Louis XVI. was reluctant to abandon a tittle of his absolute power, nor would the privileged classes sacrifice their time-honoured traditions; they were inexorable. The king, more ponderous and irresolute every day, vacillated Meeting of the states-general. between Necker the liberal on one side and Marie Antoinette, whose feminine pride was opposed to any concessions, with the comte d’Artois, a mischievous nobody who could neither choose a side nor stick to one, on the other. When the states-general opened on the 5th of May 1789 Louis XVI. had decided nothing. The conflict between him and the Assembly immediately broke out, and became acute over the verification of the mandates; the third estate desiring this to be made in common by the deputies of the three orders, which would involve voting by head, the suppression of classes and the preponderance of the third estate. On the refusal of the privileged classes and after an interval of six weeks, the third estate, considering that they represented 96% of the nation, and in accordance with the proposal of Sieyès, declared that they represented the nation and therefore were authorized to take resolutions unaided, the first being that in future no arrangement for taxation could take place without their consent.
The king, urged by the privileged classes, responded to this Oath of the tennis-court. first revolutionary act, as in 1614, by closing the Salle des Menus Plaisirs where the third estate were sitting; whereupon, gathered in one of the tennis-courts under the presidency of Bailly, they swore on the 20th of June not to separate before having established the constitution of the kingdom.
Louis XVI. then decided, on the 23rd, to make known his policy in a royal lit de justice. He declared for the lesser reform, the fiscal, not the social; were this rejected, he declared that “he alone would arrange for the welfare of his people.” Meanwhile he annulled the sitting of the The Lit de Justice of June 23, 1789. 17th, and demanded the immediate dispersal of the Assembly. The third estate refused to obey, and by the mouth of Bailly and Mirabeau asserted the legitimacy of the Revolution. The refusal of the soldiers to coerce the Assembly showed that the monarchy could no longer rely on the army; and a few days later, when the lesser nobility and the lower ranks of the clergy had united with the third estate whose cause was their own, the king yielded, and on the 27th of June commanded both orders to join in the National Assembly, which was thereby recognized and the political revolution sanctioned. But at the same time, urged by the “infernal cabal” of the queen and the comte d’Artois, Louis XVI. called in the foreign regiments—the only ones of which he could be certain—and dismissed Necker. The Assembly, dreading a sudden attack, demanded the withdrawal of the troops. Meeting with a refusal, Paris Taking of the Bastille. opposed the king’s army with her citizen-soldiers; and by the taking of the Bastille, that mysterious dark fortress which personified the ancien régime, secured the triumph of the Revolution (July 14). The king was obliged to recall Necker, to mount the tricolor cockade at the Hôtel de Ville, and to recognize Bailly as mayor of Paris and La Fayette as commander of the National Guard, which remained in arms after the victory. The National Assembly had right on its side after the 20th of June and might after the 14th of July. Thus was accomplished the Revolution which was to throw into the melting-pot all that had for centuries appeared fixed and stable.
As Paris had taken her Bastille, it remained for the towns and country districts to take theirs—all the Bastilles of feudalism. Want, terror and the contagion of examples precipitated the disruption of governmental authority and of the Spontaneous anarchy. old political status; and sudden anarchy dislocated all the organs of authority. Upon the ruins of the central administration temporary authorities were founded in various isolated localities, limited in area but none the less defiant of the government. The provincial assemblies of Dauphiné and elsewhere gave the signal; and numerous towns, following the example of Paris, instituted municipalities which substituted their authority for that of the intendants and their subordinates. Clubs were openly organized, pamphlets and journals appeared, regardless of administrative orders; workmen’s unions multiplied in Paris, Bordeaux and Lyons, in face of drastic prohibition; and anarchy finally set in with the defection of the army in Paris on the 23rd of June, at Nancy, at Metz and at Brest. The crying abuses of the old régime, an insignificant factor at the outset, soon combined with the widespread agrarian distress, due to the unjust distribution of land, the disastrous exploitation of the soil, the actions of the government, and the severe winter of 1788. Discontent showed itself in pillage and incendiarism on country estates; between March and July 1789 more than three hundred agrarian riots took place, uprooting the feudal idea of property, already compromised by its own excesses. Not only did pillaging take place; the boundaries of property were also ignored, and people no longer held themselves bound to pay taxes. These jacqueries hastened the movement of the regular revolution.
