The French Revolution, from 1789 to 1799, was the decade that destroyed the French monarchy, dismantled feudalism, and proclaimed the universal rights of man, while devouring its own children in the Terror. It invented modern politics: left and right, the citizen army, the secular state, and the national anthem were all born in revolutionary France. It began with bankruptcy, it passed through republic and Terror, and it ended with Napoleon, who promised to preserve the Revolution by burying its liberty.
The French Revolution began with a bill. By the 1780s, the French monarchy was effectively bankrupt. The state spent about half its revenue on interest on its debt, a debt swollen by the Seven Years' War and by French support for the American Revolutionary War. The tax system was the problem: the nobility and the clergy, who owned much of the land, were largely exempt, while the burden fell on the Third Estate, the commoners who made up the great majority of the population. The king's ministers tried reform after reform. The parlements, the high courts dominated by nobles, blocked them. The monarchy, which claimed absolute power, could not tax its own rich.
The crisis was social as well as fiscal. The nobility had lost much of its old military function but kept its privileges: seigneurial dues, hunting rights, and exemption from the main direct tax. The clergy, the First Estate, owned vast lands and collected tithes. The Third Estate included everyone else: peasants, artisans, merchants, bankers, lawyers, and the whole rising bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie read the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and asked why birth should decide who governed. The peasants asked a simpler question: why they paid dues for land they worked, to lords who did nothing for them.
Louis XVI was not a tyrant in the style of later caricature. He was a decent, indecisive man, poorly equipped for the crisis he inherited, married to Marie Antoinette, an Austrian princess who became the symbol of court extravagance. In 1788, facing default, the king summoned the Estates-General, the assembly of the three orders, for the first time since 1614. The decision was a gamble: the Estates-General would either grant the taxes the king needed, or it would become the instrument that destroyed his authority. It became the second.
The Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789. The Third Estate, which represented the great majority of Frenchmen, demanded voting by head, not by order, which would have given it the majority. The privileged orders refused. On 17 June, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly. On 20 June, locked out of their hall, its deputies met in a tennis court and swore the Tennis Court Oath: they would not disband until they had given France a constitution. The King ordered them to disperse. They stayed. The old order had lost the initiative, and it never recovered it.
Paris decided the rest. On 14 July 1789, crowds stormed the Bastille, the royal fortress-prison that symbolized arbitrary royal power. The fortress held only a handful of prisoners, but its fall was a signal: the King's authority no longer ran in his own capital. The tricolor cockade replaced the white of the Bourbons. In the countryside, the Great Fear spread, with peasants attacking chateaux and burning the records of feudal dues. The National Assembly, faced with a countryside in revolt, acted on the night of 4 August 1789, abolishing feudal dues, tithes, and seigneurial courts in a single ecstatic session. A thousand years of feudalism ended in one night of decrees.
Three weeks later came the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August 1789. Its first article declared that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. The Declaration proclaimed liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, and it made law the expression of the general will. It became the template for human rights charters worldwide, and it remains the founding text of modern French political life. In October 1789, the women of Paris marched on Versailles and brought the King and the Assembly back to the capital. The Revolution had a home, and the King was its prisoner.
The National Assembly, renamed the Constituent Assembly, remade France root and branch. It divided the old provinces into 83 departments, rational units designed to break old loyalties. It reformed weights and measures, laying the ground for the metric system. It reformed the calendar, the courts, and the administration. It seized church lands to back a new paper currency, the assignats, and it passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, making priests state employees elected by citizens. The Civil Constitution split the nation: priests who swore the oath were loyal to the Revolution, priests who refused were loyal to Rome, and the religious divide became a civil war in waiting.
The Assembly also wrote a constitution. The Constitution of 1791 made France a constitutional monarchy, with a king who reigned but did not rule, and a legislature elected by active citizens, men who paid a certain amount in taxes. It was a compromise, and it satisfied almost no one. The King, who had never accepted the Revolution, tried to flee France in June 1791 and was caught at Varennes, recognized from his portrait on the currency. The flight destroyed the last trust in the monarchy. The republicans, once a fringe, became a force. The Assembly, which had promised the King a constitutional throne, found itself guarding a king who had tried to run.
The Revolution also remade the army. The old royal army, officered by nobles, dissolved as its officers emigrated. In its place rose a citizen army, volunteers and conscripts who fought for the nation rather than for a king. The Marseillaise, composed in 1792, became the anthem of that army and of the Revolution. The army's victories, at Valmy in September 1792, saved the Revolution from the invading Prussians and Austrians, and they gave the Revolution its military legend: a nation in arms, defending its own principles.
