The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  A procession said to be 60,000 strong accompanied Louis XVI and his queen on their nine-hour journey back to his capital that afternoon. As a gesture of goodwill, they brought wagonloads of flour from the palace stores, and the crowds as they marched sang the praises of ‘the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy’—a reference to the dauphin, who travelled in his parents’ coach. In fact there was little the king could do to remedy a bread shortage caused by natural accidents and administrative upheavals. It was November before cheaper and more regular supplies were available, and market-day riots came to an end. Nevertheless in the history of the Revolution the ‘October Days’ were decisive. Louis XVI never returned to Versailles. Henceforth he and his family would be confined to Paris, as a British observer put it,5 ‘more like prisoners than Princes’. A few days later the National Assembly followed him there, and by November was established in a converted riding-school a stone’s throw from the Tuileries. The central authorities of the regenerate French State were now at the mercy of Paris, and time and time again over the next five years Parisians would intervene in national politics in the role of self-appointed watchdogs of the Revolution.

  Few foresaw the extent of this danger in 1789. It seemed as if the August decrees could not have secured royal assent by any other means. Only some of the monarchiens thought all was already lost—although they included Mounier, who, though president of the National Assembly during the October Days, now slipped away home to Dauphiné to preach the dangers of metropolitan popular despotism. A new wave of emigration among great nobles and army officers certainly followed the October Days; but these were people who had been appalled at the course of the Revolution almost from the start, and took the abandonment of Versailles and the end of royal resistance to the Assembly’s work as a sign that the movement was now irreversible. They were right, too. All open attempts on the king’s part to resist the reform of France now came to an end. Twenty-one months later he too would try to leave. But between October 1789 and that moment the Assembly would have transformed the country out of all recognition.

  The essence of the constitution of 1791, as the work the Constituent Assembly was now embarked on would be called, was to keep the executive weak. Despotism must have no opportunity ever to revive in France. And so the King of the French (a new title, intended to make clear that he did not own the kingdom) was to enjoy hardly any powers not subject to review by the legislature. He could propose no laws, and could only use his suspensive veto to block legislation he did not like for the length of two legislative sittings, a maximum of three years. His income, the civil list, would be determined by legislative vote; and although he alone appointed ministers, they were open to legislative impeachment. Nor was his choice of ministers entirely free: they could not be chosen from, or sit in, the legislature. This was entirely in accord with the separation of powers principle derived from Montesquieu and set out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen as one of the criteria of a true constitution. But it might not have been so firmly embedded in the 1791 constitution without an ill-timed intervention by Mirabeau in one of the earliest debates after the Assembly moved to Paris. On 6 November he moved that the king should choose ministers from the Assembly, on the British model. His earlier support for the monarchiens, however, had rekindled old suspicions, and it was widely rumoured that he was himself hoping to enter the ministry. Nobody believed his protestations to the contrary, and the debate ended with a decision that no deputy might become a minister or join the government until three years after leaving the Assembly.

  Future Legislative Assemblies, as the successors to the Constituent were to be called, were to contain 745 seats and sit for two years. They were to be elected indirectly, and by far from universal suffrage. The deputies certainly did not intend to allow any say in political power under constitutional government to the sort of people who had come to their aid, but whom they had barely been able to control, in July and the first weeks of October. And so by the decree of 29 October 1789 they introduced the famous category of active citizens. Only active citizens might vote, and they were defined as men (almost nobody put the case for women) over 25 paying the equivalent of three days’ unskilled labour in taxes. This gave the vote, it was estimated in 1790, to almost 4.3 million Frenchmen. But all active citizens did in the electoral process was choose one in a hundred of their number as electors, and those eligible for this next level had to be paying taxes to the value of ten days’ labour. The result was an effective electorate of around 45,000, although perhaps half the number of active citizens were fiscally qualified. Electors, in turn, met in departmental assemblies to choose the deputies themselves, who had to be landowners paying at least a ‘silver mark’ in taxes, the equivalent of 54 days’ labour. Between 700,000 and 800,000 active citizens met this requirement; and although under the new system around 60 per cent of men were given some say in political life, the franchise was considerably more restrictive than that for the elections to the Estates-General, and it appeared profoundly at odds with the principles of civil equality proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. From the start it was extremely controversial, the silver-mark provision in particular being denounced by the popular press. ‘There is only one voice in the capital,’ complained Camille Desmoulins in one of the first issues of his Révolutions de France et de Brabant, destined to be one of the most widely read radical papers,6 ‘and soon there will be but one in the provinces against the silver mark. It has turned France into an aristocratic government … But what is this much repeated word active citizen supposed to mean? The active citizens are the ones who took the Bastille.’

