French Revolution

The French Revolution was a period of major social upheaval that began in 1787 and ended in 1799.¹ It reached its first climax in 1789, when the ancien régime in France was overthrown.¹ It sought to completely change the relationship between the rulers and those they governed and to redefine the nature of political power.¹ Its ideas and values — associated with the growth of liberal democracy, the development of nationalism, and the rise of socialism — have had worldwide influence.¹ The problem was most acute in France, which, with 26 million inhabitants in 1789, was the most populated country of Europe, in a continent whose population doubled between 1715 and 1800.¹ The borrowing required to pay for the American war drove the government to the brink of bankruptcy and led the king to back the radical reforms of his controller-general of finance, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, in 1787.² An earlier attempt at liberalisation had already failed: Turgot removed trade barriers and price-fixing on grain, but bad harvests and rising prices led to riots in the provinces and the Paris region, and, forced to resign, he handed over to Jacques Necker in 1776.³

The society that paid for that state was itself changing: an increasingly numerous and prosperous elite of wealthy commoners — merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called the bourgeoisie — aspired to political power where it did not already possess it.¹ Scholarly debate continues about the exact causes of the Revolution, but the reasons commonly adduced include the bourgeoisie's resentment of its exclusion from political power, peasant hostility to the feudal system, the wide readership of the philosophes, bankruptcy after the American Revolution, the crop failures of 1788, and a monarchy no longer seen as divinely ordained.¹ The philosophes — Enlightenment intellectuals influenced by 17th-century theorists such as René Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza, and John Locke — drew very different conclusions about political, social, and economic matters, and a revolution seemed necessary to apply the ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.¹ This Enlightenment was spread among the educated classes by the many 'societies of thought' founded at the time: Masonic lodges, agricultural societies, and reading rooms.¹ Above all, the monarchy was no longer viewed as divinely ordained, and when the king sought to increase the tax burden on the poor and expand it to classes that had previously been exempt, revolution became all but inevitable.¹

The museum of the Archives nationales, opened in 1867 in the hôtel de Soubise, presents to the public the written monuments of the history of France and gives access to the decorative jewel formed by its salons.⁴ The hôtel itself carries the history it guards: sequestrated at the Revolution in 1789 and then sold for the benefit of the family's creditors, it was acquired by the state by imperial decree of 6 March 1808 and officially assigned to the Archives of the Empire.⁵ Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, holds a digitised 1789 edition of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, dated to the Assembly's sessions of 20, 21, 22, 23 and 26 August 1789.⁶ In Paris, the revolutionary collection of the Musée Carnavalet — the museum of the history of Paris — is without equivalent in the world.⁷ The museum's 2024–25 exhibition on 1793–94 brought together more than 250 works of all kinds: paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, historic and memorial objects, wallpaper, posters, and furniture.⁸ In Britain, the classroom resource of the UK National Archives works from contemporary primary sources, including extracts from the London Gazette of 18–21 July 1789.⁹

Alexis de Tocqueville's The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 (1856) argued that administrative centralisation was not an achievement of the Revolution but a product of the former institutions of France — the only portion of the monarchy's political constitution that survived it.¹⁰ Lynn Hunt's Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, published in 1984, reframed the debate, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes — modernisation, capitalist development, the rise of 20th-century totalitarian regimes — to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society.¹¹ Keith Michael Baker's Inventing the French Revolution (1990) asks how the Revolution became thinkable, analysing the new politics of contestation that transformed the traditional political culture of the Old Regime.¹² Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors (Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson) measured long-run consequences in The Consequences of Radical Reform, published in the American Economic Review in 2011: the Revolution removed the legal and economic barriers protecting oligarchies and established the principle of equality before the law, and the authors' within-Germany study finds that occupied areas experienced more rapid urbanisation growth, especially after 1850.¹³

The Estates General that met in 1789 was composed of three estates — the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners — who had the power to decide on the levying of new taxes and to undertake reforms in the country.¹⁵ Its convocation had been sent out on 5 July of the previous year, assembling the Estates General for the first time since 1614.¹⁵ On 4 May 1789 the last grand ceremony of the Ancien Régime was held at Versailles — the procession of the Estates General — for which 1,200 deputies had arrived from all over France.¹⁵ The opening of the Estates General, on 5 May 1789 in Versailles, also marked the start of the French Revolution.¹⁵ The budget deficit was 56 million, and, as a peaceful king, Louis XVI declared himself 'the people's greatest friend'.¹⁵ The BnF's account of the scene adds a second figure for the deputies: more than 1,100 of them crowded into the columned hall specially built for the occasion.¹⁴

On 17 June 1789 the deputies of the Third Estate, together with some members of the nobility and the clergy, formed themselves into a National Assembly.³ Louis XVI immediately had their hall shut down, whereupon the deputies relocated to a nearby venue: the Royal Tennis Court.³ Having reconvened there, the deputies from the three orders took an oath vowing 'not to separate and to meet wherever circumstances require, until the Constitution of the kingdom is established and grounded on solid foundations'.³ The Tennis Court Oath was taken on 20 June 1789.³ Various responses to the event are still remembered: Deputy Bailly's 'Go tell your master that the nation assembled takes orders from no one', and Deputy Mirabeau's declaration that the deputies were there at the will of the people and would leave only at the point of a bayonet.³ Jacques-Louis David's planned grand painting of the scene would forever remain in draft form only, and a fragment of the unfinished canvas can be found in the attics of the Palace of Versailles.³

The dismissal of Necker in early July 1789 set off popular demonstrations culminating in the storming of the Bastille, which forced the king to accept the authority of the newly proclaimed National Assembly.² The Bastille was a royal fortress, prison, and arsenal, regularly associated since 1770 with the arbitrariness of the kingdom, and in 1789 it was guarded by about a hundred men but held only seven prisoners.¹⁴ The news of its capture spread rapidly through France and Europe, and the event became the symbol of the revolution under way.¹⁴

During the night of 4 August 1789, while the National Constituent Assembly was working on establishing the future constitution of the country, it voted to abolish feudal rights and privileges.³ This vote was one of the key moments of the French Revolution.³ On 26 August 1789 the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a founding and universal text which affirms that all individuals have rights and lays the bases of the Republic and of democracy.¹⁴ A week of debates sufficed to draft it, and it was inspired in part by the American Declaration of Independence of 1776.¹⁴

On 5 October 1789 a procession of women, accompanied by a few men, met at Versailles.³ The reunited royal family left the palace the following day, on 6 October 1789, and it is at this point that the Palace of Versailles ceased to be a royal residence.³ The first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille was marked on 14 July 1790 by the Fête de la Fédération, held on the Champ-de-Mars in Paris.¹⁴

On the night of 20 to 21 June 1791, Louis XVI and his family tried to leave Paris secretly to join royalist forces at Montmédy, hoping to reverse the political situation.¹⁴ Disguised and accompanied by few people, they were recognised and arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne.¹⁴ The argument over the Revolution also ran in print: Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, her indignation roused by what she called its 'sophistical arguments'.¹⁶

The opening of the Estates General, on 5 May 1789 in Versailles, also marked the start of the French Revolution.¹⁵ The decade that followed ran to 9 November 1799, when General Napoleon Bonaparte organised the coup of 18 Brumaire and proclaimed the Consulate.¹⁴

War transformed the crisis: the publication of the manifesto of the Austrian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, threatening the destruction of Paris if the safety of the royal family were again endangered, led to the capture of the Tuileries by the people of Paris and provincial militia on 10 August 1792.² It also led to the temporary suspension of the king's powers by the Legislative Assembly and to the proclamation of the First French Republic on 21 September.² The Legislative Assembly had governed from October 1791 to September 1792, replacing the power of the king, and was then replaced by the National Convention.⁹ A National Convention was set up in 1792 to abolish the monarchy and to write a new constitution, and it began by proclaiming the Republic and stripping the king of all power, making him an ordinary citizen under the name Louis Capet.¹⁴ He was tried from December 1792 to January 1793 and condemned to be guillotined on 21 January for the crime of high treason, on the Place de la Révolution.¹⁴

Despite the last-minute efforts of the Girondins to save him, Citizen Capet, as Louis was then called, was found guilty by the National Convention and condemned to death on 18 January 1793 by 387 votes to 334.² When a final decision on the question of a respite was taken on 19 January, Louis was condemned to death by 380 votes to 310.² He was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution in Paris on 21 January 1793, and nine months later his wife met the same fate.² His younger brothers would succeed him as Louis XVIII and Charles X, and his sister Elizabeth would follow him to the guillotine.²

The family's fate reached further: their son Louis (XVII) died at the age of 10 while imprisoned by the Revolutionary government.² Louis XVI had married the Austrian archduchess Marie-Antoinette in 1770 and had succeeded to the French throne on the death of his grandfather Louis XV on 10 May 1774.² In early August 1789 the National Assembly had proclaimed him 'the restorer of French liberty'.² He was known for his role in two revolutions: the American and the French.² The first was a foreign-policy success for France, but its financial consequences precipitated the second, which led to his execution.²

By the spring of 1793 the war was going badly, and France found itself surrounded by hostile powers while counterrevolutionary insurrections were spreading outward from the Vendée.¹⁷ A combination of food scarcity and rising prices led to the overthrow of the Girondins and increased the popular support of the Montagnards, who created the Committee of Public Safety to deal with the various crises.¹⁷ The committee was created within the Convention in April 1793, facing internal and external difficulties.¹⁴ In the Vendée, the revolt of March 1793 began as a rising of peasants opposed to compulsory conscription and to de-Christianisation with the support of local nobles and clergy, and this royalist and Catholic movement led to a bloody civil war marked by massacres and brutal repression by the Convention.¹⁴

On 5 September 1793 the Convention decreed that 'terror is the order of the day', resolving that opposition to the Revolution needed to be crushed and eliminated so that the Revolution could succeed.¹⁷ Laws were passed that defined who should be arrested as counterrevolutionaries, and committees of surveillance were set up to identify suspects and issue arrest warrants.¹⁷ During the Terror the Committee of Public Safety — of which Maximilien de Robespierre was the most prominent member — exercised virtual dictatorial control over the French government.¹⁷ The committee obtained the Law of 22 Prairial, Year II (10 June 1794), which suspended a suspect's right to public trial and to legal assistance and left the jury a choice only of acquittal or death.¹⁷ The 'Great Terror' that followed, in which about 1,400 persons were executed, contributed to the fall of Robespierre on 27 July, or 9 Thermidor.¹⁷ About 300,000 people were arrested, and 17,000 of them were tried and executed, while as many as 23,000 more were killed without trial or died in prison.¹⁷ The Terror had an economic side embodied in the Maximum, a price-control measure demanded by the lower classes of Paris, and a religious side embodied in the program of de-Christianization pursued by the followers of Jacques Hébert, yet it also instituted the conscripted army that saved France from invasion by other countries — in that sense preserving the Revolution.¹⁷

Year II of the republican calendar, which covers the period from 22 September 1793 to 21 September 1794, was a key year for the French Revolution.⁸ Compared to the clarity of '89, '93 appears much darker and thornier, and the word 'Terror', fabricated for political reasons, points to the authoritarian transition that the republican regime had undergone.⁸ For the first time, the Musée Carnavalet — renowned worldwide for its collections on the French Revolution — decided to single out one year in the revolution, without doubt the most complex of them, and its exhibition brought together more than 250 works.⁸

In July 1794 Robespierre was arrested and executed, as were many of his fellow Jacobins, thereby ending the Reign of Terror, which was succeeded by the Thermidorian Reaction.¹⁷ Many had credited him with near-dictatorial power, and the excesses of the Terror combined with the decreased threat from other countries led to increased opposition to the Committee of Public Safety and to Robespierre himself.¹⁷ Robespierre is said to have pronounced at that moment the famous words: 'The Republic is dead; the brigands triumph'.¹⁴ In the judgement of the BnF Essentiels authors, the death of Danton — lawyer and politician, a major figure of the Revolution and a prodigious orator — marks the end of the Revolution, because it implies Robespierre's, definitively breaking the people's collective momentum.¹⁴

