France before 1789: the causes of the Revolution

1Two sources from 1789

Before you read what historians say, look at what people saw at the time. The first source is a cartoon sold in Paris in 1789. The second is from the diary of Arthur Young, an English farmer and writer who travelled across France on horseback in 1787, 1788 and 1789 to study its farming.

Walking up a long hill, to ease my mare, I was joined by a poor woman, who complained of the times, and that it was a sad country; demanding her reasons, she said her husband had but a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet they had a franchar (42 lb.) of wheat, and three chickens, to pay as a quit-rent to one Seigneur; and four franchar of oats, one chicken and [a small sum of money] to pay to another, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes. She had seven children, and the cow's milk helped to make the soup. […] This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent, and her face so furrowed and hardened by labour, — but she said she was only twenty-eight.

Source B. Arthur Young, diary entry for 12 July 1789, on the road to Mars-la-Tour in eastern France, from Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, 1789 (first published 1792).

Analysing the sources. Both sources show the same thing from two angles: the people at the bottom of French society carried the weight of those at the top. In Source B one poor family owes grain and chickens to two lords (a seigneur is a lord), plus the taille and other taxes to the king. Source A turns that burden into a picture. Notice also who made each source: A is propaganda, made to anger its buyers; B is an eyewitness diary by a foreigner with no side to take in French politics, though it describes only one woman on one day.

2An unequal society

Figure 1. The clergy and nobles were about 2 in every 100 French people but owned much of the land and paid little tax.

3The long-term causes

1. Social inequality. Two per cent of the people held privileges that the other 98 per cent paid for, as Figure 1 and both sources show.
2. Absolute monarchy. King Louis XVI (reigned 1774 to 1792) ruled without an elected parliament. With a sealed royal order, a lettre de cachet, a person could be imprisoned without trial, for example in the Bastille fortress in Paris.
3. The Enlightenment. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), argued that power should be separated between those who make, apply and judge the law. Rousseau, in The Social Contract (1762), argued that sovereignty belongs to the people and that law should express the "general will". Voltaire attacked religious intolerance and censorship. Educated readers began to judge the Ancien Régime by these ideas.
4. A rising bourgeoisie. Merchants, bankers and lawyers grew rich and educated, but the best posts in the army, Church and government were kept for nobles. They wanted careers "open to talent".
5. The American example. France helped the American colonists win independence from Britain (1775 to 1783). French officers such as the Marquis de Lafayette came home having fought for "no taxation without representation", which you met in Senior 2.

4The short-term causes

Bankruptcy. Wars had drained the treasury. The Seven Years' War cost about 1.8 billion livres, and French help to the Americans about 1.3 billion livres, more than twice the Crown's yearly income. Because the privileged paid little tax, the king could not raise enough money, and lenders charged France about twice the interest rate Britain paid. In August 1788 the government had to suspend some payments.

Hunger. The harvest of 1788 was very poor. In 1789 the price of bread rose by 88% while real wages fell by 25%, so bread swallowed a larger and larger share of a worker's wage.

The Estates-General. The nobles refused new taxes unless the king called the Estates-General, an assembly of the three estates that had not met since 1614. Louis XVI called it for May 1789. That meeting turned a money crisis into a revolution, as the next lesson shows.

Figure 2. Long-term causes (blue) made France ready to explode; short-term causes (orange) lit the fuse.

5Discuss

French peasants owed the corvée, unpaid work on the roads. In Senior 1 you studied uburetwa, unpaid labour that grew heavier under Belgian rule in Rwanda. In what ways are the two alike, and in what ways are they different? Why do systems of forced, unpaid labour so often cause anger?