Resort to arms transformed the struggle of social orders into civil war which, abruptly changing the character of the Revolution, gave it a scope that far surpassed what the bourgeoisie had intended or expected. Popular intervention, which provoked the sudden collapse of the social system of the Old Regime, issued from progressive mobilization of the masses by the simultaneous influences of the economic crisis and the convocation of the Estates-General. These two causes fused to create a mentality of insurrection.
Following the Seven Years War, a surge in production after 1778 gave rise to what is known as the splendour of Louis XV. It was checked in France by difficulties rooted in agricultural fluctuations, a continual problem of the old economy. These setbacks became established in cyclical depressions and caused what their historian 1 called the decline of Louis XVI. First, unusually heavy grape harvests provoked a dreadful slump in the wine market. Prices fell by as much as 50 per cent. They rose somewhat after 1781 because of scarcity, but short supply then meant that the wine sector could not recoup its losses. Wine growing was still practised in almost every part of the kingdom and for many peasants was the most profitable market product. They suffered cruelly; those who were sharecroppers found their income reduced to nothing. Grain prices were the next to fall, remaining relatively low until 1787. Finally, a drought in 1785 killed off much of the livestock.
Rural inhabitants constituted the majority of consumers, and because their purchasing power was reduced industrial production was in turn threatened after 1786. Traditional interpretation has laid primary blame for industry’s troubles upon the commercial treaty with Britain. Although this was not the most important cause, it certainly did obstruct industry temporarily, since production had to modernize if it was to withstand foreign competition. Unemployment spread. The countryside, where domestic industry had developed, suffered as much as the cities.
The lower classes therefore had no reserves left when they faced the brutal prospect of famine after grain crops failed in 1788. The price of bread rose steadily. At the beginning of July, 1789, a pound of bread sold for four sous in Paris—where the government nevertheless sold its imported grains at a loss—and twice as much in some provinces. At that time wage earners considered two sous per pound the highest price they could possibly pay and still subsist, for bread was their staple food and average daily consumption ranged from one and a half pounds per person to two or three for an adult manual labourer. Necker ordered large purchases from abroad, and, as usual, labour centres opened up, while measures were taken for distributing soup and rice. The previous winter had been severe, and the cruel effects of high prices did not lessen as the harvest season drew near. For over a half-century we have known, chiefly from the works of Jaurès, that the prosperity of the kingdom of France was responsible for the growing power of the bourgeoisie, and in this sense it is with reason that Michelet’s interpretation has been attacked, for the Revolution broke out in a society in the midst of development, not one crippled and seemingly threatened with collapse by nature’s Providential shortages. But the social importance of this enrichment should not deceive us. Since colonial profits were realized mainly through re-exportation, the nation’s labour force did not benefit as much as we might think, and, while a long-term rise in prices swelled the income of large landowners and bourgeoisie, wages failed to keep pace. We now know that production was dislocated and curtailed in the last decade before the Revolution, and we can justifiably state that the living standard of the masses was steadily declining. Famine, when it came, overwhelmed the populace.
‘The people’ (artisans, shopkeepers, hired help) as well as proletarians (‘the populace’), peasants—small proprietors and sharecroppers who did not raise enough to support themselves or wine-growers who did not raise any grain—as well as townsmen unanimously agreed that the government and upper classes were responsible for these afflictions. Income declined but taxes did not. Tolls and duties on consumption became more hateful in times of high prices. If the wine market was restricted it was because excises limited consumption. There was no bread because Brienne removed controls on grain exports and shipments in 1787. True, Necker had stopped exports, subsidized imports, and reinstituted market sales. But he was too late. ‘Hoarders’ had gone to work. Anyone in authority, all government agents were suspected of participating in hoarding. The ‘famine plot’ was thought to be more than a myth. Tithe collectors and lords were just as odious—they were hoarders because their levies cut into a poor harvest and consumed the peasants’ supplies. The final blow was that collectors and lords profited even more from the high prices that increased poverty. And, finally, the solidarity of the Third Estate was shaken: the grain merchant, the baker, and the miller were all threatened; the bourgeois, partisan of economic freedom, clashed with popular hostility towards capitalism, since the people by nature favoured requisitions and controls. In April Necker authorized requisitions to replenish the markets, but the intendants and municipal officials rarely used this power.
