The ancien régime was the name given to the pre-revolutionary French government by the protagonists of the summer of 1789. In doing so they were defining not so much what they had suppressed, but more “what they wanted to create-a complete break with the past, which was to be cast into the shadows of barbarism.”[1] As the Declaration of the Rights of Man[2], published on 26th August 1789 showed, the aim of the members of the new National Assembly, which had claimed national sovereignty under the leadership of Abbé Sièyes on 17th June, was to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all that they now aspired to become. The revolution of 1789 was thus baptised in revolutionary rhetoric and political beliefs. Why however did the ancien régime, which had previously weathered so many storms, which had survived the euphemistically-titled “flour war”[3] of 1774 and even more recently the Révellion riots[4] of April 1789, collapse so suddenly and catastrophically? The answer is the fatal fusion of this aforementioned political crisis, beginning with the assault on the outmoded anachronism of absolutism, with the worse economic crisis that France had experienced in years, after a series of poor harvests and expensive foreign wars. Indeed, it was on the famous journée of 14th July, when the medieval fortress of Bastille was seized that the price of bread reached its highest point of 16 sous since 1770. Such food riots coincided with the political effervescence of various clubs and enlightened societies as well as the mutterings in the suburbs with the revolutionary speeches of the duc d’Orléans’ Palais-Royal, who had opened up his gardens to the general public in 1780. The Capetian dynasty had never faced such broad-based opposition and during the summer of 1789, the ancien régime had collapsed.
The system of financial control in France is somewhat difficult to understand, as we still have no absolutely reliable figures on French finances. This is perhaps why it took the Controller-General of Finance, Calonne two years to arrive at the conclusion of a deficit of 112 million livres and subsequent bankruptcy on 20th August 1786. After the failure of the Scottish adventurer John Law to set up a state bank, the government was compelled to rely on intermediaries for raising its loans to fund its foreign wars, bodies like the municipality of Paris and the banks of Amsterdam. The wars of the French government had imposed a crippling legacy of debt on the royal finances, and although this burden was much alleviated by the great financial crisis of 1720-1, which enabled the government to write off huge sums, four major European and overseas wars since that time had brought batters once more to crisis proportions, including the American War of Independence (1778-83) at a cost of 227,000,000 livres. The internal instability of the Dutch Republic, where “patriots,” which seemed to be provoking Prussian invasion through their opposition to the Prince of Orange, meant that France could no longer rely on foreign capital to finance its ambitious foreign policy. The 1,250 million livres borrowed since 1776 had to be repaid, however the French financial system structurally was in a mess. Other than a series of emergency measures, such as the vigntième[5], established with much difficulty for the third time in 1782, there were few successful attempts to solve this financial crisis. The 1780 intendant[6]...was always trying to think up plans for increasing the wealth of the province”[7] though as any new methods were difficult to enforce and usually short-term, this was ultimately fruitless. Council meetings were the scene of acrimonious clashes to gain the favour of the king, resulting in ministers denouncing and rejecting each other’s policies. Indeed, when the Assembly of Notables convened on 22nd February 1787, they were unable to agree on any economic reform, due to clashes between a vocal Neckerite party and Calonne, despite the modest proposals of a new graduated land tax. Moreover, the only police force in the countryside was the maréchaussée, a body less than 4,000 strong to cover the whole of France, ill-paid, ill-equipped and not numerous enough anywhere to enforce any measures. Major economic reforms were needed, which brought the political crisis of the Bourbon monarchy to the forefront, resulting in the eventual announcement on 8th July 1788 of the summoning of the Estates-General.
