France in the nineteenth century: Encyclopedia II - France in the nineteenth century - Historical Overview

France in the nineteenth century - Historical Overview

France in the nineteenth century - The Period of the French Revolution

Louis XVI of France's reign saw a temporary revival of French fortunes, but the over-ambitious projects and military campaigns of the 18th century had produced chronic financial problems. Deteriorating economic conditions, popular resentment against the complicated system of privileges granted the nobility and clerics, and a lack of alternate avenues for change were among the principal causes for convoking the Estates-General which convened in Versailles in 1789. On May 28, 1789, the Abbé Sieyès moved that the Third Estate proceed with verification of its own powers and invite the other two estates to take part, but not to wait for them. They proceeded to do so, and then voted a measure far more radical, declaring themselves the National Assembly, an assembly not of the Estates but of "the People".

Louis XVI shut the Salle des États where the Assembly met. The Assembly moved their deliberations to the king's tennis court, where they proceeded to swear the Tennis Court Oath (June 20, 1789), under which they agreed not to separate until they had given France a constitution. A majority of the representatives of the clergy soon joined them, as did forty-seven members of the nobility. By June 27 the royal party had overtly given in, although the military began to arrive in large numbers around Paris and Versailles. On July 9, the Assembly reconstituted itself as the National Constituent Assembly.

On July 11, 1789, King Louis, acting under the influence of the conservative nobles, as well as his wife, Marie Antoinette, and brother, the Comte d'Artois, banished the reformist minister Necker and completely reconstructed the ministry. Much of Paris, presuming this to be the start of a royal coup, moved into open rebellion. Some of the military joined the mob; others remained neutral. On July 14, 1789, after four hours of combat, the insurgents seized the Bastille prison, killing the governor and several of his guards. The king and his military supporters backed down, at least for the time being. After this violence, nobles started to flee the country as émigrés, some of whom began plotting civil war within the kingdom and agitating for a European coalition against France. Insurrection and the spirit of popular sovereignty spread throughout France. In rural areas, many went beyond this: some burned title-deeds and no small number of châteaux, as part of a general agrarian insurrection known as "la Grande Peur" (the Great Fear).

On August 4, 1789, the National Assembly abolished feudalism, sweeping away both the seigneurial rights of the Second Estate and the tithes gathered by the First Estate. In the course of a few hours, nobles, clergy, towns, provinces, companies, and cities lost their special privileges. The revolution also brought about a massive shifting of powers from the Roman Catholic Church to the State. Legislation enacted in 1790 abolished the Church's authority to levy a tax on crops known as the "dîme", cancelled special privileges for the clergy, and confiscated Church property: under the Ancien Régime, the Church had been the largest landowner in the country. Further legislation abolished monastic vows. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed on July 12, 1790, turned the remaining clergy into employees of the State and required that they take an oath of loyalty to the constitution. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy also made the Catholic church an arm of the secular state.

Looking to the United States Declaration of Independence for a model, on August 26, 1789, the Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Like the U.S. Declaration, it comprised a statement of principles rather than a constitution with legal effect. The Assembly replaced the historic provinces with eighty-three départements, uniformly administered and approximately equal to one another in extent and population; it also abolished the symbolic paraphernalia of the ancien régime — armorial bearings, liveries, etc. — which further alienated the more conservative nobles, and added to the ranks of the émigrés.

Louis XVI opposed the course of the revolution and on the night of June 20, 1791, the royal family fled the Tuileries. However, the next day the overconfident king had the imprudence to show himself. Recognised and arrested at Varennes in the Meuse late on 21 June, he returned to Paris under guard. With most of the Assembly still favouring a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic, the various groupings reached a compromise which left Louis XVI little more than a figurehead: he had perforce to swear an oath to the constitution, and a decree declared that retracting the oath, heading an army for the purpose of making war upon the nation, or permitting anyone to do so in his name would amount to de facto abdication.

