The 1789 French Revolutionaries Treated the Have-Nots Like Dirt While They Were Beheading Royals

The awful, bloody Terror was not the result of a revolution by the have-nots, but by enemies of the have-nots

Let’s take a close look at how the French Revolutionaries treated the have-nots like dirt

We need to start with a very brief discussion of the context in which the French revolutionaries acted. I am relying here on The French Revolution: A Peasants’ Revolt, by David Andress, Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth, UK., to which page numbers (or sometimes links to the online text itself) refer and from which the extracts below are taken unless stated otherwise.

By 1789 the French government of King Louis XVI was facing imminent bankruptcy because of accumulated large war debts combined with the fact that the nobles and clergy were resisting paying sufficient taxes to cover the debts, citing all sorts of privileges they had enjoyed for ages. The intellectuals (especially judges) who wanted this problem solved persuaded the king that the solution required the convening of an Estates- General, a body (the last one had been convened in 1614) composed of elected delegates from the nobles, the clergy (Catholic Church) and the people who were in neither of these categories, known as the Third Estate. The Estates General was initially conceived purely an advisory body for the king without direct power but an aroused public said that the Estates-General was, itself, the real Nation, and demanded that it have real power and that the Third Estate have the most delegates.

The king’s government allowed for elections of delegates to the Estates-General and also allowed the have-nots—especially peasants—to write up their specific complaints, called Cahiers de doléances, to be collected and read by the Estates-General.

David Andress, in his other book, The French Revolution and the People, notes that revolution had broken out throughout France as towns and villages were writing their Cahiers de doléances grievance, even before the Estates General had met (in some cases) or issued any proclamations (in other cases). He writes (pg. 101-3), after describing major food riots by peasants,

“It is fair to say that the authority of the state, as expressed in the will of the king and embodied in previously existing institutions, collapsed in France after the drafting of the Cahiers de doléances…Reports from Rennes an Nantes of threatening crowds of peasants emerged in early July, and he sub-delegue of Ploermel in central Brittany made clear th enature of some threats on 4 July:

Tempers are so high that the threats I hear make me and all other sensible folk greatly fear the riots and disturbances which will surely follow the tithe-gathering this year…All the peasants around here and in my area generally are preparing to refuse their quota of sheaves to the tithe-collectors and say quite openly that there will be no collection without bloodshed on the senseless grounds that as he request for the abolition of these tithes was included in the cahier of this [district], such an abolition has now come into effect.

Local Sovereignty of the Have-Nots Broke Out!

“These beliefs had nonetheless burgeoned in the aftermath of the Estates-General elections. The lieutenant-general of the bailliage of Saumur put it succincintly, if smugly, during the process itself:

What is really tiresome is that these assemblies…have generally believed themselves invested with some sovereign authority and that when they came to an end, the peasants went home with the idea that henceforward they were free from tithes, hunting prohibitions and the payment of feudal dues.”

In late July and early August of 1789 a period historians call The Great Fear broke out all across France as people feared starvation due to the upper class seizing grain and raising its price beyond reach of most people. It turned out that the upper class had no such plan. David Andress in The French Revolution and the People [pg. 114] writes,

If the Great Fear has been easy for historians to write off as a delusion, what cannot be denied are itrs consequences, which helped to create a unprecedented social change. Fear-driven communities formed themselves into ‘revolutionary’ self-governing bodies. When the took action, it was visibly against their seigneurs and the symbols and realities of feudal authority and exaction.

The French Revolutionaries Acted to Suppress Local Sovereignty of the Have-Nots

When the Estates General convened, the most influential members—those who would become the revolutionaries—ended up being Third Estate members who were middle class people, typically lawyers (as was the most famous revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre) or fairly wealthy capitalists or land owners or professionals of some sort—not working class people such as peasants or factory workers.

The Third Estate delegates, meeting daily in June of 1789, voted by a large majority to declare itself the ‘National Assembly’ and called on the other Estate delegates to join it in creating a new modern constitution for France; a substantial number of nobles and clerics did so. Amidst great social upheaval at the time throughout France (the end of 1788 had been a near-famine winter; there were peasant insurrections against oppressive taxes and fees and tithes in the spring and early summer months of 1789 and the famous storming of the Bastille in Paris occurred on 14 July, 1789), the King felt it prudent to—at least publicly—go along with the demands of the National Assembly.

The National Assembly was faced with massive peasant unrest and anger at the feudal system which required the peasants to pay a host of various taxes and fees and tithes to nobles who held ancient so-called seigneurial rights. These seigneurial rights, however, could be purchased by non-nobles for a large sum, and there were many non-noble wealthy capitalists who had purchased them in order to acquire the economic and social privileges of nobility if not the formal status of nobility.

At the same time, the National Assembly needed to find a way to collect taxes that the nobility and Church had so far resisted paying.

On August 11, 1789 the National Assembly passed a decree saying “the National assembly entirely destroys the feudal regime.” [p. 62] The Assembly further abolished many seigneurial rights and rights of the Church to collect tithes.

The Revolutionaries Pretended To, But Did Not Actually, Abolish Feudal Oppression of the Have-Nots

But—a huge but!—the National Assembly undermined its anti-feudal and anti-Church proclamations with devastating loop holes to protect the wealthy and the Church.

