis Biard, tanners by profession, Laurent, a

fish seller, Le Prieur, a carpenter, and Sauvé, a baker, could collaborate with

Defrieux, Fournel, and Reslon, magistrates in the presidial court, and with

46 Malcolm Crook,
Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy,
1789–1799
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.193–94.

47 Ibid., pp. 192–93, 194–95. Crook’s interpretation here owes something to Patrice

Guennifey,
Le Nombre et la raison: La Révolution franc¸aise et les élections
(Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993).

48 A theme especially prominent in the writings of Franc¸ois Furet; see
Interpreting the French
Revolution
, passim.See also the relevant articles by Furet – and others – in Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds.,
A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
; and Guennifey,
Le Nombre et la raison
, passim.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

129

Lesguern, formerly a parlementary justice, to have a voice in their com-

mon future, it was clear that new patterns of political sociability were being

created.And it certainly seems that this transformation of civic life was be-

ginning – slowly, no doubt – to take hold in rural as well as in urban France.

That, for example, the Breton village of Sel could bring 650 active citizens

together to choose five electors, or that the village of Saint-Servan could

assemble 800 active citizens to choose eight electors, certified the creation

of political forums that were more accessible and equitable by far than the

remote and aloof Estates of Brittany, which had lorded it over such villages

since time out of mind.49

The reference to “active” citizens brings to mind the Assembly’s decision

(reflecting in part the counsel of Siéyès and other deputies) to distinguish

between citizens to whom the vote was to be given and citizens not to

be so enfranchised.The Assemblymen decreed that only those males aged

twenty-five or over, domiciled for at least a year, not engaged in domestic

service, and paying a direct tax equivalent to three days of unskilled labor,

could vote in the primary assemblies.Among these electors, only those

whose direct taxation was worth ten days of unskilled labor could vote

at the secondary stage for citizens fully qualified (through payment of a

“silver mark” of 50 livres in annual taxation) to serve at various levels in

the new administrative system.

Precisely how inclusive (or exclusive) these provisions were intended to

be or indeed turned out to be is, from our viewpoint, of less than paramount

importance.They demonstrably brought many previously unenfranchised

Frenchmen into politics and in doing so created a reservoir of citizens

upon which the government could draw in time of national emergency.

In fact, however, scholars commenting most recently on electoral issues

have emphasized the inclusiveness rather than the exclusiveness of France’s

new voting procedures.“Over the country as a whole,” Malcolm Crook

has determined, “some 3 million citizens were at least occasionally

involved in voting.” The “electoral apprenticeship” in revolutionary

France was “extremely intensive ...especially for the minority (perhaps

500,000 Frenchmen) who attended regularly.”50 Michael P.Fitzsimmons,

endorsing the old estimate of roughly 50 percent of males over twenty-

five participating at some point in the electoral process in 1790–91, has

observed that the Assembly did not require active citizens to be literate,

and furthermore “reformed taxation in such a way that liability to direct

taxation extended far down the social scale.” The deputies, “basing the

electorate on taxes rather than property and freeing it of any religious

49 Michael P.Fitzsimmons,
The Remaking of France: The National Assembly, the

Constitution of 1791 andthe Reorganization of the French Polity, 1789–1791
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.187–91.

50 Crook,
Elections in the French Revolution
, p.192.

130

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

affiliation, brought into being one of the most participatory and demo-

cratic national political structures in the world.”51

And so the electoral procedures developed by the Assemblymen were –

like so many of their other reforms – a double-edged weapon.They were

devised in part as a curb upon officeholders in the new France, as a reas-

surance that the “despotism” of benighted times of old could never return.

Yet by helping to break down old barriers of corporate organization and

privilege while simultaneously permitting the survival of established pat-

terns of collective and communal political culture, and by mobilizing un-

precedented numbers of Frenchmen on public occasions, these procedures

indirectly contributed in the course of the 1790s to the reconsolidation

of state power.

But whereas local and national elections (like the new hierarchy of

departments, districts, and communes) became in time a double-edged

weapon, financial-bureaucratic changes seemed to cut in one direction only:

toward an enlargement of the public domain, and, hence, of state authority.

The whole point of fiscal reform in the 1790s, John Bosher has explained,

was to remove all budgetary and related matters from the purview of private

individuals – the invidious “capitalists” (bankers,
traitants
, venal officers) –

and place them under the watchful eye of the “nation.” Those who dared

to speak up for the old system – Calonne and Dupont de Nemours, for

example – were ignored from the start.“The parliamentary forces imbued

with the new principles of nationalism were composed of provincial rep-

resentatives brought into the Assembly in the elections of 1789.They were

only too anxious, once Mirabeau, Custine and others had made the issues

clear, to exert the crushing weight of their numbers to thwart the ambitions

of Parisian financial interests, whether of bankers or financiers.”52 Accord-

ingly, the Assemblymen, all the more to consolidate the “honest” part of

the royal debt – those payments owed to
rentiers
– moved to liquidate the

king’s obligations to “capitalists” such as venal bureaucrats.They created

a national agency, the
Caisse de l’extraordinaire
, to issue notes, the famous
assignats
, which would be used to facilitate the transfer of nationalized

properties – clerical and crown estates and buildings – to venal officers,

thus extinguishing the offices (and associated national debt) in question.