As the months of 1789 passed, riots kept the tired and frightened officials in a constant state of alert. On April 28 Parisian workers from the faubourg Saint-Antoine sacked the manufactories of Réveillon and Henriot. Throughout the kingdom markets were the scenes of disturbances. Grain shipments, forced by milling and transportation conditions to use roads and rivers in plain view of famished hordes, were sometimes halted. The army and constabulary exhausted themselves rushing from one place to another, but were not inclined to deal harshly towards rebels whose privations they shared and unconsciously began to feel a common sympathy with them. The armour of the Old Regime was rapidly disintegrating.
Agitation was especially pronounced in the countryside. There the tax burden was crushing; tithes and manorial dues drove the peasants to desperation. Sentiment in the peasant community was divided among journeymen, sharecroppers, small proprietors, and large-scale tenant farmers, but on all matters of taxation it was solidly opposed to royal authority and the aristocracy. Tremors of agrarian revolt could be felt well before July 14—in Provence at the end of March, around Gap in April, in Cambrésis and Picardy in May. Near Versailles and Paris game had been exterminated, forests cleaned out. Moreover, the people were afraid of each other because begging, a regional trouble, spread before their eyes. Many journeymen and small landowners became mendicants. The poor left their villages to crowd into towns or else became vagabonds, forming groups which coursed through the country. They invaded farms even at night, forced themselves in by the fear of burning and of attacks on livestock, trees, the crops that were just beginning to grow, or by threatening to pillage everything. Officials had their own reasons for worrying about the crops and let the villagers arm themselves for protection. As fear of brigandage spread, panics broke out. The slightest incident was enough to put a timid person to flight, convinced that brigands had arrived, sowing fear wherever he fled.
But we cannot be sure that economic crisis would have driven the people to aid the bourgeoisie if the calling of the Estates-General had not deeply moved the populace. The goals appropriated by the bourgeois they elected scarcely concerned the lower classes, but an event so foreign was welcomed as ‘a good piece of news’ presaging a miraculous change in men’s fates. It awoke hopes both dazzling and vague of a future when all would enjoy a better life—hopes shared by the bourgeoisie. This vision of the future united the heterogeneous elements of the Third Estate and became a dynamic source of revolutionary idealism. Among the common people it gave to the Revolution a character that can be called mythical, if myth is taken to mean a complex of ideas concerning the future which generate energy and initiative. In this sense the Revolution in its early stages can be compared to certain religious movements in nascent form, when the poor gladly discern a return to paradise on earth.
Arthur Young has recorded that on July 12, while walking up a hill near Les Islettes, in the Argonne Forest, he met a poor woman who described her misery to him. ‘“Something was to be done by some great folk for such poor ones,” but she did not know who nor how, “but God send us better, car les tailles et les droits nous écrasent” ’ (for the taille and [manorial] rights are crushing us).
Since the king consulted his people, he pitied their plight. What could he do if not remove their burdens—taxes, tithes, fees? He would therefore be content if they went ahead and helped him: after the elections aristocratic cries of alarm arose on all sides, for the peasants openly declared that they would pay no more.
At the same time this great hope inflamed fearful passions, from which the bourgeoisie was not exempt. The revolutionary mentality was imbued with them; the history of the period bears their deep imprint.
The Third Estate was at once convinced that the nobles would stubbornly defend their privileges. This expectation, soon confirmed by aristocratic opposition to the doubling and then to the vote by head, aroused suspicions that with little difficulty hardened into convictions. The nobles would use any means to ‘crush’ the villagers; they would outwit their well-intentioned king to obtain dissolution of the Estates-General. They would take up arms, bar themselves in their châteaux, and enlist brigands to wage civil war just as the king’s agents enlisted the poverty-stricken. Prisoners would be released and recruited. Nobles who had already hoarded grain to starve the Third Estate would willingly see the harvest ruined. Fear of the aristocracy was everywhere rapidly linked with fear of brigands, a connection that fused the results of the calling of the Estates with those of the economic crisis. Moreover, foreign powers would be called on to help. The comte d’Artois was going to emigrate and win over his father-in-law (the king of Sardinia), the Spanish and Neapolitan Bourbons, and the emperor, brother of the queen. France, like Holland, would be invaded by the Prussians. Collusion with foreign powers, which weighed heavily in the history of the Revolution, was assumed from the beginning, and in July an invasion was feared imminently. The whole Third Estate believed in an ‘aristocratic conspiracy’.