Feudal rents would be abolished, but only if and when they were “redeemed.” To redeem a rent that peasants had been paying to the owner of some seigneurial right, the peasant had to pay the owner of that seigneurial right twenty (in some cases twenty-five) times the value of the annual rent. (The pro-capitalist “logic” here was this: the annual rent was presumed to be 5% interest on the capital, and so the capital—the value of the seigneurial right—was therefore 20 times the annual income it produced.) Guess what? It was a rare peasant who could come up with the cash to “redeem” the seigneurial rent that was officially “abolished.”

Likewise, Church tithes, though officially “abolished” were to continue to be paid ‘in accordance with the laws, and in the customary manner’ until replaced by a new means of supporting the Church. [p. 63]

The peasants across France had been engaged in countless acts of resistance on a local scale for the past half year and it was for the goal of truly and immediately abolishing the hated feudal rents and church tithes. The peasants saw that the National Assembly was their enemy in this regard, as it decreed that their acts of resistance were illegal; it decreed that ‘disorder and anarchy’ spread by ‘false alarms’ were a ‘criminal plan’ conceived by the ‘enemies of the nation’ to prevent ‘the establishment of liberty’. municipalities, militias and the regular army were ordered to co-operate to hunt down ‘the leaders of these conspiracies’ and subject them to ‘exemplary punishments’, and that ‘all seditious gatherings… even under the pretext of hunting’ were to be ‘immediately dispersed’ by the forces of the new order. Such authorities were also to compile registers of all ‘disreputable persons, men without trade or occupation, and those with no fixed domicile’; all such persons were to be disarmed of any weapons, and kept under surveillance by the ‘national militia’.” [ source: https://a.co/6BXrTLY ]

The National Assembly persisted in its anti-peasant version of “abolishing feudal and seigneurial privileges” by subsequent decrees in March 1790. David Andress, in The French Revolution and the People, writes (pg. 130):

In mid March 1790 the Assembly confirmed definitively many of the provisions of its decrees of August 1789, most notably that feudal dues on land would have to be redeemed and were not ‘abolished.’ The Assembly further sided with the seigneurs by ruling that possession of rights could be ‘proved’ by evidence of their prior enjoyment—rendering vain the effort of peasants to destroy titles and charers over he previous year. Peasants were also obliged to come to individual contractual settlements for the redemption of dues, rather than working, as they were so often accustomed to do, as communal units. they were further bound to redeem all relevant dues at once, rather than being able to dispose of only the most onerous ones (or excercise any other choice in the matter). On 3 May 1790 further regulations were published confirming these last points, and also specifying that the tariff for redemption was to be twenty times the annual payment for dues paid in cash, and twenty-five for those given in kind…Yet again the point was reiterated that peasants were obliged to continue to pay all unredeemed dues indefinitely, and that such debts remained enforceable at law. It was not even clear that seigneurs had to accept redemption if the peasants offered it—no overt mechanism was created to force the issue.

The injustice of requiring peasants to pay large sums to get out from under feudal and seigneurial oppression was pointed out, as Andress writes, by a priest in the Ardeche who said in early January 1790, “The poor are never in a position to accumulate a large sum of money.” The revolutionaries in the National Assembly did the equivalent of saying what it would have been if the U.S. government after the Civil War had said that the slaves would be freed only after they paid their master a large sum of money, and even then only if the master agreed to accept it.

The Revolutionaries Wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Which Limited These Rights to Whatever the ‘General Will’—i.e., the Revolutionaries—Would Permit

The National Assembly in late August 1789 decided that the new constitution needed a Declaration of the Rights of Man preface. They wrote a document that was a collection of middle-class grievances against the old French government, using flowering language about ‘natural and imprescriptible’ rights that are nonetheless limited by “the Nation” and the “general will.” [source: https://a.co/bjAbRlq ]

To deal with the problem of unemployed wage laborers in the capital, Paris, the National Assembly created a new militia, called the National Guard, and used it to round up and ship the unemployed workers to their home provinces. It also banned public meetings of other working people demanding relief, and in some cases rights of political participation. [source: https://a.co/dfZnwYG ]

At the close of 1789 and early 1790 battles raged in villages across France between peasants and seigneurs with the latter trying to collect feudal rents and assured that the letter of the law gave them this right, while the former threatened to hang “the first to pay his rent.” In January 1790 the revolutionary authorities arrested several ringleaders and imprisoned them in a local town, whereupon 4,000 men from local villages “invaded the town, released the prisoners and threw a local notalbe into the cells instead.” Such resistance spread in the next few months to more than 300 communities with 100 separate such incidents commonly involving several hundred people at a time. [source: https://a.co/0vI31qA ]

“The confluence of nation, sovereignty and ‘general will’ written into the Declaration of Rights marked something close to a metaphysical conviction among the National Assembly, and the wider political class, that there could, should, and must be unity, and essential unanimity, in political action.” [source: https://a.co/9jsca8x ]

This “metaphysical conviction” meant that, in the eyes of the French revolutionaries, any opposition to the laws they wrote was equivalent to counter-revolutionary opposition to the ‘general will.’

