R4.4 The French Revolution (1774–1815)

The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI and replaced a society of legal privilege with one based, in principle, on equal rights and the sovereignty of the nation. Its ideas, its wars and the empire of Napoleon that grew out of it reshaped Europe for a quarter of a century, and later revolutionaries from Haiti to Russia used its language.

The timeline of 1774–1815 shows three periods: the last fifteen years of the Ancien Régime, ten years of revolution, and fifteen years of Napoleonic rule. Each period grew out of the problems of the one before. The monarchy fell because it could not pay its debts or reform its tax system; the revolution ended in military rule because its governments could not end the war or agree on how France should be governed.

France under the Ancien Régime

Before 1789, French society was organised into three legal orders, or estates. The Ancien Régime ("old order") is the name revolutionaries later gave to this system of absolute monarchy and privilege. The king ruled by divine right, with no elected body to limit his power: the representative Estates-General had not met since 1614.

France had a population of about 28 million, the largest in western Europe. The First and Second Estates together made up less than 2 per cent of it, yet they held between a third and two-fifths of the land and paid little direct tax. The Third Estate was very diverse. It included wealthy merchants, bankers, lawyers and officials (the bourgeoisie), urban artisans, shopkeepers and labourers (the menu peuple, or "little people"), and more than 20 million peasants.

Estimates of the size of the privileged orders vary because no census was taken; historians give a range for the nobility in particular. The figures for landholding are also estimates, and they varied greatly between regions.

Taxes, dues and privilege

The tax system was complicated and unequal. The taille was the main direct tax on land or income, paid almost entirely by commoners. The vingtième ("twentieth"), a tax on income introduced in 1749, was in principle paid by all, but the privileged negotiated reductions. Indirect taxes fell on everyone who bought goods: the gabelle on salt, the aides on drink and the octroi tolls on goods entering towns. Many indirect taxes were collected by private financiers, the Farmers-General, who kept a share.

Peasants also paid the tithe to the Church (on average less than a tenth of the harvest, despite its name) and owed the royal corvée, unpaid labour on roads, until it was turned into a money tax in 1787. Historians estimate that in a bad year these burdens together could take a third or more of a peasant family's income.

The burden described in the caricature was real but uneven. Many nobles were poor, and some bourgeois families bought noble titles through royal offices: about 6,500 families were ennobled in the eighteenth century. The sharpest grievance among educated members of the Third Estate was often exclusion from status and power, more than the tax bill itself. In 1781 the Ségur Ordinance required four generations of nobility for direct entry as an army officer, a sign of the "noble reaction" that made privilege look more closed than before.

An absolute monarchy that could not reform itself

In theory the king was absolute; in practice his power was limited. Royal officials in the provinces, the intendants, enforced his orders, but they had to work with powerful provincial estates, town councils and the thirteen parlements. These high law courts, staffed by nobles who had bought or inherited their offices, registered royal laws and could delay them with formal protests (remonstrances).

The monarchy could not tax the privileged or borrow cheaply without their consent, and the parlements presented their resistance as a defence of the nation's liberties against royal despotism. By the 1780s, therefore, any serious financial reform required a political settlement that the crown was not prepared to make.

Louis XVI and the monarchy, 1774–1787

Louis XVI became king on 10 May 1774, aged nineteen, on the death of his grandfather Louis XV. He was well educated, pious and interested in geography and the navy, and he wanted to be a good king. He was also shy and indecisive, and he changed ministers and policies under pressure from the court, his ministers and his wife, the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette.

Turgot and Necker

Louis began with reform. His controller-general of finances, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, an economist influenced by the physiocrats, freed the grain trade and in 1776 issued the Six Edicts, which abolished the royal corvée and the guilds. The Parlement of Paris resisted, courtiers and financiers lobbied against him, and the freeing of the grain trade coincided with a poor harvest and bread riots in 1775 (the "Flour War"). Louis dismissed Turgot in May 1776.

Jacques Necker, a Genevan Protestant banker, ran the royal finances from 1776 to 1781. He financed French entry into the American War of Independence (1778–1783) almost entirely by loans rather than new taxes; the war cost the crown somewhere between 1 and 1.3 billion livres (estimates vary). In February 1781 he published the Compte rendu au roi ("Account rendered to the king"), the first public statement of the royal accounts, which claimed a surplus by leaving the costs of the war out of the ordinary budget. It made Necker popular and made later ministers' warnings of a deficit hard to believe.

The image of the monarchy

The prestige of the crown declined in the 1780s. Marie Antoinette was attacked in pamphlets and pornographic libels as extravagant, foreign and immoral. The Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785–1786, in which a con artist used the queen's name to obtain a necklace worth 1.6 million livres from jewellers, damaged her reputation although she was innocent; the acquittal of the cardinal involved, Rohan, by the Parlement of Paris looked like a judgement against her.

Louis also made decisions that reformers welcomed. In November 1787 the Edict of Toleration gave Protestants a legal civil status for births, marriages and deaths. The king's problem was less a lack of good intentions than an inability to impose a policy on the privileged and to stick to it.

Intellectual challenges: the Enlightenment and the American example

The Enlightenment was the eighteenth-century movement that judged institutions and beliefs by reason. Its French writers, the philosophes, did not call for revolution, and several of them admired strong monarchs. They nevertheless gave educated French people a language for criticising privilege, arbitrary power and the Church. Enlightenment thought is a regional study of its own; here it matters as one cause of 1789.

Ideas spread through newspapers, salons, Masonic lodges, provincial academies and reading rooms, which together formed a new public sphere in which "public opinion" judged the government. Historians such as Robert Darnton have shown that cheap, scandalous pamphlets attacking the court probably reached more readers than the works of the philosophes.

The American War of Independence added an example and a cost. French soldiers and sailors, with officers such as the Marquis de Lafayette, fought for the American colonists, who justified their revolt by natural rights and popular sovereignty. Returning officers brought these ideas home, and Lafayette drafted the first version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789.

The financial crisis of the monarchy, 1783–1788

The immediate problem of the monarchy was debt. France had fought the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) and then the American War, mostly on borrowed money, often at high interest. By 1788 about half of all royal spending went on servicing the debt. France was not poorer than Britain, which had a larger debt per head; the difference was that Britain's Parliament could vote taxes that lenders trusted, while the French crown could neither tax the privileged nor borrow cheaply.

The chart of royal spending in 1788 shows why cutting the court's costs, which many pamphlets demanded, could never solve the problem. Even ending all court spending would have covered only a fraction of the deficit. The crown needed either more revenue from the privileged or a default on its debts, and both meant a political crisis.

Calonne and the Assembly of Notables

Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, controller-general from 1783, at first kept borrowing and spending to maintain confidence. In August 1786, with loans running out, he proposed to Louis XVI a package of reforms: a single land tax to be paid by all landowners regardless of rank, elected provincial assemblies to share it out, the end of internal customs barriers and free trade in grain.

To win support without the parlements, Louis called an Assembly of Notables, a hand-picked body of 144 nobles, bishops, magistrates and officials, which met in February 1787. The notables refused to approve the tax. Some genuinely objected to losing privileges; many distrusted Calonne, whose figures revealed a deficit that contradicted Necker's Compte rendu; and several argued that only the nation, through the Estates-General, could consent to new taxation. Louis dismissed Calonne in April 1787.

Brienne and the revolt of the parlements

Calonne's successor, Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse and one of the notables, put forward a similar programme. The Parlement of Paris refused to register the land tax and in July 1787 also called for the Estates-General. Louis exiled the Parlement to Troyes in August, recalled it in September, and in May 1788 his justice minister Lamoignon issued edicts that removed most of the parlements' powers.

The provincial parlements and their supporters resisted. On 7 June 1788 in Grenoble, townspeople pelted royal troops with roof tiles to stop the expulsion of the local parlement (the "Day of Tiles"). In July an assembly of the three estates of Dauphiné at Vizille demanded the Estates-General, with double representation for the Third Estate and voting by head. The resistance of 1787–1788 united nobles, magistrates and many commoners against "ministerial despotism".

By August 1788 lenders would no longer lend. On 8 August the king announced that the Estates-General would meet on 1 May 1789, and on 16 August the treasury suspended some payments, in effect a partial bankruptcy. Brienne resigned and Louis recalled Necker, whose popularity restored enough confidence to borrow until the Estates-General met.

Economic hardship and popular anger, 1786–1789

A short-term economic crisis struck at the same time. The Eden Treaty of 1786 with Britain lowered duties on British manufactured goods, and cheap British textiles hurt French producers in the north. The harvest of 1788 was very poor after a dry spring and a violent hailstorm across northern France on 13 July 1788, and the winter of 1788–1789 was exceptionally cold.