If the economic problems of the ancien régime succeeded in bringing the political crisis to the forefront, then it also furthered such antagonism. Population increase from 20 to 28 million between 1700 and 1789 was accompanied by the fragmentation of peasant holdings, increasing the vulnerability of crop yields to bad harvests. Despite a moderate increase in agrarian production as more waste land was put under the plough due to demographic changes, the result of the persistent drought and flooding in 1788 was a disastrous harvest, in twenty-seven of the 32 généralites. “The political crisis was accelerated by one of the biggest economic and social storms of the century; the heavens also were revolutionary.”[8] During the worse days of spring 1789, bread alone was absorbing up to 88 per cent of an average Parisian worker’s wage. First serious looting of bakers shops occurred in Brittany in January, while in Provence mobs forced local authorities to fix low prices for bread. Such protests of hunger foreshadowed the popular revolution and the Great Fear during the summer of 1789. Wages had not kept pace with inflation, as the real value of wage between the 1720s and 1789 seemed to have fallen about 7 per cent, due to the wine glut during the mid 1780s. Peasants needed this to supplement their slender livelihood and the result was a growing “floating” population of migrant workers who drifted into Paris in search of work and would later form the revolutionary crowds during the summer of 1789. Most of these penurious immigrants lived in great squalor, huddled together many to a room in garrets or cellars and thus increasing their opposition to the French government. The free-market conditions on grain introduced by Calonne, based on the principles of the physiocrats[9], had produced uncertain bread supplies in the city that would form the motives of many of the Paris crowds, as many demanded uniform bread prices. It was the announcement of the dismissal of Necker, the guarantor of bread supplies, as financial advisor on July 11th 1789 that led to the fall of Bastille. The failure of agriculture and the subsequent bread supplies was thus one of the main motives of the Parisian crowds. As the purchasing power of the populace collapsed, the populace looked desperately for ways out with a decrease in demand for industry. The international hegemony of luxury Parisian industries was short-lived and following the Anglo-French[10] trade agreement, which came into operation in May 1787 and opened the French market to competition from the cheap, high-quality products of the industrial north of England, textile production fell as much as 50 per cent in a few months, leading to mass unemployment and further discontent. “Even the most glamorous sectors, like the colonial re-export trade, did not have sufficient power to draw the rest of the economy into self-sustained growth.”[11] Foreign trade, the real success story of the ancien régime, with its fivefold augmentation since 1715 had enriched many of the ports like Bordeaux, described as “a busier commercial centre than Liverpool”[12] by the contemporary English agronomist Arthur Young. Nevertheless, “spectacular though this boom was, it was peripheral. Only the inhabitants of a few ports and their rural hinterlands derived much benefit.”[13] Indeed, the success of foreign trade was not without its vicissitudes. Chaos among whites and mixed-race creoles opened the way up to “massive uprising among the 450,000 black slaves -“the greatest slave revolt in history”[14] and a damaging trade dispute in the late 1780s with Spain had augmented the economic plight of the French government. The first facing the ancien régime was indeed its economic failings, later fused with its political problems, provoked popular agitation.
The political crisis of the ancien régime was therefore the absolutist rule of the Bourbon monarchy. “Opposition to the government before the revolution was never focused on a national institution such as the English Parliament.”[15] No such institution existed. It is true that medieval and early-modern kings had sometimes called convoked the Estates-General, an elective national representative body; but its powers were vague, its composition fluctuating, and its convocation irregular, with the last meeting in 1614. Faced with an economic crisis, the government could not act without facing remarks of despotism, seen as the worst of all possible governments, the rule of one man according to no law but his own caprices. The elected Assembly of Notables, which met every five years, was the closest paradigm of a permanent national representative body of any sort. Furthermore, it only really survived as it could borrow money at rates more advantageous than the French government (4 to 5 per cent rather than 8 per cent). The real difference therefore between Britain and France at the time was that William Pitt in an economic crisis could raise taxation whereas the equivalent French ministers could not without raising public alarm. Indeed, the French monarchy could not even declare itself bankrupt without seeming despotic. The chaotic years following the financial crash of 1720, in which thousands of government creditors were ruined “had installed French public opinion with a deep hostility to the breaches of public faith.”[16] In 1770, amid the most serious economic crisis for decades, the attempts of the Controller-General of Finance, Terray, to suspend payments of short-term credits was greeted with a general outcry and he was eventually dismissed in 1774. Similar outcries were provoked by the brief imprisonment of the former government minister Beaumarchais and the execution of the Protestant John Calas in Toulouse in 1762, for the false allegations of murder. His father’s support of Chancellor Maupeou’s ruthless reorganisation of the judiciary at the height of the Brittany affair[17] in January 1771 may seem to support the idea that “by the time Louis XVI came to the thrown in 1774 the political system he had inherited had lost its legitimacy.”[18] It may therefore seem that in the middle of an economic crisis, the absolutist rule of Louis XVI could not function. “His power was not absolute, only arbitrary”[19]
