A Level History J,Sibanda 1

THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION
(1789-1799)

Guillotining of Louis XVI,

1793

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CAUSES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

LONG TERM REASONS

The French Revolution was, like the Russian Revolution of 1917, the result
of a combination of short-term and long–term factors, triggered off by the
momentous events of a single year, in this case 1789.

 The Estates System. France was a rigidly classified society

divided into three estates. These estates had their own rights and
privileges in the case of the first two, and lots of onerous duties and
responsibilities in the case of the Third.

“We were the First Estate. Made up of

around 130 000 members, we were the
cardinals, archbishops, bishops, abbots,
nuns, monks - and humble curates. We paid
no taxes whatsoever, but every few years
would present a monetary ‘gift’ to the King.
We owned about 10% of the land in France
and even had our own courts. Many of us
were fabulously wealthy and powerful and
had served as ministers of the King, like
Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. The wealth
and power of the Church had led to a certain
level of anti-clericalism in France. However,
the majority of us were ordinary village
priests who were loved by our peasant
flocks”.

“We are the Second Estate and

comprised the aristocracy of 400 000
members. We had enormous
privileges and droits (or rights). We
paid a few taxes, but most of the truly
onerous ones, like the taille and the
corvee, we certainly did not. We even
had a term for those who paid the
former. We contemptuously called
them ‘the taillable’ meaning those
who were directly taxed. We were so
snobbish and aloof that we divided
ourselves into three hierarchies: with
the court nobles being the true elite,
then the nobility of the sword and
those of the robe coming last, as
many were government ministers and
civil servants who had only been en-
nobled in the last hundred years or
so”.
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“We were the Third Estate. We made up

the vast majority of France’s 26 million
people. We, however, were not really an
homogeneous group like the others, as we
comprised everyone from doctors and
lawyers and rich merchants to artisans and
peasants. We paid all the taxes and had
onerous duties like paying for the roads and
bridges to be repaired. We had no say in
government, despite the fact that our
members were often the best educated
people in society. We detested the Second
Estate, especially, which was holding us
back and refusing to relinquish any of its
enormous privileges or allow us to enter its
ranks”.

This rigid system meant even the 1st Estate was increasingly the
preserve of the nobility, while just to be an officer in the army
required generations of noble ancestry. The King was advised solely
by the nobility. Opportunities were thus closed to men of education
and talent with no title. It is not a coincidence that, as Christopher
Hibbert has stressed, the main leaders of the Revolution would be
highly educated members of the middle class and in particular
failed writers and lawyers. Danton, one of the leaders of the
Revolution, would say that “the ancien regime drove us [to
revolution] by giving us a good education, without opening any
opportunity for our talents”.

The 2nd Estate was regarded as parasitical, as it enjoyed its many

droits without living up to any of its responsibilities. The economic
problems of the 1770s and 1780s were increasingly passed down to
the peasantry by their noble landlords, who had nothing but
contempt for their tenant farmers. In France, the local squire
certainly did not play cricket on the village green with his tenants -
nor did he pay his way. A bankrupt France was not allowed to tax
the very people who had all the money!

High Ordinary Poor financial Insufficient

Costs of wars Expenditure administration revenue e.g.
e.g. in America e.g. palaces e.g. borrowing = not only lack of
interest to pay taxes, but their
Massive Debts! inefficient
= £££££££££££££ collection

The 2nd and 3rd Estates may have detested each other, but they also
despised the monarchy’s absolutism and so had a common cause.

What is historiography? Is it important? How should we utilise it in

our answers?

 Royal Absolutism. Since the times of the dictatorial and bigoted

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Louis XIV, French kings had been invested with enormous powers
(e.g. the infamous lettres de cachet, censorship, etc.).