The price of bread, the basic food of most French people, rose sharply. In Paris the four-pound loaf, which normally cost about 8 or 9 sous, reached 14½ sous in early July 1789, when a labourer might earn 20–30 sous a day. Families that already spent half their income on bread now spent much more, and had little left for manufactured goods, so unemployment rose in the textile towns as well. In April 1789 rumours that the wallpaper manufacturer Réveillon wanted to cut wages led to riots in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine of Paris, in which troops killed several dozen people (estimates vary widely).

Hunger did not by itself make people revolutionaries: France had suffered worse harvests without revolution. It mattered in 1789 because it coincided with a political crisis. People expected the Estates-General to bring relief, blamed hoarders and speculators (and often the court) for high prices, and were ready to act when they believed the deputies were threatened.

The cahiers show widespread agreement on some points and deep division on others. Almost all accepted the monarchy and asked for regular meetings of the Estates-General, consent to taxation and an end to arbitrary arrest. Many noble cahiers accepted equal taxation. Peasant cahiers attacked seigneurial dues, the tithe and game laws, while Third Estate cahiers in the towns demanded careers open to talent; very few noble cahiers were willing to give up their honorific privileges or voting by order.

From Estates-General to National Assembly, 1788–1789

Once the Estates-General was called, the question of how it would vote became the centre of politics. If each estate voted as one body (voting by order), the clergy and nobility could outvote the Third Estate two to one. If deputies voted as individuals (voting by head), and the Third Estate had as many deputies as the other two together, reformist nobles and parish priests could give it a majority.

In September 1788 the Parlement of Paris ruled that the Estates-General should meet in the form of 1614, with each order voting separately. Overnight the parlements lost their popularity: they were now seen as defenders of privilege, not of the nation. In December 1788 the king's council doubled the number of Third Estate deputies but did not decide how votes would be counted.

A flood of pamphlets argued the Third Estate's case. The most influential was written by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a clergyman from the Third Estate, and opened with three questions: what is the Third Estate (everything), what has it been until now in the political order (nothing), and what does it ask (to become something). Later in the pamphlet he set out his argument directly.

Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can succeed without it, everything would be infinitely better without the others.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, What is the Third Estate?, pamphlet, January 1789 (translation in J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History, 1906). Sieyès wrote to persuade, in the weeks before elections to the Estates-General, and his claim that the Third Estate alone formed the nation was a political argument, not a description of French society. Its value as a source lies in showing how a dispute about voting procedure was turned into a claim about sovereignty that excluded the privileged from the nation altogether.

The deputies claim sovereignty, May–June 1789

The Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789 with about 1,200 deputies: roughly 300 clergy (two-thirds of them parish priests), 300 nobles and 600 Third Estate deputies, most of them lawyers and officials. Necker's opening speech dealt with finance and said nothing about voting. The Third Estate refused to verify its deputies' credentials separately, and the estates deadlocked for six weeks.

On 17 June, joined by a few parish priests, the Third Estate deputies voted by 491 to 89 to call themselves the National Assembly, claiming to represent the whole nation. When they found their meeting hall locked on 20 June, they gathered in a nearby indoor tennis court and swore the Tennis Court Oath, not to separate until France had a constitution. By claiming to represent the nation, the deputies took for themselves the sovereignty that had belonged to the king.

At a royal session on 23 June, Louis XVI offered reforms, including consent to taxation and an end to some privileges, but ordered the estates to meet separately and declared the Assembly's decisions void. The deputies refused to leave. On 27 June the king gave way and ordered the clergy and nobility to join the Assembly, which renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July.

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The Bastille and the Great Fear, July–August 1789

The king's concession of 27 June coincided with a military build-up: about 20,000 troops, many of them foreign regiments, were moving towards Paris and Versailles, and on 11 July Louis dismissed Necker. Parisians took this as the start of a royal attempt to close the Assembly by force. Crowds seized weapons, and on 14 July they stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison in the east of the city, in search of gunpowder. About a hundred attackers and several defenders were killed, and the governor, de Launay, was murdered.

The fall of the Bastille saved the Assembly. Louis withdrew the troops, recalled Necker and on 17 July visited Paris, where he accepted the new red, white and blue cockade from the new city government. A citizen militia, the National Guard, was formed under Lafayette. Some great nobles, led by the king's brother, the Comte d'Artois, left France: they were the first émigrés.

In the countryside, rumours that nobles were hiring "brigands" to destroy the harvest set off the Great Fear (about 20 July to 6 August 1789). Peasants armed themselves, and in several regions they attacked châteaux and burned the documents that recorded their seigneurial dues. The rising was a peasant revolution within the revolution, with its own aims.

The August Decrees and the Declaration of Rights

The Assembly responded to the peasant revolt in a night session on 4 August 1789. Liberal nobles, led by the Vicomte de Noailles and the Duc d'Aiguillon, proposed giving up feudal rights, and deputy after deputy renounced privileges of every kind. The decrees finalised on 11 August are known as the August Decrees.

ARTICLE I. The National Assembly hereby completely abolishes the feudal system. It decrees that, among the existing rights and dues, both feudal and censuel, all those originating in or representing real or personal serfdom shall be abolished without indemnification. All other dues are declared redeemable, the terms and mode of redemption to be fixed by the National Assembly.

National Assembly, Decree abolishing the feudal system, 11 August 1789 (translation in J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History, 1906). The opening sentence was a sweeping statement, but the rest of the article shows the deputies' respect for property: most dues were to be bought out, not simply ended. Peasants largely refused to pay, and the dues were finally abolished without compensation only in July 1793.

The decrees also abolished the tithe, the sale of offices, tax privileges and the special rights of provinces and towns, and opened all careers to all citizens. Together they ended the society of orders. On 26 August the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as the preamble to a future constitution.

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good. … The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. … Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation.

National Constituent Assembly, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Articles 1, 3 and 6, 26 August 1789 (Avalon Project translation). Written in universal terms, it drew on Enlightenment ideas and the American declarations and stated the principles on which the new order would rest: equality before the law, national sovereignty, freedom of opinion and religion (Article 10), and property as "inviolable and sacred" (Article 17). Its silences matter as much as its words: it did not say whether women, the poor, Jews, Protestants or enslaved people in the colonies were included, and each of these groups soon tested it.

The October Days

Louis XVI delayed approving the August Decrees and the Declaration, and in early October bread was again scarce in Paris. On 5 October several thousand women, many of them market women, marched from Paris to Versailles to demand bread, followed by the National Guard. The next morning a crowd broke into the palace, and the royal family was forced to move to the Tuileries palace in Paris. The Assembly followed. From then on the king and the deputies worked under the eye of the Paris crowd.

Why did revolution break out in 1789?

Historians explain the outbreak of the revolution through causes that worked over different timescales. The long-term causes created the conditions for a crisis, the short-term causes produced the crisis of 1786–1789, and the dispute over voting set off the revolution itself.

The causes in the diagram interacted. The financial crisis made reform necessary; privilege, defended by the notables and parlements, made reform impossible within the existing system; the calling of the Estates-General turned the problem into a public political contest; Enlightenment ideas supplied the claims to national sovereignty and rights; and hunger in 1788–1789 brought the crowds whose violence in July and August forced the king and the privileged to give way.

The role of Louis XVI

Louis XVI's part is much debated. He inherited the debt, the tax system and the parlements, and his support for the American war, which created the final crisis, was popular at the time. His weakness lay in inconsistency: he backed reforming ministers and then abandoned them, offered concessions too late (23 June), and alternated between giving way and threatening force (the troops of July). He never accepted that the Assembly had replaced his sovereignty, and his reluctance to approve its decrees fed the suspicion that led to the October Days.

A more decisive king might have imposed Calonne's reforms in 1787 or accepted voting by head in early 1789 and kept control of a reforming Estates-General. Counterfactual judgements like these cannot be proved, but they help to weigh how far the outcome depended on Louis personally and how far on the structure of the Ancien Régime.

Rebuilding France: the Constituent Assembly, 1789–1791

Between 1789 and 1791 the National Constituent Assembly rebuilt almost every institution in France. Its members were mostly lawyers, officials and liberal nobles who wanted a constitutional monarchy, equality before the law and government by property owners. Their reforms lasted far longer than the constitution they wrote, and several of them divided the country.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy

Having taken the Church's land, the state had to pay the clergy. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 12 July 1790 reorganised the Church in France: dioceses were cut from 135 to 83, one per department; bishops and priests were to be elected by local voters (including non-Catholics) and paid by the state; and the pope was only to be informed of new bishops, not to approve them.

Many clergy might have accepted this, but in November 1790 the Assembly required all clergy in public office to swear an oath to the constitution. Only seven bishops took it. Among the parish clergy, slightly more than half swore (the "constitutional" or juring priests) and the rest refused. In March and April 1791 Pope Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution and the Declaration of Rights.

