Europe: A History (141 page)

In the United Provinces, the ancient conflict between the Stadholder and his opponents reached a new boiling-point in October 1787, when the Prussian army was invited in to maintain the status quo. The Dutch had suffered acutely from their adherence to armed neutrality during the American War of Independence, and from the resultant naval war with Great Britain. By the late 1780s old-established commercial and republican interests were in revolt against the Stadholder, Willem V (r. 1766–94), and his British and Prussian allies. They began to call themselves ‘patriots’ in the American style, and claimed to be the champions of the people against the princes. They caused an international outcry when in the course of their campaign against the government they kidnapped the Stadholder’s consort, Wilhelmina. It was Wilhelmina’s misfortune which spurred the Prussians into action and provided the pretext for the pacifications which followed in Amsterdam and elsewhere. But the appeal to force was not lost on those who were watching on the sidelines. It undoubtedly strengthened the resolve of the ‘patriots’ in the Austrian Netherlands, who were engaged in a trial of strength of their own; and it caught the attention of the French at the very time when relations between the monarch and his subjects were coming under intense scrutiny. French dissidents had looked to Holland as a haven of liberty ever since the days of Descartes. From 1787 the Dutch dissidents were looking again to France as the only realistic source of a rescue.

The Estates of Dauphiné met in the Salle du Jeu de Paume in the Château de Vizille, near Grenoble, on 21 July 1788. The meeting, which was illegal, had been conceived by local prominents as a means of defending the provincial parlement
against the royal decrees which it had recently been ordered to register. It was the first assembly of its kind since 1628, when Richelieu had suspended many provincial institutions; and it was prompted by a riotous demonstration in support of the parlement which had taken place in Grenoble on 7 June. It started a process of escalating demands which anticipated many of the events in Paris a year later. The Parlement of Dauphiné had been defying royal authority for more than twenty years. Its refusal to legalize many of the King’s demands for increased taxation had given it great local popularity. The decrees of May 1788, which aimed to break all such recalcitrant parlements and which provided for the banishment of offending magistrates, threatened to overthrow the comfortable stand-off of a whole generation.

A second meeting of the Dauphiné Estates at Romans in September 1788 was technically legal, since it coincided with authorized preparations for the Estates-General. But it saw the passage of a veritable provincial constitution. Apart from the election of deputies to the Estates-General, among them Lefranc de Pompignan, Archbishop of Vienne, it heard impassioned speeches on civic rights from its chairman, Judge J.-J. Mounier (1758–1806), the future Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, and from Antoine Barnave (1761–93), soon to be the author of the Jacobin Manifesto. It arranged for the doubling of the representation of its
Tiers État
, for joint debate of the three orders, and for individual voting. Each of these measures, when repeated in the Estates-General, was to turn a subservient body convened by the King into an independent assembly bent on implementing its own agenda. As the local guidebook proudly proclaims, ‘1788 est l’année de la Revolution dauphinoise.’
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The mini-revolution in Dauphiné caused ructions at the royal court. It provoked the resignation of the King’s chief minister, Archbishop Loménie de Brienne, who had set in motion the convocation of the Estates-General but who was now refused permission to crush the rebel province by force. The way was thus opened for the return of Jacques Necker, the Swiss banker, who was recalled to rescue the King’s finances. The events in Dauphiné dominated the deliberations of the (second) assembly of notables which was summoned to Versailles in November 1788 to advise on preparations for the Estates-General. The proposals of the dauphinois regarding the role of the Third Estate undoubtedly influenced the most radical pamphlet of the day. ‘What is the Third Estate?’ asked the pamphlet’s author, the Abbé Sievès. ‘Everything. And what has it been until the present time? Nothing. And what does it demand? To become something.’
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In Warsaw, the assembly of the Wielki Sejm or ‘Four Years’ Diet’ in October 1788 was conceived as part of a royal scheme to gain Russian approval for restoring the Republic’s independence. It started a process of reform in Poland-Lithuania which ran parallel to developments in France until both were overtaken by coercion. Much had changed in recent years. Frederick the Great was dead, and the new King of Prussia was well disposed to his Polish neighbours. Russia was heavily engaged in campaigns against both Swedes and Turks. Austria under
Joseph II was preoccupied with the Netherlands. In 1787 Stanisław-August judged the moment ripe for an overture to the Empress Catherine. If the Empress would permit the Republic to raise a modern army, and the financial and administrative structures to support it, the King would immediately sign a treaty of alliance with Russia for common operations against the Turks. Russia and the Republic could then pursue their objectives in harmony. In May the King received the Russian Empress on the Dnieper near the royal castle of Kaniów. In this, the last meeting with his former lover, he learned little from Catherine. But it gradually emerged that the Empress, who also conferred with Joseph II, was not well disposed. In fact, she was determined to maintain the status quo at all costs. Polish aspirations were not to be accommodated.

