The French Revolution was a historical process whose echoes have resounded in European and world society for more than two centuries. The impact of the revolution has been so strong that it is considered “the starting point of the contemporary era” (Villares and Bahamonde, 2015: 59). To this day, 230 years later, it continues to throw up numerous debates and interpretations: was it a bourgeois revolution? Was the participation of the French population decisive in consolidating the revolution? Did it have any impact on European society or was it, as some revisionists argue, a simple historical fact that happened without pain or glory? The debates have extended from the first moments of the revolution in 1789 to the present day. Although there is still a current that tries to deny any influence of the revolution in later history, the truth is that, as Hobsbawm (2018: 57) said, “the French revolution dominated the history, language and symbolism of Western politics from its inception to the period after the First World War.
However, the aim here is not to analyze these controversies and historiographical discussions, but rather to show what were the causes that made it possible for the Bastille fortress to be taken in July 1789 —symbol of absolutism—, the National Assembly to be saved and a new period in French history. This article tries to break down the factors and events that conditioned the social and political unrest during the final phase of the reign of Louis XVI. It also analyzes how and why the revolution of 1789 took place. Likewise, this text begins a series of articles on the French revolution, which ends with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte on November 9, 1799 to the imperial throne and the beginning of the I French Empire.
pre-revolutionary france
Until 1789, France was an absolute monarchy, a system of government in which Louis XVI, supported by a small sector of the nobility, governed the destiny of nearly twenty-eight million French people under divine mandate. At that time there was a State, the French, but not the French nation. We will have to wait until 1789 for awareness of belonging to a nation to be generated, at the same pays, French term that indicated a provincial territory and that will become the concept to designate the territory of a nation (country). Until then, France was characterized as a huge administrative conglomerate with multiple regions, each of them having a different tax and different internal customs, which made it difficult to organize and modernize the State.
Nor was there a single language for the entire territory, but numerous minor languages and dialects coexisted. French was used fundamentally in official instances and at a high cultural level, but since it was not in the majority, it complicated interaction between regions —a town could have difficulties communicating with another located a few kilometers away—. Thus, throughout the eighteenth century there was, on the part of the monarchy, an attempt at linguistic unification to facilitate not only trade, but also the administrative organization of the State. Faced with this enormous heterogeneity that characterized pre-revolutionary France, there were only two elements that homogenized the population: religion and the category of subject, since it is estimated that 97% of the population had this condition and practiced Catholicism (McPhee, 2003: 10-13).
As for the socioeconomic system, it was typical of a society of the Old Regime in transition: it combined the weight of feudalism with the timid innovations of industrial capitalism. However, the weight of the countryside was overwhelming and the life of the peasantry, made up of 80% of the population, passed around the parishes, the village community and the manors. These took on special importance because a link was established between lord and servant, where the former had to offer protection to the latter while the peasant had to deliver a series of tributes. In general, the lord had many privileges that provided him with enormous economic gains, as opposed to the life of misery that surrounded the peasant. This will be one of the main causes of his uprising against the privileged in 1789.
French social structure in the 1780s
To understand the revolution of 1789 it is necessary to know the French social pyramid, as it was one of the factors in the crisis of the Old Regime. The great majority of society was made up of the Third Estate, as opposed to a minority —3%— that constituted the first and second order. The first, made up of about 150,000 individuals, was divided into high clergy (10,000) and low clergy (140,000), of which some 80,000 formed the secular clergy and 60,000 the regular clergy. It was not a homogeneous group, as there were enormous differences between the richest and most powerful —such as a bishop or an abbot— compared to those who occupied the lower part of the clergy. These lived almost in misery, often receiving a small part of the parish tithe to survive.
The second order was composed of the nobility. Most of them were not by birth, but by royal ennoblement or by the purchase of high positions (venality of trades), in turn transmitting that social position through inheritance to their descendants. (Castells Olivan, 1997: 28). They owned about 20% of all the land in France and despite what has tended to be believed, it was not a reactionary establishment in itself. There was a great fragmentation within it with notable differences between the high and low nobility, which gave rise to a sector of the nobles more committed to capitalist activities investing in industry and commerce. However, it was usual for the nobility to live on the income and interest that their loans to the monarchy procured, as well as the privileges received.