Meanwhile, a renewed threat from abroad arose: Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick William II of Prussia, and the king's brother Charles-Phillipe, comte d'Artois issued the Declaration of Pilnitz which considered the cause of Louis XVI as their own, demanded his total liberty and the dissolution of the Assembly, and promised an invasion of France on his behalf if the revolutionary authorities refused its conditions. The politics of the period inevitably drove France towards war with Austria and its allies. France declared war on Austria (April 20, 1792) and Prussia joined on the Austrian side a few weeks later. The French Revolutionary Wars had begun.

In the Brunswick Manifesto, the Imperial and Prussian armies threatened retaliation on the French population should it resist their advance or the reinstatement of the monarchy. As a consequence, King Louis was seen as conspiring with the enemies of France. January 17, 1793 saw King Louis condemned to death for "conspiracy against the public liberty and the general safety" by a weak majority in Convention. The January 21 execution led to more wars with other European countries. Louis' Austrian-born queen, Marie Antoinette, would follow him to the guillotine on 16 October.

When war went badly, prices rose and the sans-culottes (poor labourers and radical Jacobins) rioted; counter-revolutionary activities began in some regions. This encouraged the Jacobins to seize power through a parliamentary coup, backed up by force effected by mobilising public support against the Girondist faction, and by utilising the mob power of the Parisian sans-culottes. An alliance of Jacobin and sans-culottes elements thus became the effective centre of the new government. Policy became considerably more radical.

The Committee of Public Safety came under the control of Maximilien Robespierre, and the Jacobins unleashed the Reign of Terror (1793–1794). At least 1200 people met their deaths under the guillotine — or otherwise — after accusations of counter-revolutionary activities. In 1794 Robespierre had ultra-radicals and moderate Jacobins executed; in consequence, however, his own popular support eroded markedly. On July 27, 1794, the French people revolted against the excesses of the Reign of Terror in what became known as the Thermidorian Reaction. It resulted in moderate Convention members deposing and executing Robespierre and several other leading members of the Committee of Public Safety. The Convention approved the new "Constitution of the Year III" on 17 August 1795; a plebiscite ratified it in September; and it took effect on September 26, 1795.

The new constitution installed the Directoire and created the first bicameral legislature in French history. On November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire of the Year VIII) Napoleon staged the coup which installed the Consulate; this effectively led to his dictatorship.

France in the nineteenth century - Napoleon and the French Empire

In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military general who had participated in the French Revolutionary Wars of 1796, 1797 and 1798, seized power as First Consul (see French Consulate), and in 1802 he was made First Consul for life. Bonaparte attracted more power and gravitated towards imperial status, gathering support on the way for his internal rebuilding of France and its institutions. He gradually dampened opposition and -- using exile, systematic bureacratic oppression, and constitutional means -- in 1804, the Senate granted him the title of emperor. The French Empire (or the Napoleonic Empire) (1804-1814) was marked by the French domination and reorganization of continental Europe (the Napoleonic Wars) and by the final codification of the republican legal system (the Napoleonic Code).

By 1804, Britain alone stood outside French control and was an important force in encouraging and financing resistance to France. Napoleon lacked the resources to attempt an invasion of Britain or to defeat the Royal Navy at sea, and his one attempt to do so ended with defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Napoleon resorted instead to economic warfare and instituted an embargo (the Continental System), forbidding his allies and conquests from trading with the British.

Portugal was the only European country that openly refused to join the Continental system. After the Treaties of Tilsit of July 1807, Napoleon attempted to capture the Portuguese Fleet and the House of Braganza, to occupy the Portuguese ports and to expel the British from Portuguese soil, and failed. King John VI of Portugal took his fleet and fled to Brazil with a Royal Navy escort. The Portuguese population rose in revolt against the French invaders, the Duke of Wellington's British Army intervened and the Peninsular War began in 1808.

