Europe and France before 1789: Causes of the Revolution

1The source: a pamphlet that asked three questions

In January 1789 a clergyman, the Abbé Sieyès, published an anonymous pamphlet. It answered an invitation from the finance minister Necker to say how the coming Estates-General should be organised. It opened like this:

"1. What is the Third Estate? Everything. 2. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. 3. What does it ask? To become something."

Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-État? (1789); translated from the French on the page above by Ganzaa.

Analyse it. Sieyès argued that the Third Estate, the common people, already did all the work of the nation and was a complete nation in itself. About 300,000 copies were printed, reaching around a million readers. The pamphlet is evidence of the ideas that made revolution thinkable and of the anger of the educated commoners, the bourgeoisie, who were rich and capable but shut out of power. It is not neutral: it is a piece of persuasion written for a political fight.

2Europe before 1789

In 1789 most of Europe was ruled by kings and emperors who claimed absolute power. Some, the "enlightened despots", borrowed Enlightenment ideas to make their states more efficient: Frederick the Great ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786 and invited Voltaire to his palace; Emperor Joseph II's rule was summed up as "Everything for the people, nothing by the people". Society everywhere rested on privilege by birth, and in central and eastern Europe peasants were still serfs. Britain, where Parliament had limited the king since 1688, was the main exception. France was the largest and richest of these monarchies, and its crisis shook them all.

3France before 1789

The first two estates made up 2% of the population and the Third Estate 98%, and the many kinds of tax were paid by the Third Estate. Inside the Third Estate, the bourgeoisie made up only 7.7% of the population but earned 39.1% of national income. Wealth had shifted; political power and privilege had not. Absolute monarchy in practice was a patchwork: regional courts called parlements blocked tax reforms under Louis XV and again under Louis XVI.

4Causes of the Revolution

One surprise for historians: France's debt was not high compared with Britain's. The crisis lay in the system that could not raise taxes from the privileged, not in the size of the debt.

5A historians' debate: whose revolution?

From the late 1920s to the 1960s, historians such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, often writing from a Marxist perspective, saw the Revolution as a class struggle: a rising bourgeoisie overthrowing a feudal nobility. From the 1960s revisionist historians such as Alfred Cobban and François Furet challenged this: class conflict, they argued, was not the main cause, and political choices and chance mattered more. Your answers will be stronger if you can say which causes each school stresses.