From Absolute Monarchy to Democratic Absolutism: The French Revolution

The “Germanization” of the medieval Christian Empire led to the breaking off of the Frankish kingdom under Hugh Capet (987–996), the first king who managed to bestow his throne upon his descendants via inheritance in what was an essential step in the institutional consolidation of the monarchy.⁹

Hugh Capet’s descendants, however, saw their power undercut by the profound “feudalization” of Frankish society, at least until Abbot Suger (1080–1151), championed the idea that the king occupied the apex of the feudal pyramid.¹⁰ The next step would be taken by the jurists of France’s Louis IX in the thirteenth century, when they developed the concept of royal “sovereignty”, which posited that the king stood above and beyond any vassal ties.

Hugh Capet and his descendants bore the title “King of the Franks” until Philip II Augustus (1179–1223), the seventh king of the Capet Dynasty, replaced this title with that of “King of France”. No longer was the king to rule over a specific people, but rather a territory and all its inhabitants, a crucial initial step in the development of the identification between monarch and kingdom.

The kings of France, however, would still need to gain their independence from the papacy, a feat achieved by Philip IV the Fair (1285–1314), who successfully secured a series of powers in his confrontation with Pope Boniface VIII. To achieve this, the king had to summon representatives of his kingdom, convoking the first assembly of the estates in French history: the Estates General of 1302. With the political support of the three estates (nobility, clergy and the third state, the citizens) and the technical-legal counsel of the jurists, the king of France became an emperor in his kingdom. By basing his authority upon the ceremony of “anointment” he, at the same time, reaffirmed before the Pope the principle of his divine right and the implication that his legitimacy proceeded directly from God and did not require papal intervention.

Louis XV was the Sun King’s great-grandson, taking the throne at the age of five, and remaining on it for a reign spanning 59 years (1715–1774). Unlike his great-grandfather, however, the new king took no interested in affairs of state. When reading accounts of his time on the throne one has the impression that France was adrift, as the quality of its government depended entirely upon the minister to whom the reins of power had been entrusted. France’s policies were erratic, causing Europe’s most powerful kingdom to falter and enter into a spiral of rapid decay.¹³ Among other setbacks, the French monarchy lost virtually all of its colonial possessions in North America (Canada) and India to England, while Louis XV also failed to score any significant victories in the endless wars France was waging against England, Prussia and the Austrian Empire. The nation which capitalized most upon French decline was England, which over the course of the eighteenth century rose to supersede France as Europe’s primary power. Worst of all for France was that at the end of Louis XV’s reign, its political decline triggered a serious economic crisis which decimated the king’s prestige in the eyes of his people. So ultimately maligned was the monarch that when he died had to be buried at night in a clandestine ceremony.

When Louis XVI’s reign began, France was suffering a serious economic crisis and the state was still bogged down by the sluggishness characterizing the Ancien Regime. Consequently, it was incapable of confronting the changes and transformations spawned by new economic realities and the ideas and trends ushered in by the Enlightenment.¹⁴

Louis XVI (May 10, 1774–October 10, 1789) was intelligent, cultured and a man of goodwill who earnestly endeavored to govern to promote his subjects’ best interests. He was, however, a terrible politician. He was weak of will and utterly lacked experience, which was no fault of his own, for he simply had not been educated to reign, since he initially was not the crown prince, having been preceded in the line of succession by his father Louis of France (1729–1765), and his older brother Louis Joseph Xavier de Bourbon (1751–1761). Defying all expectations, their premature deaths placed him upon the throne in spite of himself. There is an anecdote that when he was told that his grandfather had died and he had become the new king of France (“The king is dead! Long live the king!”) he replied, desperate: “It seems that the whole universe is going to fall upon me! My God! What a burden has beset me, at my age (he was 20) I have not been taught anything!”¹⁵