The burden of royal centralization and the conflict of orders dominated the Third Estate’s view of the crisis. Neglecting to accuse natural forces and incapable of analysing the total economic situation, the Third Estate laid responsibility upon royal power and the aristocracy. An incomplete picture perhaps, but not inexact. The freeing of the grain trade, which Brienne had decreed, did favour speculators; to the argument that this would increase production the people replied that it would profit the aristocracy and bourgeoisie first, while they had to bear the costs. Similarly, if the Third Estate falsely imputed Machiavellian qualities to the aristocracy, it was true that the court, in agreement with the nobles, thought to punish the deputies for their insubordination; and it was true that the aristocratic conspiracy, although denounced prematurely, was soon to become a reality. In any case the mind of the Third Estate is of capital interest in showing the historian that events have their immediate roots not in their antecedents but in the men who intervene by interpreting those events.
If aristocratic conspiracy and ‘brigands’ instilled many with enough fear to cause occasional panics, there were others who, although frightened, remained rational and faced danger resolutely. Consequently the labels ‘fears’ and ‘Great Fear’ unjustly imply that the whole Third Estate was struck dumb with terror. Actually the revolutionary mentality was capable of countering unrest with vigorous defensive reaction. The Third was kept informed by letters from its deputies and in turn encouraged its representatives with innumerable appeals. The bourgeoisie would gladly have pushed further: it wanted to take municipal control from the petty oligarchy made up of those who owned offices, many of whom had acquired noble titles. At Paris the electors who had chosen deputies organized a secret municipal council in the Hôtel de Ville at the end of June. Notables hoped to set up a ‘national militia’. This was proposed by Parisian electors to the Constituent Assembly, but deputies did not dare authorize it. A double purpose lay behind the desire to organize a militia: to resist royal troops should the occasion rise, and to hold the people in check. Meanwhile efforts were made to win over the army, not without success, since lower-ranking officers had no hope of advancement and the soldiers, who had to pay for part of their subsistence, were affected by high prices. The French Guards fraternized with crowds at the Palais Royal; at the end of June the people freed prisoners at the Abbaye. Several men are known to have distributed money among the soldiers or to have paid the July insurgents. Beyond doubt the agents of the duc d’Orléans did as much.
Finally, along with the defensive reaction there existed a punitive will either to cripple the aristocratic conspiracy, hoarders, and all enemies of the people, or to punish those enemies. From July on this took the form of imprisonments, acts of brutality, and popular massacres.
These three aspects of the revolutionary mentality—fear, defensive reaction, and punitive will—together constitute one of the keys to the unfolding narrative of the French Revolution. The conspiracy was to all appearances halted by the end of 1789, and repression slackened. The plot later reappeared, cloaked with many of the characteristics given it in advance, and foreign powers came to its aid. The resulting defensive reaction first stimulated the volunteers who poured in and then was responsible for the mass levy. Punitive will provoked the massacres of 1792 and, when danger again loomed in 1793, the Convention warded off further perils only by setting up the Terror. Fear and its accompaniments died out only, and gradually, after the uncontested triumph of the Revolution.
Against this background, Necker’s dismissal was a torch set to a powder keg: it was taken as evidence that the aristocratic conspiracy had begun to act. News of the event circulated in Paris on Sunday, July 12. The weather was good and a crowd gathered at the Palais Royal, whose garden and arcades, recently opened by the duc d’Orléans, had become a centre of amusement. Groups clustered about extemporaneous orators; only one, Camille Desmoulins, do we know by name. Soon processions of demonstrators reached the boulevards, then the Rue Saint-Honoré. The cavalry undertook to make them disperse and charged the crowd at the Place Louis XV. The French Guards in return attacked the cavalry. The baron de Besenval, military commander, mustered his whole following on the Champ de Mars that evening.
The Parisians did not think of rallying to the aid of the Assembly; they saved it, but only indirectly. They were concerned with their own fate, convinced that their city, surrounded by royal troops and brigands, would first be bombarded from Montmartre and the Bastille and then would be pillaged. Panics erupted continually during these ‘days’, Act One of the Great Fear. The police were gone. Toll gates were burned. Saint-Lazare was sacked. Person and property were seemingly endangered. Fright hovered over the capital, abandoned to its own resources.