The oath divided France geographically. Most priests swore in the Paris basin, the centre and the south-east; most refused in the west (Brittany, Anjou, the Vendée), the north, Alsace and parts of the Massif Central. Ordinary Catholics now had to choose between their priest and the revolution, and the regions of refusal later became the main centres of counter-revolution. Louis XVI, a devout Catholic, was deeply troubled by having approved the law, and the issue helped convince him to flee.

The Constitution of 1791

The diagram of the Constitution of 1791 shows a constitutional monarchy with a single elected chamber. The king appointed ministers and could delay laws with a suspensive veto, but he could not dissolve the Assembly, and he was now "King of the French", ruling by law rather than divine right. Sovereignty belonged to the nation, which exercised it through elected representatives.

The distinction contradicted the Declaration's claim that every citizen could take part in making the law. About 4.3 million men qualified as active citizens, a very wide franchise for the time; still, roughly 3 million adult men were excluded, and the wealth required to stand for election was much higher. Radicals such as Robespierre attacked the "aristocracy of wealth", and the demand for equal political rights became central to the Paris sans-culottes.

The end of the monarchy, 1791–1793

The flight to Varennes and its consequences

On the night of 20–21 June 1791 the royal family fled Paris in disguise, heading for the fortress of Montmédy near the eastern border, where loyal troops waited. They were recognised and stopped at Varennes and brought back to Paris under guard. Louis left behind a declaration condemning the revolution's work since 1789.

The flight destroyed trust in the king. The Assembly, which needed a king for its constitution, pretended that he had been kidnapped and suspended him only until he accepted the constitution. Radical clubs demanded a republic. On 17 July 1791 the National Guard under Lafayette fired on a crowd that had gathered on the Champ de Mars to sign a republican petition, killing between about a dozen and fifty people (estimates vary). The Jacobin Club split: its moderate members left to form the Feuillants, who backed the constitutional monarchy.

Most of these groups were not parties in the modern sense. The Girondins and Montagnards were both Jacobin in origin; they divided over the war, the trial of the king, the role of Paris and the use of emergency measures.

War and the fall of the monarchy, 1792

The Declaration of Pillnitz (27 August 1791), in which the Austrian emperor Leopold II and the king of Prussia said they would act to help Louis XVI if the other powers joined them, was a cautious statement, but in Paris it looked like a threat. In the new Legislative Assembly, which met in October 1791, Brissot and his supporters argued for war against the émigrés' protectors to expose traitors and spread liberty. Robespierre, almost alone among the radicals, warned that war would benefit generals and the court. The king and queen supported war, hoping that a French defeat would restore their power.

France declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792; Prussia joined Austria. The poorly prepared French armies, whose officers had largely emigrated, retreated. In June Louis vetoed decrees against refractory priests and for a camp of 20,000 provincial National Guards (fédérés) near Paris, and dismissed his Girondin ministers. On 11 July the Assembly declared "the country in danger".

On 25 July the Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto threatening Paris with "military execution" if the royal family was harmed. The Brunswick Manifesto convinced many Parisians that the king was working with the enemy. On 10 August 1792 the sections of Paris and the fédérés, among them the battalion from Marseille, stormed the Tuileries; about 600 of the king's Swiss Guards were killed. The Assembly suspended the king and called elections, by universal male suffrage, for a National Convention to write a new constitution.

As Prussian troops took Longwy and Verdun, fear of a "prison plot" by counter-revolutionaries led crowds to break into the Paris prisons. In the September Massacres (2–6 September 1792) between about 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners were killed, about half of all those held, most of them ordinary criminals, along with over 200 priests. On 20 September the French army stopped the Prussians at Valmy. The next day the Convention abolished the monarchy, and the Republic dated its Year I from 22 September 1792.

The trial and execution of the king

The discovery in November 1792 of a hidden iron chest of the king's secret correspondence in the Tuileries strengthened the case for a trial. The Girondins hoped to save Louis by an appeal to the people or a reprieve; the Montagnards argued, in Saint-Just's words, that no one could reign innocently and that the king should be treated as an enemy. In January 1793 the Convention found Louis guilty with no votes against; 387 deputies then voted for death without conditions against 334 for other penalties or a conditional death sentence, and a reprieve was rejected. Louis was guillotined on 21 January 1793.

The execution made compromise with the monarchies of Europe impossible and split France further. For the Montagnards it showed that the revolution would not turn back; for many Catholics and moderates it was regicide. By the spring of 1793 Britain, the Dutch Republic, Spain and other states had joined the war against France in what became the First Coalition.

Robespierre and the Terror, 1793–1794

The Terror is the name given to the period from the spring of 1793 to July 1794 in which the revolutionary government used arrest, special courts and execution against people it saw as enemies of the Republic. It is the most debated part of the revolution, and its origins lie in the crisis of 1793.

The crisis of 1793

The diagram of the causes of the Terror groups the pressures that fell on the Republic in 1793. In February the Convention ordered a levy of 300,000 men for the army. In March peasants in the Vendée and neighbouring departments of the west, already angered by the attack on their priests, rose against conscription and formed a "Catholic and Royal Army". In April General Dumouriez, the victor of 1792, was defeated in Belgium and defected to the Austrians.

In Paris the conflict between Girondins and Montagnards came to a head. The Girondins attacked Marat and the Paris Commune; the sections replied by demanding their expulsion. On 2 June 1793, with National Guards surrounding the Convention, 29 Girondin deputies were placed under arrest. Their supporters in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and other cities rose against Paris in the "federalist" revolts, and in August royalists in Toulon handed the port and the French Mediterranean fleet to the British. On 13 July Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Normandy who sympathised with the Girondins, assassinated Marat.

Revolutionary government

The Convention built an emergency government during 1793. A Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris (March) tried political crimes without appeal. The Committee of Public Safety, set up in April and renewed every month by the Convention, became in effect the government; Maximilien Robespierre joined it on 27 July. Representatives on mission, deputies with full powers, were sent to the departments and armies. A democratic Constitution of 1793 was approved by referendum and then suspended until the peace.

Three measures of the late summer of 1793 defined the new system. On 23 August the Convention decreed the levée en masse, the mobilisation of the whole nation for war.

From this moment until that in which the enemy shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. The young men shall go to battle; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothing and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old linen into lint; the aged shall betake themselves to the public places in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.

National Convention, Decree of the levée en masse, Article 1, 23 August 1793 (translation in F. M. Anderson, The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1908). The decree shows the Republic's idea of total war: every citizen had a role, divided by age and sex. As a law it was mainly applied to unmarried men aged 18 to 25, and it raised the army to perhaps 750,000 effective soldiers by 1794; its wording also shows how the state expected women to serve the nation through domestic work rather than as citizens in arms.

On 5 September, under pressure from a sans-culotte demonstration, the Convention declared that terror was "the order of the day". On 17 September the Law of Suspects defined who could be arrested.

The following are deemed suspects: 1– those who, by their conduct, associations, comments, or writings have shown themselves partisans of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty; 2– those who are unable to justify … their means of existence and the performance of their civic duties; 3– those to whom certificates of patriotism have been refused; … 5– those former nobles, together with husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons or daughters, brothers or sisters, and agents of the émigrés, who have not constantly demonstrated their devotion to the Revolution.

National Convention, Law of Suspects, Article 2, 17 September 1793 (translation from Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, George Mason University). The categories were so broad that almost anyone could be arrested: a person could be suspect for "comments", for failing to obtain a certificate from a local committee, or simply for being related to a noble. The law shows how the Terror punished opinions and identities as well as acts.

On 29 September the General Maximum fixed the prices of essential goods and wages, as the sans-culottes demanded. The Law of 14 Frimaire Year II (4 December 1793) then centralised power in the two great committees and made local authorities their agents.

How the Terror worked

Most of the Terror took place outside Paris and in regions of civil war. Revolutionary tribunals and military commissions sentenced people in the west, around Lyon and in the south-east; local surveillance committees drew up lists of suspects. In Lyon, after the city surrendered in October 1793, nearly 2,000 people were executed, some by cannon fire. At Nantes the representative Jean-Baptiste Carrier had thousands of prisoners drowned in the Loire (the noyades), and in early 1794 the "infernal columns" of General Turreau burned villages and killed civilians across the Vendée.

Data: Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution (1935); Vendée estimates from Jacques Hussenet and other recent demographic studies.

The chart of who was condemned shows that the Terror was not mainly a class war against the privileged. Nobles and clergy were sentenced far beyond their share of the population, but more than eight in ten of the condemned were commoners. Greer found that most death sentences were for rebellion or treason and that most were passed in the regions of civil war; the Terror struck hardest where the Republic was fighting its own people.