Louis XVI was fully conscious of the fact that it was necessary to undertake major reform measures, and actually made efforts to address the situation. During the first years of his reign, he strove to rouse France from its lethargy. The new king, with the best of intentions, successively placed the government in the hands of reformist ministers such as Turgot, Necker, Calonne and Loménie de Brienne (Vardi 2012, 241–242). In fact, the monarch was able to introduce some reform by abolishing in 1781 and 1788 torture in criminal procedure (Johnson 2013, 20), suppressing feudal servitude on royal lands in 1779 (Kropotkin 2009, 20), and eliminating the personal tax levied on the Jews of Alsace in 1784 (Johnson 1998, 306). In 1787 he also promulgated an edict of tolerance to protect Protestants and those who did not profess the Catholic religion (Zagorin 2003, 299), although his most important reform effort was his attempt to introduce an egalitarian direct tax.¹⁶

All of this impetus for innovation, however, would be met by opposition amongst the privileged classes who, clinging to the estate-based structure inherited from the Middle Ages, did all they could to foil the king’s policies.¹⁷

As we already know, in France the Estates-General had never been well established as an estate-based assembly because it did not meet regularly. The kings of France only resorted to convoking the Estates during periods of crisis (a confrontation with the pope, the Hundred Years War, Wars of Religion), giving the body an ad hoc character. Moreover, we already saw in Chap. 8 how the Estates General were rendered dormant by Richelieu (1630–1642), as he was of the opinion that they were not compatible with royal sovereignty, which spurred him to begin abolishing the Provincial States as well. One fact suffices to indicate the situation in this regard: when Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General to Versailles in May of 1789, it had not met since 1614. The kings, then, had governed France without consulting the kingdom’s representatives for over 165 years.

This situation had been possible, to a great extent, because the kings did not require the Estates-General’s financial support. As of the mid fifteenth century they had been levying permanent taxes assuring them regular revenues.¹⁹ The result was that the Estates-General did not play in France a role moderating royal authority by any means, as occurred with the Parliament in England, or the cortes of the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon in Spain. In fact, they never managed to check or control the king.

The function of curtailing royal authority which might have lay with the Estates General in the France of the Ancien Regime fell upon another institution: the “parlements”, which were not estate-based assemblies, but rather high courts of Justice. The most important of them was the Parlement of Paris, but there were regional parlements as well. These bodies were very important because at the close of the eighteenth century the French king, institutionally, continued to be more of a supreme judge than a reformer.

The clout of the parlements essentially stemmed from the fact that they were the guarantors of the application of the old local customs, which in France still constituted, even in the last third of the eighteenth century, the essential nucleus of private law. Thus to legislate in this area, they had to have the approval of a set of parlements which had the right “to register” (formally record) royal laws, a step without which they could not be applied. The members of the parlements developed the practice (Daubresse 2005, 28) of taking advantage of this privilege to present “complaints” (droit of rémontrance) to the king, whenever the monarch requested the registration of a law, making its registration (and enactment) contingent upon the satisfaction of their pleas. This right turned the parlements into the only bodies capable of institutional opposition to the monarchy in France under the Ancien Regime.

The parlements eventually became renegade institutions, backing a military revolt against the king in the War of the Fronde (1648–1653), during the regency of Louis XIV. The ensuing chaos led the king to resolve to rule in an authoritarian manner once he was old enough to assume the throne. ²⁰

The problem was that the parlements did not use their power to promote the general welfare, but rather to defend the established order and protect their own privileges. They did not function, by any means, as an institutional channel transmitting the people’s concerns to the king. The members of the parlements were jurists (Fitzsimmons 1987, 1–32). Educated at schools of law, they purchased their posts as judges, prosecutors, barristers, solicitors and notaries, charges which they passed down to their sons, paying the crown the corresponding tax. This system turned the legal class from which they proceeded into a closed social group, a kind of caste (“Nobles of the Robe”), predominantly concerned with defending their privileged positions (Stone 1986, 75–124).

Louis XV, weary of the parlements’ constant hindrances and hampering, chose to subjugate them by means of force through the reform measures advanced by his Chancellor, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, in 1771. In response to the systematic resistance which the Parlement of Paris put up the chancellor dismissed the defiant body and prohibited judicial offices from being purchased or inherited (Baker 1992, 1–16). With one stroke of the legislative pen, the judges lost their traditional prerogatives and were reduced to simple civil servants. In this way, the monarchy took a major step towards the forging of a new France in which the privileged classes were to be required to serve the general interest (Echeverria 1985).

