Chapter 19 Part 1!
Independence from Britain
As fighting spread, colonists moved toward open calls for independence. The attitude of British government and its use of German mercenaries did much to dissolve loyalties to the home country and unite separate colonies. Common Sense, an attack by English radical Thomas Paine, mobilized public opinion in favor of independence. It ridiculed the idea of a small island ruling a great continent. In his call for freedom and republican government, Paine expressed Americans' growing sense of separateness and moral superiority. The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Written by Thomas Jefferson and others, this document listed the tyrannical acts committed by George III and confidently proclaimed the natural rights of mankind and the sovereignty of the American states. The Declaration of Independence universalized the traditional rights of English people and made them the rights of all mankind. It stated that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." No other American political document has ever caused such excitement, either at home or abroad. After the Declaration of Independence, the conflict took the form of a civil war pitting patriots against Loyalists, those who maintained allegiance to the Crown. The Loyalists, who numbered 20 percent of the total white population, tended to be wealthy and politically moderate. They were small in number in New England, but more common in the Deep South. British commanders also recruited Loyalists from enslaved people by promising freedom to any slave who left his master to fight for the mother country. Many wealthy patriots — such as John Hancock and George Washington — allied themselves with farmers and artisans in a broad coalition. This coalition harassed the Loyalists and confiscated their property to help pay for the war, causing 60,000 to 80,000 of them to flee, mostly to Canada. The broad social base of the revolutionaries tended to make the revolution democratic. State governments extended the right to vote to many more men, including free African American men in many cases, but not to women. The French wanted revenge against the British for the defeats of the Seven Years' War. They sympathized with the rebels and supplied guns from the beginning of the conflict. By 1777 French volunteers were arriving in Virginia, and a young nobleman, the marquis de Lafayette, became one of the most trusted generals of George Washington, who was commanding American troops. In 1778 the French government offered an alliance to the American ambassador in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, and in 1779/1780 the Spanish and Dutch declared war on Britain. Catherine the Great of Russia helped organize the League of Armed Neutrality to protect neutral shipping rights and succeeded in hampering Britain's naval power. By 1780 Britain engaged in a war against most of Europe and the thirteen colonies. In these circumstances, and in the face of severe reverses in India, the West Indies, and Yorktown in Virginia, a new British government decided to cut its losses and end war. American officials in Paris were receptive to negotiating a deal with England alone, for they feared France wanted a treaty that would bottle up the new nation east of the Allegheny Mountains and give British holdings west of the Alleghenies to France's ally, Spain. Thus the American negotiators deserted their French allies and accepted the extraordinarily favorable terms Britain offered. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Britain recognized the independence of the thirteen colonies and ceded all its territory between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River to the Americans. Out of the bitter rivalries of the Old World, the Americans snatched dominion over a vast territory.
Total War and the Terror
In July 1794 the central government had reasserted control over provinces, and the Austrian Netherlands and Rhineland were in French hands. This change of fortune was due to the government's success in harnessing the explosive forces of a planned economy, revolutionary terror, and modern nationalism in a total war effort. Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety advanced on several fronts in 1793-1794, seeking to impose republican unity across the nation. They collaborated with the sans-culottes, who continued pressing the people's case for fair prices and a moral economic order. Robespierre and his coworkers established a planned economy with egalitarian social overtones. Rather than let supply and demand determine prices, the government set maximum prices for key products. Though the state was too weak to enforce all its price regulations, it did fix the price of bread in Paris at levels the poor could afford. The people were put to work, producing arms and munitions for war effort. The government told craftsmen what to produce, nationalized small workshops, and requisitioned raw materials and grain. Through these economic reforms the second revolution produced an emergency form of socialism, which thoroughly frightened Europe's propertied classes and greatly influenced the subsequent development of socialist ideology. While radical economic measures supplied the poor with bread and armies with weapons, the Reign of Terror enforced compliance with republican beliefs and practices. Special revolutionary courts responsible to Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety tried "enemies of the nation" for political crimes. Forty thousand French men and women were executed or died in prison, making Reign of Terror one of the most controversial phases of the Revolution. Presented as a measure to save the republic, the Terror was a weapon directed against all suspected of opposing the revolutionary government. For many Europeans of the time, however, the Reign of Terror represented a frightening perversion of the ideals of 1789. The Jacobins took actions to suppress women's participation in political debate, which they perceived as disorderly and a distraction from women's proper place in the home. On October 30, 1793, the National Convention declared that "the clubs and popular societies of women, under whatever denomination are prohibited." Among those convicted of sedition was writer Olympe de Gouges, who was sent to the guillotine in November 