Dechristianisation and the Supreme Being

In the autumn of 1793 some representatives on mission and the Paris Commune led a campaign of dechristianisation. Churches were closed or turned into "Temples of Reason", bells and silver were seized for the war, priests were pressured to give up their vocation and marry, and on 10 November 1793 a Festival of Reason was held in Notre-Dame. A new revolutionary calendar, adopted in October 1793, dated years from the Republic (Year I began on 22 September 1792), replaced weeks with ten-day décades and removed Sundays and saints' days.

Robespierre opposed the dechristianisers. He believed that atheism was aristocratic and that a republic of virtue needed belief in God and in the immortality of the soul. In May 1794 the Convention recognised the existence of a Supreme Being, and on 8 June 1794 Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being in Paris. The Cult of the Supreme Being made his enemies fear that he wanted to become a pontiff or dictator.

Robespierre and the ideology of terror

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), a lawyer from Arras, had been a deputy since 1789 and the leading voice of the Jacobin Club. He was known as "the Incorruptible" for his austere life and his defence of popular rights, and in 1791 he had argued against the death penalty. In February 1794 he set out the theory of revolutionary government in a speech to the Convention.

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

Maximilien Robespierre, speech to the National Convention "On the Principles of Political Morality", 5 February 1794 (Fordham Internet Modern History Sourcebook). Robespierre spoke as the leading member of the Committee of Public Safety to justify its policy to the deputies. The speech shows that the Terror was defended as a temporary instrument of virtue and democracy in wartime; historians who stress ideology (such as Furet) and those who stress circumstances (such as Tackett) both use it, the first for its moral language, the second for its appeal to "urgent needs".

The Committee then turned on rival revolutionaries. The Hébertists, leaders of the Paris Commune who demanded more terror and dechristianisation, were executed in March 1794; Danton, Desmoulins and the "Indulgents", who called for the Terror to be relaxed, followed in April. The Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) removed defence counsel from the Revolutionary Tribunal and allowed only two verdicts, acquittal or death. In the next seven weeks, the period called the Great Terror, nearly 1,400 people were guillotined in Paris.

Thermidor, July 1794

By the summer of 1794 the military emergency had passed: the victory at Fleurus on 26 June opened Belgium to the French armies. Yet the Terror was intensifying. On 26 July (8 Thermidor) Robespierre told the Convention that there were traitors in the committees whom he would not name. Deputies who feared they were on his list, including former terrorists such as Fouché, Tallien and Barras, combined with members of the Plain. On 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor Year II) the Convention ordered his arrest. The Paris Commune tried to rescue him, but few sections rose; he was guillotined with Saint-Just, Couthon and nineteen others on 28 July.

The Thermidorian reaction, 1794–1795

The men who overthrew Robespierre had not meant to end the Terror, but public opinion forced them to. Prisoners were released, the Law of 22 Prairial was repealed and the powers of the committees were reduced. The Jacobin Club was closed in November 1794, and Carrier and other terrorists were tried and executed. The Girondin deputies who had survived returned to the Convention, and in February 1795 freedom of worship was restored, although Church and state were now separated.

Reaction also had a social side. Gangs of well-dressed young men, the jeunesse dorée ("gilded youth"), attacked Jacobins in the streets. The Maximum was abolished in December 1794, and in the very cold winter of 1794–1795 prices soared as the assignat collapsed; in some towns people starved. In the south-east, royalist and Catholic groups killed hundreds of former Jacobins and prisoners in a White Terror in the spring of 1795.

Hungry sans-culottes rose twice in Paris, on 12 Germinal (1 April) and 1–4 Prairial (20–23 May) 1795, demanding "bread and the Constitution of 1793". The Prairial rising, in which women played a leading part, was crushed by the army and the National Guard of the wealthier sections; thousands of militants were disarmed or arrested, and the sans-culotte movement was broken. In June–July 1795 an émigré landing at Quiberon in Brittany, supported by the British, was defeated and over 700 of its prisoners were shot.

The Convention then wrote a new constitution. The Constitution of the Year III (August 1795) was designed to prevent both a return to the Terror and a royalist restoration. To keep power, the Convention ruled that two-thirds of the new deputies must come from its own members. Royalist sections in Paris rose against this on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795) and were scattered by troops under the young general Napoleon Bonaparte, using artillery in the streets. The Directory began its rule at the start of November 1795.

The French Revolutionary Wars, 1792–1802

France was at war almost continuously from April 1792 to 1802, and again from 1803 to 1815. The Revolutionary Wars began as a defence of the revolution and became wars of expansion. They radicalised politics at home, created the conditions for the Terror, made the army a political force, and gave Napoleon Bonaparte his reputation.

Why were the French armies so successful?

The French armies of 1792 were disorganised: about two-thirds of the royal army's officers had left by the end of 1791, and volunteers fought beside regular soldiers who distrusted them. By 1794 the Republic had the largest army in Europe. Historians usually explain its success through a combination of factors.

• Numbers. The levée en masse and later conscription produced armies of a size no other state could match, able to accept heavy losses.

• Organisation. The amalgame of 1793–1794 merged regulars and volunteers into new half-brigades. Lazare Carnot, the member of the Committee of Public Safety responsible for war, organised supply, arms production and strategy, which earned him the title "organiser of victory".

• Careers open to talent. With the old officer corps gone, able men rose fast: Hoche and Jourdan became army commanders in their twenties and thirties, and Bonaparte was a general at 24.

• Tactics and mobility. Columns of attack, swarms of skirmishers, independent divisions and armies that lived off the land moved faster than enemy armies that depended on supply depots. Many of these ideas came from military reformers of the 1760s–1780s, such as Gribeauval's artillery.

• Motivation and politics. Patriotism and revolutionary ideas motivated many soldiers, and the Terror punished defeated generals.

• Enemy divisions. Prussia, Austria and Russia were distracted by the second and third partitions of Poland (1793, 1795) and distrusted one another, so the coalitions rarely acted together.

The wars changed the revolution. Conquest brought "sister republics" (the Batavian, Cisalpine, Ligurian, Roman and Helvetic Republics), whose resources France took. By 1795–1799 the war paid for itself through levies on conquered lands, which gave the generals independence from the government in Paris. Victories made generals heroes, and the Directory came to depend on them.

The Directory, 1795–1799

The Directory governed France for four years, from November 1795 to November 1799. Its leaders, among them Barras, Reubell and (until 1797) Carnot, were former members of the Convention who had voted for the death of the king. They wanted a republic of property owners, safe from both Jacobins and royalists. The diagram of the Constitution of the Year III shows how carefully they divided power.

Problems of the Directory

The Directory faced opposition on both sides. On the left, Gracchus Babeuf organised the Conspiracy of the Equals (1796), which planned an insurrection to establish common ownership of property; it was betrayed and Babeuf was executed in May 1797. On the right, royalists won the elections of April 1797, and many expected them to restore the monarchy legally.

The Directors used the army to stay in power. In the coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797), troops sent by Bonaparte under General Augereau occupied Paris; the elections were annulled in 49 departments, 177 deputies were removed, and some opponents were deported to Guiana. In the coup of 22 Floréal (11 May 1798) the Directors annulled left-wing election results. In the "coup" of 30 Prairial (18 June 1799) the councils in their turn forced out several Directors.

The economy was another weakness. The assignat was abandoned in February 1796, and a new paper currency (the mandats territoriaux) collapsed within months. The return to coins brought falling prices and hardship for farmers. In September 1797 the finance minister Ramel cancelled two-thirds of the state's debt (the "bankruptcy of the two-thirds"), and he later reorganised the direct taxes. Corruption among war contractors and politicians, and the luxury of the new rich, made the regime unpopular.

Achievements and the crisis of 1799

The Directory was not simply a failure. It restored some order after the Terror, created a stable tax system and better public finances that Napoleon later inherited, set up the écoles centrales (secondary schools) and the Institute, and in 1798 passed the Jourdan Law, which made conscription a regular system. Its armies won great victories in 1796–1797.

In 1799, however, everything went wrong at once. The Second Coalition drove the French out of most of Italy, and Bonaparte's army was trapped in Egypt after the British destroyed its fleet at the Nile (August 1798). Conscription provoked a peasant revolt in Belgium (1798) and renewed royalist risings in the west. The councils passed a forced loan on the rich and a Law of Hostages (July 1799), which allowed relatives of émigrés and rebels to be held, and these revived memories of the Terror. Property owners feared both a Jacobin revival and a royalist return.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, the author of What is the Third Estate?, became a Director in May 1799 and planned to revise the constitution with the help of a general, a "sword". Bonaparte, who left his army in Egypt and landed in France in October 1799, became that sword.

The coup of Brumaire and the Consulate, 1799–1804

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica, a year after France acquired the island, into a family of minor Corsican nobles. Trained as an artillery officer in French military schools, he owed his rise to the revolution: promotion after Toulon (1793), the defence of the Convention at Vendémiaire (1795), command of the Army of Italy at 26, and fame from the Italian campaign of 1796–1797, which he publicised in his own army newspapers.