The Revolutionaries Replaced Oppression In a Feudal Dress With Plain Old Oppression

During the year 1790 the revolutionaries attacked the peasants by using the rhetoric of “abolishing Church and feudal oppression” to replace the trappings of Church and feudal oppression with the reality of plain old oppression of the have-nots by the haves. Here is how the revolutionaries did it. They seized the land of the Church and put it up for sale. They abolished the offices of “royal office holders” (held by wealthy people who were able to buy these positions.) So far so good, one might think. But wait! The revolutionaries then printed paper money (of dubious value) and gave it to the former royal office holders to reimburse them for their lost offices. And then, guess what? These former royal office holders bought up most of the Church land with their new paper money. Result: “Sold by auction in large plots, these biens nationaux or ‘national property’ boosted the wealth of the already wealthy, while communities had to stand by and watch their best fields pass from the hands of one absentee landlord to another. The district of Cholet in the new Maine-et-Loire department, for example, saw over 56 per cent of all church lands sold to members of the bourgeoisie, and less than 10 per cent to working peasants….To add insult to injury, the Assembly closed out the year with another piece of prejudiced economic logic. It declared that landowners with existing rental contracts were entitled to receive from their tenants the additional income that would have been paid in tithe on their fields, and in the south, where the old taille was assessed on each plot of land, the value of that as well. The argument was that landowners were now the liable taxpayer, and the state was entitled to draw through them on revenues previously paid by tenants–but in practice, of course, this was simply a new burden on such tenants, and a loss of any nominal gain from changes in the system. It came on top of what was already a widely decried practice of landowners simply increasing rents with the assertion that abolished taxes and dues gave the peasantry more capacity to pay. Overall, in an economy where many peasants both owned and leased land, paying both taxes and rents, and where the new revolutionary landlord class were often exactly the same people as the Old-Regime seigneurial class, the question of what the Revolution had actually done for the peasantry, eighteen months on from the ‘abolition of feudalism’, remained disturbingly ambiguous.” [source: https://a.co/j7LdU8Z ]

“The failure of such revenues to flow back to communities often in dire need of charitable support was vehemently critiqued in many cahiers de doléances, as the collected complaints were called. However, when the cahiers were gathered up and reviewed at the level of the some 300 district-court jurisdictions, where delegates met to elect their representatives to attend the Estates-General, much of the specific nature of village complaints was lost. Overshadowed by middle-class tendencies to focus on what were perceived as more important national issues of continuing representation and constitutional change, village concerns were easy to downplay as grumbling about pigeons and rabbits, hedges and ditch digging. The cahiers carried forward to Versailles smothered the peasants’ voice under the concerns of a literate and propertied public.”

— The French Revolution (The Landmark Library Book 19) by David Andress

https://a.co/czUa1Fd

The Revolutionaries Equated Being Religious With Being Counter-Revolutionary

The revolutionaries had contempt for the many peasants who were devout Catholics and who wanted their local and often loved Catholic priests to be free from government interference in performing religious functions, even if they supported abolishing the oppressive Church tithes and the role of the Church as an oppressive landlord. The revolutionaries demanded that priests take an oath of allegiance to the new revolutionary constitution. The result was great peasant opposition to this.

“In this region it was quite difficult for a priest actually to take the oath–one Breton clergyman of forty years’ seniority lamented to the authorities that he had been stoned by his own parishioners when he attempted it, and in the Vendée, one such cleric was shot.”

— The French Revolution (The Landmark Library Book 19) by David Andress

https://a.co/deePe9f

“Such words and deeds reflect a complex collision of material self-interest, genuine (if also self-interested) concern for spiritual efficacy, and a determined belief that religious community was a thing to be safeguarded, if necessary by force. The overall impression created in the minds of the political class, however–proud adherents of enlightened progress, and consumed by belief in patriotic unanimity–was that the rural population was penetrated by a religious ‘fanaticism’ that posed a real danger to the Revolution. The complementary notion, following on from generations of urban scorn, that the root of this lay in peasant passivity and ignorance, led astray by wily priests, easily took hold. While in truth much of the rural population remained devoted to the gains they believed they had won in 1789, and continued to prefer a new order to the prospect of reversion to the old, the grating tension between the National Assembly’s constitutional vision and the autonomy of the village community continued to grow. It did so as beliefs among other sectors of the common people about the ongoing battle for their freedom against counter-revolution continued to harden.”

— The French Revolution (The Landmark Library Book 19) by David Andress

https://a.co/5tErS5X

The Revolutionaries Feared Egalitarianism Much More Than They Feared Mass Starvation

The revolutionaries preferred the have-nots to suffer great hunger rather than permit an egalitarian response to food shortages replace reliance on free markets (i.e., capitalism).

“Urban populations had much to be anxious about in the early months of 1791. There were persistent problems in the supply of basic foodstuffs, as revolutionary administrators tried time and again to wean the French away from their earnest belief that free markets in grain were a licence for exploitative speculations.”

— The French Revolution (The Landmark Library Book 19) by David Andress

https://a.co/iRm4Y0b

The revolutionaries could not even conceive of egalitarianism. For example, when there was a severe shortage of food and food riots demanding a cap on food prices, some revolutionaries supported a cap on food prices along with REDUCING wages, while other revolutionaries (the most “radical” ones called the Montagnards, which group Ropespierre had belonged to) wanted no price controls because they worshipped the free market as the solution to all problems. None of the revolutionaries conceived of or wanted the egalitarian solution, which would have been to ration food on the principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each—for free!—according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need, and with what is reasonable and equitable determined by the LOCAL assembly of egalitarians.