1793. The Terror sought to bring the Revolution into all aspects of everyday life. The government sponsored revolutionary art and songs as well as a series of secular festivals to celebrate republican virtue and patriotism. The government attempted to rationalize French daily life by adopting the decimal system for weights and measures and a calendar based on ten-day weeks. Another element of this cultural revolution was the campaign of de-Christianization, which aimed to eliminate Catholic symbols and beliefs. Fearful of the hostility aroused in rural France, however, Robespierre called for a halt to de-Christianization measures in mid-1794. The most decisive element in the French republic's victory over the First Coalition was its ability to draw on the power of dedication to a national state and a national mission. An essential part of modern nationalism, this commitment was something new in history. With a common language and a common tradition newly reinforced by the ideas of popular sovereignty and democracy, large numbers of French people were stirred by a common loyalty. They developed an intense emotional commitment to the defense of the nation, and they saw the war against foreign opponents as a life-and-death struggle between good and evil. The all-out mobilization of French resources under the Terror combined with the fervor of nationalism to create an awesome fighting machine. After August 1793 all unmarried young men were subject to the draft, and by January 1794 French armed forces outnumbered those of their enemies almost four to one.5 Well trained, well equipped, and constantly indoctrinated, the enormous armies of the republic were led by young, impetuous generals. These generals often had risen from the ranks, and they personified the opportunities the Revolution offered gifted sons of the people. By spring 1794 French armies were victorious on all fronts. The republic was saved.
The Formation of the National Assembly
Spurred by a depressed economy and falling tax receipts, Louis XVI's minister of finance revived old proposals to impose a general tax on all landed property as well as to form provincial assemblies to help administer the tax, and he convinced the king to call an assembly of notables to gain support for the idea. The assembled notables, aristocrats and high-ranking clergy, declared that such tax changes required the approval of the Estates General, the representative body of all three estates, which had not met since 1614. Facing bankruptcy, the king tried to reassert his authority. He dismissed the notables and established new taxes by decree. The judges of the Parlement of Paris declared the royal initiative null and void. When the king tried to exile the judges, a wave of protest swept the country. Frightened investors refused to advance more loans to the state. Finally in July 1788, a beaten Louis XVI bowed to public opinion and called for the Estates General. Absolute monarchy was collapsing. The Estates General was a legislative body with representatives from the three orders of society: clergy, nobility, and everyone else. Each estate met separately to elect delegates, first at local and then at regional level. Results of the elections reveal the mind-set of each estate on the eve of the Revolution. The local assemblies of the clergy, the first estate, elected parish priests rather than church leaders, demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the church hierarchy. The nobility voted a majority of conservatives, primarily from provinces, where nobles were less wealthy and more numerous. Fully one-third of noble representatives were liberals committed to major changes. Commoners of the third estate, who constituted over 95 percent of population, elected lawyers and government officials to represent them, with few delegates representing business and the poor. The petitions for change drafted by assemblies show a degree of consensus about the key issues confronting the realm. In all three estates, voices spoke in favor of replacing absolutism with a constitutional monarchy where laws and taxes would require the consent of the Estates General. There was also the strong feeling that individual liberties would have to be guaranteed by law and that economic regulations should be loosened. On May 5, 1789, the 1200 delegates of the three estates gathered in Versailles for the opening session of the Estates General. The Estates General deadlocked over the issue of voting procedures. Controversy begun during the electoral process itself, when the government confirmed that each estate should meet and vote separately. During the lead-up to the Estates General, critics demanded a single assembly dominated by the third estate. In his pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? the abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès argued that the nobility was a tiny, overprivileged minority and the third estate constituted the true strength of France. The government conceded that the third estate should have as many delegates as the clergy and the nobility combined, but then upheld a system granting one vote per estate instead of one vote per person. This meant that the two privileged estates could always outvote the third. In June 1789 delegates of the third estate refused to meet until the king ordered the clergy and nobility to sit with them in a single body. On June 17 the third estate, which had been joined by a few parish priests, voted to call itself the National Assembly. On June 20, excluded from their hall because of "repairs," the delegates moved to a large indoor tennis court where they swore the famous Tennis Court Oath, pledging not to disband until they had been recognized as a national assembly and had written a new constitution. The king's response was disastrously ambivalent. On June 23 he made a conciliatory speech urging reforms, and four days later he ordered the three estates to meet together. At the same time, Louis apparently followed the advice of relatives and court nobles who urged him to dissolve the Assembly by force. The king called an army of eighteen thousand troops toward the capital to bring the delegates under control, and on July 11 he dismissed his finance minister and other more liberal ministers. It appeared that the monarchy was prepared to use violence to restore its control.