18–19 Brumaire

On 18 Brumaire Year VIII (9 November 1799) the Council of Ancients, told of an invented Jacobin plot, voted to move both councils to the palace of Saint-Cloud outside Paris and gave Bonaparte command of the troops. Three Directors, including Sieyès, resigned; the other two were held. The next day Bonaparte addressed the councils badly and was shouted down in the Council of Five Hundred, where deputies called for him to be outlawed. His brother Lucien, president of the Five Hundred, persuaded the soldiers outside that the deputies had tried to kill their general, and grenadiers cleared the hall. That evening a small group of deputies voted to replace the Directory with three provisional consuls: Bonaparte, Sieyès and Roger Ducos.

The coup of Brumaire succeeded because the political elite wanted a stronger executive, because the army was the only force that mattered, and because few people were willing to defend the Directory. Its emergence as a model of authoritarian rule after a revolution, often called Bonapartism, is examined in the thematic study of authoritarian states; here it matters as the end of the revolutionary decade.

The Constitution of the Year VIII, published in December 1799, set up the Consulate and made Bonaparte First Consul for ten years, with Cambacérès and Lebrun as second and third consuls with only advisory roles. The diagram of the constitution shows how little power the assemblies held. In a plebiscite in early 1800 the government announced 3,011,007 votes for the constitution and 1,562 against. The historian Claude Langlois showed in 1972 that Lucien Bonaparte, then minister of the interior, had added about 1.5 million invented "yes" votes; the real number was about 1.55 million, with most voters abstaining.

Bonaparte confirmed his position with victory and peace. He defeated the Austrians at Marengo (14 June 1800), and Moreau won at Hohenlinden in December. The Treaty of Lunéville with Austria (1801) and the Peace of Amiens with Britain (March 1802) brought general peace for the first time since 1792. At home the Concordat with the pope (1801) ended the religious schism, an amnesty allowed most émigrés to return (1802), and the west was pacified.

From Consulate to Empire

Each success was turned into more power. Opponents in the Tribunate were removed in 1802, and a plebiscite in August 1802 made Bonaparte consul for life (about 3.6 million votes for, about 8,000 against, according to the official figures). Royalist plots, above all the bomb in the rue Saint-Nicaise in December 1800 and the conspiracy of Georges Cadoudal in 1804, were used to justify repression of both royalists and Jacobins. In March 1804 French troops seized the duc d'Enghien, a Bourbon prince, in neutral Baden; he was tried by a military commission and shot, a warning to royalists that a restoration would not happen.

On 18 May 1804 the Senate proclaimed Napoleon "Emperor of the French", with the title hereditary in his family, and another plebiscite approved it. At the coronation in Notre-Dame on 2 December 1804, with Pope Pius VII present, Napoleon crowned himself and then Josephine. The Empire was presented as the completion of the revolution: the imperial oath promised to maintain equality of rights, political and civil liberty and the sale of national lands.

Napoleon's domestic policies and their impact on France

Napoleon ruled France for fifteen years, first as First Consul and from 1804 as emperor. His domestic policies aimed to end the revolution on terms that would last: to keep the gains that most property owners and peasants valued, to reconcile former enemies, and to concentrate power in his own hands. Their effects can be judged area by area.

Government, police and censorship

A law of February 1800 placed a prefect at the head of each department, appointed by and answerable to the First Consul, with sub-prefects in the districts and appointed mayors in the communes. Elected local councils, created in 1790, lost real power. The Council of State, a body of expert officials, drafted laws and decrees. Historians see this as a return to the centralised administration of the royal intendants, made more efficient.

Joseph Fouché, minister of police for most of the period, ran a network of spies and informers. The press was tightly controlled: in January 1800 all but 13 of the political newspapers of Paris were closed, and by 1811 only four remained, all under official supervision. Theatres and books were censored, and a decree of 1810 allowed people to be held in state prisons without trial. Political opposition had almost no legal outlet; the Tribunate, the last assembly with a right of debate, was abolished in 1807.

The Concordat

The Concordat of July 1801 between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII ended the religious split that had divided France since 1790. Catholicism was recognised as "the religion of the great majority" of the French, not the state religion. The pope accepted the sale of Church lands and the resignation of all existing bishops; the First Consul nominated new bishops and the pope invested them; bishops appointed parish priests; and the state paid the clergy, who swore loyalty to the government.

When the Concordat was published in April 1802, Napoleon added the Organic Articles without the pope's agreement. They required government approval for papal documents and councils in France and also organised Protestant churches, whose pastors were paid by the state as well. Napoleon's view of religion was practical: a reconciled Church would support the regime, end the royalist cause in the west and keep order among the poor.

The Civil Code

The Civil Code, issued on 21 March 1804 and renamed the Code Napoléon in 1807, brought together in 2,281 articles the many laws of the revolution and the different customary and Roman law systems of the old provinces. Napoleon chaired many of the Council of State's sessions on it. The Code kept the central principles of 1789 in civil life: equality before the law, the end of feudal privilege, freedom of conscience, a secular state that registered births, marriages and deaths, and the security of property, including the land bought from the Church and émigrés.

The Code was also conservative and patriarchal. It strengthened the authority of fathers over children and husbands over wives, restricted divorce, reduced the rights of children born outside marriage, and gave employers an advantage over workers: in a dispute over wages, the employer's word was to be believed (Article 1781). From 1803 workers had to carry a livret, a passbook recording their employment. Equal division of inheritance among all children, sons and daughters alike, was kept, with a share the father could leave freely.

Husband and wife mutually owe to each other fidelity, succor, and assistance. The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband. The wife is obliged to live with her husband, and to follow him wherever he may think proper to dwell … The wife can do no act in law without the authority of the husband.

Civil Code of the French, Articles 212–215 (in part), 1804 (English translation of 1811, from Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution). The articles show how the Code applied equality before the law to men while placing married women under their husbands' authority in law, property and residence. Article 213 stayed in French law until 1938, which is one reason historians stress the long-term cost of Napoleonic law for women.

Education and honours

A law of May 1802 created the lycées, state secondary schools with a uniform, military discipline and a curriculum of Latin, mathematics and science, to train officers and officials. In 1808 the Imperial University was given control of all secondary and higher education, with a monopoly over teaching. Primary education was left largely to the Church and local communes, and girls' education to families and religious orders.

The Legion of Honour (May 1802) rewarded military and civil service with a decoration and a pension, open to all ranks. In 1808 Napoleon created an imperial nobility of princes, dukes, counts and barons; he granted more than 3,000 titles, most of them to army officers. Critics saw these as a return of privilege; Napoleon presented them as rewards for merit, with no tax exemptions or feudal rights attached. The aim was to fuse the old nobility and the new elite of the revolution into one class of notables loyal to the regime.

The economy

Napoleon's economic policies aimed at stability and at paying for war without the inflation of the 1790s. The Bank of France (1800) handled government business and from 1803 had the sole right to issue banknotes in Paris. The franc germinal of March 1803, a coin defined by a fixed weight of silver, stayed stable until 1914. Tax collection was centralised under state officials, and new indirect taxes on drink, tobacco and later salt (the droits réunis, from 1804) brought back some of the hated taxes of the Ancien Régime.

The effects were uneven. Peasants who had bought or kept land did well while grain prices were good, and conscription created labour shortages that raised rural wages. Industries protected from British competition grew, above all cotton spinning in Normandy, Alsace and the north, and the shortage of colonial cane sugar led to the first beet-sugar factories (1811–1812). The Atlantic ports, cut off from colonial trade by the British navy, declined sharply: Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille lost much of their commerce. A commercial and banking crisis in 1810–1811 and a poor harvest in 1811–1812 caused unemployment and bread riots.

The table of the revolution's gains suggests a mixed verdict. Napoleon consolidated the civil and social revolution of 1789, which mattered most to peasants and property owners, while ending the political revolution of rights, elections and free debate. Whether that was a betrayal or a completion of 1789 depends on which part of the revolution is taken as its essence.

The impact of Napoleon's foreign policy on France

Napoleon's wars shaped France as much as his domestic reforms. Victory brought glory, territory and wealth; the price was paid in men, money and, in the end, invasion and defeat.

• Glory and propaganda. Army bulletins, newspapers, paintings by Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros, medals and monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe (begun 1806) presented the emperor as an invincible hero and the wars as defensive. The Imperial Catechism (1806) taught children that military service and taxes were duties owed to Napoleon.

• Wealth from conquest. Defeated states paid large indemnities (Prussia after 1807), and occupied lands fed and paid French armies. Conquered art filled the Louvre. Until about 1808 the wars largely paid for themselves, which kept taxes in France lower than they would otherwise have been.