Needless to add, the Assembly insisted on keeping the sale of
biens

nationaux
under public control, and the
assignats
themselves, for better or worse, were to be securely tied to the state’s fortunes.

To be sure, the deputies had additional reasons in 1790 to expedite this

vast transfer of wealth.As Philip Dawson, among others, has noted, some

51 Fitzsimmons,
The Remaking of France
, pp.187–91.

52 John Bosher,
French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp.309–10.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

131

of the parlements were still attempting to foment opposition to judicial

(and other) reforms in the Assembly; how better to defeat such efforts than

to encourage owners of the old judicial posts to accept reimbursement

in the form of
biens nationaux
? Moreover, the sooner the liquid capital

released by the abolition of venal offices could be absorbed in purchases

of ecclesiastical and royal properties, the greater the chances of avoiding

a monetary instability that could sap the credibility of the new regime.

Hence, in part, the determination of the revolutionaries to finalize plans

for a
Caisse de l’extraordinaire
and for another special agency, the General Directory of Liquidation: these two agencies in collaboration would carry

out the envisaged operation.53

But, in the end, it all came back to the same purpose: legitimizing a

transference of fiscal influence and functions from private hands to those

of the “nation” – that is, the revolutionized and revivifed state.Inevitably,

when France resumed its ways of war, enterprising individuals would still

finds ways to profit from the state’s military needs; yet never would they

be able to worm their way as deeply into the administration as had the

accountants and tax farmers of the old regime.54 This was because liqui-

dating that part of the crown’s debt owing to the
financiers
of the past

was only the prelude to the main task at hand: creation of a modern bu-

reaucracy to safeguard the nation’s finances.Inspired by the vision of a

state functioning with mechanical efficiency, the men of the Constituent

Assembly hoped to marshal the forces of organization to banish all forms

of malversation in office.In France, they decreed, the multitudinous sep-

arate treasuries in the hands of free-wheeling, profiteering tax farmers and

accountants would have to go.In their place a consolidated, bureaucratic

Treasury would emerge whose salaried officials would operate in a ratio-

nal, prescribed fashion.As the Revolution wore on, bureaus from the old

regime’s Department of Finance and funds formerly administered by tax

farmers and receivers-general were assimilated into the new Treasury and

the new ministries of Interior and Public Contributions.The Assembly

assumed supervision of employees, salaries, and operating expenses in the

new financial system and required the annual submission of unprecedent-

edly detailed accounts.It seems that most common clerks functioning in

the old departments moved over successfully into the new agencies; most

of the noble and “venal” accountants, on the other hand, did not.What

these latter had known as “an aristocratic system, based on personal po-

sition in a social hierarchy, became a bureaucracy with an administrative

53 Philip Dawson,
Provincial Magistrates andRevolutionary Politics in France
,
1789–1795

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 255–59. The liquidation of venal posts thus undertaken would in the end “free up” around 600 million
livres
in capital.

54 Bosher,
French Finances
, pp.310–11.

132

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

hierarchy in which the organization of public functions took precedence

over the claims of individual officials.”55

Admittedly, these were fundamental changes that could not occur

overnight; they were part of a process, the ongoing process of revolution.

We can now state fairly confidently that at least until 1792 – that pivotal

year marked by the reversion to war – the “new” fiscal system retained

many if not all of its traditional characteristics.It managed to preserve a

degree of its erstwhile autonomy within the state apparatus; it still lacked

general operational rules and a precise definition of its place within French

constitutional arrangements; its ministries remained somewhat uncoordi-

nated and only partially modernized; and its functionaries, veterans and

neophytes alike, retained some of the prejudices and habits of old regime

officialdom.Nonetheless, it is clear by the same token that state employ-

ees now were no longer hangers-on from Court.They were state servants,

subordinate to the directorate of the state and expected to defend the na-

tional interest.They worked within a system purged of its ruinous venality

and subject increasingly to legislative oversight, a system already taking the

first steps toward a major rationalization of routines.56 It is hard to resist

the conclusion that the new financial bureaucracy, “with its flexible hierar-

chy of command, its division of labor, its central records, its double-entry

book-keeping systems, and its mechanical efficiency ...was capable of mo-

bilizing the ...resources of the nation to a degree ...necessary for 20 years

of war against nearly the whole of Europe.”57 The geopolitical implications