  But active citizens had more to do than choose assemblies of electors. Under the new regime all public officials, except ministers of the Crown, were to be elective. That meant local administrators, judges, and magistrates, and even parish priests. Power was to emanate, if not from the bottom, then at least from below, and the only entitlement of eligible citizens to positions of authority would be election by their fellow citizens. All this doomed the old judicial system, already condemned in principle by the abolition of venality and judicial fees. As early as 5 August the suppression of the parlements had been suggested, and on the seventeenth of the same month it became a formal recommendation of the constitutional committee. The political prerogatives of the old sovereign courts violated the principle of the separation of powers, and in any case patriots suspected them of being nests of obstructive aristocrats. In November they were put into perpetual vacation, and ten months later abolished outright. The whole structure of lower courts disappeared with them, to be replaced with a system of local justices of the peace, district civil and departmental criminal courts, and a single court of appeal (tribunal de cassation) to review the conduct, but not the substance, of cases. No administrative authority was vested in the new courts, and although the deputies committed themselves to an eventual total recodification of the civil and criminal law, and as a start introduced trial by jury, they made no provision for any sort of police to enforce it. Public order was the responsibility of local administrative, not judicial, authorities, and the sole instrument of coercion at their disposal was the National Guard.

  Uniformity and decentralization were the keynotes of the administrative organization undertaken by the Constituent Assembly. All the old provinces, generalities, principalities, and municipalities, in all their rich and limitless variety, were swept away. They were replaced by eighty-three departments, roughly equal in size, population, and wealth. These in turn were subdivided into districts and communes, all run by elected councils and officials. Nobody was appointed from the centre: the intendants, those instruments of despotism, were still too fresh in everybody’s memory. Central government under the new system was to be completely dependent on the zeal and energy of thousands of underpaid (and, at the humblest level, unpaid) local officials, of very variable levels of ability, understanding, or indeed political sympathy, for the
implementation throughout France of its entire range of reforms. Most were completely inexperienced. In the earliest elections, it is true, considerable numbers of old regime office-holders and lawyers were returned, but even their experience offered little guidance for the unprecedented duties that revolutionary legislation was to heap upon them. And as time went by they largely disappeared from district and communal office, which became the preserve of merchants, petty tradesmen, and artisans: at this level to be an active citizen was enough. The first local government elections, which took place between May and July 1790, marked, in fact, not only a break with the old order, but in towns at least the end of the interim order that had established itself in the municipal revolutions of July 1789. The latter had produced arrangements almost as diverse as those of the old order itself; but now every commune elected a mayor, a procurator, and a general council. Communes with over 25,000 inhabitants, the great cities in effect, were divided into sections for electoral purposes. Thus Lyons and Marseilles had 32 each, Bordeaux 28, Toulouse 15. Paris had 48, and in thus redividing the capital the deputies congratulated themselves on decimating certain of the 60 electoral districts which had begun to function as centres of popular radicalism. The Cordeliers district, just south of the Pont Neuf, had been among the most prominent, under its ambitious and opportunistic president Georges-Jacques Danton. Desmoulins’s newspaper was published from there, as was its older-established rival, Loustalot’s Révolutions de Paris, and several others. Together they led a vigorous campaign over the spring of 1790 to preserve the Paris districts, but in vain. Yet the legislators underestimated the ingenuity and organization of the political machine Danton had built up. It soon dominated the new section (Théâtre-Français) as it had the old district, and by its activity was to show the other sections the way to continued influence in national as well as purely Parisian affairs.