• Conscription. More than two million men, most of them conscripts, served in Napoleon's armies between 1800 and 1814. At first only a small share of each age group was called, and the rich could buy substitutes. From 1812 the levies became huge, draft evasion and desertion grew, and in some departments mobile columns hunted down deserters. Several hundred thousand French soldiers died, though estimates vary widely.

• The economy. The Continental System protected some industries but ruined the Atlantic ports and colonial trade, and the wars cut France off from overseas markets for a generation.

• Defeat. In 1814 and again in 1815 foreign armies invaded and occupied France. The Second Treaty of Paris (November 1815) reduced France to roughly its borders of 1790, imposed an indemnity of 700 million francs and an army of occupation.

Contemporaries judged the balance differently according to place and time. For a young officer from a modest family in 1805, Napoleon's wars meant promotion and glory; for a merchant in Bordeaux, ruin; for a peasant family in 1813, the loss of sons to conscription. Support for the regime fell sharply after 1812, and few French people fought to save it in 1814.

Religion and the Church, 1789–1815

Religion was the issue on which the revolution divided France most deeply. In 1789 the Catholic Church was the only legal public religion, owned perhaps 6–10 per cent of the land, ran most schools, hospitals and poor relief, and kept the registers of births, marriages and deaths. By 1815 it had lost its lands, its tithe and its independence, but it had survived persecution and regained a recognised place in public life.

Napoleon used the reconciled Church as an instrument of government. Bishops read government proclamations from the pulpit, and a feast of Saint Napoleon was created for 15 August, his birthday. In 1806 a new catechism, the book from which all children learned their faith, was issued for every diocese in France.

Question: What are the duties of Christians toward those who govern them, and what in particular are our duties towards Napoleon I, our emperor? Answer: Christians owe to the princes who govern them, and we in particular owe to Napoleon I, our emperor, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and the taxes levied for the preservation and defense of the empire and of his throne.

Imperial Catechism, lesson VII, 1806 (Fordham Internet Modern History Sourcebook). Written by churchmen under government supervision and taught to every Catholic child, the catechism shows how Napoleon turned the Concordat into a tool for building loyalty, conscription and tax-paying into religious duties. As a source it shows the regime's intentions more than what children or priests actually believed.

Relations with the papacy broke down when Pius VII refused to join the Continental System against Britain. French troops occupied Rome in 1808, the Papal States were annexed in 1809, and when the pope excommunicated those responsible he was arrested and held at Savona and later Fontainebleau until 1814. The conflict cost Napoleon the support of many Catholics, especially in Italy, Belgium and the west of France.

Protestants and Jews

For France's Protestant minority (about 700,000 people, mainly in the south and Alsace), the revolution brought full citizenship and freedom of worship, and the Organic Articles made their churches a recognised and state-paid body. The Jews of France (about 40,000) became the first in Europe to receive equal citizenship: the Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne in January 1790 and the larger Ashkenazi communities of Alsace and Lorraine in September 1791, against strong local hostility.

Napoleon's policy towards Jews combined integration with discrimination. In 1806 he called an Assembly of Jewish Notables and in 1807 a Grand Sanhedrin of rabbis and laymen, which declared that Jewish law accepted the laws of the state, civil marriage and military service. In March 1808 three decrees organised Jewish worship in state-supervised consistories but also, in the so-called Infamous Decree, restricted for ten years Jews' rights to lend money, trade without a licence, settle in Alsace and hire substitutes for military service. It was not renewed in 1818.

Experiences of women, 1789–1815

Women took part in the revolution from the start, as rioters, petitioners, writers, club members, workers, soldiers' wives and defenders of their Church. The revolution changed the law of the family in women's favour in 1792–1793, but it refused them political citizenship, and the Napoleonic Code reversed many of their gains.

Women in revolutionary politics, 1789–1793

Market women and working women led the October Days of 1789 and took part in many later food riots, the traditional form of popular protest in which women defended their families' access to bread. Women attended the debates of the assemblies and clubs as spectators, and from 1790 some formed their own clubs or joined mixed "fraternal societies". A few demanded political rights. In September 1791 the playwright Olympe de Gouges published a reply to the Declaration of 1789.

Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility. … No one should be disturbed for his fundamental opinions; woman has the right to mount the scaffold, so she should have the right equally to mount the rostrum, provided that these manifestations do not trouble public order as established by law.

Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, Articles 1 and 10, September 1791 (translation by Lynn Hunt, 1996). De Gouges copied the structure and wording of the Declaration of 1789 to show that its "universal" rights left women out. She addressed the pamphlet to Marie Antoinette and found few readers at the time; its fame is largely modern. Her point about the scaffold was grimly confirmed: she was guillotined in November 1793 for writings attacking the Montagnards.

In 1793 the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, founded in May by Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe, joined the sans-culottes in demanding price controls and harsh measures against suspects, and campaigned for women to wear the revolutionary cockade. Girondin women also played political roles, above all Manon Roland, whose salon was a centre of Girondin politics; she was executed in November 1793. Charlotte Corday's murder of Marat in July 1793 was used by Jacobins as proof that women in politics were dangerous.

On 30 October 1793, after street fights between members of the Society and market women over the wearing of the red cap, the Convention banned all women's clubs. Speaking for the Committee of General Security, the deputy Jean-Pierre-André Amar asked whether women should exercise political rights and take part in government and answered, in the official record, "We can respond in general no", because nature called women to private duties. The ban marked the end of organised women's politics in the revolution.

Law, family and work

Laws of 1792–1794 changed women's lives more than political debates did. A divorce law of September 1792 allowed divorce by mutual consent, for incompatibility or for a range of causes, on equal terms for husbands and wives; in towns such as Rouen women started most divorces. Women gained the right to give evidence in civil cases and to be witnesses to legal documents, and laws of 1793–1794 gave daughters an equal share of inheritance with sons. Marriage became a civil contract registered by the state.

At the same time, the revolution gave women new burdens. The levée en masse assigned them work for the army; women who had served as soldiers were sent home under a decree of April 1793. Women in the west and elsewhere led resistance to the closing of churches, hiding refractory priests and reopening churches for worship. Hunger fell heavily on women as household managers in 1795, and women were prominent in the Prairial rising and in its repression.

Historians disagree on the balance. Olwen Hufton stresses that most women experienced the revolution through bread, religion and family, and that its effect on them was often negative. Joan Landes argues that the republic was built on the exclusion of women from public life, and Lynn Hunt links the exclusion of women to the revolutionaries' ideas of the family and of fraternity. The gains of the divorce and inheritance laws were real, but Napoleon's Code fixed women's legal subordination for more than a century.

Napoleonic rule beyond France

At its height around 1811, Napoleon's Grand Empire covered most of western and central Europe. Its territories experienced French rule in different ways, depending on how close they stood to France, how long French rule lasted, who ruled for Napoleon, and how strong local elites and the Church were. Each of the countries in the sections on Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and the colonies can serve as the "one country" of the empire or colonial empire, examined for its political, social and economic impact and for the experiences of marginalised groups.

The diagram of the Grand Empire shows three kinds of territory. Lands annexed to France (the "inner empire") were divided into departments and governed like France itself. Dependent states had their own rulers, usually members of Napoleon's family or loyal German princes, but adopted French institutions under French pressure. Allied states kept their own institutions but supplied troops and joined the war against British trade.

Historians such as Stuart Woolf and Michael Broers describe a common pattern. French rule brought a "package" of reforms: the Civil Code, the abolition of feudal privileges, the sale of Church lands, centralised administration with prefects, uniform taxes, conscription and religious toleration. It also brought heavy taxation, requisitions, the Continental System, the loss of local autonomy and attacks on popular religion. Broers argues that the French saw their mission as "civilising" backward peoples, a kind of cultural imperialism that local populations resented.

Germany: the Kingdom of Westphalia and the Confederation of the Rhine

Napoleon redrew the map of Germany. The Imperial Recess of 1803 (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) abolished almost all the Church states and most of the free cities and small principalities, and the number of German states fell from over 300 to about 40. Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden grew greatly and became kingdoms or grand duchies allied to France. After the defeat of Prussia in 1806–1807, Napoleon created the Kingdom of Westphalia from Hesse-Kassel, Brunswick and Prussian lands west of the Elbe, with his youngest brother Jérôme as king and Kassel as its capital.

Westphalia was meant to be a model state that would win Germans to French rule. Napoleon explained the plan to Jérôme when he sent him its constitution.

What German opinion impatiently demands is that men of no rank, but of marked ability, shall have an equal claim on your favor and your employment, and that every trace of serfdom, or of a feudal hierarchy between the sovereign and the lowest class of his subjects, shall be done away. The benefits of the Code Napoléon, public trial, and the introduction of juries, will be the leading features of your government. … What people will want to return under the arbitrary Prussian rule once it has tasted the benefits of a wise and liberal administration?

