Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (34 page)

reflected powerful social pressures in post-absolutist France.Most citizens

with any capital to spare wished to invest it in land, and the peasants ached

to be relieved of their seigneurial dues and associated obligations.Yet the

men of the Constituent Assembly, as they came to inherit the burden of

ruling France, had to have more than socioeconomic interests in mind.

John Markoff has in this connection cited the
political
as well as the social calculations behind the deputies’ decision to allow the redemption (in cash

or in kind) of all seigneurial dues and services supposedly grounded in

past “legitimate” transferrals of property.The legislators, many of whom

were landed seigneurs themselves, may have viewed indemnification as a

reasonable social compromise both for rebellious peasants wishing to have

done with seigneurialism altogether and for lords insisting on the retention

of all their property rights.But they were also uneasily aware that to go

beyond indemnification – that is, to abolish seigneurial obligations out-

right – would adversely affect state finances.The unconditional abolition

67 Ibid., pp. 291–98.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

137

of seigneurial rights would not only eliminate that minor but heretofore

assured state revenue which the king received as “lord” of royal domains;

it would also lower the market value of crown and ecclesiastical lands and

buildings whose prospective purchasers could no longer look forward to

acquiring seigneurial rights.And declining proceeds from such purchases

would, naturally, translate into a diminished financial windfall for the

(less competitive?) French state.68

Thus, the Assembly’s adoption of the principle of indemnification for

the heaviest of the old seigneurial dues was dictated as much by statist

requirements as by social interests.Peter M.Jones has underscored this

reality by recalling its harsh implications for some humble Frenchmen

toiling in the countryside.Peasants who until 1789 had paid a “wide range

of monetary and harvest dues” to ecclesiastical landlords were “henceforth

expected to pay to the government” everything they had formerly remitted

to their clerical seigneurs.These dues would be collected until November

1791 by district authorities in each department, and thereafter by an agency

called the Régie National de l’Enregistrement.It seems that these payments

were bringing in around 900,000
livres
a month and were still rising in

May 1792.This suggests a state revenue of about 12 million
livres
a year.

Only the onset of a war crisis in the summer of 1792 would cut off this

source of income to the state, along with all other remittances to Paris

deriving from the by now thoroughly discredited seigneurial regime.69

The actual conditions offered by the Assembly for the purchase of
biens

nationaux
also disclosed tensions between citizens and the state that were

probably unavoidable.A number of the deputies – Thouret, Delley d’Agier,

and the duc de La Rochefoucauld among them – spoke of the need to seize

the opportunity to spread the ownership of land by selling church estates in

small lots for low prices and on deferred terms.Others, however, reminded

their colleagues that the whole object of the sale was to rescue state finances

from the bankruptcy of the old regime; and this implied getting the high-

est price possible and enforcing prompt payments.The initial decree on

the subject, that of 14 May 1790, provided a “compromise” that proba-

bly subordinated the interests of small landowners to those of the state

(and, incidentally, to those of wealthier proprietors).Although only

12 percent of the purchase price was immediately due, with the remainder

(at 5 percent interest) payable over twelve years, lands were obtainable

only in large blocks, and sales were to be by auction (which would drive

prices up) and limited to the administrative centers of districts, to which

few peasants would have the time to travel.

70 In a sense, the buyers of

68 See John Markoff, “Violence, Emancipation, and Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution,”
American Historical Review
100 (1995): esp.365–66.

69 See Jones,
The Peasantry in the French Revolution
, pp.109–10.

70 Norman Hampson,
A Social History of the French Revolution
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), pp.124–26.

138

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

these properties, whatever their socioeconomic status, had the last laugh,

since in subsequent years the government found itself receiving payments

sharply reduced in value by runaway inflation.Still, Necker’s sobering

projection in 1790 of a state deficit rising to at least 294 million
livres
had given the legislators an urgent financial cue, and larger political considerations would continue in ensuing years to lie behind the brisk transactions

in
biens nationaux
.71

Larger political considerations also profoundly informed the Constitu-

entAssembly’sdecisionin1791(embodiedinthefamous‘‘LeChapelierlaw’’)

to dissolve all corporate bodies in the kingdom.Historians addressing this

contentious issue have as a rule stressed the
social
motivations behind, and consequences of, the Le Chapelier legislation.And it is incontrovertible

that, even if the law’s formal prohibitions and penalties were supposed to

apply equally to employers and employees, in practice they fell almost

exclusively upon workers.It is hard to see how, over the next century or so,

this could
not
have been the case: abolition of guilds and other producers’

associations and the prohibition of unions and other workers’ coalitions,

in effect deregulating the marketplace of capital and labor, could only hand

the latter over to the “tender” mercies of the former.But the really germane

point here is that the chief motive behind the legislation was constitutional

(or political) rather than social.Passage of the Le Chapelier law signaled the

revolutionary credo that “corporations” as such could not be reconciled

with the founding principles of the new, regenerated state.No intermedi-

ary body could be allowed to exist between the individual citizen and the

nation – and the nation was henceforth to be the sole guardian of civic

rights and the sole venue for the exercise of the general will.72 This,

of course, had also been the revolutionary gospel in whose light that

venerable “intermediary body” the Gallican Church had stood condemned

the preceding summer.

