Welcome back. Make yourself comfortable. Today we're going to talk about the French Revolution. Big subject. We're spending some time on this because I really want you to just kind of understand the way these ideas develop and how they're different in understanding the democratic revolution. So, in the case of the French Revolution, it starts out with convening the Estates General in 1788 and 1789. What are the Estates General? The Estates General are part of that constituted order that I talked about. This is an intermediary body that's going to reflect the liberties and privileges of France. The First Estate: clergy. Second Estate: nobles. Third Estate: others. [LAUGH] Basically, other men of property, lawyers, and so forth who we were not in the First and Second Estates. This is just the kind of traditional intermediary body I talked about earlier when I talked about the arguments in the early 1770s, when King Louis XV tried to levy some new taxes. The nobles fought him back in the Parlements, claiming their liberties. Then Louis XVI comes to power and he's proclaimed as the �restorer of French liberty.� Well now he's convening the Estate's General to help him levy new taxes. We know the Estates General happened. Why did it happen? Why did Louis XVI and others convene this intermediary body? They did it because the finances of the French government were in disrepair, especially because France had just fought yet another war on the side of the rebellious Americans. It had been a relatively successful war, geopolitically, but the fiscal-military state was out of fiscal. The only way Louis XVI could get the money he needed, remembering the experience of Louis XV, was to convene this intermediary body to approve raising the taxes he needed. But when he's doing this in 1788 and 1789, now all these ideas from North America, from the American Revolution, are sweeping back across the Atlantic into France. And the Estates General is taking on a life of its own. An especially influential argument was made by one of those present, Abb� Siey�s. Siey�s writes an extraordinarily influential pamphlet simply called �What is the Third Estate?� The Third Estate and all those others. Well, he asks, in a kind of catechism: What is the Third Estate? Why, everything, because almost everyone in France [LAUGH] is in the Third Estate. They're not clergy or not nobility. Well, what has the Third Estate been heretofore in the political order? Oh, nothing, because the aristocracy runs Everything, and, indeed, in the Estates General they make up two-thirds of the Estates. What does the Third Estate want? What does everyone want? Well, to become something in this new established order that we're creating. Arguments like these fire the passions of both the emerging new classes of French authority (i.e. lawyers, businessmen) and the street of Paris which takes the law into its own hands and, in effect, overthrows the Estates General and insists that a new kind of assembly needs to be created, one that fully represents the proper citizens of France. And what then comes into being is the creation of a constitutional monarchy for France. Louis XVI will become the nation's king. The mob hastens him to go from his palace in Versailles, to come to Paris and rule over his country in combination with a National Constituent Assembly that will represent the Third Estate. Now, this is being created deeply influenced by ideas from America, by ideas from Britain, it's parliamentary example, but also a lot of things that are very distinctively French And, after all, a lot of the ideas in America had also originated in France. For instance, the French National Constituent Assembly prepares a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. They're preparing that declaration with the help of Thomas Jefferson, who was the author of the American Declaration of Independence and, at the time, was the ambassador of the new American republic in Paris. Here's a contemporary print proclaiming this new Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Look at what it Says: �Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.� You can instantly see here the influence of the language Jefferson had penned in the American Declaration of Independence. But the second sentence is very much a French one: �Social distinctions can be based only on public utility,� not artificial distinctions. It's an attack on the aristocracy of birth, the exclusivity of the old ruling class. Article 2: the natural rights of man and those rights are named. You'll also see language here that's influenced by the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. And then, in turn, when the Americans come to draft a Bill of Rights for their Constitution, which they'll do in the early 1790s, they'll be influenced by the language the French have been preparing. And then here's Article 3. I really want to call your attention, though, to this key first sentence: �The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.� The concept of the nation is a relatively new, modern idea. By the way, note they didn't say sovereignty resides essentially in the people. Which is the way some of the Americans might have put it. They've created a single national Community. That national community, reflecting the values of people like Rousseau, has a unified �general will� and once the nation has expressed its general will, all must obey. That sense of unified purpose, of national purpose, is a distinctively French addition to this vocabulary. What do the French mean by the nation? They mean a new concept of France. A new concept of France that needs a powerful new symbol. They literally invent a symbol, a flag, that will stand for the French nation. That's the tri-color. This is the period in which the tri-color is invented as the new symbol of what France means: a blending of different factions, of traditions, in one nation. In this nation, who were the citizens? Well actually not everyone. In this constitutional monarchy, citizenship is bestowed to men of property. In fact the way they define