HIST 102 #21 - The Origins of the French Revolution

Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. We now turn our attention to the French Revolution and, of course, what starts it: the origins of the French Revolution.

Now, remember, of course, that Louis XIV, you've learned quite a lot about Louis XIV in previous lectures, died. And he left a very young grandson by the name of, a son by the name of Louis XV, okay? And, of course, you know, Louis XV was not his father, definitely not his father. And he also doesn't inherit a very stable France. Remember all the wars that Louis XIV had gotten France involved in? Well, it depleted the French Treasury. And not to mention the, the monarchy's extravagant lifestyles. Peasants paying taxes, a lot of the aristocracy were getting out of that, and it causes major discontent.

Now, when Louis XVI comes to power, these, Louis XV and Louis XVI, they're called the Old Regime, or Ancien Régime, and they were not extremely popular in France at this time. The aristocracy is trying to gain more power. You have weak monarchs during this Old Regime period. And you also have France, France had actually helped the Americans during the American Revolution. They didn't get involved officially until the Battle of Saratoga, which was actually the turning point of the American Revolution. But France had been helping the Americans because their long-standing enemy was Britain, and they were true enemies. So obviously, the French will come on the side of the Americans when they are fighting the Great British Empire. This cost a lot of money as well.

But any of the French soldiers that had come to the North American continent fighting in the American Revolution also read American papers and read about the American government. We don't need a monarchy. In fact, there were arguments saying that a republic could work. We didn't have to have a king. And so the French are being exposed to all this. Not to mention the fact that one of the enlightened philosophes, or thinkers, by the name of Rousseau, talked about what's called popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty means the people could decide. The people could decide. And the American government that comes out of the American Revolution, we are an experiment. No one knows if it's going to work or not, but so far, it's proving to work. And so the French people are seeing this.

France also had that huge war debt. It just could not pay it at all. Now, Louis XVI was not very proactive in any effort to reform or alleviate any suffering in France. And his wife, of course, was the very famous Maria Teresa, I mean, I'm sorry, thinking Austria, Marie Antoinette, very famous wife of Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette, yes, she lost her head as part of this French Revolution. You'll see that the American Revolution was never radicalized. Yet, we'll see the French Revolution going down a path of radicalism, and we'll see, of course, this Reign of Terror that will eventually take place during the French Revolution, with thousands of the nobility in France dying, execution, getting their heads cut off by Mr. Guillotine. Louis XVI, his wife Marie Antoinette, also died by the guillotine. And I want to say their son mysteriously disappeared.

So, the guillotine was actually invented, by the way, thinking of the guillotine, it was invented as a humanitarian gesture because it was quicker to execute using the guillotine, as long as you kept the blade sharp. And you know, when you're using an ax or a sword, sometimes you may miss partly, it may take longer to die. And actually, a doctor invented it, and it was supposed to be a humanitarian gesture. But the French found that it was also a very expedient way of execution. You could kill a lot of people in a short amount of time using the guillotine.

So it seems that Louis XVI and his wife were not just, they were isolated from reality. It didn't seem like they, they were totally aware of what was going on. You know, at the worst part of it, France was suffering, and the peasants were suffering. Marie Antoinette had this whole village built in her gardens, I mean, you know, and had parties and such. Not a very good message to send at this time.

Also, you'll probably learn about in the upcoming lectures that Louis XVI obviously needed money. We're having a problem. And so he tries to register a royal edict for a land tax, a new land tax. And he had to go before this group of aristocracy and church members to get it approved. And they said the only way that you can get this new land tax approved is if you go through the Estates General. And you've heard about this in previous lectures. I think Dr. Price has mentioned it, how, you know, all these different countries usually had an advisory body or an assembly. Britain had Parliament, Germany had the Diet, and of course, France has what's called the Estates General.

The problem is, the Estates General had not met since 1614. The year 1614, yes. We are now in 1789. So it's been a long time since they've actually met. And so there's no experience there. And we're going to have problems because it's made up of three Estates. The First Estate is made up of the clergy, which is aristocratic. The Second Estate is made up of the nobility, which is hereditary and obviously aristocrats, nobility. And the Third Estate were the elected common people. You know, it could be wealthy middle classes. You still had to be able to afford to serve in this kind of body, okay? Not everybody could do that, but writers, doctors, we had skilled artisans, shopkeepers that made up this Third Estate.

