9

CONSTITUTION-MAKING AND CONFLICT

September–December 1789

THE DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND CITIZEN WOULD COME to be regarded as the most important statement of the French Revolution’s principles. Nevertheless, the debate over its provisions divided and exhausted the deputies, leaving them eager to move on to the substance of the new constitution. Within a few months, they defined the major features of a new system of government that would, they hoped, effectively protect the individual liberty now guaranteed to all citizens and give them a real voice in making the laws under which they would live. At the same time, they began tackling other urgent questions, from how to solve the financial crisis to how France’s territorial divisions might be reshaped. Their answers to these questions had profound effects on every individual and community in the country.

At every step, the revolutionary legislators were forced to take the reactions of the population into account. The public’s hopes had been raised by the extraordinary events of the previous few months, but its fears had also been ignited. Now able to follow events more closely than ever through the political press, the public was also able to intervene through new local governments and participation in the National Guard. Peasants rejoiced at the prospect of the abolition of feudal dues, but they worried that landlords might find ways to protect their interests. Members of the bourgeoisie celebrated the end of noble privileges, but they wondered whether aristocrats would accept the end of their special status peacefully. Changes in the status of the Church were profoundly unsettling for the clergy and for much of the population. The urban and rural poor demanded bread, and citizens of all classes were troubled by the disorder that continued to disrupt daily life.

While expressing satisfaction that the National Assembly was moving from abstract theoretical questions to practical ones, the deputy Duquesnoy noted that his colleagues were splitting into opposing groups. “The room is divided in such a way that, in one part, one finds men who sometimes, without a doubt, have exaggerated opinions but, in general, have a high idea of liberty and equality.… [T]he other part is occupied by men whose less idealistic ideas and less firm opinions give them a character of weakness, of caution, very regrettable in present circumstances,” he wrote.¹ The deputies who supported the Revolution sat on the left side of the meeting hall, while their opponents occupied the seats on the right; the terms “left” and “right” soon became the recognized labels for progressives and conservatives that continue to be used around the world.

As the differences among the deputies became clearer, like-minded legislators began to form clubs in which they could come together outside the Assembly to plot strategy with their allies. Many of the “patriot” radicals had participated in the club formed by the Breton deputies earlier in the year. Once the Assembly moved to Paris in mid-October 1789, the group rented a meeting room conveniently close to the legislature’s new hall. Officially, the group called itself Les amis de la constitution (The Friends of the Constitution), but they became better known simply as the “Jacobins,” because the Jacobin religious order had leased the space to them. Membership was at first limited to deputies, but within a few months it was opened also to ordinary citizens, provided they could afford the relatively steep dues. Meanwhile, the patriots’ rivals created their own organizations. The more moderate among them, identified as monarchiens, defenders of the monarchy, saw themselves as working to replace absolutism with a British-style constitutional monarchy. They therefore supported the Revolution’s early stages. A more conservative group of deputies was known as the noirs, or “blacks,” because many of them had originally been representatives of the clergy and wore black robes. The noirs openly opposed the basic principles of the Revolution and hoped for its collapse.

The debate about whether the king should have the power to veto laws passed by the assembly of the people’s representatives became the first focus of the disagreements among these factions. The monarchiens, led by the Dauphiné lawyer Joseph Mounier and several liberal nobles, accepted the idea that the king needed to share power with a legislature representing the will of the people. But, in their view, the king needed to have real authority to maintain public order and to oppose ill-considered laws. Still chairman of the Assembly’s constitutional committee, Mounier used his position on August 28, 1789, a day after the conclusion of the debates on the Declaration of Rights, to put forward a proposal that gave the king the right to veto laws he opposed.

The debate over the king’s veto went to the heart of the question of what was meant by Article 3 of the Declaration of Rights, which said that “the basis of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.” If the elected deputies of the National Assembly truly represented the nation, the “patriots” asked, by what right could a single individual, even the king, reject their decisions? The issue was particularly explosive, because the king had not yet accepted either the August 4 decrees or the Declaration of Rights itself. “The nobles and the clergy want to make use of the veto to have all of our reforms rejected,” one nervous deputy wrote. In response to the monarchiens’ proposal, Parisian radicals at the Palais-Royal proclaimed themselves a “patriotic assembly” and warned conservative deputies that “fifteen thousand men [were] ready to set their chateaux and their houses alight” if they persisted in their efforts.² On August 30, a crowd even tried to march to Versailles to pressure the Assembly. Lafayette, the commander of the Paris National Guard, dispersed the demonstrators, but the incident reminded the legislators that a restless population was watching closely and could easily turn on them.

The debate about the royal veto clarified the distinction between the constitution and ordinary laws. If the king had the power to veto the constitutional laws that set limits on his power, the Revolution would indeed be undone. Even Mounier agreed that “the king has no consent to give to the constitution; it is anterior to the monarchy.” But the monarchiens considered the king’s power to veto ordinary laws as a necessary safeguard against an elected assembly that might pass hasty measures under the pressure of an excitable populace. Sieyès, however, insisted that any kind of veto would be “a lettre de cachet launched against the national will, against the entire nation.”³ In the middle stood a number of deputies who proposed what they called a “suspensive” veto, giving the king the right to delay laws, but only for a certain period of time. Advocates of this compromise argued that it would allow the people to make the final decision. If they then reelected deputies committed to overriding a royal veto, it would be clear what they wanted.