Louis XVI, undeniably with the best of intentions, though in an utterly imprudent step, abolished Maupeou’s reforms, which had made it possible to control the institution that had most effectively stymied royal authority in France.²¹ This had serious consequences, as it was the members of the Parlement of Paris, those who most staunchly opposed the reform efforts which the king endorsed, and who led the ideological debate (Baker 1978, 279–303), who initiated the first act of the French Revolution in what came to be called, significantly, the Revolt of the Nobles.²²

Louis XVI’s successive ministers were aware that to resolve the economic crisis, it was essential that they thoroughly reform the French tax system, which had been passed down intact since the fifteenth century. The old nobility, however, the clergy, and the members of the parlements (Nobles of the Robe) insisted that the status quo tax code (which granted them major advantages) could not be modified without convoking the Estates General (Goldstone 2011, 67).

Technically, the privileged classes were right. However, given the desperate plight faced by most of the French during the last third of the eighteenth century, they were playing with fire—especially considering the dangerous precedent set by the American Revolution (which, paradoxically, had been made possible to a great extent by the support France’s Louis XVI had lent the rebels). The oligarchy recklessly and stubbornly opposed the fiscal reform proposed by the king (Sonenscher 1997, 64–103) in a movement which historians have called the “Revolt of the Privileged”.

Resurrecting a mechanism as complex as the Estates General after 165 years of inactivity, was an undertaking fraught with risks. Thus, Louis XVI, who was much more conscious of the situation than the members of the parlements, fiercely opposed what they requested. An acrimonious and fruitless exchange thus began during which the tone of the parlements’ protests became increasingly insolent. Unfortunately for the king, the parlements’ attitude began to win over public opinion (Lucas 2006, 33–50), and the people began to organize protests against the monarchy. There came a point at which even the army expressed its willingness to collaborate with the Nobles of the Robe to stem the increasing anarchy, worsened by the general malaise born of the economic crisis.

As we already know, the Provincial States had almost disappeared by 1700, because Richelieu and Louis XIV tried to abolish them all. Thus, most provinces had forfeited all right to administrative independence by the eighteenth century, with the exception of four regions: Languedoc, Brittany, Burgundy and Provence. When Louis XVI took the throne, one of his reforming minister’s priorities was to establish an institutional way by which the country could share power with the king (Jones 1995, 139). Calonne (1783–1786), in an attempt to reinstate the nobility’s political power, summoned an Assembly of Notables to approve some reform measures, including a universal land tax, and in 1787, Loménie de Brienne had the idea of revitalizing these Provincial States to provide the stimulus that would lead to repairing the worn-out fabric of absolute monarchy (Jones 1995, 139). ²³

The political crisis came to a head when Louis XVI, poorly advised by his Justice Minister, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, decided to abolish the parlements’ right to enact royal legislation. The announcement was ill timed and only ended up fueling the conflict and tensions, exacerbating the rebellion of an entire region, Dauphiné (Dauphiny) where the people, rallied by the Parlement of Grenoble, decided in June of 1788, to unilaterally organize (without the governor’s convocation on behalf of the king, as was the legal practice) a meeting of the three estates in the Palace of Vizille. This constituted a clear challenge to the king’s authority, as Dauphiné’s old provincial estates had been eliminated in the first half of the seventeenth century by Richelieu. ²⁴

In addition, the meeting in Vizille ended up taking on a revolutionary tone, as the voting was not conducted in accord with tradition, with each estate meeting separately and voting in blocks, with internal, majority polling determining each of the three’s votes. Rather, all the representatives met in one chamber, with each man voting individually. This approach gave a clear advantage to the “Third Estate”, which had the same number of representatives as the nobles and clergy combined. Finally, the representatives of the three estates decided to jointly demand that the king urgently convoke the Estates General. To force him to accede to their demand they called for the French people to refuse to pay any taxes until the monarch had consented (Chianéa 1988, 33–49).²⁵

In August of 1788, in light of the state’s virtual bankruptcy and the government’s manifest inability to restore order, the king yielded. After calling for the Estates General to convene on May 1, 1789, he replaced Loménie de Brienne as his Finance Minister with the more popular Jacques Necker.

