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There are many encyclopedias and textbooks which I am sure can give you wonderful, concise and factually accurate accounts of the Revolution. But that's beside the point. You are at my web site right now. Therefore, I am giving you my very own, rather artistic (read: opinionated) summary with sarcastic commentary. Stages are done according to Crane Brinton's very helpful model of revolution in Anatomy of Revolution. Caveat emptor!
France was pretty well off, comparatively, in the late eighteenth century. (Comparatively-see what I'm talking about in the other countries) The peasantry was well off . They owned 67% of the land they worked. There was a rich and thriving middle class.
The coming of King Louis XVI was an occasion for great joy, since he seemed like a nice, liberal guy and was the first French King since Saint Louis IX who actually took marital vows somewhat seriously. He was however an inept ruler, unable to deal with the chaotic times.
France was the most prosperous country in Europe. Here's where the problems begin though. First, this was during the Enlightenment, and, if you hadn't noticed by their hard-to-pronounce names, most of the philosophes were French. Diderot, Voltaire, and especially Rousseau had left a lasting legacy. The philosophes, though generally supportive of "enlightened despotism," had totally undermined the basis of monarchy when the ripped apart the Catholic Church. Why should we have kings at all? The well-educated middle and aristocratic classes began to ask. Rousseau's legacy was far more tangible. Most of the Jacobin leaders were absolutely obsessed with the Social Contract. Rousseau's concept of the General Will, deism and diatribes against monarchy caught the sensibilities of a lot of bourgeois lawyers who were bored because Scrabble hadn't been invented yet.
Also, France had a rather obnoxious caste system. First there was the First Estate, the clergy, less than 1% of the population, they owned 1/3 of the land and didn't pay taxes. There was a big difference though between the rich, aristocratic bishops and the poor country cures. Then there was the Second Estate, the aristocracy..about 1% of the population. Very few of them lived at Versailles like they depict in movies. Those were the descendents of the most powerful nobles of Louis XIV's time and, as funny as this may sound, they were annoyed that all they did all day was sit around and indulge their wildest sensual fantasies. They wanted power.....the kind of power they had before Louis XIV. Most of the nobility, however, lived rather modestly and didn't want their tax immunity taken away because they were already jealous of their thriving middle-class neighbors. Then there was the Third Estate...or Everybody Else. In this group, there was the bourgeois who made the Revolution. They were thriving lawyers, doctors, merchants etc. who chaffed under aristocratic tax privileges and birth rights to certain offices. There were the urban poor, the powder keg of Revolution, who were usually hungry and usually ready to riot. Then there was the overwhelming majority of France, the solid, Catholic peasantry. The Third Estate were forced to pay a tax code that makes the IRS look comparatively simple. The vingtieme to the church, the tithe, the taille, the gabelle,...the average workingman paid 1/2 his income in taxes.
To add to this, France was cursed with a huge national debt left over from Louis XIV's incessant "let's go conquer all of Europe" wars and only expanded by the disastrous Seven Years' War. When France sided with the Americans in their War of Independence (NOT a REVOLUTION!!!!) they had the joy of finally making up for having their French tushies kicked out of the New World by England a few years before. But now the debt was threatening national solvency. More money needed to be found. A string of financial advisors...who kept getting fired....Turgot, Calonne, Brienn, Necker...advised that maybe, just maybe the nobility and aristocracy should be taxed.
The King, finally desperate for money, summoned the parlements who refused to pay. Then he summoned the Assembly of Notables who recommended that he call the Estates General....the official legislative body of France that had been forgotten about for about 150 years. The first meeting since 1614 was convened on May 5, 1789.