Before they finally resolved the veto issue, the deputies took up another major question: Should the future national legislature consist of just one chamber, or, like the British Parliament and the United States Congress, of two houses that would both have to approve proposals before they became laws? Concerned that a one-house legislature would be too vulnerable to public opinion, the monarchiens wanted a “senate,” whose members would be named for life, to balance an elected lower chamber. To their opponents, this amounted to the restoration of a privileged aristocracy that could stand in the way of the will of the people. Tempers flared to the point where “an f-word came out of the mouth” of one speaker, setting off a “universal tumult” that brought debate to a halt.⁴ The resort to swearwords in the midst of a debate about a major constitutional issue undermined the notion that the deputies were being guided only by reason as they struggled to draft the constitution. Even so, the monarchiens’ proposal was defeated. Altogether, 849 of the 1,060 deputies voted for the creation of a one-house legislature. Those who helped to pass the measure included a number of noirs, who hoped to discredit the Revolution by encouraging its most extremist tendencies.

On September 11, at the end of a debate that dragged on until 4:00 a.m., the Assembly gave the king a suspensive veto. He would have the power to make three successive legislative assemblies pass a law before it could go into effect over his opposition. No one was satisfied with this outcome: radicals objected that the king could obstruct the will of the people, even if only for a certain number of years, whereas conservatives claimed that a suspensive veto was not enough to maintain a genuine balance of powers between the monarch and the legislature.

The debates about the royal veto and the creation of a bicameral legislature inflamed public opinion, especially in Paris. The high bread prices that had provoked agitation throughout the year continued to weigh on the population as they waited anxiously for the results of the new harvest. Moreover, the many artisans in the capital who depended on aristocratic customers suffered as their clients stopped spending or even fled the country. The king’s refusal to declare his acceptance of the August 4 decrees and the Declaration of Rights left a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the direction of the Revolution. The government’s financial crisis continued to worsen: the breakdown of order meant that taxes were no longer coming in, driving the Assembly to appeal to citizens to make voluntary contributions to keep the government solvent. Delegations of women offering their jewelry, students donating their silver shoebuckles, clergy sacrificing treasures from their churches, and Jews hoping that their contributions would help win them rights visited the Assembly to make “patriotic gifts,” but they were not enough to cover the government’s needs. Mirabeau felt compelled to denounce proposals to resolve the financial crisis by declaring bankruptcy, which some legislators had come to see as a way of making the rich pay while sparing the rest of the population. “Will you be the first to show the world the spectacle of a people assembled in order to betray the public trust?” he demanded.⁵

In Mirabeau’s own mind, his success in talking the National Assembly into taking the unpopular decision to approve more borrowing showed what could be achieved if only a strong leader was given the necessary authority. Mirabeau’s evident ambition was to persuade Louis XVI to embrace the Revolution and to appoint a chief minister—himself, of course—who, unlike the cautious Necker, could dominate the legislature. In this endeavor he encountered obstacles from all sides. The king deeply distrusted the rebellious nobleman who had done so much to undermine royal authority in June and July. Mirabeau’s fellow deputies were equally suspicious of a man who, after leading the defiance of the king at the royal session of June 23, had later defended an absolute royal veto. Mirabeau enthusiastically embraced media-driven politicking by creating a newspaper, the Courrier de Provence, which was very successful. This, and his demonstrated ability to rouse crowds, deepened the fear of his less talented colleagues that he might gain power at their expense. Behind the scenes, Mirabeau was trying to establish direct contact with the king and queen to offer them advice on how to bolster royal power within the framework established by the Revolution. Had they known this, the other deputies would have been even more reluctant to trust him. When popular violence broke out in Paris on October 5, 1789, leading to an armed march on Versailles, many suspected that the ambitious deputy must have somehow had a hand in provoking it.

Although Mirabeau and the Assembly’s radicals profited from the “October Days,” it was the women of Paris who played the major role in the second of the Revolution’s journées. In addition to their anxiety about the price of bread, the women who began gathering outside of Paris’s city hall early on the morning of October 5 were agitated by the latest news from Versailles. For the first time since the July crisis, the king had summoned a unit of foreign soldiers, the Flanders regiment, reviving fears that he planned military action against the Revolution. On the evening of October 1, officers of the king’s bodyguard gave a banquet to welcome the newcomers. The royal family briefly appeared to greet the participating officers, who responded with cheers of “Long live the king!” The reports about the banquet that circulated in Paris depicted it as a veritable counterrevolutionary orgy: regaled with food and drink by the court, the military officers had supposedly adorned themselves with white and black ribbons, symbols of the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties, and trampled on revolutionary tricolor cockades.

