It's Complicated.
You can't beat Marianne aux barricades, although the Delacroix painting is actually about a later revolution, in 1830. The painting was restored in 2023-2024, giving us more intense colors and finer detail.
I kind of backed into writing this story. I had come across Robert Darnton's The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982) and was fascinated by the underground literature of the ancien regime, a great deal of which was quite vulgar, and most of which was illegal. (For more, see A World Without Newspapers.)
This information immediately raised for me the question of what influence these scandal sheets had in bringing on the French Revolution.
I confess to being a dilettante when in comes to the eighteenth century. I vaguely remember my European history survey course in college - all I bring up for France is Louis XIV, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Napoleon. I'm sure there was more information in the course, but I don't remember it.
Well, actually I remember the War of Jenkins' Ear. Just the words, not the facts. What a silly name for a war. Alright, I just found some facts. The war was between Spain and Great Britain, and scholars are still arguing over why it was fought. But it was a war. And there may even have been an ear.
And, coming back to France, I suppose I was guilty of the post hoc propter hoc fallacy - if Thing A precedes Thing B, then of course Thing A caused Thing B, and in this case the Enlightenment caused the French Revolution.
In my defense, the Enlightenment was a big deal - Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and a lot of other names I don't remember.
But what if the Enlightenment didn't cause the French Revolution? Maybe the scandal sheets were what inflamed the people of Paris, and many other places in France, and caused the Parisians to rise up and storm the Bastille on July 14, 1789.
And that was about as far as I got until I read Professor Darnton's The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, which just came out last year (2024).
Here are my quick and undoubtedly biased takeaways: The creation of a pre-revolutionary situation in France involved a number of very different factors, which managed to interact in interesting ways - in the end it was one society, after all.
We have an ossified regime, with an antiquated government structure and an antediluvian financial system, struggling to pay for a series of wars that are slowly bleeding the country dry. We have a nation of people who come to see how rotten things are at the top. Some of these people can afford to buy books, and learn about promising alternatives for reform. And this knowledge trickles down to a much larger audience in simpler form; this large audience also learns to despise the people running things, and has great fun talking about the private lives of those at the top of the heap.
I find Professor Darnton's story complicated, but compelling. He and other scholars have different opinions about which of the various causes are more, or less, important. But all the causes were present and interacting with one another; some of them were necessary, but I doubt anyone would argue that any one cause was sufficient.
I find myself asking a slightly different question: Why didn't things collapse earlier, rather than when they did?
Finally, here's my elevator speech: Two ideas permeated French society and were primary drivers of the French Revolution. One: The bosses don't know what they're doing. Two: There is a better way. Bonus piece of advice for the people in charge: Try not to make everyone in your country hate you at the same time.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to Louis XIV and look at his government and how it evolved - perhaps degenerated would be a better word - over the reigns of his two successors, Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Louis XIV
It appears that Louis XIV did not say, "L'etat, c'est moi." (The state, it is me.") But when he died in 1715, he did bequeath an absolute monarchy to his heirs. The king's word was law. Everybody else worked for him, including the courts.
Mr. XIV had succeeded in bringing the often fractious nobility to heel; his marquee tool was a large playground, the palace complex that he built at Versailles, just a little bit outside Paris. Think of it as Mar-a-Lago on steroids. He encouraged the nobles to spend time at his court rather than at their country estates, where it was harder to keep an eye on them.
And he made a strong ally out of the Catholic church by, among other things, revoking the Edict of Nantes. A prior king, Henry IV, had grown tired of the incessant religious wars that had been tearing Europe to pieces for many years, and so he issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, declaring that Protestants would be tolerated and hoping to stop the slaughter, at least in France. In 1685, the better part of a century later, XIV said the equivalent of Nevermind.
Mr. XIV saw that a unified religious structure could support his own unified power, and so he turned France into, at least theoretically, an entirely Catholic country. This made France similar to Spain, where the Inquisition had regularly burned Protestant heretics at the stake, and very different from England, which became Protestant so Henry VIII could collect more wives, persecute Catholics, and carry out the very lucrative Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536 and 1540.
