Topic 5.4 Notes – The French Revolution

How the French Revolution Destroyed the Old Regime

France’s Ancien Régime was built on monarchy, legal privilege, and an established Catholic Church. People were not equal citizens. Your rights depended on the social order you were born into.

The Three Estates

Different groups hated the system for different reasons:

• Bourgeoisie resented that wealth and education did not guarantee political power or top offices if you lacked noble birth.
• Peasants were angry over feudal dues, rents, tithes, and unfair taxes.
• Urban workers were crushed by rising bread prices and unemployment.

Enlightenment thinkers gave people the language to attack the system:

• Rousseau argued that sovereignty came from the people.
• Montesquieu argued power should be limited.
• Voltaire attacked intolerance and privilege.

Louis XVI made the crisis worse. He needed reform, but nobles and parlements blocked him. That matters because the monarchy looked “absolute” in theory but weak in practice.

The immediate trigger was money and hunger:

• debt from the Seven Years’ War
• even more debt from helping the American Revolution
• failure of the Assembly of Notables
• bad harvests and bread shortages in 1788 to 1789

This is the classic AP setup. Long-term inequality plus Enlightenment ideas plus short-term fiscal and food crisis.

From the Estates-General to Constitutional Monarchy

In 1789 the Estates-General met, and the first fight was over voting. If each estate got one vote, the First and Second Estates could outvote the Third every time.

The cahiers de doléances showed that many French people still wanted reform under a king, but they wanted fairer taxes and regular representation.

Sieyès and the nation

In What Is the Third Estate?, Abbé Sieyès said the Third Estate was “the nation.” That shifted sovereignty away from privileged orders and toward the people.

National Assembly and the Bastille

The Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and took the Tennis Court Oath, promising to write a constitution.

The Tennis Court Oath

That oath became one of the revolution’s founding moments because it claimed that political authority came from the nation, not just the king.

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 mattered less for the prisoners inside and more because it showed that crowds could shape the revolution.

The countryside exploded in the Great Fear. Peasants attacked manor records, and the August Decrees abolished feudal privilege and hereditary legal inequality.

Moderate reforms 1789 to 1791

• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression, equality before the law, and national sovereignty.
• The October March on Versailles, led by market women, forced the king back to Paris under pressure from the bread crisis.
• France abolished old provinces and created 83 departments for more uniform rule.
• Church lands were nationalized, and assignats were issued.
• The Civil Constitution of the Clergy made clergy state officials and split them into juring and refractory priests.
• The Constitution of 1791 created a constitutional monarchy, but only property-owning men counted as active citizens.

The Flight to Varennes wrecked trust in Louis XVI. After that, many people stopped believing he would cooperate with the revolution.

Why the Revolution Turned Radical

War pushed the revolution into a new phase. France fought Austria and Prussia in 1792, and fear of foreign intervention exploded after the Declaration of Pillnitz and the Brunswick Manifesto.

On August 10, 1792, the monarchy was overthrown. The September Massacres showed how fear of conspiracy could turn into political violence.

The National Convention declared a republic, and the victory at Valmy helped save it.

The main radical forces worked together but were not identical:

• Jacobins and the Mountain pushed hard for radical republican action.
• Sans-culottes were urban workers and militants who demanded price controls and harsh action against enemies.
• Key leaders included Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Jean-Paul Marat.

The execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 destroyed monarchy as a sacred institution. Radicalization was driven by foreign war, the Vendée revolt, federalist revolts, inflation, shortages, and fear of plots.

The Radical Republic and Its Consequences

The Committee of Public Safety became the emergency government.

• The levée en masse created mass conscription and linked citizenship to military service.
• Revolutionary armies spread anti-feudal changes beyond France.
• The General Maximum imposed price and wage controls.

Reign of Terror

The Reign of Terror used the Law of Suspects, Revolutionary Tribunal, and executions to crush enemies. Marie Antoinette, Danton, and Olympe de Gouges were all executed. The core contradiction is easy to test on. The revolution defended liberty through coercion.

De-Christianization and women

De-Christianization closed churches, promoted the revolutionary calendar and Cult of Reason, and later Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being. This calendar image is the clearest example of the attempt to break with the Christian past and reorganize daily life around revolutionary values. Keep this separate from the earlier Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which controlled the Church rather than trying to erase Christian public life.

French Republican calendar

Women played a major role early on. Olympe de Gouges demanded rights for women, and the Society of Republican Revolutionary Women pushed activism. Women gained some civil reforms like divorce and inheritance changes, but no political citizenship. Women’s clubs were banned in 1793.

After Thermidor, Robespierre fell in 1794. The Directory, created by the Constitution of Year III, restored property qualifications, stayed unstable, relied on the army, and ended with Napoleon’s coup in 1799.

What the French Revolution Changed

The revolution permanently changed politics in France and across Europe:

• It ended feudalism and hereditary privilege.
• It replaced divine-right monarchy with national sovereignty.
• It created constitutions, male citizenship, and legal equality.
• It subordinated the Catholic Church to the state.
• It expanded mass politics through clubs, petitions, elections, and crowds.
• It built a stronger, more centralized, more coercive state.
• It made warfare national and ideological through mass conscription.