Ultimately the embargo failed. Its effect on Great Britain and on British trade is uncertain, but the embargo is thought to have been more harmful on the continental European states. Russia in particular chafed under the embargo, and in 1812, that country reopened trade with Britain, provoking Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The disaster of the march on Moscow would lead to Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Nations in 1813 and his abdication in 1814.

After an initial forced exile on the island of Elba, Napoleon briefly returned to power (the Hundred Days of 1815), but the imperial dream was finally crushed by the defeat of Waterloo and Napoleon was definitively exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the south Atlantic.

France in the nineteenth century - The Restoration

Following the ouster of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814, the Allies restored the Bourbon Dynasty to the French throne. The ensuing period is called in French "The Restoration" and is characterized by a sharp conservative reaction and the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic Church as a power in French politics. Louis XVIII, brother of the deposed Louis XVI, ruled from 1814-1824 and was succeeded by his brother Charles X in 1824.

Despite the return of the House of Bourbon to power, France was much changed from the era of the Ancien Regime. The egalitarianism and liberalism of the revolutionaries remained an important force and the autocracy and hierarchy of the earlier era could not be fully restored. The economic changes, which had been underway long before the revolution, had been further enhanced during the years of turmoil and were firmly entrenched by 1815. These changes had seen power shift from the noble landowners to the urban merchants. The administrative reforms of Napoleon, such as the Napoleonic Code and efficient bureaucracy, also remained in place. These changes produced a unified central government that was fiscally sound and had much control over all areas of French life, a sharp difference from the situation the Bourbons had faced before the Revolution.

Louis XVIII, for the most part, accepted that much had changed and pursued a moderate course while in power. Charles X of France, however, took a far more conservative line. He attempted to compensate the aristocrats for what they had lost in the revolution, curbed the freedom of the press, and reasserted the power of the church. In 1830 the discontent caused by these changes culminated in an uprising in the streets of Paris, known as the July Revolution. Charles was forced to flee and a member of the Orléans branch of the family, Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, ascended the throne, and ruled, not as "King of France" but as "King of the French" (an evocative difference for contemporaries).

France in the nineteenth century - July Monarchy

Louis-Philippe's "July Monarchy" (1830-1848) is generally seen as a period during which the haute bourgeoisie was dominant. Louis-Philippe, who had flirted with liberalism in his youth, rejected much of the pomp and circumstance of the Bourbons and surrounded himself with merchants and bankers. Ruling as a constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe left much of the governing to the parliament. The period was one of economic growth, and also major change in the Catholic Church, as it dropped much of its rigidly reactionary views. At the same time the church became seen as less of an enemy by the left.

Despite this, the July Monarchy remained a time of turmoil. A large group of Legitimists on the right demanded the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. On the left, republicanism remained a powerful force. Late in his reign Louis-Philippe became increasingly rigid and dogmatic and his Prime Minister, François Guizot, had become deeply unpopular, but Louis-Philippe refused to remove him. The situation gradually escalated until the Revolutions of 1848 saw the fall of the monarchy and the creation of the Second Republic.

France in the nineteenth century - Second Republic

The Revolution of 1848 had major consequences for all of Europe: popular democratic revolts against authoritarian regimes broke out in Austria and Hungary, in the German Confederation and Prussia, and in the Italian States Milan, Venice, Turin and Rome.

The revolution in France had brought together classes of wildly different interests: the bourgeoisie desired electoral reforms (a democratic republic), socialist leaders (like Louis Blanc, Pierre Joseph Proudhon and the radical Auguste Blanqui) asked for a "right to work" and the creation of national workshops (a social welfare republic) and for France to liberate the oppressed peoples of Europe (Poles and Italians), while moderates (like the aristocrat Alphonse de Lamartine) sought a middle ground. Tensions between groups escalated, and in June 1848, a working class insurrection in Paris cost the lives of 1500 workers and eliminated once and for all the dream of a social welfare constitution.