Louis XIV had been heavily responsible through his innumerable

wars for the parlous state of the French monarchy’s finances by
1789. A megalomaniac, he had developed the ideas of absolutism
and had strived for hegemony of Europe. His Chief Minister,
Cardinal Mazarin taught him belief in divine kingship, along with a
cynicism and contempt for his fellow Man. He was a spendthrift
womaniser with an insatiable sexual appetite. However, Louis had
also been capable, charming, accomplished and competent. He had
been an ideal king of France.

However, unlike the Sun King, the present monarch, Louis XVI was
not a prepossessing figure. Kind, generous, a loving family man, he
was also indolent, indecisive and vacillating. A pious man with an
enormous appetite, who preferred to hunt rather than attend to the
affairs of state, it did not help that he was short and fat (1.70m and
120kg), and hardly looked very regal. His hobbies were also rather
plebeian (horology, e.g.). His two brothers: the Counts of Provence
and Artois were extreme reactionaries and rarely gave their elder
sibling sensible advice.

His extravagant Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette, hardly helped with

his image. Grant and Temperley have even claimed that she was a
“powerful and dangerous counsellor” to her husband. She had
helped in the dismissal of the progressive finance minister Turgot,
for instance.

The royalist system would be referred to as the ancien regime, so

anachronistic was it. The nobility were becoming increasingly
resentful of royal power and attacks on its institutions, like the
parlements or law courts. They were also disinclined to pay any
new taxes, which the increasingly insolvent monarchy needed to
impose, in order to pay its debts. It was Louis’ willingness to
contemplate an erosion of the 2nd Estates rights that would drive
them into an alliance of convenience with the 3 rd Estate. They
demanded the re-calling of the Estates General, a type of
parliament that had not sat since 1614, hoping to put pressure on
the King. To the 3rd Estate, the Estates General would give them a
chance of representation, at last.

S. J. Lee is very critical of Louis whom he says oversaw the loss of

direction of government policy and refers to his “chaotic economic
and fiscal system” which, for example, saw him sign a free trade
treaty in 1786 with GB, which unleashed the forces of laissez faire
at the exact time when the struggling economy most needed
protection. This made the 3rd Estate even more determined on a
parliamentary monarchy so that its commercial interests could be
represented. The well-meaning, but incompetent and ineffectual
antics of the King’s finance ministers, like Calonne and Necker,
hardly helped matters or endeared the King to the nobility whom
they were threatening to tax. It was this attack on the most
privileged of classes (whose discontent had been apparent as early
as 1787) that ironically spurred the French Revolution into life.

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The 3rd Estate wanted a review of all the inequitable taxes and a
reduction, but not abolition, of the monarchy’s powers. These ideas
were expressed often in the words of liberal and Enlightenment
philosophers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, though Lee
(and Matthews) stresses they were used merely to articulate the
demands of the reformers rather than having drawn up their
policies. In the same way, the American war of Independence
(1775-1781), in which many Frenchmen had fought (and which
more importantly had contributed to France’s insolvency), had an
influence on the thinking behind the demands of the 3 rd Estate (and
even some of the Second).

Louis XVI was not as astute and clever as Louis XIV, who had used the
support of the bourgeoisie to keep the nobility under control and so
relatively docile. Nor was he as ruthless as other French kings like Louis
XI, the infamous ‘Spider King’. Such ‘divide and rule’ principles, as utilised
by Le Soleil Roi, were beyond the later Louis’ limited political
understanding. By calling an Estates General, says Lee, Louis was
acknowledging “the collapse of absolutism and the existence of a political
vacuum at the centre”. Grant and Temperley put it more clearly,
describing how it was “not inflexibility, but weakness of will that was his
bane”. While Matthews comments that: “the king can be said to bear
major responsibility for bringing things to a head in June 1789”.

 Common problems affecting Europe. Lee, like Palmer and

Godechot, has also stresses that France’s revolution was part of a
general wave of unrest in Europe and even North America.
Enormous population growth (from 100 to 200 million people,
between 1700-1800); the severe economic crises of the 1770s and
1780s, and the innate instability of government were not restricted
to France. France, however, experienced the most momentous and
lasting changes because it had the strongest bourgeoisie and
elements of social co-operation, while the peasantry also supported
the Revolution. Consensual factors that were absent in other
countries.