In the years when the revolutionaries exercised power, they used it AGAINST, not for, the have-nots of France.

“New measures in the finalized constitution sought to shut down popular club agitation and petitioning, building on measures passed in the spring that had clamped down on urban workers’ agitation, banning strikes and trade unions in the name of the contractual rights of individual citizens.”

— The French Revolution (The Landmark Library Book 19) by David Andress

https://a.co/a0PtpXL

The Revolutionaries Repressed the Urban Working Class

In the spring of 1791 workers in Paris began organizing against the employers for things such as better wages and mounting protests for their rights. David Andress, in The French Revolution and the People, pg.148-9 writes of the revolutionaries’ repression of and contempt for these workers:

The view of the workers’ actions as disorder was that taken up by the municipal. authorities, who pursued a strategy of denouncing the protests in printed orders, and of policing them vigorously with the National Guard. Workers’ groups themselves entered the print arena, protesting there, and in petitions to the National Assembly, that there was nothing intrinsically unfair about their proposed conditions: while the workers were accused of ‘caballing’, it was the employers who were self-evidently doing this, both to hold wages down initially and to condemn the workers’ actions.

Such an argument held no water with the politicians of the National Assembly, nor even with the relatively radical commentators. The newspaper The Revolutions of Paris, normally a. suppoter of popular societies, argued in May that workers’ groups were different: “An assembly which can only admit men who exercise the same profession injures the new order of things; it asts a shadow on liberty; in isolating the citizens, it makes them strangers to the fatherland.’ With even ‘advanced’ patriots taking a sharply individualist interpretation of the Rights of Man, the social insubordination implied by the workers’ stance finished off their cause, and on 17 June 1791 the Le Chapelier Law was passed specifically removing the right of assembly and association from groups of urban workers, and criminalising any effort to exercise collective influence over individual wages or conditions of work. A month later the measure was extended to farm workers and domestic servants. This reflected the continually hostile tone amongst the political class towards popular activity of all kinds. Five weeks before the Le Chapelier enactment, on 10 May, the new popular societies had had their activities curtailed by a aw which banned the petitioning of public authorities on behalf of groups rather than by named signatories. The societies were becoming an increasing irritant to the leadership of the Assembly, as they questioned and challenged the conservative tone of its deliberations, and its eagerness to draw the constitution to a close without taking further decisive action against counter-revolution.

Just as the societies saw counter-revolution within the Assembly, so its leadership was inclined, as it had always been, to see brigandage at work in any and al popular demonstration, protest or alleged disorder. Brigandage, to elite eyes, was itself counter-revolutionary, even if only indirectly as the gullible mob spurned what was good for it through its own stupidity, listening to the voices of irresponsible firebrands with no practical conception of political realities.

The revolutionaries’ contempt for and repression of the have-nots continued in subsequent years:

Regarding a poor sharecropper in the winter of 1793-4, pg. 163:

The arbitrary way in which they were treated is signalled by the fate of peasant brother and sister Leonard and Paule Meynard, from the village of Romain-sur-Colle, in the Dordogne. A banal squabble with a local official, in which they grabbed some papers from his hands, expressing frustration and disgust with the burden of republican demands, sent them all the way to the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, and the guillotine, ten days before Robespierre’s fall.

pg. 169:

The Montagnards [the most radical revolutionaries] also set up a few months later a ‘Grand Register of National Welfare’ which made some limited payments to widows and the elderly, but this was a skeletal replacement for religious charity at best. Such schemes sat within a sider imagined structure of future life which plotted a control over the people’s thoughts and deeds as thorough as anything the dechristianizers accused the church of exercising. Indeed, in the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’, launched with massive festivities in early June 1794, Robespierre and his associates looked to integrate the explicit power of supernatural divinity to reinforce he didactic messages of the new calendar’s parade of celebrations.

They also presided over a system that crushed dissent from below ruthlessly. The sans-culottes movement, for all its flaws [it was composed of petit bourgeois people adopting the exaggerated stereotypical dress and mannerisms of working class Parisians—J.S.] did keep in touch with the feelings of its Parisian base, and one reason for the tensions which ed to its elimination in the spring of 1794 was discontent at the working of the maximum price system. Black-marketeering flourished, and Parisian crowd in February and March 1794 had flared into protest—for the third time in as many years—at prices of butter, eggs and other goods, unavailable without paying illegal amounts. The Montagnard answer was to increase the legal prices while also, incomprehensibly, to start planning for an enforced downward revision in wage rates, as if that would somehow create a new equilibrium.

By April, resultant workers’ protests were being banned using the laws established under the monarchy in 1791, and ringleaders of movements among bakers, plasterers, tobacco workers and others were arrested as dangerous subversives. The many thousands who worked in the new war industries of the capital, and in manufactories dispersed across the nation, were effectively under military discipline, and compelled to take wages that left them reliant on state rations.

Emblematic of the Montagnards’ attitudes to work and workers was the enforcement of the Republican Calendar itsef with its most direct material consequence: nine-day uninterrupted stretches of labour between single days of decadi ‘rest’ (often accompanied by compulsory festive participation). The Catholic calendar of feasts and Sundays had given workers around a hundred rest days a year (roughly equivalent to modern two-day weekends); the Jacobin Republic expected them to manage with barely forty.

