Chapter Summary
It is, perhaps, surprising that it was in France, Europe's strongest nation at the end of the eighteenth century, that the first European revolution would take place. The result of that revolution was nothing less than the destruction of the ancien régime, a social order that had been built over centuries but crumbled in a few short years. The Revolution was also modern in its breadth and scope; it bequeathed a political vocabulary to the nineteenth century that included words like citizen, liberty, equality, and nation. The revolution began as a solution to the fiscal crisis France endured at the end of the eighteenth century; it quickly developed into a constitutional struggle to rid the nation of aristocratic prestige and status. The natural and inalienable rights of man, perhaps one of the great hallmarks of Enlightenment thought, were raised to the forefront of political argument. New political elements entered the national dialogue and wanted their grievances redressed and their voices heard.
The revolution was not about regicide and destruction. Louis XVI would not be the first king to lose his life at the hands of his subjects. But Louis was the ruler of a nation in torment, and within the ranks of the three estates were men whose cries were ones of desperation. "If only the king knew," they may have exclaimed as they drew up their cahiers et doléances (list of grievances) and elected delegates to the Estates General. But very quickly, Louis revealed his duplicity and weakness, which led to the dissolution of the Estates General and the establishment of the National Assembly. This popular resentment would metastasize into popular revolution-both in cities and in the countryside. The great experiment in making Louis a constitutional monarch ground to a halt in September 1792, when the monarchy was dissolved and a republic declared. And at the end of January 1793, Louis was guillotined like a common criminal.
With Louis out of the way, the Jacobins were overwhelmed by domestic crises and foreign wars. In the form of a declaration from the National Convention, the twelve apostles of the Committee of Public Safety, led by the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, made "terror the order of the day," bringing before revolutionary tribunals anyone who was suspected of opposing the Revolution. However, even the Jacobins eventually had enough of the Terror; on the Ninth of Thermidor, Robespierre was shouted down in the Convention, and he was guillotined the following day.
As the Directory dismantled the radical republic and replaced it with a more moderate version of the principles of 1789, France faced its deepest challenge: war. Proclaiming himself the savior of France, Napoleon Bonaparte entered the scene in 1799 as First Consul of the Republic. Five years later he declared himself the emperor of France. As François Furet aptly concluded: "In 1789, the French had created a Republic, under the name of a monarchy. Ten years later, they created a monarchy, under the name of a Republic." The rise and fall of Napoleon foreshadow waves of revolutionary activity that would characterize French government through the twentieth century.