Back in everyday France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes meant that the government would persecute people who did not toe the Catholic line. Professor Darnton provides a vivid picture of what this oppression could look like on an individual level. This example is actually from the reign of Louis XV: "Francois-Jean, Chevalier de la Barre, was convicted of blasphemy and sacrilege in 1765. He had failed to take off his hat when a religious procession with the Eucharist passed by in a street in Abbeville, and according to a rumor, he and other feckless young men had desecrated a cross. ... He was condemned to have his tongue cut out, to be beheaded, and to have his body burned on a bonfire... ." In the end, the excision of the tongue was removed from the menu of butchery, but the rest of the sentence was carried out. (Darnton, Revolutionary Temper, p. 109.)
Louis XIV did not have to worry about being harassed by firebrand politicians in the national legislature. There was no national legislature. One did exist in theory. It was called the Estates General, and consisted of three bodies - the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate), and the commoners (Third Estate). The Estates General had not met since 1614. It was recalled in 1789 and played a pivotal role in the development of the Revolution, but for 175 years the only national legislative body in France was the king's body.
By the end of XIV's reign, only the nation's parlements stood as a barrier to the monarch's arbitrary rule. I think the typical American may have heard of the British Parliament, and may even be aware of some of the ways it differs from the American Congress. And when the French word parlement comes up, there may be a tendency to assume that it is something like the Parliament that sits in London.
Such an assumption would be incorrect, although I certainly shared it before I started reading about the parlements in graduate school, about fifty years ago. I was studying medieval history, and I had become interested in the development of the French legal system, and particularly the emerging idea that you could appeal the decision of a local court to a higher authority. Frankly, I had forgotten most of what I had learned back then. So I've had to cobble things together. Please forgive me if I get some details wrong.
The French parlements were courts of law. Originally there was only one - the king's parlement, which traveled with the king. It acted as a court of appeals and dispensed the king's justice to those who were unhappy with the decisions of local courts. Eventually this parlement settled down in Paris and was called the Parlement de Paris. Over time, other parlements were formed in other parts of the country; the parlement for Brittany was located in the town of Rennes and called the Parlement de Rennes.
As a logical extension of their legal work, the parlements were given the responsibility of making a record of the king's new laws, or edicts, as they came down from the crown. In time, the various parlements decided to share their reactions to some of these laws. They would write a note to the king, called a remonstrance, providing a critique of the legislation, and they would not register the new law on their books until they heard back from the king. This dance could go on for several rounds, but under the Bourbons in the eighteenth century, the king could always insist on registration.
We can see here a law court attempting to perform some of the functions of a legislature, and as the century progressed, the parlements became increasingly popular, not just with the nobility who were trying to preserve their privileges, but also with the common people, who saw that there was at least one part of the government that would try to stand up to the crown when it went too far.
The faith of the people in the parlements was well founded. In 1787 the Parlement de Paris demanded that the king call the Estates General, and thereby set in motion the events that led to the French Revolution (Darnton, p. 321).
Louis XV
By the time Louis XIV died, he had lived so long that most of the people in his immediate line of succession were unable to mount the throne because they were dead. The king's court scrambled around and came up with a great-grandson, who had the defect of being only five years old. Louis XV had a kind of baby-sitter, known formally as a regent, for a number of years, and then ruled in his own right. (The regent, by the way, was a habitual drunkard.)
It was a rocky road. The worst bump was undoubtedly the loss of the Seven Years War (1756-1763), known in Britain's American colonies as the French and Indian War. This is sometimes called the first world war; certainly it covered a lot of real estate. Among the highlights - Britain throws the French out of India, and also Canada, and secures its place in the sun as a global empire, placing France, the country of Louis XIV, the Sun King, in some serious shade.
One downside that may not receive enough attention is the fact that the Seven Years War came about in the wake of something called the Diplomatic Revolution. France had been allied with Prussia and against Austria; in 1756 France shifted to Austria. Or at least the French government did. The people, having been trained for a very long time to see Austria as an inveterate enemy, did not alter their affections so lightly. One of the victims of this situation was a 14-year-old girl named Maria Antonia. She was the youngest daughter of the empress Maria Theresa, and, as was a usual practice in the Europe of kings, she was shipped off to France to marry the French king's son, as a way of solidifying the new alliance. She changed her name to Marie Antoinette, but the French people remained suspicious, and when the occasion arose, they found it very easy to dislike her.