The king’s decision did not pacify everyone. Though nearly all agreed that absolute monarchy had to be overturned, there was no unanimity about just how to do this. On the one hand the privileged wanted to restore an oligarchical regime in which they wielded authority. The bourgeoisie and the middle-class, meanwhile, whose representatives began to be called “patriots”, aspired to play a new role in the regime in line with their actual social importance, both quantitative and qualitative.

The result was that during the months preceding the meeting of the Estates General, a great debate was held on the way in which this event should be organized and administrated. The privileged wanted the meeting to proceed in accordance with the model of its last summoning, which went all the way back to 1614 and the regency of Louis XIII’s mother, Marie de Médicis.²⁶ At previous meetings of the Estates General, the three classes (nobility, clergy and the Third Estate) had met separately and had voted by estate, each class assigned one vote. However, the “patriots” argued that the model should be followed employed at the provincial estates held in Dauphiné 1 year prior. There, at the Palace of Vizille, every man’s vote was counted individually.

The debate soon spread to all France thanks to the publication of innumerable pamphlets in which both sides presented their arguments (Margerison 1998). Of all of these one of them soon stood out: “What is the Third Estate?” written by a priest, Abbé Sieyès.²⁷ The work would prove pivotal not only for its content, but because it made clear that the “patriots” enjoyed the support of the low clergy, and even of some members of the nobility, such as the Marquis of Lafayette, the hero of the American war; the Count of Mirabeau, one of France’s finest orators who, because of his unconventional lifestyle—gambling debts, scandalous love affairs, quarrels (Zorgbibe 2008)—had been marginalized by the members of his estate; and even Talleyrand, a great nobleman who lost his title because of a lifelong infirmity.²⁸

The debate seemed to come to a head in December of 1788, when Necker managed to convince Louis XVI to make a series of concessions,²⁹ among them to double the number of representatives assigned to the Third Estate. To do so he employed the argument that it could be dangerous for the monarchy to stand squarely against majority public opinion. This measure constituted a clear defeat for the privileged classes inasmuch as it opened the door to the patriots playing an effective and decisive role in the Estates General.

The meeting of the first Estates General since 1614 sparked great excitement and expectation, with all of France mobilizing to prepare for the event. In the first months of 1789, the representatives of the three estates began to meet everywhere, especially those from the Third Estate, to elect representatives and draft “books of grievances” (cahiers of doléances) to be presented to the king on behalf of those they represented. The meeting was to commence in Versailles in early May 1789.

The representatives of all three estates agreed unanimously in their attribution of the nation’s ills to the king’s arbitrary power, and considered it indispensable that it be “confined to its just limits”. All coincided in advocating that the meeting of the Estates General ought to serve to draft a constitution clearly setting down “the rights of the king and of the nation”, as well as a supreme law serving to guarantee “individual freedom”, reduce the powers of the intendants, and establish regular meetings of the provincial estates throughout the kingdom (Shapiro 1998, 257–258).

They were, however, far from being in agreement in regards to a whole series of other questions. For example, the representatives of the nobility and the third state, unlike those from the clergy, generally favored lifting censorship and guaranteeing the freedom of the press. The representatives of the Third Estate, meanwhile, clashed with the nobles and the clergy by defending the principle of equality, while the nobles and clergy only agreed to renounce their fiscal privileges if it did not mean giving up the feudal rights, both honorary and financial, which they enjoyed vis-à-vis the peasants (Markoff 1998, 298–300).

All the high hopes which the representatives had harbored for the Estates General were shattered at the opening ceremony held on May 5, 1789, at which neither Louis XVI nor Necker made any reference whatsoever to the possibility of writing up a constitution, leading the representatives to conclude that the monarch was unwilling to give up his divine right to rule and would not allow constitutional limits to be placed upon his authority.