Napoleon, letter to Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, November 1807 (English translation published in Lapham's Quarterly). The letter shows Napoleon's political purpose: reform was a weapon against Prussia, designed to win the loyalty of the middle classes and peasants. As a private letter from the emperor to his brother it is good evidence of his intentions, but it says nothing about how the reforms worked in practice, which was very different.

Westphalia collapsed in October 1813 after the battle of Leipzig, and most of its laws were repealed by the returning rulers. In the south German states, by contrast, reforms carried out by German ministers such as Montgelas in Bavaria lasted, because they strengthened the rulers' own states. Napoleon's victories also provoked reform in Prussia: the ministers Stein and Hardenberg issued the October Edict of 1807, which freed the peasants from serfdom, and began reforms of towns and administration, while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau rebuilt the army that fought France in 1813.

Italy: the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Naples

French rule in Italy began with Bonaparte's campaign of 1796–1797 and the "Jacobin" sister republics, which collapsed in 1799, and returned after Marengo. By 1810 Piedmont, Genoa, Tuscany, Parma and the Papal States had been annexed to France. The north and centre formed the Kingdom of Italy (1805), with Napoleon as king and his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais as viceroy in Milan. The south became the Kingdom of Naples, ruled by Joseph Bonaparte (1806–1808) and then by Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat (1808–1815).

• Political. Centralised departments and prefects, a professional bureaucracy and a single legal system replaced the patchwork of old states. Italians held most posts in the Kingdom of Italy, but real decisions were made in Paris, and Napoleon forbade any idea of Italian independence.

• Social. Feudalism was abolished in Naples by a law of August 1806 and the Civil Code introduced; Church lands were sold, mostly to nobles and middle-class buyers, so peasants gained little land. Monasteries were closed, which removed charity and work for many poor people.

• Economic. Roads such as the Simplon pass route improved communications, but taxes were heavy and the Kingdom of Italy paid a large annual tribute to France. The Continental System forced Italian silk to be sold to France and cut off other markets.

• Resistance. Conscription and attacks on the Church provoked banditry and revolt, above all in Calabria from 1806, where a brutal guerrilla war against the French lasted for years. Secret societies such as the Carbonari formed in Naples, first against Murat's rule.

• Marginalised groups. Jews were freed from the ghettos (the gates of the Venice ghetto were torn down in 1797) and gained equal rights, which were removed after 1815 in most states. Peasants bore the costs of conscription and taxes; women lost rights under the Code that some had held in local law.

The long-term significance of the Napoleonic period for Italian unification, through shared administration, an Italian army and the Kingdom of Italy's tricolour flag, is part of the regional study of German and Italian unification; here the point is the immediate impact of French rule.

Poland: the Duchy of Warsaw

After defeating Prussia, Napoleon created the Duchy of Warsaw in July 1807 from Polish lands that Prussia had taken in the partitions of 1793 and 1795, and enlarged it with Austrian Polish territory in 1809. The king of Saxony became its duke. Many Poles welcomed Napoleon as a liberator who might restore an independent Poland, partitioned out of existence in 1795.

• Political. A constitution (July 1807) created a parliament (the Sejm) with limited powers; the Civil Code was introduced in 1808; the administration was centralised on the French model. Polish nobles ran the state, but Napoleon never restored the Kingdom of Poland.

• Social. The constitution abolished serfdom, but a decree of December 1807 gave the land to the lords, so freed peasants could be evicted or had to keep working for their landlords. Noble dominance in society hardly changed.

• Economic and military. The Duchy raised a large army under Prince Józef Poniatowski, which formed one of the biggest foreign contingents in the invasion of Russia in 1812. Taxes for the army, war damage and the Continental System, which closed the British market for Polish grain, ruined its finances.

• Marginalised groups. A decree of 1808 suspended the political rights of Jews for ten years, despite the equality promised by the constitution; many Polish nobles and townspeople opposed Jewish equality.

The Duchy was overrun by Russia in 1813 and became the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland in 1815, but the Civil Code stayed in force there for well over a century, and the Polish legions that fought for Napoleon became part of Polish national memory: their marching song became the Polish national anthem.

Spain: Joseph Bonaparte and the Peninsular War

Spain was an ally of France until 1808. After French troops crossed Spain to invade Portugal in 1807, Napoleon exploited a quarrel within the Spanish royal family: in May 1808 at Bayonne he forced both Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII to give up the throne and made his brother Joseph king of Spain. In Madrid a rising on 2 May 1808 (Dos de Mayo) was crushed and its prisoners shot, events later painted by Francisco Goya.

Joseph's government brought the Napoleonic programme: the Bayonne Statute (1808), the first Spanish constitution; the decrees of Chamartín (December 1808), issued by Napoleon himself, abolished the Inquisition, feudal rights and internal customs barriers and reduced the number of convents to a third. A minority of educated Spaniards, the afrancesados, supported these reforms.

Most Spaniards, led by the clergy and local juntas, rejected a foreign king imposed by force. A Spanish army forced a French army to surrender at Bailén in July 1808, the first major defeat of a Napoleonic army, and Napoleon had to come to Spain himself with 200,000 men. The Peninsular War (1808–1814) combined a British army under Wellington, Spanish and Portuguese armies and guerrilla warfare by bands that ambushed French convoys; French reprisals and Spanish atrocities fed each other. Famine in 1811–1812 killed many thousands in Madrid and elsewhere.

The war produced its own Spanish revolution. The Cortes (parliament) meeting in Cádiz, the city the French never took, wrote the Constitution of 1812, based on national sovereignty and a constitutional monarchy with a single chamber, and passed decrees ending seigneurial jurisdiction (1811) and the Inquisition (1813). When Ferdinand VII returned in 1814 he abolished it and restored absolutism, but the Cádiz Constitution became a model for liberals in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Latin America. Napoleon called the war his "Spanish ulcer"; it tied down about 200,000–300,000 French troops for years.

The Netherlands

The Dutch Republic became the Batavian Republic in 1795, a sister republic that emancipated Jews in 1796 and created a unitary state. In 1806 Napoleon made it the Kingdom of Holland under his brother Louis, who tried to protect Dutch interests and was slow to enforce conscription and the Continental System. Napoleon forced him to abdicate and annexed the Netherlands to France in July 1810. Dutch overseas trade, the basis of the economy, collapsed; the state cancelled two-thirds of the interest on its debt; and conscription was introduced in 1811. French rule left a centralised state and a single national law based on the Civil Code, on which later Dutch codes built.

The colonial empire: Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and Egypt

Napoleonic rule also reached the colonies. The Convention had abolished slavery in February 1794, under pressure from the revolt of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue. Napoleon reversed this policy. A law of 20 May 1802 kept slavery in colonies such as Martinique that Britain was returning to France. In Guadeloupe an expedition under General Richepanse crushed resistance led by Louis Delgrès, an officer of colour, in May 1802, and slavery was formally restored that July. The Leclerc expedition to Saint-Domingue (1802–1803) failed with the loss of most of its soldiers to war and yellow fever, and Haiti declared its independence on 1 January 1804. The Haitian Revolution, including the struggle against Leclerc, is a focused study of its own.

For the colonies, the impact of Napoleonic rule was therefore the restoration of slavery and racial discrimination: decrees of 1802–1803 also banned Black people and people of colour from entering France and forbade mixed marriages. The failure in Saint-Domingue led Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803. The Egyptian expedition (1798–1801) brought French administration, scholars and printing to Egypt and provoked a revolt in Cairo in October 1798; it ended with French withdrawal in 1801.

Decline and defeat of the First French Empire, 1805–1815

War with Britain resumed in May 1803, after only a year of peace. Between 1805 and 1815 Napoleon fought five more coalitions of European powers. He defeated each of the first three in short campaigns, but after 1808 the wars in Spain and Russia drained his resources, and in 1813–1814 all the great powers fought him together for the first time.

The table of the coalitions shows both Napoleon's military skill and the limits of his victories. Each defeated enemy was made to sign a punishing peace, which left it waiting for revenge rather than reconciled. Britain, protected by its navy after Trafalgar and by its wealth, was never defeated and financed one coalition after another.

The Continental System

Unable to invade Britain after Trafalgar, Napoleon tried to defeat it economically. The Berlin Decree of 21 November 1806 declared the British Isles under blockade and banned all trade with Britain from the territories of France and its allies; the Milan Decrees of 1807 extended the ban to neutral ships that obeyed British regulations. Britain replied with Orders in Council that blockaded French-controlled ports.