And the major problem here is how do they vote? The Third Estate is the biggest, okay? Obviously, the Third Estate, the common people, want it to go by person, each person gets a vote. They would dominate the aristocratic classes. The First and Second Estate said, no, we vote by estate. So Estates one and two theoretically would always have the vote over the Third Estate, which was the common people. So this was a big, big problem leading up to the French Revolution. So much so that the Third Estate will end up walking out of the meeting. They will set up their own, it's called the National Assembly, and everything disintegrates from there.

So let's learn more about the origins of the French Revolution. The French Revolution met a perfect storm in 1789 when the French Revolution broke out, but it was brewing in the years leading up to it during the 18th century. France, as a nation, had grown in population. The economy had grown. The monarchy that had been built on absolutism had been put in place by Louis the 13th and Louis XIV. Now was being ruled during the 18th century by Louis the 15th, and he would leave that throne to his son, Louis XVI. And that's when the problems begin. But in many respects, what happens leading up to that time is what will send the French monarchy down, and the French system of government, into what is known as the French Revolution. It's the people of France that will bring the French monarchy down and the institutions, the old institutions, or the Old Regime down. Those feudal institutions will come crashing down very abruptly, and it will be at the hands of the French people themselves.

During the 18th century, even though the population had grown from 20 million to 26 million and the economy had grown quite a bit during those years as well, France got itself into debt. A series of wars that the French participated in, including the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War, the French also helped out the Americans in the American Revolutionary War. Those wars helped to put the French more and more in debt, coupled with an inadequate tax system for France, an inadequate banking system. This debt is what will help bring the monarchy down in the dramatic change that will take place in the French government during the 18th century.

Now, Louis the 15th reigns for a very long time. He's, by the time that Louis XV dies in 1774, he's generally unpopular. He leaves the throne to his son, Louis XVI, who's even more unpopular, and someone who is seen as not well-suited to be a leader and not well-suited to make decisions. He's also, Louis XVI is also married to Marie Antoinette, who is not liked very much in France because she is an Austrian Habsburg. Marie Antoinette is the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, and the marriage of the king to Queen Marie Antoinette is not very popular. One of the factors in that is the fact that Marie Antoinette has not produced an heir to the throne, and as time goes on, that becomes a problem. Now, it's also something that will be resolved eventually, but it won't matter because the monarchy will come crashing down.

Now, when Louis XVI takes over, the debt problems begin to mount. The participation of the French in the American Revolutionary War escalates the debt. And the debt in France is short-term debt. Most of it is privately held. The banking system that the French have is not really adequate to transfer or to transform that debt into more long-term debt, and bankruptcy really is looming for the French government.

Now, when Louis XVI takes over in 1774, he's only 20 years old. His wife is even younger, she's 17 years old. And he himself feels that he's not up to the job. He's also someone who seems to be influenced by the last person that he talked with or that he spoke with or that advised him, and he seemed to side with that particular person. That's not something that you usually equate with leadership, someone who's swayed by the last person that they talk to, but that seemed to be the case with Louis XVI.

Now, he does recognize that France has this problem. The interest for the debt that they have eats up about 50%, about half of the expenditures for France is being eaten up just by the interest payments on the debt. So something has to be done. It can't really be restructured because the banking system is not adequate. So he needs a new source of revenue, and the new source of revenue has to be with the French people. Now, most of the French people are taxed out, but there's a group, specifically the clergy and the nobility, who are virtually exempt from paying taxes. They are the possible source of revenue for the French King at this point.

Cool, at the same time, the nobility is not being taxed. They themselves realize that this might be an opportunity for them to gain a little bit of independence from the institution of the monarchy, which had developed into an absolute monarchy in the previous century under Louis XIII and Louis XIV. That absolutism continued into the 18th century, and that absolutism, of course, was established through taking the power away from the nobility over time. And the nobility wants to exert their authority or their independence from the monarchy. At the same time, they see this opportunity that, okay, well, maybe we will be taxed, but you have to do something for us in return.