Ultimately, though, the fundamental reasons for the events of 1789

were the result of the above factors; while the short-term, more
direct considerations were of even more paramount concern. Grant
and Temperley are certainly convinced that France was in no danger
of revolution until the late 1780s.

An official and flattering portrait of Louis Seize

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Summaries of the Estates’ Demands

“We wanted…
“We must have…

“Please give us…

SHORT-TERM CAUSES

It is one of the many ironies of the French Revolution that it was not
brought about by un-ending misery, but quite the reverse.

The middle class (bourgeoisie) were prospering throughout most of the

18th century. Famines were actually decreasing and were nothing like
those that had happened in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. With
this prosperity there came increasing aspirations and an expectation of
continued progress. The droughts, famines and increased prices that thus
hit France from 1785 were an even more traumatic shock than they might
otherwise have been. The suddenness of the terrible downturn in
prosperity that came in 1788 and 1789, after the disastrous harvests of
those years, says S. J. Lee, had “a far more dangerous psychological
impact” than normal. The deep resentment and growing bitterness aimed
at the entrenched Second Estate thus had a focus: if we are now suffering
why do they continue to do so well?

Louis, ever the reactionary, tried to halt the meeting of the Estates
General (the first since 1614) who then met instead at an indoor tennis
court. There they signed the famous tennis court oath, vowing not to go
home until they had secured their political and human rights.

The calling of an Estates General had helped to turn a crisis into outright
revolution. Arguments over voting rights led the 3 rd Estate to convene a
National Assembly and a determination by the bourgeoisie to keep the
(political) rights it had won by July 1789.

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However, the Assembly members were not particularly radical. They were
much less interested in social reforms, than in securing their political
rights first and foremost, and it was left to the Parisian poor to really push
the revolution in a more radical, new direction.

The storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789, was a massive symbolic
event, which had also involved great bloodshed. But it was also a reaction
to the King’s attempts to suppress the Revolution. The assistance of the
regular army and French Guards, showed how the revolution was
spreading. The Bastille’s fall helped to radicalise the revolution and gave
it a lasting memorial and day of celebration. To Grant and Temperley it
symbolised the takeover of the Revolution by Paris, which then began to
attract the desperate and unemployed from the provinces. Even the King,
and his family, were forced to live in Paris and abandon their beloved
Versailles, from October, 1789.

The peasants in the countryside though also took matters into their own
hands and the Grand Peur of the late summer (soudure) of 1789 saw them
seize land and destroy the last vestiges of the hated seigneurial droits and
terriers.

Revolution needs all classes’ involvement to succeed and, in France, this

was pretty much the case, with even Louis himself ending up wearing the
new, revolutionary tricolour in the days that followed (the tricolour being a
combination of the red and blue of Paris - and the white of the king).
Grant and Temperley have even claimed Louis wanted revolution to help
sort out the nation’s problems; just not the Revolution he was to get.

The storming of the Bastille- ideal symbol of the revolution

THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF REASONS FOR THE FRENCH

REVOLUTION

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Most
a. The ideas of Enlightenment thinkers Significant
like Montesquieu, Quesnay, Rousseau
& Voltaire pervaded educated society

b. France was an over-populated

nation of 26m, which was c. France’s involvement in the
experiencing a general downturn American War of Independence
in prosperity, like the rest of (1776-1781) had helped bankrupt
Europe the state and added to its fiscal
woes

d. The disastrous
harvests of the late e. Royal absolutism f. Many Frenchmen
1780s led to rising was distrusted by had fought in
bread prices and all three estates, America and came
starvation amongst the especially as back with radical
poor, as well as Louis XVI was an ideas and beliefs,
unemployment ineffectual ruler which the Revolution
would copy

g. France was nearly

bankrupt. The King needed to h. Unlike in the rest of Europe,
raise new taxes and in France there was certain
disastrously considered taxing consensus amongst the
the wealthy 1st and 2nd Estates classes

i. Ambitions of the Third Estate for power and influence,

and an end to seigneurial, feudal droits, along with lower
taxes. They had been doing well, but in the last decades
of the 18th century had seen their progress and
prosperity thwarted by the ancien regime, which had
been unable and unwilling to reform, with Louis not
supporting his ministers Less
Significant