  The National Assembly was also determined to rationalize the various citizens’ militias established in the course of the municipal revolution, and it finally did so at the time of the first municipal elections. In August 1789 it had brought them all under the umbrella of the National Guard and placed them at the disposal of local authorities, but left their organization to local initiative. Only in Paris, where a professional soldier like Lafayette was in command, and many of the old French Guards had been drafted in at the initial stage, was it well organized and fully armed and uniformed by the end of the summer. Even then its discipline was uncertain, as Lafayette learned on 4 October when his own men forced him to march to Versailles. Yet the Guard were the only armed force patriots felt they could rely on. The army was officered by nobles known for their unquestioning loyalty to the king; and although the discipline of the ranks had begun to crumble and desertions to soar over the summer, with even the dreaded Flanders Regiment joining Lafayette’s force on 4 October, the very idea of calling on the army to maintain public order remained far too dangerous for all but the most conservative of deputies to contemplate. Instead they made their intention to depend on the National Guard crystal clear immediately after the October Days by the passage, on 21 October, of the Martial Law against Tumults. It permitted municipal authorities to proclaim martial law, indicating their decision by deploying red flags. They were then empowered to call out the National Guard and order it to fire on crowds or demonstrators who refused to disperse. Clearly it was essential that this force, at least, should be completely reliable, and over subsequent months uncertain elements were slowly weeded out. A national uniform was introduced, which members had to buy for themselves at a price poorer citizens could not afford. Membership was also confined to active citizens, and repeated oaths of loyalty to the nation, the law, and the constitution were demanded. And although National Guard officers were barred from municipal office, they were positively encouraged to make contact with their counterparts in neighbouring places to develop a common spirit and outlook. Over the spring of 1790 regional rallies of National Guards, or ‘federations’, began to be held. They culminated on 14 July, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, in a gigantic ‘Feast of the Federation’ held in the Champ de Mars on the western outskirts of Paris. Here the National Guards from all over France converged, under the eye of their general and the king himself, to renew their oaths and celebrate a year of achievements. The king led the oath-taking in front of an assembly some estimated at 350,000. It rained, but still proved an occasion of genuine enthusiasm, marking perhaps the high-point of national consensus about what the Revolution had achieved, and was achieving. Those who had built the arena expressed their optimism in a new popular song which was to sweep the country in subsequent months: ‘Ça ira’, things will work out.

