Revolution
In
1776, the French became intellectually and emotionally engaged in the American
War of Independence. The Marquis de Lafayette fought extensively on the American
side against the forces of the English king. It seemed that, on the far side of
the Atlantic, a bright new dawn was possible. Why not at home?
Louis XIV's successors, Louis XV and XVI, were aware that they had to respond to the unrest, but their strategies were too feeble and too piecemeal to prevent the catastrophe that awaited them and the French monarchy.
Finally, in 1788, the accident of poor weather - and, therefore, a poor harvest - led to a period of punishing inflation, price speculation and hoarding of commodities. It set a lighted taper to the powder keg of discontent.
In May 1789, the king called a great council of state – the Etats généraux – to calm the situation, but it merely served to make more widely known the desperate condition of the public purse. (The council was renamed the Assemblée Nationale, the forerunner of the modern French parliament.)
On 14 July 1789, anger reached a peak in the capital. The mob sought a symbolic target for its rage. At the prison of the Bastille just seven prisoners were being held, but it also contained a large stock of gunpowder belonging to the royalist forces. The building was attacked and the French Revolution had crossed its Rubicon. The entire Bastille prison was dismantled stone by stone and fragments dispersed throughout France.
A Revolutionary government was set up, known as the Commune de Paris. It proceeded to dismantle what they called the 'neo-feudal' structures of French society. They sought to liberate the nation from a straitjacket of oppressive corporate controls and release free, responsible individuals from the tyranny of the past.
But destruction came at considerable cost and some aspects of the old regime which had functioned for the benefit of the people – such as church alms for the poor, hospitals and education – were lost.
There was more unrest. The response of the revolutionary authorities under Robespierre was the Terror. In 1793-4, more than 16,000 people were executed. The slightest suspicion, the least tenable denunciation, could lead to the scaffold. Half a million French men and women were imprisoned and more than a quarter of a million placed under house arrest. Judicial murder extended to both radical and moderate members of government.
Robespierre's autocratic dictatorship lost public support. A new constitution was drawn up and, for the first time, France was governed by 750 representatives in twin chambers of parliament. But the experiment was short lived. Ten years on from the storming of the Bastille, the Revolution did not seem to have achieved enough. On 9 November 1799, Napoléon Bonaparte, defender of the Revolution and the nation's most successful general, announced:
'Citizens, the Revolution has been established according to the principles which inspired it. It is over.'
There was, it seemed, no place in French society for a monarch. So Napoléon would have to become Emperor.
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