The

French
Revolutio
n and
Napoleon
 1789
• The year 1789 marks a signal event in European
and world history: the overthrow of a monarchy
through a popular revolution.
• Although 1789 included the storming of the
Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
the king, Louis XVI (r. 1774–1793), was not actually
dethroned until 1792, and he was executed in
1793. And much of the impact of the French
Revolution was felt elsewhere in Europe only after
Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799. The
revolution was not fully concluded until the defeat
of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy
in 1815 (nor was it truly defeated even then).
 As with all revolutions, the causes of the French Revolution of
Causes of the 1789 included both long-term and structural factors as well as
more immediate events. The former consisted of the
socioeconomic changes of the eighteenth century, the ideas of the
Revolution Enlightenment, and weaknesses in the monarchy. The short-term
factors were primarily economic: government debt, a financial
crisis, and a bad harvest year. The financial crisis led the king to
convoke a meeting of the Estates General in 1789, and from there,
events cascaded out of control.
 Causes of the
Revolution
• Rise of the Middle Class (the bourgeoisie)
• Enlightenment writers: religious and cultural
freedom.
• An inefficient system of taxation.
• Financial and material aid provided by France
to the American colonies during their war of
independence against Britain.
• Inflation (fueled by the import of silver from
the New World).
• The weakness of the monarchy in the period.
 1789 The Revolution
Begins
• In the face of the financial crisis and the refusal of
the privileged classes to approve new taxes, Louis
XVI decided to convoke the Estates General to
address government reforms and the tax system.
• The 1,200 delegates of the Estates General met at
Versailles beginning in May 1789, bringing with
them the cahiers de doléances, or list of grievances,
that voters had drawn up in the electoral
assemblies that selected the delegates.
• the very process of drawing up the lists had
politicized the population and focused national
attention on the assembly in Versailles.
 Abbé Sieyès

• Traditionally, each of the three estates sent

the same number of delegates to the Estates
General, and the voting there was by order,
not by head, meaning that the Third Estate,
representing 97 percent of the population,
had only one vote of the three.
• In an influential pamphlet titled “What Is the
Third Estate?” a theretofore obscure priest,
Abbé Sieyès, answered the title question,
“Everything,” and suggested a similar formula
for voting.
• “If the privileged order were abolished,” he
wrote, “the nation would be not something
less but something more.”
 Tennis Court Oath
• In June, the Third Estate essentially adopted the
program set out in Sieyès’s pamphlet and
declared itself the National Assembly. When they
next tried to assemble, they found the doors of
their meeting place locked, so they moved next
door to an indoor tennis court, where they swore
the famous Tennis Court Oath: “Wherever we
meet, there is the nation,” they proclaimed and
vowed not to adjourn until France was given a
new constitution.
• As the delegates and the city of Paris became
more unruly, the king began to move troops into
the city. With rumors that the regime was intent
on dissolving the National Assembly, armed
militias began to form throughout the city.
 Storming of the
Bastille
•On July 14, a crowd of 80,000 stormed the Bastille, the old
royal prison, in hopes of seizing ammunition stored there.
Royal troops opened fire, killing a hundred people, but the
crowd prevailed, seized the governor of the fortress, cut off
his head, and carried it about town on the end of a pike.
•On that hot summer day, the Bastille's prisoners numbered
but seven, a motley crew that included a nobleman
imprisoned upon request of his family, a renegade priest,
and a demented Irishman, who alternately thought he was
Joan of Arc, Saint Louis, and God.
 The Fall of the
Bastille
The fall of the Bastille, like the fall
of the Berlin Wall two hundred
years later, became an important
symbol of the Revolution, and that
day, Bastille Day, is still celebrated
as a French national holiday,
complete with fireworks and
parades.
 The Fall of the
Bastille
The Bastille may have had mostly symbolic
importance, but in revolutions, symbols are
crucial. The vulnerability of the monarchy
was exposed, and its authority quickly
evaporated. Word about the fall of the
Bastille spread to the provinces, where
peasants followed the Parisians by raiding
the chateaus of their landlords. In August,
the newly styled National Constituent
Assembly officially abolished the remnants
of feudalism and freed peasants from their
payments under the seigneurial system.
 Declaration of
Rights of Man and
the Citizen
• The assembly then turned to the task of
determining the principles on which a new
political regime would be based. The result,
passed by the assembly on August 26, was the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,
similar in impact to the American Declaration of
Independence and later the symbolic foundation
of the French Republic.
• King Louis XVI refused to sign the declaration.
• A crowd of six thousand women, aggravated by
the short supply of bread in city markets,
marched the fifteen miles to Versailles and
escorted the king back to Paris.
 The New
Constitution
• In June 1791, the new constitution was presented
to the public, providing for an elected legislative
assembly and granting the king only a suspensive
veto; that is, the power to delay legislation but
not to defeat it.
• Dismayed by these developments, Louis XVI fled
Paris disguised as a commoner and attempted to
reach the French border to rally those opposed to
the revolution.
• But Louis was captured and brought back to Paris.
The new constitution was put into force, and a
legislative assembly was elected.
 The French
Republic
The new constitution was put into force,
and a legislative assembly was elected.
Prussia and Austria soon joined in a war
against France, and when their troops
began to move into France, charges that
Louis was in collusion with foreign
monarchs provoked a new insurrection in
Paris. New elections were called, and in
September 1792, the newly elected
National Convention scrapped the recent
constitution, abolished the monarchy, and
declared the establishment of the first
French republic.
The Terror

• Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre

• In January 1793, King Louis was beheaded on
the guillotine, as was his wife, Marie
Antoinette, nine months later.
• Within a month of Louis’s execution, Britain,
Holland, and Spain joined Austria and Prussia
in the war against France.
• Creation of a Committee of Public Safety to
defend the gains of the revolution and
eliminate its enemies.
• As Robespierre put it, “To good citizens
revolutionary government owes the full
protection of the state; to the enemies of the
people it owes only death.”
The End of the Terror

• Overall, about 40,000 people perished

during the Terror. Within a year, the Terror
had run its course but not before
consuming its own.
• Robespierre and Danton were guillotined.
• After the death of Robespierre, the
convention dismantled the revolutionary
dictatorship, wrote yet another
constitution, and established a five-man
Directory to hold executive power.
• The directors themselves supported a
coup d’état in late 1799, placing the levers
of power in the hands of a dynamic young
military officer named Napoleon
Bonaparte.
 Napoleon

Napoleon had been made a general in 1793 at

the age of twenty-four. Two years later, he
made a name for himself by putting down a
royalist uprising in Paris. The next year, he was
given command of the French army of Italy,
where he scored victory after victory against
the supposedly superior forces of Austria. He
returned to France a hero, and even after the
coup of 1799, his popularity remained high. He
was elected first consul for life in 1802 and two
years later crowned himself Napoleon I,
emperor of the French. He was to hold that
title for ten years, and during most of that time,
he and France dominated Europe.
 Napoleonic policies
• Within France, Napoleon pursued the middle
course of the Directory, trying to preserve the
major gains of the revolution while avoiding a
return either to radicalism or to monarchy.
• He also made peace with the Catholic Church,
signing a concordat with the pope and
eliminating most of the harassment of the
church and clergy that had been unleashed by
the revolution.
• Introduction of a new legal code, the
Napoleonic Code, which remains today the
basis for the legal systems of France and most
of the rest of Europe.
 Napoleonic
Empire
• Napoleon formed mass armies and
led them into other countries to
spread the ideas of the revolution
and to enhance his own power and
that of France. In 1805, he inflicted a
punishing defeat on combined
Austrian and Russian forces at
Austerlitz in Austria. The next year,
he crushed the Prussian army at
Jena, Germany, and occupied Berlin.
• At the height of the Napoleonic
Empire in 1810–1812, France
controlled Spain, Italy, Belgium,
Holland, and Switzerland and much
of Germany, Poland, Croatia, and
Slovenia.
Napoleon and Enlightenment
• Napoleon was not a revolutionary, but he solidified many
of the revolutionary changes of 1789–1791, and he himself
supported most of the ideas and proposals of
Enlightenment philosophes.
• In every part of the empire, he undermined feudalism,
introduced a legal code, fostered notions of representative
government, and awakened the spirit of nationalism.
• The European monarchs, of course, saw Napoleon as a
threat, both to the old order and to the balance of power
in Europe.
 Napoleon and the
nature of Warfare
Napoleon had changed the nature of warfare in
Europe by conscripting huge armies and
infusing them with a commitment to fight for
France and for “liberty, equality, and
fraternity,” the slogan of the revolution. Almost
everywhere, the size and spirit of these armies
overcame the better-trained but mercenary
armies of European monarchs, whose soldiers
fought for a salary rather than a cause.
 Defeat in the
Russian Campaign
• Eventually, though, Napoleon’s extensive
military conquests spread his power too thin.
• In 1812, he assembled an army of 400,000
soldiers and launched an attack on Russia.
• By the time Napoleon’s army reached Moscow,
the Russian winter had set in, and the city was in
flames, probably set by the Russians themselves
to deprive the French of shelter from the cold.
• In retreat, almost the whole French army either
deserted or perished from cold, hunger, and
guerrilla attacks by the Russians. Only 70,000
made it back to France.
 The End of
Napoleon
• By this time, Austria, Prussia, and Britain were
allied with the Russians against Napoleon,
whose military fortunes began to wane.
• The allied armies pressed on, entered Paris, and
forced Napoleon to abdicate, sending him into
exile on the island of Elba off the Italian coast.
• He escaped within a year, rallied support in
France, and confronted the allied armies again,
only to be finally defeated by a British and
Prussian army at the famous Battle of Waterloo,
in Belgium, in 1815. This time, he was banished
to a small island in the South Atlantic, St.
Helena, where he died in 1821.
 Congress of
Vienna
• At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815),
the four triumphant Great Powers (Britain,
Austria, Russia, and Prussia) confirmed the
restoration of the old order, with some
modifications, and put back in place the
balance of power with the intent of
preserving monarchical power and
maintaining a lasting peace.
• But the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars had unleashed forces
that would shake the foundations of
European society.