The French Revolution: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Was the revolution inevitable? And I guess you can kind of broaden that out to what are the chief causes of the French Revolution.’...
‘I would not say that the French Revolution was inevitable, because very few people in France before the Revolution was anticipating that this would happen. In fact, France seemed like a very strong and powerful regime. It was the most powerful regime in Western Europe, it was wealthy, or so it appeared. It had a big army, it was very stable, it seemed, France had had an autocratic monarchy for centuries. Really, no one was anticipating what, what would happen in France, and yet there were underlying problems and these problems brought about the Revolution.
So one of the biggest difficulties was political, that all power was in the hands of, of one man, the king. And when you have power in one person's hands, if there's any problem with that person, then the whole regime is weakened considerably. So that autocratic system in itself was difficult. It was a regime where a certain group of people had a great deal of power. And these were the nobility, who were the, the second estate in France, France is divided up into estates. Nobles, were the wealthiest section of society. They had many privileges, both honorific and financial privileges. nobles didn't pay the principal taxes on the grounds that they were noble and they'd fought for their, their country, they had a great deal of power, and they were very venal. Though, corruption was an institutionalized part of the old regime. So that power blockage was a really difficult one for France.
But France might have continued as an autocratic monarchy for many years to come if it hadn't been for a financial crisis. And it's the financial crisis that really is the thing that brings down the old regime in just a space of a few years. That financial crisis has its origins partly in the endemic system that they have in France, where, as I said, the nobles pay very little in the way of taxes, the clergy, the first estate pay little in the way of taxes. Many of the bourgeoisie pay relatively little in the way of taxes. And it's very hard for the monarchy to raise enough money to continue. Then added to that are the problems of France, helping out the Americans in their war of independence. So large sums were borrowed to finance that war. And then there are the problems of the court and the royal court and excessive expenditure of the court. It just becomes very, very hard for monarchies to manage in the late 18th century. And in 1786, it becomes evident to the King’s Finance Minister Calonne that France, the French state is on the point of a bankruptcy and it's that bankruptcy that brings about the Revolution, it brings about the collapse of the old regime.’...
‘What happened in the French Revolution?’...
‘Short answer to your question what happens in the French Revolution: a lot. A lot happens very quickly. So it's quite hard to keep up because so much changes.
As I said there was bankruptcy, it becomes known that the state is on the verge of bankruptcy from 1786. And attempts are made to ward that off. The King attempts to reform the financial system to make above all, the nobility pay a fair and equitable share of the tax burden to raise money and the nobles, most of the nobles oppose that vehemently, vehemently. They don't trust the king. They don't trust the Kings finance minister Calonne. The King tries to go through a special assembly, he calls the assembly of notables. That's called in 1786. It was the great and the good of the old regime. All higher nobles are part of it. You would think that they would support this financial reform, but of course, they don't know revolution is brewing. They do not support it, they oppose it. They think that the king somehow is, is fooling them. And the crisis isn't as bad as he and Calonne say that it is. That assembly is dismissed, then the king approaches the or has his ministers approach the, the chief law court at the time, that's the Paris parlement and tries to get reform through them. The Parliament, also made up entirely of nobles who bought their posts, also block this attempt to reform and they say that the only body that has the sufficient credit to, to authorize the necessary reform of the tax system is the Estates General. This is a body that has not met since 1614. And the king does not wish to call it because it's, it's like it's summoning something that might have a bit more representation. And that's not how the autocratic monarchy has functioned.
But eventually the king has to give way and the Estates General meet in May 1789. There are many commoner deputies there, the so called third estate deputies. And these men when they meet, they don't just want to vote through reforms. They want to give France a constitution and they want to form themselves into a National Assembly. So a political revolution begins. And the king vacillates and does nothing. So the assembly decrees itself to be a National Assembly, the third estate deputies decree themselves alone to be a National Assembly. Eventually they are joined by members of the lower clergy who support them. And the king gives way, eventually to this and so they constitute themselves into a National Assembly.
But the king starts bringing up troops around Paris and Versailles. And there is a fear that he intends to act to arrest the deputies of the National Assembly and to move against Paris where Parisians have been supporting this new revolution. So what you then have is 14th of July 1789, the storming of the Bastille, where the people of Paris launch themselves onto the stage of history, in defense of the revolution, in defense of the National Assembly, and they overthrow this, this prison in the heart of Paris, the Bastille, and this is seen as the the founding moment of the Revolution. The King again seems to have capitulated, seems to have accepted things.
But then in October of that year, October 1789, hordes of women from Paris who are hungry, who are desperate, who do not trust the king, march on Versailles, where the king is based, it’s about 12 miles outside Paris, they go in this, in the pouring rain and they demand the king, supply them with bread so that people can eat, and return with them to Paris where he can be under the eye of the people. That night, there is an attack on the Palace of Versailles. People from the populace get into the palace, they have, they have quite a go at murdering the Queen but she manages to escape. And the next day the king capitulates, he goes back to Paris, October 1789. It seems that the Revolution is over. A constitutional monarchy is set up. And it seems that France will have something that looks a little bit like the the British system of government across the channel. Things seem to be settled after then.
