The French Revolution 1789-1795

by Bertha Meriton Gardiner

The nobles and the revolution.

The joy and enthusiasm exhibited at the festival of the federation was a genuine expression of desire for union entertained by the main and best part of the population, but this desire rested on no substantial basis. As the Assembly continued its work divisions multiplied, party spirit increased in violence, and the country, in place of enjoying order and settled government, drifted further in the direction of anarchy. The upper nobility did not conceal its detestation of the work of the revolution, or its expectation that the whole would be reversed. Most great nobles left the country, and establishing themselves at Coblentz or Turin proscribed all who took part in the revolution, threatened invasion, and called on foreign powers to restore the King to his rights by force. Those who remained in France assumed an attitude of scornful defiance, and by protests and intrigues sought to stir up hatred against the Assembly, and to bring it into contempt with the country. The lower nobles, if in some way losers, would have greatly gained by the revolution if it had proceeded no further; but various causes induced them to declare against it. The Assembly made no efforts to conciliate them, and a decree abolishing titles and armorial bearings had deeply hurt the pride of the whole order (June 9). By many it was held a point of honour to remain true to their caste; and, in fact, those who gave support to the revolutionary laws were placed under a social ban. Many nobles quitted the country with their families, owing to the insecurity of their lives. Those who were arming on the frontiers brought on all who belonged to their order the suspicion of being their accomplices. The peasantry needed no incentive to turn upon the seigneurs. Although the Assembly had abolished the feudal rights of a servile origin, and those which represented sovereignty, it maintained, until compensation was made to the owners, all dues presumed to have had their origin in agreement, and to represent the price paid for the possession of land. The arrangement was just, and, if it had been feasible, would have been of advantage to almost everyone interested. But to effect it a strong government was required, and France was in the midst of revolution. The peasants, in whose minds all feudal rights were inextricably bound up together, refused to recognise legal distinctions between them. The machinery, moreover, provided by the Assembly for effecting enfranchisement, in place of being speedy and simple, was complicated and in many cases practically inoperative. Hence the relations between peasants and seigneurs, as the revolution advanced, grew more and more embittered. While the owners of the dues threatened suits, their debtors resorted to violence. Scenes similar to those witnessed in the east in 1789 now occurred over a large portion of the country. Again and again, in 1790 and 1791, in the centre, in La Marche and Limousin, further south in Perigord and Rouergue, in the west in Bretagne, as well as in the east in Lyonnais, Alsace, Franche-Comté, and Champagne, peasants and vagabonds went about the country in bands, burning country-houses and title-deeds, and murdering those who attempted resistance.

Weakness of the Central Government.

The central government, whose duty it was to protect life and property, was impotent even to attempt the restoration of order. The Assembly, through fear that the King would use authority for the undoing of its work, had left him without means of enforcing obedience to the laws. His only agents were the administrative bodies, and he had no means of compelling them to perform their duties. The highest authority in reality rested with the administrative bodies which were lowest in the hierarchical scale—namely, with the municipalities. Of these there were no less than 44,000, each acting independently of the other, and though, according to the constitution, bound to carry out the instructions of the directories of districts and departments, able to disregard them with impunity. For the maintenance of order a Riot Act had been passed, but that the King might not take advantage of it for the suppression of constitutional rights, the municipalities alone had been empowered to put it in force. Sometimes municipal officers were unable, sometimes unwilling, to call out the national guard for the forcible dispersion of rioters. In towns the bourgeoisie served on the national guard, and there was no want of educated men to hold office. But in rural districts there were no inhabitants except a few nobles and curés and an unlettered peasantry. In hundreds of instances the mayor and his colleagues could neither read nor write, spoke only their own patois, and were incapable even of understanding the laws that they were required to enforce. National guards, in place of protecting the noble and his family from harm, took part with their neighbours in destroying their dwelling, and in maltreating all whom interest or prejudice incited them to regard as conspirators against the revolution.

Mutinies in the army.

Though troops of the line could be called out by municipalities to aid in the enforcement of the Riot Act, their presence was in towns but an additional cause of disorder. Class feeling was strongly pronounced in the army, and the men turned upon their officers, accusing them of extortion and oppression. All over the country, wherever regiments were quartered, troops mutinied, demanding milder discipline and higher pay, forming councils, seizing military chests, and compelling officers to render account of the sums that passed through their hands. These frequent mutinies alarmed men who closed their eyes to outrages committed by peasants. Supported by a large majority in the Assembly, the Marquis of Bouillé suppressed with heavy loss of life a serious mutiny that broke out in a Swiss regiment, Châteauvieux, stationed at Nancy (August 31). Reforms were afterwards effected both in army and navy. The pay of the men was raised, and juries composed of both men and officers instituted for the trial of military offences.

Schism in the Church.