Poland’s Diet pressed on regardless with the internal aspects of the King’s scheme. In October 1788 it began by declaring itself a confederation and subject to majority voting, thereby bypassing the
liberum veto
of its russophile members. It then proceeded to vote for the creation of a national army of 100,000 men, a step which had been blocked ever since the Russian-guaranteed constitution of 1717. It also backed a
rapprochement
with Frederick-William II of Prussia. Its activists were grouped round the anglophile King, who dreamt of a British-style monarchy, and a group of intellectuals—the Revd Hugo Kołłataj (1750–1812), Rector of the reformed Jagiellonian University, the Revd Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826), and Stanisław Małachowski (1736–1809), Speaker of the Sejm, who were all strong admirers of the American example. After three years of frenzied legislation, their brief moment of glory was to come in May 1791, when they pushed through their Constitution of Third May (see below).

In November 1788 the Estates of Brabant and Hainault took an equally momentous step. Infuriated by the torrent of reforms imposed by their overlord, the Emperor Joseph II, they voted to withhold the provinces’ taxes. They had long felt aggrieved both on religious and on political grounds. As Catholics of the Spanish school, they could not easily accept the imperial decrees which had suppressed seminaries, pilgrimages, and contemplative orders; which had replaced episcopal by state censorship; and which had subjected the Church to direct taxation. Equally, as beneficiaries of privileges which had functioned since 1354, they could not bear the Emperor’s lack of consultation. The cities of Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain were jealously attached to their traditional right of veto over the deliberations of the Estates. Yet by making their stand at the time they did, they precipitated a constitutional crisis which would play itself out in the Austrian Netherlands one step ahead of the parallel crisis that was brewing in France. The Belgian ‘patriots’ hit the headlines in Paris in the same week that France’s notables were heading for Versailles to advise on the agenda of the Estates-General. The Emperor tried to impose a new constitution on the Belgian Estates on 29 April 1789, exactly six days before France’s Estates-General convened. When the Emperor’s impositions were rejected by the State Council of the Austrian Netherlands, he determined to use force. The Austrian army invaded Brussels, dissolved the State Council, and abolished the
Joyeuse Entrée
on 20 June 1789. This
was the self-same day when a defiant Estates-General, by taking the ‘Tennis Court Oath’, was setting the revolutionary process in motion in France (see below).

Brussels and Paris shared the same language. News travelled fast between them. The ‘Belgian Revolt’, which continued to run long after the Emperor’s coup, was an essential component of the ‘French Revolution’. Paris did not lead Brussels; Brussels led Paris.

The last week of April 1789 brought death to the streets of Paris. An exceptionally cold winter had added to the hardships inflicted by a bankrupt government, rising prices, and lack of work. Hunger stalked the poorer districts, and raids on bakeries were frequent. When a rich manufacturer called Réveillon dared to say in public that his workmen could live well off half the 30 sous per day which he paid them, his house in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was surrounded. On the first day, the angry crowd demolished several buildings amidst cries of ‘Vive le tiers!’ and ‘Vive Necker!’. On the second day, when soldiers of the Régiment du Royal-Cravatte were brought in, they were pelted with missiles; and someone fired a shot. The soldiers responded with volleys of musket-fire that left at least 300 dead. This was the news which awaited the members of the Estates-General when they converged on the capital at the weekend from all ends of France.

