French revolution revised

1. The
French
Revolution
1789-1799

2. • The Age of
Enlightenment
culminated in the
French Revolution
of 1789.

3. • France was the
center of
Enlightenment and
was influenced by
the American
Revolution (1775–
1783) and U.S.
Constitution (1787).

4. • The Revolution
destroyed the last
remaining social
institutions of the
Middle Ages in
French society.

5. • France was
transformed from
an absolute
monarchy to a
republic of free and
equal citizens
(… and then to a
dictatorship and
then back to an
absolute monarchy
… and eventually
back to a republic
again).

6. • Revolutionary ideas
spread from France
to the whole of
Europe and Latin
American colonies.

7. Long-term Causes:
• By 1789 many French peasants were critical of the monarchy. They resented the
heavy taxes (taille), the persecution of religious minorities, and government
interference in their private lives.

8. Long-term Causes:
• Popular disgust with the waste and corruption of the entire Ancien Regime (Old
Regime aka Catholic clergy & nobles), especially at the royal court of Versailles

9. Long-term Casues:
• Spread of Enlightenment ideas;
philosophes argued that people
had certain natural rights and that
governments existed to guarantee
these rights. They ridiculed the Old
Regime’s inefficiencies and its
abuses of power and spoke of
liberty, rights; and the nation.

10. Short-term Causes:
• The cost of the War of the Austrian
Succession (1740-1748), French
loss in Seven Years’ War (1756-63)
and French assistance provided
during the American Revolution
(1775-81) led to high war debt.

11. 50%
Interest payments of
national debt
25%
Military expenditures
6%
Court life at Versailles
19%
Running the country
FRENCH ANNUAL
BUDGET IN THE 1780s
Short-term Causes:
• By 1787 there were massive budget deficits (expenses = 600 million livres,
revenue = 475 million livres)

12. Short-term Causes:
• 1788-1789 –
bad winters 
crop failures 
bread shortages
(one loaf of bread =
a month’s wages!)
 mass starvation
 the Great Fear.
Violence erupted
across France in the
spring and summer
of 1789

13. Short-term Causes:
• 1788-1789 – bad winters  crop
failures  bread shortages (one loaf
of bread = a month’s wages!) 
mass starvation  the Great Fear.
Violence erupted across France in
the spring and summer of 1789

14. Phase 1:
From Absolute Monarchy
to Constitutional Monarchy

15. 1789
May 1 – To deal with the financial crisis,
King Louis XVI called the first meeting of
the Estates-General in 175 years; Little was
accomplished for five weeks as the
assembly debated over proper meeting and
voting procedures.

16. 1789
First Estate:
Clergy
Second Estate:
Nobles
Third Estate:
Everyone else

17. Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès wrote
What Is the Third Estate? decrying nobles
as social parasites and stating that
commoners represent the French nation.
What is the Third Estate?
Everything!
What has it been … in the political order?
Nothing!
What does it demand?
To become something …!

18. 1789
June 17 – The Third
Estate declared
itself to be a
National Assembly.
Some reform-
minded members
of the clergy and
nobility joined
them in a single-
chambered
legislature where
the voting would be
by head.

19. 1789
June 20 - When the National Assembly arrived to their regular meeting place,
they found it locked in preparation for a royal function. Interpreting the lockout as
a move to destroy their movement, the National Assembly moved their meeting
to a nearby indoor tennis court. They swore the Tennis Court Oath to continue
meeting until France had a constitution.

20. 1789
July 14 - The king
moved troops around
Paris and many
people thought he
sought to undo the
progress of the
National Assembly.
Fearing the king’s
soldiers, a Parisian
mob looking for
weapons stormed
the Bastille, a royal
armory and prison.

21. 1789
The Bastille had stood throughout the Middle Ages as a symbol of the king’s power.
The attack on it marked a turning point - attempts at reform had become a full-
scale revolution.

22. 1789
The people of Paris formed a National Guard
led by American Revolutionary War veteran
Marquis de Lafayette.

23. 1789
August 4: With the Great Fear gripping
the country, the feudal system and
Ancién Regime privileges were abolished.
Aristocratic émigrés fled.

24. 1789
Aug. 26 - The Declaration of the Rights of
Man and Citizen recognized the sovereignty of
the people and attacked the notion of the
divine right of kings. The revolutionaries
believed the French nation was not a group of
royal subjects but a society of equal citizens.

25. The Tricolor (1789)
The WHITE of the Bourbons + the RED & BLUE of Paris.

26. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen posed new
dilemmas.
• Did women have equal rights with men?
• What about free blacks in the colonies?
• How could slavery be justified if all men were born free?
• Did religious toleration of Protestants and Jews include equal
political rights?

27. Role of Women
• Pre-1789: Women were “passive citizens” with no political rights.
• Olympe de Gouges wrote Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791).

28. Role of Women
• Théroigne de Méricourt called for
“legions of amazons” claiming the right
to bear arms would transform women
into citizens. She was arrested, flogged,
and sentenced to an insane asylum.

29. Role of Women
• Many female
activists were
executed during the
Reign of Terror for
“conspiring against
the unity and
indivisibility of the
Republic.”
• The Napoleonic
Code confirmed
women’s legal
second-class status.

30. The Haitian Revolution
1789: St. Domingue was the most profitable
French colony and world’s largest sugar producer
with a population of 32,000 whites and 452,000
slaves (2/3 African-born). The Declaration of
Rights of Man and Citizen challenged ideas of
equality.

31. The Haitian Revolution
1791: Toussaint L’Ouverture led a
revolt of 100,000 slaves.

32. The Haitian
Revolution
1804: Jean-
Jacques Dessaline
was named
emperor of Haiti.
The remaining
3,000 to 5,000
whites were
massacred. The
Haitian Revolution
was the most
successful slave
revolt in history.

33. The Haitian
Revolution
1803: The revolution
prompted Napoleon’s
sale of the Louisiana
Territory to the
United States.

34. 1789
Oct. 5 - A crazed mob
of women conducted
a March on Versailles
and captured the royal
family. Louis XVI and
Marie Antoinette were
moved to Paris and
became virtual
prisoners of the
National Assembly.

35. 1789
The National Assembly
turned its attention to
writing a new
constitution modeled
after the British
constitutional
monarchy.

36. Phase 2:
From Constitutional Monarchy
to the First Republic

37. 1790: Civil Constitution of the Clergy brought Catholic Church in France under
state control. Old provinces re-formed into new departments.
Government paid the salaries of the French clergy and maintained the
churches.
Parish priests  elected by district assemblies
Bishops  named by department assemblies
The pope had NO voice in the appointment of the French clergy.
It transformed France’s Roman Catholic Church into a branch of the state.

38. 1791
Oct. 1 - National Assembly became the National Convention.
Louis XVI “accepts” the Constitution and the National Convention

39. The Political Spectrum
Jacobins
Montagnards
(“The Mountain”) Girondists
Monarchíen
(Royalists)
1790s:
The Plain
(swing votes)
TODAY:
Seating represented the left-right political divide.

40. 1791
June 20 – The royal family attempted to escape to Austrian Netherlands but were
stopped at the border and were returned to Paris.

41. 1792
April 20 - Concerned about the
potential effects of the Revolution
on their own kingdoms, Austrian
Emperor Francis II and Prussian
King Frederick William II declared
a willingness to intervene
militarily on behalf of the French
monarchy. The declaration
provoked deep fears of an
invasion. The National Assembly
struck first and declared war
against Austria and Prussia.

43. 1792
Aug. 10 – A mob in Paris
attacked the king’s Tuileries
Palace. The Convention lost
influence due to the chaos
of war and revolution.
Political power shifted to
the Paris Commune, a city
consul dominated by the
sans-culottes, a group of
shopkeepers and artisans
fiercely dedicated to the
Revolution and universal
male suffrage.

44. 1792
Sept. 2-6 - September Massacre of prisoners. The sans-culottes slaughtered
thousands of imprisoned clergy and nobles.

45. The sans-
culottes
depicted as
savages by a
British
cartoonist.

46. 1792
Sept. 20 – French
victory at the
Battle of Valmy
outside of Paris 
tide of war against
Austria & Prussia
began to turn

47. Phase 3:
The First Republic,
radical Jacobin dictatorship

48. 1792
Sept. 22 - Abolition of monarchy  birth of First French Republic

49. 1793
Jan. 21 -
Execution of
Louis XVI;
Radical Jacobins
allied with the
sans-culottes
found Louis XVI
guilty of treason
and voted (by
one vote) for his
immediate
execution via
guillotine.

50. The Jacobins were a political club of bourgeois revolutionaries.

51. • The Girondins were moderate
Jacobins. They supported
political but opposed complete
social and economic equality.
They pushed for war to unite
the people and spread the
revolution but opposed Louis
XVI’s execution.

52. • Montagnard (Mountain) were
radical Jacobins and were
backed by the sans-culottes.
• Jean-Paul Marat published
Montagnard newspaper
L’Ami du Peuple.
• Maximillien Robespierre
was a persuasive speaker, led
the Montagnard faction, was
popular with the poor of
Paris, and led the
Committee of Public Safety
during the Reign of Terror.

53. 1793
Mar. 11- The National
Convention declared war against
Britain and the Netherlands.
The French met defeat after
defeat. A counter-revolutionary
rebellion erupted in Vendee, a
tradition-bound rural region.

54. 1793
July 27 - Another bad harvest caused
further economic crisis and starvation.
Revolutionary leaders turned on one
another.
The Jacobins seized power and created a
12 man dictatorship led by Maximilien
Robespierre called the Committee for
Public Safety until France was secure. The
Committee called for a Reign of Terror to
use extreme violence to solve the
Republic’s crisis.

