What Changes Came To Europe During The Enlightenment? How Did Socioeconomic Situations Lead To Them?

Map: Quondam Regime Provinces

Map: Departments of 1798

Two Peasants Repairing a Cart

People under the Old Regime

A leading cause of social stress in France during the Revolution was its big population. At the offset of the eighteenth century, French republic had 20 meg people living within its borders, a number equal to nearly twenty per centum of the population of non-Russian Europe. Over the course of the century, that number increased by another 8 to x million, equally epidemic illness and acute food shortages diminished and mortality declined. By contrast, it had increased by but ane meg between 1600 and 1700. Also important, this population was concentrated in the rural countryside: of the nigh 30 million French under Louis 16, about 80 percent lived in villages of 2,000 or less, with most all the rest in fairly small-scale cities (those with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants).

The foremost exception, of course, was Paris, which was dwelling house to about 600,000 by 1789. Only a handful of other cities—notably Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles—had more than 100,000 within their limits. These demographics had an enormous impact, both within and exterior French republic.

In addition, the eighteenth century saw the intrusion of capitalism into everyday life. Thanks to a big expansion of overseas trade and a longer-term development of domestic trade, the money economy experienced continued growth. Although self-sufficiency or local substitution remained the preponderant way of economic life, these incursions of capitalism began drawing everyone into some course of regional and even international exchange.

Amongst these wide economic and population shifts, daily life in the countryside remained much the same, particularly on modest family farms. Their owners and workers were known every bit peasants, although they differed considerably in wealth and status. A few could merits to be "living nobly," meaning they rented their land to others to work, but many were day-laborers desperate for work in exchange for a identify to stay and food to consume. In the middle were others, including independent farmers, sharecroppers, and renters. Historians have estimated that in lean years 90 pct of the peasants lived at or below the subsistence level, earning only plenty to feed their families. Others inhabited the countryside, well-nigh notably small numbers of noble and not-noble owners of manors, conspicuous by their dwellings, at the least. Consequently, documents on life in the countryside at this time reflect the omnipresence of poverty. I of the most well-known observers of the late-eighteenth-century French countryside, the Englishman Arthur Young, considered these small farms the great weakness of French agriculture, especially when compared with the large, commercial farms he knew at home. Others commenting on the lot of impoverished peasants before 1789 blamed the tensions between rich and poor on the state's vast social differences.

Although home to the wealthy and middling, cities tended to be fifty-fifty more than unsavory places to alive than the countryside. Exposed daily to dingy air and water, urban dwellers could expect to accept a shorter life span than their state brethren. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a writer who adored life in Paris and wrote extensively well-nigh all aspects of it, often lamented not only the poor health of city workers but also the strict conditions governing their employment. Guilds regulated almost every sector of the economic system and thus limited the number who could enter a trade as an amateur, become a journeyman, or set up a workshop and retail store every bit a primary. With experience, a worker could theoretically move up the social bureaucracy, simply in practice such ascent was extremely difficult to achieve, every bit the limited number of masterships in any given industry tended to be passed down within a family. Thus in some trades and in some cities journeymen complained of feeling restricted and expressed greater solidarity toward their counterparts in other trades than toward their own masters.

Bread constituted the staple of most urban diets, then sharp price increases were felt quickly and were loudly protested at grain markets or at local bakers' shops. About people directed their anger at breadstuff suppliers rather than political regime, although information technology was often the municipal and purple authorities who tried to alleviate shortages and prevent such protests. Equally a result, the credibility and popularity of regime officials came to be linked to the functioning of the grain and bread markets.

In add-on to economic differences, early modern French order was legally stratified by birth. Its 3 traditional divisions, or "orders," were the clergy, the nobility, and the common people. Nobles ruled over commoners, but even among commoners, specific individuals (such as officeholders) or groups (such as a particular guild or an unabridged town) enjoyed privileges unavailable to outsiders. Considering these privileges were passed on primarily through inheritance, they tended to constrain social mobility—although without preventing it, since they could besides be bought or sold. Thus individuals and groups constantly negotiated with one another and with the crown for more and better privileges. Even as these privileges maintained a shut grip on eighteenth-century imaginations, writers of the Enlightenment plant them too rooted in tradition and proposed that talent supersede birth as the main determinant of social standing. Even when based on merit, they argued, social differences should not be defined by law, as they were in the onetime authorities's orders. Traditionalists countered that a hierarchy of social orders was necessary to hold society together.

