The War of Wars (4 page)

The embers of revolution, however, still smouldered to be blown by Atlantic winds across to Britain’s north American colonies. There, as in Britain before the Civil War, rapid economic and demographic change in the mid-eighteenth century suddenly collided with the attempt of a centralizing state to extend its authority in 1776. The result was inevitable: the latter was swept away in a torrent: only in calmer waters further downstream, could it re-emerge in very different guise.

If the American Revolution can be described as a distant descendant of the English Revolution, the French Revolution was undoubtedly a firstborn child of the American one. It was no coincidence at all that it began when Benjamin Franklin – lecherous, egotistical, homespun, brilliant Franklin – was America’s longstanding envoy to France (where
he subverted the French court by wearing shabby republican clothes amid the finery, becoming a cult figure for intellectuals), nor that Thomas Paine was to be swept up in the tumult of the French Revolution, nor that one of the first revolutionaries was the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the heroes of the American War of Independence.

Franklin, a representative of men who had rejected the authority of a monarch altogether and preached a republic was a lethal cancer in the body politic of the French monarchy, and it was almost suicidally obtuse of Louis XVI and his courtiers not to realize it, obsessed as they were with the old power struggle with Britain.

France had sought to turn the American Revolution into a dagger aimed at Britain’s breast, but succeeded in striking only a glancing blow before falling on the weapon itself. For in an age of press, printing and pamphleteering the ideals of the American Revolution soon found a following among intelligent and dissatisfied men in France. The immediate catalyst for the French Revolution, however, was the French court’s need to raise money – an exact echo of the cause of the English Revolution, when Charles I had had to summon parliament to raise revenue. The cost of French participation in the American war had been prohibitive, and had been met by loans. The French government afterwards ran out of ready access to lenders and in 1786 the minister of finance was forced to inform the French King that the situation could only be corrected by imposing taxes. In 1788, the
ancien régime
for the first (and last) time drew up a budget, which showed there to be a shortfall of some 20 per cent between expenses and revenues. Of the total budget, some 6 per cent was being spent on the court itself, some 20 per cent on administration, and 26 per cent on defence and foreign affairs. Nearly half was being swallowed up on debt service of some 318 million livres.

It was thought necessary to reduce the debt through taxation – not through a general increase of the taxes that already fell almost entirely on the poor classes, whose wages had risen only by 22 per cent, compared to average price increases of 65 per cent over the previous half century – but by extending taxation to the wealthy bourgeoisie and to the nobility. The cause of the French Revolution was thus not the state’s attack on the poor, but on the rich!

The minister of finance, Calonne, proposed an eminently progressive taxation regime: a uniform tax on salt and tobacco across the nation, a land tax and an end to internal tariffs and freedom for the grain trade (which affected the all-important price of bread) as well as the selling off of manorial properties possessed by the church so that they would be able to pay tax. Finally tax was to be administered by provincial assemblies in which the traditional ‘three estates’ of France – the clergy, the nobility, and all property owners – should be represented equally.

Exactly as occurred under Charles I’s exactions, and George Grenville’s attempts to raise taxes in America through the Stamp Act the King’s plan provoked a furious outcry from the men of property – in particular, in France, the nobility. After bitter exchanges, the King was forced to summon the Estates-General, a kind of national assembly of the three estates, which had last been convened at the beginning of the seventeenth century, to get his way. At that stage the dispute was between the modernizing centralized royal court and the reactionary nobility – not the popular image of the people against King and aristocracy.

France was in the throes of a social and economic revolution – a huge increase in population and in property: unfortunately the new prosperity was not well distributed among the expanding population. Worse, the economic boom was disrupting existing social arrangements: an urban working class had sprung up in the cities, in particular Paris, estimated at around 300,000 or around half the population of 600,000. Many of these benefited from the economic revolution, but this new concentration was also a powerful force in its own right. While the new property created a large urban bourgeoisie, the inequalities between the bourgeoisie and the workers also became obvious where they rubbed shoulders together.

