Daily Life During the French Revolution (6 page)

On September 29, 1793, the General Maximum to control food
prices was introduced, extended now to all grains and to many staple goods. The
revolutionary army was sent to various districts to enforce price controls and
to requisition grain from farmers. A portable guillotine went with them. By
this time, royalist and Roman Catholic insurgents controlled much of the Vendée
and Brittany. Caen, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux were in the hands of the
Girondins.

The government of terror acted ruthlessly toward everyone
who did not adhere to its political ideals. It even took revenge on people who
played no prominent role in politics but who had committed past sins in the
eyes of the revolutionary zealots, who had little compunction about executing
men of talent and international fame and who were a credit to France.

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, now recognized as the father of
modern chemistry, had been a Farmer General (tax collector) and had spent the
income from this post on science, sharing his laboratory with colleagues and
young researchers. James Watt, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestley, among
others, had visited his laboratory. The salon run by his wife was one of the
intellectual centers of Paris. The fact that he had carried out numerous
experiments, coined the term “oxygen” and studied its role in human and plant
respiration, discovered the chemical composition of water, made discoveries in
human metabolism, and demonstrated that, although matter changes its state in a
chemical reaction, the quantity of matter remains the same, had little effect
on members of the Committee of Public Safety. Many other facets of science also
came under the scrutiny of this remarkable man. As a member of the Academy of
Science, Lavoisier had played a role in denying membership to Jean-Paul Marat,
perhaps a fatal move. He was in favor of the revolution, for funds for the aged
poor, as well as for the abolishment of the
corvée
(forced labor), but
he had once assisted in the building of the much-resented wall around Paris
whose gates controlled taxes on goods entering the city. In 1793, the Academy
of Science was abolished. In November of that year, an arrest warrant was
issued for all former Farmers General. Lavoisier was incarcerated and then sent
to the guillotine, on May 8, 1794, his body thrown into a pit. In 1796, his
name was resurrected, and a magnificent state funeral was given in his honor.

FEDERALIST REVOLT

The reaction to the ejection of the Girondist deputies from
the Convention in June 1793 led to the Federalist revolt. The two factions,
Girondist and Montagnard, had long quarreled over most issues: the September
massacres, the trial of the king, the constitution of 1793, and the influence
of the Parisian sans-culotte sections in politics. Many departments objected to
the ousting of the Girondist deputies, and 13 of them carried on prolonged
resistance to the Montagnards (mostly Jacobins). They declared themselves in a
state of resistance to oppression and withdrew their recognition of the
National Convention, calling upon their citizens to take up arms, march on
Paris, and restore the deputies. This bellicose declaration, lacking support,
failed. With the revolt in the Vendée, the government nevertheless felt the hot
breath of civil war. By October 1793, the Montagnards, now in control of the
Convention, rounded up the Girondist deputies who had not fled Paris and
arrested them. Armed forces were sent to suppress the revolt in the various
regions. Lyon resisted a two-month siege, capitulating on October 9, 1793, and
reprisals afterward cost the lives of 1,900 rebels. The government did not
carry out its threat to destroy the homes of the wealthy and erase the city’s
name from the record. About 300 rebels were executed in Bordeaux and Marseille.

In the three-day battle of Wattigenies, a little south of
Lille, on October 15–17, the French defeated the main Austrian army.
Marie-Antoinette, after a farcical trial, was beheaded on October 16, 1793, to
the glee of many Parisians, and the next day the Vendeans were defeated at
Cholet, east of Nantes; they subsequently resorted to scattered guerrilla
warfare. On the last day of October 1793, the Girondins arrested some weeks
before were executed. On November 10, the Festival of Reason was celebrated in
Nôtre Dame, and on November 23, the Commune of Paris, in a measure soon copied
by authorities elsewhere in France, closed all churches in the city and began
actively to sponsor the revolutionary religion known as the Cult of Reason.

The factional struggle between the extremist publisher
Hébert (a member of the Cordeliers) and his followers on one side and the
Committee of Public Safety on the other ended on March 24, 1794, with the
Hébertists meeting Madame Guillotine. Within two weeks, Robespierre moved
against the Dantonists, who had begun to demand peace and an end to the Terror.
Danton and his principal colleagues met the same fate on April 5. Due to purges
and wholesale reprisals against supporters of these two factions, Robespierre
also lost the backing of many leading Jacobins, especially those who feared
their heads could be next on the block.

The committee had struck violently at internal opposition;
thousands of royalists, nonjuring priests, Girondins, workers, and peasants,
along with others charged with counterrevolutionary activities or sympathies,
were brought before revolutionary tribunals, summarily convicted, and beheaded.
Executions in Paris totaled 2,639 during the Terror. In many outlying
departments, particularly the main centers of royalist insurrection, even
harsher treatment was meted out to traitors, real and suspect. The Nantes
tribunal, headed by Jean-Baptiste Carrier, which dealt most severely with those
who aided the rebels in the Vendée, sent more than 8,000 persons to the
guillotine within three months. The machine could not work fast enough to empty
the overcrowded prisons, so batches of nonjuring priests were crammed into barges,
hog-tied, and taken out into the Loire River and sunk. In all of France,
revolutionary tribunals and commissions were responsible for the execution of
about 16,000 individuals. Many other victims included those who died in
overcrowded, disease-ridden prisons and others who were shot. More than 100,000
died in the brutal pacification of the Vendée.