55. Oct. 1793 – June 1794 –
Reign of Terror  500,000 people
imprisoned; 40,000 executed by
guillotine or die awaiting execution.

56. Around 150,000 were killed pacifying royalist counter-revolution in Vendée.

57. Oct. 1793 – June 1794 – Robespierre had anyone he considered too moderate in
their political views charged with “crimes against liberty." The Reign of Terror was
the most radical phase of the Revolution, and it remains the most controversial.
“Let terror be the order of the day!”
“Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.”
- Robespierre

58. Oct. 1793 – June 1794 – Some historians see it as a major advance toward modern
democracy, while others call it a step toward modern dictatorship. The violence
and authoritarian methods used during the Reign of Terror have been adopted by
revolutionaries on either end of the political spectrum – from Communists to
Fascists.

59. Oct. 1793 – June 1794 – Karl Marx modeled his dream of
a worker’s revolution on the French Revolution and it has
directly served as a model to the Russian Revolution, the
Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and many
others.

60. 1793
Aug. 23 - Mass conscription began.
A draft, the seizure of grain from
farmers, and price fixing helped
save the Republic. A reorganization
of the army led to a series of
military victories. By 1794, France
had repelled Austrian, Prussian,
British, and Spanish invasions.
Mass conscription drafted 800,000
soldiers into 14 armies,
outnumbering the French enemies
nearly four to one.

61. Jacques Hébert led de-Christianization. Church lands and wealth were
confiscated, symbols and art were destroyed, the calendar was replaced, priests
were executed, and Catholicism was replaced by the atheistic Cult of Reason
and the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being.
The Festival of Supreme Being

62. The “Temple of Reason”
Come, holy Liberty, inhabit this temple,
Become the goddess of the French people.
The Catholic Church
was linked with real or
potential counter-
revolution.
Religion was associated
with the Ancien Régime
and superstitious
practices.
Religion had no place in
a rational, secular
republic.

63. 1793
Oct. 5 – A non-Christian Revolutionary calendar based on 10-day weeks was
adopted.
Vendemaire Vintage September 22 – October 21
Brumaire Fog October 22 – November 20
Frimaire Frost November 21 – December 20
Nivose Snow December 21 – January 19
Pluviose Rain January 20 – February 18
Ventose Wind February 19 – March 20
Germinal Budding March 21 – April 19
Floreal Flowers April 20 – May 19
Prairial Meadow May 20 – June 18
Messidor Harvest June 19 – July 18
Thermidor Heat July 19 – August 17
Fructidor Fruit August 18 – September 21

64. 1793
Oct. 16 - Execution of Marie Antoinette

65. 1793
Dec. 18 - Siege of Toulon ended -
Napoleon Bonaparte drove a British fleet
from an important port. At the age of 24,
he was a national hero.

66. 1794
July 27 - Thermodorian Reaction: Execution of Robespierre, Terror ended; Mass
executions led Robespierre to a loss of political support. On July 27, 1794, he and
82 of his followers were arrested and sent to the guillotine themselves. The Terror
was ended and thousands of prisoners were released.

67. 1795
Oct 5 - An angry mob of
counter-revolutionaries
threatened to topple the
revolutionary government.
Napoleon fired cannons
into the crowd and the
government was saved.
Napoleon gained national
fame and his marriage to
Joséphine de Beauharnais
elevated him to new social
heights.

68. Phase 4:
The First Republic,
moderate Directory Era

69. 1795
Oct. 26 - End of the National
Convention  the Directory based
on limited democracy – only the
30,000 wealthiest men in France
could vote.

70. 1795: The Netherlands was captured, and Spain and Prussia sued for peace.

71. 1796-97: Napoleon Bonaparte drove Austria out of Italy.

72. 1798: Napoleon invaded Egypt. Egyptology
introduced with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

73. 1799
Nov. 9-10 - Coup d’etat by
Napoleon  the Consulate;
Napoleon left his army and returned
to Paris. There, he joined a
conspiracy to conduct a coup d’etat
- a plot to overthrow the Directory,
seize power, and establish a new
government.

74. Napoleon was named first consul and held
dictatorial powers with far more power than
any French king had ever possessed.
“The Revolution is over. I am the
Revolution.”

75. A British Cartoon about Napoleon’s Coup in 1799

76. Revolutionary Reforms
• Feudalism was abolished.
• Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen was issued.
• Protestants and Jews were given legal equality.
• Church and state were formally separated.
• Slavery was abolished in the colonies.
• The Christian calendar was replaced by the rational Revolutionary calendar.
Seven-day weeks were replaced by ten day weeks to eliminate Sundays.
• Rational metric system was adopted.
• La Marseilles French national anthem and tricolor flag were introduced.
• Divorce laws were loosened.
• Free primary school (lycées) education was available to all.
• Napoleonic French civil law code was adopted.