Let us come back to Louis XV. People do try to find nice things to say about him - it seems he was fond of flowers, and got the Versailles gardeners to raise their game. But it's clear that, for most of his reign, he simply wasn't terribly interested in government - although he was ferocious in defense of his absolute power.
In 1766, XV displayed that ferocity to the Parlement de Paris. The Parlement de Rennes, in Brittany, had been particularly aggressive in defending what Bretons perceived to be their rights, which of course Louis did not perceive at all. Some of the magistrates went to jail; others resigned in protest. The Parlement de Paris was strong in support of its Breton confreres, and XV called the Parisian parlementarians together in a meeting that has been called the "session of flagellation." "What has happened in my Parlement of Rennes" - to quote the king's speech - "does not concern my other parlements. I treated that court as it was important for my authority, and I do not owe an accounting to anyone. In my person alone resides the sovereign power; from me alone my courts derive their existence and their authority; the legislative power belongs to me alone, without any dependence and any division." (Darnton, p. 131.)
Okay. Everybody take a deep breath.
XV seems to have been primarily interested in sex, although he also liked hunting. His two official mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, were only the tip of the iceberg. When XV contracted a serious case of smallpox in 1774, the government issued detailed reports on the progress of the disease, but did not address the question on everyone's mind: "How had Louis contracted the disease? Parisians wondered. By May 9, the answer circulated as a devastating on dit. [Literally 'one says,' or more colloquially, 'rumor has it.'] The king's procurers, aided by Mme du Barry, had come upon a lovely, sixteen-year-old peasant girl. They had the dirt scrubbed off her, dressed her enticingly, and served her to the king. Unknown to anyone, she had caught smallpox. She broke out with it on the day after her encounter with Louis and died three days later." (Darnton, p. 159.)
Louis XV died on May 10, 1774, and on May 12 was transported in a double lead coffin to the Basilica of St. Denis, the traditional resting place of French royalty.
Louis XVI
In any country ruled by a monarchy that practices hereditary succession, the royal family may be seen as, among other things, a stud farm. And so when Louis the Dauphin, or Heir Apparent, and Marie Antoinette got married in 1770, they were expected to produce children expeditiously, even though they were both only teenagers.
Louis the Dauphin became Louis XVI in 1774, and the couple had their first child in 1778, eight years after their wedding. They went on to have a total of four children, but the damage was done. Rumor abhors a vacuum, and the stories multiplied like rabbits.
One little ditty composed about this time went as follows: "It is well known that the poor Sire [Louis XVI] / Three or four times condemned / By the salubrious faculty [of medicine] / For complete impotence, / Cannot satisfy Antoinette. / Quite convinced of this misfortune, / Considering that his match stick is no bigger than a straw, / Always limp and always curved, / He has no prick, except in his pocket; / Instead of fucking, he is fucked."
This poem was in a booklet that was printed well before the revolution but did not enter circulation until 1789. The authorities had managed to purchase the entire press run in London, but instead of destroying the booklets they stored them in the Bastille, where they were found and liberated after the Bastille fell. I suppose the people involved simply couldn't imagine the Bastille being overrun and occupied by a revolutionary nation in arms. (Darnton, p. 259.)
On to the next topic.
Like his predecessor, Louis XV, Louis XVI did find it in himself to mount a ferocious defense of his absolute power. The peak moment came, again, in a controversy with the Parlement de Paris. In 1787, when the king sent along an edict authorizing loans to help pay for the government, the Parlement seemed unwilling to register it. The king then showed up for a complicated face-to-face with Parlement, and after much discussion ordered the edict to be registered. There was then a procedural objection - because of the way the meeting was conducted, it was argued that registration without a formal vote of Parlement might be illegal. The king's response was reported in a number of versions. Here's one that's particularly succinct: "It is legal because I want it." (Darnton, p. 327. In 1977, former president Richard Nixon said something similar to journalist David Frost: "Well, when the president does it ... that means that it is not illegal.")
Beyond that, XVI seems to have been a pretty feckless king. His primary interest was apparently wine, but he also liked hunting. In his later years, in fact, hunting seems to have moved from being an escape to being an obsession.