This primarily political reading of the Le Chapelier decree is supported

by the fact that the Constitution of 1791 in its final draft began by explicitly

abolishing “the institutions that have injured liberty and the equality of

rights.” In this connection, corporate bodies were dispatched to infamy

along with nobility, peerage, hereditary distinctions, all orders of chivalry,

the sale and inheritance of public office, religious vows, and the privileges of

provinces and cities.“Loyalties to provinces, estates, orders, communities,

corporations, all were to vanish before the interests of individual citizens

71 See, on these further details, ibid., and Jones,
The Peasantry in the French Revolution
, pp.154–55.It is also true, as Hampson has noted, that many deputies were “sceptical of the economic wisdom of splitting large holdings into a number of small plots.” Hampson,
A Social History
, pp.124–26.

72 William H.Sewell, Jr.,
Work andRevolution in France: The Language of Labor from the
OldRegime to 1848
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp.90–91.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

139

and the supreme loyalty of every citizen to the nation.”73 Here, then, was

yet another instance of a reform enacted by the Constituent Assembly that,

while catering to real socioeconomic interests, responded as well to larger

issues of the polity.Moreover, events in the world beyond France would

soon require that the “interests of individual citizens” trumpeted by the

early Revolution take a far back seat to that other championed concept, the

“supreme loyalty of every citizen to the nation.”

For many French citizens, that paramount civic fidelity would soon be

demonstrated (voluntarily or not) through service in the armed forces of

the revived state.A brief review of the initial stages of the overhaul of the

army and navy discloses, in this as in so many other areas of the Constituent

Assembly’s work, a mix of political and social concerns.Given the martial

purposes of these great institutions, such a reassessment also recalls for

us the larger connection between geopolitical and sociopolitical issues in

Revolutionary France.

Reforms in the army during 1789–91 testified in several ways to the

paramount statist concerns of the revolutionaries.For one thing, the

deputies’ sensitivity to international pressures drove them to contest and

eventually deny the crown’s traditional role in military affairs.“Whether

peace would ever be established in Europe was doubtful,” Jean-Paul

Bertaud has realistically written.“For all their yearning for universal peace,

many bourgeois were well aware that war was not about to disappear from

the continent....An army would therefore be necessary in future years.

To prevent its becoming an instrument of despotism, it must become

national.”74 “National,” at the very least, meant in this context “responsive

to the Assembly’s will.” Louis XVI remained in theory chief of the army,

working through a war ministry, until his overthrow in August 1792.In

fact, however, “by a decree of February 28, 1790, the Assembly reserved to

itself the possibility of encroaching on the executive domain.It provided

that, at each session of the legislature, the Assembly should determine the

funds needed to maintain the army and assure its pay.”75 Alan Forrest has

stressed that the Assembly “dramatically” increased its influence over the

military in other ways as well: for instance, “by sending to the various

armies deputies who had instructions to report on the political loyalty of

their generals” and to take up “more routine questions of supply, morale,

and general readiness for war.” Also important was “the administrative de-

vice of ...a special military committee of the Assembly that could provide

the deputies with expert advice.”76

73 Ibid., pp. 90–91 and 88–89.

74 Bertaud,
The Army of the French Revolution
, p. 40.

75 Ibid., pp. 44–45.

76 Alan Forrest,
The Soldiers of the French Revolution
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), pp.42–45.

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Reinterpreting the French Revolution

The Constituent Assembly also bore witness to its dominant political

concerns when (by legislation of 7 and 9 March 1791) it transformed the

terms of military enlistment.Joining the army no longer was to involve

“a contract between one man and another; it became a contract between

the individual and the State, represented by the municipalities and the

directories of the departments.” The reconsolidated state thereby decreed

that enlistment be for eight years, that the recruit be between eighteen and

forty years old, and that he display “good moral character and physical

aptitude.” In addition, foreigners were excluded by these criteria; and soon

the state (through its legislature) would be insisting that all preexisting

foreign regiments “form part of the French infantry, wear the same uniform,

and be under the same discipline.”77

In matters of recruitment of officers and promotion in the ranks,

the revolutionaries plainly subordinated social (that is, “new” noble and

“bourgeois”) aspirations to immediate pragmatic concerns.“Although

they might have serious reservations about the aristocratic profile of the

officer corps,” Forrest has noted, “few in the Assembly saw any alterna-

tive to a gradual transfer of authority.Army officers did, above all, need to

possess expertise, and the possibility of an army without a clear struc-

ture of authority was attractive to no one.” In effect, those revolutionaries

who above all else sought to inculcate professionalism in the soldiery so

as to create an army capable of waging full-scale aggressive war as well as

handling defensive operations won out (at least for the time being) over

those who viewed the army in ideological terms as helping to fashion the

“new man.”78

This meant, in practice, that the Assembly, hoping to recruit officers on

the basis of technical merit, left the nominating process more or less to

officers in place.A decree of 20 September 1790 gave noncommissioned

officers one out of every four vacancies for the rank of sublieutenant, to be

filled either by seniority or by selection.In the latter case, officers of the

unit would do the nominating.The same procedure held for the choosing

of noncoms.NCOs prepared lists of candidates from which the company

commander drew three names to present to the colonel; he actually made