Growing Demands for Liberty and Equality
The call for liberty was a call for individual human rights. Before the revolutionary period, even enlightened monarchs believed they needed to regulate what people wrote and believed. Supporters of individual liberty demanded freedom to worship according to dictates of their consciences, an end to censorship, and freedom from arbitrary laws and judges who obeyed orders from the government. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed "liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm another person." This was a radical idea. The call for liberty was a call for a new kind of government. Reformers believed people had sovereignty — people had the authority to make laws limiting an individual's freedom of action. This system of government meant choosing legislators who represented the people and were accountable to them. Monarchs might retain their thrones, but their rule should be constrained by the will of the people. Equality was an ambiguous idea. Liberals argued that citizens should have identical rights and liberties and that the nobility had no right to special privileges. However, they accepted a number of distinctions. First, most liberals were men of their times, and they believed that equality between men and women was not practical. Women played an important political role in the revolutionary movements, but the men who wrote constitutions for the new republics limited political rights to men. Second, few questioned the inequality between blacks and whites. Even those who believed that the slave trade was unjust and should be abolished usually felt that emancipation was so dangerous that it needed to be an extremely gradual process. Liberals never believed that everyone should be equal economically. Although Jefferson wrote in a draft of the Declaration of Independence that everyone was equal in "the pursuit of property," liberals did not expect equal success in that pursuit. Great differences in fortune between rich and poor were acceptable. The essential point was that every free white male should have a legally equal chance at economic gain. However limited they appear to modern eyes, these demands for liberty and equality were revolutionary, given that a privileged elite had long existed with little opposition. The two most important Enlightenment references for liberals were John Locke and the baron de Montesquieu. Locke maintained that England's political tradition rested on "the rights of Englishmen" and on representative government through Parliament. He argued that if a government oversteps its function of protecting the rights of life, liberty, and private property, it becomes a tyranny. Montesquieu was inspired by English constitutional history and the Glorious Revolution, which placed sovereignty in Parliament. He believed that powerful "intermediary groups" offered the best defense of liberty against despotism. The belief that representative institutions could defend their liberty and interests appealed to the educated middle classes. Yet liberal ideas about individual rights and political freedom appealed to members of the hereditary nobility in western Europe and as formulated by Montesquieu. Representative government did not mean democracy, which liberal thinkers equated with mob rule. They envisioned voting for representatives as being restricted to men who owned property. The blurring of practical distinctions between landed aristocrats and wealthy commoners meant there was no clear-cut opposition between nobles and non-nobles on political issues. The poor themselves had little time to plan for reform, given the challenges of earning their daily bread. Revolutions began with aspirations for equality and liberty among the social elite. Soon, dissenting voices emerged as some revolutionaries became frustrated with the limitations of liberal notions of equality and liberty and clamored for a fuller realization of these concepts. Depending on location, their demands included political rights for women and free people of color, the emancipation of slaves, and government regulations to reduce economic inequality. The age of revolution was thus marked by sharp conflicts over how far reform should go once it was initiated.
The Origins of the Revolution
The cost of the Seven Years' War doubled the British national debt. Anticipating further expenses to defend newly conquered territories, the government in London imposed new administrative measures. Breaking with tradition of loose colonial oversight, the British announced they would maintain a large army in North America and tax colonies directly. Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which levied taxes on a list of commercial and legal documents, diplomas, newspapers, almanacs, and playing cards. A stamp glued to each article indicated the tax was paid. These measures seemed reasonable to the British, for a much heavier stamp tax already existed, and proceeds from the tax were to fund the defense of the colonies. Nonetheless, the colonists protested the Stamp Act by rioting and by boycotting British goods. Parliament repealed it. This dispute raised important questions. The British government said Americans were represented in Parliament (indirectly) and that Parliament ruled throughout the empire. Many Americans felt otherwise. British colonial administration and parliamentary supremacy came to appear as unacceptable threats to existing American liberties. Americans' resistance to these threats was fed by the degree of independence they enjoyed. In British North America, no established church existed, and religious freedom was taken for granted. Colonial assemblies made important laws, which were overturned by the British government. The right to vote was much more widespread than in England. In many parts of colonial Massachusetts, for example, as many as 95 percent of adult males could vote. Greater political equality was matched by greater social and economic equality. No hereditary nobility exercised privileges over peasants and other social groups. Instead, independent farmers dominated colonial society. This was particularly true in the northern colonies, where the revolution originated. Disputes over taxes and representation flared up. Under the Tea Act, the British government permitted the East India Company to ship tea from China directly to its agents in the colonies rather than through London middlemen, who sold to independent merchants in the colonies. Thus the company secured a monopoly on the tea trade, and colonial merchants were excluded. The price on tea was lowered for colonists, but the act generated a great deal of opposition because it granted a monopoly to the East India Company. In protest, Boston men disguised as Native Americans staged a protest by boarding East India Company ships and throwing tea from them. In response, the Coercive Acts closed the port of Boston, curtailed local elections, and expanded the governor's power. County conventions in Massachusetts urged that such measures be rejected as the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America. Other colonial assemblies joined in the denunciations. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia. The more radical members of this assembly argued successfully against concessions to the English crown. The British Parliament rejected compromise, and in April 1775 fighting between colonial and British troops began at Lexington and Concord.