The Three Estates forge a new system

NATURE AND EFFECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

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“It is feared that the Revolution like Saturn will end up devouring its own
children” Citizen Vergniaud (A Moderate, Guillotined during the Terror)

After the first tentative months, the Revolution became genuinely radical.
The Parisian sans-culottes under their acerbic leaders like the journalist
Marat, had a say in government and enormous political clout. The
Legislative Assembly was divided into radical and more moderate factions,
the Montagnards and Feuillants, respectively. Conservatives sat on the
right-hand side, radicals on the left, establishing a convention that exists
to this day. The struggle to take the revolution in different directions
would dominate the years after 1789 with first one faction, and then the
other, triumphing. The Revolution, though, would ultimately end up
fizzling out and, as so often happens in history, events would ironically end
up producing a system that was reminiscent of the ancien regime, which
the Revolution had meant to dismantle. Plus ca change…

The events of the early phases of the Revolution between 1789-92

can be summarised as:

 The destruction of the Bastille prison in July 1789, a hated

symbol of royal power, though also another example of the many
ironies of the Revolution in that it contained only 7 prisoners, none
of whom were even political detainees (4 were forgers, one a
lunatic, one a sex-offender and one a foreigner!) - and that
conditions there were a lot better than in most other (more over-
crowded) French prisons; the actual storming though, unlike that
other great Revolutionary symbolic event, the storming of the
Winter Palace in 1917, was genuinely bloody. Hundreds were killed,
and it ended with the governor of the prison, the Marquis de
Launay, being decapitated by the mob and having his head placed
on a pike; Lee says the events symbolised the bankruptcy of royal
authority; Louis’s further attempts to stem the direction of the
events of 1789 would result in the famous October march on
Versailles (orchestrated by the women of Paris) and his removal to
Paris;
 Events in the countryside especially where, during the Grand Peur,
the peasants had taken matters into their own hands, resulted in a
number of radical changes: feudalism and the tithe were
abolished; Church lands put up for sale and the Declaration of the
Rights of Man drawn up; the aristocratic parlements were
dismantled; de-centralisation, with the establishment of the
departments system, was introduced; the ‘National Assembly’
became the more egalitarian ‘Constituent Assembly’;
 Other more moderating influences though were already
apparent; the franchise was restricted to taxpayers and property
owners, (with a definition of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens) though
this still meant 4.3 million voters; the 1791 Constitution, however,
opened up a Pandora’s Box according to J. Roberts, that could not
be closed;

As so often in revolutions, the initial altruistic aims were hijacked by those

of a more conservative, and even reactionary, frame of mind, and they in
turn were opposed by the fanatics. The King, a very reluctant supporter of
the new constitution of 1791, was determined not to see any further

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erosion of his powers which now saw him termed not ‘King of France’, but
‘King of the French’. The Left agitated in response for a republic, and
radicals, like the incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre, denigrated a
system that had not introduced universal male suffrage. The radicals even
started in-fighting amongst themselves with the Montagnards, triumphing
over the slightly more moderate Girondins.

During 1792-94, the Revolution entered its most radical stage; the
catalyst for this being war with Revolutionary France’s many foreign
enemies and counter-revolution in the Vendee. The search for internal
enemies after attacks by the Prussians resulted in the truly barbaric
massacres of September 1792, in which the prisons were emptied of
‘traitors’. Louis’ fate was sealed after his attempt to escape France and re-
capture at Varennes (along with the activities of his aristocratic supporters
in exile abroad). With the declaration of a republic in September 1792, he
was executed in January 1793, the blade of the guillotine finding it difficult
to slice through his fat neck. The Montagnards then turned on the
Girondins who were also executed.