By 8:00 a.m. on October 5, a crowd of angry women began to form in front of the Hôtel de Ville, the site of the Paris city government. Prominent among them were the dames de la Halle, the tough and determined marketwomen from the city’s wholesale food market, a group that traditionally expressed the sentiments of the city’s working population on public occasions. The women called on the city fathers to authorize a march of the National Guard to Versailles to demand punishment of the aristocratic officers who had insulted the national colors; they also wanted immediate action to increase the city’s food supply. Recognizing Stanislas Maillard, a National Guard captain who had helped storm the Bastille in July, they called on him to lead their protest, telling him that “the men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they (the women) would do better,” as Maillard recalled the following year.⁶

By the time Lafayette, the National Guard commander, arrived at 11:00 a.m., some women had already set out for Versailles. They recruited others they found in the streets to join them and armed themselves with “broomsticks, lances, pitchforks, swords, pistols, and muskets.” Maillard, who tried to persuade them to leave their weapons behind, estimated their number at seven thousand to eight thousand. The mood of the armed male National Guards at the city hall was also turning mutinous. Not only did they make it clear to Lafayette that they would not fire on “women begging for bread,” but many of them wanted to join the march. Until the middle of the afternoon, Lafayette remained at the Hôtel de Ville, trying to calm the crowd. But by this point, in spite of a cold rain, thousands of Parisians were heading for Versailles, carrying whatever weapons they could find and dragging along some of the National Guard’s cannons. A “prisoner of his own troops,” as an American observer put it, Lafayette finally decided that he had no choice but to join the throng himself.⁷

As the crowd began to arrive in Versailles in midafternoon, some of the king’s advisers urged him to take flight, but the opportunity passed before the monarch could make up his mind to act. The demonstrators flooded into the National Assembly’s meeting room, disrupting its proceedings. “Soon the hall was filled with drunken women, who danced, climbed up the president’s desk, [and] embraced him,” the scandalized Duquesnoy wrote in his journal. Madeleine Glain, a forty-two-year-old housewife, demanded the deputies’ attention and told them that the women “were asking that they not be lacking bread.” A delegation of women were admitted to present their demands for bread to the king himself. “His Majesty answered them that he was suffering at least as much as they were, to see them lacking it,” said the lacemaker Marie-Rose Barré, according to a summary of her testimony the next year; he promised to see that grain shipments to Paris were protected.⁸ The king met with Mounier, the presiding officer of the Assembly, and finally agreed to accept the August 4 decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. By the time Lafayette reached Versailles, the king’s concessions seemed to have calmed the situation. The main problem appeared to be finding food for the hungry marchers, many of whom had not eaten all day, and places for them to sleep.

As dawn broke on October 6, marchers who had spent the night in Versailles began to force their way into the palace. When the royal bodyguards tried to drive them out, violence exploded. Two bodyguards were killed and decapitated, and Marie-Antoinette, fearing for her life, fled from her private bedroom in her nightgown. Lafayette persuaded the National Guardsmen to protect the royal family, and he had the bodyguards affirm their loyalty to the nation by putting on tricolor cockades. But he made it clear to the king that the only way to prevent further bloodshed was for the king to agree that he and his family would immediately move to the capital. The crowd cheered the king when he appeared on the palace balcony to make the announcement, but no one knew how they would react to the queen, whom many Parisians regarded as the Revolution’s main opponent. It took considerable courage for her to show herself on the balcony. When she did, she was accompanied by Lafayette, who risked his own popularity by bowing and kissing her hand. The crowd’s anger subsided enough to bring the crisis to an end, but the queen was deeply shaken. “No one would ever believe what has happened in the last twenty-four hours,” she told her Austrian confidant Mercy d’Argenteau when she was finally able to write to him.⁹

By midday, the royal family had completed its hasty preparations, and the huge mass of protesters, National Guardsmen, and courtiers began a slow march to Paris. As they trudged along, the crowd called out that they were “bringing back the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy,” a reference to the king, the queen, and the little heir to the throne, whose presence in the capital would supposedly guarantee the supply of bread. They also carried the severed heads of the two royal bodyguards they had killed that morning, a grim warning of the fate that awaited those who opposed the Revolution. Popular engravings of the October Days throughout the country highlighted the extraordinary role women had played in the event. Several showed the victorious Paris marketwomen suggestively straddling the barrels of National Guard cannon. Some depictions singled out a striking-looking young woman named Théroigne de Méricourt, whose flamboyant red riding jacket stuck in witnesses’ minds. De Méricourt, originally from Belgium, was one of a number of foreigners who had been so inspired by the outbreak of the Revolution that they had moved to Versailles to follow the National Assembly debates in person. As the Revolution progressed, she would become one of the leading activists calling for women to take a direct role in politics, but she would also become a leading target for misogynist attacks.

The idea that women’s actions had forced a decisive reversal of the relations between the king and the people underlined the degree to which the Revolution was putting fundamental aspects of French society into question. The initiative women had taken during the October Days was so disturbing that many men preferred to believe that a good part of the crowd had been men disguised in women’s clothing. Men who could not bring themselves to accept that women could intervene so forcefully in politics would have been even more upset if they had read two manifestos published soon after the October Days. One of them declared that men, “with their systems of equality and liberty, with their declarations of rights,… leave us in a state of inferiority, truly, of slavery.” In addition to demanding political representation, both these pamphlets called for equal marriage rights between husbands and wives; one even wanted a reform of the French language, so that “the masculine gender will no longer be regarded, even in grammar, as the more noble.” The journalist Brissot, who applauded the political results of the October Days, stayed true to his Rousseauist principles about the distinct roles of the sexes, a view shared by many male revolutionaries. Brissot insisted that once the Assembly relocated itself to Paris, women should be banned from its public galleries. “They can only create a spirit of frivolity there, cause distractions and throw the discussions into disorder,” he opined. “We are still too childish to debate in front of women.”¹⁰

The effect of the women’s march on the October Days was to force both the king and the National Assembly itself, which moved to Paris along with the monarch, to recognize the power of the people of the capital. The royal family was now installed in the Tuileries Palace in the center of the city, a building that would be destroyed in another Paris uprising, the revolt of the Commune in 1871. After moving to the city, the Assembly began holding its sessions in the nearby Salle de Manège, the royal riding hall. The king and the deputies were now dependent on the municipal government of Paris to guarantee their safety. This meant relying on Lafayette and on the city’s Assembly of Representatives, even though Lafayette could barely control his National Guard, and the Assembly of Representatives faced pressure from activists like the rabble-rousing lawyer Georges Danton, who supported a kind of direct democracy at the local level.

Some of the more conservative deputies found the thought of being so closely surrounded by the easily aroused Parisians threatening. Mounier, labeled “Monsieur Veto” in the press, because of his stand during the debate about the king’s powers, retreated to his native province of Dauphiné. He thus became the first of many politicians who, after initially supporting the revolutionary movement, found themselves stigmatized as counterrevolutionaries when they decided it had turned too radical. Others saw opportunities in the new situation, however. Madame de Staël, the daughter of the minister Necker, was one of these. Exercising a more traditional form of female influence on politics than the women who had marched on Versailles, she brought men from different groups into her salon for conversations. These included men from the Third Estate, “distinguished by their intelligence and their talents,” as well as “gentlemen more proud of their merit than of the privileges of their group.” As she liked to recall later, as a result of her hospitality, “the greatest questions that the social order ever gave rise to were treated by the minds most capable of discussing and understanding them.” The king and queen were less assured about their safety and the course of the Revolution than Madame de Staël and her friends. Outwardly, Louis XVI tried to give the impression that he now accepted his position as a constitutional monarch; secretly, he sent a “solemn protestation” to his Bourbon relative, the king of Spain, denouncing “all the acts contrary to royal authority that have been extracted from me since last July 15.”¹¹

At first, Lafayette appeared to be the major winner from the October Days crisis: he had succeeded in limiting the violence at Versailles while prodding the royal family into moving to Paris. But Lafayette’s initial efforts to stop the march to Versailles on October 5, and his intervention to protect the royal family on October 6, made the more radical patriots distrustful of him. In any event, he lacked the temperament to seek power for himself. Mirabeau had no such scruples, but rumors that he had worked to inspire the October Days hurt his already dubious reputation. On November 7, Mirabeau’s rivals in the Assembly blocked his ambitions by passing a decree that prohibited sitting deputies from serving as royal ministers: France’s constitutional monarchy would not imitate the British system, in which royally appointed ministers managed Parliament while also directing the government. Ostensibly, the National Assembly’s decision was justified as a way to protect the separation of powers required by Article 16 of the Declaration of Rights, but everyone understood that it was aimed at Mirabeau. “An eloquent genius directs you and subjugates you,” the deputy Jean Denis Lanjuinais told his colleagues. “What would he not do if he were minister?”¹²

With Lafayette unwilling and Mirabeau unable to take control of the revolutionary movement, new personalities took leading positions in the Assembly and the clubs. Among the patriotic members of the Jacobin Club, a “triumvirate” of young deputies, Antoine Barnave, Adrien Duport, and Alexandre Lameth, emerged as leaders. Barnave, originally a close collaborator of Mounier’s in the Dauphiné provincial movement barely a year earlier, was a talented speaker who did not hesitate to measure himself against Mirabeau in the Assembly debates. Duport, a young magistrate from the Parlement of Paris, had turned against that institution and played an important role in the Society of Thirty. Lameth, less active as a speaker, was a skillful behind-the-scenes politician. Devoted to making the Revolution work, the “triumvirs” had little patience for what they saw as the doctrinaire democratic positions that Robespierre and a handful of other radicals defended. The Jacobin leaders also had to deal with opposition from the right. Despite the defection of their recognized leader, Mounier, the monarchiens still had a number of effective speakers, such as Malouet. On the far right, the abbé Maury, a Catholic priest with experience as a preacher, was a powerful presence at the podium.

As it turned out, the October Days would be the last major upsurge of popular violence in the capital until the summer of 1791; after months of nearly continuous turmoil, the deputies could now resume their work on the constitution under calmer circumstances. Although the Assembly no longer had to fear direct popular pressure after its move to Paris, the deputies now found themselves closely scrutinized and pressured by new media called into existence by the Revolution: the political press and the politicized theater. The first revolutionary newspapers largely confined themselves to reporting what the deputies did, condensing hours of confused debate to brief summaries; even so, it was soon evident that their editors, by the choices they made about which speeches to emphasize, and the language in which they described events, were actively shaping their readers’ reactions. The deputies themselves quickly recognized the indispensability of these printed news bulletins, which spared them the effort of composing their own summaries of the debates for their friends and supporters back home.