A Constitutional Monarchy and Its Challenges
The day after the women's march on Versailles, the National Assembly followed the king to Paris, and until September 1791, saw the consolidation of the liberal revolution. In June 1790 the National Assembly abolished the nobility, and in July the king swore to uphold the unwritten constitution, enshrining a constitutional monarchy. The king remained head of state, but all power now resided in the National Assembly, elected by the wealthiest half of French males. The constitution passed in September 1791 was the first in French history. It broadened women's rights to seek divorce, to inherit property, and to obtain financial support for illegitimate children from fathers, but excluded women from political office and voting. This decision was attacked by men and women who believed the rights of man should be extended to all French citizens. Olympe de Gouges, a writer and woman of the people, protested evils of slavery and injustices done to women. She published Declaration of the Rights of Woman, which echoed its predecessor, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming, "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights." De Gouges's position found little sympathy among leaders of the Revolution, however. The National Assembly replaced the patchwork of historic provinces with eighty-three departments of equal size, a move toward rational and systematic methods of administration. Guilds, workers' associations, and internal customs fees were abolished in name of economic liberty. Thus the National Assembly applied the spirit of the Enlightenment in a thorough reform of France's laws and institutions. The National Assembly imposed a radical reorganization on religious life. The Assembly granted religious freedom to the minority of French Protestants and Jews. It nationalized the Catholic Church's property and abolished monasteries. The government used all former church property as collateral to guarantee a new paper currency, the assignats, and then sold the property in an attempt to put the state's finances on a solid footing. Imbued with rationalism and skepticism of the philosophes, many delegates distrusted popular piety and "superstitious religion." With the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, they established a national church with priests chosen by voters. The National Assembly then forced the Catholic clergy to take an oath of loyalty to the new government. The pope formally condemned these measures, and only half the priests of France swore the oath. Many sincere Christians, especially those in the countryside, were appalled by these changes in the religious order. The attempt to remake the Catholic Church, like the abolition of guilds and workers' associations, sharpened the conflict between the educated classes and the common people that had been emerging in the eighteenth century.
The Second Revolution and the New Republic
The fall of monarchy marked a radicalization of the Revolution, a phase historians call the second revolution. Louis's imprisonment was followed by September Massacres. Fearing invasion by Prussians and riled up by rumors that counter-revolutionaries would aid invaders, angry crowds stormed prisons and killed jailed priests and aristocrats. In September 1792 the popularly elected National Convention, which replaced the Legislative Assembly, proclaimed France a republic, a nation in which the people, instead of a monarch, held sovereign power. Many members of the new National Convention belonged to the Jacobin Club of Paris. But the Jacobins themselves were divided into two opposed groups — the Girondists and the Mountain, led by Robespierre and young lawyer Georges Jacques Danton. This division emerged after the National Convention convicted Louis XVI of treason. The Girondists accepted his guilt but did not wish to put the king to death. By a narrow majority, the Mountain won, and Louis was executed on January 21, 1793, by guillotine, which the French had perfected. Marie Antoinette suffered the same fate. But both the Girondists and the Mountain were determined to continue the "war against tyranny." The Prussians had been stopped at the Battle of Valmy one day before the republic was proclaimed. French armies invaded Savoy and captured Nice, moved into the German Rhineland, and by November 1792 were occupying the entire Austrian Netherlands. Everywhere they went, French armies of occupation chased princes, abolished feudalism, and found support among peasants and middle-class people. But French armies lived off the land, requisitioning food and supplies and plundering local treasures. The liberators looked like foreign invaders. Meanwhile, international tensions mounted. In February 1793 the National Convention, at war with Austria and Prussia, declared war on Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Spain as well. Republican France was now at war with almost all of Europe. Groups within France added to the turmoil. Peasants in western France revolted against being drafted into the army, with the Vendée region of Brittany emerging as the epicenter of revolt. Devout Catholics, royalists, and foreign agents encouraged their rebellion, and the counter-revolutionaries recruited veritable armies to fight for their cause. In March 1793 the National Convention was locked in a life-and-death political struggle between members of the Mountain and the moderate Girondists. With the middle-class delegates so bitterly divided, the people of Paris once again emerged as the decisive political factor. The laboring poor and the petty traders were often known as the sans-culottes because their men wore trousers instead of the knee breeches of the aristocracy and the solid middle class. They demanded radical political action to defend the Revolution. The Mountain, sensing an opportunity to outmaneuver the Girondists, joined with sans-culottes activists to engineer a popular uprising. On June 2, 1793, armed sans-culottes invaded the Convention and forced its deputies to arrest twenty-nine Girondist deputies for treason. All power passed to the Mountain. The Convention also formed the Committee of Public Safety in April 1793 to deal with threats from within and outside France. The committee, led by Robespierre, held dictatorial power, allowing it to use whatever force necessary to defend the Revolution. Moderates in leading provincial cities revolted against the committee's power and demanded a decentralized government. Counter-revolutionary forces in the Vendée won significant victories, and the republic's armies were driven back on all fronts. By July 1793 only the areas around Paris and on the eastern frontier were firmly held by the central government. Defeat seemed imminent.