Revolution

In France, as in England 149 years before, the general crisis came to a head when a bankrupt King summoned a long-neglected Parliament to his aid. The expectation on all sides was that financial relief for the royal government would be granted in return for the redress of grievances. By prior arrangement, therefore, all the delegations elected by the provinces and cities came to the Estates-General armed with
cahiers de doléances
or ‘catalogues of complaint’. These
cahiers
were intended by the King’s ministers, and are widely used by historians, as a prime instrument for assessing the nature and proportions of popular discontent. Some of the complaints were less than revolutionary: ‘that the master wig-maker of Nantes be not troubled with new guild-brethren, the actual number of ninety-two being more than sufficient.’
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The opening scene in Paris, on Sunday 4 May 1789, was painted in one of Carlyle’s memorable word-pictures:

Behold … the doors of St. Louis Church flung wide: and the Procession of Processions advancing to Notre-Dame! … The Elected of France, and then the Court of France, are marshalled … all in prescribed place and costume. Our Commons ‘in plain black mantle and white cravate’; Nobles in gold-worked, bright-dyed cloaks of velvet, resplendent, rustling with laces, waving with plumes; the Clergy in rochet, alb, or other best
pontificalibus
. Lastly comes the King himself, and the King’s Household, also in the brightest blaze of pomp … Some fourteen hundred men blown together from all winds, on the deepest errand.

Yes, in that silent marching mass there is futurity enough. No symbolic Arc, like the old Hebrews, do those men bear; yet with them, too, is a Covenant They, too, preside at a new
era in the history of men. The whole future is there, and Destiny dim-brooding over it, in (their) hearts and unshaped thoughts …
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Once summoned, however, the Estates-General proved impossible to control. The three orders of clergy, nobility, and Third Estate were supposed to meet separately, and to follow an agenda laid down by the royal managers. But the Third Estate, which had been granted double representation as in Dauphiné, soon realized that it could bend the proceedings to its own desires, if the three chambers were permitted to vote as one. The clergy and nobility, who included many sympathizers, offered no concerted opposition. So on 17 June, having invited the two other Estates to join them, the Third Estate broke the existing rules and declared itself to be the sole National Assembly. This was the decisive break. Three days later, locked out of their usual hall, the deputies met on the adjacent tennis court,
le jeu de paume
, and swore an oath never to disband until France was given a Constitution. ‘Tell your master’, thundered Count Mirabeau, to troops sent to disperse them, ‘that we are here by the will of the people, and will not disperse before the threat of bayonets.’
[GAUCHE]

Pandemonium ensued. At court, the King’s conciliatory ministers fell out with their more aggressive colleagues. On 11 July Jacques Necker, who had received a rousing welcome at the opening of the Estates-General, was dismissed. Paris exploded. A revolutionary headquarters coalesced round the Due d’Orléans at the Palais Royal. The gardens of the Palais Royal became a notorious playground of free speech and free love. Sex shows sprang up alongside every sort of political harangue. ‘The exile of Necker’, screamed the fiery orator Camille Desmoulins, fearing reprisals, ‘is the signal for another St Bartholomew of patriots.’ The royal garrison was won over. On the 13th a Committee of Public Safety was created, and 48,000 men were enrolled in a National Guard under General Lafayette. Bands of insurgents tore down the hated
barrières
or internal customs posts in the city, and ransacked the monastery of Saint-Lazare in the search for arms. On the 14th, after 30,000 muskets were removed from the Hôtel des Invalides, the royal fortress of the Bastille was besieged. There was a brief exchange of gunfire, after which the governor capitulated. The King had lost his capital.

At that point, at the centre of affairs, there was still hope of an orderly settlement. On the 17th, to much surprise, Louis XVI drove from Versailles to Paris and donned the tricolour cockade in public. In the provinces, in contrast, news of the fall of the Bastille triggered an orgy of attacks on ‘forty thousand other bastilles’. Castles and abbeys were burned; noble families, indiscriminately attacked by hungry peasants, began to emigrate; cities declared for self-rule; brigandage proliferated. France was dividing into armed camps. It was the season of
la Grande Peur
, the Great Fear—a summer of unprecedented social hysteria fired by rumours of aristocratic plots and peasant atrocities across the country.
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