The storming of the Bastille transformed the revolutionary press. Throughout the summer and fall of 1789, dozens of new periodicals tried to satisfy the public’s insatiable appetite for political news and polemics. The weekly Révolutions de Paris’s breathless description of the taking of the fortress, featured in its first issue on July 19, showed how journalism could make readers feel they were in the heart of revolutionary action: “The fury was at its height, no one cared about death or danger… Numerous women helped us with all their strength. Even children, after each salvo from the fort, ran here and there to pick up the cannonballs.… We pressed ahead, we reached the staircase, we seized the prisoners, we penetrated everywhere.… This glorious day should astonish our enemies, and promise us the triumph of justice and liberty.”¹³ The journal’s epigraph—“Those above us look powerful only because we are on our knees. Stand up!”—captured the essence of the extraordinary events it recounted.

Not only did the new papers plunge readers into the rush of events as they happened, but they were also far more outspoken than their old-regime predecessors. Typical was Brissot’s Patriote français, whose motto was “A free newspaper is a sentinel always on watch for the people.” Intent not only on reporting the news but also on telling readers what to think about it, Brissot did not hesitate to lecture deputies who, in his view, did not properly understand the principles of democracy. He also used his paper to continue the campaign against slavery that he had launched in February 1788, when he had founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. In his view, the liberty for which the French were fighting needed to be universal.

No other journalist had as much impact as Jean-Paul Marat, an older man previously known primarily for his attacks on established medical and scientific authorities. His Ami du peuple (Friend of the people) quickly attracted attention for its vehement denunciations of deputies and officials whom Marat accused of trying to subvert the Revolution. He also became known for his criticism of the people, whom he chastised for their failure to “demand without let-up the punishment of public enemies.” Marat outdid all other journalists in his zeal to expose hidden opponents of the Revolution and denounce their indifference to the sufferings of the common people. Other revolutionaries worried that his unceasing vilification of all but a handful of the movement’s leaders, and his open celebration of violence—the privileged orders would never have given up their rights “without the bloody scenes that followed the storming of the Bastille,” he wrote in his first issue—would make stability impossible. Within a few weeks of the launch of Marat’s newspaper, the newly installed municipal government tried to shut him down for criticizing one of its officials. It was only the first of many brushes with the authorities that let him pose as a persecuted martyr. Other “patriot” journalists were reluctant to condemn him, fearing that to do so would open the door to an imposition of limits on their own activities. “I regard him as a good citizen who goes too far out of an excess of zeal,” the woman journalist Louise de Kéralio wrote to Brissot.¹⁴ Marat’s provocations changed the boundaries of revolutionary discourse and made him a genuine force in political life.

By the time another celebrated pamphleteer, Camille Desmoulins, began his own weekly newspaper, the Révolutions de France et de Brabant, in late November 1789, so many other periodicals had already started up that he complained he could hardly find a title that wasn’t already taken. Whereas Marat was consistently pessimistic about the prospects for the Revolution’s success, Desmoulins started with a hopeful attitude. The reference to the Belgian province of Brabant in his title reflected optimism that the revolt against Austrian rule that had recently broken out there was a sign that the principles of the French movement were spreading beyond the country’s own borders. Desmoulins promised to treat the news with a sense of humor; it was the only characteristic he shared with the creators of the Actes des Apôtres (Acts of the Apostles), a sharply satirical counterrevolutionary title whose denunciations of the Revolution were as violent as Marat’s polemics. Its contributors included several well-known poets and wits as well as the revolutionary leader Mirabeau’s own brother.

Between the extremes of the pro-revolutionary left and the anti-revolutionary right, other newspapers promised an impartial account of the news. The most important of them, started in November 1789 by the publisher Panckoucke, became the Revolution’s generally acknowledged newspaper of record. Twice the size and price of other newspapers, Panckoucke’s Moniteur had the space to give a full transcript of the Assembly’s debates, rather than just a summary. Reading rooms and cafés made newspapers accessible even to those who could not afford private subscriptions. A German visitor to Paris, Johann Heinrich Campe, observed how workers in Paris would find “one of their comrades, who possesses the rare advantage of being able to read,” and have him read the latest news out loud to them.¹⁵ In the provinces, village priests and local officials performed the same function, sometimes translating papers into the local dialect. By the early fall, revolutionary politicians were acutely aware that their every move was being watched and criticized by an audience spread throughout the country and even beyond.

The collapse of censorship made the stage another powerful venue for the spread of political ideas. Marie-Joseph Chénier, who had been struggling for several years to get his play about the massacre of the Protestants on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 staged, achieved his ambition in November 1789. The play, Charles IX, recounted the story of a French king lured into committing a crime by a foreign-born queen, and a Catholic prelate preaching murder in the name of religion. Answering critics who warned that it might cause a public disturbance, Chénier replied, “If it is dangerous to make fanaticism and tyranny detestable; if it is dangerous to make virtue, laws, liberty, tolerance admirable, let me boast that there are few works as dangerous as ‘Charles IX.’”¹⁶ Another frustrated playwright who was suddenly able to gain a hearing was Olympe de Gouges, whose abolitionist drama Mirza and Zamore, in which a black slave escapes punishment after killing a white man, provoked a riot at the end of 1789. The play launched de Gouges as a one-woman media phenomenon: for the next four years, she bombarded Parisians with theater pieces, pamphlets, wallposters, and public speeches. Like journalists, actors willing to take a political stand became celebrities overnight: when his older colleagues at the Comédie française declined to take leading roles in Chénier’s and Gouges’s plays, the young François-Joseph Talma stepped in and quickly became the era’s most famous performer. His adoption of Roman togas in place of elaborate eighteenth-century costumes for plays set in antiquity helped promote the cult of classical republicanism. It also helped him forge a friendship with another ambitious young man, the military officer Napoleon Bonaparte, that would pay off handsomely after the Revolution.