One observer found him, as Darnton puts it, "well-meaning but stupid, bewildered, incompetent, timid, indecisive, constantly drunk, and unfit even to govern a German principality." Ouch. Darnton's observer also said that the "public spirit" had turned against the king, adding that "he inspires no respect, no fear, no confidence." (Darnton, p. 258.)
The Budget
Louis XVI did actually do some good things. For instance, in 1776 he hired a fellow named Necker to be his director of the royal treasury; and the next year he promoted him to director general of finances (Darnton, p. 176).
Jacques Necker was the right guy for the job. He was an industrious Swiss banker who promptly jumped into the weeds - or perhaps the muck and mire - seeking to understand in detail what was going on. This was not a job for the faint of heart. It turned out that France had not one treasury but many. And they were often controlled by semi-autonomous officials who owned their offices. Necker slogged through, attempting to reform the system and eliminate abuses. Of course the status quo and the abuses had their constituencies, but he did make progress. (Pp. 176, 177, 183.)
And then, in 1781, Necker produced his signature achievement: He published a unified budget (p. 181).
This was a very big deal for two main reasons. First, as Darnton notes, the accounts of the separate treasuries "had never been integrated in a single budget." Second, and more importantly, this budget was shared with the general public. This had not happened before. As Darnton puts it, everybody knew, and had known for a long time, that "affairs of state were secret. They were the king's business, restricted to the king himself and his advisors." (Pp. 181, 183.)
No longer. Necker laid it out for the world, in black and white. It turned out that revenues exceeded expenditures by a comfortable margin, and he stated that the operating surplus was sufficient to pay outstanding debts, without additional taxes. He also suggested that this exercise in public education should be repeated every five years. (Pp. 182, 183, 185.)
There was immediate criticism that Necker had underestimated the burden of the debt (p. 185). And perhaps he did. When France entered the American Revolution on the side of the Americans, Necker decided to support the war entirely by floating loans, and not by raising taxes (p. 183). (Lyndon Johnson did something similar with the Vietnam war and gave the nation a tenacious case of inflation.) Unfortunately, the Americans were unable to repay the loans in a timely manner during the 1780s. I suspect that this slow pay blew a big hole in Necker's budget projections. (The U.S. resumed regular payments on the debt in 1790, but by then France was in the middle of its own revolution.)
Necker's report was a huge popular success, and it changed the relationship between the crown and its subjects, who now were getting information that might allow them to have informed opinions on things that had always been handled at higher pay-grades. (Pp. 181, 185, 188.)
Naturally the defenders of the status quo went to work, and a few months after publication of his budget in 1781, Necker was fired, and the leeches he had scraped off the budget started to come back. (Pp. 186, 187.)
I can't leave the subject of finance without a word about the Paris stock exchange, which puts me in mind of a Wild West saloon on a Saturday night. This chaotic, minimally organized, poorly supervised market for securities was delivering higher returns than those available from government bonds, thereby making the bond salesmen's life difficult. (Pp. 270, 274.)
The returns in the stock exchange could, in fact, be eye-popping, as were the crashes. The trade in options was a particularly weak point. By 1785, things had gotten so bad that the government issued an official document concerning options, warning the gullible that options traders "set traps for the public trust in selling what one does not have, what one cannot deliver, what may not even exist." (Pp. 274, 278)
People should have known better. Back in 1720, a huge and complicated stock bubble, largely engineered by a Scottish financier and professional gambler named John Law, collapsed and badly burned many wealthy Parisian families. This memory was still alive; but it seems the money to be made in the 1780s was simply too enticing. (Pp. 269-270.)
The lure of the stock market was one more thing making the lives of those who were peddling government bonds just a bit more difficult.
The government's difficulty in selling new bonds continued to increase, and in 1786 a finance minister named Calonne had to inform the king that his government faced bankruptcy (p. 187).
Things hit bottom in 1788, when the government announced something that deeply disturbed the wealthy bourgeois of Paris who had long helped to float the royal debt by putting their savings into annuities, or rentes, issued by the government. These rentiers received a fixed income from their investments, paid in cash. On August 16 the government announced that two-fifths of most rentes would be paid, not in cash, but in paper notes that, as a practical matter, could only be turned into cash at a heavily discounted rate. Darnton notes: "The state had declared partial bankruptcy." (P. 369.)