War radicalized everything. In April 1792, France declared war on Austria, and soon on Prussia. The war went badly at first. Defeat panics, the King's suspected treason, and the invasion of the Tuileries palace in August 1792 pushed the Revolution toward the republic. On 10 August 1792, crowds stormed the Tuileries, the monarchy fell, and the King was imprisoned. In September 1792, the new National Convention proclaimed the republic, and in January 1793 it tried the King for treason and executed him by guillotine. The execution shocked Europe and committed the Revolution to a path from which there was no return.
The republic faced war on every front. Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, and the Dutch republic formed coalitions against France. Inside France, the Vendee in the west rose in a royalist and Catholic revolt that became a brutal civil war. The federalist revolts in Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux challenged the Convention's authority. The Convention answered with the levee en masse, the mass mobilization of the nation, and with the Committee of Public Safety, a small executive body that wielded dictatorial power in the name of the republic. The Revolution was fighting for its life, and it fought with the whole nation mobilized.
The politics of the Convention were a struggle between factions. The Girondins, moderates who favored a federal republic and a slower pace, were purged in June 1793. The Mountain, led by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, took control. The Constitution of 1793, the most democratic the Revolution ever wrote, promised universal male suffrage and social rights, but it was never applied: the Convention suspended it, declaring that the government would be revolutionary until the peace. The Revolution had a democratic constitution it did not dare to use, and a dictatorship it claimed was temporary.
From September 1793 to July 1794, the Revolution entered the Terror. The Revolutionary Tribunal, the Law of Suspects, and the representatives on mission sent to the provinces gave the Committee of Public Safety the machinery of repression. The guillotine, presented as an egalitarian instrument of execution, became the symbol of the Terror. The Queen, Marie Antoinette, was executed in October 1793. The Girondins were executed. Danton, the great voice of the Revolution, was executed in April 1794. The Terror consumed its own leaders as readily as its enemies.
The Terror was not only Paris. In Lyon, the repression was called a massacre. In Nantes, prisoners were drowned in the Loire. In the Vendee, the civil war killed on a scale that historians still debate, with both sides committing atrocities. The Terror was also a policy of the provinces, carried out by representatives on mission who wielded life-and-death power in the name of the republic. The total number of executions by the Revolutionary Tribunal is often given as around seventeen thousand, with many more dying in prison, in civil war, and in summary repression. The numbers are debated. The scale of the violence is not.
The Terror had a logic, and the logic was war. The Committee of Public Safety argued that the republic, surrounded by enemies and betrayed from within, needed terror to survive. The argument was not absurd: the republic did survive, and its armies won. But the Terror also became a machine that fed on itself. Each purge created new suspects. Each victory required new enemies. The system could not stop, because stopping would have meant admitting that the Terror had been a mistake, and the men who ran it had too much blood on their hands to admit that. It ended, as such systems usually end, with the men who ran it turning on each other.
On 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794, the Convention turned on Robespierre. He was arrested, and the next day he was executed without trial. The Terror ended overnight. The Thermidorian Reaction that followed released prisoners, closed the Jacobin club, and restored a more conservative republic. The Constitution of 1795 created the Directory, a five-man executive and a two-house legislature, with a restricted franchise. The Directory stabilized the Revolution's gains, civil equality, religious toleration, and the administrative map of France, but it never solved the political problem: it was too conservative for the radicals and too revolutionary for the royalists, and it governed by coups and purges.
The Directory's army gave the Revolution its last hero. Napoleon Bonaparte, a young Corsican general, won dazzling victories in Italy in 1796 and 1797, and then led the expedition to Egypt in 1798. He returned to a France tired of the Directory's corruption and instability, and on 18 Brumaire, 9 November 1799, his coup ended the Revolution. The Consulate, then the Empire, kept equality before the law, the Civil Code, and the administrative state, while burying liberty. Napoleon called himself the heir of the Revolution, and in a sense he was: he carried its legal and administrative achievements across Europe, by conquest.
Three readings of the Revolution endure. Liberals see the birth of rights and citizenship. Conservatives, from Edmund Burke's Reflections in 1790 onward, see the catastrophe that taught Europe to fear utopia. Marxists see the bourgeois revolution that cleared feudalism for capitalism. All three are true, and none is complete. The Revolution invented modern politics, and it invented the argument about modern politics. Every revolution since has copied it or feared it, and usually both at once.
- 1788: Facing default, Louis XVI summons the Estates-General for the first time since 1614.