At first, each Estate was to be given one vote and an equal number of representatives, which seemed really fair to the First and Second Estates and well, slanted mathematics to say the least to the other 98% of the population. After Sieyes' What Is the Third Estate? , it was decided that the Third Estate would get twice the number of representatives and every persons' vote would count individually. Good news for the Third Estate, who thought they could persuade some of the poorer clergy to their side (their side: taxing the aristocracy, reforming the gov) But things didn't justify their ealy optimism. The Third Estate was forced to dress all in black and was forced to remain standing, without a bathroom break, for four hours while the other two Estates got to sit down. They also kept being conveniently locked out of the Hall of Mirrors whenever their complaints got particularly vocal. One time they were ordered by force to leave, but stayed and changed their name to the "National Assembly" inviting sympathetic nobles and clergy to join. The King was getting pretty confused by all this and decided to have the Estates go home. Nobody minded to tell the National Assembly this so they were locked out and were getting rather ticked. So they headed over to the royal tennis courts and undertook the Oath of the Tennis Court--saying they would not leave until a Constitution was made.
All that was well and good but it took the firing of finance minister Necker---who really couldn't do anything about the financial crisis either but who was beloved by the Parisian mob---to spark further progress. With rumors about that the King was brining in Swiss mercenaries to massacre Paris, Parisisians swarmed around building barricades for a few days in July egged on by street orators like Camille Desmoulins. On July 14, in search of weapons, they attacked the "invincible" royal fortress the Bastille, releasing the prisoners (all 5--including the man who thought he was Julius Caesar) and beheading the governor. After this a Parisian Commune was set up and the National Assembly was granted more power. On August 4, the aristocracy and clergy voluntarily renounced their titles and tax exemptions.
From then on a steady stream of aristocratic emigrés, (AKA the smarter aristocrats) left the country. The very idealistic Rights of Man and the Citizen were drawn up. A Constitution allowing most propertied men to vote (the sans-culotte, those who had actually captured the Bastille still mainly had no rights)Poets like Wordsworth were gushing with optimism "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven." In the provinces, however, popular hatred of the aristocracy and vague rumors of massacre, culminated in the Great Fear, as peasants burned down chateaux and killed tax-collectors. (Things really haven't changed all that much) The National Assembly was changing so many customs it gave the nation indigestion. The King was brought to Paris after the March of the Fishwives on Versailles and placed in the Tuileries. The country still needed money though and decided to draw up the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, now the Church was a department on the State and as such could be taxed. Its land was taken away and sold through IOUs called assignats which became the standard currency, and were often overprinted, thus causing hyperinflation later on. Deputies began meeting in political clubs, such as the respectable Jacobins and the more radical Cordelier. These became bases for power in themselves.
With Mirabeau's death, the Champ de Mars massacre and the flight to Varennes, hopes of a constitutional monarchy were shattered and new groups such as the Gironde gained power. The King increasingly became a figurehead. But things seemed pretty settled for the most part--though not exactly to the point where they justified English Prime Minister William Pitt's 1792 faux pas "Never has twenty years of peace seemed more likely." The Gironde and the monarchists, for once coming together on something, wanted to declare war on well--Austria, England, Prussia, Russia, Spain, the Italian states....basically all of Europe. This was a very popular for some reason, the only people who weren't too hot the idea were the real diehard Jacobins....namely Robespierre and Marat.
Nevertheless, war was declared on Prussia, and Austria. To Paris' shock, the disorderly army lost and by July of 1792 the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Coalition's forces, could issue his Manifesto which basically threatened to raze Paris if the monarchy was touched. Paris' reaction---panic and overthrow the monarchy. "The fatherland is in danger" cried Danton and with that rallied Paris, organized an Insurrectionary Commune and led the attack on the Tuileries on August 10.....resulting in the total death of the monarchy. France was officially a Republic on September 21, 1792 with the first session of the National Convention.
In the chaotic September interval between Assembly and Convention, rumors of plots by aristos in prison and knowledge that the enemy was right outside Paris led to panic. Marat , with the tacit approval of the Commune and the Gironde Government, ordered thugs from Marseilles to slaughter thousands of prisoners from September 3-6. The sewers of Paris were said to run with blood and everyone was too afraid to ask questions.