The September Massacre of 1792

On July 25, 1792 the commander of the foreign armies counter-revolutionary armies aiming to restore the full power of the French King and nobles issued the ‘Brunswick Manifesto.’ David Andress in The French Revolution and the People writes of it as follows:

pg. 180

It was clear to all who cared to see that the king was plotting the defeat of France with his European ‘cousins’. In the last days of July, word reached Paris of what that would mean, in the form of the ‘Brunswick Manifesto’ issued by the commander of the allied armies (and written by a vengeful emigre). National Guardsmen and any other irregulars who took part in fighting were liable to be shot as rebels under arms, and if the king and royal family were not restored to unfettered power and safeguarded in their persons, ‘an exemplary and long-memorable vengeance shall be taken, in giving Paris over to military execution and total destruction.’ Needless to say, this did not cow the Parisians but helped spur them on to resistance.

At this time the counter-revolutionary armies were on the verge of being able to march onto Paris. Also at this time the king had been recently reduced to the status of a citizen and no longer a monarch, and many people allied with, or suspected of being allied with, the king had been put in prison. Furthermore, the revolutionaries perceived the internal counter-revolutionary threat as being the aristocracy using ‘brigands’—a term applied to the poorest people in society—to overthrow the constitutional republic. As a result of the understandable fear that Parisians had now of counter-revolution, they directed their hostility to the inmates—aristocrats and ‘brigands’—of the prisons.

Andress writes:

pg. 183

Such fears were fanned by the general situation, which did not get better as August wore on. Austro-Prussian military forces pushed on into eastern France, subduing fortresses methodically, and nearing the point at which the road to Paris would be open to them. The tone of the messges put out by the Provisional Executive Council was grim, as this example from 25 August show: ‘Our enemies prepare the last blows of their insane rage…they wish to open a route to Paris, they may succeed.’ The Interior Ministry was even more alarmist, noting that the French ‘should expect the cruellest vengeance if they weaken before the atrocious men who have meditated this revenge for so long’, and that ‘Every measure of preservation is good in the extreme crisis of our danger’, The Press went a stage further, the People’s Orator observing that ‘The first battle we shall offer will take place within the walls of Paris, and not outside. All the royal brigands that this unhappy city shelters shall perish in one day.’ In so doing it echoed rumours that had been in circulation since 10 August that unspecified popular radical forces planned to do away with the enemies in the prisons.

On 2 September, as news of the hopeless position of besieged Verdun, the last fortress before Paris, ran through the city, action was taken. Within five days, around half the entire prison population, some 1500 people in all, had been executed in the September Massacres, an episode which set the seal on the shattering transformation of the summer.

Although the Parisians who executed prisoners held make shift trials and indeed found some prisoners to be innocent, nonetheless no doubt many people were executed who were not counter-revolutionaries, including some very poor people perceived as the ‘brigands’ that the aristocracy used for counter-revolutionary purposes. These innocent poor people were the victims of the revolutionaries wrongfully being equally afraid of the aristocracy and of the lower class have-nots. The September Massacre, however, is nowadays misleadingly cited to stigmatize revolution by the have-nots as necessarily leading to irrational blind hatred and violence.

Because many of the French have-nots quite understandably did not view the Revolutionary Government as THEIR government, of, by, and for the have-nots, many of them did not want to enlist in the French military to fight foreign governments that the revolutionaries claimed were the enemies of the French have-nots. The revolutionaries violently attacked the unwilling have-nots.

pg. 138:

The months of February and March 1793, in which the first legislative landmarks of the Terror were laid down, saw renewed collisions between the common people and the revolutionary elite, and more evidence of the basic divides that would give the following eighteen months their awful character. Raging price inflation, particularly for sugar and soap, saw another wave of price-fixing riots in Paris, and intensified scorn from radical leaders. Robespierre spoke of rioters as ‘a mob of women, led by valets of the aristocracy’, while another leading spokesman denounced ‘the perfidious incitement of aristocrats in disguise’, and warned that ‘where I see no respect for property, there I can no longer recognize any social order.’ [In Andress’s The French Revolution and the People he comments about this quotation, “Yet again aristocrats and brigands were invoked to explain popular actions that disturbed authority—even as that authority claimed to act in the most radical fashion on behalf of the people.”]

At almost the same moment as these riots, the Convention demanded a massive new effort of military mobilization, seeking a levy of 300,000 men—volunteers if possible, but with compulsion by lot or ballot as a back-up. This was particularly critical as the Convention now expanded the war with declarations against Spain, the Dutch Republic, Britain and the Italian states, convinced that all were already part of an aristocratic conspiracy to destroy the Republic. Within two weeks, the response to this had become so alarming that the Convention began to send out teamss of its own members, dubbed Representatives-on-Mission, with plenipotentiary authority to manage local politics. The situation they faced they faced, even at this early stage, was little less than catastrophic.

Most of the northern and eastern border regions, under direct threat of invasion, raised their recruits successfully, although rarely could they rely entirely on volunteers to do so. When some 1791 volunteers agreed to return to the colours, it was notable enough to merit celebrtions, as occurred in the Haute-Saone and Doubs departments. Demographers have identified 1793 as the year of a sharp spike in marriages, as the unmarried men in their twenties and thirties targeted by the levy took one obvious course of action to avoid it.