In the countryside there existed a large independent peasantry which possessed few of the feudal characteristics of its English neighbours: the peasants had for centuries been emancipated from serfdom, although a few traits lingered as well as their obligation to do military service. Whereas in Britain huge landholdings and a paid agricultural workforce were, in many ways, an extension of serfdom, the French peasant was a
fiercely independent proprietor: but he was also poor, with a landholding barely capable of supporting him. This naturally conservative class was baffled by two aspects of the economic revolution France was unleashing during the mid-eighteenth century: bread shortages caused by the archaic and corrupt system of regulation and distribution of grain, which Calonne was determined to reform, as well as by the increased appetites of the cities; and taxation at a time when purchasing power was diminishing. To the peasant it seemed that Calonne was preparing further to exacerbate their problems by levying new taxes and instituting a free for all on prices (which would actually have improved supply but lowered prices for the peasant producer). Thus another class was added to those with grievances against the
ancien régime
.

A third class of malcontents came from the lower ranks of the nobility – of which Napoleon Bonaparte was himself to be a rather atypical example. The nobility in France was very different from that in Britain where it consisted of a select group of around 1,000 hugely wealthy landowning families. There were no fewer than 400,000 ‘nobles’ in France out of a population of some 23 million, with perhaps a fifth of the land. With the exception of the ‘nobility of the robe’ – high court officials of bourgeois background ennobled by the court – they were a caste.

A large part of the nobility, however was extremely poor and would lose status if they worked for a living. For these people, the King and his court were an enemy, the new moneyed classes a source of envy, and the new wealth injected into the country something of which they were not a part.

Thus France in the dying days of the
ancien régime
was a paradox – a newly enriched and developed society in which large numbers of people were alienated from the new prosperity – among them many of the squirearchy, most of the peasantry and part of the new urban working classes, as well as that part of the bourgeoisie with more or less fixed incomes. Meanwhile the newly prosperous merchant class – such as lower civil servants, professionals and lawyers – made up the overwhelming bulk of the elected members of the Third Estate in the newly convened Estates-General. The great French historian
Georges Lefebvre has brilliantly summed up the bourgeoisie on the eve of the Revolution:

For centuries the bourgeois, envious of the aristocracy, had aimed only at thrusting himself into its ranks. More than once he had succeeded, for a great many nobles descended from ennobled bourgeois. This ambition was not extinct. The Rolands put themselves to much trouble to get themselves recognized as nobles; the Derobespierres cut their name in two; Danton spelled his as d’Anton; Brissot, son of an innkeeper of Chartres, blossomed forth as Brissot de Ouarville, or still more fashionably, de Warville. Such were the marks of gentility. Bourgeois of old stock were frankly proud of their lineage, careful not to form an improper marriage. Officeholding and the professions established among them a hierarchy of which they were exceedingly jealous . . .

Since at best only a small number of bourgeois could enjoy the advantage of becoming nobles, the rest of them wound up by execrating what they envied without hope. The exclusiveness of the nobility in the eighteenth century made the ascent even more arduous than before, especially when the nobles tried to reserve the most distinguished public employments for themselves. At the same time, with increasing wealth, the numbers and the ambitions of the bourgeois continued to mount. Sacrifices willingly made for the education of their children were meeting with disappointingly little reward, as the correspondence of Sieyès with his father testifies, and still better the examples of Brissot, Desmoulins and Vergniaud. The young Barnave wrote, ‘The road is blocked in every direction.’ Throughout the century government administrators had expressed alarm at the spread of education, and even in the Year III (1795) Boissy d’Anglas was to fear that education would result in forming ‘parasitic and ambitious minorities’.