The introduction of the Terror in 1793, which lasted to 1794, saw the
radicals, led by the priggish Robespierre, decimate both their political and
class enemies, and anyone presumed to be a threat to the new republic.
Traditionally seen as an attack on the privileged, in reality, as Hibbert
points out, only 9% of its victims were nobles, 6% members of the former
1st Estate, and the remaining 85%, members of the class the Revolution
was meant to benefit! In all, 16 -18 000 people were executed. Most were
ordinary people.

The Committees of Public Safety and General Security, which now ran the
country, paradoxically extended the franchise, but at the same time
tended to concentrate power in their own hands. Equally contradictory,
was the emphasis on liberty at the expense of individual freedom, which
Marat and Robespierre symbolised. The latter persecuted atheists, while
introducing an absurd new religion: the Cult of the Supreme Being, and a
new calendar, and felt compelled to make men free, even if this meant the
use of terror. The Jacobins also used the Terror to eliminate their political
rivals both those they found too moderate (Dantonists) and those too
radical (Hebertists). In many ways, it was the kind of bloody purge of
political enemies that the 20th century dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler
would also resort to.

Robespierre has been seen favourably by French historians like Mathiez,

and Lefebvre, and even US historians like Jordan, as the most sincere and
dedicated of revolutionaries. When Lenin came to power he erected a
statue outside the Kremlin walls to a man he much admired. I prefer to
see him as a cold, deluded fanatic completely out of touch with reality and
having lost sight of the practical purposes of revolution. We should avoid
caricaturing him, as did a variety of nineteenth century writers from de
Stael and Carlyle to Dickens, but even so there seems little in him to find
truly attractive.

A detached, vain, ambitious, provincial lawyer who probably died a virgin,

he had few pleasures other than clothes and a fastidious hair-style. He
was also fond of oranges, loved by his sister Charlotte and kind to animals.
He had been deserted by his dissolute lawyer father at six, by which time

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his mother had also died. He was brought up by two aunts. Educated at
the best school in France, Louis Le Grand, where he had been an
outstanding scholar and the protégé of the Bishop of Arras, he had
become a judge at a young age. In 1788-89, he had defended an innocent
soldier called Louis-Marie Hyacinthe Dupond who had spent 14 years in
prison because of a royal lettre de cachet. According to Jordan, this case
made him the radical he was to become.

His later promotion of the Cult of The Supreme Being, as an alternative to

Christianity was not only absurd and unpopular, but alarmed many
atheists, as well as Catholics. According to Jordan, Robespierre the man,
and Robespierre the revolutionary, were inseparable. He lacked Danton’s
warmth and rough bonhomie, and Marat’s approachability. He would
readily give interviews, but only on receipt of formal, written notice - in
advance.

He grew to be so hated that when he was at last overthrown, someone

shot him in the face the night before his execution. He went to the
guillotine with his jaw hanging off, covered in blood and jeered by the very
masses he proclaimed to be saving. It is hard to feel much sympathy for
him nor for the equally repulsive Marat who was assassinated in his
palliative bath by the far more attractive Charlotte Corday; an event
immortalised, in the painter, Jean-Jacques David’s, masterpiece.

Lee gives Robespierre and the Committees some credit for saving France
from its external enemies, but says overall he and the government of this
period were largely a failure. One of their very few surviving reforms other
than the military system of conscription (the highly effective levee en
masse), was the decimal system, which would be revived by Napoleon.

On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI of France went to the scaffold after his
conviction for treason and the proclamation of France’s First Republic. He
had been unable to stop or adapt to the early events of the French
Revolution, and his clumsy attempts to regain control with the help of
Austria and other foreign monarchies had set him on a collision course
with the radical Montagnard deputies in the National Convention. He was
executed because he was the king and all that he symbolised, not because
he was the nonentity, Louis Bourbon.

In October, the 37 year old Marie-Antoinette was also decapitated.

‘Madame Deficit’ had not only lost a lot of money, now she had also lost
her head. During her trial, absurd accusations had been made against
her, and most cruelly, even her young son (Louis XVII) had been forced to
invent lurid tales about his mother’s sexual activities. Since the diamond
necklace affair of 1786, when she was meant to have contracted syphilis
from the Cardinal de Rohan and had affairs with men like the Swedish
Count Fersen, Marie-Antoinette had been the victim not so much of radical
gossip, as small-minded, French xenophobia.

It was a Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a deputy since 1789, who had

introduced a law requiring that all public executions be performed by a
decapitating machine, which was felt to be more egalitarian and humane
than traditional methods. Ironically, the guillotine was to become the most
lasting image of the inhumane tyranny of the Reign of Terror – and of

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French culture. (Murder in France was still punishable by the guillotine
when I was a boy, until 1981!).

The Terror, however, did not solely utilise the guillotine. In 1793, in
Nantes, mass executions took place by drowning; in Lyons, victims were
lined up in front of cannons and peppered with grapeshot. The anti-
Revolutionary reaction in the Vendee region saw 200 000 perish, while the
earlier (September,1792) massacres in Paris had been conducted with
cudgels and butchers’ cleavers.

The third phase of the Revolution (1794-1799) saw a swing to the

right, as the middle classes, for and by whom the Revolution was arguably
orchestrated, began to assert their control.

The coup that overthrew Robespierre, however, known as Thermidor, was

the result of both those who saw Robespierre as too moderate and those
who found him too radical. In many ways the Thermidorians were a
disparate bunch whose only common feature was a fear for their lives and
a desire to reverse the more radical aspects of the revolution.

The risings by the sans-culottes of Germinal and Prairial, 1795, were

brutally crushed by the government and its loyal troops (including a young
artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte).

The new regime saw reforms, including the creation of oligarchic

institutions like the Council of 500 and the Council of the Elders (men 40
plus), as a well as a five-man Directory, to run the country. Lee calls the
reforms of the new government “not unimpressive”, including: reform of
the paper currency, a return to a metallic coinage, improved
communications and poor relief being reorganised. Fashionable people
(Les Incroyables) were even free to tastelessly mock the guillotine by
wearing red ribbons around their throats, and affect English mannerisms.

The new system’s opposition to party-politics, however, allowed the

accession to power of a dictator, one Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1799. He
was helped by his brother Lucien, the real hero of the Brumaire Coup who
had fortified his quavering, older brother’s resolve.

Bonaparte would go far to overturning much of the achievements of the

Revolutionary period and betray the very revolution that had made him.

Un sans culottes

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The Wider Impact of the French Revolution

“Human blood has a terrible power against those who have spilt it…The
Terrorists have done us immense and lasting harm. Were you to go into
the last cottage in the farthest country of Europe, you would meet that
memory and that curse” (Michelet)

The French Revolution has been, generally, seen as one of the most
momentous events in world history. In 19th century France, it created an
idea of the state as a permanently revolutionary nation. France
experienced numerous revolutions in the 19th century: the overthrow of the
Bourbons in 1830; the revolutionary activities of 1848-51, as well as 1870-
71. A parliamentary enquiry in 1871 even commented that: “Other
peoples have had revolutions more or less frequently; but we have
revolution permanently”!

Even in the 20th century, ever turbulent France was in danger of various
possible revolutions and coups, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s.

Myths grew up about the 1789 Revolution, which persist to the present
day. In reality, there were no barricades, no tricoteuses (inventions of
Dickens) on the scaffolds, no liberation of political prisoners from the
Bastille. However, this in no way denigrates the impact of the Revolution
nor its radicalism, as myths can be more effective than the truth in
promoting the desired image.

France’s initial revolution’s impact then and now was, and is, wide-ranging.

Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out how: “France provided the vocabulary and
the issues of liberal and radical-democratic politics for most of the world”.
The tricolour of some kind dominates many countries emblems.
Revolutionary France would provide universal codes of law, measurement
and ideology. Given one in five Europeans were French, it is not surprising
the ideas of France came to dominate the continent. Hobsbawm believes
the French Revolution, unlike any other 18th century one, was ecumenical –
it was designed to be spread. It had influence in Latin America, even
India, to radical nationalists like Simon Bolivar and Ram Mohan Roy
respectively. Hobsbawm terms it simply: “the revolution of its time”.

Contemporaries either took hope from it (such as the English radical, Tom
Paine) or denounced it as an evil aberration (the Irishman, Edmund Burke).

Most of Europe’s rulers viewed it with a mix of alarm and disgust. The
autocratic emperors of Austria (Joseph II and Leopold) and Russia (from
Catherine the Great to Tsars Paul and Alexander I) were understandably
antagonistic to a system that proclaimed ‘Equality, Fraternity and Liberty’
for all. However, even relatively liberal states like GB, with its
constitutional, parliamentary democracy, were quickly alienated by the
goings on in France after 1789, especially given the universal promises of
its ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’.

The reactionary states of Austria and Prussia formed the first anti-French
coalition in 1792. The French then fought the British and the Dutch in

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1793. Austria was consistently anti-French, also joining the later coalition
of GB, Russia and the Kingdom of Naples.

Russia was a little more ambivalent, at least initially, in its response.

Catherine the Great (who died in 1796) was always more concerned about
the Jacobin influences on her near neighbour Poland, than with France
directly. However, even she eventually supplied ships to help the British
Royal Navy in its activities in the North Sea against France. Her son, Tsar
Paul (murdered in 1801) was more overtly anti-Revolutionary, especially
after France had invaded Malta (1798), an island he had a romantic
obsession with. Russia had even allied with its traditional arch-enemy,
Turkey, in 1798, alarmed at French encroachments into the eastern
Mediterranean, which threatened Russia’s Black Sea ports.

GB, though, would be the staunchest enemy of Revolutionary France.

Historically, both countries had always been at loggerheads and the
execution of Louis had been especially disturbing to an essentially
conservative nation like GB. The Revolution paradoxically, though,
brought Britons of all classes closer together. Portrayed as an anarchic
menace dripping with blood, most British people continued to regard
France as its prominent national enemy, and this over-riding nationalism
helped to consolidate the British state.

The Republican USA and France, however, maintained relatively cordial

relations, though perhaps more because their mutual interests rarely
clashed, than out of purely ideological compatibility.

The Revolutionary armies had initially fought defensive campaigns against

those, like the Austrians, determined to crush it. However, like the Terror,
these high ideals quickly gave way to selfish and atavistic interests. What
had initially been defensive actions, soon became wars designed to spread
the Revolution, provide friendly or at least amenable neighbours, and
eventually gain a Republican empire in vulnerable areas, like the Holy
Roman Empire and Italy. Such expansionist policies were to be further
developed by Napoleon I.

Re-Cap Acrostic

NOUN VERB ADJECTIVE

R
E
V
O
L
U
T
I
O
N

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A Level History J,Sibanda 15
HOW DID THE TERROR AFFECT PEOPLE?

Maximillien Robespierre Louis XVI An aristocrat

Edmund Burke Marie-Antoinette An abbot

A workman is brought before the Committee for Public Safety

b. “They said all

a. “They said I was an c. “I was an
aristocrats were
‘Austrian ****’ and Irishman who
enemies of the
plotted against France, criticised and
Revolution and they
and so executed me a wrote against the
killed thousands of
few months after my Revolution and
us!”
husband” encouraged
British opposition
to it”

e. “I was responsible
d. “We were sentenced
for the guillotining of
to death, and after we
thousands, before I
were guillotined in
myself was
January, 1793, a
guillotined”
republic was declared”
f. “Even though I was
an ordinary citizen, I
was brought before the
Committee and
sentenced to death like
g “The First Estate suffered enormously, thousands of other
especially from the atheists on the innocent people”
committees and many of us died”

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A Level History J,Sibanda 16

WHAT WAS THE IMPACT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION?

Positive Reforms

The French Revolution resulted in a number of improvements to peoples’

lives.

Ordinary people now had some __________ power. They had more of a say
in running the country than they had ever had before. The estates system
was ________. Titles were __________ and Church lands were __________.
Some even found their way to the ________. Priests now had to answer to
the _________ for what they did.

The legal system was also improved. ____________ was abolished. Judges
now had to be _________ and so were less likely to be ___________.

Certain freedoms were introduced so newspapers were no longer

__________. Couples could now __________ whom they pleased, without
seeking permission.

There were more _________ opportunities and people could

_________whatever god they wanted to. There were also laws to combat
__________ discrimination, reflecting the universal aspects of the
‘Declaration of the ________ of Man’.

Negative Changes

The Committee for _______ __________ ended up bringing about a reign of

cruelty known as the __________. The ___________that succeeded in ____
ended up using the _______to crush any opposition. France was going
backwards!

A new paper currency called the ______________ was introduced, but quickly
lost its value.

Revolutionary France also became a much more aggressive nation

determined to export its ideas abroad and this brought France into conflict
with countries like__________ and ____________, whose emperor was furious
at the execution of his sister.

No Change

Ordinary people rarely got a chance to buy __________ lands, which were
instead bought up by people who were _________even before the
Revolution. They could also still not __________ despite the fact they
paid___________.

In the end, France even stopped being a republic and went back to being a
_________ when in _________ a Corsican tyrant called ____________ crowned
himself the new ________________!

After his final defeat in 1815, even the _______________ monarchy returned.

Things, as they often do in history, had come full circle.

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 A Level History J,Sibanda 17

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE-TERROR-TAXES-CHURCH-EMPEROR-ELECTED-WORK-GOVERNMENT-CENSORED-
CORRUPT-RACIAL-MONARCHY-WORSHIP-ASSIGNATS-DIRECTORY-MARRY-POLITICAL-ABOLISHED-ARMY-
1795-DISMANTLED-WEALTHY-VOTE-1804-BRITAIN-CONFISCATED-PEASANTRY-
BOURBON-PUBLIC SAFETY-TORTURE-RIGHTS-AUSTRIA

Revision Timeline of the French Revolution

Date Events
1786

1787

1788

June 1789

July 1789

July/August
1789
October 1789

1790

1791

1792

September
1792

January 1793

1793

1794

1795

1796

1797

1798

1799

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A Level History J,Sibanda 18

POLITICAL

RELIGIOUS SOCIAL
SUMMARY OF EFFECTS OF THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION
An Incroyable

MILITARY ECONOMIC

PAST QUESTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

& NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
(FROM PAPER 1)

1. How far was Louis XVI personally responsible for the problems which
faced the ancient regime in France in 1789? [M. 2001]

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A Level History J,Sibanda 19
2. Why did Louis fail to satisfy the demands of the revolutionaries in
France during the period 1789-1793? [N. 2001]

3. From 1789 to 1799 who posed the more dangerous threats to the
French Revolution: its internal or its external enemies? [M. 2006]

4. How far did Napoleon Bonaparte maintain the ideals of the French
Revolution during the period 1799-1815? [M. 2003]

5. Explain why Napoleon Bonaparte was able to establish a strong

autocratic government in France [M. 2002]

6. From 1799 to 1815, how far did Napoleon maintain the aims of the
French Revolution? [N. 2006]

Planning:

Sibanda Notes Page 19