French Revolution

The French Revolution can be considered, for the political world, what the Industrial Revolution was for the economy. In other words, one could no longer understand politics from then on without the references of the French Revolution.

With the French Revolution, the social, political and economic barriers to capitalism were decisively weakened.

In addition, there was a significant demographic growth in France, which required a corresponding economic development. Instead, low agricultural production resulting from feudal impediments to productivity, exacerbated by droughts and floods, caused the price of wheat to rise sharply, and even bread became an almost prohibitive item for the low-income population, spreading misery and famine in French territory.

The economic rise of the bourgeoisie came up against the regulations, prohibitions and taxation dictated by the absolute state. Thus, it was imperative to eliminate mercantilist practices so that there could be the economic progress touted by liberal theorists.

The Enlightenment, “philosophers of reason”, when criticizing absolutism, made clear the inadequacy of the social and political order to the economic order, which ended up transforming the Enlightenment into the ideological banner of the French Revolution.

The National Assembly

The first stage of the French Revolution, known as the National Assembly phase (1789-1792), was characterized by the actions of the bourgeoisie in the cities and the peasants in the countryside. The bourgeoisie fought for social and political conquests in the streets and in the Assembly; peasants removed authorities and nobles from their castles and offices.

The Assembly of Estates-General abolished feudal privileges. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was approved, which established the equality of all before the law, the right to private property and the right to resist oppression.

At the same time, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, approved in July 1790, determined that priests would be subordinated to the State, in the role of civil servants.

In 1791, the National Assembly proclaimed France's first Constitution, establishing the constitutional monarchy. The king would exercise Executive power, limited by the Legislative power, whose deputies would be elected every two years.

One of the groups, the Girondins, represented the upper bourgeoisie; they were so called in reference to the Gironde region in southern and southeastern France, where most of their components came from. There were also the Jacobins, whose name was linked to the convent of the Jacobin (Dominican) friars, the meeting place of the Parisian revolutionaries.

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The National Convention (1792-1795)

The National Constituent Assembly, transformed into a new institution, the National Convention, took over the government on September 20, 1792.

In the meetings, the Girondin deputies wanted to consolidate the bourgeois conquests, to stanch the revolution and to avoid radicalization. The deputies of the Plain or Swamp were bourgeois without a previously defined political position. The representatives of the Jacobin petty bourgeoisie, who led the sans-culottes, defended a deepening of the revolution, formed the Montaña party.

In June 1793, the Jacobins, commanding the sans-culottes, took over the Convention, arresting the Girondin leaders, beginning the period of the Mountain Convention (1793-1794).

The Jacobins ruled the country through the Committee of Public Safety, responsible for the administration and external defense of the country, initially commanded by Danton, its creator. Below came the Committee of National Salvation, which took care of internal security, and then the Revolutionary Tribunal, which tried the opponents of the Revolution.

Thus began the period of the Terror, which lasted between September 1793 and July 1794. During this period, thousands of people accused of being counter-revolutionaries were executed: from Marie Antoinette, the former queen, to the Jacobins themselves, in addition to of Girondins.

Administratively, the mountain government adopted measures that favored the population, such as the Maximum Price Law, which fixed the prices of foodstuffs; the public sale, at low prices, of goods that belonged to the Church and to emigrated nobles; the abolition of slavery in the colonies; the creation of public and free education. The government also endeavored to end the supremacy of the Catholic religion and its clergy, developing a revolutionary cult founded on reason and freedom.

The bourgeoisie reorganized and, in July 1794, regained power in the Convention, overthrowing the leaders of the Mountain in a session that became known historically as the Thermidor Coup, in reference to the month of the new republican calendar.

The Thermidorian Convention was short (1794-1795), but it allowed the reactivation of the bourgeois political project, with the annulment of several mountain decisions, such as the Maximum Price Law and the end of the supremacy of the Committee of Public Safety.

In 1795, the Convention drafted a new Constitution – the Constitution of the Year III – which re-established the census criterion for legislative elections, thus marginalizing a large part of the population. Executive power would be exercised by a Directory, formed by five members elected by the deputies.

The Consulate directory and facility (1795-1799)

The Directory was characterized by the Girondin supremacy, which was opposed by the Jacobins, on the left, and by the defenders of the monarchy, the realists, who wanted the return of the Bourbons, on the right. It faced domestic popular uprisings and continued foreign threats. In 1795 and 1797 there were royalist coups; In 1796, the Conspiracy of the Equals took place, a movement of the sans-culottes led by François Nöel Babeuf, also known by his pseudonym Gracchus, who condemned private property and fought for a “dictatorship of the humble”. inequalities and the establishment of well-being for all Sylvain Marèchal, journalist and friend of Babeuf, wrote the Manifesto of Equals for the conspirators, harbinger of a new revolution.

Externally, the French army was accumulating victories against the absolutist forces of Europe who, in 1799, formed the Second Coalition against revolutionary France.

The Directory was replaced by a new form of government, the Consulate, formed by three representatives, one of whom was Napoleon. Power, in fact, was concentrated in the hands of Napoleon, who helped to consolidate the bourgeois achievements of the revolution.

The aristocracy of the Ancien Régime lost its privileges, which freed the peasants from the old ties that bound them to the nobles and the clergy. In the cities, the feudal ties of corporatism, which limited the activities of the bourgeoisie, also disappeared, and a market of national dimension was created.

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References

VICENTINO, Cláudio; DORIGO, Gianpaolo. General and Brazilian History: Volume 1. 2nd Edition. São Paulo: Editora Scpione, 2013.