Framing the Constitution
The liberal program of the American Revolution was consolidated by the federal Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the creation of a national republic. Assembling in Philadelphia in summer of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were determined to end economic depression, social uncertainty, and leadership under weak government. The delegates decided to grant the federal, or central, government important powers: regulation of domestic and foreign trade, the right to tax, and the means to enforce its laws. Strong rule was placed in context of representative self-government. Senators and congressmen would be lawmaking delegates of voters, and the president of the republic would be an elected official. The central government would operate in Montesquieu's framework, under which authority was distributed across three different branches — executive, legislative, and judicial — that would balance one another, preventing one interest from gaining too much power. The power of the federal government would be checked by that of the individual states. When the results of the secret deliberations of the Constitutional Convention were presented to the states, a public debate began. The opponents of the proposed Constitution — the Antifederalists — charged that framers of the new document took too much power from the individual states and made federal government too strong. Antifederalists feared for the individual freedoms they had fought. To overcome this, Federalists promised to spell out these basic freedoms as soon as the new Constitution was adopted. The result was the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which the first Congress passed shortly after it met in New York. These amendments formed an effective Bill of Rights to safeguard the individual. Most of them had their origins in English law and the English Bill of Rights. Other rights reflected natural-law theory and the strong value colonists had placed on independence from the start.
The International Response
The revolution in France produced excitement and a division of opinion in Europe and the United States. On one hand, liberals and radicals saw a triumph of liberty over despotism. On the other hand, conservative leaders like British statesman Edmund Burke were troubled. Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, where he defended inherited privileges. He glorified Britain's unrepresentative Parliament and predicted that reform occurring in France would lead to chaos and tyranny. One rebuttal came from a writer in London, Mary Wollstonecraft. Incensed by Burke's book, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Man. Two years later, she published it. Like de Gouge, Wollstonecraft demanded equal rights for women. She advocated coeducation out of the belief that it would make women better wives and mothers, good citizens, and economically independent. Considered very radical for the time, the book became a founding text of the feminist movement. The kings and nobles of Europe, who at first welcomed the Revolution in France as weakening a competing power, now feared its impact. In June 1791 the royal family was arrested and returned to Paris after trying to leave France. To supporters of the Revolution, the attempted flight was proof that the king was seeking foreign support for an invasion of France. To the monarchs of Austria and Prussia, the arrest of a monarch was unacceptable. Two months later they issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which professed their willingness to intervene in France to restore Louis XVI's rule if necessary. It was expected to have a sobering effect on revolutionary France without causing war. The crowned heads of Europe misjudged the situation. The new French representative body, the Legislative Assembly, that convened in October 1791 had new delegates and a different character. Although the delegates were still well-educated middle-class men, they were younger and less cautious than their predecessors. Many of them belonged to the political Jacobin Club. Such clubs had proliferated in Parisian neighborhoods since the beginning of the Revolution, drawing men and women to debate the political issues of the day. Jacobins and other deputies reacted with patriotic fury to the Declaration of Pillnitz. In April 1792 France declared war on Francis II, the Habsburg monarch. France's crusade against tyranny went poorly at first. Prussia joined Austria against the French, who broke and fled at their first military encounter with this First Coalition of foreign powers united against the Revolution. The Legislative Assembly declared the country in danger, and volunteers rallied to the capital. In this wartime atmosphere, rumors of treason by the king and queen spread in Paris. On August 10, 1792, a revolutionary crowd attacked the royal palace at the Tuileries, while the royal family fled to the Legislative Assembly. Rather than offering refuge, the Assembly suspended the king from all his functions, imprisoned him, and called for a constitutional assembly to be elected by universal male suffrage.