With the first French victory at the Battle of Valmy on September 20 1792, the Convention breathed a collective sigh of relief and decided to get down to the serious business of regicide. There was a threefold division here; those who wanted him exiled (mainly the Gironde), those who wanted his trial and death and those hardcores, like Robespierre and Saint-Just, who thought that due process of law was a waste of time. There was a trial and, wow, big surprise, he was declared guilty and beheaded. All of the countries that were not fighting France already, like England who just couldn't BELIEVE the nerve of those froggies--killing their king for gosh sakes, went to war.
The Gironde might have been very nice and good and etcetera, but they couldn't govern worth squat. The country was falling apart. Austrian troops were camped within 100 miles of Paris. The armies were undertrained, underfed and often without generals (all generals had been aristos) and had obnoxious tendency to be too democratic. (One general supposedly gave an order for a charge only to have his men decide not to do so by majority vote). The Montangards, together with their allies the sans-culottes, overthrew the Gironde in early June 1793.
With the overthrow of the Gironde, power belonged to the dysfunctional trio of Marat, Robespierre and Danton. The Constitution of 1793, a beautiful document which ensured voting to all men regardless of property, was in two weeks suspended by its creators in favor of martial law. The Levee en Masse mobilized the country for a war. (All men were to fight, all old men to "give patriotic speeches", all women to "make salpetre") It also broke the camel's back in the Vendee region, a poor backward Catholic province, and soon there was open and bloody civil war between royalists and the Convention. Marseilles, Lyons, Arras, Strasbourg, Nantes, and Bourdeaux, among others, also declared rebellion against the Republic. In Paris, hyperinflation and war shortages were driving up the price of bread and various factions in the Convention, ranging from veiled monarchists to Enrages who advocated communistic revenge, wrangled for power.
In this desperate situation, terror was declared the order of the day. A Law of Suspects made anyone less than enthusiastic about the Republic a likely victim of Madame La Guillotine. Since the president of the Convention was elected every fortnight, executive power was concentrated in two committees; those of General Security and the lead one, that of Public Safety. The Committee of Public Safety was composed of 12 very hard-working, very arrogant, very intelligent men who shared little in common but a fanatical dedication to the Republic. They often worked 18 to 20 hour days, sleeping on cots in the Green Room and living on bread and coffee. At their head, though never officially and not dictatorially, was Robespierre. At this time, a new calender began--featuring months of even 30 days named after the weather, decadis on ten days in place of weeks, and years starting from the first Convention. The Maximum was placed on both foods and wages, thus somewhat curbing the inflation and alleviating popular starvation.
The Reign of Terror, though famous for its toll on Parisian aristocrats, was far more deadly in the provinces where many proconsuls, like Carrier, had free reign to indulge their sadism (Carrier invented noyades in Nantes--mass drownings, often of little children. The Loire River was said to run with corpses) Fouche and Collot at Lyons burned the city to the ground, killed 2400 people and posted a sign "Lyon made war on liberty. Lyons in no more."Nevertheless, the tactics of the Committee were successful in turning back the Coalition by early 1794.
But all the time, rifts in the government grew deeper. Hébertists--"ultras"--advocated slaughter of aristocrats and more economic controls. They also were rabid dechristianizers---men who wished to replace Christianity with the atheistic Cult of Reason. Danton, coming back from pastoral retirement, advocated ending the Terror. The Committee played on each faction to crush the other. Danton was condemned to death by the Tribunal he had made the year before. With these factions gone and the war going better, the Committee should have felt free to stop the Terror. Instead, with the Law of 22 Prairal, it intensified it. Now, the accused were not even granted juries--only the innocent needed juries after all. In Paris in the following 47 days, called the Great Terror, nearly 1500 people were guillotined. Some were royalists, traitors, spies. But more likely they were seamstresses whose malicious neighbors confused "rouet" (spinning wheel) with "roi" (king) or young men who lost at card games and screamed "Damn the Republic!" In those days, some said it was safer in the prisons than out. At the same time though, France declared itself officially god-fearing as Robespierre led the Festival of the Supreme Being, a deistic Rousseauist God.
