From monarchy to republic: the course of the Revolution, 1789 to 1799

1Ten years, four governments

The men who swore the Tennis Court Oath wanted a king who ruled by a constitution. Ten years later France was ruled by a general. Between the two, it tried a limited monarchy, a republic governed by committees and terror, and a weak government of five directors. Figure 1 is your map of the decade; learn its four phases before the details.

Figure 1. The course of the Revolution in four phases.

2Phase 1: a king under a constitution (1789 to 1792)

The National Assembly reorganised France. In July 1790 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy made priests state employees elected by citizens and required them to swear loyalty to the constitution; about half refused, and many Catholics turned against the Revolution. On the night of 20 June 1791 the royal family fled Paris in disguise; the next day they were recognised and stopped at Varennes. Few people trusted the king after that. Yet the Constitution of 1791, completed on 3 September, kept him as head of a constitutional monarchy. Only "active citizens", men who paid a certain amount of tax, could vote.

In April 1792 France went to war with Austria, soon joined by Prussia. The Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, threatened to destroy Paris if the royal family was harmed. Parisians believed the king was helping the enemy. On 10 August 1792 a crowd of sans-culottes and soldiers attacked the Tuileries palace, and the Assembly suspended the king.

3Phase 2: the Republic and the Terror (1792 to 1794)

A new assembly, the National Convention, elected by almost all adult men, abolished the monarchy on 21 September 1792. Louis XVI was tried for treason and executed on 21 January 1793. The Republic now faced foreign armies on its borders, a Catholic and royalist rising in the Vendée region of western France, and hungry crowds in Paris. In April 1793 the Convention created the Committee of Public Safety, which became the real government, and in June the sans-culottes forced out the Girondin deputies.

The Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793 allowed the arrest of anyone suspected of opposing the Revolution. By July 1794 at least 300,000 people had been arrested; 16,594 had been officially sentenced to death, 2,639 of them in Paris (the historian Donald Greer's count), and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 more had died in prison or without trial. The Terror also turned on revolutionaries: Danton was executed in April 1794. Fearing they would be next, deputies turned on Robespierre, and he was executed on 28 July 1794.

4Source analysis: Robespierre defends the Terror

… the principle of our Republic is this: to influence the people by the use of reason, to influence our enemies by the use of terror. In times of peace, virtue is the source from which the government of the people takes its power. During the Revolution, the sources of this power are virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror will be a disaster; and terror, without which virtue is powerless. But terror is nothing more nor less than swift, severe and indomitable justice.

Maximilien Robespierre, speech to the National Convention, 5 February 1794, "Report on the Principles of Political Morality". Translation from Voices of Revolt, Volume 1 (1927), public domain.

Analysing the source. Robespierre argues that a revolution at war may use terror against its "enemies" and calls it "justice". But look at who decides who is an enemy: the government itself, with no independent courts. Justice that is "swift" is justice without time for defence or evidence. The speech shows how a movement that began with the rights of man in 1789 came to deny those same rights, for example the presumption of innocence in Article 9 of the Declaration.

5Phases 3 and 4: the Directory and Bonaparte (1795 to 1799)

After Robespierre's fall, moderates took control. A new constitution gave power to two councils and to a Directory of five men, from 2 November 1795. It was weak and often corrupt, it faced plots from both royalists and radicals, and it relied more and more on the army. Meanwhile a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, won victories in Italy (1796 to 1797) and led an expedition to Egypt (1798). On 9 and 10 November 1799 (18 and 19 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar) he overthrew the Directory in a coup and made himself First Consul. Many historians end the Revolution here.

6Discuss

In Unit 1 you saw that Rwanda's Constitution puts "a State governed by the rule of law" among its fundamental principles and guarantees everyone the right to be presumed innocent. Use the Terror to explain why a state must follow fair procedures even when it faces real enemies.