Now, what ends up happening? Louis is finally going to be persuaded in 1788 to call a meeting of the Estates General. Now, this is a pretty significant. The Estates General was a representative body of sorts that had been sort of like the legislative assembly or the parliament for France, but it hadn't met since 1614. The last time that it met was when Louis the 13th took over as the king, and since absolutism was established at that time, the Estates General, this representative body that France had had, went away. It's 1788. This is more than a century and a half later. Louis is being told to call the Estates General back, which hadn't met in over 150 years. And so he calls for an election to take place for the Estates General.

Now, the people in France are happy about this. They see an opportunity for themselves to be represented in the French government, something that they hadn't had for almost two centuries. And they go about a process of electing members, representatives to serve in this Estates General. The early, the early part of 1789 is when the elections will take place. And by the time you get to May of 1789, the Estates General will meet as an elected body at Versailles on May 5th, 1789.

Now, traditionally, the traditional rules of the Estates General, when you go back to when they did meet in the previous century, the Estates General is made up of three Estates. You have the First Estate, which represents the clergy or the church. The Second Estate, which represents the nobility. And the Third Estate represents the commoners, or pretty much everybody else. If you're not a member of the clergy, or if you're not a member of the nobility, you're in the Third Estate, but you are represented in that estate.

Now, the way that it worked with the Estates General is that each house, or each estate, met separately and made a decision about a law that they might enact separately, and then they would have one vote. So each estate would have one vote in the Estates General. The clergy, the nobility, and the commoners would get one vote. It's, this one estate, one vote system is the traditional way in which it was done.

Now, when we get to 1789, the Third Estate, which is by far the largest, in fact, the Third Estate represents about 97% of the population of France. The nobility and the clergy represent just 3% and they have two votes, and they can always outvote the Third Estate. But when they get to Versailles, there's an immediate debate over exactly which, or exactly how to proceed, which way are they going to go with? Are they going to go with the traditional way that they used to use in the previous century where you had one estate that would get one vote, or would it be a vote by head? In other words, that since the Third Estate had the most people represented, 97%, there were more representatives in the Third Estate when they finally met in the Estates General at Versailles. And of course, the Third Estate wants to vote by head. The other two Estates are going to want to vote in the traditional way, which means one estate, one vote. The First and Second Estate wants to meet separately. The Third Estate, though, wants to meet as one unit and then they all just simply vote by head, and of course, that would give you might say power or dominance to the Third Estate.

Now, they're going to wrangle with this for several weeks. It comes, you know, they start meeting on May 5th, it goes for several weeks, and they get into June. And finally, by June 17th, the members of the Third Estate just simply proclaim themselves to be the National Assembly instead of the Estates General. They are the National Assembly for France. They are essentially the equivalent of Parliament or the equivalent of Congress in the United States for the whole nation. And they do invite the other two Estates to join in with them. And some of the members of the first two Estates, some of the clergy and some of the nobility, do sympathize with the Third Estate. Some of these people that are in the first and second estate, as well as many of the members of the Third Estate, had been influenced by the Enlightenment, which of course was centered to a large degree in Paris. The salons of Paris were the location for the Enlightenment ideas. And of course, those Enlightenment ideas included things like liberty and equality, in terms like the citizen and the general will. Those are things in that sort of thinking are going to influence the delegates of the Estates General.

You also have the influence of what happened in America, the participation of France in the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, and the formation just two years earlier of the new constitution in America, the establishment of a republic, which is a government without a king. And these people are starting to think in a completely different way than the traditional or old ways of thinking. The Enlightenment, of course, challenged traditional institutions, traditional beliefs, and focused on things like reason. And that influence of the Enlightenment heavily influences members of the Estates General.

So the Third Estate proclaims themselves to be the National Assembly. Some of the members of the First and Second Estate join in with them. They do this on June 17th, 1789, at Versailles. Of course, Versailles is the location of the French government. It's also the house of Louis the 14th. It's the Royal Residence. At the same time, it is the seat of government for France.