The Seven Years' War
The roots of revolutionary ideas could be found in writings of Locke or Montesquieu, but it was by no means inevitable their ideas would result in revolution. Many members of the educated elite were satisfied with the status quo or too intimidated to challenge it. Instead, events created crises that opened the door for radical action. One of the most important was the global conflict known as the Seven Years' War. The war's battlefields stretched from central Europe to India to North America, pitting an alliance of England and Prussia against the French and Austrians. Its origins were in conflicts unresolved at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. Austria's Maria Theresa vowed to win back Silesia, which Prussia took, and to crush Prussia, re-establishing the Habsburgs' leadership in German affairs. By the end of the Seven Years' War, Maria Theresa had almost succeeded, but Prussia survived with its boundaries intact. Unresolved tensions lingered in North America, particularly regarding the border between French and British colonies. The encroachment of English settlers into territory claimed by the French in the Ohio Valley resulted in skirmishes that became war. Although the inhabitants of New France were greatly outnumbered, French forces achieved major victories. Both sides relied on the participation of Native American tribes with whom they had trading contacts and actively sought new indigenous allies during the conflict. The tide of conflict turned when the British diverted resources from the war in Europe, using superior sea power to destroy France's fleet and choke its commerce around the world. The British laid siege to Quebec for four long months, finally defeating the French in a battle that sealed the nation's fate in North America. British victory on all colonial fronts was ratified in the Treaty of Paris. Canada and all French territory east of the Mississippi River passed to Britain, and France ceded Louisiana to Spain as compensation for Spain's loss of Florida to Britain. France gave up most of its holdings in India, opening the way to British dominance on the subcontinent. Britain became the leading European power in both trade and empire, but at a tremendous cost in war debt. France emerged humiliated and broke, but with its profitable Caribbean colonies intact. In the aftermath of war, both British and French governments had to raise taxes to repay loans, raising a storm of protest and demands for fundamental reform. Since the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue remained French, political turmoil in the mother country would directly affect its population. The seeds of revolutionary conflict in the Atlantic world were thus sown.
The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory
The success of the French armies led Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety to relax economic controls, but they extended the political Reign of Terror. In March 1794 Robespierre's Terror wiped out many of his critics. Two weeks later Robespierre sent long-standing collaborators whom he believed had turned against him, including Danton, to the guillotine. A group of radicals and moderates in the Convention, knowing that they might be next, organized a conspiracy. They howled down Robespierre when he tried to speak to the National Convention on July 27, 1794. Thermidor according to France's newly adopted republican calendar. The next day it was Robespierre's turn to be guillotined. As Robespierre's closest supporters followed their leader to the guillotine, the respectable middle-class lawyers and professionals who had led the liberal revolution of 1789 reasserted their authority. This period of Thermidorian reaction, as it was called, hearkened back to the beginnings of the Revolution; the middle class rejected the radicalism of the sans-culottes in favor of moderate policies that favored property owners. In 1795 the National Convention abolished many economic controls, let prices rise sharply, and severely restricted the local political organizations through which the sans-culottes exerted their strength. In 1795 the middle-class members of the National Convention wrote yet another constitution to guarantee their economic position and political supremacy. As in previous elections, the mass of the population could vote only for electors who would in turn elect the legislators, but the new constitution greatly reduced the number of men eligible to become electors by instating a substantial property requirement. It also inaugurated a bicameral legislative system for the first time in the Revolution, with a Council of 500 serving as the lower house that initiated legislation and a Council of Elders (composed of about 250 members aged forty years or older) acting as the upper house that approved new laws. To prevent a new Robespierre from monopolizing power, the new Assembly granted executive power to a five-man body, called the Directory. The Directory continued to support French military expansion abroad. War was no longer so much a crusade as a response to economic problems. Large, victorious French armies reduced unemployment at home. However, the French people quickly grew weary of the corruption and ineffectiveness that characterized the Directory. This general dissatisfaction revealed itself clearly in the national elections of 1797, which returned a large number of conservative and even monarchist deputies who favored peace at almost any price. Two years later Napoleon Bonaparte ended the Directory in a coup d'état and substituted a strong dictatorship for a weak one.
