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The following is an extract from the book A Less Boring History of the World (Random House, UK), reproduced here with the kind permission of the author. Click on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com to learn more. The French Revolution
The Causes of the French Revolution What were the causes of the French Revolution? This is a question that, in a very real sense, was guaranteed to come up on the exam paper, allowing generations of schoolchildren to memorise the answer beforehand. The response they would always give, of course, was the Boston Tea Party. This is because they were sixteen and had other things on their mind*. The actual answer had more to do with bread than tea, in that the French king and his nobles ate it whenever they wanted, while the townsfolk and peasants could only have it on certain occasions, such as when it was needed for throwing at poor people in the stocks. There was also the problem of taxation. Under the current system, clergymen and landowners were exempt from paying tax, for the very good reason that they didn’t want to. The entire tax burden fell on the members of the so-called Third Estate, which covered everyone from wealthy bourgeoisie to impoverished hunchbacked bell-ringers. This was bad enough when times were plentiful, but in the late 1700s rising food prices, coupled with the spiralling costs of Marie Antoinette’s hair, led to growing discontent. To make matters worse, France was broke, and Louis XVI realised that the only way he was going to pay for his wife’s latest visit to the hairdresser was to raise taxes. Unfortunately, nobody in the Third Estate had anything left to be taxed, and so Louis regretfully turned to the nobility. The nobles listened carefully to their king’s proposal to tax them, but argued cogently against it on the grounds that they would rather not. This complex legal position persuaded Louis that he needed help, and so he called together a meeting of the EstatesGeneral. The Estates-General was an obscure body that had last met 175 years ago, and everybody was very excited at the prospect of its comeback, even though they couldn’t *
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quite recall what it was for or who sat on it. The First and Second Estates, representing the clergy and nobility, remembered it as an august body that discussed the most pressing problems of the land and, after careful consideration, voted 2 –1 not to do anything about them. The Third Estate, however, felt that this was not fair, considering that they represented about 99% of the population, and pressed for a system of one-man one-vote. When the king refused to rule on the matter, the Third Estate walked out and held their own assembly at a nearby tennis court. Louis was beside himself with frustration, because the delegates were standing right where he wanted to serve, and he finally had no choice but to accede to their demands. At the same time, however, he was determined not to let the situation get out of hand, and he hatched a secret plot to call the army up from the provinces. Unfortunately, the army’s clandestine march to Paris was given away by the drums they had to bang in order to keep time, and the capital erupted into turmoil. On July 14, angry crowds, spotting the opportunity for a national holiday, stormed the Bastille in search of weapons, and the city fell under the revolutionary command of the war hero General Lafayette. The rest of France now underwent a Great Fear, as everybody suddenly became terrified of everybody else. Townspeople attacked clergy, clergy attacked peasants, peasants attacked nobles, nobles attacked serfs, and serfs - never ones to let an opportunity slip by attacked sheep. The Revolution was on. The Rise of the Guillotine In the midst of this turmoil, the Estates-General, now dominated by the bourgeoisie, began voting on a new constitution for France. On August 27, they produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which declared that all men were equal right up to the moment they were born. A few days later, a plucky Parisian housewife named Olympe proposed a Declaration of the Rights of Women, which the National Assembly debated carefully in a closed session, before laughing so hard they were almost sick. Finally, they produced a constitution, dividing France up into executive, legislative and judicial branches, each carefully designed to cancel out the work of the other two. The powerful Legislative Assembly was composed of wealthy bourgeoisie who became either conservatives, radicals or moderates, depending on which seats were free in the assembly
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hall. The conservatives took the seats on the right and the radicals those on the left, leaving the moderates to hang precariously from the ceiling above. In 1792, they were goaded into temporary unity by an invasion by Austria and Prussia, who had decided they didn’t like the idea of men having rights so close to their borders. In the ensuing panic, Paris fell under the control of a group of radical hippies, who turned it into a Commune. They imprisoned the king and forced the Legislative Assembly to start drawing up a new constitution. The new constitution was based upon the principle of executing anything that strayed too close to the guillotine. They began with the king in 1793, and, after that proved a hit, followed it up with his wife, and then his ministers, his advisers, his courtiers, his dogs, his toys, his oranges, his turnips, anything vaguely circular in fact. Then they got to work on the rest of the population. Egged on by the psychotic Robespierre, the Jacobins spread the word that the Revolution was the cure for all of France’s most serious problems, including garlic breath, which in a sense it was. The Terror did not end until some of Robespierre’s more moderate associates persuaded him to relax his persecution*. This gave the Legislative Assembly time to make several important contributions to European society, such as universal male suffrage, the metric system and the 10-day working week. This immediately provoked war with Great Britain and Spain, who wanted to know what on earth the French were planning to do with Saturday and Sunday. Remarkably, the revolutionary forces won it, spurred on by patriotic fervour and the inability of the invading coalition forces to understand their new metric road signs.