In the terms of modern America, the government had announced that it was defaulting on the national debt.
Even the king realized this was a bridge too far; he recalled Necker. Necker found some money (he knew where to look), and the August 16 edict was rescinded (p. 376). But the damage was done. If you are currently collecting Social Security, imagine how you would feel if the government told you it was cutting your monthly payment in half. And then a few days later said Nevermind. If you're still working, imagine how you would feel if your management sent around a memo saying everybody below top management was getting a 50 percent salary cut.
Public Discourse
I've long been a fan of Voltaire, and how he used humor to deftly disarm the people he was criticizing - a useful skill if you live in a world of absolute monarchs. I had been inclined to view this as the dominant mode of approach throughout the Enlightenment. But I have learned that Voltaire and the other philosophes were only a part of the public discourse during these years, that there was a significant body of popular literature that traded largely in personal scandal but had the effect of undermining the moral authority of the king and his court. And I have learned that humor was only one of several modes of approach in the public discourse of the time, and that as the Revolution approached, the overall mood darkened. During the 1780s, as Darnton puts it, "Laughter was giving way to anger, wit to moral indignation." (P. 235 and passim.) The J'accuse style had arrived in French discourse, a sure sign of the growing weakness of the monarchy.
The Wow Finish
I suggested earlier that it's a good idea for kings and their hangers-on not to make everyone in your country hate you at the same time. I was not in a position to give that advice to Louis XVI. Perhaps someone else did, but in the end XVI did seem to have just about everybody against him. Certainly the weather was against him.
The wow finish started on July 13, 1788, when hailstones the size of eggs fell out of the sky in the Paris region, destroying crops and injuring cattle and humans who had the misfortune to be outdoors (p. 364).
I was in a hailstorm once. We were at the Washington County Fair in upstate New York. It was a beautiful summer day, and there were many people. This was probably in the early 1950s, and I was perhaps five years old. Apparently word passed through the crowd that there was a hailstorm coming, and people sought shelter under the many open-sided tents, which became quite crowded. I don't remember any chaos, but then there was never any chaos when my grandmother was around. There was a folding card table next to one of the open-sided tents. She told me and my brother to get under the card table, which we did, and then she pushed herself into the edge of the crowd under the tent, standing where she could watch us. The sky darkened, and soon the hail was coming down. Squatting under the card table was like sitting inside a snare drum. I don't recall being scared, just fascinated. The storm didn't last long, and soon my grandmother was telling us we could emerge from our shelter. There was a carpet of hailstones everywhere. They were about the size of marbles. The sun shone, and in a few minutes, there were no hailstones; everything was wet for a while, but the sun shone on, and pretty soon just about everything was dry.
The hail in France was far more severe than what I experienced, and the effects were more long-lasting. The crop damage had an immediate effect on the price of bread in Paris (pp. 364-366).
The price of bread was an extremely volatile flashpoint for the working people of Paris and their families. As Darnton puts it, "the poor often lacked adequate food, and they were haunted by the fear of dearth. Bread was the main ingredient of their diet. When he could find work, an unskilled laborer often made only 20 sous a day, supplemented by odd jobs picked up by his wife and children. A family of four normally consumed two four-pound loaves a day. During severe crises the price of one loaf reached 15 sous or more - and the family went hungry." (P. 171.)
In 1775 a sharp increase in the price of bread had led to what is known as the Flour War (Guerre des farines) - rioting which began in the provinces but rapidly came to Paris (chapter 18).
Louis XVI was a new king in 1775, having ascended the throne in 1774. Around this time, a trusted servant offered the king some advice about his subjects: "Sire, no matter what you do," he reportedly said, "you will never be loved by them as long as bread is expensive." (P. 168.)
In 1788 the price of bread shot up immediately after the hailstorm, stayed high during the winter - the most brutally cold winter anyone could remember - and stayed high in the warm weather as people waited for relief from the summer harvest (p. 366, 378, 380, 403).