However, the belief that the ancien régime was doomed to collapse in the face of a crisis may seem to determinist for some. The personal shortcomings of Louis XVI, as the linchpin of the French government, should not be overlooked. Indeed, his grandfather was able to shrug off criticisms of his despotic rule in placing his two bastard sons in the line for succession and through diligence and firmness under pressure, Louis XVI set new standards of monarchical conduct and tame a rebellious nobility, still angered after their exclusion since “Frondes.”[20] While, Louis XIV was blessed with intelligence and oratory skills, his grandson was withdrawn, solitary and unimaginative. “Where personal qualities were concerned, Louis XVI was not the ideal monarch to personify the twilight of royalty in the history of France”[21] He was plagued by chronic indecision and did not seem to understand the severity of the revolution, shown by his personal insistence on June 26th 1789 to bring up 4,800 troops, despite rumours of an aristocratic counterrevolution to subvert the power of the Estates-General. Similarly, it was his personal decision to insist on the full sacramental panoply during his coronation, not performed since 1537, including anointment with the sacred oils of Clovis[22] at a time of large-scale food riots in Paris. The semi-divine status that he attempted to acquire from this was undone by a series of hack journalists, angered at their exclusion from the ranks of the philosophes, who told titillating accounts of royal sexual depravity. His shy personality fuelled rumours about his private life, as it was only on two occasions that he left the Versailles-Paris region: in 1786 when he travelled to Cherbourg to inspect the new harbour installations and in 1791 during his flight to Varennes. Louis XVI was portrayed as a cuckolded, impotent ignoramus, blissfully unaware of Marie Antoinette’s affair with Comte d’Artois. She, much like the Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra, the last tsar of Russia, was hated because of her nationality. Though, she did little to increase her popularity, as she tangled with crooks, during the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace.”[23] Any attempts of appeasing the already volatile situation through Louis XVI’s absolutist rule therefore seemed to have faded.
It was from the privileged ranks of the nobility that opposition to the despotic rule of the ancien régime. Indeed, it was the great Paris parlement[24] that led the way in insisting on the meeting of the Estates-General to agree to any financial reforms and equally, it was the leadership of men like Mounier and Mirabeau, outraged and suspicious at the growth of troops within the centre of Paris, that led their followers to a nearby indoor tennis court on June 20th, swearing never to disperse until they had given France a constitution. When Louis XVI therefore reached for what should have been his most loyal and potent weapon, the privileged orders, he was browbeaten and intimidated into summoning the Estates-General, which met on May 4th 1789. De Tocqueville’s claim that “the nobles (of Britain and France) had identical positions, had the same privileges, the same appearance”[25] would therefore not appear to reflect the true nature of the pre-revolutionary nobility, though of course, writing in 1856, he did not have the benefit of the plethora of new evidence opened up in honour of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the revolution. Indeed, this new evidence has thrown light on the role of the nobility within the revolution and far from being a caste of feudal remnants; the nobility was an order that held close to itself the principles of meritocracy, shown by their overwhelming support of fiscal equality in the cahiers de doléances.[26] They were a class that “was constantly absorbing the richest and most enterprising members of the Third Estate.”[27] Between a quarter and a third of the nobility from 1715 were of recent origin and the result was that the French nobility was very numerous; even if the lowest of possible estimates is taken, the figure (c. 25,000 families) is more than one hundred times bigger larger than that yielded by the British peerage (220 peers in 1790). Even those without money did their utmost. Marat, the extreme Jacobin journalist and agitator falsely clamed to be noble.
More and more nobles and bourgeois alike came together to share the same tastes and discuss the same issues in the prelude to the revolution of 1789 that it is “hard to identify the nobility as a separate class at all”[28] For some 60 per cent of the nobility had revenues of less than 4,000 livres, which suggested a modest, frugal lifestyle and consequently shared the grievances of the Third Estate. This would not seem to support Lefebvre’s claim that the revolution was above all the “conquest of equal rights”[29] Conversely, at first the nobility were the staunchest supporters of the crusade against absolutism. The parlements portrayed themselves as the sole bulwark against the crown’s despotic tendencies and based on Montesquieu’s belief in the need for an intermediary body, continuously put forward the need for the meeting of an Estates-General to approve of any economic reforms. At a time when the French monarchy needed the support of its privileged orders to appease an economic crisis, the nobility took this opportunity to begin the assault on absolutism.