The Rise of Napoleon In 1795, members of the Legislative Assembly decided to write a new constitution, as the old one had accidentally got red wine spilled on it. This time they did away with universal male suffrage, because quite frankly it had been a pain counting all those votes, and restricted the franchise to themselves, a few of their rich mates, and a bloke called Pierre they had met down the pub. They then elected five directors who would take charge of the country. *
By chopping off his head.
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For the next four years, the five directors devoted themselves to the governing of France, sometimes managing to work for stretches of two or even three hours without attempting to murder each other. As the economy collapsed, prices skyrocketed, and corruption reigned, people accused the directors of doing absolutely nothing with the power they had been given. Although this was somewhat unfair, as the five men did occasionally play musical chairs during meetings, the country was soon impoverished, not to mention poor, and it was clear that yet another new constitution was needed. Fortunately, some of the leaders of the Legislative Assembly had a better idea. They had begun to think that a strong, dictatorial leader with a penchant for invading Europe might be the answer to France’s ills. They kept their ear to the ground for a suitable candidate, which was a good job because if they had looked any higher they wouldn’t have seen him. Napoleon Bonaparte had stopped growing at the age of seven, and was about the size of a man’s hand. He had risen quickly through the ranks of the French army through the cunning tactic of being too small for the guillotine, and had reached the rank of general by the age of twenty-six. He was thrust into power in 1799 by a coup d’etat, and for the first and last time in European history, the peace of the continent was about to be threatened by a megalomaniac French dwarf*.
The Napoleonic Era Napoleon quickly showed he was not going to abandon the democratic ideals of the Revolution by holding a plebiscite over the new constitution he proposed: people could either vote ‘yes’ if they wanted Napoleon as a dictator, or ‘no’ if they preferred to be tortured. Winning a respectable 104% of the vote, the new leader used his mandate to negotiate a truce with the other European powers, bringing much-needed peace and stability to the region for a period of almost three whole days. In 1804, however, the young Corsican decided to crown himself emperor of France, which immediately set the other rulers on edge, as France didn’t actually have an empire. War broke out the following year.
*
Not including Nicolas Sarkozy.
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From the outset, the Napoleonic wars followed a predictable pattern: France attacks, continental Europe surrenders, Britain heroically holds out. In 1805, Napoleon crushed Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz, and from thenceforth dominated the continent from Spain to Poland. The same year, however, saw the Battle of Trafalgar, in which Admiral Nelson, directing Britain’s fleet from the top of a huge column in London, foiled Napoleon’s invasion plans by bombarding his ships with pigeon-droppings. Although the commander was killed during the battle, when he tried to sneak in a crafty snog with Hardy, his first lieutenant, Trafalgar ensured Britain’s mastery of the seas. From then on, the two sides were locked into a stalemate, as Britain concentrated all her forces at sea and France kept hers on land, preventing their soldiers from ever meeting, except on occasional trips to the seaside. Napoleon attempted to starve the nation of shopkeepers into submission by organising a blockade, denying British holidaymakers much-needed supplies of cheap cigarettes and beer. But the plucky islanders held on. The situation remained deadlocked until 1812, when Russia got bored and broke the blockade. An irate Napoleon invaded with 600,000 troops, only to find that the sneaky Russians had all left the country some time ago, leaving behind nothing but scorched earth and a few angry peasants. Reaching Moscow, he discovered to his horror that the capital had been burned down as well, giving him no choice but to lead his forces on an organised retreat back to France, whereupon they all slowly froze to death in vast, windswept plains. The Russians then miraculously reappeared, and, following the footprints Napoleon had left in the snow, joined the rest of Europe in pursuing him to Paris. The capital became so full of people there wasn’t even room for its diminutive emperor, and Napoleon was sent off to Elba with a pension and a gold watch. A year later, however, he effected a dramatic escape by concealing himself inside his manservant’s shirt pocket, and made a triumphant return to Paris. He ruled there for a hundred days, until the Duke of Wellington finally booted him out for good at Waterloo. This time he was exiled to the dismal island of St. Helena, where he now lives quietly with his wife and two dogs.
Test Yourself on the Age of Revolution 1. Put the following in order of maximum embarrassment to French people: Waterloo, Agincourt, Trafalgar, the 2010 World Cup. 77
2. ‘Two heads are better than one’ (Voltaire). Discuss with reference to the Reign of Terror.
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