1. Introduction
I am not a historian, I’m a geographer. As far as I can tell, both history and
geography are about making sense of the events that surround us. In the case of
the French Revolution, a lot of people are trying to make sense of it in a variety
of way and they started doing that very early.
Even the original Bastille day was “made sense of” within a few weeks of the
event. They were only seven prisoners incarcerated there at the time of the
seizing, none of them were political prisoners, yet because it was a success, it
was recast as a battle against arbitrary incarceration.
Nobody can ever be entirely objective, but I’ll be trying to give you a few
elements so you can start to make sense of the French Revolution for
yourselves…
2. The long-term reasons behind the French Revolution
For Alexis de Tocqueville, a revolution is a violent and quick way to adapt the
political reality to the social and ideological climate present in society.
He’s saying that at the end of the eighteenth century the social reality and
ideological reality of France were out of touch with the system and it had to
change
There were major tensions and conflicts existed in Old Regime France.
 We have the rise of the bourgeoisie in towns, who didn’t have much of a
formal status and were left out of the political game. The nobility is also not
pleased with absolute monarchy and wanted more influence.
 We have a change in political conscience which is linked to the works of
philosophers like Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot who were being widely
read.
 The enlightenment ideas were themselves a reaction to the French
monarchy’s absolutism.
3. Short term reasons behind the French Revolution
 The French state was almost bankrupt, in part because of its involvement in
the American war of Independence and the lavish lifestyle at the royal court
which ate up 6% of the budget.
 There was a decisions to remedy the financial crisis through more taxation
which would lean heavily on those who were neither nobility nor clergy. The
people resented this additional taxation, especially since they were also
being taxed by the nobility and the clergy and that the system of privileges
meant that all of it was unfair.
 In an attempt to deal with the tensions the king called the Estate Generals
and launched a general consultation, the cahiers de doléances . This had the
unplanned effect of getting people to think about politics even more than
they already did and to get even more worked up.
 There had been bad harvests in the preceding years, which meant that the
price of bread was sky high and the people were doing without.
 The French Revolution was a collapse of a system of values, a financial
collapse, and a multi-faceted crisis that got out of control.
4. A short overview of events
1788: Decision to tax the nobility and the clergy more. Massive opposition.
Monarchy appears weak.
August 1988: The king (Louis XVI) calls in the Estate Generals, which hadn’t
been used for 2 centuries.
December 1788: Ideas about what is fair voting had changed. There is serious
disagreement about the weight of voting in the Estate Generals. The monarchy
agreed to double the number of Third Estate votes but there no agreement on
weight. This was seen as unacceptable and the Third Estate broke off to set up
its own assembly.
10 June: Third Estate meets on its own and calls itself the National Assembly.
20 June: Assembly promises not to split until they have a written constitution.
11 July: King tries to rejig the government. It is seen as a measure against the
assembly. There are rumours that soldiers are coming to forcibly close it.
14 July : People steal some weapons, and then go to the Bastille to get some
gunpowder.
4 August : The National Assembly keeps working, abolishes feudalism and
reorganises France into communes and départements.
The Assembly is very conflicted for the next five years, with several factions,
royalists, Girondins and Jacobins. For a while the Jacobins take over and are
responsible for a crazy witch hunt, the “Terror”, against all whom they see as
counter-revolutionaries. Many thousands lose their lives to the guillotine.
27 July 1794: Assembly turns against the craziest jacobins and sends
the guillotine.
them to
5. Positive legacy of the French Revolution
The French Revolution was one of most significant events in European history.
It moved social and political ideas forward.
It overthrew a feudal regime which was in decline.
It promoted opportunities according to merit over birthright.
It got rid of absolute monarchy.
It introduced the idea of the sovereignty of the people. It was one of the first
instances of modern democracy.
 It introduced the concept of Human Rights.
 It valued secularism: non-involvement and strict separation of Church and State.
 It began to reorganise the territory rationally.
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6. A more nuanced legacy of the French Revolution
Edmund Burke is of the view that society is an organism that grows slowly
(parts of that organism will live, parts of it will fade and that is the natural way
of things). A revolution of this violence is an extreme remedy that is not
necessary. In his opinion, by hating the vice too much you love the people too
little.
The French Revolution was based on the idea that we can, and sometimes
should, destroy everything and then re-build society on the basis of our great
ideas we’ve thought up in our heads. We do not have to build with what already
there. That can be seen as a fairly dangerous idea. In this sense, The French
Revolution was one of the first totalitarianism inasmuch as it admitted the
intellectual superiority of an “ avant guarde ” whose grand schemes were to be
implemented even at the cost of violence to the population.
The Jacobin
respected no humanity except the one which they proposed to create.
The French Revolutions saw cultural groups as suspicious. They were seen to
pose a danger to equality. The Revolution then proceeded to destroy entire
cultures in their richness and their traditions in order to ensure that France had a
people made of “equal” citizens. We are not talking only of geographic cultures,
but also other forms of idiosyncratic cultures that were present in various parts
of France.
The Revolution sought to control religious expression and created its own cult.
Non-juror priests were exiled or imprisoned. Religious orders were suppressed
and Church property confiscated. The stark anti-clerical policies, the execution
of King Louis XVI and mass conscription were the last straws that let to a
sizeable counter-revolution in the west of the country.
7. The thing that really interests me as a person…
As a person I’m a collector of strange ideas. I believe that it is nice that we
gained all these new concepts and ideas, positive and negative, form the French
Revolution but I’m also concerned about what we might have lost. So my main
question tends to be: What did we lose?
The Enlightenment defined its own idea of freedom. It saw popular freedom as
a set of free, autonomous individuals who are free to pursue their own best
interests according to their own abilities and merits. It conceived of us primarily
as individuals.
In this respect I’d like to talk briefly about one of my favourite articles ever –
which is freely available on the net– by Stanley Hauervas- “Discipleship as a
craft, church as a disciplined community”.
In this article Hauervas has a go at “Dead Poets Society”. You’ve all seen it.
And the main message of this film is that you have to think for yourself! But to
be told to “think for yourself” is not freeing if you have nothing interesting to
think. If you want real freedom the first step, especially for a young person, is to
realise you do not have a mind worth making up.
Hauervas would argue that groups are places in which subjectivities are formed.
We need particular groups to become who we are.
It is the specificity of a
group’ language, culture and practices that makes individuality possible.
So while we titled this talk: “What the French revolution gave the world”. I’d
like us to think about how much the concepts of the French revolution have
seeped into us. And in making its home in us, what did the French Revolution
take from us?
By subscribing too eagerly to concepts we inherited from the Enlightenment, we
have lost our ability to even imagine alternatives to our individualism and our
“French Style freedom”.
But I keep thinking that, in a parish setting, maybe we should go for “Christianstyle freedom”. The freedom to have a specific community in which to learn
how to be a different type of people. In which to learn to be ourselves.
Maybe we don’t want the same Liberté, Egualité, Fraternité as the Jacobins.
Maybe we’ve got our own: Christians have found, in Christ Jesus, their own
definition of freedom, their own understanding of equality, their own ways with
fraternity. And Christians do not necessarily wish to let latter-day Jacobins take
over their brains.