citizenship, probably something like, oh, about one fifth of the French population would be considered citizens, would have obligations of national service. This is still enormously wider than say, the aristocratic order of the past. But there are an awful lot of people who might begin to feel excluded once they examine the literal meaning of the Declaration of the Rights of Man that's just been adopted. Leading figures in this constitutional monarchy, leading citizens, were spokesmen like this man, Mirabeau, who himself is the child of privilege but was a bit of the black sheep of his family mainly because he was a notorious womanizer in an age that was relatively tolerant of womanizing. But they weren't so tolerant of eloping with a woman who was already married to someone else, if you came from a well-born house. So Mirabeau, let's say, had a reputation. But he was a powerful spokesman for this new kind of citizen. Another spokesman for new kind of citizen is this man. This is Marquis de Lafayette. He had volunteered to serve at George Washington's side in the American Revolution. Indeed, he named his son George Washington Lafayette. And thought really of George Washington almost as a kind of father figure. Here he is as the commander of France's new national army, its National Guard. And what I want you to note is that Lafayette is wearing the cockade of the tricolor, the symbol of the new French nation in the uniforms that will be worn by these new citizens in this new constitutional monarchy. So if we stop and just reflect on the situation of France's constitutional monarchy in say the year 1790, you might say they found the right balance. They found an approach that has some of the good ingredients of the English experiment. It has some interesting things drawn from the American experiment. It seems reasonably well-balance; it has got sensible people like Lafayette involved. It fails. It's overthrown in August 1792. Why? Historians can argue whether or not it was bound to fail. I can make a pretty plausible argument though that it was not bound to fail. It failed because of particular choices that they made in particular circumstances that they faced and decisions its leaders made in 1790 and 1791. First, they made some key financial decisions. They replaced France's hard money with paper money; They printed a lot of the paper money, and it created rapid inflation, which then made it harder for people to buy food and contributed to general social unrest. That would have been trouble, but that wasn't all the trouble. Second, and perhaps most important of all, the French, in effect, nationalized the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had to be part of the nation; it had to be part of its single will. So all the priests had to become state officials, officials of the nation, instead of of the Pope. That meant every single parish priest in France had to decide whether or not he was going to become a state official and abandon his loyalties to his old bishop, to his old pope, and swear allegiance to France. And every person in that parish had to decide whether they were going to go to church from the new priest appointed by the government or the old priest who refused to swear this oath. By doing this, the French government have now done something that literally touched every single community in France. A constitutional monarchy has a king, right? It would help to have a king who would provide a strong charismatic leadership role for this new constitutional monarchy. The British, for example, after their Glorious Revolution in 1688, had a relatively strong king. They imported him from Holland. But they had a relatively strong king to play a central role in their new constitutional monarchy. But the French had a relatively weak king. On this historians are generally agreed. They find Louis XVI to be a nice person, a decent person, but in circumstances that were perhaps a little bit beyond him. He was obviously ambivalent about the revolution. As this constitutional monarchy is being created, nobles are fleeing France. Louis's own brother has fled France and is leading people who are trying to overthrow the French revolutionary government, in league with foreign powers. He plays a relatively passive role. So. If he's not the leader of France, who is? There's no person who can really step forward to provide kind of a central figure of leadership in what are now very tough, disturbed times. They're especially disturbed because France is now at war. The revolution has taken a turn that both alarms some of the neighboring monarchies and also excites them into thinking that this might be a chance to get their vengeance on France and tear off pieces of French territory. So France, in 1792, now finds itself at war. It's at war, in a way, at home; it's at war with foreign enemies. The constitutional monarchy simply doesn't have vigorous enough central leadership to meet this emergency. It's prey to the mob, and in August 1792, the mob exerts its authority in Paris. In a way, the mob was representing all those people who wanted to be citizens but who felt left out by the new setup of the constitutional monarchy. By the National Constituent Assembly. So contrast in these pictures: Louis XVI, drawn as the man who's accepting the French Nation; he�s put on the tricolor and the cap of the republic. He's going to try to be a new republican king. But notice by the way, he's wearing the typical garb of the aristocracy, these knee breeches. But the common people, they think of themselves as the sans-culottes: the people who don't wear the silk stockings. Like this gentleman right here in ordinary garb, carrying the emblem of the nation. You see the cockade on his hat. He's the emblem of the people who are now going to assert their will. Their will will become the general will of the nation. And by January 1793, their will will be that King Louis XVI needs to mount the scaffold and be the victim of revolutionary justice. We're going to track the course of revolutionary justice in our next talk on The French Republic.