The constitution of the Second Republic which was ratified in September 1848 was extremely flawed and permitted no effective resolution between the President and the Assembly in case of dispute. In December 1848, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected as President of the Republic, and pretexting legislative gridlock, in 1851, he staged a coup d'état. Finally, in 1852 he had himself declared Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire.

France in the nineteenth century - Second Empire

France was ruled by Emperor Napoleon III of France from 1852 to 1870. The era saw great industrialisation, urbanization (including the massive rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann) and economic growth, but Napoleon III's foreign policies would be catastrophic.

After participation in the Crimean War, Napoleon intervened in the questions of Italian independence. He declared his intention of making Italy "free from the Alps to the Adriatic", and with the victories of Montebello, Magenta and Solferino France and Austria signed the Peace of Villafranca in 1859. Austria ceded Lombardy to Napoleon III, who in turn ceded it to Victor Emmanuel; Modena and Tuscany were restored to their respective dukes, and the Romagna to the pope, now president of an Italian federation. France received Savoy from Piedmont.

Napoleon also tried to establish the emperor Maximilian in Mexico, but in 1867 French troops were forced on a humiliating withdrawal before an ultimatum of the United States (see French intervention in Mexico).

A protracted conflict with Prussia lead to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. By the capitulation of Sedan the Empire lost its major source of support (the army), Paris was left unprotected and emptied of troops, and on September 4, 1870 the republican deputies of Paris at the hôtel de ville constituted a provisional government. The Empire had fallen, the emperor was a prisoner in Germany, and France now embarked on the era of the Third Republic.

France in the nineteenth century - The Third Republic

With the humiliating defeat of Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the fall of the second Empire, the French legislature established the Third Republic which was to last until the military defeat of 1940 (longer than any government in France since the Revolution). The birth of the republic saw France occupied by foreign troops, the capital in a popular socialist insurection -- the Paris Commune (which was violently repressed by the new republic) -- and two provinces (Alsace-Lorraine) annexed to Germany. Feelings of national guilt and a desire for vengeance ("revanchism") would be major preoccupations of the French throughout the next half century.

The initial republic was lead by pro-royalists, but republicans (the "Radicals") and bonapartists scrambled for power. The Radicals eventually gained power in the last two decades of the century, but crises like the potential "Boulangist" coup d'état (see Georges Boulanger) in 1889, showed the fragility of the republic. The Radicals' policies on education (supression of local languages, compulsory education), mandatory military service, and control of the working classes eliminated internal dissent and regionalisms, while their participation in the Scramble for Africa and in the acquiring of overseas possessions (such as French Indochina) created myths of French greatness. Both of these processes transformed a country of regionalisms into a modern nation state.

In an effort to isolate Germany, France went to great pains to woo Russia and the United Kingdom to its side, first by means of the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, then the 1904 Entente Cordiale with the U.K, and finally, with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente in 1907 this became the Triple Entente, which eventually led Russia and the U.K. to enter World War I as Allies.

Distrust of Germany, faith in the army and native French anti-semitism combined to make the Dreyfus Affair (the unjust trial and comdemnation of a Jewish military officer for treason) a political scandal of the utmost gravity. The nation was divided between "dreyfusards" and "anti-dreyfusards" and far-right Catholic agitators inflamed the situation even when proofs of Dreyfus' innocence came to light. The writer Emile Zola published an impassioned editorial on the injustice, and was himself condemned by the government for libel. Once Dreyfus was finally pardoned, the progressive legislature enacted the 1905 laws on laïcité which created a complete separation of church and state and stripped churches of most of their property rights.

The period and the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century is often termed the belle époque. Although associated with cultural innovations and popular amusements (cabaret, cancan, the cinema, new art forms such as Impressionism and Art Nouveau), France was nevertheless a nation divided internally on notions of religion, class, regionalisms and money, and on the international front France came repeatedly to the brink of war with the other imperial powers, including Great Britain (the Fashoda Incident). World War I was an inevitabilty, but its human and financial costs would be catastrophic for the French.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Historical Overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki