Origins of the French Revolution

¶ … origins of the French revolution

According to historian Steven Kreis, "the causes of the French Revolution are complicated, so complicated that a debate still rages among historians regarding origins, causes and results. In general, the real causes of the Revolution must be located in the rigid social structure of French society during the ancien regime" (Kreis 2000). However, to merely attribute the revolution to the feudal structure of French society, known as the ancien regime that subdivided French society into three estates, or social classes, that of the clergy, nobility, and 'commoners' is not enough of an explanation to truly understand why the revolution occurred. Historians give different weight to the role of the bourgeois, the extent to which tensions between and within the First, Second, and Third Estates stimulated the revolutionary fervor amongst the peasants and the middle class, and also the ideological role of the Enlightenment, as they attempt to ferret out the causes of the fall of the French monarchy.

Steven Kreis subscribes to the theory that the newly empowered French bourgeoisie had developed a collective sense of its great significance and power in the new French 18th century economy. Many members of the bourgeoisie, such as the powerful merchants, manufacturers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, intellectuals produced by the rapidly expanding industrial sector, had acquired tremendous amounts of money. This social segment owned 20% of all the land, but they could not use their wealth to gain status or privilege. Unlike the aristocracy and clergy they had to pay taxes on what they had earned through toil, not through birth. Thus the bourgeoisie were angry at the current social segmentation of France, and wanted members of the French Roman Catholic Church, army and government positions opened up to members of the Third Estate. They believed that such positions should be allocated upon merit, not upon past aristocratic parentage.

But those who profited from the structure of the ancien regime were hostile to any loss of power. The institutions of the regime were inflexible and unable to change along with the social and cultural climate of the era. The French government's class and governing structure favored the first two estates, the clergy and the nobility, and limited the degree of power the Third Estate, made up of the bourgeoisie and the peasants could gain. France was an absolute monarchy, and unlike more representational monarchies such as Great Britain, France had no Parliament, only an Estates General made up of representatives from each of the Three Estates. This supposedly representative body had not met since 1614, for the king had refused to convene the Estates General, and the Estates General met at the king's will and command (Kreis 2000).

The administrative bureaucracy of France was corrupt and dispensed its offices and edicts through a system of patronage, not merit, and France had no system of united laws. Economically, the clergy and nobility acted were a drain upon the nation, for they were not taxed. They generated no new wealth or labor while the wealth-generating Third Estate of merchants and laboring peasants did, filling the coffers of the state with the few pennies it possessed. The taxes were increasing upon the poorest members of society, the peasants who paid the most taxes, because by 1789 France was bankrupt, unable to pay off its debts as the result of the wars of Louis XIV (Kreis 2000).

Thus, "by 1789, the bourgeoisie had numerous grievances they wished addressed. They sought a Parliament that would make all the laws for the nation. They desired a constitution that would limit the king's powers. They also desired fair trials, religious toleration and vast administrative reforms. These are all liberal ideas that would certainly emerge after the summer of 1789" (Kreis 2000). Not only were members of the Third Estate angry, they also felt with some justification that the current system was so intransigent and that internal reform was unlikely, if not impossible. Thus the conditions were fertile for outright revolt, spurred on by the hard economic circumstances and misery of the peasants.

However, another theory of the causes of the French Revolution was that France essentially imploded from within its most privileged classes, namely that of the monarchy, nobility, and clergy. Although the French Catholic Church was one of the a privileged Estates, holding tax-free land that amounted to 10% of the total acreage of France, and many bishops and abbots lived in Paris or at Versailles, "members of the lower clergy were usually humble, poorly-paid and overworked village priests" (Kreis 2000). The supposedly unified First Estate was thus become stratified from within, which created weaknesses within the Estate.

Like the clergy, the nobility or Second Estate was torn between two tiers, the upper and lower nobility. The Nobility of the Sword was made up of members of ancient lineage with family history that could be traced back hundreds of years, while the Nobility of the Robe has much less power than did the Nobility of the Sword. This is why "some of the lesser nobility were partial to the philosophes of the Enlightenment and during the early days of the Revolution would be considered 'liberal nobles.' They wished to see an end to royal absolutism but not necessarily the end of the monarchy. These liberal nobles tended to look to France's traditional enemy, England, as a model for what France ought to become, a limited or constitutional monarchy" (Kreis 2000).

A third theory regarding the causes of the French Revolution suggests that the nationalism and reasoned democracy advocated by the Enlightenment caused the revolution. Steven Kreis is somewhat skeptical of this idea, noting that many of the philosophers we associate with the revolution such as Voltaire and Rousseau did not advocate violent overthrow of the existing monarchy. Voltaire actually had close relations with the monarchy during his lifetime, and merely wanted an enlightened monarch, not an abolition of the monarchy. The ideal society advocated by Rousseau was more of an enlightened ideal dictatorship, not a participatory system. These men were not the 'Karl Marxes' of the 18th century. However, the recent example of the American Revolution undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence upon the discontented members of French society, both the new middle class and the unhappy members of the lower tiers of the aristocracy. "The Enlightenment preached the steady and inevitable progress of man's moral and intellectual nature. The American example served as a great lesson -- tyranny could be challenged. Man did have inalienable rights. New governments could be constructed" (Kreis 2000).