The upper clergy, like the nobles, were alienated from the revolution by the fusion of the three orders in one chamber, and by the appropriation of Church property, and the civil constitution of the clergy, were rendered irreconcilable enemies. They accused the Assembly of seeking to destroy the Catholic religion, and denounced the civil constitution as unlawful interference with matters of Church government and discipline, which, as being matters of faith, were beyond the cognisance of the state. But these attempts to excite hostility against the Assembly had little success. The great body of the nation had its interests far too closely bound up with the revolution to be tempted into a crusade against it. The peasantry had no quarrel with ecclesiastical changes which affected neither eyes nor ears. The civil constitution itself did but reform the Church on the basis laid down in the cahiers. It was only in the south where the existence of Protestants excited religious rivalry, and the population was most fanatic and intolerant, that the work of the Assembly met with any serious resistance. At Perpignon, Tarn, Toulouse, and other towns, the election of administrative bodies and the closing of the monasteries gave rise to rioting and loss of life; while at Nimes, where Protestants formed a third of the inhabitants, the streets for three days ran with blood. Amongst the lower clergy there was small disposition to follow the lead of their ecclesiastical superiors. The state, which had appropriated church property, had improved their material condition, and raised their position within the Church. Of the monks, two-thirds elected to abandon monastic life. Nevertheless, the arguments employed against recognition of the civil constitution disturbed the minds of the curés, and the enforcement by the Assembly of an oath as a condition for holding any benefice or office, placed in the hands of the bishops, who had been driven by the loss of their revenues into unappeasable hostility to the revolution, an arm of which they were not slow to avail themselves, and by which they created a schism within the Church (November 27). This oath engaged the taker to be faithful to the nation, the law, and the King, and to maintain the constitution. The object which the Assembly had in view was to replace bishops who refused to take part in carrying out the new laws by men attached to the revolution. The fact, however, that the oath might be interpreted to imply acknowledgment of the lawfulness of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the provisions of which were inconsistent with the Papal system, was left out of account. The Pope declared that those who had taken it were schismatics, and cut off from communion with the Church. Passive acceptance of the civil constitution was, therefore, no longer possible to the curés. Of 138 bishops and archbishops only four took the oath, and two-thirds of the secular clergy refused it. Many members of the regular orders, however, took it, so that in the end about 60,000 ecclesiastics, or half of the clergy of France, accepted the new arrangements.

By the imposition of this oath discord was aroused in every department. The Assembly granted nonjurors a pension, and allowed them to officiate in parish churches. The result was that in two-thirds of the parishes of France there were two ministers, nominally of the same persuasion, struggling, the one to gain, the other to maintain, influence over the flock. The constitutional priest represented the nonjuror, or former incumbent, as a plotter against the laws and the constitution; the latter represented the intruder as a schismatic, incapable of administering any sacrament, so that persons married or children baptised by him were in reality neither married nor baptised. Here nonjurors were regarded as enemies to the State; there the constitutional clergy as enemies to religion; and whichever side was the stronger proceeded to acts of violence against the other. Generally, in the north of France, the nonjurors had comparatively small influence; and it was only in certain provinces, where they had the support of the peasantry—in Poitou, Auvergne, Alsace, and parts of Artois, Franche-Comté, Champagne, Languedoc, and Bretagne—that any large portion of the population exhibited zeal in their behalf.

Bold and radical reformers as the makers of the constitution proved themselves, monarchical sentiment and distrust of the political capacity of some million and a half of their countrymen had caused them at times to shrink from carrying out fully Rousseau’s theory of the sovereignty of the people. Hence, while their work was on one side attacked by the party of reaction, on the other it was decried by the extreme left, as being in contradiction to the principles which the Assembly had itself proclaimed in the Declaration of Rights. Outside the Assembly these views were even more strongly expressed. ♦Brissot.♦ One of the most noted journalists of the time, Brissot, combined with ultra-democratic tendencies a firm belief in the advantages of individual liberty, and was a zealous exponent of opinions subsequently known as Girondist. His ideal form of government, which he aspired to see established in France, was a democratic republic, where no civil or political distinctions existed between man and man; where habits of local government and obedience to the law allowed, without detriment to public order, the action of the central government to be barely visible; where principles of free trade, liberty of the press, and religious toleration were carried systematically out; where education, respect for labour, simple and virtuous habits of life prevailed amongst all classes. On the ground that vice and corruption readily found footing in large towns, Brissot was averse to the capital exercising political ascendancy over the country. ‘Without private morality,’ he said, ‘no public morality, no public spirit, and no liberty.’ The goal here pointed out was truly Utopian as compared with the actual condition of things in France. Nevertheless, Brissot was credulous enough to believe that, owing to the beneficial influences of general education and free institutions, its attainment would be possible in the course of some twenty or thirty years.