A defensive reaction followed immediately. Barricades arose in the streets, and gunsmiths’ stores were wiped clean. The electors appointed a permanent committee and set up a militia. To arm their forces, they took 32,000 guns from the Invalides on the morning of July 14. In search of more, they went to the Bastille. Its governor, de Launey, parleyed. Commanding only a small garrison, he had ordered the outer courts evacuated. They were quickly filled by the crowd. Behind walls ninety feet high, surrounded by a water-filled ditch seventy-five feet wide, he had no cause to fear an attack. But he lost his nerve and opened fire. Several men fell; others drew back in disorder, crying treason, convinced that they had been permitted to advance only to offer better aim. Shots rang out from those who were armed, and battle was engaged, but on an entirely unequal basis: the assailants lost a hundred men, whereas one sole member of the garrison was hit. A census was later taken among the ‘conquerors of the Bastille’, so we know a good number of the attackers. All classes of society were represented among them, but most were artisans from the faubourg Saint-Antoine.
The tide of battle was still uncertain when the French and National Guards arrived from the Hôtel de Ville. Led by a former noncommissioned officer named Hulin and by Lieutenant Élie, they entered the courtyard of the Bastille and under heavy fire aimed their cannons at the gate. De Launey took fright and offered to give himself up. Élie accepted, but the attackers protested—No surrender! Amid total confusion the governor had the drawbridge lowered, and the crowd rushed across into the fortress. Efforts to save most of the defenders were successful, but three officers and three men were massacred. De Launey was with difficulty led to the doors of the Hôtel de Ville, where he lost his life. Shortly after, Flesselles, provost of the merchants, was also killed. Their heads were paraded through the city on pikes.
Besenval ordered a retreat to Saint-Cloud. The electors took over municipal control, appointed Bailly mayor, and offered command of the National Guard to Lafayette, who soon afterwards gave the Guard a cockade of red and blue, the colours of Paris, between which he placed a white band, the king’s colour. Through Lafayette the tricoloured flag, emblem of the Revolution, joined old France with the new.
No one considered the Bastille the stakes of the struggle, and at first no one thought that its fall would determine the outcome. Panics continued. But seizure of the Bastille, of mediocre importance in itself, broke the court’s resistance. The forces Versailles had on hand were not enough to take Paris, especially since the loyalty of the troops was not certain. Louis hesitated. Would he try to flee? Against the urgings of the comte d’Artois he decided to give in. On July 15 he yielded to the Assembly and announced the dismissal of his troops. The next day he recalled Necker. On the 17th he went to Paris and accepted the cockade.
Few concluded from this that the aristocracy had laid down its arms, and wild rumours continued to circulate. The comte d’Artois and many others emigrated; according to one story an English squadron lay in wait off the coast of Brest. The permanent committee searched the edges of Paris for brigands. Finding only vagabonds, it sent them back where they had come from. The suburbs feared that they would be overrun with such wanderers, and panic spread. Bertier de Sauvigny, the intendant of Paris, his father in-law, Foullon de Doué, and Besenval himself were arrested. Massacres began again: on July 22 Sauvigny and Doué were hanged at the Place de Grève; Necker returned just in time to save Besenval on July 30. These murders provoked strong protest, but now part of the bourgeoisie, roused by the obvious danger, joined the people in their fury—‘ Is this blood then so pure?’ cried Barnave before the Constituent Assembly. Nevertheless, they could hardly deny that summary executions ought to cease. On July 23 a notary from the Rue de Richelieu proposed, in the name of his district, that a popular tribunal be set up; and on the 30th Bailly made a similar request. The Assembly paid no heed. Only in October did it institute prosecution for crimes of lèse-nation, to be handled by the Châtelet of Paris—an ordinary court. In July the Assembly did at least establish a ‘committee of investigation’, prototype of the Committee of General Security; and the municipality of Paris organized another which was the first revolutionary committee. While debating the issue of privacy of correspondence during the summer, deputies of all representation, from the marquis de Gouy d’Arsy and Target, member of the Académie Française, to Barnave and Robespierre, firmly maintained that one could not govern in time of war and revolution as in time of peace—in other words, that the rights they were proposing to grant to all citizens depended upon circumstances. This was to become the doctrine of the revolutionary government.