With the doors shut, the idea arose of breaking them down. From the moment when the nobility laid claims to being a caste, restricting public office to men of birth, the only recourse was to suppress the privilege of birth and to ‘make way for merit’. Pure vanity played its part, we may be sure; the most insignificant would-be
noble nursed the wounds of his injured pride at the mere sight of the social distance above him. Among bourgeois of diverse kinds was forged a link that nothing could shatter – a common detestation of the aristocracy.’

The bourgeoisie put its emphasis on earthly happiness and on the dignity of man; it urged the necessity of increasing the former and elevating the latter, through the control of natural forces by science and the utilizing of them to augment the general wealth. The means, it was believed, consisted in granting entire freedom to investigation, invention and enterprise, for which the incentive was to be personal gain, or the charm of discovery, struggle and risk. The conception was dynamic, calling upon all men, without distinction of birth, to enter into a universal competition from which the progress of mankind was to follow without end. The ideas appeared in a confused way in the France of the Renaissance; subsequently Descartes inaugurated a new humanism by opening up a magnificent perspective, the domination of nature by science; finally, the writers of the eighteenth century, encouraged by English and American influences – here we must note Voltaire, the encyclopaedists, the economists – set forth with spectacular success the principles of the new order, and the practical conclusions that it seemed fitting to deduce.

The works of these writers strengthened oral propaganda in the
salons
and
cafés
which multiplied in the eighteenth century, and in the societies of all kinds which were founded in great numbers – agricultural societies, philanthropic associations, provincial academies, teaching institutions like the Museum at Paris, reading rooms, Mesmerist societies where the magnetism put in vogue by Mesmer was experimented with an, finally and above all, Masonic lodges, brought over from England in 1715.

As the Abbé Sieyès so pithily put it: ‘What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now? Nothing. What does it ask? To be something.’ The aristocracy, by directly challenging the reforming monarchy, had unwittingly created the instrument of its own destruction; for the Third Estate was by far the most numerous
part of the Estates-General convened through aristocratic resistance to the new taxation. The King’s tax reform had thus assembled a formidable coalition of enemies, among them the aristocracy; and the aristocracy now provided the means by which those enemies could find expression not just against the King, but against the aristocracy as well.

With the summoning of the Estates-General on 4 May 1789, and the election of members of the Third Estate at open assemblies in which the articulate bourgeoisie prevailed over the peasants, the Revolution gathered momentum with astonishing speed. The three principal leaders at this stage were an unlikely combination: the Comte de Mirabeau, an aristocrat who had deserted his class, the Abbé Sieyès, a conspiratorial priest of lower middle-class origins and the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution. Mirabeau was a powerful orator and a wheeler-and-dealer of men with immense charm. Offsetting this was an absence of real principle, a quick eye for opportunity, and aristocratic indolence which had led to earlier scandals, particularly over money, of which he was chronically short. In spite of his gifts, it was believed he could be bought by the court party if they so chose; and this prevented him from becoming the natural leader of the Third Estate. Sieyès was a poor speaker and an unimpressive personality, but he was a brilliant polemical writer and he emerged as the chief theoretician of the idea that the Third Estate represented the nation, which alone possessed sovereignty, not the King. However, he was no radical, fearing rather than favouring the mob and democracy, and he was soon to be eclipsed as the Revolution took a radical turn. Lafayette was hugely rich, and as a young man he had led the French volunteers and later conscripts that fought by George Washington’s side. He was an earnest and generous idealist: but he was also naïve, vain and politically inept.

Lafayette’s importance in the outbreak of war between France and its neighbours can hardly be exaggerated, and it is worth looking at him
in closer detail. He had inherited his title at the age of two, when his father was killed at the Battle of Minden in the Seven Years War. Physically unimpressive, he was no athlete and was shunned at court, where his family was considered comparatively
nouveau riche
. However, he was phenomenally wealthy, with an income of around £300,000 a year by the age of twenty-one, and at the age of sixteen he had been married to the daughter of the Duc d’Ayen, head of one of the noblest families in France, who had taken the youth under his wing.