Watched closely by journalists after their move to Paris and acutely aware of the passions that could be aroused in the theaters, the king and the deputies continued their confrontation over the country’s future. The October Days gave the deputies more leverage over the king, who now promised to accept the fundamental decisions they had taken in August, but the women’s march reminded them that an angry crowd could still intervene decisively in the political process. When a Paris baker accused of holding bread off the market was lynched outside his shop on October 20, 1789, in a riot in which women again played a major role—one of them tied the noose around the victim’s neck—the Assembly reacted by passing a law authorizing the imposition of martial law to stop riots. The deputy Robespierre, already identified as the leading spokesman for the interests of the common people, objected strenuously to a measure that aimed to “push back the people” instead of addressing their complaints about high food prices. The more conservative Duquesnoy, in contrast, longed for a “violent blow to reestablish order,” adding, “A clearcut explosion is needed, some people who form themselves into a mob need to perish.”¹⁷

From Robespierre’s point of view, things became even worse on the following day, when the Assembly decided to limit the right to vote in elections to men who paid taxes equivalent to the value of three days of an ordinary laborer’s wages. A higher qualification was set for members of the electoral colleges, who would choose legislators, and an even higher one, the so-called marc d’argent, for future deputies themselves. Following an argument advanced by Sieyès, this rule created a distinction between “active” citizens, who would have the right to vote and hold office, and “passive” ones, who would be subject to the law but could not participate directly in making or enforcing it. Rising again in defense of the poor, Robespierre charged that the measure “could easily erect an aristocracy of the rich on the ruins of the feudal aristocracy.” For him, the exclusion of poorer citizens from the right to vote violated the basic principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Rights. A year and a half later, in March 1791, he was still demanding to know how “the law can be termed an expression of the general will when the greater number of those for whom it is made can have had no hand in its making.”¹⁸ Robespierre’s position has become basic to modern definitions of democracy, whereas open advocacy of property qualifications for voting has disappeared; in practice, however, Sieyès’s distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens often seems to more accurately describe how modern-day societies function.

By the standards of the time, the voting law was actually fairly inclusive: somewhat more than half of the adult male population, including much of the peasantry, qualified to vote, although the number eligible to be chosen as deputies was only around seventy-two thousand. Because the urban poor were less likely than peasants to pay the required amount of direct taxes, the proportion of passive citizens in cities was higher than in the countryside. In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the heart of revolutionary Paris, only 12 to 14 percent of the residents qualified for voting rights. Under the law, those who could not vote were also not eligible to serve in the National Guard, the citizen militia that was now tasked with keeping public order. In the capital, especially, the division the law created between the wealthier, active citizens and the rest of the population was a constant provocation to the ordinary men and women who had stormed the Bastille in July and forced the king to accept the Revolution and move to Paris in October. The journalist Marat’s populist denunciations of a system that favored “the capitalists, the bankers, the speculators… the merchants, the retailers, those who live on their investments, more concerned with their fortunes than with liberty,” while denying a political voice to “the little people, the only decent part of the capital,” had an obvious appeal.¹⁹

Even as the majority of the deputies to the National Assembly voted for a system they thought would defend the rights of property-owners, another of their decisions changed the ownership of much of the land in the kingdom and set in motion a sequence of events that would create a divisive conflict about religion. On November 2, 1789, at the conclusion of an emotional debate that had lasted nearly a month, the deputies voted by a narrow margin—510 to 345—to put the property of the Catholic Church “at the disposal of the Nation.” By abolishing the tithes and payments to clergy for performing religious rituals as part of the August 4 decrees, the National Assembly had committed itself to funding the Church. To do so, the deputies needed to find a source of revenue, making the Church’s property an obvious target. Talleyrand, a pro-revolutionary bishop, had formally proposed the measure on October 10. Born into an aristocratic family but barred from traditional careers, including the military, because of a club foot, Talleyrand was one of many members of the clergy suspected of having gone into the Church despite having no real commitment to religious concerns. According to his optimistic calculations, selling off the Church’s assets would not only provide enough revenue to raise the income of most parish priests, but also enable the government to pay off its existing debt.

The effects of the expropriation and sale of the church lands, begun the following April, were felt in every corner of France. “What a change this single decree and the consequences that it is necessarily going to have are going to make in… the arrangements of all kinds that have existed in France for many centuries,” Adrien-Joseph Colson, a lawyer employed to manage one nobleman’s estate, wrote to his client.²⁰ The Church owned roughly 10 percent of all French real estate, including rural land leased out to farmers and many choice urban properties. The income from its holdings supported schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions as well as churches, convents, and monasteries. The government would now have to decide which of these establishments it would still support, thus involving itself in the internal affairs of an institution that held deep meaning for much of the population.

