Complexities in Originating Factors: The French Revolution Unpacked

The significant impacts resulting from the intensification of political conflicts due to Enlightenment ideals, social antagonisms between two rising groups: the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, ineffective ruling and unfair taxation, which generated popular discontent. The acumination of these causes lead to secondary effects including economic crises and foreign policy oversights. The resulting tertiary effect triggered the start of the French revolution in 1789-1799.

In the nineteenth century, historical analysis that dealt with the connection between the Enlightenment and the revolution had become somewhat more complex.

Initially, Enlightenment ideals were understood to have belonged primarily to the bourgeois. However, investigations into the Cahiers de Dolances, “the list of grievances which was supposed to present the unanimous wishes of each community” of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, found enlightenment ideals to be more prevalent in the cahiers of the nobility. This development confirmed Dr. Marisa Linton's allegation that the ancien régime was challenged as much by influential critics within its organization as by the dissatisfactions of those outside of the elite class.

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Dr. Linton rejected the notion of “slave writers” – lower class writers- as extraneous due to the fact that members of the upper classes often financed their work.

In addition to having financed their works, sale figures for Diderot's Encyclopédie that “provided not only a compendium of knowledge but also the principles for attacking despotism, superstition, and intolerance, the major targets of the Enlightenment” showed that it sold exceptionally well amongst military aristocrats and professional bourgeoisie. Thus, the revolution was not a class-based conflict as many Marxist historians such as Georges Lefebvre argued.

Rather, consistent with more modern post-revisionist historians such as Linton, it was a conflict caused by a cross-class group who took from the Enlightenment the necessary tools to attack a government that could not be stopped by the current means available to them.

Another popular explanation for the long-term causes of the French revolution was the societal tensions that had originated from the ancien régime. The society of France at the time was divided into three social orders: the First Estate, “those who pray”, the Second Estate, “those who fight”, and the third estate “those who work”.

Lefebvre proposed an alternative explanation for the cause of social tensions. He asserted that the revolution resulted from the failure of the bourgeoisie to keep pace with their wealth and education. He contended that the upper bourgeoisie were exasperated by the inflexible social divisions and constraints. This in turn prevented them from attaining influence and privilege especially because they were rapidly attaining equivalent if not greater levels of wealth as the nobility. Economic power, individual capability and poise with regards to the future had passed principally to the bourgeoisie [from the landed aristocracy]. Regardless, they remained part of the third estate that granted them no administrative power and required them to endure the brunt of taxation. As Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, otherwise known as Abbé Sieyès -one of the chief theorists of the French Revolution- acknowledged in his avant-garde pamphlet "Qu'est-ce Que le Tiers État", that the third estate was “tout due to its having encompassed approximately ninety-eight percent of the total population. However, he goes on to point out that in the political order, the third estate was "rien" and banned from jurisdictional and legislative positions, which had been held by nobles.

Due to a voting system in which each order received only one vote, the first and second estates often if not always outvoted the third estate. It was for this reason that Abbé Sieyès, asserted that the third estate’s ambition was "être quelque chose" i.e. to extend political power from the ancient régime to the citizenry. Namely, the revolution was a triumph of the bourgeoisie in their exertions to obtain the authorities and dispensations of the nobility initiated by long-term antipathies on the part of the bourgeois class in regards to the privileges of the other two estates.

The view regarding the revolution being reflective of the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the nobility has been denounced by authorities including François Furet. They declared this view to be Neo-Jacobin (revolutionary far-left political movement) and accepting of the revolutionaries’ own myths about the ancien régime. Furet asserted that this understanding ignored the fact that the bourgeoisie and the nobles were members of the same economic class and that the affluence of the bourgeoisie was not founded in trade and commerce as Lefebvre suggested but rather in property and investment. British historian, Simon Schama addressed the added issue of escalation in the purchasing of offices by the bourgeoisie. He suggested that the nobility was not such a rigidly defined order but more an “open elite” with approximately two people a day ascended into the nobility.

Although it was possible to move up social strata, post-revisionist historian Gwynne Lewis claimed that the peasants of France were forced to labor under an increasingly “contemptible, antiquated feudal and theocratic system.” This system demanded from the laborers an array of duties and services and it was these peasants who were behind the revolution. Their participation was fundamentally due to the seigniorial movements throughout the eighteenth century. Examples of such movements were the annexation of common land, attack on laborer's rights, use of specialists to examine title deeds so as to increase the taxation burden on peasants and a general increase in taxation. This led to what Lewis referred to as the “transformation from an unacceptable system into an intolerable one” involving the clash between the peasants and the seigniorial structure. The heart of the revolution therefore according to Lewis was not a conflict of an escalating bourgeoisie against the nobility but instead a peasant-bourgeois revolution encompassing those at the lower end of the bourgeois spectrum.

Another deeply rooted obstacle for French society before the revolution was the configuration of its absolute monarchy, which was seen as being inefficient, unjust and corrupt. The divine right of kings

William Doyle claimed that the inability of the ancient régime to amend itself was mostly the fault of Louis XIV (r.1642-1715), Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) and Louis XVI (r.1753-1791). Louis XVI in particular was not helped by the sequestered life he led in Versailles as his seclusion lead to limitations in information relay regarding the conditions of the poor of France and their resulting rebellions. The kings were the only figures who possessed the authority to carry out the reforms but lacked the ingenuity to implement them. This led to a growing reliance on advisors who were nobles and products of the very system that needed reforming. It was therefore inconceivable that they would encourage the king to implement any reforms.

The final proposed cause of the revolutions involves taxation inequalities triggered by the financial problems of the French government. Financial difficulties under the French monarchy were not infrequent. A state of economic crisis was almost the norm during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Louis XIV left a legacy of debt due to funding numerous wars during his reign as well as major construction developments such as Versailles. By the 1780s, fifty percent of France's annual budget went towards paying off the ever-increasing interest payments on the ever-increasing debt. Another twenty-five percent went towards the maintenance of the military, while the self-indulgent and king as well as his court at Versailles absorbed six percent. This left less than twenty percent of the entire national budget available for the productive functions of the state, such as transportation, general administration, etc.

As a money saving initiative, the French régime sanctioned the ferme générale to collect taxes. The ferme générale was responsible for collecting a predetermined amount of taxes from the peasants but due to the peasants’ lack of access to the decrees, the ferme générale overtaxed them and kept the excess collected funds. The taxpayers realized where their moneys were going which triggered extensive resentment towards both tax collectors and the government. So loathed were the ferme générale that in 1782, Louis-Sebastien Mercier wrote that he “could not walk past the offices of the ferme générale in Paris without wanting to reverse this immense and infernal machine which seizes each citizen by the throat and pumps out his blood”.

The taxes fell disproportionately on low-income peasants because members of the first and second estates had obtained exemptions or were able to avoid certain taxes. Moulin suggested, “Taxes in France added up to between one-quarter and one-half of the revenue of the peasant household.” This resulted in misery as well as hardship for many. The financial weakness of the government, the wide spread hatred toward the government over taxation and the disdain toward the ferme générale for taking their money had often been held by historians such as Doyle as the major causes of the French Revolution. The Enlightenment became of key importance at this stage as it allowed those who were overwhelmed by taxes to articulate their complaints and critique the absolutist government.

There were many faults within the ancien régime in the years predating the revolution. The historiography of the origins of the French revolution has led to numerous and varied interpretations of these challenges amongst historians. The belief among select authorities has been that the primary cause of the revolution was the impact of the Enlightenment. Others have argued that notwithstanding the importance of social rigidities, the problem of overly high taxation as well as weakness and absolutism in the government were causes of the revolution. More specifically, they claimed that although the Enlightenment provoked radical thoughts in France, the stimuli for the thoughts came from many confounding variables. It is irrefutable then that without these variables, the Enlightenment would not have had the impetus to spark such great change.