Secondly, there was the third order—also called the Third Estate—, with a percentage close to 97%. If in the two previous ones a certain fragmentation can be seen, in this one the heterogeneity was much greater: from the great tycoons of industry and commerce that made up the big bourgeoisie to the proletarians, workers, vagabonds and prostitutes who were located in the lowest echelon. bottom of the social pyramid. There was also a struggle to ascend socially, but the reality is that only the richest and most powerful had that possibility. The usual thing was to be born and die in the same order, since the possibilities that a peasant, a manual worker or a wage earner would ascend were practically nonexistent. Social mobility was low. and only the sector of the bourgeoisie was able to experience a greater evolution during the eighteenth century, forming a social group within the Third Estate that gained special relevance in the revolution of 1789.
bourgeoisie or bourgeoisiesbecause contrary to what some Marxist historians claimed it was not a homogeneous group, with a defined class consciousness at the height of 1789. Irene Castells defines them as a social group that did not belong to the first two orders, or to the peasantry or to the small town of the cities. He lived in the cities —although they could have lordships— and his wealth originated from work and not from noble heritage. Their number was close to 8% of the population and “they formed a heterogeneous world stratified according to dignity, prestige and fortune, united instead by their mimicry towards the nobility, by their aspiration to live ‘nobly'” (Castells, 1997 : 33).
As can be seen, the French social structure was complex, and much less can the transformations it underwent during the 1780s be explained through structuralist explanations, which try to show the different social groups as monolithic elements. The numerous changes inside allowed that in 1788, together with a series of factors that will be analyzed below, a process was started that dismantled the structures of the Old Regime and that marked the beginning of a new period in the history of France.
The crisis of the Old Regime
During the 18th century, France experienced unprecedented economic and demographic growth., more markedly in the second half of the century, going from about 21 million to about 28. This demographic growth, although it allowed greater availability of labor to work the fields, was not parallel to an agricultural revolution, so that the productivity grew modestly. This meant that peasant society continued to use a pre-industrial, manual, low-tech and barely productive agriculture that left them in a very delicate position in the face of subsistence crises —lack of basic products such as flour or wheat—. In addition, the peasantry endured great pressure from the nobility, the clergy and the monarchy, which came to snatch around a third or a quarter of their production through taxes, tributes and manors.
To the delicate situation of the inhabitants in the rural world must be added the fragile French economy, whose wealth was linked over the years to large commerce. This meant that a good part of the merchant bourgeoisie and the enterprising nobility abandoned agricultural activities to dedicate themselves to commerce and industry. The countryside, instead of being modernized and updated, continued to be submerged in an uncompetitive and antiquated agriculture. In this way, when there were a series of bad harvests, the scarcity of agricultural products —to which must be added the low productivity of the field and the appropriations of the privileged class— caused exponential rises in prices. In turn, these caused crises not only in rural areas, but also in cities, strongly linked to the countryside.
With this type of crisis the commercial circuits were broken. The transfer of products from the countryside to the city was interrupted, prices increased and the peasantry hid their harvest so that it would not be requisitioned. Secondly, grain merchants speculated to inflate prices and landlords, to avoid losses, increased payments in kind to their subjects. Thus, a profound self-reinforcing crisis was generated that, until 1788, was bearable for the Bourbon monarchy. Subsistence crises and bad harvests were limited to certain areas of the kingdom and almost never at a general level, which allowed the king to maintain order and the situation without too many problems.
Despite the fact that agriculture – the kingdom’s main source of wealth – periodically suffered from problems, the economy continued to grow until the 1780s. This is the time when France’s structural problems begin to surface. In the first place, there was little modernization of the territory due to the fact that the investments of the nobility and the bourgeoisie were directed, above all, to the purchase of trades,…