The decrees of the 4th of August, proposed by those noble “patriots” the duc d’Aiguillon and the vicomte de Noailles, who had already on the 23rd of June made armed resistance to the evacuation of the Hall of Assembly, The night of August 4. put the final touch to the revolution begun by the provincial assemblies, by liberating land and labour, and proclaiming equality among all Frenchmen. Instead of exasperating the demands of the peasants and workmen by repression and raising civil war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they drew a distinction between personal servitude, which was suppressed, and the rights of contract, which were to be redeemed—a laudable but impossible distinction. The whole feudal system crumbled before the revolutionary insistence of the peasants; for their masters, bourgeois or nobles, terrified by prolonged riots, capitulated and gradually had to consent to make the resolutions of the 4th of August a reality.
Overjoyed by this social liberation, the Assembly awarded Louis XVI. the title of “renewer of French liberty”; but remaining faithful to his hesitating policy of the 23rd of June, he ratified the decrees of the 4th of Elaboration of the constitution. August, only with a very ill grace. On the other hand, the privileged classes, and notably the clergy, who saw the whole traditional structure of their power threatened, now rallied to him, and when after the 28th of August the Assembly set to work on the new constitution, they combined in the effort to recover some of the position they had lost. But whatever their theoretical agreement on social questions, politically they were hopelessly at odds. The bourgeoisie, conscious of their opportunity, decided for a single chamber against the will of the noblesse; against that of the king they declared it permanent, and, if they accorded him a suspensory veto, this was only in order to guard them against the extreme assertion of popular rights. Thus the progress of the Revolution, so far, had left the mass of the people still excluded from any constitutional influence on the government, which was in the hands of the well-to-do classes, which also controlled the National Guard and the municipalities. The irritation of the disfranchised proletariat was moreover increased by the appalling dearness of bread and food generally, which the suspicious temper of the times—fomented by the tirades of Marat in the Ami du peuple—ascribed to English intrigues in revenge for the aid given by France to the American colonies, and to the treachery in high places that made these intrigues successful. The climax came with the rumour that the court was preparing a new military coup d’état, a rumour that seemed to be confirmed by indiscreet toasts proposed at a banquet by the officers of the guard at Versailles; and on the night of the 5th to the 6th of October a Parisian mob forced the king and royal family to return with them to Paris amid cries of “We are bringing the baker, the baker’s wife and the little baker’s boy!” The Assembly followed; and henceforth king and Assembly were more or less under the influence of the whims and passions of a populace maddened by want and suspicion, by the fanatical or unscrupulous incitements of an unfettered press, and by the unrestrained oratory of obscure demagogues in the streets, the cafés and the political clubs.
Convened for the purpose of elaborating a system that should conciliate all interests, the Assembly thus found itself forced into a conflict between the views of the people, who feared betrayal, and the court, which dreaded being overwhelmed. This schism was reflected in the parties of the Assembly; the absolutists of the extreme Right; the moderate monarchists of the Right and Centre; the constitutionalists of the Left Centre and Left; and, finally, on the extreme Left the democratic revolutionists, among whom Robespierre sat as yet all but unnoticed. Of talent there was enough and to spare in the Assembly; what was conspicuously lacking was common sense and a practical knowledge of affairs. Of all the orators who declaimed from the tribune, Mirabeau alone realized the perils of the situation and possessed the power of mind and will to have mastered them. Unfortunately, however, he was discredited by a disreputable past, and yet more by the equivocal attitude he had to assume in order to maintain his authority in the Assembly while working in what he believed to be the true interests of the court. His political ideal for France was that of the monarchy, rescued from all association with the abuses of the old régime and “broad-based upon the people’s will”; his practical counsel was that the king should frankly proclaim this ideal to the people as his own, should compete with the Assembly for popular favour, while at the same time using every means to win over those by whom his authority was flouted. For a time Mirabeau influenced the counsels of the court through the comte de Montmorin; but the king neither trusted him nor could be brought to see his point of view, and Marie Antoinette, though she resigned herself to negotiating with him, was very far from sympathizing with his ideals. Finally, all hope of the conduct of affairs being entrusted to him was shattered when the Assembly passed a law forbidding its members to become ministers.