Now, when they do this on the 17th, you know, there are, of course, members of the First and Second Estate that do not like this. The king is not someone who is going to like this as well. They go to a meeting three days later, on June 20th, 1789, at Versailles, and the meeting hall is locked up where the Estates General is to meet. And this is just after they proclaim themselves to be the National Assembly. The meeting hall is locked, and some of the members of the National, the newly proclaimed National Assembly, begin to look at themselves and say, they've locked us out. We don't have a place to go. And they start to think, are they trying to shut us down right now?

Well, what the National Assembly does, the members, they will go into an area that is an indoor tennis court, and it's actually sort of a handball court, but they, they're going to call it a tennis court at Versailles. And they go on to this tennis court and they meet there, and they're all congregated there. And they, on June 20th, 1789, they are going to take what's known as the Tennis Court Oath. And this National Assembly is going to vow to meet until they form a new constitution for France. This really is the point where the French Revolution begins, although it is associated mainly with another event that will take place a few weeks later that I'll get to in a moment. But when the National Assembly vows that they're going to write a new constitution that transforms the government of France, that's a pretty big deal.

Now, Louis XVI, he, of course, is not someone who is going to want this to happen. And there are members of the nobility, members of the clergy, of the other two Estates that do not want this to happen. Although there are some members of the first two Estates that do join in in this effort to create a new constitution. Louis is going to demand that they meet separately, and then he's going to say, okay, well, you don't have to be separately, you can meet together. This is all taking place at Versailles.

Meanwhile, out in the countryside and in the city of Paris, things begin to develop. This perfect storm, in a sense, begins to develop in France, coupled with the Enlightenment ideas, the debt problem that Louis has, the indecisiveness of the monarch himself, couples with the fact that there is a tremendous shortage of grain and flour and therefore bread for the French people. To this day, bread is a very important part of the diet of the French. A loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, it could be lunch for someone who lives in Paris today, and it wouldn't be too dissimilar more than 200 years ago.

In 1789, the problem was there was a very big shortage of bread, and the price had skyrocketed. It was said that at this time, this was the main diet. I mean, the average French person, it was said, ate about two pounds of bread a day, and there was none, or I should say, a very, very small supply, which jacked up the price of bread tremendously. The price of bread soared way out of the reach of people, to the tune of two months' salary for a loaf of bread. And that, of course, is not something that the people are going to be able to deal with. And you start having a clamoring for bread, for flour, for grain. Bakeries are being raided.

By the time you get to July of 19, excuse me, July of 1789, and you start having a situation where people are beginning to rise up because of the hunger that they feel, the literal hunger that they feel. And to some extent, there's a hunger for things like liberty and equality that had been sort of the trademark of the Enlightenment.

Now, there was also, because of what the National Assembly had done and the rising tensions in Paris itself, Versailles about 11 or 12 miles away from the center of Paris, the king began to mobilize some of his troops around Versailles, bringing them from the countryside closer to Paris itself. And because of this, people in Paris began to organize a resistance effort. Basically, mobs going through the streets, going through the bakeries, looking for extra food. They decided that they needed weapons. They did find some weapons. Thousands of people got a hold of a storehouse of weapons, which was located in the basement of a hospital in Paris that had been put there by the Royal government. They needed gunpowder for the weapons. So someone said that gunpowder was located or could be found at the Royal prison near the same river in Paris, the Royal prison known as the Bastille, which was an old fortress.

This Royal prison was an old medieval castle that served as a symbol for the past in many ways, a symbol for Royal tyranny. And it's where prisoners were thrown, political prisoners, as well as people that would get into conflicts with the royal family. They could be tossed into the Bastille. There weren't a whole lot of prisoners there, but it was said that there was gunpowder there. And this mob on July 14th, 1789, will enter the prison, or go up to the prison, and get into an immediate fight with the prison guards, who will easily be overthrown. The warden of the prison will finally surrender to this mob. He will be executed pretty much on the spot by the mob, and his head will be severed and paraded around Paris on a pike. And the mob will subsequently begin to tear this symbol of the royal family and the symbol of the past down. The Bastille prison, brick by brick, will be taken down in the subsequent weeks by this mob.