In the provinces, too, Necker’s dismissal provoked strong feeling and an immediate reaction. The populace was no longer content only to send addresses, now often menacing, to its representatives. In several towns the public coffers were broken open and arsenals or military storehouses looted. One committee undertook to set up a militia and issued an appeal to neighbouring communes, even to the peasants. The governor of Dijon was arrested; nobles and priests were confined to their dwellings—this was the first example of detention of suspects. At Rennes the townsmen persuaded the garrison to desert and then rose up. The military commander fled.
When news came of the fall of the Bastille and of the king’s visit to Paris—an event celebrated in some places—the bourgeoisie took heart and laid hands on the instruments of control in almost every area. The ‘municipal revolution’, as it is known, was in most cases a peaceable one: the municipal councils of the Old Regime took on notables or stepped down for the electors. Very often they had to create, or permit the formation of, a permanent committee. It was charged initially with organization of the National Guard, but gradually absorbed the whole administrative apparatus. Nevertheless, the people, having taken part in bourgeois demonstrations, demanded that bread prices be lowered. If this was not soon granted riots broke out, the houses of officials and those known as hoarders were sacked, and often the former municipal councils were ousted.
The municipal revolution thus differed from place to place and was often arrested half way. In every instance, however, the only orders obeyed were those of the National Assembly. The king no longer commanded authority. Centralization, too, was weakened: each municipality wielded absolute power within its own confines and over surrounding districts as well. From August on, towns started to conclude mutual-assistance pacts, spontaneously transforming France into a federation of communes. Local autonomy opened the field of action to a small group of resolute men who, without waiting for instructions from Paris, passed what measures they considered necessary to secure public safety. This was a basic stimulant to revolutionary defence.
Yet the other side of the coin was immediately visible. The Constituent Assembly enjoyed a prestige accorded none of its successors, but the populace observed only such decrees as suited it. What did the people want above all else? Tax reform, abolition of indirect levies, institution of controls over the grain trade. Tax collection was suspended; the salt tax, excises, and municipal tolls were suppressed; exchange of grains was either forbidden or continually thwarted. Proclamations and decrees against this had no effect. At Paris the populace went even further. Within the districts—divisions established for elections to the Estates-General—assembled citizens, like the electors before them, claimed to supervise the municipal authority they set up to replace the electors. In their eyes national sovereignty entailed direct democracy, an idea that would remain dear to the sans-culottes.
The countryside had joined the towns, but revolution in Paris had even greater effect on rural areas. Agrarian revolt broke out in several regions. In the woodlands of Normandy, in the Hainaut and Upper Alsace, châteaux or abbeys were attacked by those seeking to burn archives and force surrender of manorial rights. In Franche-Comté and the Mâconnais peasants set fire to many châteaux, sometimes laying them waste. The bourgeoisie was not always spared: they, too, had to pay. In Alsace the Jews suffered. On the other hand, there was clear evidence of rural hostility towards a menacing capitalism whose instrument had become the manorial reaction: free pasturage was reclaimed, enclosures destroyed, forests invaded, commons taken back or demanded for the first time—the peasant revolution was a double-edged sword. Faced with this threat, the notables drew closer together. Urban militias were used to restore order. In the Mâconnais the bourgeoisie set up extraordinary tribunals beside the old provost courts, and thirty-three peasants were hanged. Revolt fired men’s minds. Even more important, however, was a passive resistance which everywhere interfered with collection of the tithe or the champart demanded from crops harvested. Only those who wished to pay did so. The Great Fear gave irresistible force to this movement.
Events in Paris strengthened fear of the aristocratic conspiracy, of foreign invasion which could carry it out, of recruitment of brigands for its service. Brigands were the source of even greater fear now that the wheat was ripe, and Paris, along with other large towns, was expelling beggars and vagabonds. Grain riots and agrarian revolts heightened tension. So did forays by National Guards who left towns to pillage châteaux or demand grain. The Great Fear grew out of six localized incidents no different from those which had unloosed so many panics, but this time they set off currents which were fed along the way by new outbreaks acting as relay reinforcements. Some of these can be traced for hundreds of miles, with branches that covered entire provinces. This extraordinary diffusion in a chain reaction gives the Great Fear its distinctive character and illuminates the mentality that made it possible.