The attempted reconciliation with the king having failed, the Assembly ended by working alone, and made the control that it should have exerted an instrument, not of co-operation but of strife. It inaugurated its legislative Declaration of the rights of man. labours by a metaphysical declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (October 2, 1789). This enunciation of universal verities, the bulk of which have, sooner or later, been accepted by all civilized nations as “the gospel of modern times,” was inspired by all the philosophy of the 18th century in France and by the Contrat Social. It comprised various rational and humane ideas, no longer theological, but profoundly and deliberately thought out: ideas as to the sovereign-right of the nation, law by general consent, man superior to the pretensions of caste and the fetters of dogma, the vindication of the ideal and of human dignity. Unable to rest on historic precedent like England, the Constituent Assembly took as the basis for its labours the tradition of the thinkers.
Upon the principles proclaimed in this Declaration the constitution of 1791 was founded. Its provisions are discussed elsewhere (see the section below on Law and Institutions); here it will suffice to say that it established under the The constitution. sovereign people, for the king was to survive merely as the supreme executive official, a wholly new model of government in France, both in Church and State. The historic divisions of the realm were wiped out; for the old provinces were substituted eighty-three departments; and with the provinces vanished the whole organization, territorial, administrative and ecclesiastical, of the ancien régime. In one respect, indeed, the system of the old monarchy remained intact; the tradition of centralization established by Louis XIV. was too strong to be overthrown, and the destruction of the historic privileges and immunities with which this had been ever in conflict only served to strengthen this tendency. In 1791 France was pulverized into innumerable administrative atoms incapable of cohesion; and the result was that Paris became more than ever the brain and nerve-centre of France. This fact was soon to be fatal to the new constitution, though the administrative system established by it still survives. Paris was in effect dominated by the armed and organized proletariat, and this proletariat could never be satisfied with a settlement which, while proclaiming the sovereignty of the people, had, by means of the property qualification for the franchise, established the political ascendancy of the middle classes. The settlement had, in fact, settled nothing; it had, indeed, merely intensified the profound cleavage between the opposing tendencies; for if the democrats were alienated by the narrow franchise, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which cut at the very roots of the Catholic system, drove into opposition to the Revolution not only the clergy themselves but a vast number of their flocks.
The policy of the Assembly, moreover, hopelessly aggravated its misunderstanding with the king. Louis, indeed, accepted the constitution and attended the great Feast of Federation (July 14, 1790), when representatives from all the new departments assembled in the Champ de Mars to ratify the work of the Assembly; but the king either could not or would not say the expected word that would have dissipated mistrust. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, too, seemed to him not only to violate his rights as a king, but his faith as a Christian also; and when the emigration of the nobility and the death of Mirabeau (April 2, 1791) had deprived him of his natural supporters and his only adviser, resuming the old plan of withdrawing to the army of the marquis de Bouillé at Metz, he made his ill-fated attempt to escape from Paris (June 20, 1791). The flight to Varennes was an irreparable error; for during the king’s absence and until his return the insignificance of the royal power became apparent. La Fayette’s fusillade of the republicans, who demanded the deposition of the king (July 17, 1791), led to a definite split between the democratic party and the bourgeois party. Vainly did Louis, brought back a captive to Paris, swear on the 14th of September 1791 solemnly mere lip-service to the constitution; the mistrustful party of revolution abandoned the constitution they had only just obtained, and to guard against the sovereign’s mental reservations and the selfish policy of the middle classes, appealed to the main force of the people. The conflict between the ancien régime and the National Assembly ended in the defeat of the royalists.