Popular Uprising and the Rights of Men
While delegates at Versailles were pressing for political rights, economic hardship gripped the common people. Conditions were tough due to the disastrous financial situation of the Crown. A poor grain harvest caused the price of bread to soar, and inflation spread through the economy. Demand for manufactured goods collapsed, and many artisans and small traders lost work. In Paris perhaps 150,000 of the city's 600,000 people were unemployed by July 1789. Against this background of poverty and political crisis, people of Paris entered decisively onto the revolutionary stage. They believed they should have steady work and bread at fair prices. They feared that the dismissal of the king's liberal finance minister would put them at the mercy of aristocratic landowners and grain speculators. Knowledge spread of the massing of troops near Paris. On July 14, 1789, several hundred people stormed Bastille, a royal prison, to obtain weapons for the city's defense. Faced with popular violence, Louis soon announced the reinstatement of his finance minister and the withdrawal of troops from Paris. The National Assembly was now free to continue its work. Just as laboring poor of Paris had been roused to a revolutionary fervor, the struggling French peasantry reached a boiling point. In the summer of 1789, throughout France peasants began to rise in insurrection against their lords, ransacking manor houses and burning feudal documents that recorded their obligations. In some areas peasants reoccupied common lands enclosed by landowners and seized forests. Fear of marauders and vagabonds hired by vengeful landlords — called the Great Fear by contemporaries — seized the rural poor and fanned the flames of rebellion. Faced with chaos, the National Assembly responded to peasant demands with a maneuver on the night of August 4, 1789. By a decree of the Assembly, all old noble privileges were abolished along with the tithes paid to the church. From this point on, French peasants would seek mainly to protect and consolidate this victory. Having granted new rights to the peasantry, the National Assembly moved forward with its reforms. On August 27, 1789, it issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This call of the liberal revolutionary ideal guaranteed equality before the law, representative government for a sovereign people, and individual freedom. This revolutionary credo was disseminated throughout France, the rest of Europe, and around the world. The National Assembly's declaration had little practical effect for the poor and hungry people of Paris. The economic crisis worsened after the fall of the Bastille, as aristocrats fled the country and the luxury market collapsed. Foreign markets also shrank, and unemployment among the working classes grew. In addition, women — the traditional managers of food and resources in poor homes — could no longer look to the church, which had been stripped of its tithes, for aid. On October 5 some seven thousand women marched the twelve miles from Paris to Versailles to demand action. This great crowd, "armed with scythes, sticks and pikes," invaded the National Assembly. Hers was the genuine voice of the people, essential to any understanding of the French Revolution. The women invaded the royal apartments, killed some of the royal bodyguards, and searched for the queen, Marie Antoinette, who was widely despised for her frivolous and supposedly immoral behavior. It seems likely that only the intervention of Lafayette and the National Guard saved the royal family. But the only way to calm the disorder was for the king to live closer to his people in Paris, as the crowd demanded. Liberal elites brought the Revolution into being and continued to lead politics. Yet the people of France were now roused and would henceforth play a crucial role in the unfolding of events.
Social Change
18th century society was divided into groups with privileges (nobility and clergy) and groups with burdens (peasantry). Nobles possessed 1/4 of agricultural land of France, constituting less than two percent of the population. They had exemption from taxation and rights to hunt and bear swords. Various middle-class groups enjoyed privileges that allowed them to monopolize economic activity. Poor peasants and urban laborers, who constituted the vast majority of the population, bore the brunt of taxation and were excluded from the world of privilege. Prerogatives for elite groups persisted in societies undergoing dramatic and destabilizing change. Europe's population rose, and its cities swelled in size. Inflation kept pace with population growth, making it difficult to find affordable food and living space. One way the poor kept up was by working for longer hours. More women and children entered the paid labor force, challenging the traditional hierarchies and customs of village life. Economic growth created inequalities between rich and poor. While the poor struggled with rising prices, investors grew rich from the spread of manufacture in the countryside and overseas, including the trade in enslaved Africans and products of slave labor. Old distinctions between aristocracy and merchants began to fade as enterprising nobles put money into trade and rising middle-class bureaucrats and merchants purchased landed estates and noble titles. Marriages between proud nobles and wealthy, educated commoners served both groups' interests, and a mixed-caste elite began to take shape. In the context of these changes, ancient privileges seemed to pose an intolerable burden to many observers. Another change involved the racial regimes established in European colonies to legitimize and protect slavery. European law accepted that only Africans and people of African descent were subject to slavery. Even free people of color were subject to special laws restricting the property they could own, whom they could marry, and what clothes they could wear. Racial privilege conferred a new dimension of entitlement on European settlers in the colonies, and they used extremely brutal methods to enforce it. The contradiction between slavery and the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality was all too evident to the enslaved and the free people of color.
Limitations of Liberty and Equality
The American Constitution and the Bill of Rights exemplified the strengths and limits of classical liberalism. Liberty meant individual freedoms and political safeguards. Liberty also meant representative government, but it did not mean democracy, with its principle of one person, one vote. Equality meant equality before law, not equality of political participation or wealth. It did not mean equal rights for slaves, indigenous peoples, or women. An abolitionist movement during the 1780s led to the passage of emancipation laws in all northern states, but slavery remained prevalent in the South, and discord between pro- and antislavery delegates roiled the Constitutional Convention. The result was a compromise stipulating that an enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a person for taxation and proportional representation in the House of Representatives. This solution levied higher taxes on the South, but also guaranteed slaveholding states greater representation in Congress, which they used to oppose emancipation. The young republic also failed to protect the Native American tribes whose lands fell within or alongside territory ceded by Britain to the United States at the Treaty of Paris. The 1787 Constitution promised protection to Native Americans and guaranteed their land would not be taken without consent. The federal government forced tribes to concede their land for meager returns; state governments and the population paid even less heed to the Constitution and often simply seized Native American land for new settlements. Although lacking voting rights enjoyed by their husbands and fathers in the democratic colonial assemblies, women played a vital role in the American Revolution. Women were participants in boycotts of British goods, like tea, which squeezed profits from British merchants and fostered the revolutionary spirit. After the outbreak of war, women raised funds for the Continental Army and took care of homesteads, workshops, and other businesses when their men went off to fight. Yet despite Abigail Adams's plea to her husband, John Adams, that the framers of the Declaration of the Independence should "remember the ladies," women did not receive the right to vote in the new Constitution, an omission confirmed by a clause added in 1844.
Breakdown of the Old Order
The French Revolution had its origins in the government's financial difficulties. The efforts of the ministers of King Louis XV to raise taxes to meet expenses of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War were thwarted by high courts known as parlements. The noble judges of parlements resented the Crown's threat to their exemption from taxation and decried the government's actions as a form of royal despotism. When renewed efforts to reform the tax system met a similar fate in 1776, the government was forced to finance its expenditures during the American war with borrowed money. The national debt soared. In 1786 the finance minister informed king Louis XVI that the nation was on the verge of bankruptcy. 50 percent of France's annual budget went to interest payments on the ever-increasing debt. Another 25 percent went to maintain the military, while 6 percent was absorbed by the royal family and Versailles. Less than 20 percent of the national budget served the productive functions of the state, such as transportation and general administration. Unlike England, which had larger national debt relative to its population, France had no central bank and no paper currency. When a depressed economy and lack of public confidence made it difficult for the government to obtain new loans, the government could not respond by printing more money. It had no alternative but to try increasing taxes. Because France's tax system was unfair and out-of-date, increased revenues were possible only through reforms. These crises struck a monarchy that lost much of its mantle of royal authority. Kings always maintained mistresses, who were chosen from the court nobility. Louis XV broke that pattern with Madame de Pompadour, daughter of a disgraced bourgeois financier. As the king's favorite mistress, Pompadour exercised influence that continued even after their affair ended. She played a key role in bringing about France's break with Prussia and its new alliance with Austria. Pompadour's low birth and political influence generated libelous pamphleteering. The king was stripped of the sacred aura of God's anointed on earth and was being reinvented in the popular imagination as a degenerate. Maneuverings among political factions at court further distracted the king and prevented decisive action from his government. Despite the progressive desacralization of the monarchy, Louis XV would probably have prevailed had he lived longer. The new king, Louis XVI, was a shy twenty-year-old with good intentions. The eager-to-please monarch Louis waffled on political reform and the economy, and proved unable to quell the rising storm of opposition.