It was at this point that the political discontent of the masses came together with the aforementioned economic problems, particularly the fluctuating price of bread, which had plagued Paris for some time. The heretical views of the nobility had spread to an increasingly literate Third Estate. The parlements, who since their stoical defence of those dissident priests that had criticised church power in the name of Jansenism, came to be recognised as the “vanguard” of the masses, illustrated by worker support during the “Day of Tiles”[30] in Grenobles on 7th June 1788. Holding their own printing presses, they used them to disseminate innumerable copies of various remonstrances, steeped in ideas of the Enlightenment. The hatred of monarchical despotism had reached the masses and “by the time the Estates-General actually met, some degree of political consciousness had emerged.”[31] Political clubs, most famously Duport’s Société des Trentes had blossomed during the spring of 1789 and the number of academies grew from nine in 1710 to at least thirty-five on the eve of the revolution, with entrance based entirely on merit from 1930 onwards. Figaro’s famous soliloquy denouncing the despotic Count Almavia in Act V of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro was the talk of Paris when the play secured a performance in 1784. Plebeian grievances were no longer based entirely on the price of bread, but added to this, the urban workers began to share the hatred of the nobility for royal depredations. The first edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie[32], which had penetrated public opinion so greatly and the growth in periodicals, with the first daily newspaper making its appearance in Paris in 1777, did not however have the same effect as Sièyes’ famous pamplet, “What is the Third Estate?” The growth of such propaganda pamphlets, naturally aided by an increase in literacy rates[33], had sharpened the opposition of the Third Estate, who continued to advance the example of the Vizille Assembly[34] for the convocation of the Estates-General. It is difficult to support Wright’s assertion that what had been a clash between the monarchy and the aristocracy now became “a broad conflict between the privileged and the unprivileged,”[35] but the decision of the Paris parlement on September 25th 1788 to reject the Vizille model was a major turning point. The political criticisms of the nobility had reached the masses and there was now a degree of antagonism between the masses (and the “liberal” 46[36]) and the privileged orders. It seemed to the members of the Third Estate a giant paradox that the members of the nobility, advocates of meritocracy, now supported the separation of orders of society, based on birth. The economic problems of the ancien régime that had originally pushed the political crisis to the forefront had fused together with the crisis of absolutism. Workers now complained of both the rising bread prices and the despotism of Louis XVI. Perhaps, if Louis XVI’s ministers had succeeded in introducing various political reforms to placate worker agitation, like during the Reform Bill Agitation[37] of 1830-32, then the revolution could have been avoided. Instead, “almost at once euphoria gave way to frustration and disappointment”[38] towards the Estates-General and the result was the popular revolution of the summer of 1789. Soldiers of the Garde Française, low in moral after the Révellion riots, joined rebellious crowds in burning as forty of the fifty-four custom posts, erected in 1785 to levy duty on the goods entering the capital on 14th July 1789. Power now passed into the hands of revolutionaries such as Baily and Lafayette.
The ideas of the Enlightenment were pivotal in augmenting the opposition to absolutism. The Enlightenment, an essential ingredient in both the views of the nobility and the Third Estate, was a critical movement, which spent much time pouring scorn on the pillars of the established orders. Though the movement did not advocate revolution, and was mainly used as a pretext for the Jacobin terror of 1794, the critical and irreverent views that it put forward fostered the revolutionary spirit that led to the fall of Louis XVI. L’Encyclopédie, despite the huge cost of ninety-three weeks wages of the average wage-earner, “penetrated the country in its various editions, sold well in provincial capitals, and must have been well known to large sections of the reading public”[39] The old-fashioned provincial capital of Besançon provided 338 subscribers. It was the philosophes, who had originally put forward the idea of meritocracy; a system based on ability and talent rather than birth, which would later receive such fervent supported from the French populace and the widespread enthusiasm for such ideas can be seen in the remonstrances of the parlements of the late eighteenth century; steeped in the ideas of Montesquieu, while political pamphlets from the 1770s onwards are full of the notions and language of Rousseauist ideas of popular sovereignty. Those who considered themselves “enlightened” believed they were a small band of crusaders against widespread ignorance and turned increasingly to the example of America, as “a simpler, healthier, more virtuous society”[40] and there is much evidence that this idea was shared by nobles and workers alike. Indeed, many of the fervent supporters of the revolution such as Lafayette and La Reiyne were former officers in the American War of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador and the very embodiment of the new nation’s simple virtues became the most sought-after man in Paris. Similarly, public support for the Sven Years War (1756-63) sprang from the belief that this was the opportunity to defeat the British colonial masters of America. The “Atlantic Spirit,” as it is so often called penetrated the ranks of the nobility and the philosophes, but also the public as well. This obsession with America was quite accessible to those of the petty professions. For example, in March 1783, the Paris journal advertised a complete set of engravings of the battles of the US war for the cost of only one livre. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the American example that they held in such esteem seemed to make revolution in France, and indeed elsewhere, a possible option and seemed to oppose the dynastical absolutism of Louis XVI.
On 27th June 1789 however, Louis XVI ordered the rump of the Estates-General to join the National Assembly, with voting to take place by head and in no separate orders and later promised to secure a regular bread supply in the near-famine conditions. It would seem at this point that the revolution should have ended, though the peasantry, hitherto completely passive observers of what was happening, were aroused by the meeting of the Estates-General and brought the revolution to the provinces during the period of the “Great Fear.” “In the spring, the electoral situation had aroused in peasant hearts a hope as vehement as the despair born out of the crisis.”[41] The conditions of the election for the Estates-General, with every male tax-payer over 25 allowed to participate, had provoked a great hope among the peasantry, as they spent their time preparing their lists of grievances for its meeting; originally planned for 1st May 1789. The peasantry too, still not self-sufficient, had to buy their bread and flour just like town dwellers and were badly hit by the increase in prices became frustrated at the lack of legislative change within the Estates-General and followed the example of the Paris crowds in rebellion. These revolts, which took place against a background of popular hysteria that paralysed most of rural France, hence “the agrarian insurrections, more even than those of the cities, were genuine mass movements”[42] Rumours of an aristocratic counter-revolution, when émigrés[43] would return at the head of hordes of brigands[44] and foreign mercenaries, were fed by the dispersal of military units from Paris to the countryside and by the despatch of troops from the towns to requisition grain. These brigands, it was said, in league with grain hoarders in a “famine pact,”[45] would burn the ripening corn to starve people into submission. Grain convoys were attacked and suspected hoarders intimidated. In Limousin, it was alleged that the Comte d’Artois was coming from Bordeaux with an army of 16,000. Panic-stricken, in both Dauphiné and Franche-Comté, peasants armed against brigands that never arrived, turned their intentions to the châteaux and began burning old deeds of serfdom. Though, it was out of both panic and hatred of seigniorial dues that the number of jacqueries[46] grew. The burden of the taille[47], the main direct taxation, fell heavily on the peasantry. Inflation increased the burden of dues payable in kind and the cahiers reveal that the peasants felt they suffered from recent revision of terriers[48] which recorded feudal obligations. For the French peasantry, who were the most prosperous in Europe, the heavy burden of feudal obligations seemed outmoded and archaic. “For even after it had ceased to be a political institution, the feudal system remained basic to the economic organization of France. In this restricted form it was far more hated than in the heyday of feudalism.”[49] During this period of the Great Fear, the peasantry did not hesitate to put an end to feudalism themselves. It was these revolts that forced the complete abolition of feudalism on the night of 4th August 1789.
It was on this famous night supposedly that the ancien régime collapsed, as some 100 deputies of the privileged orders gathered in the Versailles café by the Breton club and denounced fiscal privileges. The final decree, written by Du Port on 11th August claimed: “The National Assembly completely destroys the feudal regime.” It would appear here that the war against feudalism was won. The historian Doyle even suggests that the announcement from the Controller-General of Finance, de Brienne in July 1788 that the Estates-General would meet the following year, marked the end of absolutism. Though, it was during the summer of 1789 that power passed from the monarchy to the revolutionaries. Hitherto, “the political arm that was flexed to introduce tax reform was that of absolutism,”[50] though faced with an economic collapse, it could not cope. The administrative monarchy was an unstable compromise between the modern state and the feudal society. On the one hand, it continued to subvert the traditional social fabric by selling off various noble titles to raise much needed cash to fund its ambitious foreign policy. On the other hand, when it called on its traditionally most loyal weapon, the nobility, to sanction the economic reform, they refused and began the crusade against absolutism that the Paris crowd and the agrarian insurrectionists were to complete in the summer of 1789. The 2,500 pamphlets produced during the winter of 1788-89 and the irreverent attitude of the Enlightenment had created a political consciousness among the Third Estate and the opposition of the privileged orders to the arbitrary absolutism of Louis XVI was extended to the masses. It was at this point that the on-going economic problems, particularly unemployment and fluctuating bread prices came together with the political crisis of the ancien régime and “it was the fusion of these two crises in the spring and summer of 1789 which allowed the mass of discontents to become critical and turn into a revolution.”[51] This revolution was completed by the risings in rural France during the period of the “Great Fear.” The boycott of taxation in the spring of 1789 had shown the staunch opposition of the peasantry to feudal dues and the fear of an aristocratic counter-revolution was the trigger in the agrarian revolution during the summer of 1789.
[1] F. Furet, The French Revolution 1770-1814, p3
[2] A list of basic civil rights; intended as a preamble to a constitution, on the model of the declaration of rights which had prefaced the constitutions of new American states like Virginia or Massachusetts
[3] After disastrous farming in previous year, price of bread rose to 14 sous in 1774, resulting in general rioting around Paris in April and then in the capital in May
[4] Hundreds of workers took to the streets after the remarks about the high cost of wages by Révellion, a wallpaper manufacturer
[5] 5 per cent tax on landed revenue
[6] Direct representatives of the king’s authority in each of thirty-four administrative districts (généralites)
[7] A. De Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p173
[8] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p56
[9] An economic belief of the Enlightenment that developed during the late 1750s and advocated the abolition of what they regarded as artificial obstacles in the way of the “natural” economic order of agriculture, such as internal tariffs
[10] Commonly known as the Eden Treaty and was agreed in 1786. Both France and Britain agreed to a mutual lowering of tariffs. Britain, which was entirely self-sufficient agriculturally took little off France other than wine, whereas the better-quality British industries crippled French production
[11] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p10
[12] A. Young, Travels, p173
[13] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p152
[14] W. Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, p73
[15] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p65
[16] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p48
[17] After a series of disputes, 130 Parisian representatives were exiled and the entire legal profession went on strike. Maupeou responded with a general reorganisation of the judiciary system, replacing them with tribunals
[18] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p33
[19] D. Thomson, Europe since Napoleon, p27
[20] Groups of nobles who had rebelled against the King, resulting in Civil War in the seventeenth century
[21] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1814, p30
[22] Believed to have been brought down from heaven by the Holy Ghost
[23] In an attempt to regain the favor of Marie Antoinette, the Cardinal de Rohan was duped into buying a necklace worth nearly two million livres and when the plot was unmasked in 1785, he won the sympathy of the public
[24] Sovereign courts of law for the thirteen judicial districts; no law took into effect until it was registered by the courts
[25] A. De Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p15
[26] Written instructions given to the deputies by their constituencies. 89% of noble cahiers supported fiscal equality; more than those of the Third Estate
[27] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p115
[28] D. Wright, Revolution & Terror in France, 1789-95, p11
[29] G. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p166
[30] Soldiers that were called in to exile the magistrates of the regional parlement, who had refused to sanction the various economic reforms, were bombarded with tiles by workers from the roof-top
[31] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p195
[32] The main works of the philosophes
[33] The work of Daniel Roche in studying wills showed that in Monmartre, 74% of people could sign their name
[34] A provincial assembly that met on July 21st 1788 in the forms that the Third Estate desired: vote by head, rather than in separate orders and the Third Estate had as many members as the clergy and nobility put together
[35] D. Wright, Revolution & Terror in France, 1789-95, p19
[36] The 46 members of the Second Estate, who voted in favour of the Vizille model on 7th May 1789
[37] Riots in Bristol, Nottingham and Derby were appeased by the passing of the Third Reform Act in June 1832, despite the moderate increase in the franchise from 470,000 to 840,000
[38] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p157
[39] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p82
[40] W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, p90
[41] F. Furet, The French Revolution, 1770-1815, p69
[42] G. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p143
[43] Members of the aristocracy, who emigrated following the revolution
[44] A sort of unemployed “lumpenproletariat,” created out of the collapse of the textile industry, due to the Eden Treaty. Fear of these was fed by the hundreds of vagrants, who migrated to the countryside, in search of work
[45] The fear of such a pact dates back to the failure of Louis XV in 1763 to legislate the agricultural reforms proposed by the physiocrats in 1763. Many believed that he had entered into a pact with unscrupulous speculators to starve his own subjects. In the summer of 1789, increasing numbers of brigands were regarded as shock troops of the plotters.
[46] Peasant risings
[47] Poll tax
[48] Records of feudal obligations
[49] A. De Tocqueville, the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, p32
[50] S. Schama, Citizens, p112
[51] T. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash?, p5
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