To bend the will of the sovereign and his minister it was necessary for the three estates to unite and act in unison. This would prove to be very difficult, as was evident the following day (May 6), when the nobility and the clergy refused to accede to the patriots’ proposal that the traditional ceremony confirming the powers given to each representative and the legality of their election be held in one chamber, in the presence of the representatives of the three classes. One must keep in mind that traditionally in France, the Estates-General featured a tripartite structure, unlike the British Parliament. That is, in the French body each estate voted as a block, leaving the Third Estate at the mercy of the privileged classes.

The nobles were determined to defend the perpetuation of the traditional practice in which the three classes deliberated separately and voted in blocks as estates.³⁰ The clergy was less adamant on this point, with some of its members clearly in favor of accepting the Third Estate’s proposal.³¹ Their flexibility led to what would be a prolonged debate on the issue. As discussions dragged on for more than a month without any agreement being reached, the “patriots”, encouraged by Abbé Sieyes, decided to act unilaterally to secure what they had proposed.

On June 17, 1789, Sieyès declared that the members of the Third Estate were the true representatives of the nation and not simply a sectional interest, and that, as the nobility claimed prerogatives above the nation, they were not capable of being part of it (Mulholland 2012, 35). The Third Estate concluded that, as they represented 96 % of the nation (Boroumand 1990, 322–3), they alone sufficed to constitute the National Assembly and claim total sovereignty concerning fiscal affairs.³² This act had immediate consequences because once the clergy heard of this development they unanimously voted to join the Third Estate, leaving the nobles isolated.³³

The attitude of the Third Estate infuriated Louis XVI, who summoned a new session of the Estates General for the sole and express purpose of voiding that agreed to on June 17. To prevent such spontaneous meetings in the future, the monarch also ordered the closing of the chamber in which the sessions had hitherto been held. On the following day the representatives of the Third Estate found the door locked. Rather than abandoning Versailles, however, they chose to occupy a neighboring jeu de paume (a predecessor of tennis) court (Baker 2006, 68–69). Once gathered all those present (except one), presided over by the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, took an oath in response to a suggestion by Jean Joseph Mounier, not to separate until a constitution had been approved for the kingdom.³⁴

Determined to ignore the unilateral actions of the Third Estate’s representatives, on June 23, the king presided over a new session of the Estates General in which, after announcing some reform measures, he decreed that the June 17 resolution was nullified, and expressed his commitment to fully maintaining “the traditional distinction of the state’s three classes”. When the monarch ordered the representatives to depart, however, only those from the clergy and the nobility obeyed him, as those from the Third Estate refused to abandon the chamber. Its spokesman, Bailly, spat at the Marquis of Dreux Brezé: “It seems to me that the Nation when assembled cannot be given orders”. The Count of Mirabeau, the only nobleman who had crossed over to the Third Estate, then pronounced -according the most popular version, his famous phrase: “Go tell your lord that we are here by the will of the people and we will not leave except by force of bayonets.³⁵

The unflinching stand taken by the representatives of the Third Estate bent Louis XVI’s will. On June 27, he agreed to yield and ordered the representatives of the nobility and the clergy to unite with the representatives of the people to form a single assembly in which all individual votes would be counted. The king’s decision was “revolutionary” as it marked the end of the system employed by the Estates General ever since 1302, when it had arisen from a thoroughly feudal society. As this was a development which the representatives wished to make perfectly clear, on that very day they established themselves as a Constituent Assembly and began to discuss the task of drafting a constitution.

The Constituent Assembly held its sessions between June 27, 1789 and September 30, 1791. This period spanning 2 years and 3 months was, without any doubt, the most crucial of the entire Revolutionary era, as during it were adopted the legislative measures³⁶ which most contributed to altering France and, with it, the entire western constitutional tradition, forever. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was approved on August 26, 1789.³⁷ From the point of view of public order, the years of the Constituent Assembly and those of the Legislative Assembly (1791–1792) were relatively calm (at least compared to the following period, from 1792 to 1794) as, despite the popular rebellions of July 14 and October 6, 1789 the Constituent Assembly managed to maintain public order.