Of those condemned to the guillotine, approximately
one-third were nobles, priests, and wealthy members of the upper middle class,
another third were propertied peasants and lower-middle-class townsmen, and
roughly one-third were from the urban working class. Workers or peasants were
often charged with draft dodging, desertion, hoarding, theft, or rebellion.
Meanwhile, the tide of battle against the allied coalition had turned in favor
of France. By the end of 1793, the invaders in the east had been driven back
across the Rhine, Toulon had been liberated from the British, and the Committee
of Public Safety had largely crushed the insurrections of the royalists and the
Girondins.

The general dissatisfaction with the leader of the
Committee of Public Safety soon developed into full-fledged conspiracy.
Robespierre and 98 of his colleagues were seized on July 27, 1794, and beheaded
the next day, the day generally regarded as marking the end of the Terror. The
Jacobin clubs were closed throughout France, revolutionary tribunals were
abolished, and various extremist decrees, including one that had fixed wages
and commodity prices were repealed.

CONSTITUTION OF 1795 AND THE DIRECTORY

Peace was restored to the frontiers, and in July 1795 an
inept invading army of
émigrés
was defeated in Brittany. The National
Convention then completed the draft of a new constitution, which was formally
approved on August 22, 1795. On November 3, the new fundamental law of France
now vested executive authority in a Directory composed of five members.
Legislative power was delegated to a bicameral legislature consisting of the
Council of Ancients (with 250 members) and the Council of the Five Hundred. The
terms of one member of the Directory and a third of the legislature were
renewable annually, beginning May 1797. The franchise was limited to male
taxpayers who could establish proof of one-year’s residence in their voting
district. The new constitution failed to provide a means of breaking deadlocks
between the executive and legislative bodies, however, which led to constant
intergovernmental rivalry and ineffectual administration of national affairs.

The Directory had inherited an acute financial crisis that
was aggravated by disastrous depreciation of the assignats. Although most of
the Jacobin leaders were dead, transported, or in hiding, their spirit still
flourished among the urban lower classes. In the higher circles of society, royalist
agitators boldly campaigned for restoration of the crown, while the bourgeois
political groupings, determined to preserve their hard-won status as the
masters of France, soon found it materially and politically profitable to
direct the mass energies unleashed by the revolution into militaristic
channels. Old scores remained to be settled with the Holy Roman Empire. In
addition, absolutism, by its nature a threat to the revolution, still held sway
over most of Europe. The Directory gave way to the next phase, the Consulate
under Bonaparte, which opened the Napoleonic Wars.

The French revolutionaries had spent much time debating
constitutions and formulating and approving them by plebiscite. The first, in
1791, resulted in the stillbirth of a constitutional monarchy. The second, in
1793, was never implemented. The third, in 1795, created the Directory, with
the real power vested in the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, who took up
residence in the Tuileries on February 19, 1800. By 1802, he was proclaimed
Consul for Life. A dictatorship was now established.

With the fall of Napoleon, a constitutional monarchy was
instituted that survived until overthrown in 1848.

French Political Structure, 1789–1804

Three Estates merged June 27, 1789

National Constituent Assembly (June
1789–91)

Constitution

·
        
Drawn up 1791

·
        
Sanctioned
by king, September 13, 1791

Legislative Assembly (October 1,
1791–September 20, 1792)

First French Republic declared

·
        
Elected
under 1791 Constitution

·
        
Dissolved
for republican Convention                   King overthrown, August 10, 1792

National Convention
(September 20, 1792–October 26, 1795)

Left:        The
Mountain

Center:     The
Plain

Right:       Gironde (to June 1793)

Election to establish new constitution

·
        
Constitution June 24,
1793, never implemented

·
        
Constitution of 1795
voted by the convention, August 22, 1795

King executed January 21, 1793

Committee of Public Safety (April 6, 1793– October 26,
1795)

Thermidoreans

·
        
Led coup that ousted
Robespierre

Directory (October
26, 1795–November 9, 1799)      Five elected members

·
        
Council of Elders 250
members

Draft of 1795 constitution

·
        
Council of 500 members

·
        
Overthrown by Napoleon

Consulate
(1799–1804)

·
        
Napoleon appointed First
Consul for life, August 1802

·
        
France became a military
dictatorship until 1812

·
        
Napoleon defeated at
Waterloo, 1815

Limited monarchy, Louis XVIII

2 - ECONOMY

During
the last decade of the old regime, new industries were emerging and old ones
were being revitalized financed by bankers, wealthy noble entrepreneurs, and
businessmen. The population was growing, and the wealth of the nation increased
steadily. Wages did not keep up with rising prices, however, and the revenues
of the government lagged far behind expenditures. Trust—a major factor in
economic development—barely applied to the government under Louis XVI. Investors
in government securities could never be certain that interest would be
forthcoming on the date due, or even that they would retrieve their money. To
loan money to the government was, in effect, a speculative affair, since
payment was based on the estimated future income of the crown derived from
taxes. A poor harvest would, for example, reduce the amount received and thus
the crown’s ability to pay creditors. Private companies that built ships for
the navy, supplied clothes to the army, or constructed or repaired roads and
canals might wait years for payment. Treasury accounts were never audited, let
alone published, and investors were always in the dark as to the crown’s
financial liabilities.