And for some time, the assembly busies itself with making new laws and setting up this format of the constitutional monarchy, but the king is never really in favor of a constitutional monarchy. It's an anathema to him. He's been brought up to be autocratic, he doesn't accept it. Many nobles, including the king’s own brothers flee France, they become emigre, they become openly opposed to the Revolution, to prepare, even to fight against it. And in June 1791, the king and the queen attempt to flee France in what has become known as the Flight to Varenne. They're intercepted, they're brought back, but this is devastating for the monarchy, people see that the king was not really in support of the Revolution all along. And after that really, support for the monarchy really crumbles. In April 1792, a fateful decision is made for France to go to war with leading powers in Western Europe.
First of all, Austria and Prussia, and against the French emigre there, this is a really crucial moment of war, everything that happens subsequently has to be understood in the context of that war that takes place. The king and the queen have anticipated that that war would go badly for the revolutionaries, and result in a restoration of the old regime, under the aegis of Austrian and Prussian troops. But that does not happen.
And in August of 1792, there's a second revolution. The monarchy is overthrown in a pitched battle in Paris at the Tuileries Palace, the king is imprisoned, a new regime is instated, the National Convention, which is pretty much democratic in principle in the way that it's voted for. So every every man has a right to vote, not women, of course, because this is considered nonsensical. At the time. Lots of people don't vote because they're monarchist, and they don't. They feel alienated by the regime. But in principle, this convention is a very democratic body. And yet, it is immediately faced by the problem of what to do with the king, what to do with the continuing war.
The Convention decides to put the king himself on trial for treason, and he's executed in January 1793. And this is the first time that that new invention, the guillotine is used for a political execution with, with Louis XVI himself. So this, again, is a decisive moment. The execution of the king also brings Britain into the war against France. Spain also has joined the war, the Dutch have also joined the war. So France is confronting all these Western powers reined against it. And it's under that under that duress, that the deputies of the convention decide on a policy of terror, which is again to be a fateful thing.
Now that policy of terror, it's spearheaded by a group called the Jacobins, who are radical deputies. And this is the most radical phase of the revolution and from the autumn of 1792, to the summer of 1794. In the summer of 1794, on the 28th of July of that year, Robespierre, a leading figure with the Jacobins is overthrown and his group with him by other Jacobins, and he is executed. And this leads to really a cutting down on that radical phase of the revolution. After this, the terror also begins to be wound down.
A fateful decision is also made to continue the war. Up until June 1794 that war had been defensive, with foreign troops fighting on French soil, but from the summer of 1794, it becomes an offensive war. And war in itself becomes one of the things in which the revolutionaries are deeply involved. A new regime has set up the Directory, and this, that's in November 1795. And this is more of a compromise regime. They don't want to go back to the frightening democracy and terror of the the Jacobins. But they don't want the royalists to get back in power either. So it's a compromise regime. It's also a corrupt, very financially corrupt regime. And it also increasingly rests on its support from the army.
And it's that which really sets the basis for Napoleon Bonaparte to mount a coup, which he does in November of 1799. So called coup brumaire, where he overthrows the directorial regime and establishes himself as First Consul. Most people would say the French Revolution stops there. Obviously, things still happen, but they're slightly different things...
There's no Karl Marx kind of beavering away, plotting a revolution before the French Revolution breaks out. As I said, they didn't know this would happen. And there's no blueprint for revolution. It happens, it happens first, and then the revolutionaries look for, for what it is that they want to do with this situation that has come to them. So the Enlightenment shapes many assumptions about liberty and equality, but it certainly doesn't cause, cause a revolution. Even Rousseau, who is sometimes credited. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Geneva philosopher, is sometimes credited with inciting the revolution through his ideas. He said, revolution is not worth a single life, he would not have approved it. I mean, he was dead by, then they could not ask his opinion, but I think, I don't think he would have improved, certainly would not have approved of the guillotine…
Could the revolution have been prevented by a stronger King? Very possibly, yes. That brings me back to my first point. Because it's such an autocratic regime, because one man holds power in his hands, if he has a weakness, then this is going to affect everything. Because of the nature of the regime. Louis XVI had inherited a financial and political system that was badly in need of reform. This was not his fault. This was, I mean, partly an invention of his ancestor of Louis XIV. But Louis XIV was a much stronger man. He was also much more ruthless man.
And Louis XVI was not like that. He was temperamentally not inclined to be a good autocratic ruler. He wasn't nearly ruthless enough. He wasn't nearly decisive enough. He became king at the age of 19. He said, God help us, for we reign too young and he was very aware of his own inadequacy. There's, there's an assumption often made about Louis XVI that he was thick, you know, he was sort of just stupid. This is really far from the truth. He was, in his way, he was an intelligent man. He was a hard working man. He tried hard to understand the finances and the way that the old regime worked. We know that from notes and annotations that he wrote on financial documents and things like that. So yeah, he did work hard. He did try and do his duty as he saw it, but he was the kind of man who could not think outside the box. So when the old regime starts to crumble, he has no clue what to do. He really has no clue. He also, he was shy. He vacillated in courtiers to whom he gave favor and patronage and this was not a good situation because he needed strong backup.