Most of the French clergy had initially welcomed the Revolution; a former court preacher, Claude Fauchet, had delivered the eulogy for the revolutionaries who had been killed in the storming of the Bastille. There was little sympathy, even among the clergy itself, for enabling aristocratic bishops and abbots to maintain lavish lifestyles. Many deputies held up the holy poverty of the first Christians as an example worthy of the clergy’s imitation, and underpaid parish curés were willing to let the government reform an institution they saw as having lost touch with its true mission. Adrien Lamourette, one of these “patriot” priests, urged his colleagues to accept the expropriation of ecclesiastical property with “gratitude and joy, as a blessing from Providence to regenerate the Church.”²¹

It was clear, however, that many deputies, imbued with the Enlightenment’s critical attitude toward the Catholic Church, saw the restructuring of the institution as a chance to reduce its influence and autonomy. “Whether the assembly has acted… entirely through patriotism or from a great desire of lowering the clergy I will not pretend to say,” an English observer wrote. Opponents such as the abbé Maury, one of the most articulate members of the noirs, denounced the nationalization of the church lands as a sign of a “crisis of delirious impiety.” Its origins, he said, could be found in the pages of that monument of hostility to religion, the Encyclopédie.²²

The deputies were also acutely aware that this measure could be seen as a threat to property rights. The property of the Church, the deputies in favor of expropriation asserted, was made up of donations given to ensure the performance of religious and charitable services; it had not been given to any specific individuals, and if alternative sources of funding were provided for these purposes, it could legitimately be taken over by the state. Opponents of the measure warned that overriding the Church’s claims to property it had owned for many centuries would open the door to assertions that “all the members of a nation and all the goods they possess in its territory belong to the nation.”²³

The practical obstacles to converting the church lands into a source of revenue for the state were also daunting. Talleyrand noted that if all church properties were put up for sale at once, the market would be flooded and the government would not get full value for them. He proposed the issuance of certificates backed by the value of the church lands that the state would use to pay its expenses. Individuals could then exchange these assignats for church lands when they found property they wanted to purchase. In this way, the government would get the financial benefit of the operation immediately, without having to wait until the entire stock of church property was sold off. Since they could be converted into something tangible—real estate—the assignats were initially seen as something different from paper money, a form of currency distrusted in France ever since the spectacular failure of John Law’s financial schemes at the start of Louis XV’s reign.

In view of the desperate financial situation facing the French government, the lure of the scheme to sell the church lands was strong. Tax collections had virtually collapsed, and once the deputies ruled out a state bankruptcy, money had to be found somewhere. Many “patriot” members of the clergy accepted the notion that the Church needed to make sacrifices for the public good; they were also pleased with the promise of a relatively substantial income for the curés who actually served in churches. Ostensibly, the question of church property did not touch on the nature of Catholic belief or change familiar rituals. Nevertheless, it was clear to everyone that the Church would now be firmly subordinated to the state. “Religion was annihilated, its ministers reduced to the deplorable condition of agents appointed by brigands,” the conservative bishop of Tréguier in Brittany complained. Mirabeau and other supporters of the measure had foreseen that purchasers of church lands, or biens nationaux (national properties), as they came to be known, would be turned into loyalists to the Revolution; they had not anticipated that the purchasers would also be condemned as enemies of religion and sometimes threatened with excommunication. The expropriation thus created a dynamic of polarization that soon pushed the National Assembly into an even broader restructuring of the Church.

Just one day after the vote to make the church lands state property, the deputies, at Sieyès’s urging, decided to completely remake the map of France, replacing historical geographic entities with new units. The provinces were to be replaced by new départements (departments). Once the plan was implemented, in 1790, the 130-odd Catholic dioceses were also to be redrawn so that their boundaries would coincide with those of the departments. The jurisdictions of the law courts were changed to fit with the new geographic subdivisions of the kingdom as well. Of the many measures taken by the National Assembly, few have been as successful and long-lasting as the creation of the departments, which are still the fundamental subdivisions of France today.

To the revolutionary reformers, the map of the kingdom, to which Louis XVI had devoted such attention in his youth, exemplified the irrational nature of the institutions inherited from the past. The overlapping boundaries of provinces, court districts, and dioceses had been established haphazardly over the centuries. The provinces varied tremendously in size, population, and wealth. Most importantly, in Sieyès’s mind, was the fact that they were a psychological obstacle to the creation of a unified nation of equal citizens. His plan was to “melt the various peoples of France into a single people, and the various provinces into a single Empire.” He warned, “If we miss this occasion, it will not return again, and the provinces will guard eternally their esprit de corps, their privileges, their pretensions, their jealousies.”²⁴

Sieyès’s original plan called for creating eighty square units of equal size, each one subdivided into nine smaller subunits for local administration. The straight lines of Sieyès’s map ignored geographic realities, such as the location of rivers and mountains, as well as the pattern of transportation routes and market regions. The plan that was ultimately adopted tried to avoid separating towns from the rural areas that supplied them with food. Although the legislators wanted to abolish the distinct identities of the historical provinces, they accepted a proposal by Mirabeau to draw the new map in such a way that most departments were carved out of single provinces, avoiding arrangements that would have thrown together populations that sometimes had a long history of mutual hostility; some smaller provinces survived almost intact under new names.

