The French Revolution made huge impacts around the world, especially with it being not many years after the American Revolution. Here, Bilal Junejo considers how the long-standing French monarchy was deposed during the 1789 French Revolution.
1777 portrait of King Louis XVI of France.
The revolution which broke out in 1789 was against what the annals of mankind have confirmed to be the surest instigator of all revolutionary sentiment — a decrepit, effete, and increasingly invidious regime. Unlike England’s Glorious Revolution a century earlier, the entire ambition of which had lain in the overthrow of a particular monarch (rather than the monarchy per se), the French Revolution did not commence as a revolt against Louis XVI personally, but against the whole polity over which he presided, and which had been established by his forebear, Louis XIV, in the seventeenth century — the ancien régime, the hallmarks of which included outdated agricultural methods, feudal traditions of land tenure, and uncontrolled inflation. The abolition of the monarchy — which was eventually decreed in September 1792, and confirmed in January 1793 with the execution of Louis XVI — was in no way the inspiration behind the insurrection in 1789, but merely the inevitable outcome of it — much as had been the case in the English Civil War, when the intransigence of Charles I, anticipating that of Louis XVI, had eventuated in the decapitation of that proud but not hypocritical Stuart in 1649. Another similarity was the fact that both of them had married foreign princesses. Charles was the ominously faithful husband of France’s Henrietta Maria, an early Bourbon (as well as a Catholic) whose influence upon him endeared neither of them to a Protestant parliament. The pride of a Stuart, coupled with the advice of a Bourbon, did not make for the alleviation of domestic rancour, and proved not surprisingly to be Charles’s undoing. In a similar fashion, Louis XVI, who had been married to the equally perverse Marie Antoinette of Austria, was also in thrall to the peremptory politics of his unpopular wife. Every monarch is a human being, and all human beings have their faults. It was the fault of both Charles and Louis that they were endowed with absolute authority at what, in retrospect, was a critical time for their respective states, and that they exercised that authority under the not inconsiderable influence of the least desirable of advisors — their foreign spouses, who had by definition almost nothing to lose in the event of an upheaval. Myopic monarchs acting at the behest of individuals with no stake in the fate of the nation cannot but court disaster, and nothing settled Louis’s fate more decisively than his choice to side with the very status quo which was responsible for having created the problems that ushered in the Revolution.
Bankruptcy
In 1789, France was upon the verge of bankruptcy. A century of wars waged without her borders had accumulated vast debts without corresponding victories with which to justify them. The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) had all humbled Bourbon pretensions — and bestowed a raft of burdens upon their treasury into the bargain, in the discharge of which the wealthiest classes of French society, the nobility and the clergy, were not obliged to assist. In return for this magnificent concession, these classes refrained from interfering in the monarch’s policies. France’s frivolous equivalent of the British Parliament, the Estates-General (which had not been summoned by the monarch since 1614), was dominated by these two Estates, to the detriment of the third — the bourgeoisie, which, along with the peasantry, had to fulfil all the fiscal demands of the state. The class which provided the money required for the execution of state policies had no say in the formulation of those policies, and one of the reasons for never summoning the Estates-General was to ensure that so sorry a state of affairs should continue without hindrance. But this was a century of the Enlightenment, some of whose greatest luminaries — Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Montesquieu — were French. Their increasingly popular writings helped to ensure that royal absolutism would no longer be accorded medieval deference. Worse still, French arms had only recently crowned with victory the struggle of George Washington against the perverse autocracy of George III and his ministers; and French soldiers returning across the Atlantic were imbued with the hope of rejuvenating their languishing country after the American fashion. It was not so much that Louis would not compromise with the Third Estate, as that his wife and the other two Estates would not allow him to even think of doing so.
Reforms
But necessity is the mother not only of invention, but also aberration. Ambitious financial reforms devised by the likes of Calonne, Necker and Turgot in 1787 and 1788 were at the court’s disposal. All that remained to be mustered was the courage to execute them, and the first step towards achieving that was the summoning of the Estates-General. This, the King eventually did in May 1789, his decision having been endorsed by the clergy and the nobility, who believed that they would be able to exact budgetary obedience from the commoners; but for the first time, the Third Estate’s opponents received more than they had bargained for. The commoners, elated by the unexpected reappearance of a crucial forum for concerted opposition, refused to grant money over the expenditure of which they would have no control, echoing the Short Parliament’s refusal to accede to Charles’s request for funds in 1629. But Charles, no less than his people, had yet to learn, in the succeeding decade, that kings could no longer govern on their own in an era of diminishing regard for the divine right of kings. Louis, on the other hand, was already aware of that unpalatable truth, at the behest of which he had summoned the Estates-General; and he could only yield when the Third Estate, led by the energetic Abbé Sieyès, declared itself a National Assembly and seceded from the Estates-General. Subsequent events like the fall of the Bastille and the advent of the Great Fear were significant not so much in themselves as in their indication of the King’s inability to prevent them. And when he could not resist even the form of revolution, there was no way in which he could deny the substance thereof. By August, feudalism had been formally abolished, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was promulgated to circumscribe the more self-serving aspects of royal policy. Inflation, however, remained an incubus; and when the persistently rising cost of bread refused to evince any sign of coming down, ensuing demonstrations in Paris culminated in the famous “Bread March of the Women” to Versailles in October to demand — most successfully, it should be noted — the royal family’s return to Paris. The young Assembly followed them soon after, and thenceforth Parisian control of the Revolution was never seriously contested.
The end
The inability of King Louis XVI to stave off the radical and speedy overhaul of the status quo within a matter of months was indicative of the unprecedented extent to which the monarchy, as the direct result of its own insolvency, had been overwhelmed by the people. As the next eighteen months were devoted to long constitutional debates and internal reform (principally through the promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, and the sale of royal and ecclesiastical lands to small shareholders for fiscal purposes), the only brake on the speed of the overhaul was the presence not of the King, but of the moderate constitutionalist, Mirabeau, whose death in April 1791 widened the breach between the Assembly and the court, and precipitated the Flight to Varennes but a few months later. The Flight signaled the King’s acceptance of his inability to reverse the tide, to undo anything that had been accomplished in the last two years. The monarchy had been fatally undermined — or, in other words, completely overwhelmed.
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Bibliography
Kenyon, J. (1994) The Wordsworth Dictionary of British History. Wordsworth Editions Limited.
Oxford Dictionary of Word History (3rd edition, 2015).
Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics (3rd edition, 2009).
Palmer, A. (1964) A Dictionary of Modern History 1789-1945. Penguin Reference Books.