An autocrat needs people whom he trusts to be his henchmen, to do what he wants, and Louis, vacillated about that. So he didn't give full support to his finance ministers. He was much too inclined to dismiss them when they proved unpopular. So he was, he was changing his policies, changing his ideas. This is not good for an autocrat. And it looks like from about the time of the failure of the assembly of notables at 1786. It looks as though he had something like a breakdown… He withdrew from a lot of decision making. And this is the king. He took refuge in overeating, he ate massively, he drank a lot. And hunting as well, which was a traditional pastime of kings and sort of, you know, not listening, not listening, that will go away. And this was really, really bad, bad policy on his part. If he'd been more decisive, if he’d arrested the deputies of the Third Estate, when, I mean, it would have been incredibly unpopular. But for people to fight against the King, they would have had to have taken on his army. That's, that's what autocrats stand or fall by in the end, and he was uncertain of using the army. And, yeah, that was, that played very badly against him. He also listened too much to his wife. She didn't give him very good advice.’
‘What impact did his death have on public, public opinion in France, and outside of France?’
‘The death of Louis XVI, it was like a gauntlet that the revolutionaries threw down against the monarchists, against the crowned heads of Europe, it was a supremely important gesture that they made. They could have done other things with him. They weren't going to reinstate him as King because that would have made the whole convention, that would have made them an illegal body. So they were definitely going to find him guilty of treason...
Some revolutionaries say that the decision to execute the king should be put to, like a referendum, a public referendum. But we all know they can backfire. And I think it pretty certain that if they'd asked the wider public, the peasantry of France, what the peasants wanted to be done with the King, they would not have said to kill him. This was quite a strong political position. But within Paris itself, there was huge hostility to the king, huge hostility, so many people quite indifferent to his fate, as one revolutionary said of Louis XVI, you know, we loved him, we trusted him, but he never loved us. He never cared for us. They really felt betrayed after the Flight to Varennes. So Louis helps seal his own fate with that.
But the execution of the king also has huge repercussions outside France, as I said, it brings the British into the war, because they don't like this example of crowned heads being lopped off and it greatly radicalizes the position of opponents of the war. But then the King's own brothers had done, who were emigre by this time, have done nothing to save him. He was really sort of hung out to dry.’...
Louis himself took no mistresses. And you might say, well, what's wrong with that? But a French King was expected to take mistresses. And people found it suspicious that he cleaved only to her, to his wife and they thought he was uxorious. Good word. It means you love your wife too much. Charles the First and Tsar Nicholas were also accused of the same thing. You know, listening too much to a woman… certainly towards the end, the last years, from about 1786 onwards, he listened too much to Marie Antoinette.
And she wasn't the brightest button in the box. She really, really wasn't. She was very politically reactionary in her views. She advocated some very bad political appointments. And she, it was she who planned the Flight to Varennes, with the man she loved first… she was actually sending the Austrians the French battle plans in secret. So in that sense, she was, yes, you could say she was a traitor to France, which is what the French Revolutionaries said. But when she was finally put on trial, she wasn't accused of that. They didn't have the letters, the proof that she was sending the battle plans to the Austrians because they'd gone in secret...
‘The revolution has many legacies, both within France and outside France. It still has a legacy, it still has an important legacy. It changes, it changes history, and historians divide historical periods into the early modern period and the modern period. And the turning point is the French Revolution that, yeah, so it's huge in its impact. Nobody can see politics in the same way again, after the revolution. And one of the things that's most important is the idea of the possibility of a successful revolution. It could happen, this could happen, this could be made to, to work, possibly, if we do it right. If we get it right.
I'd said that there was no blueprint for revolution before the French Revolution. But in the 19th century, there are many blueprints for revolution, not least from Karl Marx, and they, they look at the French Revolution. And they say, but this is how it failed, this is what they did wrong. And this is how we should do things in the future. So it has an amazing impact. If it weren't for the French Revolution, we wouldn't have seen in the same way, the rise of so many things, political concepts that are fundamental. So the rise of liberalism, of socialism, of nationalism, of conservatism, of opposition to revolution, all these come about, in the way that they do as a direct result of the impact of the French Revolution.
Within France itself, there is a division of opinion, the French Revolution divides opinion. And certainly people in France felt very strongly both for and against. So you see a series of revolts in France in the 19th century. So 1830 there's another revolution, this time to overthrow the younger brother of Louis the 16th. That's Charles X. Then, and that results in Louis Phillipe becoming King. Then 1848, another revolution, he is overthrown, a Republic is briefly set up, this is brought to an end by Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the first Napoleon. So a Second Empire and this is brought to an end by the the Franco Prussian war, the French collapse, but also at that point, you have an attempt at a revolution in Paris, the Paris Commune of 1871.
So it's as though the French having done this once, they turn to this idea, some of them, the ones who are the radical ones, and see this as a model to emulate. But also in France and outside France, you have many people who vehemently oppose the revolution, and have done ever since and everything that it stands for. It's been a very divisive legacy, but a very important one.’"