By Thermidor (July) 1794, the Parisian populace was sick of the Terror. The Convention was paralyzed with fear; the surviving Dantonists wanted reveange, extremists such as Fouche and Carrier, ordered back for their bloody deeds, knew that Robespierre would have them killed, speculators and industrialists, hampered by Jacobin morality and economic controls, wanted to make money. It was only at the last moment that these interests bonded with conflicts in the Committee itself. The Committee of Public Safety became among the few governments to work itself to death. The heat, the overwork, the paranoia, the familiarity was too much for these men who weren't exactly good at working in groups. On 9 Thermidor, Robespierre and his colleagues were overthrown and the next day they were guillotined like so many others.
Since every historian, including those who like to compare Robespierre to various types of bloodthirsty carnivores, seems to get some sort of depression and aren't able to finish the Revolution after 9 Thermidor, I don't really know all that much about this period. So my summary is actually going to be short (for once!)
It is important to keep in mind that the men who overthrew Robespierre did so out of desperation or because he was really getting on their nerves at the moment...not because they wanted to end the Terror. Nevertheless, the Red Terror ended with Robespierre. What followed was a period of such corruption, vice and unrestrained ebullience that Robespierre would have had a eating-next-to-nothing, no-sleep-for-the-past-48-hours faint on the spot. It was the Thermidorean Reaction. Balls were held on the the mass graves of the Terror. Idle rich youth "jeunesse doree" danced, dressed outlandishly and beat up sans-cullote. A "White Terror", far less publicized then the Red, featured the executions of poor ex-Montagnards. Jacobins, even those who had helped bring Thermidor about, were banished. The Gironde were pardoned. Speculation ran rampant. The French government became infamous for its corruption, even among 18th century countries. The Maximum was repealed and with hyperinflation and a disastrous harvets in the winter of 1794, mass starvation resulted in Paris. Meanwhile, the wives and mistresses of the new rulers danced in palatial new estates in gowns made completely of strings of diamonds. To some it seemed like back to the good ol' days of the aristocracy.
In the Prairal Rebellion of Year III (1795) famished sans-cullote once again stormed into the Convention, but this time were met with gendarmes and bayonets. The days of democratic idylls were over. The Constitution of Year III set up a Directory of 5 men (in outlandish hats) presiding over a bicameral convention of Ancients and the Five Hundred. It also limited voting down to 200,000 propertied men.....now this is considering that France had a population of about 26 million. The sans-culottes, beaten and neglected, no longer took interest in the affairs of their government and instead became attracted to the military.
The work of the Committees had bore fruit in an army so effective that it had taken the bleak war scene of 1793, where France was losing to every major European power and turned it around to an offensive war, a war of conquest. Young generals (Napoleon, the norm not the exception, was 26 when he conquered Italy) inspired by Republican ideals replaced the doddering aristocratic nonentities of the ancien regime and the soldiers, fired with patriotic ideals, were generally enthusiastic. One by one the countries that had fought France either backed out of war or were conquered....leaving only England.
But all was not well with the government, which now faced uprisings by royalists, now faced uprising by communists a la Babeuf. Whenever an election result did not particularly please the directors, they would call the army in to "help" them out. This of course put a great deal of power into the hands of ambitious generals like Napoleon. In fact, after returning from the 'conquest" of Egypt ( Half the French fleet was burned but Napoleon romanticized the campaign so much that the French thought they had won) Napoleon and Sieyes, one of the directors, arranged a coup. On 18 Brumaire 1799, Napoleon took over from the Directory, creating a new Constitution with a governing Consulate (3 guys, but in reality only Napoleon ever did anything....funny how that happens) He then declared "the Revolution is over." But we all know how untrue that is. The Revolution can never be over.