When the King called for an Estates-Full general in 1789, the social tensions plaguing the one-time regime emerged equally a central result of the Revolution. Traditionally, estates representatives had belonged to one of the 3 orders of society, and in principle each order had an equal voice before the King. Considering nobles dominated the clergy, however, the majority of representatives actually came from the two privileged orders, even though they stood for simply 5 percent of the population at about. Because each voter actually would exercise one vote in the assembly, this configuration allowed the nobility two of the three votes. The King subsequently agreed to double the size of the delegation of the Third Manor, but this move failed to appease critics of the political system. Many pamphlets appeared suggesting that representatives should vote past "head" rather than by "order" (meaning all representatives should vote together as a unmarried assembly, rather than equally 3 separate bodies representing three separate orders).

The purpose of such pamphlets was not just to win greater representation for the Third Estate. Their authors were making the case for a new concept of guild, in which commoners, especially the educated middle classes, had the same value as the other orders. Despite the social rifts surrounding the political argue of mid-1789, almost contemporaries fervently sought social unity. This suggests that social unrest may non necessarily have been the basic cause of the outbreak of the Revolution. Indeed, one wonders if the nobility'south fear of losing its privileges, rather than the assertiveness of the middle classes, might have been the most important factor in the events that followed.

National Assembly Relinquishes All Privileges

The Welcoming of a Marquis in Hell

The Crushed Elite

Departure of the Three Orders for Versailles

Abuses to Suppress

Active Citizen/Passive Citizen

Madame Sans-Culotte

The Good Sans-Culotte

Within a Revolutionary Committee During the Reign of Terror

President of a Revolutionary Committee Distracting Himself With His Art While Waiting

President of a Revolutionary Committee Afterward the Seal Is Taken Off

A Democrat, or Reason and Philosophy

The Radical'southward Arms

The Third Estate Marrying Priests with Nuns

Monks Learning to Exercise

Far beyond the deputies' meeting hall in Versailles, another kind of social unrest was brewing in the countryside. Upon hearing about the taking of the Bastille, peasants decided they, too, could press for social modify through drastic actions. In the summer of 1789 hundreds of thousands mobilized to attack lords' manors and destroy the bitter symbols of seigneurialism: weather vanes, protective walls, and especially property deeds setting forth feudal dues that peasants were required to pay the lord. When news of this rural unrest reached the newly renamed National Assembly in Paris, its deputies, feeling pressured to stay alee of events in the countryside, responded by announcing the "abolition of feudalism." Their decrees of four August represented the offset stride toward the devastation of the theoretical ground of one-time government's system of privileges. Within the year, the associates would do away with the whole concept of nobility, setting off a vigorous anti noble propaganda campaign in the press.

Urban workers, as well, institute an opportunity to express their discontent, through elections to the Estates-General. Elections were held in the form of neighborhood gatherings, at which participants collectively designated a representative and compiled cahiers de doléance (lists of grievances) to present to the Rex, who would communicate them to guide the representatives. Many of these petitions expressed opposition to the privileges of nobles and officeholders. The National Associates decrees of Baronial 1789 confronting privilege—which had been the centerpiece of the French social order—were no incertitude cheered by the populace.

For all its momentousness, however, the elimination of privilege did not bring an terminate to the social conflicts underlying the Revolution. Instead, information technology marked the start of another system of social distinctions, set forth in a new constitution introduced by the National Associates. The most notable of these was the distinction between "agile" citizens, who were granted full rights to vote and hold part, and "passive" citizens, who were subject to the same laws simply could not vote or concord office. Membership in one grade or the other was determined by 1'due south income level, gender, race, organized religion, and profession. With the Le Chapelier Law of 1791, the National Assembly further differentiated workers from property owners and banned worker associations equally existence harmful to national unity.

The National Assembly seemed unwilling to grant workers full political and social participation in the new society. One reason for this reluctance was the widespread fright of further unrest. Another was the strong belief among spokespersons for the Enlightenment that only those with a propertied stake in society could be trusted to exercise reason, or to think for themselves. Furthermore, many reform-minded revolutionaries argued that economic-based "combinations" formed by workers also closely resembled corporate guilds and would impinge on the freedom of the individual.