Now, Louis XVI had gone off on a hunting trip on that day, and he comes back and he wanted to know if there was any news of what happened in Paris that day. And he was told of what happened to, what happened at the Bastille, and what happened to the warden. And reportedly, he said, "Is this a revolt?" And his aide said, "No, sire, this is a Revolution." And the French Revolution, from a symbolic standpoint, is with the storming of the Bastille prison and what happens with the National Assembly back at Versailles. They are not going to condemn the violence that had taken place in Paris, or the destruction of the prison of the Bastille prison. In fact, they're going to basically side with the mob. And so you have a joining of the urban masses in Paris with the events at Versailles with the National Assembly.

In the subsequent weeks, what happens is the peasants in the countryside begin to revolt against the rule of sort of the old noble ways out in the countryside. You're going to have a revolt that takes place throughout the countryside, and they're really, this revolt of the peasants in the French countryside in July and August of 1789. In many ways, the nobility is going to wake up. And at the National Assembly, you're going to really, you're going to have an event that takes place on the night of August 4th that really breaks down the old feudal system that the peasantry had risen up in the last few weeks against anyway. And basically, the peasants rose up against paying their dues and taxes and manorial fees and things like that. And at the National Assembly on August 4th, is going to proclaim an end to the old feudal system in France, which is a, this is a huge deal because this breaks down the whole system that France had been built on for the last several hundred years.

And during that session, nobleman after nobleman would stand up and renounce the privileges of the nobility. And they would pass a series of articles. Article one: The National Assembly hereby completely abolishes the feudal system. It decrees that among the existing rights and dues, all those originating in or representing real or personal serfdom or personal servitudes shall be abolished. All manorial courts are hereby suppressed. The manorial courts are ruled by those are court systems throughout Paris that are ruled over by the nobility and the clergy. Taxes of every description, as well as the dues that have been substituted for them, are hereby abolished, and another method devised to collect taxes shall be instituted. The sale of judiciary and municipal offices shall be suppressed. Privileges personal or real in the payment of taxes are abolished. And this means the personal privileges that the nobility had at the time where they were exempt from taxes, this is being abolished. Taxes shall be collected, they say, from all citizens and from all property in the same manner and in the same form. Also, the peculiar privileges of the provinces, principalities, districts, cities, and communes are once and for all abolished and absorbed into the law that is common for all French lands. In other words, one system in one province that is established because of the traditions of the local nobility, that's out of the way, and we're going to have common law throughout the land. That was what they had in England. And during the period of the Enlightenment, you had people like Montesquieu, who lived in England, who admired the system that was in England, admired to a great extent the relative religious freedom that they had there, and the system of government, the system of common law that they had in England. So this system in France where you had all of these different law courts and so forth and different ways of doing things are going to be stripped down to a common law.

All citizens, without distinction of birth or eligibility, are now allowed to have any office, whether civil, ecclesiastical, or military. And no profession shall be denied to that person. So you're not going to have these certain positions within the church, certain positions within the government or the military that are restricted just to certain classes of people, the nobility. And so this feudal system is going to come crashing down on the night of August 4th, 1789.

So in June, you have the National Assembly being proclaimed, the Tennis Court Oath, June 20th. The storming of the Bastille, the rise up of the peasants throughout the provinces of France. August 4th, you have the proclamation of the new, of the old feudal system and really the class system of nobility being destroyed.

Now, later in that month, August 26th, and this is a couple of months after the National Assembly is proclaimed, the assembly will draft a document known as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This is the declaration, to some extent, it's similar to the Declaration of Independence that had been written about a decade and a half before in America. It proclaims things like equal rights and that men are born free and equal. It also proclaims certain freedoms of religion and freedoms of speech and press and things like that in the Declaration of Rights of Man. Now, it is limited, by the way, to men at this time. There is a Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen that will be drafted as well.