Named after natural features such as rivers—for example, there are departments named after the “Lower Loire” and the “Upper Loire”—or mountains, such as the “Puy-de-Dôme,” the departments were not supposed to inspire the kind of psychological identification inhabitants felt toward their historical provinces. Many people accepted the idea that local interests needed to be subordinated to those of the nation. A Lyon newspaper editor, for example, commented at the end of 1789 that his paper had “ceased to be the journal of Lyon, to become… almost exclusively the journal of the National Assembly.” But there were others who were unhappy about this loss. A group of Norman nobles protested that “all the French have been rudely cut off from their customary affections by the preaching of a vague and restless false patriotism and a general system of equality and uniformity.”²⁵ In fact, provincial identities were not so easily uprooted. They would experience a revival in the nineteenth century, which witnessed a surge of interest in regional history, folklore, and dialects, and the French today still identify themselves as Alsatians or Provençaux more often than as residents of a particular department.

The decision to replace traditional political, legal, and religious units with the new departments set off an intense competition among provincial towns bidding to be chosen as the administrative centers of the new units, or at least of one of their subdivisions. The new arrangements were a demotion for some of the cities that had housed provincial parlements or intendancies under the old regime, but the redrawing of the map gave many places that had not housed major institutions before 1789 a new importance. In each department, an elected “directory” was to take over most of the functions previously exercised by royal officials. Within the departments, towns and villages would also elect their own local leaders. The National Assembly assumed that with a common spirit of patriotism, these local governments would carry out the laws decreed by the legislators; the top-down bureaucratic system of the old regime was swept away, leaving the king and the ministers dependent on the voluntary cooperation of local officials over whom they had no control.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE MAP OF FRANCE: This map details the replacement of France’s historical provincial loyalties and relocated institutions such as courts and bishoprics with departments. The redrawing of the map has proved to be one of the most lasting accomplishments of the Revolution. Credit: Richard Gilbreath.

As 1789 drew to a close, the Assembly took up another fundamental question: Could members of religious minorities exercise the full rights of citizens, including the right to hold public office? The Declaration of Rights had promised these groups freedom of worship, but Catholicism remained the only state-backed religion. The deputy Brunet de Latuque pointed out that several Protestants had been elected to the Assembly and concluded that there was no basis for excluding them from other positions. Other deputies then raised the issue of rights for practitioners of two professions, public executioners and actors, that were generally denigrated in French society at the time. The conservative abbé Maury defended these prejudices: men who put others to death, or who publicly pretended to be something they were not, did not deserve the same respect as other citizens. The monarchien Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre countered that “the executioner only obeys the law”; as for actors, since everyone attended the theater, “we should either forbid plays altogether or remove the dishonor associated with acting.”²⁶

Having agreed that Protestants, executioners, and actors should have the same rights as other French citizens, the Assembly then turned to one last group whose status had not been settled: France’s forty thousand Jews. Maury and Clermont-Tonnerre again took opposing sides. The abbé insisted that Jews were members of a foreign nation with its own laws and had “never undertaken anything other than commerce based on money.” He was prepared to tolerate them as resident aliens, but not to admit them as French citizens. Clermont-Tonnerre agreed that no minority group should be allowed to have its own laws and courts, as Jews had under the old regime, but if they were willing to give up those rights and accept French laws, they deserved citizenship rights. If they continued to keep up some distinctive practices, such as opposing intermarriage and refusing to eat certain foods, that was their business. “Is there a law that obliges me to marry your daughter?” he asked. Deviating from the logic of its rulings on other minority groups, the Assembly decided to postpone any decision on Jews’ rights. “Unhappy Jews, remain forever strangers to the nation whose justice you invoke!” a radical newspaper wrote.²⁷ At the beginning of 1790, the wealthy and assimilated Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne succeeded in obtaining citizenship, but the decision was not extended to the poorer and more numerous Ashkenazi community in Alsace until the Assembly’s next-to-last day of business in September 1791.

In an address to the French people summing up the remarkable year 1789, Talleyrand reminded them of how their lives had changed. “Raised to the rank of citizens, eligible for all jobs, informed critics of the administration when you are not part of it, knowing that everything is done by you and for you; equals before the law, free to act, to speak, to write; owing no obedience to men, only to the common will, what an improvement in your condition!”²⁸ The new national constitution was still far from finished, he admitted, and the details of many of the Assembly’s decisions still needed to be fleshed out. Nevertheless, the historic nature of the year’s events was indeed obvious to everyone. Even peasants in remote villages and humble urban artisans had done things they had never dreamed of before. They had drawn up cahiers de doléances and participated in elections. In many cases, they had risen up against their seigneurs and municipal authorities. The expropriation of church properties and the redrawing of the boundaries of provinces portended further transformations.

For Parisians, the revolutionary year 1789 had been especially intense, punctuated by the journées of July 14 and October 5–6, which had taught them that they could, by their own actions, make history. The citizens of the capital had come to expect to hear the cries of newspaper vendors in their streets, and to join the animated discussions about public events taking place in their cafés and public squares. Whether they experienced these changes as traumas, as Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette unquestionably did, or welcomed them, like many of the country’s ordinary people, everyone understood that life in France would never be the same.