Whatever the assembly's motives, its actions were met with strong opposition. Workers were not untrustworthy or retrograde traditionalists, they retorted, just difficult-working, elementary, and honest citizens, dissimilar the effete and "feminized" rich. Calling themselves sans-culottes to indicate that they wore pants, non knee breeches (a symbol of luxury), they glorified direct action, strength, candor, and patriotism, ideals that radical journalists associated with artisanal work and found lacking in property ownership solitary. The fact that such radicals as Elisée Loustallot, Jacques Roux, and Jacques-Réné Hébert were educated men who did not exactly work with their hands for a living led some to question whether their discussions of sans-culottes expressed ideas held past workers themselves. Moreover, one may wonder whether the views associated with the sans-culottes extended much beyond Paris. All the same, the sans-culotte concept took on increasing political significance, because those in say-so saw reflected in information technology the genuine working human being. Thus the utilize of the sans-culotte in radical rhetoric led contemporaries to believe that rich and poor were in conflict throughout the Revolution. How this perception influenced the course of revolutionary events may be seen in the case of Gracchus Babeuf. Before the Revolution, Babeuf had been an agent for seigneurial lords, but later 1789, he became increasingly attracted to the idea of social and political egalitarianism. By 1795, he was leading a conspiracy, although his goals and plans remained vague. Nevertheless, the political authorities worried near class war; they considered him a dangerous egalitarian revolutionary and arrested him. At his trial, Babeuf delivered an inspiring attack on private property and endorsed a arrangement of property sharing that many run into as a forerunner of socialism.

In rural areas, social cleavages were as securely rooted equally in the cities. Peasants, in their lists of grievances of 1789, expressed hostility to noble landlords; and, as noted before, this hostility intensified after Bastille Mean solar day. From July through September 1789, word of the National Assembly'south decisions and of the popular revolts in Paris and other cities spread across the French countryside. It was besides rumored that frightened nobles were sending groups of armed "brigands" to burn fields, steal crops, and attack villages in society to proceed downwards the peasantry in this moment of crisis. Propelled by what became known as "the great fear," peasants in various regions of France took matters into their own hands, forming armed groups to defend their fields and their villages. The 4 August decrees, largely a response to this upheaval, initially quieted the countryside and presently cemented the peasants to the revolutionary cause.

Like the workers and modest property owners in cities, peasants questioned the settlement reached past the National Assembly in 1791. In contrast to Parisian artisans, however, who began pushing for a more far-reaching revolution in 1792–94, big numbers of cultivators hankered for a return to stability in their villages. But this seemed a remote possibility equally the Revolution and its wars expanded.

For the peasantry, the foremost cause of instability during the Revolution was the Ceremonious Constitution of the Clergy of 1790. The Civil Constitution, like the Revolution itself, originated in the fiscal crisis that the National Assembly inherited from the crown. Needing substantial revenues, the assembly targeted church lands, which accounted for 10 percent of all landed wealth in French republic. The legislature divested the church of its holding and in exchange took charge of its expenses and administration. The revolutionaries, imbued with the Enlightenment's criticism of the Catholic faith, suspected bishops and archbishops of resisting all change. To ensure the loyalty of parish priests, the assembly (in whose employ the priests at present plant themselves) added to the Ceremonious Constitution a requirement that all clergy swear an oath of fidelity to the nation. Still, nigh half refused to practice so. Considering nigh "refractory priests" (those who refused the oath) lived in the countryside, the Ceremonious Constitution—designed to promote national unity and prevent organized religion from becoming a source of resistance to the Revolution—instead generated considerable resentment amongst the peasantry. This resentment increased with the decree of 9 March 1792, authorizing the confiscation of grain to prevent "hoarding." Chapter 7 shows how this early hostility developed into an armed counterrevolution.

Thus in both towns and countryside, it seemed that the Revolution was not producing the hoped-for results. Instead of bringing unity and a quick, political resolution to the questions of 1789, as intended by its originators, the Revolution was producing further conflicts. What had happened? Had the revolutionaries expected also much? Did the mistake lie with the new political aristocracy, because they excluded the lower classes from the optimistic prospects for change? Or did the leaders, despite their commitment to social equality, observe information technology impossible to avoid making private belongings (and the differences in wealth information technology necessarily generated) the cornerstone of the new society? The events of the 1790s brought France no closer to determining how and whether social equality could be accomplished through political measures. This very issue continues to vex modern lodge—long after the social stresses of 1789 have dissolved into the dustbin of history. Indeed, it remains one of the most vibrant legacies of the French Revolution.