Meanwhile, France's influence in Europe was waning. In August 1788, the Dutch Republic, which had been a French ally, formed an alliance with Britain and Prussia that was aimed primarily at Russia and Austria but also betokened the end of the sphere of influence that France had enjoyed in the Low Countries (p. 368).
It's easy to overlook this obscure bit of diplomatic history. In the end, the Triple Alliance, as it was called, did not go to war with Russia and Austria, and the development of the French Revolution effectively scrambled previous balances of power as the crowned heads of Europe did their best to keep Louis XVI on the throne of France.
But this little contretemps was a telling moment for France. The crown had committed large numbers of troops to the suppression of civil disorder, and of course it was effectively broke. So it was unable to respond to the challenge of the Triple Alliance; I don't think it's too much to suggest that, at this moment, France lost its standing as a great power. (See p. 368.)
Back at home, on May 5, 1789, after a series of delays, the Estates General was finally called into session, and the monarchy started to lose its control of the government. And then, on July 14, 1789, the people rose up and stormed the Bastille, inaugurating the French Revolution. (Pp. 401-402, 435-437.)
I'm going to stop here. I could go on. You don't want me to. It's not just the revolution, it's the whole history of France, with several restorations of monarchy between 1814 and 1848, two emperors (Napoleon Bonaparte and then Napoleon III of the Second Empire), Marshal Petain's fascist Vichy government during World War II, and five republics, as France oscillates between dictatorship and democracy. Then we could talk about how the ideas and tribulations of the revolution permeated the entire globe. But I promised I'd stop.
What Does All This Mean for Us?
An absolute monarchy owns your body and expects to own your mind. We saw various regimes in the twentieth century that worked on this same principle, but, although they may have had better tools, the basic outline of repression traces directly back to Louis XIV, and behind that to the Inquisition developed by the Dominican Order while fighting the Albigensian Crusade in the Middle Ages.
Donald Trump wants to be a king with absolute powers. He and Elon Musk are currently having a lovely time breaking things, which is what bulls do in china shops. They are going to do a great deal of damage. But in terms of actually governing, I think they're clueless.
They don't seem to understand that the nation is not a herd of cattle.
I think that things will not end well for them. But there will be a great deal of damage. They're such bastards, really.
Finally, let me end with a small thing. I got interested in the run-up to the French Revolution because I thought it had things to tell us about how to fight the information wars. This is probably not the most important thing to learn from this episode in French history, but I do think it's useful.
I had originally been attracted by Voltaire's use of humor. What I learned was that, as the Revolution came closer, humor fell out of favor. Denunciation - the famous J'accuse - became the dominant strain.
And of course there were all the coarse stories - both true and false - that did so much to undermine the ancien regime's moral authority. I've had a look at this, and I'm not going to do it. It's just not in me. But if others, with stronger stomachs, want to do it, I won't criticize them. Although I think an AI deepfake of Melania in an intimate embrace with a crocodile would be a bridge too far for me.
And, I will continue to look for humor through this increasingly dark glass that I have in front of me. I don't really have a choice. It's just me. Also, I think we all need some humor if we intend to survive what we are going through.
So that's what I've learned. These lessons work for me, and I hope they're useful for you.
Above is a Louis d'or gold coin from 1788, picturing Louis XVI. Courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History.
As I was trying to recall what I used to know about the early development of the French parlement, or parlements, I found myself consulting the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (13 volumes, 1982-1989). In volume 9 (1987, pp. 417-421) there is a very good article entitled "Parlement of Paris." Here is the last paragraph of that article:
"Even though the Parlement of Paris never succeeded in achieving a truly national jurisdiction, it did play a central role in the life of the French nation. It had a special relationship with the king of France that none of the provincial Parlements ever had, and it was a national institution in a way that they could never be. Its very uniqueness makes it a difficult institution for the modern mind to grasp. The eminent French historian Ferdinand Lot has called the Parlement of Paris the most original institution of medieval France; certainly he was correct when he said there was nothing like it anywhere else." (P. 420.)
See also Submerged Narratives, Where Have All the Grownups Gone? What Happened in Ferrara? Unsustainable Income Inequality, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump? The Cost of Delay, The Real Parallels Are With Weimar, Hans Fallada and the White-Collar Proletariat, Deja Vu All Over Again, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office, Unleashing the Oligarchs.