The king is not going to sign off on what the National Assembly had produced on August 4th with the destruction of the feudal rights or on the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen. He does not sign those documents. He basically is not signifying that he agrees with that. And so what, as time goes by, as we get into September, the situation with the bread and the shortage of grain and flour producing skyrocketing costs, that will enable the urban poor of France to rise up again. And this is going to be an event that's led by the women of France, mainly. I mean, if you have a situation to where you're hungry, you're starving, you might be able to endure that at a certain point, but if you're a woman who also has to feed her children, they are going to be even more passionate about it than if it was just for themselves. And you have the women of Paris rising up, coming together, banding together, and then in the rain, marching the 11 miles out to Versailles, the headquarters of the French government, the residence of the king and the queen.

And of course, a lot of prop, a lot of information and to a certain degree propaganda by the people at the time had been circulating about the extravagant lifestyle that the royals had been leading. I mean, Versailles is the largest palace in the world. The gardens of Versailles and the fountains of Versailles and the extravagance of the parties and the balls and the ceremony, all of that information was being relayed. And the fact that Marie Antoinette was someone who spent her time at Versailles in this really fairy land world at the palace, all of this was something that the French people in the city, when they were hungry, began to resent a great deal.

And so these women march out to Versailles. Of course, the women, the reason that they go there, the pull is not just that the king and the queen are there, is that they hear that there is grain and flour that are stored up there for the use of the palace and the royals, and they want access to it. There's none to be found in Paris. And an empty stomach is going to make people motivated to take action. And these women take action, bringing with them pikes. You have the famous fish ladies down at the fish market, burly women who had been used to carting around large crates and scaling fish and shark fish knives. They're going to head out there. They're joined by others that have their own arms. You have Lafayette, who will organize an armed band of citizens that will come in after the women march to Versailles.

This is in October. October the 5th and the 6th of 1789 is when this takes place. And they get there, and the guards, the royal guards at Versailles, realize immediately that they're outnumbered and they're outgunned to a certain extent. And the royal family is in real danger at this point. And they're going to get into the palace, and guards are going to be killed. And Marie Antoinette herself is going to have to scurry from her residence to the king's residence, that is heavily guarded, more heavily guarded than her residence. And of course, Marie Antoinette, to show how out of touch the royal family is, it was reported that when she heard that the people didn't have enough bread to eat, she uttered the famous, well, the most famous lines that were never really uttered by Marie Antoinette were, "Let them eat cake." That was propaganda, something put into attributed to Marie Antoinette that she didn't say. And of course, it does show the out-of-touch nature between, if you, for the royal family, maybe if you didn't have bread, you can eat cake. And of course, the materials to make bread and cake would be similar.

Now, what happens with this is the king and the queen and the royal family will be forced to go back to Paris. The mob basically says, look, you live out here isolated in this bubble, in essence, as we would refer to it today, and you're, you don't really know what's going on. The people are suffering. And they force the king and the queen to come to Paris with them. The carriage is being, you know, the carriage brings the king and the queen back to the center of Paris. They do have a palace there that they get to live in, the Tuileries Palace, is where the king and the queen will reside in Paris. And it's going to be a virtual prison for them as they live in Paris because it will, they're not going to be able to really go anywhere. They're just going to have to sit in this palace in the center of town.

And what happens from this point? The National Assembly is going to get the ball rolling, beginning to write the new constitution and establishing this really new system of government for France, this new way in which France will operate from this moment forward. What the National Assembly does is they establish a constitutional monarchy, what, a similar system to what they have in Great Britain. The National Assembly is the legislative body making the laws. The king is still there as the chief executive for the state and the symbol for the state, signing off on the laws. But of course, the heavy presence and the heavy pressure that he has, he is going to be forced to go along with the National Assembly from this point.

Now, the National Assembly will revamp the institutions, the old institutions that were torn down. What they will do when they establish this new constitution and this new way of governing is that they will establish 80, they basically decentralize the government of France, which of course, with an absolute monarchy, had become heavily centralized. Everything sort of centralized back at Versailles. They decentralize everything to these 83 departments. Instead of the French provinces being divided up by the nobility, the 83 departments will be these 83 kind of like parishes or states that they have in France that will have elected officials where they were that would run each of these 83 departments through local elections. They would make decisions on what would go on there through representatives of the people.

Now, they also reformed the tax system to where they establish a uniform tax collection system. No one's exempt from the taxes. The judicial system is also revamped by the National Assembly. The judicial system is taken out of the hands completely of the nobility and the clergy, which had traditionally run those court systems. And a new civil and criminal court system under common law is established with elected judges rather than judges from the noble class or the clergy.

You also have the confiscation of church property, and this is to pay off debt. The church property is going to be confiscated and sold off to help pay off debt. The National Assembly also dissolves all of the monasteries and convents throughout France. And then at this point, which is something that has been done in England two centuries before, but this is where maybe the National Assembly goes a little bit too far. After they dissolve the monasteries and convents and confiscate the church lands, they then require the clergy to take this oath of allegiance to the government, this national state of France. They are going to say that the clergy is not, the bishops and the hierarchy of the church is not going to be selected anymore by the Roman Catholic Church. They will essentially be elected by the people. And the existing members of the church, the existing bishops and the clergy, would be able to keep their job if they took this oath of allegiance to the new French state. This vow, and many of them, half of them roughly, half the clergy aren't going to do it. Almost none of the bishops are going to do it. And what is being established here is this Civil Constitution of the Clergy, where all members of the clergy are required to take this oath. And again, half of them do not do that. And there's this divide that comes down, not only within the church but within France as a whole. The Catholic Church, the institution of the church, the Catholic religion, was a part of the fabric of the French culture that many people were not willing to depart with. They may have been willing to have these tremendous changes within society outside of the church, but not the government demanding this action of the church. And that's going to lose some steam for the National Assembly.

Now, this process of writing this new constitution and these new rules goes forward for the next couple of years. The king is still the king, although he is limited now. Instead of an absolute monarchy, you have a constitutional monarchy. And he's forced to, when he left Versailles with the, you know, when the women go to and march on Versailles in October of 1789, that's the last time he sees Versailles. He's again a virtual prisoner inside the palace in Paris where he lives. But he is the monarch, and he is part of the government, and he is giving his support, kind of. He acts like he's going along with it, but he doesn't really believe in this whole constitutional monarchy at all.

Well, he is going to discredit not only himself and his family, and at the same time, he's going to discredit the new government that is formed under the National Assembly. What he does in June, on June 20th, 1791, this is two years after the Tennis Court Oath. He disguises himself and his family and leaves Paris in a carriage. And he tries to escape into out of Paris, out of the bounds of Paris, hoping to possibly gain support for, gain support in order to form an army, a royal army backing him, that would be able to go into Paris and put an end to all of the shenanigans that had gone on. But before he gets out, he's recognized by a postmaster. So the disguise must have not been all that great. He's recognized, and then the king and his family, they're arrested and brought back to, excuse me, Paris, brought back to Paris and forced back in the palace.

And this sort of discredits the whole National Assembly because you have this constitutional monarchy where the king is part of it, and the king acts like he's going along with it, but then he tries to escape and maybe form an army, maybe he's going to Austria where Maria Theresa is from, maybe he wants the Austrians or maybe he's trying to get the help from the Prussians to rise up against the French people in favor of the monarchy. He's viewed as a traitor by the French people. And to some people, some of the more radical elements in French society, they begin to look at this and say, you know, why do we need a king anyway? I mean, what's the point of establishing this constitutional monarchy? Hey, in America, they don't have a king. They established a republic in America. Why? And of course, the Enlightenment, where you travel, you basically question the traditional institutions of monarchies and why we have monarchies, why is that the system that is in place to begin with? And just because it happened to develop doesn't mean it's the right way. There's a lot of that kind of thinking in France and in Paris.

And you have the more radical elements of the Revolution that begin to look at the monarchy itself as being useless. And since the king doesn't seem to be buying into this constitutional monarchy, they certainly aren't going to do it. And so there's a lot of pressure now on the National Assembly. Is the king really on board with this constitutional monarchy? Apparently not, because he tried to escape, tried to get out of the country. And so by the time you get into the fall of 1791, there's enough pressure on the National Assembly to where they're going to have to call new elections for the possibility of rewriting the constitution. And the call for elections does happen in the fall of 1791, and the more radical elements or representatives are going to be put in place. And they are going to establish essentially a new government for France under a new body known as the National Convention.

This National Convention is put in place by this election to rewrite and to establish a new constitution, to throw out the one that they just put in place, the one that established this constitutional monarchy. They're going to get rid of that and establish not a constitutional monarchy, but the French Republic. And that's what happens by the time you get to 1792.

And once this happens, this happens to coincide with lots of rumors and talk in the streets of Paris about how the Austrians and the Prussians are mounting armies to invade France and to go to war with France to try to put down this rebellion, to sort of force the rebellion down in order to prop up the monarchy. These rumors are swirling throughout Paris, and that plays into the hands of the radicals.

Now, what happens is, you do have war. By the time you get to April of 1792, you do have a war that breaks out between France and Austria and Prussia. And things do not go well for France in the early going. A lot of the military generals and so forth are members of the nobility, and they had gotten out of the country long ago, and they're not there. And things, to a certain degree, with the old system or being discredited and so forth. But you see an opportunity here because the king has been discredited. The National Convention will end up helping to strip the king away, the title of king away from the, you know, this Republic being established, essentially does that. But you have a mob that will break into the palace again, the royal palace in Paris, in August of 1792. And the king and the queen are going to escape with their lives and end up in the legislative assembly and try to protect themselves. But by this point, you have the establishment of the French Republic. The king is out. And it's not going to be long before this radical element of the French Revolution will put the king on trial for treason. And basically, it's an effort to get rid of the monarchy altogether. And by the time you get to 1793, the king will be executed. And within nine months, the queen will be executed.

And you have a period as we get into 1793 and 1794 of this Reign of Terror, which is an effort to get rid of all traces of nobility in France, to wipe out not only the royal family but to wipe out the aristocracy of France. The Reign of Terror that will take place will be during this radical phase of the French Revolution under the National Convention. You have the establishment of the Committee of Public Safety that will be led by the radical leader of the Jacobin Club, which is the more radical group within the French government, Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre will lead the Committee of Public Safety, and the Committee of Public Safety is the organization that conducts the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794.

And again, the Reign of Terror, the goal of it is to wipe out all enemies of the Republic. Now, who's an enemy of the Republic? Well, the nobility, the noble families, the aristocracy of France must be an enemy of the Republic because the aristocracy doesn't fit in with a republic. And you have the invention of the guillotine, which will be called the national razor. The guillotine will be a more humane way of putting people to death, but it will be used extensively. And it's not only a humane way of putting people to death because the blade always hit its mark, but it would be more efficient, and the execution process could gather speed as it went along. And during the Reign of Terror, people would be gathered up, captured, arrested in the morning, tried by noon, and then executed in the afternoon. Literally tens of thousands of people will be caught up in this Reign of Terror. And when the aristocracy is gone, you have other people who are going to be viewed as enemies of the Republic. And before long, anybody could be accused of being an enemy of the Republic. If you had any words against the Republic, you could be accused of being an enemy of the Republic. There's a lot of revenge that takes place with the Committee of Public Safety with this Reign of Terror. It's all being led by Robespierre, who leads this hoping to cleanse France of all of the elements that had existed in the past. And there's even an effort at this time to de-Christianize, not only get rid of the Catholic Church but get rid of Christianity within France, an effort to de-Christianize France, renaming the Notre Dame Cathedral the Temple of Reason, for example.

At this point, the French Revolution in 1793-1794 spins out of control, and it's going to take another force that will put it back together to some extent, but that won't come along until Napoleon Bonaparte comes along.

All right, well, we're definitely not done with the revolution for the next few lectures. Of course, we will talk about the French Revolution. We'll talk about the warfare, the Reign of Terror, and eventually, of course, a very popular figure in Western Civilization, we will eventually discuss the Napoleonic Empire as well. So we have a few lectures to go discussing specifically the French. Until next time.