The system had some effect: British exports fell sharply in 1808 and 1811, and Britain suffered a commercial crisis in 1810–1811. But Britain found other markets in Latin America and kept control of colonial goods; smuggling flourished; and Napoleon himself sold licences to trade with Britain from 1810. Its political costs for France were enormous. To close Portugal, French troops invaded it in 1807 and then took over Spain, starting the Peninsular War. Pius VII's refusal to join led to the occupation of Rome. Russia's withdrawal from the system in December 1810, when it opened its ports to neutral shipping and taxed French goods, led directly to the invasion of 1812.

The "Spanish ulcer"

The Peninsular War (1808–1814), mattered for the fall of the empire in three ways. It kept large French armies tied down for six years, so that Napoleon never had his full strength in central Europe. It gave Britain a land front where Wellington's army, supplied by sea and supported by Spanish guerrillas, wore down French forces; his victory at Vitoria (June 1813) drove the French out of Spain, and he crossed into southern France that autumn. And it showed the rest of Europe that a people could resist French armies.

The invasion of Russia, 1812

Relations between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I broke down after 1810 over the Continental System, Napoleon's marriage to an Austrian rather than a Russian princess, the enlargement of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1809 and French annexations in Germany. On 24 June 1812 the Grande Armée crossed the River Niemen into Russia. With reinforcements, about 600,000 men took part in the campaign, about half of them from Napoleon's allies and dependent states: Germans, Poles, Italians, Austrians and others.

The Russian armies retreated, refusing battle and destroying supplies. Disease, heat, hunger and desertion cost the Grande Armée a large part of its central force before any major battle. At Borodino on 7 September Napoleon won a costly victory, with perhaps 70,000 casualties on both sides. He entered Moscow on 14 September, but the city was set on fire and Alexander refused to negotiate. On 19 October Napoleon began the retreat, too late: cold, hunger, Cossack raids and partisan attacks destroyed the army, and the crossing of the Berezina (26–29 November) became a disaster. Fewer than 100,000 men escaped; the French lost most of their cavalry horses and artillery.

Minard's chart of 1869 is a primary source of a particular kind: a statistical graphic made by a retired French engineer more than fifty years later, from earlier memoirs and accounts. Its numbers are approximate, and it shows only the main body of the army. It remains one of the clearest pictures of the scale of the disaster, and of the fact that most of the losses happened before the winter began.

The fall of the empire, 1813–1814

The Russian disaster turned Napoleon's allies against him. Prussia joined Russia in early 1813, and German patriots called the campaign a War of Liberation. Napoleon raised new armies of young conscripts and won at Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden, but he lacked trained cavalry and officers. Austria joined the coalition in August 1813, and at Leipzig (16–19 October 1813), the "Battle of the Nations", about half a million soldiers fought and Napoleon was decisively defeated. His German allies changed sides.

Napoleon failed to accept an allied offer, made through Austria in November 1813, that would have left France its "natural frontiers" of the Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees. In early 1814 he fought a skilful campaign in eastern France with a much smaller army, but the allies, bound by the Treaty of Chaumont (March 1814) not to make a separate peace, marched on Paris, which surrendered on 31 March. The Senate, led by Talleyrand, declared Napoleon deposed, and his marshals refused to fight on. He abdicated on 6 April 1814 and, under the Treaty of Fontainebleau, was given the island of Elba as a small sovereign state. Louis XVI's brother returned as King Louis XVIII.

The Hundred Days and Waterloo, 1815

The restored Bourbons quickly became unpopular: soldiers were put on half pay, and owners of former Church lands feared for their property. Napoleon escaped from Elba and landed in southern France on 1 March 1815. Troops sent to stop him joined him, including Marshal Ney, and he entered Paris on 20 March as Louis XVIII fled. During the Hundred Days he governed as a liberal constitutional ruler, with an "Additional Act" to the imperial constitutions that allowed an elected chamber and a freer press.

The allies, meeting at the Congress of Vienna, declared Napoleon an outlaw and gathered their armies. He attacked first in Belgium, defeating the Prussians at Ligny on 16 June, but on 18 June 1815 at Waterloo his army failed to break Wellington's Anglo-Dutch-German army before the Prussians under Blücher arrived and attacked his flank. The French army broke. Napoleon abdicated again on 22 June, surrendered to the British and was exiled to the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died on 5 May 1821. The peace settlement made at Vienna, which begins the next period of European history, is part of the regional study of German and Italian unification.

The diagram of the fall of the empire shows that the causes were connected. Napoleon's decisions to enforce the Continental System led to Spain and Russia; the losses of 1812 destroyed the trained army that had won his victories; the defeat brought Prussia and Austria into a united coalition paid for by Britain; and exhaustion in France meant that when the allies reached Paris, the elites abandoned him.

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Perspectives and debates

The French Revolution has been argued about since it began. In 1790 the British politician Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, condemned it for destroying inherited institutions in the name of abstract rights and predicted that it would end in violence and military rule; Thomas Paine replied in Rights of Man (1791) that every generation had the right to govern itself. Historians since have divided along lines that often reflect their own politics, as Pieter Geyl showed for Napoleon.

Why did the revolution happen?

For much of the twentieth century the dominant interpretation was social. In The Coming of the French Revolution (1939), Georges Lefebvre presented 1789 as several revolutions in one (aristocratic, bourgeois, popular and peasant), led by a rising capitalist bourgeoisie that overthrew a feudal aristocracy. From the 1950s revisionist historians challenged this. Alfred Cobban (The Myth of the French Revolution, 1955) pointed out that the revolutionaries of 1789 were mostly lawyers and office-holders, not capitalists; George V. Taylor showed that nobles and wealthy bourgeois held the same kinds of "proprietary" wealth; and William Doyle (Origins of the French Revolution, 1980) explained 1789 as the political collapse of the monarchy.

Each approach explains part of the evidence. The financial crisis made reform necessary, the defence of privilege made it impossible within the existing system, social grievances brought peasants and townspeople into the struggle, and the new political language of 1789 turned a quarrel over voting into a claim that the nation, not the king, held power. The debate has moved from asking which class made the revolution to asking how its causes interacted.

Why did the revolution turn to terror?

Each interpretation has to explain different evidence. Circumstances explain the timing and geography of the Terror: most death sentences came in regions of war and rebellion, as Greer showed. They explain less well the Law of 22 Prairial, passed in June 1794 when the main Vendéan army had been destroyed and the French armies were advancing. Ideology explains the language of virtue and the purges of the factions but not why terror was accepted by many deputies who were not Jacobin ideologues. Most historians now combine the two, as Tackett does.

The repression in the Vendée raises a separate debate. In 1986 Reynald Secher described it as a "genocide". Most historians, including Jean-Clément Martin, reject the term, arguing that the republicans aimed to destroy a rebellion, not a people, while accepting that the "infernal columns" committed mass killings of civilians. The debate shows how the revolution remains part of French political argument.

Napoleon: heir or betrayer of the revolution?

Judgements of Napoleon have changed with the politics of each generation. In Napoleon: For and Against (1949) the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl showed how nineteenth- and twentieth-century French historians had praised or condemned him according to their own views of monarchy, republic and empire; Geyl, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis, was himself writing against the admiration of strong rulers.

The views are not wholly opposed. A historian can accept that Napoleon kept and spread the civil equality of 1789 while arguing that he destroyed its political liberty and that his wars made the empire unstable. The question to ask of each judgement is which evidence it gives most weight to, which groups it considers (notables, peasants, women, enslaved people, conquered peoples), and over what timescale.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Each practice question that follows comes with markscheme guidance: what the question requires, indicative content for and against the claim, and what a top-band answer does.

Paper 3: the causes of the revolution

Paper 3: the radicalisation of the revolution

Paper 3: Napoleon and the revolution

Paper 3: Napoleonic rule in one country

Paper 3: women in revolutionary and Napoleonic France

These questions are written in the style of the IB for practice; they are not past IB questions.

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe the three estates, the tax system and the main privileges and burdens of each estate under the Ancien Régime.

• To do:

  I can explain how war debt led to a financial crisis by 1786 and why the reforms of Turgot, Necker, Calonne and Brienne failed.

• To do:

  I can assess the role of Louis XVI in the coming of the revolution and the fall of the monarchy.

• To do:

  I can explain how Enlightenment ideas, economic hardship and the cahiers contributed to the crisis of 1789.

• To do:

  I can explain why the method of voting in the Estates-General mattered and how the National Assembly claimed sovereignty.

• To do:

  I can explain the significance of the Bastille, the Great Fear, the August Decrees, the Declaration of Rights and the October Days.

• To do:

  I can describe the reforms of the Constituent Assembly, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Constitution of 1791.

• To do:

  I can explain why the monarchy fell in 1792 and why Louis XVI was executed.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, methods and scale of the Terror and assess the role of Robespierre.

• To do:

  I can explain the Thermidorian reaction and the structure, problems and fall of the Directory.

• To do:

  I can explain why the French armies succeeded in the Revolutionary Wars and how the wars changed French politics.

• To do: