Harris Fienberg

3/12/02

 

French Social Prehistory: The Bourgeoisie Upheaval

 

The social order in early 18^th Century France was largely the same as it had been in the Middle Ages.  One’s rank in society was not determined by merit or even wealth, rather it was primarily a product of one’s heredity, one’s place of birth in the social strata.  People were divided into social classes, known as orders or estates.  People from different classes could be easily told apart by simple signs such as their style of dress or the way of transportation.  Society consisted of essentially two classes: the peasants and the nobles.  The peasants made up the vast majority of the population in France; they constituted about eighty-five percent of the total population.  Most of the peasants were very poor, even as late as 1789 “forty percent of the free peasants [in France] owned little or no land.” [1]   Adding to their poverty, heavy taxes were often levied upon them. “Most owed tithes, often one-third of their crops.” [2]   Undoubtedly the peasants greatly resented these unfair taxes and the rights that they had to forfeit over to their landlords. 

Peasants

            On the other hand the nobles, who “constituted about two to three percent of the European population,” owned twenty-five to thirty percent of the land in France. They were exempt from most taxes and they were even exempt from serious punishment. [3]   Being born a noble guaranteed special privileges and entitlements that the peasants could never even consider acquiring.  To use an old adage, each noble was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  Nobles also held considerable power in terms of both national and local affairs. 

            A third group of people, just emerging as a significant force in the eighteenth century, were the urban dwellers.  “At the end of the eighteenth century, about one-sixth of the French population lived in towns of 2000 or more…Paris numbered between 550,000 and 600,000.” [4]   This population was made up of unskilled and skilled laborers, young professionals like lawyers and doctors, financiers, merchants and bankers, and the petty bourgeoisie, which consisted of artisans, shopkeepers and low-level merchants.  This new group of urbanites and especially the bourgeoisie within this population was instrumental to the fall of the old class system at the end of the 1700s, but that’s jumping a little far ahead.

            The French social structure began to seriously change from the form it had occupied in the Middle Ages during the reign of Louis XIII.  Around this time the nobles were becoming increasingly frustrated with monarchical rule and many tried to assert their independence because they were not being allowed to participate in the centralized French government.  However, the chief minister of Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, carefully undermined any noble plots against royal authority through use of spies that would identify conspirators against the crown, and bring them before the monarchy for execution.  After the end of the reign of Louis XIII and the death of Richelieu the nobles led a revolt known as the Fronde in an attempt to stop the expansion of centralized power at the expense of their own authority.  However, the Fronde was quelled by 1652, making way for the most powerful French monarch of the times, Louis XIV. 

Louis XIV

Louis XIV was an absolute monarch who refused to share his authority with the nobility.  He centralized the government at the court of Versailles, which also served as his private residence.  There he eliminated the aristocrats that he saw as the biggest threats to his authority, the high nobles and the princes of blood.  He did this by removing them from the royal council and giving them meaningless work away from politics at his court.  He replaced the high nobles with subservient ministers from low aristocratic families; in doing so he unknowingly started the ascent of the bourgeoisie into a position of political power in France.  “There were few noblemen whom he treated with as much consideration as his bourgeois [advisors].” [5]   It should be noted that despite Louis’ attempts to disarm the aristocracy they still held a great deal of local power at the time.  “Members of the high nobility still exercised much authority…[and] the control of the central government over the provinces and the people was carried out largely by careful bribery of the important people to see that the king’s policies were executed.” [6]

Louis XV was a much weaker king than his predecessor.  Growing up at Versailles Louis XV was separated from the people by the nobles, and as a result his role changed from that of the monarch to that of the head aristocrat.  Instead of counterbalancing their power he fed right into it, adding to their privileges instead of controlling their abuses.  “The great royal bureaucracy was still doing excellent work; but the king was no longer the conscious center of its activity.  The unspoken abdication of Louis XV constitutes in fact the true French Revolution.” [7]

Louis XVI was even less effective as a ruler than Louis XV.  Like his predecessor he strongly associated with the aristocracy. In addition, he “was weak and incapable as king and not overly intelligent.” ^[8]   He inherited France in poor economic condition and did not deal with the situation properly.  The detrimental shape of government finances forced Louis to summon the French representative body, called the Estates- General, in 1788.  This was the beginning of the steps leading up to the French Revolution.  “The financial chaos was due primarily to social not to economic conditions.  The old order had to pass way, because the privileged classes refused to correct abuses; and because the king, defender of the people, elected to stand with his ancient enemies, the feudal aristocracy.” [9]    

The Estates-General consisted of three representative groups.  The first estate consisted of the clergy and encompassed about 130,000 people.  The second estate consisted of the aristocracy, it numbered about 350,000 people; its members owned twenty-five to thirty percent of all of the land in France.  And the last estate, the third estate, consisted of everyone else.  Within the third estate there were people ranging from skilled artisans and professionals to unskilled laborers and peasants.  Although the majority of the people in the third estate were peasants, all of the delegates that came to the Estates-General were bourgeoisie.  The bourgeoisie constituted about eight percent of the French population; they owned about twenty to twenty-five percent of all of the land in France.  The bourgeoisie consisted of “merchants, bankers, and industrialists who controlled the resources of trade, finance, and manufacturing.” [10]   They were especially frustrated with the government because although they had financial resources that were often on par with those of the aristocracy, they were kept from social and political privileges, which were reserved primarily for nobles. 

There were a variety of problems within the assembly dealing with voting and the rights of the different estates.  This led to the first act of the French Revolution: the third estate made a symbolic split from the rest of the convention, leading the third estate to form the National Assembly on June 17^th, 1789.  Then on June 20^th the members of the third estate made the famous Tennis Court Oath, vowing that “they would continue to meet until they had produced a French constitution.” [11]   The revolution escalated on July 14^th when Parisian insurgents stormed the Bastille armory in order to both acquire weapons and to destroy a symbol of despotism.  The storming of the Bastille coincided with independent revolts in cities around France.  “The collapse of royal authority in the cities was paralleled by peasant revolutions in the countryside.  A growing resentment of the entire landholding system with its fees and obligations created the conditions for a popular uprising.” [12]

The Storming of The Bastille

On the night of August 4^th, 1789 the assembly voted to end seigniorial rights and abolish all privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy.  The assembly backed up its actions with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which affirmed the “‘natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ to ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.’” [13]   The document went on to replace the notion of aristocratic rights with the ideal of equal rights for all men and a government based on merit, not heritage.  Not all class distinctions were eliminated though.  In the new constitutional monarchy only active citizens (men over the age of twenty-five who could pay taxes worth three days of unskilled labor) could vote for delegates in the new representative assembly, the Legislative Assembly.  And in order to be able to be a representative in the assembly one had to be able to pay taxes worth fifty-four days’ labor.  These class distinctions were justified, however, by the idea that personal wealth was a measure of one’s intelligence and merit. 

After the establishment of the Legislative Assembly the revolution quickly became more radical.  Power was gained by the sans-culottes, the urban working people, artisans and sometimes even merchants, who despised the wealthy and the old regime.  Within the sans-culottes the more radical Parisian faction, the Mountain, became the most popular group.  In 1793 they charged Louis XVI with treason and sentenced him to death by guillotine; with his death on January 21^st French society was irreversibly changed; the monarch would never again hold the same place of greatness that it once held in the minds of the French people. 

The Execution of Louis XVI

Also, with his death the flood gates of accusations and executions were opened.  Under the so-called Reign of Terror the newly formed Committee of Public Safety accused somewhere between 16,000 and 50,000 people as traitors against the republic and executed them.  (It should be noted that the Committee was not biased on the basis of class, its victims came from every social strata.)   By 1795, however, most of the violence had settled and the radical factions were quieted. 

In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte took over France in a coup d’etat.  His autocratic style of leadership was a step away from the revolutionary spirit of liberty and political equality for all.  In addition he established a small new aristocracy, which was based on performance in state service.  Napoleon created “3,263 nobles between 1808 and 1814…only 22 percent of Napoleon’s aristocracy came from the nobility of the old regime; almost 60 percent were bourgeois in origin.” [14]  

Napoleon Bonaparte

Despite Napoleon’s reestablishment of some un-revolutionary policies he did establish the Civil Code, which recognized “the principle of equality of all citizens before the law, the right of the individual to choose his profession, religious toleration, and the abolition of serfdom and feudalism.” [15]   Napoleon identified himself as a son of the revolution and he was always trying to project an image, although only a thin veil at times, that his regime agreed with the goals of the revolution.  Despite his efforts to appear to be in line with the ideals of the new republic “when he fell the class that had chosen him [the bourgeois] heaved…a sigh of immense relief.” [16]

In the eighteenth century there was greater social change in France than there had been in the previous three centuries combined.  The inability of the old social order to adapt to changing economic conditions and a new political atmosphere led to bourgeois social upheaval.  The revolution and the events that lead up to it mark a turning point from France being a feudal nation led by l’ancien regime and an ancient monarchy to being a semi-modern nation led by a wealthy-bourgeoisie acting under a constitution declaring equal rights for all.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

 

Guérard, Albert.  France: A Short History.  W.W. Norton and Company Inc.: New York, 1946.

Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2000.  1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

 

Russell, John. Paris.  Harry N. Abrams Inc.: New York, 1983.

 

Speilvogel, Jackson J.  Western Civilization: A Brief History. Wadsworth Publishing Company: Belmont, 1999.

 

*All pictures are from Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2000