Such bachelor groups frequently also objected to the specific exemption given to those who held public office or served in the National Guard. Where such strata already appeared as oppressors of the peasantry, reactions could be deeply hostile. In town after town, angry crowds gathered demanding that officials, local Jacobins and purchasers of biens nationaux [national property—land—put up for sale by the government and purchased mainly by the wealthy—J.S.] show their patriotism by signing up first. In semur-en-Auxois a ballot exercise proposed the sons of the local wealthy elite for service; elsewhere, constitutional priests found their names put forward on similar lists.

Discontent and dissent reached even the remote areas. Gaspard Rousse, a peasant farmer from the hamlet of Arconac, high in the Pyrenean valleys of the Ariege, was denounced for saying that ‘the nation has begun to lay its hands on our persons’. To another man’s patriotic demand that ‘we must all rush to help the nation’, Rousse retorred that ‘since he was speaking that way, they should send him’. Two Dordogne sharecroppers, Barrot and Chaveroche, told volunteers that France’s enemies ‘were angry at the Bourgeois, not at the peasants’ and, echoing the widespread view elsewhere, that they should go to the district ‘to make the office holders march off to war.’

Representatives-on-Mission, finding such unpalatable events, widely insisted on instituting lotteries, but the result, particularly in more isolated and upland areas, was young men taking to the hills with their families’ collusion, beginning a tradition of draft-evading insoumission that would endure for years to come. Locally, things could get much worse. In the Aveyron department, potential conscripts rioted on 17 March, injuring the mayor of Rodez, and several thousand men rose in a brief insurgency that required direct military intervention, and the execution of twenty ringleaders, as it corssed over into overt counter-revolutionary incitement. This was only a skirmish, however, compared to events in the northwest of France.

A dozen departments across western Normandy, Brittany and the lower Loire valley—closely correlated with majority refusal of the 1791 clerical oath—were pushed into varying degrees of insurrection by the February levy. In Brittany, district capitals, and even the major city of Rennes, were briefly threatened with being overrun by columns of aggrieved peasants. A huge National Guard mobilization was needed to break the threat, along with fifty public executions. Although the levy was successfully imposed in April, those it left behind now coalesced into a guerrilla movement dubbed the Chouans, destroying signs and symbols of republicanism in their communities, and leaving the twon-based authorities functioning as if military occupiers, subject to random ambush if they left their armed camps.

South of here, in the region soon identified by the name of one department at its heart, the Vendee, a similar but far more thorough-going insurrection shattered the fragile web of republican authority. Conscription was the final spark to a fire of rebellion that had been stoked by every prejudiced and short-sighted attack that urban revolutionaries had launched on their communities’ culture. Peasant crowds invaded local capitals, destroying records and declaring themselves for church and king

By the first half of March, combat had already produced hundreds of casualties, as National guards tried and failed to move in on the rebels. the ebb and flow of victories and defeats, advances and retreats, produced threatening concentrations of prisoners on both sides, and a grim cycle of massacre and retaliation took hold. By the end of March, numerous incidents of the execution of dozens of republicans, and several running into the hundreds, had cemented a fight to the death.

The Convention drove this home on 19 March by voting the death penalty without appeal for rebels.

The revolutionaries’ fear of the entire population of the Vendee led them to commit extreme atrocities against them. David Andress in The French Revolution and the People, pg. 224-5, recounts the following about the revolutionaries’ treatment of people in the Vendee:

To implement the logical outcome of an already-existing policy, the republican-general Turreau sent a wave of parallel colomns infernales, “hell columns’, across the heartland of the revolt in January 1794, each detachment of troops destroying farms and killing all those in their path—the mere fact of such being being there, in a region swept clean of patriots, making them proscribed rebels. The representative-on-mission Lequinio wrote a year later, in his own account of he Vendean war, that

We saw republican soldiers rape rebel women on the stones piled by the sides of the main roads, and then shoot or stab them as they left their arms. We saw others carry nursling infants on their bayonets, or on the pikes whih had pierced mother and child with the same blow.

…

Lequinio’s account offers what is probably an accurate description—he wrote not to condemn such massacres, but believing the whole Vendean campaign had been a necessary measure of public safety. Two other representatives, Hentz and Francaste, were explicit on this at the time: ‘We are convinced that the Vendean war will be finished only when there will no longer be a singe inhabitant in this miserable land.’

The Revolutionaries Opposed the Land Reform that Many Peasants Wanted

On 10 August 1792 the Legislative Assembly “struck down all feudal dues for which the seigneur could not provide the ‘original title.’” [This section is based on Andress, The French Revolution and the People, pgs. 186-8] Unfortunately for the peasants, many such ‘original titles’ still existed despite peasant efforts to have burned them. Also, the Assembly allowed landowners to increase their rents by the value of such abolished dues. In late 1792 there was a wave of petitions by peasants for a division (called ‘partage’) of commons land. The Convention passed a law on 18 March 1793 “imposing the death penalty for advocating the loi agraire or ‘agrarian law’—a classical Roman tag for the enforced egalitarian redistribution of land.” “[P]etitions to the Convention from various parts of France in the wake of the legislative about turns of the autumn [when the Convention overturned previous pro-’partage’ legislation by a different body] made some brutally clear points about the social order. One commune in the Gard expressed what was a common view:

“Royalty, clergy and nobility have been abolished for ever, but the great landed proprietors remain to be destroyed, for it is in this very moment that they bear down with their full weight upon the poor inhabitants of the countryside.”