A ‘disturbance’ at Nantes alarmed Poitou. At Estrées-Saint-Denis, in the Beauvais, another spread fright in all directions. A third in southern Champagne sowed terror through the Gâtinais, Bourbonnais, and Burgundy. A fourth, originating near the Montmirail forest, close to La Ferté-Bernard, alerted Maine, Normandy, Anjou, and the Touraine. From the edge of the Chizé forest fear struck Angoulême, spread into Berry and the central mountains, alarmed Aquitaine as far as the Pyrenees. In the east, agrarian revolts in Franche-Comté and the Mâconnais drove fear to the shores of the Mediterranean.
Revolutionaries and aristocrats accused one another of having contrived the Great Fear. The enemies of the Revolution, charged the revolutionaries, sowed anarchy in an effort to paralyse the National Assembly. The bourgeoisie, replied the aristocrats, alarmed the people to make them take up arms and rebel just when the lower classes desired to remain at peace. This last version met with success because the Great Fear provoked a defensive reaction which turned upon the aristocracy. Near Le Mans and in Vivarais three nobles were put to death, and peasants in the Dauphiné provided a formidable relay station for panic by burning châteaux.
It was therefore repeated afterwards that fear had broken out everywhere and at once, spread by mysterious messengers and engendering agrarian revolt. It did not, in fact, cover the whole kingdom: Brittany, Lorraine, lower Languedoc, among other areas, were unaffected. The Great Fear lasted from July 20 to August 6. Documents show that some propagated it in good faith, and one significant fact is that it never touched the districts which had previously witnessed insurrection. The jacquerie of the Dauphiné was the only such incident it provoked. If it encouraged the revolution of the peasants it did not cause it. They were already on their feet.
While popular revolution spread, the Assembly’s debates dragged on ineffectively. Was this the appropriate moment to publish a declaration of rights? Would it not be better to postpone any such action until the constitution was drawn up, so that the two could be reconciled? Arguments of a general nature were voiced with no mention of the reasons behind opposing views: the existence of orders and the privileges, both of which would be suppressed by the principles to be proclaimed. Aristocrats therefore favoured postponement, hoping to preserve a few of their prerogatives, while the Patriots, growing impatient, accused the nobles of undue obstruction, and the more clairvoyant suspected that privileges held by provinces and towns gave the nobility secret supporters within the Third Estate. On the morning of August 4 the Assembly ruled that it would begin by voting the declaration. But its members could expect discussion to provoke new resistance.
On the other hand, the popular revolution had to be resolved. The Assembly, which it had saved, had no choice but to endorse it, yet order had to be re-established, since the people were quietly waiting for the reforms their representatives would deem appropriate. The bourgeoisie in all probability could control townsmen, but the peasants were a different matter. They were destroying the manorial regime without concerning themselves about the Assembly. What course should be taken? If it resorted to the army and provost courts, the Assembly would break with the people and place itself at the mercy of king and aristocracy. The alternative was to grant satisfaction to the rebels—but then how would the parish priests and liberal nobles react? And it was their support which had assured the Third Estate’s victory.
The terms of the decision and the tactics to carry it out were decreed during the night of August 3–4 by a hundred deputies meeting at the Café Amaury as a ‘Breton Club’, which dated back to the end of April, when deputies from Brittany had, as soon as they arrived in town, adopted the custom of concerting their moves and had immediately opened their debates to colleagues from other provinces. They resolved to sway the Assembly by ‘a kind of magic’. In matters involving the feudal system, the duc d’Aiguillon was to take the lead.
But on the evening of August 4 it was the vicomte de Noailles who made the first move, and there was no alternative but to support him. Without debate the Assembly enthusiastically adopted equality of taxation and redemption of all manorial rights except for those involving personal servitude—which were to be abolished without indemnification. Other proposals followed with the same success: equality of legal punishment, admission of all to public office, abolition of venality in office, conversion of the tithe into payments subject to redemption, freedom of worship, prohibition of plural holding of benefices, suppression of annates (the year’s income owed the pope by a bishop upon investiture). Privileges of provinces and towns were offered as a last sacrifice. Nevertheless, the ‘magic’ had worked its powers.
These resolutions had to be written up formally, so the debate opened again the next day and lasted until August 11. The final decree began: ‘The National Assembly destroys the feudal regime in its entirety.’ This was far from exact: they retained the law of primogeniture and honorific prerogatives, while requirement of an indemnity promised a long life to manorial fees. The tithe was suppressed without indemnity, but, just as fees could be collected until the method of redemption was determined, the tithe could be exacted until a law on public worship was passed.
Despite these qualifications, on the night of August 4 the Assembly achieved in principle the legal unity of the nation. It destroyed the feudal system and aristocratic domination over rural areas; it launched fiscal and ecclesiastical reform. The way was paved for discussion of a declaration of rights. This started on August 20 and continued without intermission until the 26th. Proclaiming liberty, equality, and national sovereignty, the text was in effect the ‘act of decease’ of the Old Regime, which had been put to death by the popular revolution.
But the king did not approve the decree of August 5–11, nor did he sanction the declaration. Once again crisis opened. The Assembly held that the two texts were constitutional, and Mounier stated that because constituent power was sovereign, the constitution, ‘anterior to the monarchy’, did not require the king’s consent. This thesis, which came from Sieyes, won the day. The constitution ceased to be a contract and assumed modern aspect.
A difference of opinion threatening to split open the Patriot party urged Louis to play for time. A few liberal nobles, parish priests, and some bourgeois holding either manorial rights or public office joined forces to halt the Revolution by coming to terms with king and aristocracy. To Louis they would grant an absolute veto—the legislative sanction which Necker had stipulated in June—and for the aristocracy they would create an upper house, which he had also mentioned before. This group comprised those called ‘Anglomaniacs’ or ‘Monarchicals.’ Among them were Lally-Tollendal, Clermont-Tonnerre, and Malouet, soon joined by Mounier, and supported by Mirabeau on the veto. Duport, Barnave, and Alexandre de Lameth—the ‘triumvirate’— then assumed direction of the Patriot party. Victory was theirs: on September 10 bicameralism was rejected; on the following day a suspensive veto was granted the king in legislative matters, with the understanding—as was made clear to Necker—that Louis would in return tacitly renounce royal sanction of the constitution by approving the August decrees. The king did nothing. Finally, on October 1 the Assembly decided to present the decrees only for royal ‘acceptance’. No headway was gained by this, as he could just as well refuse to ‘accept’ them as to approve them. There was nothing left but to apply pressure on him once more.
Agitation in Paris did not abate. Newspapers and pamphlets flooded the city. One of them, L’Ami du peuple, founded by Marat in September, bitterly criticized Bailly, Lafayette, and Necker. At the end of August an abortive march on Versailles was begun from the Palais Royal. Soon, however, there were indications that the aristocratic conspiracy was about to rear its head again: the king had recalled the Flanders Regiment, which arrived on September 23. Although Lafayette had made the National Guard an entirely bourgeois organization by eliminating popular elements, its presence, along with the hired companies he had formed, now admitted the possibility of a new ‘day’. Neither the circumstances nor the terms are known, but it is probable that some sort of agreement between Parisian revolutionaries and Patriot deputies was concluded. Probably, too, Mirabeau entered the game on behalf of the duc d’Orléans. Regardless of what Lafayette said, it seems that neither he nor Bailly disapproved the plan, for they did nothing to stop it.
Political motives therefore seem to be at the bottom of the October Days, but, as in July, they would not have been as effective without economic unrest. Foreigners, nobles, and the wealthy dismissed their servants and fled from Paris. Money was hidden in some safe place or sent out of the country. Luxury industries were in danger of foundering. The number of unemployed had never been so great. Bread was still expensive, and sometimes could be obtained only with considerable difficulty. The wheat crop was good but had not been threshed; the markets were empty and shipments were held up. Mills were slowed by mild winds and low water levels. Scarcity was again attributed to a conspiracy: laying hands on the king appeared to be one remedy. Once again, economic and political crises merged their effects.
On October 1 the officers of the Royal Bodyguard held a banquet to fête their colleagues of the Flanders Regiment. Towards the end of the feast the royal family entered and was acclaimed. The guests grew more demonstrative, staging a show of hostility towards the nation and insulting the cockade. Like Necker’s dismissal, news of this incident set off insurrection. On October 5 women from the faubourg Saint-Antoine and Les Halles gathered at the Hôtel de Ville to demand bread. This could not have been a matter of chance, but we have no knowledge of previous preparation. Neither Bailly nor Lafayette was present. The women put Maillard, one of the ‘Bastille volunteers’, at the head of their procession and set out for Versailles. Towards noon some members of the National Guard in turn assembled and told Lafayette, when he finally arrived, that they too wanted to leave for Versailles. Little by little the crowd grew larger and more threatening. The Commune finally ordered them to set out and sent two commissioners to join Lafayette. They were charged to bring the king back. The political aspect of the movement became obvious.