  Map 2. The departments of revolutionary France

  And yet by July 1790 there were plenty of signs that things were not always working out. For every patriotic noble like Lafayette, Mirabeau, Duport, the Lameth brothers, or Talleyrand, who as bishop of Autun celebrated mass at the Feast of the Federation, there were many more who deplored the turn of events. More noble deputies followed Mounier’s example of abandoning their seats in the Assembly than did clerical or non-noble ones, and emigration became a steady stream. Not a day passed, noted a soldier stationed in Alsace in May 1790, without the passage of a noble carriage en route for Switzerland. Few nobles stood for office in the new elections, and even fewer were elected. They were simply opting out of the new order. Gratuitous gestures like the abolition of nobility itself, together with all its trappings like titles, orders, ribbons, and coats of arms (19 June 1790), did nothing to reconcile them. Nor did general popular suspicion, epitomized in the second line soon added to ‘Ça ira—‘Let’s hang the aristocrats from the lanterns’. Worst of all in the eyes of many nobles was continuing disorder in the countryside, much of it directed against lords who, as the decree of 11 August explicitly authorized, attempted to continue exercising their rights and collecting their dues until redemption. There were endless intrusions into seigneurial woods and game parks, constant refusals to pay dues, and repeated attacks on remaining symbols of lordly power untouched during July and August. Bonfires of seigneurial pews in churchyards were the fashion that autumn. All over the western Massif Central the next spring peasants planted liberty trees on seigneurial land. They called them Mays, from a much older tradition, festooned them with symbols of seigneurialism, and claimed that if they stood for a year and a day their lord’s rights would be extinguished. For good measure, however, the planting ceremonies often developed into deputations requesting lords to abandon their remaining rights. January 1790 witnessed a new outbreak of château-burning in northern Brittany: twenty-two were destroyed, along with the title-deeds stored in many others. ‘In Auvergne’, wrote a despairing aristocratic lady towards the end of 1789,7 ‘we suffer a thousand horrors at the hand of our peasants. A whole village refuses to pay unless we produce our title-deeds; others wait the event and do not pay. If we do not show them, they will not pay; if we do, they may burn them.’ Further west, in Périgord and Quercy, there were scenes of spectacular violence a few months later when departmental authorities decreed the destruction of newly planted liberty trees. Bands of peasants hundreds strong gathered to protect them, and once assembled sometimes turned to attacking manor houses. Many districts, certainly, escaped such upheavals; but it was the incidents that made news, were reported to the National Assembly, and filled all landlords with dread. And although the National Guard, and occasionally regular troops, were often called out to restore order, they usually arrived too late. Riotous crowds, indeed, often included peasants in National Guard uniform. It was true that, as in July and August, their depredations were seldom indiscriminate; but that did not make them any the less illegal, and the lawyers and men of property in the National Assembly did not distinguish between types of lawlessness. The elaboration over the spring of 1790 of the precise terms for due-redemption only stiffened their determination not to yield to rural direct action. But all too often the authorities on
the spot simply lacked the means, and endemic resistance to lords’ demands, along with persistent attempts to destroy the titles that legitimized them, continued into 1791.

  Map 3. Revolutionary Paris: the sections and main places and streets mentioned in the text

  Source: G. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959).

  Even more alarming for legislators trying to keep the State going while they recast its constitution was that popular resistance was not confined to seigneurial burdens. The first year of the Revolution also witnessed massive tax-evasion. The toll-gates and tax-offices sacked during the disturbances of July and August were not rebuilt, and clerks and collectors were reluctant to brave popular fury by trying to reactivate them, even if their superiors were still there urging them to do so. People simply stopped paying, and once the habit was broken it was hard to restore. Officials who tried to collect taxes were physically threatened or had their homes sacked, especially in small places where everybody knew where they lived. In Picardy, where such activities were responsible for an 80 per cent drop in the yield of indirect taxes, resistance was organized in the spring of 1790 into a self-conscious petitioning movement against indirect taxes in general by a land agent thrown out of work by the abolition of feudalism, François-Noël (soon to call himself Gracchus) Babeuf. He was arrested, not for the first or last time; but the irony was that the deputies now reorganizing France shared his distaste for indirect levies. They knew very well how unanimously the cahiers had condemned them, and they believed, with the Physiocrats, that only direct taxation of land was not economically harmful. And so, in the course of 1790 and 1791, all the aides, traites, octrois, the salt and tobacco monopolies, and countless other local taxes on trade and consumption were abolished, along with the labyrinth of fiscal jurisdictions which supervised them, and the tax-farms through which private businessmen managed them. The old direct taxes—taille, capitation, vingtièmes—disappeared too. In place of the old system the Assembly established three direct taxes: a land tax (contribution foncière), a tax on movables (contribution mobilière), and a commercial profits tax (patente). There were no privileges or special exemptions. Citizens would pay according to their capacities; and since all this was patently in accord with the equitable demands of 1789, it was expected that they would pay more than willingly. Accordingly, no machinery of constraint was established. The deputies failed to foresee what every bureaucrat instinctively knows: that direct taxes would be far harder to recover than indirect ones; especially when taxpaying rhythms had been disrupted by years of resistance and administrative upheaval going back to the refusal of the parlements to register the fiscal reforms of 1787 and 1788.