“A notary from a village in the Somme indicted the ‘rich class who have seen with pleasure the former nobles become their equals, [but] who have not admitted those unfortunates below them as equals.’ From the Haute-Garonne came the accusation that ‘the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies have done nothing’ to help the poor, ‘they have been preoccupied only with property-owners.’ Petitions and correspondence of this kind also made use of an abusive vocabulary, once confined to the agents of counter-revolution, but now increasingly commonplace in a wider range of conflicts. Like the nobles and priests before them, rich proprietors were condemned as ‘tyrants’ and ‘despots’, agents of the aristocrats’, ‘vutures’ and ‘vampires thirsting for human blood.’”

The Revolutionaries, In the Face of Famine, Agreed to Placing a Maximum Price on Food But Then Also LOWERED Wages

1793, pg. 149

In what was partly a showdown between the different radical leaderships, the Convention agreed a series of new laws. The blanket detention of ‘suspect’ individuals was imposed (and would eventually cover several hundred thousand people), and fears of food shortage were addressed with the creation of a ‘General Maximum’ system of price controls.

The latter, while causing moral convulsions among those in the Convention (including the Montagnard [most radical] leadership) profoundly committed to economic free markets was nothing less than a capitulation to popular demands for Old-Regime-style market regulation that had never gone away since 1789. But it was also accompanied by a far more contestable commitment to cutting wages back to pre-inflationary levels. San-Culottes ‘victories’ on the Maximum and Law of Suspects were further counterweighted by a new limitation on local section meetings to twice a week, in a clear effort to block the power of a permanently mobilized Parisian movement. Throughout the Terror, everything that appeared to be a movement towards answering the demands of the common people always had another more compromising side.

Back in July 1793, the Convention had finally, almost a year after the fall of the monarchy swept away all feudal dues without compensation, having the previous month also created a measure to sell biens nationaux in smaller blocks, and one that envisaged the possibility of the division of commons. But while these reached out to the more modest property owner, those who faced the continued piling of ex-feudal and ex-tithe burdens on their rents [extra rents owed to non-nobility wealthy people who had purchased these rights from nobles] gained no relief. The summer saw rural unrest on this subject in departments from the Gers in the southwest to the Yonne, only a day’s ride from Paris, but nobody in national politics saw any reason to raise it as a problem. Ordering Representatives-on-Mission in the same weeks to demolish fortified chateaux demonstrated clearly that in the Convention’s mind, feudal lords and capitalist land-lords had nothing in common.

The TERROR: The One Thing Our Rulers Make Sure We Know About

In 1794 the Terror climaxed with the revolutionaries finding supposed evidence to guillotine lots of people of all classes already in prison, followed by Robespierre accusing revolutionaries such as the extremely aggressive atheistic de-christianizer Hebert and the contrastingly more moderate Danton of secret counter-revolutionary intrigues, sending them to the guillotine. Following this the other revolutionaries grew afraid of Robespierre and sent him and his followers Saint-Just and Couthon to the guillotine. This frenzy of paranoid mutual suspicion among revolutionaries opposed to the aims and values of the have-nots (the vast majority of the population) and fearful that any independent actions of the have-nots were instigated and controlled by aristocratic counter-revolutionaries, is what led to the ugly and bloody mass guillotining of people that is the main thing our rulers today want us to know about the French Revolution.

The period following the Terror is known as the Thermidorian Reaction. A new constitution was written. David Andress in The French Revolution and the People,, pg 167, writes of this period:

Thus the unpropertied were cut out of anything but a token role in politics, and membership of the real political nation became confined to a wealthy elite—an exclusion that was to endure in various forms for a further half-century.

In 1799 a Peasant Woman Raged Against the ‘Despotic’ Republican Administration

In July 1799 a peasant woman posted a blunt note on the severed stump of a republican ‘tree of liberty’ in the village of Villethierry in Yonne, pg. 193:

Signing herself ‘Suzanne the Fearless’, and opening boldly ‘Wake up people of France’, she raged against the ‘despotic’ republican administration that forced Catholic worship behind closed doors and forbade Sunday celebrations, making a mockery of their assertions that ‘you are free and sovereign’ while ‘enchained’ by such restrictions—’After this, are we sovereign? Isn’t this playing with the people?’ Suzanne, of course, would be on the wrong side in any conventional progressive account of revolutionary radicalism, and as things stood her female descendants would have to wait more than 140 years for the right to take an active part in political life as voters alongside their menfolk. But there she was, at the close of the eighteenth century, demanding her freedoms as a member of the soveriegn people, for what she wanted, not what some lawyer told her she ought to want, or some nobleman told he she could not have.

History is too often the story of competing efforts to trample the common people, and to cram their lives and dreams into predetermined moulds of continuity or change. But it is also the story of their fight not to be trampled, then, now and in the future. And the story of the French Revolution is a great example of how that fight, doggedly, painfully, can succeed.