The Assembly had just made another request for Louis to accept the August decrees when the women appeared. Maillard asked that Paris be given supplies and that the Flanders Regiment be dismissed, but did not mention the king. As president of the Assembly, Mounier was sent to the palace. Called back from a hunt, Louis received the women goodnaturedly and promised to send food to Paris. One part of the crowd turned to go. Still unaware that National Guards were on the way, the court thought it had escaped a bad situation. When he was soon afterwards informed by a message from Lafayette, the king heeded Saint-Priest’s advice and decided to leave for Rambouillet. Then he changed his mind. Thinking that they were probably coming to ask him to accept the decrees, he judged the crisis over when he then notified Mounier of his affirmative decision. But at eleven that evening Lafayette arrived with the commissioners of the Commune, who asked the king to come and take up residence in the capital. This was the first time the proposal had been advanced to Louis. He postponed the matter until the morrow. Acceptance of the decrees was the only substantial advantage the Assembly had gained from the day’s events.
The next morning demonstrators entered the courtyard and were stopped by the bodyguard. A scuffle ensued. One worker and several guards were killed. The mob found its way to the queen’s antechamber, but she escaped, fleeing to the king. The National Guards finally arrived and cleared out the palace. Lafayette appeared on the balcony with the royal family. They were hailed, but with cries of ‘To Paris!’ Louis gave in, and the Assembly declared it would follow him.
At one o’clock the bizarre procession set out. The National Guards first, with bread stuck on their bayonets; then wagons of wheat and flour garnished with leaves, followed by market porters and the women, sometimes sitting on horses or cannons; next the disarmed bodyguard, the Swiss, and the Flanders Regiment; the carriages bearing the king and his family with Lafayette riding beside the doors; carriages of one hundred deputies representing the Assembly; more National Guards; and finally, the crowd bringing up the rear. They forged ahead willy-nilly through the mud. It was raining, and day gave way to night at an early hour. Insensitive to the gloom, the people, appeased and confident for the moment, rejoiced in their victory. They had brought back ‘the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy’.
The king was welcomed by Bailly, who led him to the Hôtel de Ville; then he retired to the Tuileries. The Assembly did not leave Versailles until October 19. After sitting first in the archbishop’s residence, on November 9 it was installed in a hastily redecorated riding school adjoining the Tuileries.
Along with the aristocracy a group of bourgeois were indignant that violence had been done the king. The Patriot party rid itself of the Monarchicals, who passed into the opposition. Mounier returned to the Dauphiné and soon afterwards emigrated. The general inclination was to believe that at least the October insurrection had saved and enlarged the revolution of the bourgeoisie and that the period of crisis was drawing to an end. Actually, the consequences of the popular revolution were to widen. The nobility was now struck in its material possessions and not only in its pride by suppression of orders and privileges. As a result, most nobles vowed inexpiable hatred of the Revolution. The aristocratic conspiracy was to become a reality, leading to civil war and to an appeal for help from foreign powers. At the same time the Third Estate split: the petty bourgeoisie, if not the proletariat, would be excluded from political life only with strong protest, for now its members too had taken part in the struggle. In municipal councils and Parisian districts the democratic movement germinated. The Assembly enjoyed boundless respect. It alone was obeyed, but on condition that it agreed with public opinion. Now everyone refused to pay former taxes and fees. A decree had re-established freedom of the grain trade; no one obeyed it.
As Mirabeau told the bourgeois, they needed an energetic government to consolidate their accession. But because of his July attempt the king was suspect. During the following months he proclaimed his loyalty to the constitution, and the Assembly declared, in an effort to reassure the more timid, that it was sure of his allegiance. Yet doubt persisted. Distrusting Louis, the Constituent subordinated executive power to its committees and in effect exercised a dictatorship— without dictatorial efficiency, because ministers and their departments retained enough control to obstruct it behind the scenes. This was why Sieyes, Mirabeau, and many others considered getting the king to abdicate and replacing him with a regency, in the name of his son, which would secure the nation’s confidence. But they failed, having at hand only Philippe d’Orléans—discredited, void of prestige and character. The Revolution reduced Louis XVI to impotence, but until 1793 it had no government.
1 Camille Ernest Labrousse. (Translator’s note.)