- 5 May 1789: The Estates-General opens at Versailles.
- 17 June 1789: The Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly.
- 20 June 1789: The Tennis Court Oath: the deputies swear not to disband until France has a constitution.
- 14 July 1789: Paris storms the Bastille.
- 4 August 1789: The National Assembly abolishes feudal dues in a single night.
- 26 August 1789: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is adopted.
- October 1789: The women of Paris march on Versailles and bring the King to the capital.
- 1790: The Civil Constitution of the Clergy splits the nation.
- June 1791: The King's flight to Varennes is stopped and he is brought back to Paris.
- September 1791: The Constitution of 1791 makes France a constitutional monarchy.
- April 1792: France declares war on Austria.
- 20 September 1792: The French army holds the Prussians at Valmy.
- 22 September 1792: The republic is proclaimed.
- 21 January 1793: Louis XVI is executed.
- September 1793 to July 1794: The Terror, under the Committee of Public Safety.
- 27 July 1794: 9 Thermidor: Robespierre falls and the Terror ends.
- 1795: The Directory takes power under the Constitution of 1795.
- 9 November 1799: 18 Brumaire: Napoleon's coup ends the Revolution.
Louis XVI (1754 to 1793) King of France, decent and indecisive, who summoned the Estates-General and then could not control what he had summoned. Tried for treason and executed in January 1793.
Marie Antoinette (1755 to 1793) Queen of France, Austrian princess, symbol of court extravagance in revolutionary propaganda. Executed in October 1793.
Honore Mirabeau (1749 to 1791) Noble turned revolutionary, the great orator of the early National Assembly, who tried to save a constitutional monarchy and died before the Revolution turned to terror.
Marquis de Lafayette (1757 to 1834) Hero of the American war, commander of the National Guard, who tried to hold the middle ground between court and Revolution and ended by losing both.
Maximilien Robespierre (1758 to 1794) The Incorruptible, leader of the Committee of Public Safety and the voice of the Terror. Overthrown on 9 Thermidor and executed the next day.
Georges Danton (1759 to 1794) The great voice of the Revolution, founder of the Cordeliers, minister of justice, and architect of the revolutionary government, executed by the Committee he had helped create.
Jean-Paul Marat (1743 to 1793) Journalist and physician, the Friend of the People, whose newspaper demanded purges and whose assassination by Charlotte Corday became a revolutionary icon.
Olympe de Gouges (1748 to 1793) Playwright and activist who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791, demanding that the Revolution's universal rights include women. Executed in 1793.
Toussaint Louverture (1743 to 1803) Leader of the Haitian Revolution, who turned the French Revolution's promise of rights into a revolution against slavery in Saint-Domingue, and forced France to confront its own principles.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 to 1821) General and then emperor, who ended the Revolution by coup in 1799, kept its legal and administrative achievements, and carried them across Europe by conquest.
The French Revolution's most durable legacy is the language of rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became the template for human rights charters, from the United Nations' Universal Declaration of 1948 to the constitutions of dozens of states. The ideas that law is the expression of the general will, that citizens are equal before it, and that sovereignty belongs to the nation, are revolutionary ideas that became common sense. The Revolution also invented the political spectrum: left and right, named for where deputies sat in the Assembly, are still the basic coordinates of politics.
The Revolution also left the institutions of modern France: the departments, the centralized administration, the Civil Code, the secular state, and the citizen army. The metric system, the national anthem, and the tricolor all date from the Revolution. The Revolution's wars carried its ideas across Europe, and its armies, for all their conquests, spread the administrative and legal reforms that outlasted Napoleon himself.
The honest balance is this: the Revolution proclaimed universal rights and practiced terror. It abolished feudalism and invented the mass purge. It gave the world the language of liberty and the example of a state that killed its own citizens in liberty's name. Both halves of that sentence are true, and any history of the Revolution that forgets either one is a monument, not a history. Magna Bureau tells the story whole, because the decade that invented modern politics also invented its warning.
- Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, 1989.
- William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2002.
- Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, English edition 1962.
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.
- Albert Soboul, The French Revolution 1787 to 1799, English edition 1975.
- Edmond Burke and Thomas Paine, debates on the Revolution, collected in Rights of Man, 1791.
- Archives Nationales, France, records of the revolutionary assemblies.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on the French Revolution, Robespierre, and Napoleon.
- Musee Carnavalet, Paris, collections on the French Revolution.
- Bibliotheque nationale de France, Gallica, digitized sources on the Revolution.