The French Revolutionaries of 1789 HATED local sovereignty of the have-nots, and THAT’s why they were in fact BRUTAL enemies of the people despite their “liberty, equality, fraternity” rhetoric.

The French revolutionaries could not even conceive of egalitarianism. For example, when there was a severe shortage of food and food riots demanding a cap on food prices, some revolutionaries supported a cap on food prices along with REDUCING wages, while other revolutionaries (the more “radical” ones called the Montagnards, which group Robespierre had belonged to) wanted no price controls because they worshipped the free market as the solution to all problems. None of the revolutionaries conceived of or wanted the egalitarian solution, which would have been to ration food on the principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each—for free!—according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need, and with what is reasonable and equitable determined by the LOCAL sovereign assembly of egalitarians.

Likewise, the revolutionaries could not conceive of handling the clergy in an egalitarian genuinely democratic way that would have enlisted the support of virtually all of the have-nots, whether they were deeply religious Catholics who wanted the clergy to be free to administer religious functions, or adamant atheists opposed to the Catholic church altogether, or somewhere in between. The egalitarian way of handling the clergy would have been for the have-nots in each village or town to decide how to handle them, with their decision in some towns being different than in others, and in either case with the have-nots separating the issue of the clergy’s religious role versus their role as landlords and feudal oppressors so as to abolish the latter regardless of how they dealt with the former role.

The behavior of the French revolutionaries is strikingly similar to that of the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia 128 years later; the former justified their contempt for the have-nots and for genuine democracy with the ideology developed by Rousseau and the latter with the ideology developed by Marx.

The American, French, Russian and Spanish revolutions all illustrate that genuine democracy is egalitarian democracy that is described here.

Egalitarian democracy is local sovereignty of egalitarians. This is what, in effect, millions of French have-nots were fighting for during the French Revolution, even though the revolutionaries in Paris were dead set opposed to it.

"When existing municipal corporations failed to meet the townspeople's demands for price controls on food, they would invade the Hotel de Ville [i.e., City Hall] and forcibly expel the old authorities, replacing traditional institutions and their officeholders with more democratic forms and personnel. Once again, the unreliability of the army made these changes possible. At Strasbourg, for example, royal troops looked on passively as the Hotel de Ville was sacked by demonstrators. By such various means did the vast local officialdom of the ancien regime--from the loftiest intendant to the lowliest bureaucrat--withdraw from the places they had occupied, causing the collapse of the central authority. Effectively, France was now decentralized: the new municipal governments agreed to accept the decisions of the Assembly [i.e., the central governmental body], but only with the proviso that those decisions accorded with the wishes of the local population." [emphasis not in the original: The Third Revolution, vol. 1, pg. 286, by Murray Bookchin

​The leaders of the French Revolution in Paris, people like Robespierre, were upper middle class people, typically lawyers, who were absolutely in love with what I call the invalid authoritarian principle—the notion that people must obey the highest body of government no matter what. They were absolutely opposed to genuine democracy as I describe it here. Their ideology held that there was something called the French General Will ("will of the people") and that it was the duty of their central revolutionary government in Paris to impose that "will of the people" on  everybody in France. They also believed that it was necessary to chop off the heads of all those who disagreed with them about what the General Will was. Eventually they ended up chopping off almost all of their own heads because of disagreements among themselves  about what the "will of the people" was.

The reputation of the French Revolution as being a horrible bloody Terror stems from this killing of revolutionaries by revolutionaries; it does not stem from the fact that the have-nots (often very justifiably) used violence against the haves who oppressed them, without which there would not have been the very real gains made by the have-nots in spite of opposition from the revolutionaries.

More fundamentally, the French revolutionaries represented the small part of the French population that wanted capitalism and its associated class inequality but minus all of the old strictly feudal and monarchical forms of class privilege that excluded the new capitalist class from the full benefits of class inequality. Because the revolutionaries represented only a small part of the population, and opposed the vast majority that was the rural and urban have-nots (peasants and workers), they viewed the have-nots as their enemy—as counter-revolutionaries—no less so than the aristocrats who wanted to restore the old feudal/monarchical regime, whenever the have-nots acted in the interests of and for the values of the have-nots. When a small minority seeks to impose its will on the vast majority, it cannot help but develop paranoia and engage in terrible oppressive and even just irrational violence. This is exactly what happened in the French Revolution.

What the French Revolution shows is NOT that all revolutions to make society more equal inevitably lead to horrible bloody violence and result in “all animals being equal but some more equal than others” but rather something very different. It shows that revolution of, by and for the have-nots is a very good thing, but that revolutionaries who have contempt for the have-nots even though they use revolutionary rhetoric cause terrible things to happen that unfortunately stigmatize what is good: egalitarian revolution.

Despite the anti-have-nots actions of the revolutionaries, French peasants made a revolution that profoundly improved their lives and reduced their oppression. David Andress in The French Revolution and the People, pg. 246, writes of the French peasantry following the revolution:

“Although family size shrank, life expectancy at birth rose over the following generation from under thirty to almost forty, and the number of children surviving to age fifteen from under half to almost two-thirds. This happened in no other country on such a dramatic scale, so general trends such as improvement in medicine can be discounted. There can be no doubt that the French peasantry’s persisent refusal to accept anything other than a complete removal of the feudal yoke was ultimately a great victory for them, and made a real difference to the lives of their children and grandchildren.”