A new constitution inaugurated the Directory in 1795, with five directors holding executive power and two legislative chambers, and the regime ran until 1799.¹⁴ It ended on 18 Brumaire of Year VIII — 9 November 1799 — when the recognised military hero General Napoleon Bonaparte organised a coup d'état and proclaimed a new regime: the Consulate.¹⁴ Bonaparte was named First Consul, endowed with executive, military, and diplomatic powers, under a new constitution that bore his stamp and established an authoritarian regime.¹⁴ Although the Revolution thus ended in a coup d'état that installed a new authoritarian regime, it remains engraved in memory as a founding era, at once hopeful and marked by deep contradictions.¹⁴ In some respects it did not succeed, but the ideas of representational democracy and basic property rights took hold, and it sowed the seeds of the later revolutions of 1830 and 1848.¹

Versailles was the stage of the last grand ceremony of the Ancien Régime on 4 May 1789, when 1,200 deputies from all over France had arrived for the procession of the Estates General.¹⁵ The reunited royal family left Versailles on 6 October 1789, and it is at this point that the Palace of Versailles ceased to be a royal residence.³ The palace also keeps the most famous unfinished picture of the Revolution: a fragment of Jacques-Louis David's canvas of the Tennis Court Oath, a project that would forever remain in draft form, can be found in the attics of Versailles.³

In Paris, the Musée Carnavalet's revolutionary collection is without equivalent in the world, and its guide singles out the pieces richest in memories: a canvas by Hubert Robert, a model of the Bastille, Danton's toilet case, the portrait of 'the Incorruptible', and the royal family's room in the Temple.⁷ The museum of the Archives nationales, opened in 1867 in the hôtel de Soubise, has a double vocation: presenting to the public the written monuments of the history of France and giving access to the decorative jewel formed by its salons.⁴ The hôtel de Soubise itself was sequestrated in 1789 and sold for the benefit of the family's creditors before the state acquired it by imperial decree of 6 March 1808 and assigned it to the Archives of the Empire.⁵ Gallica holds the Declaration in its 1789 printed form, digitised from the edition of the Assembly's sessions of 20, 21, 22, 23 and 26 August 1789.⁶

Alexis de Tocqueville maintained that administrative centralisation was not an achievement of the Revolution but a product of the former institutions of France — the only portion of the monarchy's political constitution which survived the Revolution, the only one that could be made to adapt itself to the new social condition brought about by that Revolution.¹⁰ He recalled an orator praising administrative centralisation as the Revolution's enviable achievement, and he set out to refute the claim.¹⁰ Lynn Hunt's reframing of 1984 moved the argument onto the terrain of political culture, locating the Revolution's central political significance in the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by moulding character, culture, and social relations.¹¹ Keith Michael Baker asked how the Revolution became thinkable at all, tracing the new politics of contestation that transformed the traditional political culture of the Old Regime and revising the historical map of the political space in which the Revolution took form.¹² Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors trace the long-run effects: the Revolution removed the legal and economic barriers protecting oligarchies, established equality before the law, and prepared economies for the new industrial opportunities of the second half of the 19th century, while their within-Germany study finds occupied areas experienced more rapid urbanisation growth, especially after 1850.¹³

The famous slogan 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' called for every person's right to freedom and equal treatment.⁹ Slave revolts had broken out from 1791 in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) under the impulse of Toussaint Louverture, and it was only in 1794 — more than four years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man — that the Convention officially abolished slavery.¹⁴ Abolished by the Convention in 1794, slavery was re-established in the French colonies by Napoleon in 1802.¹⁴

For Thomas Carlyle the French Revolution meant the open violent rebellion and victory of 'disimprisoned Anarchy' against 'corrupt worn-out Authority' — the crowning phenomenon of the modern age, overstepping all rules and experience.¹⁸ As his narrative builds toward 1789, it warns 'that rock-fortress, Tyranny's stronghold' — the Bastille — to look to its guns.¹⁸ Mary Wollstonecraft answered the Revolution's critics with reverence for the rights of men, which she called sacred rights, acquiring a more profound respect for them the more she looked into her own mind.¹⁶

The record preserves the Revolution's voices directly: the oath sworn at the Royal Tennis Court on 20 June 1789, the replies of Bailly and Mirabeau, the words attributed to Robespierre at Thermidor, and Danton's appeal to the citizens.³ It continues with the reflections of those who wrote afterwards: Chateaubriand's eyewitness memory of 14 July 1789, Carlyle's verdict on the whole upheaval, Wollstonecraft's reverence for the rights of men, and Tocqueville's recollection of an orator.¹⁸